I'm not so concerned about mice with human brains taking over the world, but the chance that you might have a native mouse virus evolving in a hybrid organism that would be able to attack humans. Not that this doesn't happen already, but a hybrid environment would make this type of thing a bit more common. With any luck, these hybrid populations will not become so established that their long-term existance would increase the chance of this happening.
OK. Allow a system to set up 5 connections in the first second, 3 in the second, and 1 in the 3'rd. Then have a relaxation period of 4 seconds where no connections could be initiated. Of course, there goes a lot of thte pr0n industry:-). But maybe people would stop designing crap graphic sites with more eye candy than info if you did something like this, too.
One might suppose that the non-tech housewife (or whoever), whilst using less bandwidth, could cost a fortune to support.
Maybe, maybe not.
Ms. Housewife is a set and forget kind of gal (as Mr. "Let's surf for Pr0n when I'm not looking at ESPN" is that kind of guy, not to be sexist). Once set up, their maintenance cost is close to nil. If a site is not up, they're not likely to complain, but check again the next day. Contrast this to me - Mr. Geek who notices when Sun Microsystems and Slashdot seem to be down for a couple of days and spend some (set of) tech's time for a week tracing it to a bad router in their upstream provider. In short, Ms. Housewife may be more clueless, but she follows directions (which usually fix her simple problems) rather than arguing with a CS rep, doesn't run weird OS'es or hardware configurations, and is overall less demanding WRT QoS.
Face it -- us geeks are not very desirable customers. We're the ones who set up the giant P2P feeds with Terabyte stores, 4-proc SMPs, and dual Ethernet controllers and are too cheap to pay for a business-class account. It's no wonder to me that the BBco's are trying to get more of Ms. Housewife and fewer of us.
It is not unusual that when the system use is ordered by quantity that Zipf's Law holds. It hapens with most stable, randomly distributed, self-organizing systems.
The sad thing, being a WM customer myself, is that they really are one of the best of the bunch. Compared with Wells Fargo or US Bank, for instance, they're effin' saints.
Other than that, my home could be Windows-free. I would doubt, though, that one could ever successfully build an Open Source tax package. And for some of us, that keeps the Windows box around (at least around Apr. 15).
I trust a language implementation a heck of a lot more than I trust a coder. What's the ratio of compiler bugs to programmer-sourced bugs? Almost nil in my experience and I've spent 20+ years in this industry proving it:-). People who deny that basic fact are sticking their heads in a very, very dark place. The use of high-level language is to be encouraged at every turn.
Re:kill with a computer, rot in jail. MSNBC sucks.
on
HomeSec In the News
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· Score: 2
Society has always been sickened by those who posess tools, knowledge and position but chose to harm others.
Amen. Especially knowledge and tools that the general populace doesn't posess or understand. To the good people of our nation, advanced technology (like computers) looks like magic. And since they can't (or won't) understand the knowledge possesed by the white and black witches that hold the power of the boxes in their hands or understand the difference between white, grey, and black, they must kill them all.
I programmed using VB for a six month period once (don't ask...). The main problem with most VB controls is not that their abstractions are crappy (which most are), but that they try to abstract too wide a swath. They usually try to abstract the data model that the control uses, the persistance mechanism behind that, the application model that keeps track of the attributes specific to the given presentation object, the actual presenter code, and the control code that ties all of this crap together into one big unmamgeable ball of mud. This is why you can't use it in any way other than what the designer intended the control to work like without a huge amount of extension. It makes it easier for people who want to use that abstraction for the purpose it was intended, but it has no reusable parts to extend or replace, and usually the hood is sealed shut, too.
We've known how to design things right since the early Smalltalk days (MVC anyone?). But the idea of having a VB user design three classes per control makes me shudder, too. VB is a language dumbed down to the point where anyone can cobble together something that barely works. It sucks in that this is also the limitation of tool as well - you can only cobble together something that barely works. It is no surprise that the controls available to be used with this language are also on the same level.
The time that is used up when the better programmer is slowed down does not get repaid through gains in productivity of the pair.
Actually, check out this paper for an experimental that shows that the extra time you spend in pairing will increase the quality of the resulting code. So you have a choice: program alone and get buggier code faster, or pair and get less buggy code a bit more slowly (but the quality gains are larger than the speed loss).
