How do you know? You could only tell that you had respawned if your memories passed intact to your new self. Of course, if your memories don't pass intact then is it really your self? Oh, and if you go ahead and pass along your memories without you actually dying, which you is you?
And for that matter, when you step into a transporter, is the guy who comes out on the other side really you?
This is assuming that there is such a thing as a blank slate brain, or that any brain can be shaped in arbitrary ways.
Brains grow. In fact, learning to play an instrument at an early age can actually cause changes to the folds of the brain visible to the naked eye. That is a dramatic example, but I'm sure there are a bazillion subtle ways the physical wiring of the brain gets set in near-permanent ways as it is forming. Some of that might be the result of experience, but some is likely the result of genetics, or even just chance.
They fessed up to what? Handling Tea Party applications differently, or doing it for political reasons? It is the latter I'm concerned with - they handle various groups of organizations differently all the time so it isn't really news that the Tea Party is among them. Doing it for political rather than legal reasons is a different matter.
That would be a major omission. I was wondering how cloning an embryo would be news.
I'm sure it isn't done every day of the week due to the ethical concerns, but I couldn't see how cloning embryos would present any difficulty at all. You basically just have to pluck a cell off of it and you're done as long as it is done before differentiation. if you chop an embryo in two you end up with identical twins, which is exactly how it happens naturally.
Cloning an embryo from an adult cell (especially a skin cell) is DEFINITELY news. I figured it was just a matter of time - again the ethical issues are the biggest obstacle to doing it considering that we can already clone other mammals.
The IRS scandal is one that many Americans will be concerned about. Most Americans understand that the IRS coming after people on a political basis is a very bad thing even if it is about a group that may not be their cup of tea, so to speak.
I haven't been following it closely, but has any evidence actually emerged that it was politically motivated?
It is pretty typical for it to take many years to get an IRS certification for an organization. It also appears for it to be typical for related organizations to get lumped together to see how things go with a common policy defined to govern all of them. I know that there are tons of FOSS organizations that are waiting in limbo for determinations, perhaps for the same reason.
It shouldn't take years for the IRS to determine if an org is legit, but that seems to be a matter of general inability to get things done. I'd need to see some specific evidence to confirm that the Tea Party was targeted any more than a collection of all the Bieber fan clubs.
I certainly can. There are a million ways that I could make my next door neighbor's life miserable that are completely legal. You can certainly blame me for employing any of those tactics if it was done simply to hurt somebody. Sure, if somebody doesn't like the sight of clothes lines I'm not going to refuse to hang up my laundry. However, if my next door neighbor just lost his job and needs to sell his home to reduce his expenses, I'm not going to go out and paint my house with perfectly legal polka dots and put 1k pink flamingos in my lawn just to knock 40% off of his home value, even if I could somehow make money off the deal.
That's a much bigger problem with Windows than with Linux. You can easily mount md-raid drives from linux booted from USB or CD. I don't believe Windows supports booting off of anything other than a hard drive.
I would not want a windows-only software hard drive.
Yup, my workplace has had small victories, but usually only once things get out of hand.
It was pretty typical when buying a piece of equipment for the vendor to bundle a PC controller and printer with it for $5k (the software alone was only a few hundred dollars). Once that got on the radar the procurement group was instructed to look for this and disallow this - the internal IT group would deliver a managed bare-bones PC with the required OS and only basic management/antivirus software, and a network printer would be used. 99% of the time the printer that was bought would just get installed in somebody's office anyway.
The forced move to network printers also helped people to kick the paper habit. At this point it is pretty rare for me to handle paper at all at work, even with numerous legal requirements for documentation, sign-offs, and so on. It just takes commitment and it is wonderful to be able to live out of little more than a backpack, or sign off on stuff on weekends with nothing more than a VPN connection.
Thanks - wasn't aware of that development. What is their noise output compared to nuclear subs operating at the same speeds? The article really only says that they're quiet, but all modern subs are quiet. I doubt that modern US anti-sub platforms were designed to only be able to detect WWII subs.
