Same approach at the Sun Java Center in NYC. They have this web-app - you log in & register for a slot (workstation+desk+chair, in a shared office) for a given day between say 9am to 1pm, and the slot is yours if available.
Ofcourse, you can't store your books there, or put up your feet or have a messy desk with papers & stuff, cause you have to be out by 1pm. You can't even use the workstation for development, since you have to check out by 1. So you basically work on your laptop, but use this slot to ftp your work to the server, & that's it.
You feel quite disconnected from your team, since you never meet your colleagues unless there's a scheduled group-meeting. Everything gets done by email & phones.
Sounds ideal but in reality, its far from that. You are spending far too much time communicating, booking these slots & doing admin work when you should really be coding.
It didn't work out for me...but some of my former colleagues have gotten used to it. I like having a dedicated cubicle to myself, some bookshelf space, dedicated workstation, colleagues bumping into each other so we can bounce off ideas, exchange gossip at the watercooler etc I guess I'm too old-fashioned, but work to me means camaraderie, not living out of a laptop.
When a guy with an ipod walks up to a hottie with an ipod, he must be able to point his ipod to hers, like hot-sync, and that'll automatically send the message "You wanna do it?" to her ipod.
She can then press the fastforward button for "Yes!", or the rewind button for "Get lost"
This feature facilitates ummm. mutual intercourse between ipod owners.
Don't make stuff up.
I'm an emacs user myself, but sometimes have to use Notepad at work. Even way back in Win95, Notepad never inserted carriage returns for WordWrap. Never seen a single notepad that did that. Ever.
Frameworks and GOTOs - that's surely a stretch.
Try writing a marginally useful Java application without using oh.. say ArrayList, HashMap, System,.. hell you can't even write a "Hello World" without System, and that's part of the framework ( java.lang.System ), not part of the language.
As a person of Indian origin in the IT industry, but based here in the USofA and NOT in India, I feel sorry about you feeling sorry for us.
Millons of Indians chose to take advantage of the H1B program to immigrate to the US, where they filed for a greencard and expected to become an American citizen in due coure and live the good life. They paid their taxes, bought houses & cars, took out a mortgage, had kids born here & go to local schools here - bottomline, they acclimatized themselves very well & contributed heavily to the US economy. All of this is legal, good ( in the sense someone's trying to improve his wellbeing ) and beneficial ( to the US economy & society at large ).
All of a sudden, their plans were derailed. Thousands have lost their jobs. They can't go on welfare cause they are not yet a citizen, and they can't afford the mortgage & bills, and they are forced to hit the reset button. They have to abandon the life they built here in the country of their choice, sell their houses, cars, possessions, and go back to India to start from scratch. Their children, born & brought up in America, have no idea of the travails of India. This disrupts not just their schooling but their entire future life.
Saying "I feel sorry" just doesn't cut it. Real human lives are direly affected. Rest assured, this isn't the end - just as jobs were outsourced from the USA to India, they will be outsourced from India to elsewhere - China, fareast, many other candidates. A lot more lives will be disrupted simply because a few CEO's can cut costs & take home a larger paycheck.
"a Frenchman trying to educate me about how the U.S. ought to work"
Liberty comes from the french root libre. Who does America owe the statue of Liberty to ? George W Bush ?? Forget the statue, the very concept of liberty is French, just as the vey concept of colonialism is British, who btw happen to be the closest pals of GWB at the moment. You are free to opine on slashdot because of liberty. Were you colonized, you wouldn't get within a mile of a keyboard. Now think of all the millions in Iraq GW wants to colonize oops.. he's out to grant them liberty, no ?
"the vast majority of Iraqis want to live in a peaceful, free world. And we will find these people and we will bring them to justice."-- GWB, Washington, D.C., Oct. 27, 2003
The problem with Sun is its R&D budget. In general, research is a privileged activity. The perils of capitalism being what they are, only a monopoly with "free money" pouring in can throw billions on R&D. Two examples -
1. For a long long time upto the 90s, Bell Labs was one of the largest research centers. Why ? Well, AT&T was a virtual monopoly, and everytime you made a phonecall, about 60 cents per dollar was "free money", that went into supporting R&D at Bell Labs. 2. Microsoft - Out of every $499 Office CD, probably $400 is "free money". For every $299 you pay for a seat of Windows XP, MS gets say $200 "free money".
What is "free money" ? Any revenue that accrues after the actual cost of producing the product has been paid for. eg. If you factor in the cost of making an 8 oz can of pepsi, filling it with sugared water, shipping it on a truck, getting it to customer, it probably amortizes to say 20 cents per can. You pay a dollar, so there's 80% free money! No wonder the PEP stockholders are so happy.
