What you need to do is state openly and clearly what the design specs of your software are, like this is the spec for what I'm currently working on (half of them are guesses, but don't tell my boss;-) )
Limitations: Max No. of Patients 1 million (tested with 4 Invoices per Patient, 10 Appointments per Patient) Max size of 1 Document > 10 Megabytes Max size of Doc. storage 2 Terabytes, theoretical > 10 Petabytes
Application Design Specification:
Hard Realtime Not designed for hard realtime (nuclear reactor control, aircraft control systems, space rocket guidance, etc.) Soft Realtime Designed to minimise the time of many operations, especially when database size is high Reliability Data access and storage inside world-renowned Microsoft® Access(TM) 2000 database Data Protection Private Data may be stored on Hard disk, RAM, any backup systems, and hardcopy. Category 6 - No protection against sensitive data theft is provided. Recommended data protection action is compartmentalisation - this software should be run on an isolated computer (not connected to the Internet, no floppy drive etc.) in a physically and electromagnetically secure location in a windowless room. Uptime Designed for daily application restart, more often under heavy use; as dictated by Microsoft® Access(TM) database fragmentation limitation policy (compaction upon restart) Malfunctions Category 2 - all errors reported (even trivial), unless anticipated ALL runtime errors will bring up a dialogue box to inform the user of this error and its location, unless the error is expected (e.g. Tuple deletion error thrown upon request to delete a tuple)
Scalability:
Operation Database size < size of RAM Speed degradation Database size >> size of RAM Speed degradation
Add Patient Negligible Unknown Delete Patient Negligible Negligible BillPayer/GP history lookup Linear Linear Find Patient Negligible Linear View/Create Appointments and Invoices, Today's Appointments Negligible Logarithmic Print Invoices Negligible Linear Print Invoices Patient_ID change Linear Linear Audit Linear Linear
Commercial software requirements: Ignore bugs, they'll upgrade and the company will get more $$$ fro paid upgrades. If I was Machiovellian I'd suggest put bugs in deliberately, I'm sure this is why those managers keep a respectful distance from coders. Testing => delay => competitors will steal your profits so you might as well scrap the project completely.
Commerical systems can be reliable if it's demanded, e.g. Cisco 12000 series, and with some of the bugs in FreeBSD until the latest version "FileSystem corruption on heavy disk usage at shutdown e.g. after kernel rebuild" I mean WTF?????? I don't believe it, file corruption ain't no joke and it's halfway down the release notes. If you can't rely on your fs then you can't rely on your computer, how could FreeBSD have such a bad bug until recently, this is a "game over dude" bug. Nobody on/. has any right to bash Micro$oft any more. fs corruption is the main sign of an immature childish pre-alpha operating system, both Windows and FreeBSD had this bug until recently.
Do you try to tell the students before they apply for China? I saw the rally where Coco Lee and Ah-Mei protested against CD burning, but these stars don't try to tell these kids the bad side of China, these kids don't read the news and so don't know Ah Mei was banned from appearing in China after agreeing to sing Taiwan's national anthem at President Chen Shui-bian's inauguration. Somebody needs to tell them these bad things about China, somebody needs to make a big deal out of it. China is patient, it's like a tiger hiding moving slowly to attack without anyone seeing it, only now is it starting to act against the Falun Gong protestors in Hong Kong. To avoid international outrage it moved its policies to Hong Kong slowly, somebody has to tell these kids China's real tactics.
I should point out though that I had an American wife at one point who also bit me --drew blood even
Yeah, many of them do that often. I think it's some sort of New York thing, but they don't pay much attention to news and things happening, much like these Taiwan kids.
I am writing a EULA for my own software right now, so this is right up my alley. All you have to do is kill the "click-thru without thinking about it people"
This is what I suggest: Companies selling software with a market capitalisation of over $100,000 have their EULA's have no meaning in a court of law UNLESS they quiz the customer so that he understands the EULA. This'll stop the "implicit trust" that everybody apart from/. has for Micro$oft. The courts must recognise that the implicit trust consumers have for megacorporate EULAs is illegal because you don't read the agreement. A questionnaire should follow the following format:
Who is legally liable for a failure in this software? (you must answer - I, the user am solely responsible) User types: Me, I am solely responssiible mommy
What use restrictions are on this software? (you must answer - only me on my own computer and laptop) User types: Only me on my own computer and laptop.
