While your at it, why spend all that time developing Linux software? Can't we just tell everybody to install Windows? That'd be much easier on everybody, (except the Microsoft developers, I suppose, but nobody around here cares much for them anyways, so no harm done).
I seem to remember seeing a TV newscast covering a similar device months to years ago. It was a pair of computerized underwear with heat sensors that could detect whether the underwear was being worn.
IIRC, it would log all the remove/replace events. The idea was that a wife would get her husband to wear the underwear when he went away on a business trip. When he returned, if the logs showed that he had removed the underwear for more than 3 consecutive minutes, she would have reason to suspect him of fooling around.
According to Jack Herer, the number is much lower:
Farming only 6% of continential U.S. acreage with biomass crops would provide all of America's gas and oil energy needs, ending dependence upon fossil fuels.
Manahan, Stanley E., Environmental Chemistry, 4th edition.
America was NOT founded on the principles of IP but on freedom of choice (religious and otherwise) and the idea
that everyone is supposed to contribute to the public good.
Is that so? I couldn't find anything to that effect when I looked at the U.S. Constitution. I did manage to find Section 8, Clause 8, though:
[The Congress shall have Power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Imagine a well-constructed honeypot framework capturing a worm, redirecting worm traffic to fake services, and launching counter attacks to clean infected hosts!
Tom DeMarco (co-author of Peopleware), wrote an article addressing the issue of certification. Here's a snippet:
The case for certification made by Ralston, Mead and also by Patricia Douglas goes something like this: Poor old Citicorp and poor old Aetna and poor old Microsoft really can't tell if the people they are thinking of hiring are good, competent, educated programmers or lazy, uneducated, even unscrupulous types, so what should we do? How about we appoint an august elite (made up of our own august selves plus some of our august pals) to judge. We will divide the world into betas, who will be allowed to work in the field and gammas, who will not. In the process we will be demonstrating that we ourselves are alphas. What a brave new world!
If all the world leaders were trapped on an inflatable life raft, how long would it take before they decided to cut it up and distribute the pieces amongst themselves?
Now that C++ is standardized, when, if ever, do you think the first standard-compliant compilers will be available?
Will we ever see the day where C++ is as portable as C?
What is going to happen to code that breaks with standard-compliant compilers? (I suspect, for example, most Windows code is written expecting a failed new to return null instead of throw an exception. A standard-compliant compliler would be a very unwelcome thing in this particular example.)
I am more concerned or interested in some sort of global universal coding project in which a lowest common denominator set of basic Operating System functionality is supported.
It already exists in the form of Posix.1 but try getting Microsoft to conform to it - good luck.
In a November 10th Yahoo-UK story http://uk.news.yahoo.com/991110/22/ax8w.html, the government of Communist China is alleged to have said that Apple Pie will be adopted by that country as its official dessert and that "There is a strong identification between communist China and the tasty good dessert" Authority for this statement is traced to a press release by GraphOn www.graphon.com.
This story appears to be untrue. The only GraphOn press release I can find that mentions China is http://www.graphon.com/News/pr-china991102.html from 2 Nov. This is a routine announcement of a partnership with a private firm in Hainan. There is no mention of any Chinese government sponsorship or action to make Apple Pie "official".
In the past, I have avoided presuming to speak for the whole Apple Pie community. This time, however, I think I may safely say that this news will come as a vast relief to all of us. Insofar as it has politics at all, the pie-sharing movement promotes freedom, increased choice, and *voluntary* cooperation. Any "identification" between the values of the pie-sharing community and the repressive practices of Communism is nothing but a a vicious and cynical fraud.
There are a few of us who have a soft spot for the theoretical Communist ideal of "from each according to his ability, to his each according to his need"; but I am certain that even that minority would not care to be associated with the totalitarian and murderous government of Communist China -- unrepentant perpetrators of numerous atrocities against its own people.
It may be too much to hope that this statement will head off a flurry of snide opinion pieces divagating about "pie-sharing communism"; the clumsy rhetoric of some of our past ambassadors may have made that outcome inevitable. But the prospect of being "identified" with the bloody-handed gerontocrats behind the Tianamen Square massacre would be, I believe, genuinely revolting and insulting to all of us.
No matter that such official Chinese government sponsorship might add a quarter of the planet's population to our taster base; if this is "world domination", we'll want none of it.
............
What's with the knee jerk reaction? So communists like Linux. It's a good OS. Why shouldn't they like it?
How many transistors are in a couple of op amps? I'm guessing on the order of 10-100.
How many transistors in a PIII? Millions? Tens of millions?
If processor manufacturers used this same process we would expect the the PIII to be 10,000x to 1,000,000x bigger than this 'little' device, giving it a size of 200mm x 210mm to 2000mm x 2100mm (given that this device is 2mm x 2.1mm).
The only thing interesting here is the packaging and that's not something that is going to scale well when you try it with millions of transistors. You need the heat dissipation mechanisms that the P3 has.
