And consider that most cable companies (which 80% of american homes get most of their content though) are regional monopolies that can mandate the use of particular hardware on their networks.
In order for this to happen, you'd have to have some new type of hardware come out, completely patented, with no alternatives available that could do something similar.
Thank goodness that could never happen. Oh, except for the DVD player, which is controlled by a cartel. Or most video game consoles, where the companies involved exercise complete control over who makes games and what goes in 'em.
In other words, it's not obvious that nice businesses fail because they're nice.
This is very true. Look at Newman's Own, Paul Newman's food company, which gives 100% of its profits to charity.
But I'd bet that it is an additional risk factor. If your only question about an activity is "does it increase profits?" that's easier to sort out than "will this increase profits in a way that fits with our mission statement?"
On average, non-profits that I've dealt with seem much more chaotic than for-profits of the same size. I'm sure there are many factors, but the snarling dogs of capitalism provide a whole lotta discipline.
And what happens when they compromise the second password? [/obvious] Great idea.
This is one of the things about talking about security that makes me froth. The implication is that perfect security is unachievable, ergo all imperfect security attempts are somehow dumb.
This yutz probably has a lock on his house. A smart guy could pick it in under a minute. A beefy guy could just kick down the door. A sneaky guy could probably get in through a window. A smooth guy could pose as a postman and get him to open the door. A brutal guy could kidnap his girlfriend and demand to be let in. Does this mean that locks are useless? That we should forget about them, leaving our houses open?
In this particular case, I said, "here is a way to make it so that somebody who has rooted your box can't do anything harmful." The scoffing answer of "what happens when they compromise the second password" is so clue-deficient that it is probably a troll, but in case somebody has been fooled by it, reasonable answers are:
They're unlikely to get the first password; 99% of breakins involve getting root through insecurities, not through password compromise.
And how would that happen? The password is only used during OS maintenance, which should happen rarely on a production server. LIDS itself protects the LIDS binaries from being trapdoored. Use it only from the console to remove a number of network risks.
Then do something more! This is all open-source software; if you need SecureID cards, thumbprint scanning, and blood sampling, you can put that in, too.
Nothing is perfectly secure; the interesting question is how much you can get for a given level of money and inconvenience. LIDS adds quite a bit of security for relatively little inconvenience.
Or better yet, no swap at all. For all of the real-time (as opposed to batch) server stuff I write, I make sure the hardware should never need to swap. Once you allow swapping, response time goes into the toilet, usually causing queuing and spiralling delays. Yuck.
Of course, root can still walk through RAM, but there are ways to fix that. I've lately been trying LIDS, which adds a more complex permission model. You can make it so that root is normally pretty limited, requiring a separate maintenance password to do anything dangerous.
Darn, then I guess they're at the mercy of the market. Better regulate the market because California is too good to have to pay for its shortsighted ways.
You seem to be missing the point. The "shortage" was artificially created by manipulating the market. There was no shortage of electricity during the crisis, and the recently exposed Enron memos prove that.
You'd be hard pressed to find an economist who doesn't think there should be rules against market manipulation. Take our stock market: it's widely regarded as the world's most successful, so much so that foreign corporations will list themselves here. Is that because we don't regulate it? Hardly. The SEC is one of the toughest regulators in the world; CEOs fear them universally. The tight regulation creates the level playing field necessary for a liquid market.
This isn't to say that California doesn't have a NIMBY problem, and it may yet come to bite them. But it hasn't yet, and claiming that the power crisis is an example of too much regulation is missing the point entirely.
The only places in the USA that have power problems are the ones that haven't built any additional power capacity in the last 10 years due to environmentalist protests.
I'm glad to blame leftist kooks for all sorts of dumbness, but they are entirely innocent in California's power crisis.
California's celebrated (and really pretty minor) brownouts happened during the winter, the time of lowest electricity demand. The problem wasn't capacity, it was a poorly constructed market regulated by the naive and gamed by many of the major power companies, Enron prime among them.
My rough rule of thumb is that I can bill about 50% of the hours I work; the rest is taken up in sales, research, training, conferences, and the various freebies that it's good karma to give. So a standard year at $75/hour would be circa $75k before expenses. And expenses can be substantial; I pay all my own medical, dental, vacation, training, bandwidth, software, and hardware costs.
