One alternative I wondered about was running distributed clients to support OS.
While I would have no qualms running an OS or application which displayed a small, unobtrusive pop-up ad on startup (providing the only information it returned to the server was what ad had been shown and how many times/how long - absolutely no identifying information!) I would be very wary about running a piece of software that did distributed work behind my back. There are some distributed computing projects I would support, but I am not going to let someone sell my cycles to the highest bidder to run god knows what on my system. I want to control what runs on my system and for who.
Could someone exactly explain the issue? The complaint doesn't make any sense. I mean, really. Who could honestly care if the software's been opened, and resealed, and why?
Well, when I'm buying GameBoy Advance games I care. Many GBA games store game save data in either EEPROM, SRAM or Flash ROM, and with some games you do not have the option of completely clearing the game save data. Sonic Advance is one in particular that won't delet all the saved information. (If you use the 'Delete Data' option in Sonic Advance, it still remembers how many rings you had collected, and that can cause problems with the 'Tiny Chao' sub-game.)
I don't normally play a lot of games, but when I do, I like to find the secrets and unlock game extras myself. I don't want to enter cheat codes and I definitely don't want someone else to have unlocked parts of the game for me.
Besides, if I buy a second-hand product (of any type, not just software) then I refuse to pay the full price for it. If the store has re-wrapped a second-hand product and sells it a full price, then I would be talking to the local Csumer Afairs department about false/misleading product labelling.
Short answer: Calls TO a cell phone are charged at a long-distance rate, regardless of actual location. Recharge credits have a built-in expiry period.
Long answer: The way it works in Australia is that calls TO cell phones are NOT classed as local calls. They are charged on a timed rate, similar to long-distance calls (ie, Telstra charge $0.22 per minute to cell phones from a land line).
With pre-pay phones, the recharge/top-up credits have a built-in expiry - ie, you must use the credit within 30 or 60 days or you will lose it, if you top-up within that time period, unused credit will roll-over though. This can still be very cost-effective. A single $20 top-up card can give you incomning call access for up to 12 months (depending on the carrier and plan).
But that was because the acting, script and plot were so awful.
Go back and watch the original trilogy again. The script and acting really weren't that special. I am a big Star Wars fan, but I was 9 when Star Wars first came out - to me at the time it was something fantastic and out of this world. I still love watching the original trilogy (I own three copies of each movie on video!) but looking at it dispassionately, the acting (whiny-boy Luke?), script (some gawd-awful and cringe-worthy dialogue at times) and plot (so full of holes) are all a bit lacking.
Doctor Who did start out with a stronger script and plots, and yes, it did go down hill in the latter years. I personally think that the Star Wars prequels are at about the same level (okay, some parts _are_ worse - Midi-chlorians, the "love story" in Ep II) as the original trilogy. Remember, Star Wars was originally targetted at kids, not adults...
They don't actually deny that a new series is being considered, merely that the rumour about Anthony Head as the new Doctor is false.
Personally, I'm not too sure about the idea of reviving Doctor Who... While I really liked the series, I doubt that anything that could be made today would work. Fans would always be harking back to the original series ("The sets don't shake - it's not a real Doctor Who without shaky sets!", "The special effects are too good for Doctor Who!", etc). Just look at some of the negative reactions from Star Wars fans to the prequels...
Would it be possible to a something similar to ST:TNG? I don't think so - let's just leave the Doctor as he is and be content with what remains of the original episodes.
The point was a simple Google search can answer this, and most other Ask Slashdot questions that have been appearing lately. I'll admit I didn't read any of the sites I listed, because I have no interest in parsing...
These types of project are typically doomed to fail from the outset, and when it goes boom, the external guys will get off relatively scott-free.
I would suggest checking the details of the original contract to see exactly what was included in it. My guess, however, is that the contract will be so vague that the contractors can get away with blue-murder. Ideally there should be performance clauses, milestones and details of the outputs required - if they're not there, try to see what out clauses you have and get out of it as soon as possible.