This is the *ONLY* way to get Joe sixpack to think twice about "signing" the document. This way people that sign a stupid EULA are gonna look the same as that stupid woman at the used car lot saying, "I signed the paper without reading it, and they took my house away, I didn't know it was written in the contract."
How do you know that China won't turn around and bite you like they did to Tibet (where they are constructing a railroad to cause ethnic cleansing by forcefully settling Hun chinese in Tibet genocide of 1.2 million people - World Trade Centre is insignificant nothing) and in Xinjiang province where they are killing the Muslims. How do you know they won't do the same to you? Do you tell your students this before they leave to go to the mainland?
You are correct. Unfortunately oversupply is a problem. It means you can screen applicants based on who eats Hershey and still you'll have far too many. To use an amorphism, shields are up dude, you need the exact key to get through the shield.
Every company knows they can train you, but having 1,000 resumes of trainable people and then 10 people who actually have used.NET for 3 years, well who would you choose?
Only use new stuff when it makes whatever easier/better/cheaper.
Before McDonalds - get food out of overcrowded fridge, secure children so they aren't harmed while cooking, prepare food, wash utensils, cook food, spend 1 hour cleaning up baked-on egg. After McDonalds - drive up to window, give money, get food.
Before OOP - procedural FORTRAN-style stuff, VCs lose interest, refuse to give money to further software development. After OOP - software companies get so much money from buzzword-mania that a bubble is created, they can outsource to third world countries and creating gigantic power stations and infrastructure (no other private businesses have paid for an entire national infrastructure, too high risk).
Well, After OOP might be a little exaggerated, but you can see that I'm getting at the fact that the big buzzword sell is important, unless you want to be a free software programmer on welfare. Even if OOP is just a buzzword-generating algorithm, it brought in the money Micro$oft-style so I'm not gonna complain. If my Manager tells me that OOP is the best thing in the world, I'll say, "Yeah great" then take a paycheck from him and call him "Sucker"
The entire economy will continue to fall as more and more companies go belly up, or lay people off to stay afloat. This isn't just a recession, it's a depression
Dude, sounds like you're talking more about yourself than about the economy. Take some Prozac (don't worry everyone does, especially nowadays).
Recessions usually last about 6 years, we've only had it for 2. When the STUPID Merrill Lynch and friends illiterate "Analysts" find that they've been talking up the economy because everyone *wants* a recovery, and that things have been a little buoyant recently because they were banking on a recovery, they're gonna get screwed for 4 years. Now the Japanese economy, now that's different, or perhaps the US is also suffering from this baby boomer effect, hmmmm.
? If it's about the uncertainty regarding whether the economy has any more shoes to drop, you are not a very good student of economic history. Many recessions have a mild initial dip, such as this one, then recover a bit as inventory is depleted and manufacturing starts, and then demand falls out and the real recession begins. Most of the time few people had a clue that a "double dip" would happen, and many at the point of recovery from the first dip predicted that there would be no more economic trouble for a while
That's a +5 in my book. The question is has the WTC attack induced the second dip prematurely making this the real recovery, or is the effect of WTC merely to cause a short-term artificial dip, then a short-term artificial recovery (NOW) followed by a full recession (SOON)?
There is always work for people who are good at what they do
Nope, your resume has to show that you're good at it. Whether you're good or not doesn't matter, as long as you can "talk the talk and walk the walk".
The Movies are correct, the Scientists are wrong
on
Physics in the Movies
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· Score: 2
This is Slashdot, where geeks that think different from the status quo get their voice. I think out of the box, although many others on/. seem to follow the scientific consensus, just like RIAA follows the music industry.
Well I'm gonna blow a hole in your minds.