The reason to be an independent contractor isn't the money; sometimes you can clean up, and sometimes you don't. I do it for the freedom. There are few things sweeter than telling a client that because they're a pain, it will cost them 30% more. Except, perhaps, having them pay it!
As far as I know, sea levels are rising in some areas and falling in others. Erm... ROFL.
How, should that be possible? Take a soup plate fill it wit water, then let it raise at one side and fall at the other, show me how you do that.
Blow on it.
Seriously, the sea isn't all at sea level. Thanks to winds and currents, the level of the water differs. If wind and current patterns were to change, some places would show drops and others would show rises.
That said, the studies I've seen about sea level changes account for this, so I think that the ocean is indeed rising. And since one of the things that global warming would cause is a shift in wind and current patterns, that seems even more evidence.
dealing with an offshore programming team is no different than dealing with any other consultancy. Agree on the statements of work Make sure that the statements of work are adhered to.
No theoretical difference, but a ton of practical difference.
For the kind of software that can be completely specified in advance, maybe you can get away with it. But most software development, especially the small stuff like this, is an exploratory process; the developers make something, the users say "no, no, we really mean..." And you repeat this until everybody's happy, or happy enough that they want to spend their money elsewhere.
With developers twelve time zones away, you introduce big communication barriers. Temporal: everything takes a day, so the feedback loop is slow. Cultural: until you've worked with the team a while, it requires much more communication to get the same ideas across. Bandwidth: email and phone conversations are a poor substitute for physical presence. Until you've tried working remotely, you just don't realize how much info is picked up indirectly or casually.
If the poster is going to try this, it should be a long-term choice. If you want to build an Indian team that will be kick-ass in two years, go for it. But if it's a temporary solution, it will be nothing but a thorn in your side.
If I had a PDA or laptop in there you probably couldn't hear it over the chewing and slurping noises[...]
Having spent many an evening at Chicago's Brew & View I can say that this is just untrue; it's certainly no worse than in a normal movie theater. Moreover, many of the noises that electronic devices make are designed to catch your attention. Plus, very few foods, even in Chicago, glow; most handheld computing devices do.
In other words, I won't be going to see Episode II anywhere that has the words "Draft House" in the name.
Seeing a good, serious movie at Brew & View isn't great. But it's a great place to see something funny; the South Park movie was a blast there. And there is nowhere better see a really bad movie; between the beer and the sassy heckling from the audience, even Jar Jar Binks is tolerable.
In actuality, an email address can contain almost anything except '@', a '%' or a '!'. Yes, email addresses can even contain spaces if you quote them: "FirstName LastName"@domain.com is a perfectly valid email address.
I agree with the sentiment, but I don't think that's exactly correct. Those special characters are also allowed under RFC 822, just as long as they are quoted.
As a practical matter, both sendmail and qmail seem to allow those characters quite happily. I just sent email from qmail and sendmail boxes to a qmail box with addresses like "foo@@example.com", "bar!@example.com", and "foobar!%@@example.com", and all of them got to the destination machine and were delivered happily.
I've worked in organizations up to a few thousand users and this system has worked fine. In a truly huge organization you'd end up having user names that look like AOL, though. Certainly in an educational environment I imagine a more authoritarian system would be warranted.
I don't buy it. The University of Michigan allows everybody to pick whatever they like. Their system, known as uniqname, has been running for at least a decade, and they must manage on the order of 75,000 users with a turnover of at least 10,000 per year.
The main reason to go with the hideous names that many places hand out is because it's slightly easier for the sysadmins, no matter that if it's a royal pain for the users.
I laugh especially hard at places that try to encode all sorts of information in the username, especially things like status (faculty, staff, student), school (undergrad or grad, engineering or liberal arts), or year of graduation. That may have been handy back before the invention of the network-connected database. But stuff like that changes all the time; making them change their ID seems much dumber than just looking up their status when you really need to know it.
So you *liked* working in an environment where one person would interrupt and destroty the concentration of the whole group to ask a question? And you think that's productive?
It sounds counterintuitive, but it can work very well. Studies of pair programming, for example, show substantial gains in quality.
Personally, I love open office arrangements, except when I hate them utterly. What's the difference? For me, it's whether everybody in the room is involved in the same project.
