I found their discussion around the difference between source and binary distribution interesting. I'd be curious as to whether you could even come up with a truly robust definition for those terms.
Is the distinction being human-readable? Well, if I have an opcode table binary executables are at least as readable to me as Chinese is.
Is the distinction being directly executable? Well, what about Java and any language that compiles to bytecode? What about a theoretical microprocessor that implements in hardware a C interpreter?
Machine code and C are just two languages - they are a bunch of symbols arranged in some syntax that coveys a series of steps to be executed.
I could see how you could distinguish between writing code and executing code, just as you can distinguish between talking about robbing somebody and actually doing it.
If my biggest problem in life were having to spend a few million dollars out of my billion-dollar bank account to help me make a few billion more, than I think I'd sleep pretty well.
Which is the smarter choice if you're starting a new company:
1. Spend an extra $100k now before you collect a dime. 2. Save the money now, but once your company is worth $100B you'll have to spend $5M.
The chances of #2 ever happening are probably one in a million at best, so that $5M should be viewed as spending a risk-adjusted $5 years from now rather than a certain $100k today. Gee, that's a hard decision...
Well said, but there is no excuse for not doing things right first time.
I disagree.
Let's say I'm a start-up. I have very little cash. Do I spend that cash on database licenses, just in case I'm the 1 out of 2 billion startups that ends up with a billion dollar market cap? Do I take an extra six months to create a design that will scale to 3/4ths of the world's population?
99.9999999 times out of 100 you're better off assuming that you're not going to end up being Facebook, and start out modest. A website that actually is running on a mediocre RDBMS is worth more than a website that isn't done on an amazing one. If your developers know MySQL, then you're probably best off using it. If you bet wrong and turn out to be Facebook, then I'm sure you'll be crying about your decision all the way to your private island.
So what, Facebook needs to spend some money redesigning their software. That should certainly be hard for them to afford!
And total rewrite is an exaggeration - they only need to edit the SQL and mysql function calls and add in an abstraction layer. Sure, that takes time, but it isn't super-high-risk or anything. In fact, they can implement that abstraction layer one module at a time. Step 1, create abstraction function, step 2 replace direct mysql calls with calls via the function, step 3 unit test. Do that maybe a few hundred times and the whole thing is properly designed. Now you can start editing the abstraction functions to support some other storage backend.
As long as they get it done before mysql melts down they'll be fine.
But when the costs themselves become unmanageable, let the voters and representatives of that time deal with it. Their problem, their decision. Cutting Medicare only requires one Congressional vote, it's not magic.
If they can afford Medicare as it is now, good for them. If they can't, they'll have no choice but to cut it. That'll be unpopular, but in that case it'll also be necessary which means it'll happen.
Well, if I'm not going to get Medicare in 30 years, why not just cut it today so that I can stop paying all those taxes for the next 30 years? If it will work for me to pay taxes for the next 30 years and not collect a dime, then it will work fine for the previous generation to do the same. Besides, we don't need to cut it so much as we need to reform it (raise retirement age, only spend money where we have clinically proven results, etc).
On the other hand, US foreign policy today will impact the kind of world I live in 30 years from now. I don't see a need to be as engaged overseas as we have been, but the fact is that an army is actually one of those things that the Federal Government was created for in the first place.
So, does the PTO get $2.7B in fees, and another $2.7B in funds from Congress? Or, is this just one of those accounting things where the money collected by the PTO goes to the treasury, and then the treasury pays the same amount back to the PTO? (Ie a self-funding department shows up as a huge credit and a huge debit on the budget.)
Well, arguably the best documentation is the binary, since ultimately it is the only thing that determines what actually happens when you run the program.:)
I tend to be pragmatic when it comes to documentation. Maybe because I've seen too many projects that churn out reams of design documents that are little more than dumps of table definitions - which I could just look up in the database. I love good documentation, but perhaps only because I see it so rarely...
Well, even the target is probably contrived to make for an interesting press release.
If they didn't tweak the sequence the millionth observation would probably be something like "routine image of empty space for dark current calibration" or "routine image of boring star to calibrate sensor xyz" or whatever. I'm sure the schedule was shuffled to make for better reading in the news...
Well, avoiding the US market isn't exactly a smart move - it is a pretty huge segment of the profits considering the buying power people have, plus the cultural power the US exerts over the rest of the world. Do you think that iPhones would be as fashionable in Denmark if some famous actor in the US didn't use it?
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that the rest of the world just gets up every morning and reads People magazine to tell them how to think. However, a dollar invested promoting a product in the US gains a lot of mindshare among people that have money to spend.
All that said, agree totally that the US legal system is in need of MASSIVE reform. It seems like half our economy is lawyers and finance - two industries that don't actually create anything of real value. Sure, R&D is a "service" and isn't terribly tangible, but the fact is that mankind as a whole benefits incrementally when somebody comes up with a new kind of transistor, or even a new kind of toothpaste.