Liquid Oxygen is also not something that can be regenerated at sea, so for cruise across the Pacific I would imagine that they would still snorkel, or their range would be fairly compromised when they got to the US. They could also be tailed the entire way from their port of embarkation. Then again, if this were a one-way suicide trip planned out as such I imagine they could make it on their load of oxygen assuming the speed is decent.
But we have laws against suicides, allowing suicides, and snuff films (not sure which category this falls into).
Speaking of laws, what happens when food gets low and the biggest guy on the show murders the smallest one and cooks him up for dinner? Do we send up a one-way police ship to arrest him?
Sophisticated, maybe, but there's no real evidence of that openly available. Not to mention, what those that aren't obsolete or (at best and being generous) obsolescent and aren't extremely short ranged miniature boats are short range coastal submarines. The numbers may be impressive to the non professional, but their capabilities shouldn't be.
Tend to agree. Subs come in two major categories:
Diesel-electric subs can be very quiet on electric power. I'd think that even the US would struggle to locate a very well-designed one (no idea if NK actually has these). However, their range on electric power is purely tactical - they're not going to cross the ocean on batteries. On diesel power they're very detectable - they're loud, and they have to have a snorkel detectable by radar above the surface. If one got close to a city finding it and getting rid of it would be tough, but they aren't getting there without the US knowing about it, and they could be trivially intercepted well before they got close enough to cause trouble.
Nuclear subs are the bigger threat in general, but the US is very good at detecting these as well. They can cruise the oceans underwater, but I doubt NK has any. They also are noisy enough that they will be spotted if they pass near a hydrophone, and the US has all those nice hydrophone networks left over from the cold war.
Bottom line is that NK isn't going to sneak into US waters. They could potentially lose a chase for a while if they wanted to, but about the only way to attack a city would be to approach it under diesel under peacetime and park just outside territorial limits, and then close the rest of the distance under electric and mount a first strike. However, if the US was concerned and was already tailing the sub when it was on diesel and they saw it go quiet near a city, they could just follow the thing on active sonar. There is nothing the electric sub could do to escape being followed, short of opening fire on the sonar platform, at which point you're now at war and there's no sneaking up on anything from then on.
The crews have to be taught how to handle the weapons, and you do not do that on a live round.
Not only that, but do you really want your supreme leader standing across the street from hundreds of tons of rocket fuel just waiting for some kind of accident to set it afire?
Training rounds likely also come in a variety of styles, from fully inert to working rockets but inert warheads (for missiles, etc). It depends on just what you're training for. But yes, I wouldn't want to be in a hanger with a bunch of people learning for the first time how to load a bomb on a plane using live ammo. The pilots aren't even supposed to touch the bombs on their planes (though they do inspect them visually and notify somebody if they see a problem).
I was just reading an article the other day about people in states where there is no compensation, where the conviction still shows up on your record, and where employment for those wrongfully convicted is almost impossible as a result.
These people don't want $50k/yr for lost time - they want their records cleared. Heaven forbid that somebody proven innocent by DNA evidence have a clean record!
$50k/yr is the least we should be doing for them - it should probably be closer to $150k/yr. It isn't like we should be locking up that many people wrongfully that we can't afford it - if we are then the reparations are the least of our problems.
Why didn't the IT group suggest contacting the software developers and asking them to add support for the not-so-old equipment? It should be cheaper than replacing the equipment.
I'm sure if you threw enough gold at them they might come around, but who knows.
Suppose your business just HAD to use Galaxy S phones for some reason, but you really wanted security updates and JB on them. I'm sure it can be done, so just call up Samsung and ask them to re-support your phones. Even if you offered them a million dollars a year they probably wouldn't bother with you. Maybe if you offered them $500M they'd take the offer, but that would probably not make sense for you no matter how desperate your need was.
In the case of durable goods that possess computerized processes there should be some sort of support contract in place that states the vender will maintain upwards compatibility for X amount of time at reasonable costs. 3 years is too short to cut off support.
Agreed, but it seems like the people who have the power to buy this equipment often resent the idea of having to get input from IT/etc on their selections. They just want to try 3 models out and buy whatever model they like best, and they'll call IT in 3 years if something goes wrong.