If the people around me are all working on the same thing, then their conversations aren't a distraction any more than my teammates in a basketball game. The number of times an overheard comment has saved me hours of work are beyond counting. Errors, like weeds, grow quickly once they take root; best to kill them as early as possible.
On the other hand, if people around me are talking about things irrelevant to the work I'm doing, it's like having random people wandering through the basketball court. It makes me crazy, and I have to put on headphones to get anything done.
My recommendatation: project rooms (aka war rooms). But managers should be aware that this isn't the cheap way out; to reap the high-communication benefits of open offices, you must provide meeting rooms and private places for making personal calls, checking email, and any activities not related to the project!
Secondly, I find the figure of $1 per spam to be kind of ludicrous. It takes me about 5 seconds to recognize a piece of mail is spam and delete it.
So let's assume that like most geeks, you're way on the end of the bell curve when it comes to processing information. Suppose the average spam delay is 30 seconds per person. They just said the guy worked at "a major telecommunications company"; let's assume that they're in the same league as SGI, another company mentioned in the article which has revenues of $300,000 per year per employee.
That works out to about $150 per hour in revenue, or $2.50 per minute. So that 30-second spam distraction costs $1.25 on average.
And assuming their mail beeped and distracted them from something else, the cost could be a lot higher; distractions substantially reduce productivity. And if they click on a link or actually read the spam? yet more time gone. $1 is probably too low.
The volume of relay testing traffic has increased signficantly over the past year.
That's because the big ones were shut down. They're still handy, so a zillion people have started them. If they are allowed to say open, then everybody will converge on a good one and the unused ones will drop off the face of the earth. But if they keep getting shut down, expect a greater number of too-small-to-bother-with relay testers in the future.
Re:Software is not a car
on
ORBZ Shuts Down
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Maybe you're right; as a programmer, I'm sympathetic the notion. But arguing like you are won't convince anybody.
Since customers already vote with their dollars (if you make useless, buggy software then nobody's going to buy it) why do we need artificial restrictions imposed on developers?
That's a silly argument; you could make it just as well for any product, from bonds to airplanes. Why do we need auditors and all these fussy finanical regulations? The shares in poorly run companies won't be bought, right?
If every piece of software adhered to current best practices, we wouldn't have any new innovation would we? New algorithms? They're against the law (they're not certified as secure).
There are immense numbers of regulations for things like food, cars, and financial products, and there have been for decades. But all of those have changed drastically in the last 50 years, and they'll keep on changing. Why wouldn't the same be true for software?
You haven't explained to me why we need this. Regulations should never be applied unless they are absolutely necessary - i.e. in the case of personal safety.
That's certainly not the only case where we have product regulations. The things that are entirely unregulated seem to be the things that are perfectly ok to screw up. If you make music, there's no law saying it has to be good, but if your CD doesn't play in my player, you have to take it back.
When computers are used for something equally low-risk, then not regulating software seems fine. If a game crashes once in a while, that's swell.
But some of us would like to use software for more important things, too. Suppose you run an on-line business, and you pay Microsoft a lotta dough for a fancy ecommerse setup. Then the week after you install it, some script-kiddie takes it down, steals your customer credit card data, and forwards all your pages to porn sites. By the time your clean up the mess, you're in Chapter 11.
So you turn to Microsoft, and they say, "Sorry, Charlie, no warranties express or implied. Your check cleared, so we're outta here!" Is that how things should work?
That's how they worked with investments before we regulated them up the wazoo. And far from crushing investment, our financial markets are immensely lively and highly regarded around the world.
You seem perfectly suited for bottom-line, 'no new idea is a good idea' middle management.
Yeah, ad hominem attacks against a guy with a reasonable point persuade me of your views.
No, they have no rights that are not moral rights. Since it is far from clear that there is such a moral right... is also follows that they may or may not have such a right. [...]If there is no need to loan a copy, they how can the authors be so upset over "piracy" ? Clearly, it's not theft at all.
I'm going to presume you're not just trolling, although it's hard to tell. Here's the scoop:
They put the software out there and say "If you're going to use this, pay us; if you don't think it's worth paying for, don't use it." If you take their software, use it, and don't pay, from their perspective it's hard to interpret that as other than a big "fuck you".