What does this have to do with SUNW ? Well, Sun doesn't get a lot of free money, so having a billion dollar R&D budget is silly - that kind of freemoney is simply not coming in. The kind of pie-in-the-sky research that Sun's engaged in eg. distributed computing such as Javaspaces, writing an operating system in Java aka JavaOS etc. should be engaged by fully funded government labs and fatcats like the NSF and MIT, not a company that is accountable to shareholders.
Sounds cruel, but this is the reality - let Sun first sell plenty of boxes and generate free money, then they can spend $1B doing research on academic/esoteric/theoretical topics.
I happen to like this film quite a bit. But opinion seems to be fairly divided on whether its good science or bad.
Consider - NASA cuts funding on a mars mission, so the "bad scientist" decides to fake the space mission by staging it in an unused air-force facility, disguised to look like mars, and then transmitting the footage to the audience.
NASA "good guy" looks at transmission lag, compares it to what the real lag should be if the transmission were indeed from mars, and figures something's fishy. "good guy" talks to "bad scientist" who then knocks him off, but before he disappears, he divulges suspicions to a close friend/reporter, who plays the hero.
Now, whole thing requires cooperation from the astronauts, who comply, only to find the spacecraft blowing up on re-entry due to heat-shield failure, thereby "killing" them, even though they've never even left the earth. Now, astronauts must escape before "bad scientist" really kills them off.
Nice sci-fi/thriller/comedy/70mm action flick, but didn't get the acclaim it deserved.
Ppl poked numerous holes into the plot, which I concede isn't airtight, but still, is pretty sound considering other cheaply made sci-fi's involving data on a floppy disk or somesuch.
Amen, brother! As much as I hate Ann Coulter, this is one topic Ann's absolutely right about - WHY should the government legislate on people's personal preferences within the four walls of their house ? Why do I care if two adults want to commit sodomy ? Why should the govt step in and mandate "sodomy is ok" ? Does the govt mandate "You must eat your vitamins" ? So why should the govt mandate smoking or not-smoking marijuana ? Just be indifferent, is all.
As a GNC member & frequent customer, I can attest to the fact that many of the products work on placebo effect, if at all they do. The side-effects are severe, sometimes fatal. The advertizing is quite deceptive, bordering on scam.
Here are some examples -
1. GNC MRPs & Protein powders : Body can utilize only so much protein. If you buy a powder with 100 grams protein per serving, you'll simply tax your kidneys and piss it off - no anabolic ( muscle-building ) effect. Anything above 30-40 grams is overkill.
2. Aspartame in MRPs : Almost ALL meal replacement powders sold in GNC have aspartame. Check aspartamekills.com for known risks. Lately, a few ( eg. MET-RX ) have switched to suclarose and prominently advertize "No aspartame", but doesn't that make then liable since they have sold aspartame-laced powders for so many years before making the switch.
3. Protein cannot be effectively utilized without carbs, however, the protein powders sold in GNC contain 2-4% carbs, quite inadequate.
4. GNC also sells soy-protein. On the protein utilization scale, soy has the lowest value. ie. just 30-40% of soy can be utilized by body, the rest is excreted. Besides, soy protein intake leads to man-boobs.
5. GNC sells ephedra in various brands ( stacker, xenadrine, metabolift etc ). Ephedra is banned in over 20 states in US and has caused over 100 deaths ( check New England Journal of Medicine transcripts ) & thousands of cardiac impairments.
6. GNC sells glutamine. Now, the body can only utilize glutamine manufactured by its BCAA. It cannot use glutamine consumed orally, so it is pointless to even take glutamine in this form. If you really want glutamine, take BCAA capsules. Of course, GNC won't tell you that.
7. WTF is NO2 ? Huge ads in GNC for NO2, totally unproven product.
8. All these calcium supplements - coral calcium, oral calcium whatnots - quite ineffective. Calcium does not bind to the bones when taken in this fashion. Milk builds bones, because the calcium in milk is bound to the carbs and digested as such, and gets to the bones. You can't just pop a pill of calcium & hope it'll get to your bones - it'll simple be excreted.
9. Male sexual aids in GNC - yohimbe & other herbs, are quite unproven in their efficacy. Check any sex-med mag.
10. GNC is in the health business, just as tobacco companies are in the nicotine-delivery business. The set aim of GNC franchisee is to sell healthfoods so they make money. Just walk into a GNC and act dumb, and ask them what you should buy to get fit fast. You'd be amazed - they'll give you tons of useless junk that simply don't work & if it does, contributes marginally to making you fit. You have to workout intensely, and they won't tell you that.