Unfortunately management can be very reluctant to pull the plug on a project. My previous company would not accept that they ever failed in any software development projects, despite running 200% over schedule and 500% over budget in one disastrous case! (The reason I left BTW.) It would definitely be worth while to at least put a freeze on the project and perform an audit of the progress to date - get an external party to perform this audit, and make it clear to all involved that the company doing the audit will not be eligible to picking up the the contract if you decide to ditch the original contractors. Be prepared to pay for GOOD quality auditors too!
It would also be worthwhile reassessing the need to convert the code. Is it really necessary or could you just modify/fix any broken bits? If you really DO need to move to a different language/platform, are you sure you have made the right choice with J2EE, and should you be converting or re-writing? These can be very difficult issues to answer in many cases - it is sometimes hard to determine where the trade-off point is between maintaining the existing code-base, converting to a new platform and re-writing from scratch...
I would suggest that you look at books such as Death March, and even The Mythical Man Month, as they can give an insight on how to play the politics required in such situations...
Whatever you decide to do, keep an eye out for a better job, but be prepared to come across similar situations... 8^)
First of all you should decide on exactly what you want to do. Do you want to design and build your own computer, or are you happy to build a computer that other people have already designed? I started building other people's designs (the first computer I built was a Z-80 kit computer) and managed to teach myself enough to tackle designing and building a simple 8-bit computer. 8-bit computers are reasonably simple to design and build and there's quite a lot of resources on the net available.
The IEEE is a global technical professional society...
I is not for international.
Although global implies more than just the US.
Personally I don't think that an institution which only accepts membership fees in $ and has no decent payment sheme for non-USians besides credit cards is hardly international.
And yet I am able to pay my membership fees in Australian dollars if I so choose... In fact, the IEEE sets an exchange rate anually which tends to be more favourable than the actual exchange rate, meaning I effectively save money by paying with a personal cheque in Aussie dollars.
However, I am getting more and more concerned that the IEEE is becoming far too US-centric. There is less and less distinction between the IEEE and IEEE-USA.
I can relate to what you are saying. Sometimes you need the ability to go into a private office and get away from the chatter of an open-plan or cube-farm environment.
Important thing to remeber when designing an office: Do NOT give people in a open environment speaker-phones!!! Only put speaker-phones in meeting rooms and (maybe) private offices.
I have worked in a variety of office configuations over the years, and have found that while an office to myself was generally preferable, when working with a team on a reasonably important and/or difficult project, having ready access to other members of my team is of vital importance. At my last employer I managed to convince management that it would be best to hijack one of the meeting rooms for one of the projects I was working on. The entire development team (4 developers, one BA and (unfortunately 8^) ) the project manager) were in the one room. We were able to get an incredible amount of work done in a very short time as we did not have to try to find the right people to answer our questions. We were all able to join in discussions related to any issues that arose and we could easily send the PM and/or BA off to talk to the client to get any business rule requirements clarified.
Having headphones certainly helped to reduce any distractions from other conversations happening in the room, yet you could still catch someones attention easily enough if you needed to. Had we been out in the main area (not really cubicles - more open-plannish) there would have been more distractions and we would have been scattered throughout the building.
This worked well for our small-ish project, and when we had got through the bulk of the work, we were able to go back to our regular desks. If anyone wanted to use a private office, there were a couple of small meeting rooms (that could fit 4 people around a table) which were generally available.
Most studies of information flow seem to suggest that open-plan environments facilitate the free flow of information - it is easy to ask anyone a question, and someone walking by might be able to chip-in with some useful advice. Cubicles are generally ranked next, followed by shared offices then private offices. If private/shared offices are used, then an open-door policy should be urged.
I don't think there is any one ideal solution as it really depends on your office culture, the size of the projects and teams and the nature of the work you are doing. Being in a flexible environment certainly helps. If I was setting up a new office, I would go for mostly open-plan with a handful of private offices and a couple of larger meeting/project rooms. Team dynamics would dictate exactly how the office space was used at any one time.