Do they lose anything? For an individual case, it's hard to say, but statistically, it's certain: at any given price, some of those people would have paid, and all of them would have paid at some price. $50 too much? How about $5? $0.50? $0.000005?
Do you gain something? Assuming you're not a moron, sure, or you wouldn't have bothered to invest the time to take their work.
So you get something for nothing, and they get nothing for something. Great deal, eh? Maybe it's unclear whether they have a "moral right", but it's pretty clear that you have no right, moral or legal, to boost their work and then step up on a soapbox and wag your finger at them.
So if you aren't going to bust open your piggy bank and send them a little dough, howzabout you stick to the tens of thousandsofpackages that were given away freely? Or better, maybe go out and write something?
Interestingly enough, relational database technology itself was created to overcome the limitations of hierarchal databases(aka tree-based data structures). [...] Look at Java - everything ultimately is inherited from the almighty Object.
Don't mistake a hierarchical type structure for a hierarchical data structure.
In Java, one might model things so that Persons and Vehicles are both subclasses of Object, and that Cars and Trucks are subclasses of vehicles. This is indeed strictly hierarchical.
But a Person called Joe can be the owner for a Truck, ride in a Car, and be the spouse of another person Jane simultaneously. That's not a hierarchical relationship; it's a web of connections.
You can still have hierarchical relationships with OO data; if Joe sells his truck, the Engine and the four Wheels would automatically go along with. But that's just one possible relationship.
My only gripe with LJ articles is that, even if you put them in print mode, they still run off the end of my paper when I print them.
So I just looked up this "paper" thing on Google, and it sounds really cool, kinda like a flat-panel display with a built-in battery. But how do you slice the trees so thin?
Much more practical, I'd think, to get an FM transmitter installed in your PC [yahoo.com], or even just attach one to your speaker jack [drbott.com]. Noticably cheaper, than a Rio Receiver either way. This way you can pick up your MP3 collection from any FM radio in the house, even untethered battery-powered ones.
Why that's brilliant! Of course, you'll need a little extra hardware if you want to actually control what you listen to.
Aside from not having to run back to the computer to skip to the next song, the big advantage of these networked players is that not everybody has to listen to the same thing. A friend of mine has audiotrons around his house; he, his wife, and his daughter can all listen to different things.
relational is the choice of DB for almost all projects for its sheer speed, OO is only good for academic reasons to show off organization...
It depends on what you're trying to do. If your data is easily modeled in a relational way, then relational databases are certainly faster, if only because people have spent the last couple decades optimizing the bejezus out of them. If your data has to be bent or mangled to get it to fit into a relational database, then you can be better off with an OO database.
It's similar to the different between a CSV (comma-separated value) file and an XML file. If your data naturally fits into X rows by Y columns, then putting it into XML is a waste.
But imagine how far the web would have gotten if Tim Berners-Lee had used not HTML but a document with a series of interrelated rectangular tables. It would have gone nowhere; many interesting things are not easily expressed in the style of relational databases.
Typical American thinking: "Those other countries just exist on TV, right?"
I grant entirely that many Americans are woefully ignorant of overseas events. But, having lived on four continents, I am at least slightly better off in this regard than the average gringo.
So allow me to point out that "lazy", "efficient" , and "hopelessly overworked" can be hard to distinguish, especially from across an ocean. It could be, as you suggest, that they were typical slothful gaijin, only stirring themselves from their consumption of greasy hamburgers and watching of John Wayne movies long enough to drop you netblock in the bin, perhaps pausing momentarily to scratch their underwashed heads while saying, "Juh-pan? Didn't we kick their asses once?"
Or it could be that they looked with loving care at their logs, said, "This week we got 148,000 pieces of spam from them, plus a hacker coming from that block just brought down the server of one of our biggest clients. We see no legitimate mail from them this week. Even worse, their abuse desk has not answered us! We'll block them until we hear otherwise."
Or it could be that the sysadmin, like an awful lot of ISP admins, had been their 80 hours that week and just wanted to fucking go home, and that he didn't have handy his copy of "A Field Guide to Large, Respected, and Entirely Noble-Hearted ISP's in Japan", perhaps because noboby has written one.