Phasers *are* visible - Phasers != Lasers. Phasers have a particle beam of ions/plasma fired at the enemy ship, these emit an omnidirectional glow (sci-fi movies are correct). This pulsating light will hit the observer-ship's hull (light has a weight of 1g/m^2) making it vibrate. Vibrating membrane becomes sound in the observer ship's atmosphere, which is picked up by the microphone on the observer ship. Try it - fire a pulsating laser at a microphone, it WILL make a noise. Using lasers only you don't need shields, just a mirrored surface on your ship. Plus the fact that these ion beams might need a toroidal electromagnetic field to constrict them, this changing electromagnetic field indices movement (thus sound) in the ferrous/superconducting components of the super-sensitive microphone thus sound
Sparking bulletsArmour piercing bullets on Stargate SG-1 are coated with teflon, plus military issue bullets can be made of depleted uranium. Does this spark?
Flaming Cars - Ford Pinto***BOYCOTT FORD, RIAA***. This is why the (RI|MP)AA will win - was Ford forced out of business? Nope.
Mac 10 - I don't dispute this.
A person who jumps through a safety glass window would be far more likely to survive than if he jumped through a plate glass window but would still sustain at least minor injuries
This happened to my friend, when he was 7 he ran through a porche sliding door - problem, the door was closed, the glass had just been cleaned. After he ran through for a second his impression was left in the glass, a hole shaped like him, then the glass fell apart. He was completely uninjured.
You are correct. If I had mod points, I'd mod you up, but you've got karma where it really counts anyway. Although I'll admit it would feel good to look at my bank account and have it not in the red for a change.
Maybe I would FIX THE DAMN BUFFER OVERFLOW IN CVS?
After you got infected by the virus, how would you know the virus was there without an AV proggie? Fixing the buffer overflow after getting infected DOES NOT REMOVE THE VIRUS/WORM/TROJAN.
Don't tell me you're one of those Window$ people where even if the slightest buffer overflow is detected in any installed app you delete the partition and restore from a disk image?
If you are using Windows or Outlook, do not open an attachment if you don't know what it is.
How about Dual Boot systems? When running Windows to play games or to see how l4ame it is, a virus/worm/trojan would have root access to the linux partition under "fun" OSes like Win'98 or even Administrator on Win 2k and Win XP and could rootkit your linux. This software already does this sort of access. I don't think any inter-partition viruses exist right now. Hmmmm
Antivirus companies can probably earn more money by hiring programmers to write antivirus software instead of hiring programmers to write virus software
Heh. In that case why didn't Symantec pay for Mitnick's lawyer?
Dude, there's no point showing up dumb people. In the same way that many linux hAtHoRs won't dispute a speeding ticket in front of a Judge (the cop was tailgating me and racially discriminating against me) but would instead bitch on Slashdot, most people that use computers will stick with Windows and Outlook.
Unless you'd love to be DDoS port-scanned 100 times a second by a million Micro$oft IIs infected with code red, be quiet and let the AV vendors do what they want. If all AV vendors go bust, then a worm that propogates via CVS app buffer overruns gets released, what will you do then?
I'm just quoting an urban legend... (computing legend sorta)... Or maybe everybody that replies negatively to my post is actually a CIA agent trying to spread disinformation. I distinctly remember watching the Discovery channel and watching this US spy submarine (DSRV cover story) tapping into undersea cables by taking a feed from the repeaters.
It can be done. It cannot be done transparently. It takes a fair bit of time and equipment and even if you are sucessful, they will still be able to tell.
Actually every fibre optic cable suffers from leakage, it may be possible to detect the data in this leakage with a vulcan joint without breaking the connection. I don't remember the details.
The thing that attracts us to the ground is a static field; this is only an effect of dynamic fields. Just like AC + DC. What you feel now is a more or less static field. A dynamic gravitational field at, well, any noticeable frequency would feel, I imagine, incredibly weird, like an fast rollercoaster
Hmmmm, in that case if you can rapidly switch the superconductor between superconducting and non-superconducting states, it might allow motion in the static field. Unfortunately since superconductors require extremely low temperatures, you'd need to rapidly rotate the temperature of the superconducting material somehow.