However, having a single desk anywhere that you can call your own is far more preferable to hot-desking! If you are in a project room with a team, it is very nice to be able to go back to your desk and feel at home. That is unless someone steals your desk while you are sequestered away, as happened to me 8^(
Unfortunately not a valid Googlewhack. Both words must appear in the dictionary used by Google. ie, both words whould be underlined in the blue bar where it says "Searched the web for..."
Now "ocelot louvres" is a valid Googlewhack, which returns just one result.
You might want to check out some books on software reliability engineering which would help answer your questions. One in particular I have read is simply called "Software Reliability Engineering" by John Musa.
I get your point here, but I generally do look at other books in the bookstore. I discovered Stephen Donaldson's books by accident, I was looking for something else, picked up a Donaldson book and read the blurb and decided to buy it. Same with Terry Pratchett - I discovered his Discworld books by chance, well before I had ever heard anything about him via the media or friends. Sometimes in a book store I just browse the shelves, picking books at random and flicking through them - serendipity is a wonderful thing.
With web-browsing though it can be a bit more difficult though. In a book store, there are thousands of books visible, so you can easily browse the shelves. With the web, you cannot do that so easily. Search engines do not really give you the same impact as browsing through a shelf of books, so you may not always stumble across that site which is going to hook you.
What web-sites thrive on is links from other sites. Unless you can get your URL out there, no-one will know where to find you. Search engines can help a bit, but you really need to identify your target audience, find other sites that that audience is likely to visit, and get your site listed on them. This is not always easy...
Ummm... All this proves is that you remember some basic physics, but obviously failed your reading and comprehension. What the poster was saying is basically correct (although he got it backwards). The mass will remain the same, but the weight of shipped items would be less in India, therefore it would be cheaper to post something from India (assuming the rates per kg are the same).
Slashdot Mirror
One alternative I wondered about was running distributed clients to support OS.
While I would have no qualms running an OS or application which displayed a small, unobtrusive pop-up ad on startup (providing the only information it returned to the server was what ad had been shown and how many times/how long - absolutely no identifying information!) I would be very wary about running a piece of software that did distributed work behind my back. There are some distributed computing projects I would support, but I am not going to let someone sell my cycles to the highest bidder to run god knows what on my system. I want to control what runs on my system and for who.
Perhaps moreso in this case since the lifeguards were presumably civil servants at work.
The majority of Surf Lifesavers in Australia are volunteers...
Could someone exactly explain the issue? The complaint doesn't make any sense. I mean, really. Who could honestly care if the software's been opened, and resealed, and why?
Well, when I'm buying GameBoy Advance games I care. Many GBA games store game save data in either EEPROM, SRAM or Flash ROM, and with some games you do not have the option of completely clearing the game save data. Sonic Advance is one in particular that won't delet all the saved information. (If you use the 'Delete Data' option in Sonic Advance, it still remembers how many rings you had collected, and that can cause problems with the 'Tiny Chao' sub-game.)
I don't normally play a lot of games, but when I do, I like to find the secrets and unlock game extras myself. I don't want to enter cheat codes and I definitely don't want someone else to have unlocked parts of the game for me.
Besides, if I buy a second-hand product (of any type, not just software) then I refuse to pay the full price for it. If the store has re-wrapped a second-hand product and sells it a full price, then I would be talking to the local Csumer Afairs department about false/misleading product labelling.
Short answer: Calls TO a cell phone are charged at a long-distance rate, regardless of actual location. Recharge credits have a built-in expiry period.
Long answer: The way it works in Australia is that calls TO cell phones are NOT classed as local calls. They are charged on a timed rate, similar to long-distance calls (ie, Telstra charge $0.22 per minute to cell phones from a land line).
With pre-pay phones, the recharge/top-up credits have a built-in expiry - ie, you must use the credit within 30 or 60 days or you will lose it, if you top-up within that time period, unused credit will roll-over though. This can still be very cost-effective. A single $20 top-up card can give you incomning call access for up to 12 months (depending on the carrier and plan).
But that was because the acting, script and plot were so awful.