Know your facts before you step into a GNC. At least talk to a nutritionist. There is some really good stuff in GNC, but the vast majority is just sham products with fantastic marketing.
"Premiere is still the most popular film editing app amongst Mac users"
- It isn't. DV/film editors typically buy a turnkey system ( Dual-cpu system + editing app + DV card+ monitors +...). In the turnkey market, Premiere is always bundled with PCs, and FCP with Macs. These ppl are simply interested in editing their footage, and the turnkey guys give you a working system off the bat. Nobody bothers to investigate whether there is a Premiere for Macs, or an FCP for PCs - they're not computer geeks.
How many do you think know about this ? Yeah, the slashdot crowd. Yeah, the guys who read yahoo news and landed on this news snippet by chance. The "rest of America" = NO CLUE.
What do you think will happen next ? MS will use this info bigtime. Within a week, you'll see huge ads on WSJ, NYT & every other print outlet, and every channel starting with MSNBC, CNN, FOX etc, telling the "rest of America" that the US Army endorses MS software. Immediately, retail customers will get on board. MSFT will zoom into stratosphere. When it can't go any further, institutions & mutual funds will dump MSFT, and the retail guys will get screwed as usual.
I say, use this info. Go out NOW, sell your house and put every nickel into MSFT. Make huge profits, & then invest that into RHAT. Win-win situation.
javachip was prototyped, but never marketed - yet another execution failure at Sun.
At on point, Sun declared "Java implemented right was not slow". It then hired coders to implement a "Java compiler in Java". Result ? The Java compiler in Java was 20 TIMES SLOWER than the Java compiler written in C! These were never widely published, but just do a search on Technical Abstracts on sun.com, you'll find them.
Butch Cassidy ( Robert Redford ) keeps going "Who ARE these guys?" & that's exactly what struck me when I read this piece.
Where's Gosling ? Where's Ken Arnold ? Where are the IBM developers ? Instead, you have some "chief software evangelist", a whole bunch of suits, and these are the "luminaries" ? Gimme a break. Hamilton came into the Java scene at such a late stage, I doubt the relevance of his take on the industry.
Look at the overly simplistic opinions they voice - "Unix is complicated, it won the server, Windows is simple, it won desktop". Jesus.
JCP will make Java stronger ?! Ha ha ha. Do you know how much you have to pay to become a part of JCP ? What exactly did Kodak's participation in the JCP get them ? Their powerful imaging API is still not part of the standard JDK. log4j never made it into the JDK. The regex libraries were booted out too. In both cases, Sun simply issued a JSR & reinvented the wheel, instead of accomodating valuable work done in an open-source environment.
The only sure thing I got out of this discussion -"Microsoft.NET is maturing and will be a ferocious competitor to Java...companies putting Java projects on hold pending their evaluation of their.NET projects." - I work for one of them companies. Despite the deep experience in Java & Swing ( we designed grids & calendar widgets when things like JTable were unknown ), we've decided to go the C# route for our finance apps. Java's fine on the server, but windows clients need a C#, no two ways about it. Same story with Linux once Mono's a done deal - just you wait.
There's no generic real competition advantage - its a very domain-specific thingy.
Real competition advantage in microcontrollers & firmware for cameras will continue to be C & assembler for a long time.
For the wall-street crowd,where every quant analyst has a thousand Excel macros & math models, windows terminals are a reality. Java AWT client on windows is a joke - small set of UI controls, no built-in grid-support, no inter-op with Excel, no built-in charts/graphs, the list goes on. The swing clients are another story - getting a Java plugin installed, huge jar downloads, no versioning - clearing the Plugin cached jars every so often, jeez, I've been thru enuf nightmares.
For that particular subset of users, which btw is a pretty LARGE subset, C# is the real competitive advantage. They give two hoots about a JDBC driver that has to use an ODBC bridge to talk to their local MS Access database. ( Typically, interesting data-sets are extracted from a huge Oracle DB into a much smaller MSAccess DB - like an cache, so that Excel can mathmodel your data. C# taks this notion to a whole new level - notion of disconnected DB-access, where you use an in-memory cache to download interesting tables/rows from your DB, disconnect & operate on that subset, & then sync up your data. Read up on it, its quite original & non-trivial, certainly no "dumb little language trick". )
don't get me wrong. i love java, its the only thing on my resume, sole bread-n-butter for past 6 years, etc.
but the C# designers really know the market. when i first read "C# = java done right" in a PR article, i said, "yeah right, what absolute BS".
but then, i attended my first c# training seminar last month, & having just completed a major java-to-c# porting project, i can say this much - C# has definitely won the windows-only-client-side battle. if you are developing an app that front-ends on a windows client ( that's pretty much ALL of wall street, given the heavy use of MS-Excel ), C# is simply the way to go.