If the superconductor also resists changes in the direction of the gravitational field, a rotating superconductor will be affected by a static field somehow.
Re:I think it's harder for single people
on
The Almighty Buck
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· Score: 1
My friend got posted to Dubai 3 years ago. He says a lot has changed, loads of new people have come in, they're Taliban-calibre and they ain't pretty. When you've been taught to hate someone since you were 3 it's kinda hard to go against that. His company's threatened to halve his pay if he comes back here, but the calibre of people there has deteriorated so much he says he's seriously considering it. Al Quaeda already has a strong foothold in Somalia and is spreading fast despite Afghanistan so I think the US will look for some excuse to bomb that place as well (among others), let's see, "we need to deliver more aid, I know let's construct a road using our spare 1,000lb bombs, it's environmentally friendly no need for trucks and pollution.". Nice.
Re:I think it's harder for single people
on
The Almighty Buck
·
· Score: 1
Thank You, that was a marathon rant, and the oval office agrees with me. They're still busy coming up with new buzzwords as an excuse to make it politically correct to bomb those countries. They've started using Wahabbi now, it was Islamic renegades but that can't justify a war against another entire country, Islamic radicles sounds a bit broader, but with Wahabbi I think they're onto a real winner with that, they can go bomb Saddam now and hopefully the Kurds will finally get their own country. Dirty bomb, eh, I wonder whether the next time I go Americans will still be running around care-free like Alicia Silverstone in Clueless.
I can see the script of the next oval office speech "We will bomb the muslims^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hradicles^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hwahab bis back into the stone age.
Re:How is the Brooks article unintentionally funny
on
The Almighty Buck
·
· Score: 2
You are mistaking Banks for a benevolent entity. The Banks despite their (usual) 8:1 gearing ratio still pull loans from home owners and businesses if liquid asset value of the business > risk assesment & NPV of loan. This way the Banks can pull their money out of profitable business so they can get more money now instead of moderate money over 20 years.
This happened to my friend, he had a $200,000 mortgage with BCCI, he had paid $150,000 of this mortgage off, so he only had $50,000 to go. He had $100,000 cash available but because of mortgage tax relief he didn't want to pay up his mortgage fully.
When BCCI tanked, they auctioned his house, they didn't give him a chance to pay $50,000 cash to buy the house.
Banks point of view: If they buy the house from us, we get $50,000 If we seize the house and auction it, we get $300,000.
If you're thinking 8:1 is a bottomless pit, remind yourself that MANY top Bank employees get paid > $1.5million per year, and not just CEOs. You think the dot com boom was driven by the Nasdaq, well here's something for you - where do the VCs get their money from? $100 million doesn't grow on trees you know.
Slashdot Mirror
What you need to do is state openly and clearly what the design specs of your software are, like this is the spec for what I'm currently working on (half of them are guesses, but don't tell my boss ;-) )
Limitations:
Max No. of Patients 1 million (tested with 4 Invoices per Patient, 10 Appointments per Patient)
Max size of 1 Document > 10 Megabytes
Max size of Doc. storage 2 Terabytes, theoretical > 10 Petabytes
Application Design Specification:
Hard Realtime Not designed for hard realtime (nuclear reactor control, aircraft control systems, space rocket guidance, etc.)
Soft Realtime Designed to minimise the time of many operations, especially when database size is high
Reliability Data access and storage inside world-renowned Microsoft® Access(TM) 2000 database
Data Protection Private Data may be stored on Hard disk, RAM, any backup systems, and hardcopy.
Category 6 - No protection against sensitive data theft is provided. Recommended data protection action is compartmentalisation - this software should be run on an isolated computer (not connected to the Internet, no floppy drive etc.) in a physically and electromagnetically secure location in a windowless room.
