IANAMA (I am not a market anaylist) but stock buyers these days usually aren't stupid. We don't have day traders like we use to back in the boom days. My guess is that regular buyers dumped their stock after the initial run when they announced the law suit. Now that it is clear that they will lose, I believe the stock price is kept artificially high buy shorts who are betting that the stock price will fall.
On Oct 15 you can see a lot of traffic resulting in the price moving higher. Why would anybody buy an obviously overpriced volitle stock? At such a time when it is blatenty clear that the lawsuit is pure FUD and the future of the company is moot and their market cap will collapse? The only reason is a LOT of people are betting it will indeed collapse.
and kalishnakovs per household. I know few people that own guns, (I live in the city) and know nobody that has an assult rifle. Grandparent should back up statistics that gun ownership in the US is higher than Iraq.
I think the point that the article was about was lessening the need for software engineers in favor of process/algorithmic engineers. Processes are still very complex and require intellegence and education to solve efficiently. It's the difference between writing quick sort in puedo-code or whatever and actually implementing in a language where you need to worry about implemention details. It's those details which really tend to be bothersome. If they can find a way to make "psuedo-code" executable, or a system that's ~100% business logic, that would make complex system design a heck of a lot easier. And thus, if it's all business logic, then non-programmers should be able to go in and change it. That however is still non-trival and hence the new term "process" engineer.
SCO is arguing that not only is the GPL null and void, but code put under that license is under the public domain. Therefore, according to their dumass logic they can do anything with it.
Anyway, I've found some modicum of logic, no matter how small or misguided in all of SCO actions to this point. But I can not find any evidence of intellegence in this action. Someone should submit to Merriam-Webster a new definition of stupidity. Or as, somebody said(i think Enstien) , insanity is doing something over and over again but expecting different results.
NPR is nationally syndicated to just about every market in the US. Member stations have to pay for that content. NPR News, This American Life, Fresh Air, Market Place etc., costs public radio stations a large part of their budget. Rising costs of radio production are a big reason why public radio stations have more member drives than they used to.
During the North East Blackout were more people listening to their car/battery powered radio or surfing the internet? Yes, one radio station is a single point of failure. But with radio you don't have to worry about infrastructure in between source and destination. Also, the less it takes to bring down something the less it takes to bring it up again.
Or search engines that abide by the rules of robots.txt. Anybody could write a search engine that archives specifically what is in robots.txt.
Anyway, maybe the Whitehouse doens't want to be the number 1 hit when searching for "iraq" in google. Kinda hints at that whole "occupier" vs. "rebuilder" dilema if you search for iraq and get all sites from whitehouse.gov.
Or maybe the content changes so frequently that any archives would be almost immediately out-of-date. Of course it could be something more nefarious, but it just sounds like some below-the-radar PR to me.
please, none sponsored by the UN... no offense, but they're a bunch of tree-hugging hippies
Care to give some examples?
that would twist and distort facts to suit their own purposes
Um... you mean the goals of the entire global community? That's who the UN represents(aside from the security council, but that's on non-economic issues anyway). And as such there is no coherant 'purpose' of the UN because it's members and therefore opinions is so diverse. Really, your opinion of the UN is assine and ignorant. Name one policy or action that is fool-heartedly 'hippie'
However, if anyone has a link to a study that shows exactly when we're destined to run out of oil
Global oil estimates vary from widely from a few decades to around 150-200 years. Global estimates seem to be only
14 times what what we have already extracted. Add to that an ever-climbing consupmtion
rate How about 284 years at present consumption rates, and much less than that given the inevitable increate in consumption rates. I give it ~100 yrs before oil becomes scarce enough to drive it off the market.
Oh, and that survey is by the USGS, I hope that meets your exacting standards. Their estimates are liberal
If even the USGS is not sufficient, propose a competeing estimate.
The truth is, unless we find that the core of the earth is made of oil, we're going to run out in a matter of decades (probably 10-20) instead of thousands of years.
Errr... I agree with the subject of most of your post, but your math is a little, um, dubious. If sales drop by 90% thats only, say, 100000 CDs instead of one million. Thus the artist sees $1mil vs. $500000 at the lower distribution rates even at $5 per cd, a 50% decline in revenue.