Sure, that's bad for stockholders, but it is great for empire-building. Sometimes it is deliberate, sometimes it is just a lack of knowledge. Everybody uses computers, right, so why should IT have anything useful to say about purchasing them? I bought a computer for my home and didn't need help from IT...
To upgrade, you can start a new database on a new machine and then migrate the different apps at different times. I've done that.
Sure, and that's exactly what we do at work as well. The problem is that until the last application is migrated you have a super-expensive database server that could be serving hundreds of applications serving a handful that haven't migrated yet. If the apps don't bundle stuff like stored procedures they migrate much more quickly, and hence your super-expensive DB servers are recycled quickly and not running Oracle 8i for the next decade with two apps on them (sure, you can probably recycle some of the RAM/CPUs/licenses, but it is still a cost sink).
I couldn't tell you exactly how many different databases get run on a server at work, but it certainly ranges from dozens to hundreds if not more. Many databases aren't all that busy, but that doesn't mean that they are no longer needed. Other databases strain the capabilities of the largest servers we can find for them and end up involving more exotic technologies to address. In my experience the ones that are hardest to migrate are the ones with business logic implemented in the database.
The trick, I think, is to treat IT more like a leased resource than a purchased tool. Or should I say 'a depreciating asset'?
Sure, but that can be a tough pill to swallow when the costs are high.
Back when my company migrated from NT->XP a small number of workstations ended up staying on NT for a VERY long time - well past the end-of-support date. They were firewalled in various ways to minimize the security risk, but the company was definitely at risk of them getting infected and having to reimage them/etc.
Why was this done? Simple - they were used to control equipment, and the software wasn't compatible with XP. Of course the IT group suggested just upgrading the software, but the upgraded software didn't support the old equipment. So, then the IT group suggested just getting new equipment, but the equipment was only a few years old and was worth something like $500k or more (and we were talking about a bunch of examples like this). The equipment had been bought under the assumption that it would earn back its cost over 30 years, not 3. Spending millions of dollars to upgrade equipment just because the OS was obsolete was a VERY hard sell.
Now, you could argue that you should take OS lifecycles into account when planning depreciation cycles, but a company that buys the equipment and just accepts/mitigates the OS security risks would be at an advantage over a company that decided not to buy the equipment at all because it would never pay for itself in 5-10 years.
What needs to be understood is that running an unsupported OS is a risk, but it is still a finite risk, and some risks just are worth taking, especially if you can mitigate them.
Well, they can always make something up to keep you from calling back.
A manager in our operations support group once explained the situation to some internal customers - if the system is down, do you want everybody available to be fixing the problem, or do you want them to spend their time telling people that it is under control? (Mind you, this was only for internal customers.) The ultimate decision was that for very short outages they'd just deal with it, and once it was taking more than 15min they'd start issuing communications. For a short outage few would even notice it in the first place or bother to call it in, and announcing it after the fact didn't really provide any value-add.
Now, if we were contracting with an outside company we'd insist on knowing about all outages as part of our SLA - we'd care about them after the fact because we'd want to know if we're getting value for our money. Where internal customers are concerned the data would get reported to management, and they'd decide if the support group was doing a good job. The random company workers really didn't have decision rights over where the work was done - it isn't like we let individual departments contract for their own support.
What's the benefit to upgrading your web browser before the current one isn't supported?
Sure, you'll have to do it eventually, so why not do it now? Simple - time value of money. Suppose it costs $100k to upgrade your browser now, and $100k to upgrade it a year from now. If you spend the money now you get a fancy new web browser, and you don't make a dime more in revenue as a result. If you spend the money a year from now you can invest the money for a year at 6% interest and end up with $6k more than you would have otherwise had a year from now after you spend the $100k. If you wait 6 years to upgrade then you have an extra $20k, and if you missed two upgrade opportunities along the way then you have $200k more on top of that because you make one investment instead of three.
How do you make 6% these days? Well, for starters by not taking out more debt - if you're in debt then pay down that debt, and that is probably the better part of 6% with a 100% guarantee depending on your creditworthiness. If not that, then invest in the business - chances are your company gets more than a 6% return on capital if it is doing well - that $100k could let you expand your business elsewhere.
Bottom line is that browser upgrades and such are a means to an end, and not an end in itself.