6 years ago, i recall graduating from school & deciding to go into a Java-job. classmates were like - "what's java ? unproven stuff. use MFC. that's were the $$ is".
how wrong they were! C# is now in the same position - poised to skyrocket.
every single java concept has made it into C#.
furthermore C# has several useful notions ( delegates, boxed types, attribute annotations,assemblies etc ) not in Java.
finally, cross-language interop is a dead reality - i can write a C# class, my VB class can inherit from it, and my C++ class can inherit from my VB class, and call functions in Perl - the CLS & the common type system makes it easy for even a casual novice pgmmer.
once's the mono project attains fruition, c# on linux will be the defacto pgmming style - need i say more ?
As a fellow Indian, lemme summarize the problems with this, many of which have already been pointed out -
1. The Indian president is defined in the constitution as a "titular head". Granted he is probably the best thing that happened to India - a nuclear physicist, a real visionary, but he still is NOT the prime minister. So at best, his take on OSS is an opinion, not an official directive.
2. IT has made billions for India, sure, but which part of India? You might think IT touches say 10% of India. Guess what, IT directly affects less than 0.1% of India!!! Strange but true. India is primarily a village economy. The 0.1% who are affected live in metropolitan cities like Bangalore ( India's silicon valley ), Hyderabad, Bombay etc. They are rich beyond belief compared to the average guy on the street. But they are surrounded by the remaining 99.9% , of which >70% belong to villages, earning less than $1 a day. This is the reality in India.
3. Indian IT has yet to make a single brand-name software product for its internal Indian consumer market. The top Indian IT companies viz Infosys, Wipro, TCS etc. make all their revenue writing code for US companies who outsource. There's a rising backlash in the US today against such "code-coolies" ( 5 states have "banned" outsourcing government IT jobs to India...NJ, CT & a few others ). Take a look at the stock price of Infosys ( ticker INFY ) - it took a nosedive recently for forecasting lower growth in next quarter. Conditions are very difficult. At this time, revenue ( from proprietary MS products ) is more critical than technical expertise ( from OSS ).
4. The president's remark did not even attract a passing glance in the local Indian news...tells you how little atention is paid to it by the masses.
5. I do hope 1-4 get reversed...but a quick reality-check tells me otherwise.
Tintin, now that's a REAL comic. The cartoon version's available for all 22 episodes.
Spielberg's now putting together the first American version of Tintin. Most likely, Caprio'll play the lead. I can't think of anybody else with a closer resemblance to Tintin.
( For the ignorant masses who know not who Tintin is, the definitive site : http://www.tintin.be )
The compact flash marketplace is huge. Just about every digital camera requires and supports CF2, and the IBM microdrive is the only HD fitting in that slot that offers 1GB capacity. By choosing to ditch CF2, I don't see these guys having much of a chance. Do you seriously expect Nikon and Canon and every other big fish in the camera market who have finally agreed to settle on CF2 to now support this new harddisk without CF2 ?
"the majority good engineers in India, have left India. Those remaining for the most part are not the sharpest knives in the drawer"
Well said. Over 50% , that's right 50%, of the creme-de-la-creme of Indian undergradutes from the IITs leave India. Every year. And in departments like Comp Science and EE, its over 90%.
In general, over 20 million Indians have left India. Over 80% of them are in IT.
The most overcrowded offices in India are the US Embassy, The Australian embassy, the NZ embassy and the Canadian embassy. On a cold winter's day, you'll catch thousands of people queued outside these, just dying to immigrate.
Its easy to paint a rosy picture of Wipro or Infosys, but ask the people who leave India why they do so if the opportunity is so great. The reality is not rosy at all.
The Indian-American community has a sizeable population, particularly in San Jose & silicon valley, central New Jersey, parts of NY, etc. They live on a staple diet of Indian music & movies. They can definitely afford to pay Rs10 per track. I'm sure they'd plunk down $100 in an instant if you put up golden oldies in Hindi or other Indian languages. These are quite hard to find outside India, and EMI & BMG have the copyrights & do not market them well in the US.
I doubt if an Indian living in India will bother, though ( unless he is an upper middle class bloke with a white-collar job in a multi-national corp )
The rest get to listen to tons of cool stuff on the radio & buy inexpensive audio cassettes, which are really the mainstay there.
Slashdot Mirror
Same approach at the Sun Java Center in NYC. They have this web-app - you log in & register for a slot (workstation+desk+chair, in a shared office) for a given day between say 9am to 1pm, and the slot is yours if available.