I do believe, however, that the music industry is outdated. The CD rush was brought on by a lot of people buying music they already had but wanted in CD form. People rebought and reestablished their entire music libraries.
The problem is that once market saturation occurs, sales are going to drop significantly. The RIAA would argue that even new music sales are taking a hit, and I would respond that it still isn't piracy that hold the majority of the responsibility. Why spend $17 for a soundtrack, when you can buy the DVD of the movie (which alot include the soundtrack) for only $3 more? When the industrialized pop stars fail to pump out innovative material and the whole boy band/diva girl/rap-rock thing is getting old cd sales of new music are going to go down.
The solution is to introduce tons of new and different music (and don't say alternative because alternative rock is mainstream). Music companies don't like this option because it wouldn't be profitable for them. They make all of their money from a small-set of over-hyped mega stars. So let the RIAA companies die, I won't miss them and their death won't be the end of music.
It shouldn't cost a million dollars to record a CD. $100000 buys a lot of studio time and post work ($100/hr is still 1000 hrs or six months full time). Only need to sell 10000 copies at $10 dollars a pop to break even. $100000 too expensive? Build your own in-home studio for $10000 dollars. Produce it yourself or pay another $10000 for a professional. Most music doesn't require teams of sound engineers or producers. Now we are talking 4000 (at $5) copies to break even. Say you sell your own CDs at gigs you have. You can take 100% of the profit. Charge $10 and sell 2000 and you've broken even, not to mention gig money. Sell 50 cds at every gig and you'll break even after 40 gigs.
Don't throw RIAA type arguments at me, there are too many hands in the pot. Do what other companies do and reestablish your profit model. Gas companies took a tremendous hit at the advent of electric light. Did they try to ban electricity? No, they found another profit model in something else. Cars. Now I'm not saying that pirating is moral, just nobody can ever stop it. Adapt. Move on.
With a gift of essentially free energy for a couple of decades, I'm sure some of 2+ million (700000 gallons at $3+ per gallon) they spend on gas (for generators) annually could be spend bringing in security personelle.
A million plus dollars buys a security force more than able to gaurd the perimeter around a complex not larger than a school building. Security is then essentially free for these people, and in fact they are still saving a lot of money per year in energy costs. Plus they are paying for a service in their community to people that will be living in their community. And those security people will spend money somewhere.
This solution may not be fesible when there are cheaper fuel alternatives, but out there it seems to make a lot of sense.
Yes, but patches that fix exploitable bugs are very time sensitive. One can ususally wait until 3:00 am or the weekend for a power cycle. If you need machines working 24-7, round robin the restarts so you have continous functionality (as suggested by another in this thread).
If you are running a critical 24-7 service on one machine then that's bad implementation. Also, plan on outages in advance so you have a time to fix something, (also suggested earilier in this thread). A lot of servers plan an hour of down time every week. This will screw up your 5 nines uptime, but if it saves you from having unscheduled downtime then it is worth it. Plus it makes you comfortable with the process of fixing stuff and rebooting. If there is an unexpected outage (and there will be) then you will get it back up faster becasue you reboot machines every week. s/week/month/ if need be. YMMV.
Well, I forget how they accomplish it here on our unix boxen (HP-UX, solaris, Linux) but there is a network available user identification service so that I only have to use one user/password no matter what type of box I telnet into. Password changes and new users are reflected immediately, and the home directories are all remotely mounted so you have access to them no matter what box I am on. This is what interoperability is about.
<rant>We have a network appliance here called a filer so that there is "transparent" access to our home directories on the windows side. Permissions here are a nightmare as permissions set on one side rarely set up correctly on the other. Admins frequently forbar permissions up to half fix problems. I'll come in in the morning and find that while I can delete files in my home directory, I can not create a new folder. Line ending are forever being screwed up to the point that I have a cron job to 'unixify' all text files.</rant>
We've been working in a heterogenous environment here for a decade and the only reason we had to add IT staff was because they decided to move to windows boxen (for those neat office programs!) instead of unix workstations. Unicies have been interoperating for decades. Apple made the move. When will microsoft learn?
Err.. with the exception of video games, because the Mac platfrom still lacks significantly in that department, Macs and unix based systems in general take actually using them to gauge their effectiveness.