Hey, dummy - last time I checked, Gore wasn't in the government. Why don't you re-read the first thread instead of trying to propogate the falacious, slanderous, and relatively shallow and stupid "I invented the Internet" meme by way of a lame joke.
P.S. The ones of you who modded this funny need to get out more. Sheesh...
the only difference was the size of the pulley off the main motor - and you could upgrade by having an IBM tech that came and changed the pulley for a bigger one
Uh... They still do that. Almost all of their z- and iSeries boxes other than their bottom of the line models come equipped with multiple CPU's that are soft unlocked. It's an easy way to do an upgrade - send IBM a check and they call your computer and unlock another few MIPS. No downtime, either. Actually, I'd be surprised if Sun didn't do something similar for its large clusters.
Because there are a dozen or so countries in which labor, even semi-skilled labor such as coding, is far, far cheaper to hire than it is here.
This is less of a factor than you think for a couple of reasons.
First, companies need to be relatively skilled in order to understand and write requirements to a level of detail such that work can be exported. Even then, in-house acceptance testing needs to be run (unless you like handing out blank checks), and, in most cases, project management overhead quickly eats up any savings in labor cost.
Second, the actual cost of software construction is a minimal portion of the overall system cost throughout the product lifecycle and drops more rapidly each day. You're minimizing a rather small upfront cost when all is said and done. Maintenance cannot be assured, since keeping the project structure in place following the initial delivery of code costs too much to allow that to be an option in the maintenance phase and not having access to the people who wrote the code makes maintenance cost more too.
In short, I tell folks who want to do this sort of thing to consider their best and worst experience with onsite contractors. Then you halve the best and double the worst and ask thenm if the savings is still worth it. Once you look at the entire product life-cycle, most will find it isn't...
... for online (or catalog) merchants to be given special advantage over the brick and mortar kind. If you hate taxes, you can say that no business can be taxed, but as long as any are taxed, they should all be taxed equitably. If you like taxes, again, businesses should be taxed equitably. The people who quote Heinlein whenever the **AA come up should also gripe about the advantage given to companies - in this case, those who are given advantageous tax exclusions.
In any case, I see taxes as one of the prices one pays for living in a civilized society, so I see no problem taxing online folk at an equitable level.
People have been studying the economy as a "mathematical system" for decades. Goog "econometrics" or "economic model" and see what you get. Mathematical models of the economy have advanced far beyond what engineers normally use in the design of normal circuitry (and this is me speaking as an actual electrical engineer). Some of the best mathematical minds today are working on analysis of economic systems, since engineering and physics have gotten so simple. Besides - you can make a lot of money if you do it right:-).
... we didn't even have office buildings. We had to keep our S/360's out in the barn, and when the hogs crapped on 'em, we'd have to dig 'em out from under the... well, you get the idea. And we used barbed wire to wire 'em to the power grid, too.
You kids these days just have it too fscking soft, I tell you...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not so concerned about mice with human brains taking over the world, but the chance that you might have a native mouse virus evolving in a hybrid organism that would be able to attack humans. Not that this doesn't happen already, but a hybrid environment would make this type of thing a bit more common. With any luck, these hybrid populations will not become so established that their long-term existance would increase the chance of this happening.
So what you're saying is that we should use the flaming crosses for spammers? Good idea. Where's my gas can?
OK. Allow a system to set up 5 connections in the first second, 3 in the second, and 1 in the 3'rd. Then have a relaxation period of 4 seconds where no connections could be initiated. Of course, there goes a lot of thte pr0n industry :-). But maybe people would stop designing crap graphic sites with more eye candy than info if you did something like this, too.
... is my backup repository.
Maybe, maybe not.
Ms. Housewife is a set and forget kind of gal (as Mr. "Let's surf for Pr0n when I'm not looking at ESPN" is that kind of guy, not to be sexist). Once set up, their maintenance cost is close to nil. If a site is not up, they're not likely to complain, but check again the next day. Contrast this to me - Mr. Geek who notices when Sun Microsystems and Slashdot seem to be down for a couple of days and spend some (set of) tech's time for a week tracing it to a bad router in their upstream provider. In short, Ms. Housewife may be more clueless, but she follows directions (which usually fix her simple problems) rather than arguing with a CS rep, doesn't run weird OS'es or hardware configurations, and is overall less demanding WRT QoS.