/* FBI CIA NSA IRS ATF BATF DOD WACO RUBY RIDGE OKC OKLAHOMA CITY MILITIA GUN HANDGUN MILGOV ASSAULT RIFLE TERRORISM BOMB DRUG HORIUCHI KORESH DAVIDIAN KAHL POSSE COMITATUS RANDY WEAVER VICKIE WEAVER SPECIAL FORCES LINDA THOMPSON SPECIAL OPERATIONS GROUP SOG SOF DELTA FORCE CONSTITUTION BILL OF RIGHTS WHITEWATER POM PARK ON METER ARKANSIDE IRAN CONTRAS OLIVER NORTH VINCE FOSTER PROMIS MOSSAD NASA MI5 ONI CID AK47 M16 C4 MALCOLM X REVOLUTION CHEROKEE HILLARY BILL CLINTON GORE GEORGE BUSH WACKENHUT TERRORIST TASK FORCE 160 SPECIAL OPS 12TH GROUP 5TH GROUP SF */
At a quick glance, it looks like the SGI license is pretty close to the GPL. Why don't they just GPL this sucker? Am I missing something here?
Database compilers fight for copyright protection
on
Who Owns The Database?
·
· Score: 1
Picture this: A scientist spends an afternoon at a baseball game compiling the game and player statistics. Then, shortly after, he turns on his computer to find a sports service has photocopied his stats, posted them on a Web page, and splashed it across the Internet.
When choosing between contracting or hiring the biggest issue is the lifetime of the product. Its not code quality - hired staff can produce bad code just as effectively as contractors. Its not loyalty - in today's economy there is no such thing, not even for hired staff. And its not cost - the project will probably cost you the same whether you go with staff or contractors.
The fact of the matter is contractors take all of their knowledge with them when they leave. If your product's lifetime is limited to a single version, never to be enhanced or modified in the future, it makes sense to go with contractors (why staff a huge development team only to fire them all at the end of the project). But if you intend to enhance and/or maintain the product, you would probably be better off keeping some brains around that understand it. That usually means having full time staff.
In any event I would be leery of going with an all-or-nothing strategy. Going only with hired staff will lead to layoffs at the end of the project. Going only with contractors might will lead to organizational ignorance. Finding the balance is the key.
Often the healthiest approach is to build a core team of engineers (as stated by a number of posters already, this is a challenge in and of itself) and hire contractors to work with full-timers as projects necessitate.
Slashdot Mirror
While your at it, why spend all that time developing Linux software? Can't we just tell everybody to install Windows? That'd be much easier on everybody, (except the Microsoft developers, I suppose, but nobody around here cares much for them anyways, so no harm done).
Quandrum, judging from your comments, it sounds like you might enjoy reading Gatto's Underground History of American Education.
Then again, maybe you already have.
I seem to remember seeing a TV newscast covering a similar device months to years ago. It was a pair of computerized underwear with heat sensors that could detect whether the underwear was being worn.
IIRC, it would log all the remove/replace events. The idea was that a wife would get her husband to wear the underwear when he went away on a business trip. When he returned, if the logs showed that he had removed the underwear for more than 3 consecutive minutes, she would have reason to suspect him of fooling around.
I haven't checked his citation.
So it seems memory won't be a bottleneck.
What about disk access? Serial ATA runs at 1.5 GBytes/s. Would that be fast enough to keep a CELL system busy?
Oh shit! I deserve that.
Is that so? I couldn't find anything to that effect when I looked at the U.S. Constitution. I did manage to find Section 8, Clause 8, though:
Yes. Just imagine.
If I send Gray Davis an email to ask him to repeal this new law will I incur a $1000 fine?
The EWD archive is looking for volunteers to convert the handwritten articles to google-able HTML. See here if you are interested.
Another option for ML-ish languages is the Standard ML compiler for .NET CLR: SML.NET. It implements SML 97 with similar language interoperability.
Who in his right mind would like to have his brain fondled by a MS product?
Who, in his right mind, would like to have his brain fondled?
Tom DeMarco (co-author of Peopleware), wrote an article addressing the issue of certification. Here's a snippet:
The case for certification made by Ralston, Mead and also by Patricia Douglas goes something like this: Poor old Citicorp and poor old Aetna and poor old Microsoft really can't tell if the people they are thinking of hiring are good, competent, educated programmers or lazy, uneducated, even unscrupulous types, so what should we do? How about we appoint an august elite (made up of our own august selves plus some of our august pals) to judge. We will divide the world into betas, who will be allowed to work in the field and gammas, who will not. In the process we will be demonstrating that we ourselves are alphas. What a brave new world!
The whole article is here.
If all the world leaders were trapped on an inflatable life raft, how long would it take before they decided to cut it up and distribute the pieces amongst themselves?
Sheck
Since nobody else has mentioned it:
The Psychology of Computer Programming - Weinberg
The full text of which can be found online, here:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/sicp.html
Now that C++ is standardized, when, if ever, do you think the first standard-compliant compilers will be available?
Will we ever see the day where C++ is as portable as C?
What is going to happen to code that breaks with standard-compliant compilers? (I suspect, for example, most Windows code is written expecting a failed new to return null instead of throw an exception. A standard-compliant compliler would be a very unwelcome thing in this particular example.)
I am more concerned or interested in some sort of global universal coding project in which a lowest common denominator set of basic Operating System functionality is supported.