First off, isn't the fact that Macs are industry standard in music and video editing mean anything to you?
Secondly, power users are limited by GUIs and mouse clicking. The unix philosophy of the CLI and small utilities that do their job well has eased the jobs of developers for decades. You simply lose time by taking your hands off of the keyboard.
Include the fact that Apple is an idustry leader is user interfaces and you get the best of both worlds. Try a Mac, learn to use it, then ask yourself what you can do. No one can fully explain it to you. As a developer/programmer it is your responsibility to learn new tools to remain effective. Anyone who says they are a windows programmer is nothing more than a trained code monkey. Real programmers would say I'm a programmer with working experience in Windows, but I also have all this non-work related experience working with other systems.
In conclusion, don't assume you aren't getting your money worth until you try it. As a computer "professional" you owe it to yourself to at least try. Why do so many people think Macs are th bomb? Answer that one yourself.
Actually, I don't think SCO stock is going to collapse immediately. Many of the people who bought SCO stock in the past few month were shorting it. The idea is somebody promises you the right to sell a stock at a the current price. If the price falls, you short it and pocket the difference.
But if the stock is saturated with shorts because everybody thinks it will go down, then poeple won't sell because they are waiting for the price to go down.
Then all it takes is one big sell, like one of the execs selling offs. Then shorts all see the downward movement and dump all at once. But basically stock price gets very unpredicable when a stock is extremely overvalued.
I was wondering why you put put this up on your own page instead of submitting it as a feature article on slashdot. No slashdot effect to worry about.
On the other hand, it would have been nice to see some./ effect graphs (which in turn would be./'ed). But really, more people need to realize that they can submit feature articles.
The publishers are not worrked that the technically literate can work around the restrictions
They should be, it only take one copy to put it up onto KaZaa or whatever. There anybody half familiar can download it. What they are doing is preventing fair use for people who like to rip their music and play it on their iPod (like me). I bought it, and as long as I don't give it to anybody else, then god damn it, I'm going to do whatever I feel like with it.
There is a difference between using Word for a ten or twenty page papaer, and when you start writing hundreds of pages. Those minutes add up quickly. Then you have to worry about consistancy, and look. Not to mention that formatting 300 pages by hand (and making sure that it is consistant) is very tedious. Then you get into stylesheets and wind up spending three days programming rather than writing. You become not just the writer, but the copy-editor and become adept at desktop publishing (which by the way, word is horrible at, try Framemaker). Then you realize your behind schedule and over budget and decide to simplify, simplify, simplify.
Real professional writers need simplicity and ease . Other people take care of formatting for them. That's why I've always used vi as the editor and sometimes LaTeX.
Even for high school students, you should try a thin editor and use no formating other than tabs and see how much quicker you write when you don't have to worry about bullets, auto-correct, margins, pagination etc.
Uh, well you could just give them a choice about what to use somewhat like all major distributions do.
Computer starts up... what desktop enivronment you want to use? (kde/gnome/icewm). Have mozilla and openoffice apps on the app bar but call them internet/email and word processing etc a la redhat. Under the 'start' menu, list the alternate apps, but only under an advanced setting.
This way normal users get a less confusing well laid out one choice for what they want to do, and users that know about the other apps will be able to hit advanced and change the default app.
It would take a single programmer just a week to come up with something customized like this.
Further more, you can have all of the other variations of the software on a second cd. They don't take up a lot of space. Look at the plethoria of apps that you get with multiple cd distros.
From your reply I'm guessing that you and I have different definitions of the term 'newbie'. I'm thinking of someone who has a year or under of actual experience, not including the time it takes to get comfortable with the company's software dev. process and dev environment (which can easily take a month, I know it did for me.)
I'm guessing you're talking about just-walked-in-the-door fresh green programmer, in which case I'd be more inclined to agree with you. Greens need a couple months to get up to speed, at which point I would then consider them a newbie.
The ADPT thing is you deciding how long you think it will take him to do it, not asking him how long it will take. Two different things.
ADPT works best when both parties know it. Also with newbies they try to impress by estimating the least possible time it could take them to get it done. Managers and programming leads need to stress over-estimation over under-estimation, and the importance of a right estimate over a quick one. When you have a good ADPT, the programmer should be able to give a reasonable estimate which you shouldn't really have to pad, especially if they are experienced or 1337. If not, your programmers need to take time management classes.