Now, if that old browser is holding you back from deploying some new software that will greatly enable your business, then upgrade that thing tomorrow, and borrow money if you don't have the cash to do it! This isn't about having a newer browser - it is about making a profit.
As far as where all the money you save/make goes - it goes to the company owner/shareholders, or gets invested into other areas of the business. When you finish paying off your car do you take the extra $400/month and tell the guy who mows your lawn to drop by every day to trim it, because after all the lawn is a little higher each day and you have the money to do something about it? Do you start getting your car waxed twice a week? No, you do whatever the heck it is that you enjoy doing with your money, because it is your money, and it really isn't anybody else's business what you do with it once you've paid your taxes.
But the bill is not clear as to whether or not other government agencies, like local governments, could ignore letters from other government agencies.
I'm not familiar with the law, but in general local governments do not have any standing at the Federal level. The US Constitution recognizes a federal government (with enumerated powers) and state governments (which have all other powers, in theory). If states want to delegate internally they can choose to do so, but states are generally unitary governments. If Orange County, California is failing to pay their bills the State of California can just take over, appoint a local controller, and even suspend local elections except as provided by their own State Constitution. States take over school districts all the time when things get out of hand (usually the locally elected leadership still exists, but they have no legal power in this situation - just input). If the State of California went bankrupt the US Federal Government would not have any obligation to make good on the debt, and would not have any power to interfere in the operation of the state. States are not wholly subservient to the Federal government, but local governments typically are wholly subservient to the states.
Disclaimer - I have not read all 50 state constitutions - it is entirely possible that some federate power within their jurisdictions.
Exactly! I have gotten best buy gift cards for $20 that I've never used, because usually when I need to get something I'd pay more to get it there even after taking off the $20. The same is true of other retail outlets. I wanted to get a decent stand mixer and Amazon was about $150 less for the same item. Do you think that the sales tax would sway my decision?
With $4 Amazon Prime overnight shipping I've even used them for semi-emergency purchases. Unless I was going to make it to the store THAT NIGHT I can have the item the next day usually for less even with the sales tax (which Amazon collects in my state). Plus, I get the model I want, not the one the store happens to stock (which is often inferior despite the higher price).
Here's all the code you need, what a better programmer would write: while (*dest++ = *src++);
The problem with that is that when the next non-expert developer comes along they won't grok the code and might break something when things change. Suppose the string delimiter changes for some reason - would a non-expert even appreciate that you're checking for the delimiter there?
Compact code is not necessarily better, unless you accompany it with a comment or something. You also omitted the extra code to set your pointers to the start of the string (though you also omitted initializing your loop counter). Your code would definitely perform better, assuming the compiler didn't appreciate the effects of the loop and implement it in the same way. Actually, I might be wrong on performance - I'm not sure if a move against two indexed memory locations is slower on modern x86 than a MOVSB or whatever. The loop would also be fewer instructions with the MOVSB though I'm not sure if that matters on a modern processor with all the hardware optimizations/etc. I know that x86 can reference indexed memory locations in a single opcode, though not all x86 instructions execute in the same number of clocks...
First of all code quality is difficult to measure, and the number of (known) defects per 1000 lines of code is a very poor metric.
That word "known" is a BIG one. It is critical to the metric, and I'd strongly question whether the known vs actual ratio is the same in proprietary and open-source software. The latter usually makes it MUCH easier to report problems, but on the other hand usually involves less structured or regression testing.
If I'm using Openoffice and it doesn't paginate a document correctly I just log an entry on their bugzilla (or whatever they use). If MS Word does the same thing I hit print preview a few times and count to 30 before hitting print and hope it works, unless I buy 20k licenses from them.
Errors per lines of code may give you a hard number, but that number has nothing to do with the quality of code. It only takes one well-placed error to ruin a piece of software.
Better still, how do you even measure it? I can understand REPORTED errors per lines of code, but not errors per line of code. How do you know if a line of code contains an error?
And the differences could be a matter of error reporting. When was the last time you were able to log something on Microsoft's bug-tracking DB?