Ofcourse, you can't store your books there, or put up your feet or have a messy desk with papers & stuff, cause you have to be out by 1pm. You can't even use the workstation for development, since you have to check out by 1. So you basically work on your laptop, but use this slot to ftp your work to the server, & that's it.
You feel quite disconnected from your team, since you never meet your colleagues unless there's a scheduled group-meeting. Everything gets done by email & phones.
Sounds ideal but in reality, its far from that. You are spending far too much time communicating, booking these slots & doing admin work when you should really be coding.
It didn't work out for me...but some of my former colleagues have gotten used to it. I like having a dedicated cubicle to myself, some bookshelf space, dedicated workstation, colleagues bumping into each other so we can bounce off ideas, exchange gossip at the watercooler etc I guess I'm too old-fashioned, but work to me means camaraderie, not living out of a laptop.
I request Apple to add a feature to ipod -
When a guy with an ipod walks up to a hottie with an ipod, he must be able to point his ipod to hers, like hot-sync, and that'll automatically send the message "You wanna do it?" to her ipod.
She can then press the fastforward button for "Yes!", or the rewind button for "Get lost"
This feature facilitates ummm. mutual intercourse between ipod owners.
Don't make stuff up. I'm an emacs user myself, but sometimes have to use Notepad at work. Even way back in Win95, Notepad never inserted carriage returns for WordWrap. Never seen a single notepad that did that. Ever.
Frameworks and GOTOs - that's surely a stretch. Try writing a marginally useful Java application without using oh.. say ArrayList, HashMap, System, .. hell you can't even write a "Hello World" without System, and that's part of the framework ( java.lang.System ), not part of the language.
As a person of Indian origin in the IT industry, but based here in the USofA and NOT in India, I feel sorry about you feeling sorry for us.
Millons of Indians chose to take advantage of the H1B program to immigrate to the US, where they filed for a greencard and expected to become an American citizen in due coure and live the good life. They paid their taxes, bought houses & cars, took out a mortgage, had kids born here & go to local schools here - bottomline, they acclimatized themselves very well & contributed heavily to the US economy. All of this is legal, good ( in the sense someone's trying to improve his wellbeing ) and beneficial ( to the US economy & society at large ).
All of a sudden, their plans were derailed. Thousands have lost their jobs. They can't go on welfare cause they are not yet a citizen, and they can't afford the mortgage & bills, and they are forced to hit the reset button. They have to abandon the life they built here in the country of their choice, sell their houses, cars, possessions, and go back to India to start from scratch. Their children, born & brought up in America, have no idea of the travails of India. This disrupts not just their schooling but their entire future life.
Saying "I feel sorry" just doesn't cut it. Real human lives are direly affected. Rest assured, this isn't the end - just as jobs were outsourced from the USA to India, they will be outsourced from India to elsewhere - China, fareast, many other candidates. A lot more lives will be disrupted simply because a few CEO's can cut costs & take home a larger paycheck.
You feel sorry ? You betcha!
"a Frenchman trying to educate me about how the U.S. ought to work"
Liberty comes from the french root libre. Who does America owe the statue of Liberty to ? George W Bush ??
Forget the statue, the very concept of liberty is French, just as the vey concept of colonialism is British, who btw happen to be the closest pals of GWB at the moment.
You are free to opine on slashdot because of liberty. Were you colonized, you wouldn't get within a mile of a keyboard. Now think of all the millions in Iraq GW wants to colonize oops.. he's out to grant them liberty, no ?
"the vast majority of Iraqis want to live in a peaceful, free world. And we will find these people and we will bring them to justice."--
GWB, Washington, D.C., Oct. 27, 2003
To summarize - one is ill advised to dance in fountains, especially when naked.
The problem with Sun is its R&D budget. In general, research is a privileged activity. The perils of capitalism being what they are, only a monopoly with "free money" pouring in can throw billions on R&D. Two examples -
1. For a long long time upto the 90s, Bell Labs was one of the largest research centers. Why ? Well, AT&T was a virtual monopoly, and everytime you made a phonecall, about 60 cents per dollar was "free money", that went into supporting R&D at Bell Labs.
2. Microsoft - Out of every $499 Office CD, probably $400 is "free money". For every $299 you pay for a seat of Windows XP, MS gets say $200 "free money".
What is "free money" ? Any revenue that accrues after the actual cost of producing the product has been paid for. eg. If you factor in the cost of making an 8 oz can of pepsi, filling it with sugared water, shipping it on a truck, getting it to customer, it probably amortizes to say 20 cents per can. You pay a dollar, so there's 80% free money! No wonder the PEP stockholders are so happy.
