One manager to every 1.85 computer programmers. At current rates, managers will outnumber programmers in a few years.
I don't know if my experience counts as microcosm for the larger IT world (it probably doesn't) but I recall at the beginning of my career that there was maybe one manager for 8 or 10 programmers. There was a lot of cameraderie and teamwork, people divided up tasks amongst themselves, areas of expertise were overlapped or specialized in reasonably efficient manner, and a lot of stuff got done, and done well.
At one recent job, I had one coworker and FIVE people with the word "manager" in their title who felt like they could tell me what to do and when to do it, and I had zero authority to do anything except my own job: every thing else was "owned" by a manager somewhere.
Anyway, I don't think the situation was unique, and I continue to be baffled at the inversion of the business hierarchy. It doesn't make financial sense, given how expensive managers are compared to regular workers.
All you've done is reduced the search space for a brute force crack. And now it's not even obscure--you've just posted it in the one place where almost every cracker is guaranteed to see it and someone will probably incorporate it into the next version of a cracking engine.
Better idea might be to issue a uniquely scrambled rectangle of letters to each user every N days (and a uniquely shaped overlay if practical).
I would gladly write code for free, and have often done so. The paycheck is to compensate me for having to put up with managers and other corporate annoyances.
The Escape Hybrid claim is about 35MPG. The Prius's real world mileage is only about 85% of it's EPA rating. So let's say the Escape Hybrid gets 30mpg, that's still pretty good for an SUV. A 4 cylinder regular Escape is rated at 24 mpg and doesn't suffer the hybrid EPA mileage penalty.
Okay, so per mile, I'm saving (1/24 - 1/30) gallons. That's 0.008333 gallons per mile saved. Let's say $2 a gallon for gas. That's 0.01666 dollars per mile saved. The list price is going to be $3300 for the hybrid option, but since it is likely to be very popular Ford won't offer rebates and dealers won't discount, so the real price premium is likely to be more like $4500.
Okay, so $4500 / 0.01666 dollars per mile before you actually get full payback from your initial investment, as a consumer of hybrid technology.
That's 270,000 miles.
If you make optimistic assumptions, i.e. that it will actually get the full 35mpg and that dealers won't price gouge you, it's still going to be well over 100,000 miles before you'd be better off choosing the hybrid over the 4 cylinder.
the idea of using fiber optic connections between chips? far less latency over long distances, no heat or capacitive coupling problems, no noise, incredible bandwidth, only one connection instead of 900+ little metal dots.
If someone actually does the effort to pick the lock or hack down the door, it's proof enough that they did [not] get their hint to stay out and deliberately circumvented it. So we throw them in jail.
The metaphor breaks down here because houses cannot be tricked into breaking into other houses, taking them over and repeating the process until 70% of the houses on the planet have been broken into by zombie houses.
It's more like a public nuisance: at some point, the city council gets together and decides a problem is the responsibility of all concerned citizens in the area, and people just have to upgrade their doors and locks, or be held responsible for the damage that happens when their house gets of control and starts attacking other houses.
I can't let my dog run loose...i'm responsible for its actions, even if someone else teases it into attacking. I can't leave my keys in the ignition...some kid might take my car for a joyride and kill some pedestrians. I can't put a pool in my front yard...anyone could show up drunk at 3am and drown himself. I didn't design those products, but if I own them and they are a public nuisance in some way, I have to take active control and make sure my property is not misused.
At some point, we have to be responsible for the things we own, even if they are susceptible, difficult to control, or dangerous. If you can't keep control over your rottweiler or windows 95, take it back to the store and get a dachsund and a mac.
The particles that we are made of are constantly winking in and out of existence due to quantum fluctuations anyway. It's only a matter of degree to compare that to being completely disassembled and reassembled somewhere else from different particles.
At a more concrete level, most of the chemical elements your body is made of are gradually dissolved and replaced over several years; you literally are not the same person you were 15 years ago.
In other words, you are already being subject to similar "transporter" like effects as you travel through time.
1. Each vendor has a special language for stored procedures that is incompatible with other DB's...so it's a vendor lock-in mechanism.
2. Stored procedures which are triggers operate in a weird out-of-phase universe where they can do stuff before, during, or after a transaction. Yes, this makes them powerful, but the transactional behavior of the procedure depends on the context in which it is invoked. So you end up making a mental map (it never seems to be documented) of which SP's operate in which phase. One odd but effective way to deal with this to put the word "before", "during", or "after" (optionally row also) into the name of the stored procedure.