Uptime Designed for daily application restart, more often under heavy use; as dictated by Microsoft® Access(TM) database fragmentation limitation policy (compaction upon restart)
Malfunctions Category 2 - all errors reported (even trivial), unless anticipated
ALL runtime errors will bring up a dialogue box to inform the user of this error and its location, unless the error is expected (e.g. Tuple deletion error thrown upon request to delete a tuple)
Scalability:
Operation Database size < size of RAM
Speed degradation Database size >> size of RAM
Speed degradation
Add Patient Negligible Unknown
Delete Patient Negligible Negligible
BillPayer/GP history lookup Linear Linear
Find Patient Negligible Linear
View/Create Appointments and Invoices, Today's Appointments Negligible Logarithmic
Print Invoices Negligible Linear
Print Invoices Patient_ID change Linear Linear
Audit Linear Linear
PLC requirements:
Crash: Unthinkable
Transient anomaly (glitch): Unacceptable
Dependent on flawed assumptions: Unacceptable
Commercial software requirements:
Ignore bugs, they'll upgrade and the company will get more $$$ fro paid upgrades. If I was Machiovellian I'd suggest put bugs in deliberately, I'm sure this is why those managers keep a respectful distance from coders.
Testing => delay => competitors will steal your profits so you might as well scrap the project completely.
Commerical systems can be reliable if it's demanded, e.g. Cisco 12000 series, and with some of the bugs in FreeBSD until the latest version "FileSystem corruption on heavy disk usage at shutdown e.g. after kernel rebuild" I mean WTF?????? I don't believe it, file corruption ain't no joke and it's halfway down the release notes. If you can't rely on your fs then you can't rely on your computer, how could FreeBSD have such a bad bug until recently, this is a "game over dude" bug. Nobody on /. has any right to bash Micro$oft any more. fs corruption is the main sign of an immature childish pre-alpha operating system, both Windows and FreeBSD had this bug until recently.
This is what I suggest: /. has for Micro$oft. The courts must recognise that the implicit trust consumers have for megacorporate EULAs is illegal because you don't read the agreement. A questionnaire should follow the following format:
Companies selling software with a market capitalisation of over $100,000 have their EULA's have no meaning in a court of law UNLESS they quiz the customer so that he understands the EULA. This'll stop the "implicit trust" that everybody apart from
Who is legally liable for a failure in this software? (you must answer - I, the user am solely responsible)
User types: Me, I am solely responssiible mommy
What use restrictions are on this software? (you must answer - only me on my own computer and laptop)
User types: Only me on my own computer and laptop.
This is the *ONLY* way to get Joe sixpack to think twice about "signing" the document. This way people that sign a stupid EULA are gonna look the same as that stupid woman at the used car lot saying, "I signed the paper without reading it, and they took my house away, I didn't know it was written in the contract."
How do you know that China won't turn around and bite you like they did to Tibet (where they are constructing a railroad to cause ethnic cleansing by forcefully settling Hun chinese in Tibet genocide of 1.2 million people - World Trade Centre is insignificant nothing ) and in Xinjiang province where they are killing the Muslims. How do you know they won't do the same to you? Do you tell your students this before they leave to go to the mainland?
Every company knows they can train you, but having 1,000 resumes of trainable people and then 10 people who actually have used .NET for 3 years, well who would you choose?
Only use new stuff when it makes whatever easier/better/cheaper.
Before McDonalds - get food out of overcrowded fridge, secure children so they aren't harmed while cooking, prepare food, wash utensils, cook food, spend 1 hour cleaning up baked-on egg.
After McDonalds - drive up to window, give money, get food.
Before OOP - procedural FORTRAN-style stuff, VCs lose interest, refuse to give money to further software development.
After OOP - software companies get so much money from buzzword-mania that a bubble is created, they can outsource to third world countries and creating gigantic power stations and infrastructure (no other private businesses have paid for an entire national infrastructure, too high risk).