So given that alternative explanations exist, perhaps you could back right off on using the racial stereotypes that you yourself claim are part of the problem?
Slashdot Mirror
Nice over-reaction, but you are forgetting one MAJOR point... the telephone company at the time had a huge monopoly!
There is no similar monopoly in the hardware markets that could make me rent all my equipment and not keep control of it.
Yet.
But RIAA and the MPAA are sure trying to get it that way. Note the efforts of the senator from Disney, for example.
And consider that most cable companies (which 80% of american homes get most of their content though) are regional monopolies that can mandate the use of particular hardware on their networks.
In order for this to happen, you'd have to have some new type of hardware come out, completely patented, with no alternatives available that could do something similar.
Thank goodness that could never happen. Oh, except for the DVD player, which is controlled by a cartel. Or most video game consoles, where the companies involved exercise complete control over who makes games and what goes in 'em.
In other words, it's not obvious that nice businesses fail because they're nice.
This is very true. Look at Newman's Own, Paul Newman's food company, which gives 100% of its profits to charity.
But I'd bet that it is an additional risk factor. If your only question about an activity is "does it increase profits?" that's easier to sort out than "will this increase profits in a way that fits with our mission statement?"
On average, non-profits that I've dealt with seem much more chaotic than for-profits of the same size. I'm sure there are many factors, but the snarling dogs of capitalism provide a whole lotta discipline.
This is one of the things about talking about security that makes me froth. The implication is that perfect security is unachievable, ergo all imperfect security attempts are somehow dumb.
This yutz probably has a lock on his house. A smart guy could pick it in under a minute. A beefy guy could just kick down the door. A sneaky guy could probably get in through a window. A smooth guy could pose as a postman and get him to open the door. A brutal guy could kidnap his girlfriend and demand to be let in. Does this mean that locks are useless? That we should forget about them, leaving our houses open?
In this particular case, I said, "here is a way to make it so that somebody who has rooted your box can't do anything harmful." The scoffing answer of "what happens when they compromise the second password" is so clue-deficient that it is probably a troll, but in case somebody has been fooled by it, reasonable answers are:
Nothing is perfectly secure; the interesting question is how much you can get for a given level of money and inconvenience. LIDS adds quite a bit of security for relatively little inconvenience.
Or better yet, no swap at all. For all of the real-time (as opposed to batch) server stuff I write, I make sure the hardware should never need to swap. Once you allow swapping, response time goes into the toilet, usually causing queuing and spiralling delays. Yuck.
Of course, root can still walk through RAM, but there are ways to fix that. I've lately been trying LIDS, which adds a more complex permission model. You can make it so that root is normally pretty limited, requiring a separate maintenance password to do anything dangerous.
Effiencies will be exploited.
Is that the new euphemism for fans? Or consumers in general?
Darn, then I guess they're at the mercy of the market. Better regulate the market because California is too good to have to pay for its shortsighted ways.
You seem to be missing the point. The "shortage" was artificially created by manipulating the market. There was no shortage of electricity during the crisis, and the recently exposed Enron memos prove that.
You'd be hard pressed to find an economist who doesn't think there should be rules against market manipulation. Take our stock market: it's widely regarded as the world's most successful, so much so that foreign corporations will list themselves here. Is that because we don't regulate it? Hardly. The SEC is one of the toughest regulators in the world; CEOs fear them universally. The tight regulation creates the level playing field necessary for a liquid market.
This isn't to say that California doesn't have a NIMBY problem, and it may yet come to bite them. But it hasn't yet, and claiming that the power crisis is an example of too much regulation is missing the point entirely.
The only places in the USA that have power problems are the ones that haven't built any additional power capacity in the last 10 years due to environmentalist protests.
I'm glad to blame leftist kooks for all sorts of dumbness, but they are entirely innocent in California's power crisis.
California's celebrated (and really pretty minor) brownouts happened during the winter, the time of lowest electricity demand. The problem wasn't capacity, it was a poorly constructed market regulated by the naive and gamed by many of the major power companies, Enron prime among them.
My rough rule of thumb is that I can bill about 50% of the hours I work; the rest is taken up in sales, research, training, conferences, and the various freebies that it's good karma to give. So a standard year at $75/hour would be circa $75k before expenses. And expenses can be substantial; I pay all my own medical, dental, vacation, training, bandwidth, software, and hardware costs.