3. It kind of breaks the (sometimes adhered to) idea of keeping a clean separation of the algorithms from the data, in the same way that writing into the instruction cache is best not done.
Won't matter, though; stock has lost its $5 support,
Is there anyway to tell who is providing the price support? Obviously SCO has a stock buyback plan in place, and it's such a thinly traded stock that they can just buy 10000 shares a day and it still doesn't compare to their legal expenses. But is there any possibility that anyone else would want to provide support?
MSFT probably wouldn't care about it. In all likelyhood they have given up the idea of using SCO as goons since they're incompetent.
A mutual fund or two might want to keep their position looking good, but it's hard to imagine that any fund manager holding SCOX would have NOT read groklaw by now and closed or hedged their position by now.
Or are there just a bunch of day traders buying at 4.00 and selling at 4.20 playing off the occasional short squeeze.
It's actually quite puzzling that this stock has any value at all.
Tech books have page count targets. These are set by the publisher and the author just has to expand or contract the subject material to fit. I think o'reilly is actually less annoying about this than most other publishers.
224 pages is actually pretty modest compared to some of the 1100+ page tech books out there, some of which even have "introduction to" or "teach yourself in 21 days" in their title. I should know: I have several of them on my bookshelf so I'm actually contributing to the problem by buying them!
I started programming for $6 an hour, only slightly above minimum wage at the time. I did this because I loved it, and I didn't care about money really. But the new generation of programmers in the US expect to make enough money to support a mortgage, two car payments, their wife's credit card, and two kids in private school. That kind of salary plus benefits and overhead means that a programmer can cost $150,000 a year to maintain. It is not unusual for them to work in teams of 4 or more and they require testers, admin, and management personnel, so it very easily adds up to over $1 million per year to support a team. I've seen it happen multiple times, and it wasn't always for particularly ambitious, or even successful, projects either.
I've come to the conclusion that business just can't support that kind of expense for a team anymore, and something has to be done. If not for outsourcing, a sensible business would still have to find another way to trim software development expenses. And it's not like they're being unfair in punishing the IT people. Other aspects of business like health benefits, strikes, mergers, layoffs, pensions, etc are basically fights over money too. Software development isn't special in that regard, and isn't cheap enough to fly under the radar anymore. Outsourcing is a symptom, not the disease.
Kevin Rose had a dark tip on Unscrewed a while back in which he disassembled a disposable camera and exposed the flash leads. He wired this up to the fingertips of a heavy rubber glove.
First he demoed the stun-gun effect on a metal object, then Joey the Intern walked on the set and agreed to be hit by the device. He recoiled and looked a little agitated, then swore (mildly) a little bit. Kevin asked if he could do it again and Joey continued swearing, getting more agitated and of course declined a repeat performance.
I'm kind of in agreement with the parent re properties of the media themselves, but I would like to add that there is an information-overload aspect to e-books that I find intimidating.
I have a replay PVR and if I leave it alone for a week and come back there can be 75 TV shows waiting for me. Which one do I watch? I dunno, I go do something else so I don't have to face up to the dread of 75 hours of TV, most of which I intentionally chose but forgot why, waiting for me.
Okay, I also have a modest collection of DVD's. So I found a DVD changer big enough to hold all of them at once, now all I have to do is look through the on-screen menu and decide which one I want to watch. Funny, I already watched them all already and now the choice between "Spinal Tap" and "Toy Story 2" just isn't as obvious as it used to be.
So what happens if I buy an ebook? I have to think about what I want to load into it. I have to intentionally take time to read each title, then go find new ones. I mean, am I feeding it's habit or mine?
It's like all these devices are just mocking me.
"Hey, you paid $500 for the hardware and $15 each for each software title and now you aren't going to use me. I'm just going to sit here and remind you what a compulsive, wasteful person you are until you get confused for a moment and buy another entertainment device and repeat the pattern yet again."
Actually, would it be a big deal if some hackers did get into the convention network?
Nobody is going to die from a wifi security breach. The same laptops are going to be in hotels a few hours later and be just as attackable then as they ever were anyway.
In fact I would be surprised if there was anything of value accessible through the convention wifi network. More than likely there will be a hopelessly overloaded T1 and a handful of printers that are out of paper anyway, just like every other convention.
If the democrats set up a file share with a bunch of strategic plans or something, well sheesh, they're going to get leaked anyway, regardless of the wifi network.
I think the article goes into the old "the sky is falling" category. It's kind of amusing that wifi actually takes place in the sky, but that's about it.