Go back and watch the original trilogy again. The script and acting really weren't that special. I am a big Star Wars fan, but I was 9 when Star Wars first came out - to me at the time it was something fantastic and out of this world. I still love watching the original trilogy (I own three copies of each movie on video!) but looking at it dispassionately, the acting (whiny-boy Luke?), script (some gawd-awful and cringe-worthy dialogue at times) and plot (so full of holes) are all a bit lacking.
Doctor Who did start out with a stronger script and plots, and yes, it did go down hill in the latter years. I personally think that the Star Wars prequels are at about the same level (okay, some parts _are_ worse - Midi-chlorians, the "love story" in Ep II) as the original trilogy. Remember, Star Wars was originally targetted at kids, not adults...
They don't actually deny that a new series is being considered, merely that the rumour about Anthony Head as the new Doctor is false.
Personally, I'm not too sure about the idea of reviving Doctor Who... While I really liked the series, I doubt that anything that could be made today would work. Fans would always be harking back to the original series ("The sets don't shake - it's not a real Doctor Who without shaky sets!", "The special effects are too good for Doctor Who!", etc). Just look at some of the negative reactions from Star Wars fans to the prequels...
Would it be possible to a something similar to ST:TNG? I don't think so - let's just leave the Doctor as he is and be content with what remains of the original episodes.
The point was a simple Google search can answer this, and most other Ask Slashdot questions that have been appearing lately. I'll admit I didn't read any of the sites I listed, because I have no interest in parsing...
Parsing Techniques - A Practical Guide
Flexible Parsing
Workshop on The Evaluation of Parsing Systems
Robust Parsing
Parsing Resources
Probably the last one on that list would be the most useful starting place...
These types of project are typically doomed to fail from the outset, and when it goes boom, the external guys will get off relatively scott-free.
I would suggest checking the details of the original contract to see exactly what was included in it. My guess, however, is that the contract will be so vague that the contractors can get away with blue-murder. Ideally there should be performance clauses, milestones and details of the outputs required - if they're not there, try to see what out clauses you have and get out of it as soon as possible.
Unfortunately management can be very reluctant to pull the plug on a project. My previous company would not accept that they ever failed in any software development projects, despite running 200% over schedule and 500% over budget in one disastrous case! (The reason I left BTW.) It would definitely be worth while to at least put a freeze on the project and perform an audit of the progress to date - get an external party to perform this audit, and make it clear to all involved that the company doing the audit will not be eligible to picking up the the contract if you decide to ditch the original contractors. Be prepared to pay for GOOD quality auditors too!
It would also be worthwhile reassessing the need to convert the code. Is it really necessary or could you just modify/fix any broken bits? If you really DO need to move to a different language/platform, are you sure you have made the right choice with J2EE, and should you be converting or re-writing? These can be very difficult issues to answer in many cases - it is sometimes hard to determine where the trade-off point is between maintaining the existing code-base, converting to a new platform and re-writing from scratch...
I would suggest that you look at books such as Death March, and even The Mythical Man Month, as they can give an insight on how to play the politics required in such situations...
Whatever you decide to do, keep an eye out for a better job, but be prepared to come across similar situations... 8^)
First of all you should decide on exactly what you want to do. Do you want to design and build your own computer, or are you happy to build a computer that other people have already designed? I started building other people's designs (the first computer I built was a Z-80 kit computer) and managed to teach myself enough to tackle designing and building a simple 8-bit computer. 8-bit computers are reasonably simple to design and build and there's quite a lot of resources on the net available.
I would suggest that you look at sites like 6502.org, www.coprolite.com, Mark-8, POD 6502 or Grant Searle's collection of sites build your own UK101, build your own ZX-80 and build your own Jupiter Ace...
These are all quite good sites, and you can study their designs to learn how they work.
Hope this helps!
The IEEE is a global technical professional society...
I is not for international.
Although global implies more than just the US.
Personally I don't think that an institution which only accepts membership fees in $ and has no decent payment sheme for non-USians besides credit cards is hardly international.