Well, After OOP might be a little exaggerated, but you can see that I'm getting at the fact that the big buzzword sell is important, unless you want to be a free software programmer on welfare. Even if OOP is just a buzzword-generating algorithm, it brought in the money Micro$oft-style so I'm not gonna complain. If my Manager tells me that OOP is the best thing in the world, I'll say, "Yeah great" then take a paycheck from him and call him "Sucker"
Recessions usually last about 6 years, we've only had it for 2. When the STUPID Merrill Lynch and friends illiterate "Analysts" find that they've been talking up the economy because everyone *wants* a recovery, and that things have been a little buoyant recently because they were banking on a recovery, they're gonna get screwed for 4 years. Now the Japanese economy, now that's different, or perhaps the US is also suffering from this baby boomer effect, hmmmm.
Well I'm gonna blow a hole in your minds.
Phasers *are* visible - Phasers != Lasers. Phasers have a particle beam of ions/plasma fired at the enemy ship, these emit an omnidirectional glow (sci-fi movies are correct). This pulsating light will hit the observer-ship's hull (light has a weight of 1g/m^2) making it vibrate. Vibrating membrane becomes sound in the observer ship's atmosphere, which is picked up by the microphone on the observer ship. Try it - fire a pulsating laser at a microphone, it WILL make a noise. Using lasers only you don't need shields, just a mirrored surface on your ship. Plus the fact that these ion beams might need a toroidal electromagnetic field to constrict them, this changing electromagnetic field indices movement (thus sound) in the ferrous/superconducting components of the super-sensitive microphone thus sound
Sparking bulletsArmour piercing bullets on Stargate SG-1 are coated with teflon, plus military issue bullets can be made of depleted uranium. Does this spark?
Flaming Cars - Ford Pinto ***BOYCOTT FORD, RIAA***. This is why the (RI|MP)AA will win - was Ford forced out of business? Nope.
Mac 10 - I don't dispute this.
This happened to my friend, when he was 7 he ran through a porche sliding door - problem, the door was closed, the glass had just been cleaned. After he ran through for a second his impression was left in the glass, a hole shaped like him, then the glass fell apart. He was completely uninjured.You are correct. If I had mod points, I'd mod you up, but you've got karma where it really counts anyway. Although I'll admit it would feel good to look at my bank account and have it not in the red for a change.
Obviously some stupid people want VC money by making themselves look like the next big thing. This is just a variance on a theme.
Don't tell me you're one of those Window$ people where even if the slightest buffer overflow is detected in any installed app you delete the partition and restore from a disk image?
Unless you'd love to be DDoS port-scanned 100 times a second by a million Micro$oft IIs infected with code red, be quiet and let the AV vendors do what they want. If all AV vendors go bust, then a worm that propogates via CVS app buffer overruns gets released, what will you do then?
If the superconductor also resists changes in the direction of the gravitational field, a rotating superconductor will be affected by a static field somehow.
My friend got posted to Dubai 3 years ago. He says a lot has changed, loads of new people have come in, they're Taliban-calibre and they ain't pretty. When you've been taught to hate someone since you were 3 it's kinda hard to go against that. His company's threatened to halve his pay if he comes back here, but the calibre of people there has deteriorated so much he says he's seriously considering it. Al Quaeda already has a strong foothold in Somalia and is spreading fast despite Afghanistan so I think the US will look for some excuse to bomb that place as well (among others), let's see, "we need to deliver more aid, I know let's construct a road using our spare 1,000lb bombs, it's environmentally friendly no need for trucks and pollution.". Nice.
I can see the script of the next oval office speech "We will bomb the muslims^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hradicles^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hwahab bis back into the stone age.
This happened to my friend, he had a $200,000 mortgage with BCCI, he had paid $150,000 of this mortgage off, so he only had $50,000 to go. He had $100,000 cash available but because of mortgage tax relief he didn't want to pay up his mortgage fully.
When BCCI tanked, they auctioned his house, they didn't give him a chance to pay $50,000 cash to buy the house.
Banks point of view:
If they buy the house from us, we get $50,000
If we seize the house and auction it, we get $300,000.
If you're thinking 8:1 is a bottomless pit, remind yourself that MANY top Bank employees get paid > $1.5million per year, and not just CEOs. You think the dot com boom was driven by the Nasdaq, well here's something for you - where do the VCs get their money from? $100 million doesn't grow on trees you know.