One notable victim is xv, which has also been held back because of the Unisys GIF patent nonsense.
While xv's functionality is limited compared to other image viewers and editors, it's a classic utility program that enabled millions of college students to...ummm...view downloaded images in their dorm rooms at night when no-one else is around...
Firstly, up to 8 electrons stored, unless you can detect which of the electrons is being stored, only yields 3 bits
Some of the electrons may have different potentials and thus could be differentiated from the rest. Not enough detail is given to evaluate the theoretical information content of the molecule independent from their claims.
The article didn't imply that the problem employee worked at a different location or department, so perhaps the title would be more correctly put as "Preventing/Resolving Intraoffice Conflict". It would have been fine (and slightly less pretentious) to just call it office conflict also. Not a big deal.
Tbe fair, other major operating systems of today (e.g. most linux distros, macos x) install web browsers, email clients, etc by default. In fact they go further and install office suites, which MS does not do.
The concept of installing a bunch of possibly-useful stuff along with the kernel and device drivers isn't really new or bad. You can disagree with choices the OS vendors have made about what to bundle, and how tightly to integrate it. The alternative, an empty OS that just sits there and flashes a block cursor at you has its place, but it isn't going to be very popular these days.
Randomly assign numbers to the machines (perhaps the IP address or last 3 digits of the serial number) and hold a raffle-like event. Getting all managerial and trying to "optimize" who gets what first is just a lot of wasted effort that makes you feel important but doesn't really improve anyone's productivity, least of all yours. Just start replacing machines.
You're actually kind of lucky. Most library-computer-admin types are barraged by viruses, protect-the-kiddies issues, idiots clicking yes on a pop-up activex thing or any of the other 900 ways computers can get messed up by daily use in a public environment. If you have time to worry about prioritizing new hardware installation, you are in an enviable position!
Slashdot Mirror
Napster the copyright weasel!
SGI thrives because it can put together a clustered supercomputer
SGI is not thriving. Check the stock price.
Western Digitals's headquarters is in CA, a right to work state.
If Pete moves there, the lawyers will have a shot at having the case heard there.
One manager to every 1.85 computer programmers. At current rates, managers will outnumber programmers in a few years.
I don't know if my experience counts as microcosm for the larger IT world (it probably doesn't) but I recall at the beginning of my career that there was maybe one manager for 8 or 10 programmers. There was a lot of cameraderie and teamwork, people divided up tasks amongst themselves, areas of expertise were overlapped or specialized in reasonably efficient manner, and a lot of stuff got done, and done well.
At one recent job, I had one coworker and FIVE people with the word "manager" in their title who felt like they could tell me what to do and when to do it, and I had zero authority to do anything except my own job: every thing else was "owned" by a manager somewhere.
Anyway, I don't think the situation was unique, and I continue to be baffled at the inversion of the business hierarchy. It doesn't make financial sense, given how expensive managers are compared to regular workers.
All you've done is reduced the search space for a brute force crack. And now it's not even obscure--you've just posted it in the one place where almost every cracker is guaranteed to see it and someone will probably incorporate it into the next version of a cracking engine.
Better idea might be to issue a uniquely scrambled rectangle of letters to each user every N days (and a uniquely shaped overlay if practical).
GM hybrid pickups feature four 120-volt, 20 amp electrical auxiliary power outlets
4 outlets * 120V * 20A = 9600 watts.
It is indeed an impressive inverter, but the 14KW number can only be for the propulsion motor.
I would gladly write code for free, and have often done so. The paycheck is to compensate me for having to put up with managers and other corporate annoyances.
Okay, time for some math.
The Escape Hybrid claim is about 35MPG. The Prius's real world mileage is only about 85% of it's EPA rating. So let's say the Escape Hybrid gets 30mpg, that's still pretty good for an SUV.
A 4 cylinder regular Escape is rated at 24 mpg and doesn't suffer the hybrid EPA mileage penalty.
Okay, so per mile, I'm saving (1/24 - 1/30) gallons.
That's 0.008333 gallons per mile saved.
Let's say $2 a gallon for gas.
That's 0.01666 dollars per mile saved.
The list price is going to be $3300 for the hybrid option, but since it is likely to be very popular Ford won't offer rebates and dealers won't discount, so the real price premium is likely to be more like $4500.
Okay, so $4500 / 0.01666 dollars per mile before you actually get full payback from your initial investment, as a consumer of hybrid technology.
That's 270,000 miles.