Face it -- us geeks are not very desirable customers. We're the ones who set up the giant P2P feeds with Terabyte stores, 4-proc SMPs, and dual Ethernet controllers and are too cheap to pay for a business-class account. It's no wonder to me that the BBco's are trying to get more of Ms. Housewife and fewer of us.
It is not unusual that when the system use is ordered by quantity that Zipf's Law holds. It hapens with most stable, randomly distributed, self-organizing systems.
The obligatory TicketMaster service charge, too?
You should have included the obligatory goatse link. I'm sure you're saying "Doh!" now (for the obligatory Simpsons link)...
Yeah. They taste like chicken...
The sad thing, being a WM customer myself, is that they really are one of the best of the bunch. Compared with Wells Fargo or US Bank, for instance, they're effin' saints.
Other than that, my home could be Windows-free. I would doubt, though, that one could ever successfully build an Open Source tax package. And for some of us, that keeps the Windows box around (at least around Apr. 15).
I trust a language implementation a heck of a lot more than I trust a coder. What's the ratio of compiler bugs to programmer-sourced bugs? Almost nil in my experience and I've spent 20+ years in this industry proving it :-). People who deny that basic fact are sticking their heads in a very, very dark place. The use of high-level language is to be encouraged at every turn.
Amen. Especially knowledge and tools that the general populace doesn't posess or understand. To the good people of our nation, advanced technology (like computers) looks like magic. And since they can't (or won't) understand the knowledge possesed by the white and black witches that hold the power of the boxes in their hands or understand the difference between white, grey, and black, they must kill them all.
Beware, Dorthy!
We've known how to design things right since the early Smalltalk days (MVC anyone?). But the idea of having a VB user design three classes per control makes me shudder, too. VB is a language dumbed down to the point where anyone can cobble together something that barely works. It sucks in that this is also the limitation of tool as well - you can only cobble together something that barely works. It is no surprise that the controls available to be used with this language are also on the same level.
Actually, check out this paper for an experimental that shows that the extra time you spend in pairing will increase the quality of the resulting code. So you have a choice: program alone and get buggier code faster, or pair and get less buggy code a bit more slowly (but the quality gains are larger than the speed loss).
Leaked, hell - it was magic, I tell you... MAGIC!
P.S. The ones of you who modded this funny need to get out more. Sheesh...
Uh... They still do that. Almost all of their z- and iSeries boxes other than their bottom of the line models come equipped with multiple CPU's that are soft unlocked. It's an easy way to do an upgrade - send IBM a check and they call your computer and unlock another few MIPS. No downtime, either. Actually, I'd be surprised if Sun didn't do something similar for its large clusters.
This is less of a factor than you think for a couple of reasons.
First, companies need to be relatively skilled in order to understand and write requirements to a level of detail such that work can be exported. Even then, in-house acceptance testing needs to be run (unless you like handing out blank checks), and, in most cases, project management overhead quickly eats up any savings in labor cost.
Second, the actual cost of software construction is a minimal portion of the overall system cost throughout the product lifecycle and drops more rapidly each day. You're minimizing a rather small upfront cost when all is said and done. Maintenance cannot be assured, since keeping the project structure in place following the initial delivery of code costs too much to allow that to be an option in the maintenance phase and not having access to the people who wrote the code makes maintenance cost more too.
In short, I tell folks who want to do this sort of thing to consider their best and worst experience with onsite contractors. Then you halve the best and double the worst and ask thenm if the savings is still worth it. Once you look at the entire product life-cycle, most will find it isn't...
Why not just use the sort command? Then it would be a no-liner.
No, it's "Differently-Abled Audio Media"...
In any case, I see taxes as one of the prices one pays for living in a civilized society, so I see no problem taxing online folk at an equitable level.
Grundig also markets a model of their shortwave radios with a case designed by these guys...
People have been studying the economy as a "mathematical system" for decades. Goog "econometrics" or "economic model" and see what you get. Mathematical models of the economy have advanced far beyond what engineers normally use in the design of normal circuitry (and this is me speaking as an actual electrical engineer). Some of the best mathematical minds today are working on analysis of economic systems, since engineering and physics have gotten so simple. Besides - you can make a lot of money if you do it right :-).
You kids these days just have it too fscking soft, I tell you...