It's a^^holes like you who don' t want anyone to devoting time to "non-productive stuff" like decent documentation or manuals, which DO require the ability to write more than just "codese".
I don't agree with your perspective. I work in IT, and I also edited a college newspaper and while I won't claim to be Robert Frosst I think most of my teachers in the humanities would have agreed that I'm well above-average in my writing. I don't generally take time to write manuals. It isn't that I couldn't - it is that this really isn't my preference and I'm in enough demand in the areas that I do prefer to work in that I have a bit of discretion in where I invest my time. I've read a number of manuals for custom-written software in my days, and the only one I'd consider even remotely useful (aside from box-checking purposes) is one that was written by somebody who was a career technical writer - a specialist. It isn't that I couldn't have written a manual like that - it is that I'd never have bothered to and anybody who would care one way or the other would be hiring a career technical writer. If somebody asks me to write a manual they're doing it because they are legally obligated for whatever reason to write one, and I'm just the guy who can plug the hole.
Don't get me wrong, being able to write in coherent English is something my peers and customers all value. I'm not convinced my employer cares a great deal about it, considering they outsource half the IT work to Asia. I've seen system outage notices that could have been better-written by a middle school student in the US.
I'm all for people pursing enrichment. However, I do question a good deal of the college experience. I could have read some cliff-notes and a few textbooks in my spare time and learned about as much as I did in many of my non-core courses. I probably learned more in high school, and for free. Today, the internet makes me question the value of these institutions even more unless you're going for a career in a related field or have money to blow.
Simple solution - just make a change to how contract law works. A contract is legally binding when two parties communicate their agreement to be bound to the terms to a court, which then publishes the contract.
If you keep the terms of an agreement secret, then a court will not uphold that agreement. That means that if you secretly pay MS a lot of money not to sue you, they can sue you anyway. Hence, nobody will secretly pay a lot of money to MS not to sue them.
While we're at it, in the special case of transfers of real-estate the court keeps an index of property owners, updated based on those published contracts. No need for title insurance now, either.
I've always felt that there is a simple way to allow for fairness in civil cases.
1. Based on the amount at issue, the court declares a budget for legal fees (say 5% of what is at stake - how's that for reform!). 2. Both sides select legal counsel. The court pays half the budget to the lawyers for each side in accordance with some schedule, with the lawyers having to show that they're being effective/etc. 3. The case is decided - so far the court is the only one to pay a dime to anybody. 4. The loser is then liable to the court to repay the bills. The lawyers are no longer involved - it is just like any other public debt like taxes.
Lawyers would be banned from accepting payment or employment from anybody but the court. Their only income or expenses would be those funded by the trial budgets - which are always equal for both sides.
This would start to create a system that approximated fairness.
I think the key tends to be in whether somebody does a lot of content creation vs content consumption.
For example, senior managers and executives tend to be content consumers. They consume data and recommendations (often MBs of information), and produce decisions (likely just a few bits of entropy). With a tablet they can browse through 10 emails, attached reports and powerpoints, and browse some articles on the web. Then they can hit "reply" to the project manager and type in "yes" or "no" and hit send. Nothing could be easier.
People who like to passively consume media on the web also consume MB or GB of data, and produce nothing but cookies and hits. Tablets work great.
Many hip teenagers actually do produce a fair bit of "content" (at least they sure type a lot in various messaging apps). However, I suspect that utility ranks right up there with comfort when they select shoes. A laptop sounds like the sort of thing their boring parents would use and would likely be a hand-me-down, but a shiny new expensive iPad is relatively exclusive and sure to make somebody the envy of the crowd.
On the other hand, somebody like me who takes the time to type a verbose slashdot comment isn't going to be terribly interested in doing that on a touchscreen. Ditto for the people creating those videos everybody stares at on Youtube (in large organizations directors/producers/etc might use them, but the guy doing frame-level splicing is only going to use it if they have to do it someplace where there isn't room for a conventional workstation - I wouldn't say a laptop is any better).
I've piloted tablets at work. Usually the reaction is the same - "wow, neat" for the first 5 minutes, and then "well, it's OK" after a few days of using it heavily for actual work. In some workflows they excel, and when they do we buy them. Usually a regular laptop costs a lot less and is actually more usable. People doing real work usually avoid doing it standing up on trains and such...
Yup, nothing like rotating management to ensure no accountability. I've seen projects where managers moved around - everybody declared success up until the point that the project failed, and the last manager gets to then blame the nebulous "predecessor" - where nobody specifically is named lest anybody be held accountable.