If you make optimistic assumptions, i.e. that it will actually get the full 35mpg and that dealers won't price gouge you, it's still going to be well over 100,000 miles before you'd be better off choosing the hybrid over the 4 cylinder.
I liked the part where they said the silverado's electric motor can produce 14,000 watts of power.
Oooh, 19hp.
the idea of using fiber optic connections between chips? far less latency over long distances, no heat or capacitive coupling problems, no noise, incredible bandwidth, only one connection instead of 900+ little metal dots.
Spending too much time reading slashdot.
If someone actually does the effort to pick the lock or hack down the door, it's proof enough that they did [not] get their hint to stay out and deliberately circumvented it. So we throw them in jail.
The metaphor breaks down here because houses cannot be tricked into breaking into other houses, taking them over and repeating the process until 70% of the houses on the planet have been broken into by zombie houses.
It's more like a public nuisance: at some point, the city council gets together and decides a problem is the responsibility of all concerned citizens in the area, and people just have to upgrade their doors and locks, or be held responsible for the damage that happens when their house gets of control and starts attacking other houses.
I can't let my dog run loose...i'm responsible for its actions, even if someone else teases it into attacking. I can't leave my keys in the ignition...some kid might take my car for a joyride and kill some pedestrians. I can't put a pool in my front yard...anyone could show up drunk at 3am and drown himself. I didn't design those products, but if I own them and they are a public nuisance in some way, I have to take active control and make sure my property is not misused.
At some point, we have to be responsible for the things we own, even if they are susceptible, difficult to control, or dangerous. If you can't keep control over your rottweiler or windows 95, take it back to the store and get a dachsund and a mac.
The particles that we are made of are constantly winking in and out of existence due to quantum fluctuations anyway. It's only a matter of degree to compare that to being completely disassembled and reassembled somewhere else from different particles.
At a more concrete level, most of the chemical elements your body is made of are gradually dissolved and replaced over several years; you literally are not the same person you were 15 years ago.
In other words, you are already being subject to similar "transporter" like effects as you travel through time.
1. Each vendor has a special language for stored procedures that is incompatible with other DB's...so it's a vendor lock-in mechanism.
2. Stored procedures which are triggers operate in a weird out-of-phase universe where they can do stuff before, during, or after a transaction. Yes, this makes them powerful, but the transactional behavior of the procedure depends on the context in which it is invoked. So you end up making a mental map (it never seems to be documented) of which SP's operate in which phase. One odd but effective way to deal with this to put the word "before", "during", or "after" (optionally row also) into the name of the stored procedure.
3. It kind of breaks the (sometimes adhered to) idea of keeping a clean separation of the algorithms from the data, in the same way that writing into the instruction cache is best not done.
Won't matter, though; stock has lost its $5 support,
Is there anyway to tell who is providing the price support? Obviously SCO has a stock buyback plan in place, and it's such a thinly traded stock that they can just buy 10000 shares a day and it still doesn't compare to their legal expenses. But is there any possibility that anyone else would want to provide support?
MSFT probably wouldn't care about it. In all likelyhood they have given up the idea of using SCO as goons since they're incompetent.
A mutual fund or two might want to keep their position looking good, but it's hard to imagine that any fund manager holding SCOX would have NOT read groklaw by now and closed or hedged their position by now.
Or are there just a bunch of day traders buying at 4.00 and selling at 4.20 playing off the occasional short squeeze.
It's actually quite puzzling that this stock has any value at all.
Tech books have page count targets. These are set by the publisher and the author just has to expand or contract the subject material to fit. I think o'reilly is actually less annoying about this than most other publishers.
224 pages is actually pretty modest compared to some of the 1100+ page tech books out there, some of which even have "introduction to" or "teach yourself in 21 days" in their title. I should know: I have several of them on my bookshelf so I'm actually contributing to the problem by buying them!
I started programming for $6 an hour, only slightly above minimum wage at the time. I did this because I loved it, and I didn't care about money really. But the new generation of programmers in the US expect to make enough money to support a mortgage, two car payments, their wife's credit card, and two kids in private school. That kind of salary plus benefits and overhead means that a programmer can cost $150,000 a year to maintain. It is not unusual for them to work in teams of 4 or more and they require testers, admin, and management personnel, so it very easily adds up to over $1 million per year to support a team. I've seen it happen multiple times, and it wasn't always for particularly ambitious, or even successful, projects either.