What does this have to do with SUNW ? Well, Sun doesn't get a lot of free money, so having a billion dollar R&D budget is silly - that kind of freemoney is simply not coming in. The kind of pie-in-the-sky research that Sun's engaged in eg. distributed computing such as Javaspaces, writing an operating system in Java aka JavaOS etc. should be engaged by fully funded government labs and fatcats like the NSF and MIT, not a company that is accountable to shareholders.
Sounds cruel, but this is the reality - let Sun first sell plenty of boxes and generate free money, then they can spend $1B doing research on academic/esoteric/theoretical topics.
I happen to like this film quite a bit. But opinion seems to be fairly divided on whether its good science or bad. Consider - NASA cuts funding on a mars mission, so the "bad scientist" decides to fake the space mission by staging it in an unused air-force facility, disguised to look like mars, and then transmitting the footage to the audience. NASA "good guy" looks at transmission lag, compares it to what the real lag should be if the transmission were indeed from mars, and figures something's fishy. "good guy" talks to "bad scientist" who then knocks him off, but before he disappears, he divulges suspicions to a close friend/reporter, who plays the hero. Now, whole thing requires cooperation from the astronauts, who comply, only to find the spacecraft blowing up on re-entry due to heat-shield failure, thereby "killing" them, even though they've never even left the earth. Now, astronauts must escape before "bad scientist" really kills them off. Nice sci-fi/thriller/comedy/70mm action flick, but didn't get the acclaim it deserved. Ppl poked numerous holes into the plot, which I concede isn't airtight, but still, is pretty sound considering other cheaply made sci-fi's involving data on a floppy disk or somesuch.
Are you saying this doesn't work ?
Amen, brother!
As much as I hate Ann Coulter, this is one topic Ann's absolutely right about - WHY should the government legislate on people's personal preferences within the four walls of their house ?
Why do I care if two adults want to commit sodomy ? Why should the govt step in and mandate "sodomy is ok" ? Does the govt mandate "You must eat your vitamins" ?
So why should the govt mandate smoking or not-smoking marijuana ?
Just be indifferent, is all.
As a GNC member & frequent customer, I can attest to the fact that many of the products work on placebo effect, if at all they do.
The side-effects are severe, sometimes fatal.
The advertizing is quite deceptive, bordering on scam.
Here are some examples -
1. GNC MRPs & Protein powders : Body can utilize only so much protein. If you buy a powder with 100 grams protein per serving, you'll simply tax your kidneys and piss it off - no anabolic ( muscle-building ) effect. Anything above 30-40 grams is overkill.
2. Aspartame in MRPs : Almost ALL meal replacement powders sold in GNC have aspartame. Check aspartamekills.com for known risks. Lately, a few ( eg. MET-RX ) have switched to suclarose and prominently advertize "No aspartame", but doesn't that make then liable since they have sold aspartame-laced powders for so many years before making the switch.
3. Protein cannot be effectively utilized without carbs, however, the protein powders sold in GNC contain 2-4% carbs, quite inadequate.
4. GNC also sells soy-protein. On the protein utilization scale, soy has the lowest value. ie. just 30-40% of soy can be utilized by body, the rest is excreted. Besides, soy protein intake leads to man-boobs.
5. GNC sells ephedra in various brands ( stacker, xenadrine, metabolift etc ). Ephedra is banned in over 20 states in US and has caused over 100 deaths ( check New England Journal of Medicine transcripts ) & thousands of cardiac impairments.
6. GNC sells glutamine. Now, the body can only utilize glutamine manufactured by its BCAA. It cannot use glutamine consumed orally, so it is pointless to even take glutamine in this form. If you really want glutamine, take BCAA capsules. Of course, GNC won't tell you that.
7. WTF is NO2 ? Huge ads in GNC for NO2, totally unproven product.
8. All these calcium supplements - coral calcium, oral calcium whatnots - quite ineffective. Calcium does not bind to the bones when taken in this fashion. Milk builds bones, because the calcium in milk is bound to the carbs and digested as such, and gets to the bones. You can't just pop a pill of calcium & hope it'll get to your bones - it'll simple be excreted.
9. Male sexual aids in GNC - yohimbe & other herbs, are quite unproven in their efficacy. Check any sex-med mag.
10. GNC is in the health business, just as tobacco companies are in the nicotine-delivery business. The set aim of GNC franchisee is to sell healthfoods so they make money. Just walk into a GNC and act dumb, and ask them what you should buy to get fit fast. You'd be amazed - they'll give you tons of useless junk that simply don't work & if it does, contributes marginally to making you fit. You have to workout intensely, and they won't tell you that.