At work we've had re-orgs just about annually for the last 5-6 years, and moved to a model that is so matrixed that you might as well be a consultant. It tends to result in an organization where everybody is fairly detached from just about everything. If you do somebody a favor you can pretty-much guarantee that they'll never be in a position to help you back, so the only motivation to do it is to be nice. Nobody invests in training/developing anybody else - that is just a sunk cost from a personal standpoint. Managers don't have any interest in building their teams, since they will likely only manage them for a year. A manager has 12 reports one year, zero the next, and then 5 in two tiers the year after that.
My feeling is that the senior leaders are spending way too much time talking to consultants. Each one comes along and "revolutionizes" the company which will totally turn everything around. Some contrived metric is used to show that somehow the company is better off (usually by firing a few people and looking at payroll). In the end the organization ends up functioning like a consulting firm - with dynamic teams assigned to projects and everybody basically sinks and swims on their own. Not much attention gets paid to whether any work actually gets done. In fact, the goal is to align everybody to similar revolutionary projects and spend money on actually operating the business only when something really bad goes wrong...
Except in this case, it's the private contractor that didn't get the job done.
In a $600 million contract, there are performance guarantees. This outfit didn't meet them and now they've got to pay up.
Well, I don't know the details of this particular case, but when big IT projects like this go south it is usually the result of nobody being accountable for the result. I wouldn't be surprised if the lawsuit goes nowhere (even if local courts favor the state, federal courts will probably overturn them) - unless there is some obvious smoking gun.
Typically the contractor has no real incentive to make the project a success - the contracts are drawn up that they will deliver a system that does X, Y, and Z - defined fairly precisely in the form of requirements. They then spend a bunch of money and the system generally ends up doing X, Y, and Z. However, it may not be flexible or user-friendly, and fail to meet a bazillion other unwritten specifications. It will certainly contain bugs that come up in various situations. It will turn out that doing X, Y, and Z doesn't actually address the client's needs.
So, the contractor draws up a new contract to modify the software to do A, B, and C, and drop Y. Contract gets signed. Lather, Rinse, Repeat...
In the end the contractor probably followed the letter of the contract, because the contract wasn't about meeting the client's needs, but about delivering a very particular service.
However, everybody does get somebody else to point a finger at, so nobody gets punished. The managers running the whole project (both at the client and contractor) collected a paycheck the entire time and probably numerous bonuses for meeting various milestones. This just guarantees that they and others will do the same thing the next time a project comes along.
Having been on the client side of these engagements I've seen more than a few where the goal of the client lead on the project was just to have somebody else to blame when the project went south. Sure, the contractor eventually gets fired and replaced with a new one, and the client manager looks good for being tough on the vendor. In the end, however, the client still loses a lot of money.
Indeed, I've worked in companies where the sunk cost dilemma was essentially planned in by the project management.
Project gets green light and millions in budget. Two weeks later order is placed for millions in hardware and software licenses - all very difficult or impossible to sell/return.
Later in year corporate management goes through their regular routine of deciding to reduce budgets for the year - project escapes being cut since most of its money was already spent, and the investment is worthless unless the project runs to completion.
Project then drags on for an extra year or so, and it turns out half the hardware was unnecessary. By the time much of the hardware enters production it is obsolete, failing often, and even the subject of a vendor recall or two.
Now, anybody who cares about financial stewardship would defer buying hardware (beyond the minimum necessary for development/testing) until close to the launch date, since it does no good in a closet and just depreciates the entire time. That money would have earned considerable interest if simply placed in a bank account (probably one person's salary for the year).
However, since jobs are always on the line when projects get cut, it is in the personal interest of a project team to safeguard the life of the project without much regard for the financial well-being of the company. Management tendency to approve money and then later yank it away also doesn't help.
I'm sure in the end we'll find out that everybody was involved in making this boondoggle what it is - outsourced IT deals like this are loaded with conflicts of interest...
Oracle (incl. XE) has a lot of SQL features that MySQL doesn't have.
Ugh, my pet peeve. Maybe I'm missing something, but I suspect you really mean that Oracle has a lot of PL/SQL features that MySQL doesn't have. ANSI SQL doesn't really do a whole lot more than INSERT, DELETE, UPDATE and such.
Yes, I realize you can write a whole application in triggers and all that, but I've found that straying from ANSI SQL tends to get you an application that is very tied down to a particular database vendor, and often just a few versions for that vendor.
At work every other Oracle upgrade it seems like we have major apps with issues. The ones that never have issues are the ones that targeted ANSI SQL and are platform-independent. The wonderful API that Oracle tells everybody to target is deprecated 5-10 years later and then everybody has to rewrite their apps...
Without getting into the whole Postgres vs MySQL thing, I'm not sure that XE and MySQL are so evenly matched. XE has artificial limits on database size. It might perform better, or be more easily upgraded to something that performs better, but if you have a huge but relatively low-load database you're not going to want to use it. Quite a few databases get large without having the transaction volume of a credit card company/etc...