I've come to the conclusion that business just can't support that kind of expense for a team anymore, and something has to be done. If not for outsourcing, a sensible business would still have to find another way to trim software development expenses. And it's not like they're being unfair in punishing the IT people. Other aspects of business like health benefits, strikes, mergers, layoffs, pensions, etc are basically fights over money too. Software development isn't special in that regard, and isn't cheap enough to fly under the radar anymore. Outsourcing is a symptom, not the disease.
Kevin Rose had a dark tip on Unscrewed a while back in which he disassembled a disposable camera and exposed the flash leads. He wired this up to the fingertips of a heavy rubber glove.
First he demoed the stun-gun effect on a metal object, then Joey the Intern walked on the set and agreed to be hit by the device. He recoiled and looked a little agitated, then swore (mildly) a little bit. Kevin asked if he could do it again and Joey continued swearing, getting more agitated and of course declined a repeat performance.
A viewer took kevin to task over credit for the "invention" as well:
http://www.dc602.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=58
I'm kind of in agreement with the parent re properties of the media themselves, but I would like to add that there is an information-overload aspect to e-books that I find intimidating.
I have a replay PVR and if I leave it alone for a week and come back there can be 75 TV shows waiting for me. Which one do I watch? I dunno, I go do something else so I don't have to face up to the dread of 75 hours of TV, most of which I intentionally chose but forgot why, waiting for me.
Okay, I also have a modest collection of DVD's. So I found a DVD changer big enough to hold all of them at once, now all I have to do is look through the on-screen menu and decide which one I want to watch. Funny, I already watched them all already and now the choice between "Spinal Tap" and "Toy Story 2" just isn't as obvious as it used to be.
So what happens if I buy an ebook? I have to think about what I want to load into it. I have to intentionally take time to read each title, then go find new ones. I mean, am I feeding it's habit or mine?
It's like all these devices are just mocking me.
"Hey, you paid $500 for the hardware and $15 each for each software title and now you aren't going to use me. I'm just going to sit here and remind you what a compulsive, wasteful person you are until you get confused for a moment and buy another entertainment device and repeat the pattern yet again."
Actually, would it be a big deal if some hackers did get into the convention network?
Nobody is going to die from a wifi security breach. The same laptops are going to be in hotels a few hours later and be just as attackable then as they ever were anyway.
In fact I would be surprised if there was anything of value accessible through the convention wifi network. More than likely there will be a hopelessly overloaded T1 and a handful of printers that are out of paper anyway, just like every other convention.
If the democrats set up a file share with a bunch of strategic plans or something, well sheesh, they're going to get leaked anyway, regardless of the wifi network.
I think the article goes into the old "the sky is falling" category. It's kind of amusing that wifi actually takes place in the sky, but that's about it.
One notable victim is xv, which has also been held back because of the Unisys GIF patent nonsense.
While xv's functionality is limited compared to other image viewers and editors, it's a classic utility program that enabled millions of college students to...ummm...view downloaded images in their dorm rooms at night when no-one else is around...
Firstly, up to 8 electrons stored, unless you can detect which of the electrons is being stored, only yields 3 bits
Some of the electrons may have different potentials and thus could be differentiated from the rest. Not enough detail is given to evaluate the theoretical information content of the molecule independent from their claims.
The article didn't imply that the problem employee worked at a different location or department, so perhaps the title would be more correctly put as "Preventing/Resolving Intraoffice Conflict". It would have been fine (and slightly less pretentious) to just call it office conflict also. Not a big deal.
It sure as hell doesn't involve a web browser
Tbe fair, other major operating systems of today (e.g. most linux distros, macos x) install web browsers, email clients, etc by default. In fact they go further and install office suites, which MS does not do.
The concept of installing a bunch of possibly-useful stuff along with the kernel and device drivers isn't really new or bad. You can disagree with choices the OS vendors have made about what to bundle, and how tightly to integrate it. The alternative, an empty OS that just sits there and flashes a block cursor at you has its place, but it isn't going to be very popular these days.
Replace the machines lottery-style.
Randomly assign numbers to the machines (perhaps the IP address or last 3 digits of the serial number) and hold a raffle-like event. Getting all managerial and trying to "optimize" who gets what first is just a lot of wasted effort that makes you feel important but doesn't really improve anyone's productivity, least of all yours. Just start replacing machines.
You're actually kind of lucky. Most library-computer-admin types are barraged by viruses, protect-the-kiddies issues, idiots clicking yes on a pop-up activex thing or any of the other 900 ways computers can get messed up by daily use in a public environment. If you have time to worry about prioritizing new hardware installation, you are in an enviable position!