Slashdot Mirror
1 - no respawn
How do you know? You could only tell that you had respawned if your memories passed intact to your new self. Of course, if your memories don't pass intact then is it really your self? Oh, and if you go ahead and pass along your memories without you actually dying, which you is you?
And for that matter, when you step into a transporter, is the guy who comes out on the other side really you?
This is assuming that there is such a thing as a blank slate brain, or that any brain can be shaped in arbitrary ways.
Brains grow. In fact, learning to play an instrument at an early age can actually cause changes to the folds of the brain visible to the naked eye. That is a dramatic example, but I'm sure there are a bazillion subtle ways the physical wiring of the brain gets set in near-permanent ways as it is forming. Some of that might be the result of experience, but some is likely the result of genetics, or even just chance.
They fessed up to it, Id say thats enough proof.
They fessed up to what? Handling Tea Party applications differently, or doing it for political reasons? It is the latter I'm concerned with - they handle various groups of organizations differently all the time so it isn't really news that the Tea Party is among them. Doing it for political rather than legal reasons is a different matter.
That would be a major omission. I was wondering how cloning an embryo would be news.
I'm sure it isn't done every day of the week due to the ethical concerns, but I couldn't see how cloning embryos would present any difficulty at all. You basically just have to pluck a cell off of it and you're done as long as it is done before differentiation. if you chop an embryo in two you end up with identical twins, which is exactly how it happens naturally.
Cloning an embryo from an adult cell (especially a skin cell) is DEFINITELY news. I figured it was just a matter of time - again the ethical issues are the biggest obstacle to doing it considering that we can already clone other mammals.
The IRS scandal is one that many Americans will be concerned about. Most Americans understand that the IRS coming after people on a political basis is a very bad thing even if it is about a group that may not be their cup of tea, so to speak.
I haven't been following it closely, but has any evidence actually emerged that it was politically motivated?
It is pretty typical for it to take many years to get an IRS certification for an organization. It also appears for it to be typical for related organizations to get lumped together to see how things go with a common policy defined to govern all of them. I know that there are tons of FOSS organizations that are waiting in limbo for determinations, perhaps for the same reason.
It shouldn't take years for the IRS to determine if an org is legit, but that seems to be a matter of general inability to get things done. I'd need to see some specific evidence to confirm that the Tea Party was targeted any more than a collection of all the Bieber fan clubs.
I can't blame them for playing the game.
I certainly can. There are a million ways that I could make my next door neighbor's life miserable that are completely legal. You can certainly blame me for employing any of those tactics if it was done simply to hurt somebody. Sure, if somebody doesn't like the sight of clothes lines I'm not going to refuse to hang up my laundry. However, if my next door neighbor just lost his job and needs to sell his home to reduce his expenses, I'm not going to go out and paint my house with perfectly legal polka dots and put 1k pink flamingos in my lawn just to knock 40% off of his home value, even if I could somehow make money off the deal.
That's a much bigger problem with Windows than with Linux. You can easily mount md-raid drives from linux booted from USB or CD. I don't believe Windows supports booting off of anything other than a hard drive.
I would not want a windows-only software hard drive.
Yup, my workplace has had small victories, but usually only once things get out of hand.
It was pretty typical when buying a piece of equipment for the vendor to bundle a PC controller and printer with it for $5k (the software alone was only a few hundred dollars). Once that got on the radar the procurement group was instructed to look for this and disallow this - the internal IT group would deliver a managed bare-bones PC with the required OS and only basic management/antivirus software, and a network printer would be used. 99% of the time the printer that was bought would just get installed in somebody's office anyway.
The forced move to network printers also helped people to kick the paper habit. At this point it is pretty rare for me to handle paper at all at work, even with numerous legal requirements for documentation, sign-offs, and so on. It just takes commitment and it is wonderful to be able to live out of little more than a backpack, or sign off on stuff on weekends with nothing more than a VPN connection.
Thanks - wasn't aware of that development. What is their noise output compared to nuclear subs operating at the same speeds? The article really only says that they're quiet, but all modern subs are quiet. I doubt that modern US anti-sub platforms were designed to only be able to detect WWII subs.