Lots of people use MySQL, which I think is a big driver for Oracle to try to stagnate it. I suspect they'll just use the FUD approach - be vague enough to discourage forking, but also vague enough that enterprise users think twice...
Yeah, but Microsoft makes just as much money when somebody deploys IE6 as IE8 or whatever. That is why they still support it - they understand enterprise customers.
Ubuntu thinks supporting a version for three years is LTS. Microsoft will still send you patches for XP. Big browser/OS changes are disruptive to very large companies, so companies will do anything to avoid them, even if it means spending more on licenses/etc.
Yeah, but a cell phone was already a device with a 2-year lifespan before the smartphone came along. If cell phones already cost $1k and lasted 10 years I doubt you'd get as many people to just toss them to buy a new $1500 phone with a computer built-in.
A TV typically lasts 10 years easily. They can also be quite expensive. Plus, the sorts of people who buy $150 TVs that are fairly disposable are unlikely to be in the market for anything Apple is going to sell them.
Now, what I could see is Apple pushing TV manufacturers to adopt some kind of standard so that one remote can control the Apple TV and the monitor together. There is no reason you should have to separately control them when one of them is a full-fledged computer that presumably could figure out how to negotiate an input setting with the TV or whatever.
I'm not saying Apple won't try still, but it doesn't seem like a slam-dunk to me. I know I've never been a fan of having anything integrated into my TV (VCRs, DVD players, and so on) - inevitably the TV lasts a decade and whatever else is in it either breaks or becomes obsolete long before then.
I'll admit that I've done it - mainly to replace a failing hard drive that I didn't want to wait weeks for shipping on.
Of course, the fact that they price match to Micro Center, which itself aims to match NewEgg prices didn't hurt.:)
I've actually had Best Buy gift cards sit unused in my wallet for years, because even with $20 off it is far cheaper to get most things from NewEgg or Amazon. However, when they're willing to actually sell their products for a reasonable price due to price-matching then they're not a problem (well, if you discount the limited selection of anything I'd actually buy).
I think you meant 2^256 in your second example. Technically, bruteforcing that probably is easier with a GPU, kind of like how you can get to Alpha Centauri faster in a galleon than by walking.
You know, why the hell don't regular employment contracts for regular employees have "golden parachutes"? It doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense for executives to have them. It seems to me that it does make sense for regular employees to have them.
It makes plenty of sense for executives to have golden parachutes, since executives are the ones who create the policy around terminations. In the same way it makes plenty of sense for Congress to vote itself a raise periodically (or make them automatic).
Is it in the interests of anybody but the executives? Of course not. However, executives rarely act primarily to look after the interests of anybody but themselves. Some companies have policies that occasionally align these interests with those of shareholders and get some incidental benefit.
Re:Is it even possible to roll back a bitcoin trad
on
Bitcoin Price Crashes
·
· Score: 1
Agreed - the solution would be whoever hosted the bank the money was deposited in should purchase BitCoins on the market and deposit them in the accounts where they are missing. Then they can pursue legal action against whoever robbed them.
The whole point of e-cash is to make it anonymous/etc. A decent e-cash system should make reversing a trade impossible anyway - just like a trade with paper money (at best you can try try to hunt somebody down and throw them in jail until they pay you back).
With landlines the cost is lower, but is still finite.
People seem to think that the cost per port is the only thing that matters. The problem with this logic is that ports only handle so much data, and when you exceed this amount the provider has to upgrade or split the traffic across multiple ports. Also, cables only carry so much data and to carry more you need to lay new cable (at astronomical costs - granted when you do it you can try to anticipate future demand and pick better technologies).
All of this translates into a very real cost for shuffling around bits. I have no doubt that the cost is a lot lower than many ISPs charge, but it is still there.
You also need to consider the impact of cost on behavior (as you also indicate). If you make data completely free and don't discourage saturating the pipe, then pretty soon everybody will be running torrents 24x7 or whatever and you can't oversubscribe at all. You then need to charge as if you were selling dedicated lines - which are FAR more expensive than typical consumer internet service.
I agree that the solution is to simply charge per-MB or whatever. I'd go a step further and make the last mile PUC-regulated like any other utility, with rates set by the government, and administered by a company forbidden from providing anything but a wire to the local CO. At the local CO you could then contract with any of 47 independent ISPs at market-set rates, with those ISPs just paying the utility last-mile provider a regulated rate for rackspace. Barriers to entry would be low (anybody can afford a rack and an uplink, more-or-less). The local utility would not be allowed to contract with content-providers/etc - they just supply a pipe. As a result, their interest is going to be to provide the best pipe they can to sell the most MB from anybody you're willing to download it from, or upload it to.