Know your facts before you step into a GNC. At least talk to a nutritionist. There is some really good stuff in GNC, but the vast majority is just sham products with fantastic marketing.
"Premiere is still the most popular film editing app amongst Mac users"
- It isn't. DV/film editors typically buy a turnkey system ( Dual-cpu system + editing app + DV card+ monitors +...). In the turnkey market, Premiere is always bundled with PCs, and FCP with Macs. These ppl are simply interested in editing their footage, and the turnkey guys give you a working system off the bat. Nobody bothers to investigate whether there is a Premiere for Macs, or an FCP for PCs - they're not computer geeks.
How many do you think know about this ?
Yeah, the slashdot crowd.
Yeah, the guys who read yahoo news and landed on this news snippet by chance.
The "rest of America" = NO CLUE.
What do you think will happen next ? MS will use this info bigtime. Within a week, you'll see huge ads on WSJ, NYT & every other print outlet, and every channel starting with MSNBC, CNN, FOX etc, telling the "rest of America" that the US Army endorses MS software. Immediately, retail customers will get on board. MSFT will zoom into stratosphere. When it can't go any further, institutions & mutual funds will dump MSFT, and the retail guys will get screwed as usual.
I say, use this info. Go out NOW, sell your house and put every nickel into MSFT. Make huge profits, & then invest that into RHAT. Win-win situation.
javachip was prototyped, but never marketed - yet another execution failure at Sun. At on point, Sun declared "Java implemented right was not slow". It then hired coders to implement a "Java compiler in Java". Result ? The Java compiler in Java was 20 TIMES SLOWER than the Java compiler written in C! These were never widely published, but just do a search on Technical Abstracts on sun.com, you'll find them.
Butch Cassidy ( Robert Redford ) keeps going "Who ARE these guys?" & that's exactly what struck me when I read this piece.
.NET is maturing and will be a ferocious competitor to Java...companies putting Java projects on hold pending their evaluation of their .NET projects." - I work for one of them companies. Despite the deep experience in Java & Swing ( we designed grids & calendar widgets when things like JTable were unknown ), we've decided to go the C# route for our finance apps. Java's fine on the server, but windows clients need a C#, no two ways about it. Same story with Linux once Mono's a done deal - just you wait.
Where's Gosling ? Where's Ken Arnold ? Where are the IBM developers ? Instead, you have some "chief software evangelist", a whole bunch of suits, and these are the "luminaries" ? Gimme a break. Hamilton came into the Java scene at such a late stage, I doubt the relevance of his take on the industry.
Look at the overly simplistic opinions they voice - "Unix is complicated, it won the server, Windows is simple, it won desktop". Jesus.
JCP will make Java stronger ?! Ha ha ha. Do you know how much you have to pay to become a part of JCP ? What exactly did Kodak's participation in the JCP get them ? Their powerful imaging API is still not part of the standard JDK. log4j never made it into the JDK. The regex libraries were booted out too. In both cases, Sun simply issued a JSR & reinvented the wheel, instead of accomodating valuable work done in an open-source environment.
The only sure thing I got out of this discussion -"Microsoft
"Real competitive advantage" in which market ?
There's no generic real competition advantage - its a very domain-specific thingy.
Real competition advantage in microcontrollers & firmware for cameras will continue to be C & assembler for a long time.
For the wall-street crowd,where every quant analyst has a thousand Excel macros & math models, windows terminals are a reality. Java AWT client on windows is a joke - small set of UI controls, no built-in grid-support, no inter-op with Excel, no built-in charts/graphs, the list goes on. The swing clients are another story - getting a Java plugin installed, huge jar downloads, no versioning - clearing the Plugin cached jars every so often, jeez, I've been thru enuf nightmares.
For that particular subset of users, which btw is a pretty LARGE subset, C# is the real competitive advantage. They give two hoots about a JDBC driver that has to use an ODBC bridge to talk to their local MS Access database. ( Typically, interesting data-sets are extracted from a huge Oracle DB into a much smaller MSAccess DB - like an cache, so that Excel can mathmodel your data. C# taks this notion to a whole new level - notion of disconnected DB-access, where you use an in-memory cache to download interesting tables/rows from your DB, disconnect & operate on that subset, & then sync up your data. Read up on it, its quite original & non-trivial, certainly no "dumb little language trick". )
shouda done this 6 years ago.
don't get me wrong. i love java, its the only thing on my resume, sole bread-n-butter for past 6 years, etc.
but the C# designers really know the market.
when i first read "C# = java done right" in a PR article, i said, "yeah right, what absolute BS".
but then, i attended my first c# training seminar last month, & having just completed a major java-to-c# porting project, i can say this much - C# has definitely won the windows-only-client-side battle. if you are developing an app that front-ends on a windows client ( that's pretty much ALL of wall street, given the heavy use of MS-Excel ), C# is simply the way to go.