Liquid Oxygen is also not something that can be regenerated at sea, so for cruise across the Pacific I would imagine that they would still snorkel, or their range would be fairly compromised when they got to the US. They could also be tailed the entire way from their port of embarkation. Then again, if this were a one-way suicide trip planned out as such I imagine they could make it on their load of oxygen assuming the speed is decent.
But we have laws against suicides, allowing suicides, and snuff films (not sure which category this falls into).
Speaking of laws, what happens when food gets low and the biggest guy on the show murders the smallest one and cooks him up for dinner? Do we send up a one-way police ship to arrest him?
Sophisticated, maybe, but there's no real evidence of that openly available. Not to mention, what those that aren't obsolete or (at best and being generous) obsolescent and aren't extremely short ranged miniature boats are short range coastal submarines. The numbers may be impressive to the non professional, but their capabilities shouldn't be.
Tend to agree. Subs come in two major categories:
Diesel-electric subs can be very quiet on electric power. I'd think that even the US would struggle to locate a very well-designed one (no idea if NK actually has these). However, their range on electric power is purely tactical - they're not going to cross the ocean on batteries. On diesel power they're very detectable - they're loud, and they have to have a snorkel detectable by radar above the surface. If one got close to a city finding it and getting rid of it would be tough, but they aren't getting there without the US knowing about it, and they could be trivially intercepted well before they got close enough to cause trouble.
Nuclear subs are the bigger threat in general, but the US is very good at detecting these as well. They can cruise the oceans underwater, but I doubt NK has any. They also are noisy enough that they will be spotted if they pass near a hydrophone, and the US has all those nice hydrophone networks left over from the cold war.
Bottom line is that NK isn't going to sneak into US waters. They could potentially lose a chase for a while if they wanted to, but about the only way to attack a city would be to approach it under diesel under peacetime and park just outside territorial limits, and then close the rest of the distance under electric and mount a first strike. However, if the US was concerned and was already tailing the sub when it was on diesel and they saw it go quiet near a city, they could just follow the thing on active sonar. There is nothing the electric sub could do to escape being followed, short of opening fire on the sonar platform, at which point you're now at war and there's no sneaking up on anything from then on.
The crews have to be taught how to handle the weapons, and you do not do that on a live round.
Not only that, but do you really want your supreme leader standing across the street from hundreds of tons of rocket fuel just waiting for some kind of accident to set it afire?
Training rounds likely also come in a variety of styles, from fully inert to working rockets but inert warheads (for missiles, etc). It depends on just what you're training for. But yes, I wouldn't want to be in a hanger with a bunch of people learning for the first time how to load a bomb on a plane using live ammo. The pilots aren't even supposed to touch the bombs on their planes (though they do inspect them visually and notify somebody if they see a problem).
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Could you imagine ranks of soldiers, tanks, and missiles parading down Pennsylvania Ave?
I was just reading an article the other day about people in states where there is no compensation, where the conviction still shows up on your record, and where employment for those wrongfully convicted is almost impossible as a result.
These people don't want $50k/yr for lost time - they want their records cleared. Heaven forbid that somebody proven innocent by DNA evidence have a clean record!
$50k/yr is the least we should be doing for them - it should probably be closer to $150k/yr. It isn't like we should be locking up that many people wrongfully that we can't afford it - if we are then the reparations are the least of our problems.
Why didn't the IT group suggest contacting the software developers and asking them to add support for the not-so-old equipment? It should be cheaper than replacing the equipment.
I'm sure if you threw enough gold at them they might come around, but who knows.
Suppose your business just HAD to use Galaxy S phones for some reason, but you really wanted security updates and JB on them. I'm sure it can be done, so just call up Samsung and ask them to re-support your phones. Even if you offered them a million dollars a year they probably wouldn't bother with you. Maybe if you offered them $500M they'd take the offer, but that would probably not make sense for you no matter how desperate your need was.
In the case of durable goods that possess computerized processes there should be some sort of support contract in place that states the vender will maintain upwards compatibility for X amount of time at reasonable costs. 3 years is too short to cut off support.
Agreed, but it seems like the people who have the power to buy this equipment often resent the idea of having to get input from IT/etc on their selections. They just want to try 3 models out and buy whatever model they like best, and they'll call IT in 3 years if something goes wrong.