Slashdot Mirror
I found their discussion around the difference between source and binary distribution interesting. I'd be curious as to whether you could even come up with a truly robust definition for those terms.
Is the distinction being human-readable? Well, if I have an opcode table binary executables are at least as readable to me as Chinese is.
Is the distinction being directly executable? Well, what about Java and any language that compiles to bytecode? What about a theoretical microprocessor that implements in hardware a C interpreter?
Machine code and C are just two languages - they are a bunch of symbols arranged in some syntax that coveys a series of steps to be executed.
I could see how you could distinguish between writing code and executing code, just as you can distinguish between talking about robbing somebody and actually doing it.
Fate worse than death indeed.
If my biggest problem in life were having to spend a few million dollars out of my billion-dollar bank account to help me make a few billion more, than I think I'd sleep pretty well.
Which is the smarter choice if you're starting a new company:
1. Spend an extra $100k now before you collect a dime.
2. Save the money now, but once your company is worth $100B you'll have to spend $5M.
The chances of #2 ever happening are probably one in a million at best, so that $5M should be viewed as spending a risk-adjusted $5 years from now rather than a certain $100k today. Gee, that's a hard decision...
Well said, but there is no excuse for not doing things right first time.
I disagree.
Let's say I'm a start-up. I have very little cash. Do I spend that cash on database licenses, just in case I'm the 1 out of 2 billion startups that ends up with a billion dollar market cap? Do I take an extra six months to create a design that will scale to 3/4ths of the world's population?
99.9999999 times out of 100 you're better off assuming that you're not going to end up being Facebook, and start out modest. A website that actually is running on a mediocre RDBMS is worth more than a website that isn't done on an amazing one. If your developers know MySQL, then you're probably best off using it. If you bet wrong and turn out to be Facebook, then I'm sure you'll be crying about your decision all the way to your private island.
So what, Facebook needs to spend some money redesigning their software. That should certainly be hard for them to afford!
And total rewrite is an exaggeration - they only need to edit the SQL and mysql function calls and add in an abstraction layer. Sure, that takes time, but it isn't super-high-risk or anything. In fact, they can implement that abstraction layer one module at a time. Step 1, create abstraction function, step 2 replace direct mysql calls with calls via the function, step 3 unit test. Do that maybe a few hundred times and the whole thing is properly designed. Now you can start editing the abstraction functions to support some other storage backend.
As long as they get it done before mysql melts down they'll be fine.
But when the costs themselves become unmanageable, let the voters and representatives of that time deal with it. Their problem, their decision. Cutting Medicare only requires one Congressional vote, it's not magic.
If they can afford Medicare as it is now, good for them. If they can't, they'll have no choice but to cut it. That'll be unpopular, but in that case it'll also be necessary which means it'll happen.
Well, if I'm not going to get Medicare in 30 years, why not just cut it today so that I can stop paying all those taxes for the next 30 years? If it will work for me to pay taxes for the next 30 years and not collect a dime, then it will work fine for the previous generation to do the same. Besides, we don't need to cut it so much as we need to reform it (raise retirement age, only spend money where we have clinically proven results, etc).
On the other hand, US foreign policy today will impact the kind of world I live in 30 years from now. I don't see a need to be as engaged overseas as we have been, but the fact is that an army is actually one of those things that the Federal Government was created for in the first place.
So, does the PTO get $2.7B in fees, and another $2.7B in funds from Congress? Or, is this just one of those accounting things where the money collected by the PTO goes to the treasury, and then the treasury pays the same amount back to the PTO? (Ie a self-funding department shows up as a huge credit and a huge debit on the budget.)
Well, arguably the best documentation is the binary, since ultimately it is the only thing that determines what actually happens when you run the program. :)
I tend to be pragmatic when it comes to documentation. Maybe because I've seen too many projects that churn out reams of design documents that are little more than dumps of table definitions - which I could just look up in the database. I love good documentation, but perhaps only because I see it so rarely...
Well, even the target is probably contrived to make for an interesting press release.
If they didn't tweak the sequence the millionth observation would probably be something like "routine image of empty space for dark current calibration" or "routine image of boring star to calibrate sensor xyz" or whatever. I'm sure the schedule was shuffled to make for better reading in the news...
Well, avoiding the US market isn't exactly a smart move - it is a pretty huge segment of the profits considering the buying power people have, plus the cultural power the US exerts over the rest of the world. Do you think that iPhones would be as fashionable in Denmark if some famous actor in the US didn't use it?
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that the rest of the world just gets up every morning and reads People magazine to tell them how to think. However, a dollar invested promoting a product in the US gains a lot of mindshare among people that have money to spend.
All that said, agree totally that the US legal system is in need of MASSIVE reform. It seems like half our economy is lawyers and finance - two industries that don't actually create anything of real value. Sure, R&D is a "service" and isn't terribly tangible, but the fact is that mankind as a whole benefits incrementally when somebody comes up with a new kind of transistor, or even a new kind of toothpaste.