And yet I am able to pay my membership fees in Australian dollars if I so choose... In fact, the IEEE sets an exchange rate anually which tends to be more favourable than the actual exchange rate, meaning I effectively save money by paying with a personal cheque in Aussie dollars.
However, I am getting more and more concerned that the IEEE is becoming far too US-centric. There is less and less distinction between the IEEE and IEEE-USA.
I can relate to what you are saying. Sometimes you need the ability to go into a private office and get away from the chatter of an open-plan or cube-farm environment.
Important thing to remeber when designing an office: Do NOT give people in a open environment speaker-phones!!! Only put speaker-phones in meeting rooms and (maybe) private offices.
I have worked in a variety of office configuations over the years, and have found that while an office to myself was generally preferable, when working with a team on a reasonably important and/or difficult project, having ready access to other members of my team is of vital importance. At my last employer I managed to convince management that it would be best to hijack one of the meeting rooms for one of the projects I was working on. The entire development team (4 developers, one BA and (unfortunately 8^) ) the project manager) were in the one room. We were able to get an incredible amount of work done in a very short time as we did not have to try to find the right people to answer our questions. We were all able to join in discussions related to any issues that arose and we could easily send the PM and/or BA off to talk to the client to get any business rule requirements clarified.
Having headphones certainly helped to reduce any distractions from other conversations happening in the room, yet you could still catch someones attention easily enough if you needed to. Had we been out in the main area (not really cubicles - more open-plannish) there would have been more distractions and we would have been scattered throughout the building.
This worked well for our small-ish project, and when we had got through the bulk of the work, we were able to go back to our regular desks. If anyone wanted to use a private office, there were a couple of small meeting rooms (that could fit 4 people around a table) which were generally available.
Most studies of information flow seem to suggest that open-plan environments facilitate the free flow of information - it is easy to ask anyone a question, and someone walking by might be able to chip-in with some useful advice. Cubicles are generally ranked next, followed by shared offices then private offices. If private/shared offices are used, then an open-door policy should be urged.
I don't think there is any one ideal solution as it really depends on your office culture, the size of the projects and teams and the nature of the work you are doing. Being in a flexible environment certainly helps. If I was setting up a new office, I would go for mostly open-plan with a handful of private offices and a couple of larger meeting/project rooms. Team dynamics would dictate exactly how the office space was used at any one time.
However, having a single desk anywhere that you can call your own is far more preferable to hot-desking! If you are in a project room with a team, it is very nice to be able to go back to your desk and feel at home. That is unless someone steals your desk while you are sequestered away, as happened to me 8^(
Unfortunately not a valid Googlewhack. Both words must appear in the dictionary used by Google. ie, both words whould be underlined in the blue bar where it says "Searched the web for ..."
Now "ocelot louvres" is a valid Googlewhack, which returns just one result.
You might want to check out some books on software reliability engineering which would help answer your questions. One in particular I have read is simply called "Software Reliability Engineering" by John Musa.
I get your point here, but I generally do look at other books in the bookstore. I discovered Stephen Donaldson's books by accident, I was looking for something else, picked up a Donaldson book and read the blurb and decided to buy it. Same with Terry Pratchett - I discovered his Discworld books by chance, well before I had ever heard anything about him via the media or friends. Sometimes in a book store I just browse the shelves, picking books at random and flicking through them - serendipity is a wonderful thing.
With web-browsing though it can be a bit more difficult though. In a book store, there are thousands of books visible, so you can easily browse the shelves. With the web, you cannot do that so easily. Search engines do not really give you the same impact as browsing through a shelf of books, so you may not always stumble across that site which is going to hook you.
What web-sites thrive on is links from other sites. Unless you can get your URL out there, no-one will know where to find you. Search engines can help a bit, but you really need to identify your target audience, find other sites that that audience is likely to visit, and get your site listed on them. This is not always easy...
Ummm... All this proves is that you remember some basic physics, but obviously failed your reading and comprehension. What the poster was saying is basically correct (although he got it backwards). The mass will remain the same, but the weight of shipped items would be less in India, therefore it would be cheaper to post something from India (assuming the rates per kg are the same).