Sure, that's bad for stockholders, but it is great for empire-building. Sometimes it is deliberate, sometimes it is just a lack of knowledge. Everybody uses computers, right, so why should IT have anything useful to say about purchasing them? I bought a computer for my home and didn't need help from IT...
To upgrade, you can start a new database on a new machine and then migrate the different apps at different times. I've done that.
Sure, and that's exactly what we do at work as well. The problem is that until the last application is migrated you have a super-expensive database server that could be serving hundreds of applications serving a handful that haven't migrated yet. If the apps don't bundle stuff like stored procedures they migrate much more quickly, and hence your super-expensive DB servers are recycled quickly and not running Oracle 8i for the next decade with two apps on them (sure, you can probably recycle some of the RAM/CPUs/licenses, but it is still a cost sink).
I couldn't tell you exactly how many different databases get run on a server at work, but it certainly ranges from dozens to hundreds if not more. Many databases aren't all that busy, but that doesn't mean that they are no longer needed. Other databases strain the capabilities of the largest servers we can find for them and end up involving more exotic technologies to address. In my experience the ones that are hardest to migrate are the ones with business logic implemented in the database.
The trick, I think, is to treat IT more like a leased resource than a purchased tool. Or should I say 'a depreciating asset'?
Sure, but that can be a tough pill to swallow when the costs are high.
Back when my company migrated from NT->XP a small number of workstations ended up staying on NT for a VERY long time - well past the end-of-support date. They were firewalled in various ways to minimize the security risk, but the company was definitely at risk of them getting infected and having to reimage them/etc.
Why was this done? Simple - they were used to control equipment, and the software wasn't compatible with XP. Of course the IT group suggested just upgrading the software, but the upgraded software didn't support the old equipment. So, then the IT group suggested just getting new equipment, but the equipment was only a few years old and was worth something like $500k or more (and we were talking about a bunch of examples like this). The equipment had been bought under the assumption that it would earn back its cost over 30 years, not 3. Spending millions of dollars to upgrade equipment just because the OS was obsolete was a VERY hard sell.
Now, you could argue that you should take OS lifecycles into account when planning depreciation cycles, but a company that buys the equipment and just accepts/mitigates the OS security risks would be at an advantage over a company that decided not to buy the equipment at all because it would never pay for itself in 5-10 years.
What needs to be understood is that running an unsupported OS is a risk, but it is still a finite risk, and some risks just are worth taking, especially if you can mitigate them.
Well, they can always make something up to keep you from calling back.
A manager in our operations support group once explained the situation to some internal customers - if the system is down, do you want everybody available to be fixing the problem, or do you want them to spend their time telling people that it is under control? (Mind you, this was only for internal customers.) The ultimate decision was that for very short outages they'd just deal with it, and once it was taking more than 15min they'd start issuing communications. For a short outage few would even notice it in the first place or bother to call it in, and announcing it after the fact didn't really provide any value-add.
Now, if we were contracting with an outside company we'd insist on knowing about all outages as part of our SLA - we'd care about them after the fact because we'd want to know if we're getting value for our money. Where internal customers are concerned the data would get reported to management, and they'd decide if the support group was doing a good job. The random company workers really didn't have decision rights over where the work was done - it isn't like we let individual departments contract for their own support.
What's the benefit to upgrading your web browser before the current one isn't supported?
Sure, you'll have to do it eventually, so why not do it now? Simple - time value of money. Suppose it costs $100k to upgrade your browser now, and $100k to upgrade it a year from now. If you spend the money now you get a fancy new web browser, and you don't make a dime more in revenue as a result. If you spend the money a year from now you can invest the money for a year at 6% interest and end up with $6k more than you would have otherwise had a year from now after you spend the $100k. If you wait 6 years to upgrade then you have an extra $20k, and if you missed two upgrade opportunities along the way then you have $200k more on top of that because you make one investment instead of three.
How do you make 6% these days? Well, for starters by not taking out more debt - if you're in debt then pay down that debt, and that is probably the better part of 6% with a 100% guarantee depending on your creditworthiness. If not that, then invest in the business - chances are your company gets more than a 6% return on capital if it is doing well - that $100k could let you expand your business elsewhere.