It's a^^holes like you who don' t want anyone to devoting time to "non-productive stuff" like decent documentation or manuals, which DO require the ability to write more than just "codese".
I don't agree with your perspective. I work in IT, and I also edited a college newspaper and while I won't claim to be Robert Frosst I think most of my teachers in the humanities would have agreed that I'm well above-average in my writing. I don't generally take time to write manuals. It isn't that I couldn't - it is that this really isn't my preference and I'm in enough demand in the areas that I do prefer to work in that I have a bit of discretion in where I invest my time. I've read a number of manuals for custom-written software in my days, and the only one I'd consider even remotely useful (aside from box-checking purposes) is one that was written by somebody who was a career technical writer - a specialist. It isn't that I couldn't have written a manual like that - it is that I'd never have bothered to and anybody who would care one way or the other would be hiring a career technical writer. If somebody asks me to write a manual they're doing it because they are legally obligated for whatever reason to write one, and I'm just the guy who can plug the hole.
Don't get me wrong, being able to write in coherent English is something my peers and customers all value. I'm not convinced my employer cares a great deal about it, considering they outsource half the IT work to Asia. I've seen system outage notices that could have been better-written by a middle school student in the US.
I'm all for people pursing enrichment. However, I do question a good deal of the college experience. I could have read some cliff-notes and a few textbooks in my spare time and learned about as much as I did in many of my non-core courses. I probably learned more in high school, and for free. Today, the internet makes me question the value of these institutions even more unless you're going for a career in a related field or have money to blow.
Simple solution - just make a change to how contract law works. A contract is legally binding when two parties communicate their agreement to be bound to the terms to a court, which then publishes the contract.
If you keep the terms of an agreement secret, then a court will not uphold that agreement. That means that if you secretly pay MS a lot of money not to sue you, they can sue you anyway. Hence, nobody will secretly pay a lot of money to MS not to sue them.
While we're at it, in the special case of transfers of real-estate the court keeps an index of property owners, updated based on those published contracts. No need for title insurance now, either.
I've always felt that there is a simple way to allow for fairness in civil cases.
1. Based on the amount at issue, the court declares a budget for legal fees (say 5% of what is at stake - how's that for reform!).
2. Both sides select legal counsel. The court pays half the budget to the lawyers for each side in accordance with some schedule, with the lawyers having to show that they're being effective/etc.
3. The case is decided - so far the court is the only one to pay a dime to anybody.
4. The loser is then liable to the court to repay the bills. The lawyers are no longer involved - it is just like any other public debt like taxes.
Lawyers would be banned from accepting payment or employment from anybody but the court. Their only income or expenses would be those funded by the trial budgets - which are always equal for both sides.
This would start to create a system that approximated fairness.
I think the key tends to be in whether somebody does a lot of content creation vs content consumption.
For example, senior managers and executives tend to be content consumers. They consume data and recommendations (often MBs of information), and produce decisions (likely just a few bits of entropy). With a tablet they can browse through 10 emails, attached reports and powerpoints, and browse some articles on the web. Then they can hit "reply" to the project manager and type in "yes" or "no" and hit send. Nothing could be easier.
People who like to passively consume media on the web also consume MB or GB of data, and produce nothing but cookies and hits. Tablets work great.
Many hip teenagers actually do produce a fair bit of "content" (at least they sure type a lot in various messaging apps). However, I suspect that utility ranks right up there with comfort when they select shoes. A laptop sounds like the sort of thing their boring parents would use and would likely be a hand-me-down, but a shiny new expensive iPad is relatively exclusive and sure to make somebody the envy of the crowd.
On the other hand, somebody like me who takes the time to type a verbose slashdot comment isn't going to be terribly interested in doing that on a touchscreen. Ditto for the people creating those videos everybody stares at on Youtube (in large organizations directors/producers/etc might use them, but the guy doing frame-level splicing is only going to use it if they have to do it someplace where there isn't room for a conventional workstation - I wouldn't say a laptop is any better).
I've piloted tablets at work. Usually the reaction is the same - "wow, neat" for the first 5 minutes, and then "well, it's OK" after a few days of using it heavily for actual work. In some workflows they excel, and when they do we buy them. Usually a regular laptop costs a lot less and is actually more usable. People doing real work usually avoid doing it standing up on trains and such...
Yup, nothing like rotating management to ensure no accountability. I've seen projects where managers moved around - everybody declared success up until the point that the project failed, and the last manager gets to then blame the nebulous "predecessor" - where nobody specifically is named lest anybody be held accountable.