The reason to be an independent contractor isn't the money; sometimes you can clean up, and sometimes you don't. I do it for the freedom. There are few things sweeter than telling a client that because they're a pain, it will cost them 30% more. Except, perhaps, having them pay it!
Seriously, the sea isn't all at sea level. Thanks to winds and currents, the level of the water differs. If wind and current patterns were to change, some places would show drops and others would show rises.
That said, the studies I've seen about sea level changes account for this, so I think that the ocean is indeed rising. And since one of the things that global warming would cause is a shift in wind and current patterns, that seems even more evidence.
dealing with an offshore programming team is no different than dealing with any other consultancy. Agree on the statements of work
Make sure that the statements of work are adhered to.
No theoretical difference, but a ton of practical difference.
For the kind of software that can be completely specified in advance, maybe you can get away with it. But most software development, especially the small stuff like this, is an exploratory process; the developers make something, the users say "no, no, we really mean..." And you repeat this until everybody's happy, or happy enough that they want to spend their money elsewhere.
With developers twelve time zones away, you introduce big communication barriers. Temporal: everything takes a day, so the feedback loop is slow. Cultural: until you've worked with the team a while, it requires much more communication to get the same ideas across. Bandwidth: email and phone conversations are a poor substitute for physical presence. Until you've tried working remotely, you just don't realize how much info is picked up indirectly or casually.
If the poster is going to try this, it should be a long-term choice. If you want to build an Indian team that will be kick-ass in two years, go for it. But if it's a temporary solution, it will be nothing but a thorn in your side.
I tried a PIM for a bit [...] It offers no advantages over paper[...]
Aside from backups, you mean.
William
If I had a PDA or laptop in there you probably couldn't hear it over the chewing and slurping noises[...]
Having spent many an evening at Chicago's Brew & View I can say that this is just untrue; it's certainly no worse than in a normal movie theater. Moreover, many of the noises that electronic devices make are designed to catch your attention. Plus, very few foods, even in Chicago, glow; most handheld computing devices do.
In other words, I won't be going to see Episode II anywhere that has the words "Draft House" in the name.
Seeing a good, serious movie at Brew & View isn't great. But it's a great place to see something funny; the South Park movie was a blast there. And there is nowhere better see a really bad movie; between the beer and the sassy heckling from the audience, even Jar Jar Binks is tolerable.
In actuality, an email address can contain almost anything except '@', a '%' or a '!'. Yes, email addresses can even contain spaces if you quote them: "FirstName LastName"@domain.com is a perfectly valid email address.
I agree with the sentiment, but I don't think that's exactly correct. Those special characters are also allowed under RFC 822, just as long as they are quoted.
As a practical matter, both sendmail and qmail seem to allow those characters quite happily. I just sent email from qmail and sendmail boxes to a qmail box with addresses like "foo@@example.com", "bar!@example.com", and "foobar!%@@example.com", and all of them got to the destination machine and were delivered happily.
I've worked in organizations up to a few thousand users and this system has worked fine. In a truly huge organization you'd end up having user names that look like AOL, though. Certainly in an educational environment I imagine a more authoritarian system would be warranted.
I don't buy it. The University of Michigan allows everybody to pick whatever they like. Their system, known as uniqname, has been running for at least a decade, and they must manage on the order of 75,000 users with a turnover of at least 10,000 per year.
The main reason to go with the hideous names that many places hand out is because it's slightly easier for the sysadmins, no matter that if it's a royal pain for the users.
I laugh especially hard at places that try to encode all sorts of information in the username, especially things like status (faculty, staff, student), school (undergrad or grad, engineering or liberal arts), or year of graduation. That may have been handy back before the invention of the network-connected database. But stuff like that changes all the time; making them change their ID seems much dumber than just looking up their status when you really need to know it.
So you *liked* working in an environment where one person would interrupt and destroty the concentration of the whole group to ask a question? And you think that's productive?
It sounds counterintuitive, but it can work very well. Studies of pair programming, for example, show substantial gains in quality.
Personally, I love open office arrangements, except when I hate them utterly. What's the difference? For me, it's whether everybody in the room is involved in the same project.