It already exists in the form of Posix.1 but try getting Microsoft to conform to it - good luck.
In a November 10th Yahoo-UK story http://uk.news.yahoo.com/991110/22/ax8w.html, the government of Communist China is alleged to have said that Apple Pie will be adopted by that country as its official dessert and that "There is a strong identification between communist China and the tasty good dessert" Authority for this statement is traced to a press release by GraphOn www.graphon.com.
This story appears to be untrue. The only GraphOn press release I can find that mentions China is http://www.graphon.com/News/pr-china991102.html from 2 Nov. This is a routine announcement of a partnership with a private firm in Hainan. There is no mention of any Chinese government sponsorship or action to make Apple Pie "official".
In the past, I have avoided presuming to speak for the whole Apple Pie community. This time, however, I think I may safely say that this news will come as a vast relief to all of us. Insofar as it has politics at all, the pie-sharing movement promotes freedom, increased choice, and *voluntary* cooperation. Any "identification" between the values of the pie-sharing community and the repressive practices of Communism is nothing but a a vicious and cynical fraud.
There are a few of us who have a soft spot for the theoretical Communist ideal of "from each according to his ability, to his each according to his need"; but I am certain that even that minority would not care to be associated with the totalitarian and murderous government of Communist China -- unrepentant perpetrators of numerous atrocities against its own people.
It may be too much to hope that this statement will head off a flurry of snide opinion pieces divagating about "pie-sharing communism"; the clumsy rhetoric of some of our past ambassadors may have made that outcome inevitable. But the prospect of being "identified" with the bloody-handed gerontocrats behind the Tianamen Square massacre would be, I believe, genuinely revolting and insulting to all of us.
No matter that such official Chinese government sponsorship might add a quarter of the planet's population to our taster base; if this is "world domination", we'll want none of it.
............
What's with the knee jerk reaction? So communists like Linux. It's a good OS. Why shouldn't they like it?
How many transistors are in a couple of op amps? I'm guessing on the order of 10-100.
How many transistors in a PIII? Millions? Tens of millions?
If processor manufacturers used this same process we would expect the the PIII to be 10,000x to 1,000,000x bigger than this 'little' device, giving it a size of 200mm x 210mm to 2000mm x 2100mm (given that this device is 2mm x 2.1mm).
The only thing interesting here is the packaging and that's not something that is going to scale well when you try it with millions of transistors. You need the heat dissipation mechanisms that the P3 has.
/*
FBI CIA NSA IRS ATF BATF DOD WACO RUBY RIDGE OKC OKLAHOMA CITY MILITIA GUN HANDGUN MILGOV ASSAULT RIFLE TERRORISM BOMB DRUG HORIUCHI KORESH DAVIDIAN KAHL POSSE COMITATUS RANDY WEAVER VICKIE WEAVER SPECIAL FORCES LINDA THOMPSON SPECIAL OPERATIONS GROUP SOG SOF DELTA FORCE CONSTITUTION BILL OF RIGHTS WHITEWATER POM PARK ON METER ARKANSIDE IRAN CONTRAS OLIVER NORTH VINCE FOSTER PROMIS MOSSAD NASA MI5 ONI CID AK47 M16 C4 MALCOLM X REVOLUTION CHEROKEE HILLARY BILL CLINTON GORE GEORGE BUSH WACKENHUT TERRORIST TASK FORCE 160 SPECIAL OPS 12TH GROUP 5TH GROUP SF
*/
do these guys seem just a bit too preoccupied with tea and coffee?
At a quick glance, it looks like the SGI license is pretty close to the GPL. Why don't they just GPL this sucker? Am I missing something here?
Picture this: A scientist spends an afternoon at a baseball game compiling the game and player statistics. Then, shortly after, he turns on his computer to find a sports service has photocopied his stats, posted them on a Web page, and splashed it across the Internet.
Oh no. What's the world coming to?
No sooner is Microsoft's Freedom to Innovate Network founded than they get the government to relax the crypto export regulations.
I just wish I had joined FIN so I could claim to be part of the group that made it happen [or at least claim to have made it happen].
Can't wait until FIN finds a way to protect me from the internet boogey man.
When choosing between contracting or hiring the biggest issue is the lifetime of the product. Its not code quality - hired staff can produce bad code just as effectively as contractors. Its not loyalty - in today's economy there is no such thing, not even for hired staff. And its not cost - the project will probably cost you the same whether you go with staff or contractors.
The fact of the matter is contractors take all of their knowledge with them when they leave. If your product's lifetime is limited to a single version, never to be enhanced or modified in the future, it makes sense to go with contractors (why staff a huge development team only to fire them all at the end of the project). But if you intend to enhance and/or maintain the product, you would probably be better off keeping some brains around that understand it. That usually means having full time staff.
In any event I would be leery of going with an all-or-nothing strategy. Going only with hired staff will lead to layoffs at the end of the project. Going only with contractors might will lead to organizational ignorance. Finding the balance is the key.
Often the healthiest approach is to build a core team of engineers (as stated by a number of posters already, this is a challenge in and of itself) and hire contractors to work with full-timers as projects necessitate.