At work we've had re-orgs just about annually for the last 5-6 years, and moved to a model that is so matrixed that you might as well be a consultant. It tends to result in an organization where everybody is fairly detached from just about everything. If you do somebody a favor you can pretty-much guarantee that they'll never be in a position to help you back, so the only motivation to do it is to be nice. Nobody invests in training/developing anybody else - that is just a sunk cost from a personal standpoint. Managers don't have any interest in building their teams, since they will likely only manage them for a year. A manager has 12 reports one year, zero the next, and then 5 in two tiers the year after that.
My feeling is that the senior leaders are spending way too much time talking to consultants. Each one comes along and "revolutionizes" the company which will totally turn everything around. Some contrived metric is used to show that somehow the company is better off (usually by firing a few people and looking at payroll). In the end the organization ends up functioning like a consulting firm - with dynamic teams assigned to projects and everybody basically sinks and swims on their own. Not much attention gets paid to whether any work actually gets done. In fact, the goal is to align everybody to similar revolutionary projects and spend money on actually operating the business only when something really bad goes wrong...
Except in this case, it's the private contractor that didn't get the job done.
In a $600 million contract, there are performance guarantees. This outfit didn't meet them and now they've got to pay up.
Well, I don't know the details of this particular case, but when big IT projects like this go south it is usually the result of nobody being accountable for the result. I wouldn't be surprised if the lawsuit goes nowhere (even if local courts favor the state, federal courts will probably overturn them) - unless there is some obvious smoking gun.
Typically the contractor has no real incentive to make the project a success - the contracts are drawn up that they will deliver a system that does X, Y, and Z - defined fairly precisely in the form of requirements. They then spend a bunch of money and the system generally ends up doing X, Y, and Z. However, it may not be flexible or user-friendly, and fail to meet a bazillion other unwritten specifications. It will certainly contain bugs that come up in various situations. It will turn out that doing X, Y, and Z doesn't actually address the client's needs.
So, the contractor draws up a new contract to modify the software to do A, B, and C, and drop Y. Contract gets signed. Lather, Rinse, Repeat...
In the end the contractor probably followed the letter of the contract, because the contract wasn't about meeting the client's needs, but about delivering a very particular service.
However, everybody does get somebody else to point a finger at, so nobody gets punished. The managers running the whole project (both at the client and contractor) collected a paycheck the entire time and probably numerous bonuses for meeting various milestones. This just guarantees that they and others will do the same thing the next time a project comes along.
Having been on the client side of these engagements I've seen more than a few where the goal of the client lead on the project was just to have somebody else to blame when the project went south. Sure, the contractor eventually gets fired and replaced with a new one, and the client manager looks good for being tough on the vendor. In the end, however, the client still loses a lot of money.
Indeed, I've worked in companies where the sunk cost dilemma was essentially planned in by the project management.
Project gets green light and millions in budget. Two weeks later order is placed for millions in hardware and software licenses - all very difficult or impossible to sell/return.
Later in year corporate management goes through their regular routine of deciding to reduce budgets for the year - project escapes being cut since most of its money was already spent, and the investment is worthless unless the project runs to completion.
Project then drags on for an extra year or so, and it turns out half the hardware was unnecessary. By the time much of the hardware enters production it is obsolete, failing often, and even the subject of a vendor recall or two.
Now, anybody who cares about financial stewardship would defer buying hardware (beyond the minimum necessary for development/testing) until close to the launch date, since it does no good in a closet and just depreciates the entire time. That money would have earned considerable interest if simply placed in a bank account (probably one person's salary for the year).
However, since jobs are always on the line when projects get cut, it is in the personal interest of a project team to safeguard the life of the project without much regard for the financial well-being of the company. Management tendency to approve money and then later yank it away also doesn't help.
I'm sure in the end we'll find out that everybody was involved in making this boondoggle what it is - outsourced IT deals like this are loaded with conflicts of interest...
It seems boring to me to just extend the size in 3 dimensions. What about extending it beyond three dimensions?
Oracle (incl. XE) has a lot of SQL features that MySQL doesn't have.
Ugh, my pet peeve. Maybe I'm missing something, but I suspect you really mean that Oracle has a lot of PL/SQL features that MySQL doesn't have. ANSI SQL doesn't really do a whole lot more than INSERT, DELETE, UPDATE and such.
Yes, I realize you can write a whole application in triggers and all that, but I've found that straying from ANSI SQL tends to get you an application that is very tied down to a particular database vendor, and often just a few versions for that vendor.
At work every other Oracle upgrade it seems like we have major apps with issues. The ones that never have issues are the ones that targeted ANSI SQL and are platform-independent. The wonderful API that Oracle tells everybody to target is deprecated 5-10 years later and then everybody has to rewrite their apps...