Bottom line is that browser upgrades and such are a means to an end, and not an end in itself.
Now, if that old browser is holding you back from deploying some new software that will greatly enable your business, then upgrade that thing tomorrow, and borrow money if you don't have the cash to do it! This isn't about having a newer browser - it is about making a profit.
As far as where all the money you save/make goes - it goes to the company owner/shareholders, or gets invested into other areas of the business. When you finish paying off your car do you take the extra $400/month and tell the guy who mows your lawn to drop by every day to trim it, because after all the lawn is a little higher each day and you have the money to do something about it? Do you start getting your car waxed twice a week? No, you do whatever the heck it is that you enjoy doing with your money, because it is your money, and it really isn't anybody else's business what you do with it once you've paid your taxes.
But the bill is not clear as to whether or not other government agencies, like local governments, could ignore letters from other government agencies.
I'm not familiar with the law, but in general local governments do not have any standing at the Federal level. The US Constitution recognizes a federal government (with enumerated powers) and state governments (which have all other powers, in theory). If states want to delegate internally they can choose to do so, but states are generally unitary governments. If Orange County, California is failing to pay their bills the State of California can just take over, appoint a local controller, and even suspend local elections except as provided by their own State Constitution. States take over school districts all the time when things get out of hand (usually the locally elected leadership still exists, but they have no legal power in this situation - just input). If the State of California went bankrupt the US Federal Government would not have any obligation to make good on the debt, and would not have any power to interfere in the operation of the state. States are not wholly subservient to the Federal government, but local governments typically are wholly subservient to the states.
Disclaimer - I have not read all 50 state constitutions - it is entirely possible that some federate power within their jurisdictions.
Exactly! I have gotten best buy gift cards for $20 that I've never used, because usually when I need to get something I'd pay more to get it there even after taking off the $20. The same is true of other retail outlets. I wanted to get a decent stand mixer and Amazon was about $150 less for the same item. Do you think that the sales tax would sway my decision?
With $4 Amazon Prime overnight shipping I've even used them for semi-emergency purchases. Unless I was going to make it to the store THAT NIGHT I can have the item the next day usually for less even with the sales tax (which Amazon collects in my state). Plus, I get the model I want, not the one the store happens to stock (which is often inferior despite the higher price).
Here's all the code you need, what a better programmer would write:
while (*dest++ = *src++);
The problem with that is that when the next non-expert developer comes along they won't grok the code and might break something when things change. Suppose the string delimiter changes for some reason - would a non-expert even appreciate that you're checking for the delimiter there?
Compact code is not necessarily better, unless you accompany it with a comment or something. You also omitted the extra code to set your pointers to the start of the string (though you also omitted initializing your loop counter). Your code would definitely perform better, assuming the compiler didn't appreciate the effects of the loop and implement it in the same way. Actually, I might be wrong on performance - I'm not sure if a move against two indexed memory locations is slower on modern x86 than a MOVSB or whatever. The loop would also be fewer instructions with the MOVSB though I'm not sure if that matters on a modern processor with all the hardware optimizations/etc. I know that x86 can reference indexed memory locations in a single opcode, though not all x86 instructions execute in the same number of clocks...
First of all code quality is difficult to measure, and the number of (known) defects per 1000 lines of code is a very poor metric.
That word "known" is a BIG one. It is critical to the metric, and I'd strongly question whether the known vs actual ratio is the same in proprietary and open-source software. The latter usually makes it MUCH easier to report problems, but on the other hand usually involves less structured or regression testing.
If I'm using Openoffice and it doesn't paginate a document correctly I just log an entry on their bugzilla (or whatever they use). If MS Word does the same thing I hit print preview a few times and count to 30 before hitting print and hope it works, unless I buy 20k licenses from them.
Errors per lines of code may give you a hard number, but that number has nothing to do with the quality of code. It only takes one well-placed error to ruin a piece of software.
Better still, how do you even measure it? I can understand REPORTED errors per lines of code, but not errors per line of code. How do you know if a line of code contains an error?
And the differences could be a matter of error reporting. When was the last time you were able to log something on Microsoft's bug-tracking DB?