If the people around me are all working on the same thing, then their conversations aren't a distraction any more than my teammates in a basketball game. The number of times an overheard comment has saved me hours of work are beyond counting. Errors, like weeds, grow quickly once they take root; best to kill them as early as possible.
On the other hand, if people around me are talking about things irrelevant to the work I'm doing, it's like having random people wandering through the basketball court. It makes me crazy, and I have to put on headphones to get anything done.
My recommendatation: project rooms (aka war rooms). But managers should be aware that this isn't the cheap way out; to reap the high-communication benefits of open offices, you must provide meeting rooms and private places for making personal calls, checking email, and any activities not related to the project!
Secondly, I find the figure of $1 per spam to be kind of ludicrous. It takes me about 5 seconds to recognize a piece of mail is spam and delete it.
So let's assume that like most geeks, you're way on the end of the bell curve when it comes to processing information. Suppose the average spam delay is 30 seconds per person. They just said the guy worked at "a major telecommunications company"; let's assume that they're in the same league as SGI, another company mentioned in the article which has revenues of $300,000 per year per employee.
That works out to about $150 per hour in revenue, or $2.50 per minute. So that 30-second spam distraction costs $1.25 on average.
And assuming their mail beeped and distracted them from something else, the cost could be a lot higher; distractions substantially reduce productivity. And if they click on a link or actually read the spam? yet more time gone. $1 is probably too low.
The volume of relay testing traffic has increased signficantly over the past year.
That's because the big ones were shut down. They're still handy, so a zillion people have started them. If they are allowed to say open, then everybody will converge on a good one and the unused ones will drop off the face of the earth. But if they keep getting shut down, expect a greater number of too-small-to-bother-with relay testers in the future.
Maybe you're right; as a programmer, I'm sympathetic the notion. But arguing like you are won't convince anybody.
Since customers already vote with their dollars (if you make useless, buggy software then nobody's going to buy it) why do we need artificial restrictions imposed on developers?
That's a silly argument; you could make it just as well for any product, from bonds to airplanes. Why do we need auditors and all these fussy finanical regulations? The shares in poorly run companies won't be bought, right?
If every piece of software adhered to current best practices, we wouldn't have any new innovation would we? New algorithms? They're against the law (they're not certified as secure).
There are immense numbers of regulations for things like food, cars, and financial products, and there have been for decades. But all of those have changed drastically in the last 50 years, and they'll keep on changing. Why wouldn't the same be true for software?
You haven't explained to me why we need this. Regulations should never be applied unless they are absolutely necessary - i.e. in the case of personal safety.
That's certainly not the only case where we have product regulations. The things that are entirely unregulated seem to be the things that are perfectly ok to screw up. If you make music, there's no law saying it has to be good, but if your CD doesn't play in my player, you have to take it back.
When computers are used for something equally low-risk, then not regulating software seems fine. If a game crashes once in a while, that's swell.
But some of us would like to use software for more important things, too. Suppose you run an on-line business, and you pay Microsoft a lotta dough for a fancy ecommerse setup. Then the week after you install it, some script-kiddie takes it down, steals your customer credit card data, and forwards all your pages to porn sites. By the time your clean up the mess, you're in Chapter 11.
So you turn to Microsoft, and they say, "Sorry, Charlie, no warranties express or implied. Your check cleared, so we're outta here!" Is that how things should work?
That's how they worked with investments before we regulated them up the wazoo. And far from crushing investment, our financial markets are immensely lively and highly regarded around the world.
You seem perfectly suited for bottom-line, 'no new idea is a good idea' middle management.
Yeah, ad hominem attacks against a guy with a reasonable point persuade me of your views.
No, they have no rights that are not moral rights. Since it is far from clear that there is such a moral right... is also follows that they may or may not have such a right. [...]If there is no need to loan a copy, they how can the authors be so upset over "piracy" ? Clearly, it's not theft at all.
I'm going to presume you're not just trolling, although it's hard to tell. Here's the scoop:
They put the software out there and say "If you're going to use this, pay us; if you don't think it's worth paying for, don't use it." If you take their software, use it, and don't pay, from their perspective it's hard to interpret that as other than a big "fuck you".