Without getting into the whole Postgres vs MySQL thing, I'm not sure that XE and MySQL are so evenly matched. XE has artificial limits on database size. It might perform better, or be more easily upgraded to something that performs better, but if you have a huge but relatively low-load database you're not going to want to use it. Quite a few databases get large without having the transaction volume of a credit card company/etc...
Lots of people use MySQL, which I think is a big driver for Oracle to try to stagnate it. I suspect they'll just use the FUD approach - be vague enough to discourage forking, but also vague enough that enterprise users think twice...
Yeah, but Microsoft makes just as much money when somebody deploys IE6 as IE8 or whatever. That is why they still support it - they understand enterprise customers.
Ubuntu thinks supporting a version for three years is LTS. Microsoft will still send you patches for XP. Big browser/OS changes are disruptive to very large companies, so companies will do anything to avoid them, even if it means spending more on licenses/etc.
Yeah, but a cell phone was already a device with a 2-year lifespan before the smartphone came along. If cell phones already cost $1k and lasted 10 years I doubt you'd get as many people to just toss them to buy a new $1500 phone with a computer built-in.
A TV typically lasts 10 years easily. They can also be quite expensive. Plus, the sorts of people who buy $150 TVs that are fairly disposable are unlikely to be in the market for anything Apple is going to sell them.
Now, what I could see is Apple pushing TV manufacturers to adopt some kind of standard so that one remote can control the Apple TV and the monitor together. There is no reason you should have to separately control them when one of them is a full-fledged computer that presumably could figure out how to negotiate an input setting with the TV or whatever.
I'm not saying Apple won't try still, but it doesn't seem like a slam-dunk to me. I know I've never been a fan of having anything integrated into my TV (VCRs, DVD players, and so on) - inevitably the TV lasts a decade and whatever else is in it either breaks or becomes obsolete long before then.
I'll admit that I've done it - mainly to replace a failing hard drive that I didn't want to wait weeks for shipping on.
Of course, the fact that they price match to Micro Center, which itself aims to match NewEgg prices didn't hurt. :)
I've actually had Best Buy gift cards sit unused in my wallet for years, because even with $20 off it is far cheaper to get most things from NewEgg or Amazon. However, when they're willing to actually sell their products for a reasonable price due to price-matching then they're not a problem (well, if you discount the limited selection of anything I'd actually buy).
I think you meant 2^256 in your second example. Technically, bruteforcing that probably is easier with a GPU, kind of like how you can get to Alpha Centauri faster in a galleon than by walking.
You know, why the hell don't regular employment contracts for regular employees have "golden parachutes"? It doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense for executives to have them. It seems to me that it does make sense for regular employees to have them.
It makes plenty of sense for executives to have golden parachutes, since executives are the ones who create the policy around terminations. In the same way it makes plenty of sense for Congress to vote itself a raise periodically (or make them automatic).
Is it in the interests of anybody but the executives? Of course not. However, executives rarely act primarily to look after the interests of anybody but themselves. Some companies have policies that occasionally align these interests with those of shareholders and get some incidental benefit.
Agreed - the solution would be whoever hosted the bank the money was deposited in should purchase BitCoins on the market and deposit them in the accounts where they are missing. Then they can pursue legal action against whoever robbed them.
The whole point of e-cash is to make it anonymous/etc. A decent e-cash system should make reversing a trade impossible anyway - just like a trade with paper money (at best you can try try to hunt somebody down and throw them in jail until they pay you back).
Wow - a voice of sanity.
With landlines the cost is lower, but is still finite.
People seem to think that the cost per port is the only thing that matters. The problem with this logic is that ports only handle so much data, and when you exceed this amount the provider has to upgrade or split the traffic across multiple ports. Also, cables only carry so much data and to carry more you need to lay new cable (at astronomical costs - granted when you do it you can try to anticipate future demand and pick better technologies).
All of this translates into a very real cost for shuffling around bits. I have no doubt that the cost is a lot lower than many ISPs charge, but it is still there.
You also need to consider the impact of cost on behavior (as you also indicate). If you make data completely free and don't discourage saturating the pipe, then pretty soon everybody will be running torrents 24x7 or whatever and you can't oversubscribe at all. You then need to charge as if you were selling dedicated lines - which are FAR more expensive than typical consumer internet service.
I agree that the solution is to simply charge per-MB or whatever. I'd go a step further and make the last mile PUC-regulated like any other utility, with rates set by the government, and administered by a company forbidden from providing anything but a wire to the local CO. At the local CO you could then contract with any of 47 independent ISPs at market-set rates, with those ISPs just paying the utility last-mile provider a regulated rate for rackspace. Barriers to entry would be low (anybody can afford a rack and an uplink, more-or-less). The local utility would not be allowed to contract with content-providers/etc - they just supply a pipe. As a result, their interest is going to be to provide the best pipe they can to sell the most MB from anybody you're willing to download it from, or upload it to.