6 years ago, i recall graduating from school & deciding to go into a Java-job. classmates were like - "what's java ? unproven stuff. use MFC. that's were the $$ is".
how wrong they were! C# is now in the same position - poised to skyrocket.
every single java concept has made it into C#.
furthermore C# has several useful notions ( delegates, boxed types, attribute annotations,assemblies etc ) not in Java.
finally, cross-language interop is a dead reality - i can write a C# class, my VB class can inherit from it, and my C++ class can inherit from my VB class, and call functions in Perl - the CLS & the common type system makes it easy for even a casual novice pgmmer.
once's the mono project attains fruition, c# on linux will be the defacto pgmming style - need i say more ?
from a reluctant C# convert
--PLUG Check out this and this too --END PLUG
As a fellow Indian, lemme summarize the problems with this, many of which have already been pointed out -
1. The Indian president is defined in the constitution as a "titular head". Granted he is probably the best thing that happened to India - a nuclear physicist, a real visionary, but he still is NOT the prime minister. So at best, his take on OSS is an opinion, not an official directive.
2. IT has made billions for India, sure, but which part of India? You might think IT touches say 10% of India. Guess what, IT directly affects less than 0.1% of India!!! Strange but true. India is primarily a village economy. The 0.1% who are affected live in metropolitan cities like Bangalore ( India's silicon valley ), Hyderabad, Bombay etc. They are rich beyond belief compared to the average guy on the street. But they are surrounded by the remaining 99.9% , of which >70% belong to villages, earning less than $1 a day. This is the reality in India.
3. Indian IT has yet to make a single brand-name software product for its internal Indian consumer market. The top Indian IT companies viz Infosys, Wipro, TCS etc. make all their revenue writing code for US companies who outsource. There's a rising backlash in the US today against such "code-coolies" ( 5 states have "banned" outsourcing government IT jobs to India...NJ, CT & a few others ). Take a look at the stock price of Infosys ( ticker INFY ) - it took a nosedive recently for forecasting lower growth in next quarter. Conditions are very difficult. At this time, revenue ( from proprietary MS products ) is more critical than technical expertise ( from OSS ).
4. The president's remark did not even attract a passing glance in the local Indian news...tells you how little atention is paid to it by the masses.
5. I do hope 1-4 get reversed...but a quick reality-check tells me otherwise.
Tintin, now that's a REAL comic. The cartoon version's available for all 22 episodes.
Spielberg's now putting together the first American version of Tintin. Most likely, Caprio'll play the lead. I can't think of anybody else with a closer resemblance to Tintin.
( For the ignorant masses who know not who Tintin is, the definitive site : http://www.tintin.be )
The compact flash marketplace is huge. Just about every digital camera requires and supports CF2, and the IBM microdrive is the only HD fitting in that slot that offers 1GB capacity. By choosing to ditch CF2, I don't see these guys having much of a chance. Do you seriously expect Nikon and Canon and every other big fish in the camera market who have finally agreed to settle on CF2 to now support this new harddisk without CF2 ?
"the majority good engineers in India, have left India. Those remaining for the most part are not the sharpest knives in the drawer"
Well said.
Over 50% , that's right 50%, of the creme-de-la-creme of Indian undergradutes from the IITs leave India. Every year. And in departments like Comp Science and EE, its over 90%.
In general, over 20 million Indians have left India. Over 80% of them are in IT.
The most overcrowded offices in India are the US Embassy, The Australian embassy, the NZ embassy and the Canadian embassy. On a cold winter's day, you'll catch thousands of people queued outside these, just dying to immigrate.
Its easy to paint a rosy picture of Wipro or Infosys, but ask the people who leave India why they do so if the opportunity is so great. The reality is not rosy at all.
The Indian-American community has a sizeable population, particularly in San Jose & silicon valley, central New Jersey, parts of NY, etc. They live on a staple diet of Indian music & movies. They can definitely afford to pay Rs10 per track. I'm sure they'd plunk down $100 in an instant if you put up golden oldies in Hindi or other Indian languages. These are quite hard to find outside India, and EMI & BMG have the copyrights & do not market them well in the US. I doubt if an Indian living in India will bother, though ( unless he is an upper middle class bloke with a white-collar job in a multi-national corp ) The rest get to listen to tons of cool stuff on the radio & buy inexpensive audio cassettes, which are really the mainstay there.