Do they lose anything? For an individual case, it's hard to say, but statistically, it's certain: at any given price, some of those people would have paid, and all of them would have paid at some price. $50 too much? How about $5? $0.50? $0.000005?
Do you gain something? Assuming you're not a moron, sure, or you wouldn't have bothered to invest the time to take their work.
So you get something for nothing, and they get nothing for something. Great deal, eh? Maybe it's unclear whether they have a "moral right", but it's pretty clear that you have no right, moral or legal, to boost their work and then step up on a soapbox and wag your finger at them.
So if you aren't going to bust open your piggy bank and send them a little dough, howzabout you stick to the tens of thousands of packages that were given away freely? Or better, maybe go out and write something?
U BM, I BM, we all BM for IBM.
Interestingly enough, relational database technology itself was created to overcome the limitations of hierarchal databases(aka tree-based data structures). [...] Look at Java - everything ultimately is inherited from the almighty Object.
Don't mistake a hierarchical type structure for a hierarchical data structure.
In Java, one might model things so that Persons and Vehicles are both subclasses of Object, and that Cars and Trucks are subclasses of vehicles. This is indeed strictly hierarchical.
But a Person called Joe can be the owner for a Truck, ride in a Car, and be the spouse of another person Jane simultaneously. That's not a hierarchical relationship; it's a web of connections.
You can still have hierarchical relationships with OO data; if Joe sells his truck, the Engine and the four Wheels would automatically go along with. But that's just one possible relationship.
My only gripe with LJ articles is that, even if you put them in print mode, they still run off the end of my paper when I print them.
So I just looked up this "paper" thing on Google, and it sounds really cool, kinda like a flat-panel display with a built-in battery. But how do you slice the trees so thin?
Much more practical, I'd think, to get an FM transmitter installed in your PC [yahoo.com], or even just attach one to your speaker jack [drbott.com]. Noticably cheaper, than a Rio Receiver either way. This way you can pick up your MP3 collection from any FM radio in the house, even untethered battery-powered ones.
Why that's brilliant! Of course, you'll need a little extra hardware if you want to actually control what you listen to.
Aside from not having to run back to the computer to skip to the next song, the big advantage of these networked players is that not everybody has to listen to the same thing. A friend of mine has audiotrons around his house; he, his wife, and his daughter can all listen to different things.
relational is the choice of DB for almost all projects for its sheer speed, OO is only good for academic reasons to show off organization...
It depends on what you're trying to do. If your data is easily modeled in a relational way, then relational databases are certainly faster, if only because people have spent the last couple decades optimizing the bejezus out of them. If your data has to be bent or mangled to get it to fit into a relational database, then you can be better off with an OO database.
It's similar to the different between a CSV (comma-separated value) file and an XML file. If your data naturally fits into X rows by Y columns, then putting it into XML is a waste.
But imagine how far the web would have gotten if Tim Berners-Lee had used not HTML but a document with a series of interrelated rectangular tables. It would have gone nowhere; many interesting things are not easily expressed in the style of relational databases.
Typical American thinking: "Those other countries just exist on TV, right?"
I grant entirely that many Americans are woefully ignorant of overseas events. But, having lived on four continents, I am at least slightly better off in this regard than the average gringo.
So allow me to point out that "lazy", "efficient" , and "hopelessly overworked" can be hard to distinguish, especially from across an ocean. It could be, as you suggest, that they were typical slothful gaijin, only stirring themselves from their consumption of greasy hamburgers and watching of John Wayne movies long enough to drop you netblock in the bin, perhaps pausing momentarily to scratch their underwashed heads while saying, "Juh-pan? Didn't we kick their asses once?"
Or it could be that they looked with loving care at their logs, said, "This week we got 148,000 pieces of spam from them, plus a hacker coming from that block just brought down the server of one of our biggest clients. We see no legitimate mail from them this week. Even worse, their abuse desk has not answered us! We'll block them until we hear otherwise."
Or it could be that the sysadmin, like an awful lot of ISP admins, had been their 80 hours that week and just wanted to fucking go home, and that he didn't have handy his copy of "A Field Guide to Large, Respected, and Entirely Noble-Hearted ISP's in Japan", perhaps because noboby has written one.
So given that alternative explanations exist, perhaps you could back right off on using the racial stereotypes that you yourself claim are part of the problem?