Tell that to the guys working on Doom III, Duke Nukem Forever, Team Fortress 2. They are pretty senior dev teams with successful projects behind them and all are running easily 2x as long as they had projected.
Video games are under different stresses. There is the pressure to always stay state of the art and redesigns are common when projects stray too long. Also, the actual programmatic part is usually done pretty early, the rest is art work, level design, game play testing/balancing. Those topics are notoriously hard to estimate which is why so many games run over schedule. It's a whole other can of worms.
I believe I will somewhat concur with the 1.2 per person calculation, I find the rest of your estimations completely bullshit. Newbies may not have the skill to estimate acurately, but 8x? So your saying if a newbie programmer think it'll take a month to do something, it really takes eight? That is not an acceptable time schedule.
Programmers working on large projects estimate large chunks of time. If these people estimate one year, I would at most epect not more than one year and a half.
You may have meant shorter term estimations, and while they are more prone to double, saying that a you should expect a newbie to take a week to get a one day assignment done is completely rediculous.
A much more resonable device to aid estimations is to compute average daily project time. Too many people assume you can work eight hours a day on something. For sysadmins, ADPT is less than it is for dedicated programmers. 4 hours ADPT is about right for someone to can have tasks spontaneously added. For those who have a more concrete schedule, it is still dangerous to assume more than 6 hours.
Of course, it will take a couple months of careful monitoring to compute a good ADPT, but then project estimations tend to be much more realistic when people actually realize how long they actually can work on one project in any given day.
No. You know that it was pirated and it's against the law. But if Joe Blow is selling Windows Server in violation of the law/license agreement and you don't know this, you would not be held accountable.
BitTorrent is designed to distribute large files, not HTML web pages and small images and other files. Right now the overhead with running trackers for each component (which generate a non-nominal amount of traffic) would probably offset the advantages of BitTorrent. You could distribute the trakers or have a "traker traker", but you would probably wind up with the same inefficiency as direct HTTP. Furthermore, only a tiny percentage of web surfers even know what BitTorrent is, let alone have python and the correct python libraries installed.
In short, there is virtually no reson why any high traffic site would run BT to serve pages, where just load-balancing and bandwidth controls would be sufficient.
Slashdot Mirror
IANAMA (I am not a market anaylist) but stock buyers these days usually aren't stupid. We don't have day traders like we use to back in the boom days. My guess is that regular buyers dumped their stock after the initial run when they announced the law suit. Now that it is clear that they will lose, I believe the stock price is kept artificially high buy shorts who are betting that the stock price will fall.
On Oct 15 you can see a lot of traffic resulting in the price moving higher. Why would anybody buy an obviously overpriced volitle stock? At such a time when it is blatenty clear that the lawsuit is pure FUD and the future of the company is moot and their market cap will collapse? The only reason is a LOT of people are betting it will indeed collapse.
...the future direction of the enterprise
Cue witty remark from CleverNickName.
and kalishnakovs per household. I know few people that own guns, (I live in the city) and know nobody that has an assult rifle. Grandparent should back up statistics that gun ownership in the US is higher than Iraq.
I think the point that the article was about was lessening the need for software engineers in favor of process/algorithmic engineers. Processes are still very complex and require intellegence and education to solve efficiently. It's the difference between writing quick sort in puedo-code or whatever and actually implementing in a language where you need to worry about implemention details. It's those details which really tend to be bothersome. If they can find a way to make "psuedo-code" executable, or a system that's ~100% business logic, that would make complex system design a heck of a lot easier. And thus, if it's all business logic, then non-programmers should be able to go in and change it. That however is still non-trival and hence the new term "process" engineer.
SCO is arguing that not only is the GPL null and void, but code put under that license is under the public domain. Therefore, according to their dumass logic they can do anything with it.
Anyway, I've found some modicum of logic, no matter how small or misguided in all of SCO actions to this point. But I can not find any evidence of intellegence in this action. Someone should submit to Merriam-Webster a new definition of stupidity. Or as, somebody said(i think Enstien) , insanity is doing something over and over again but expecting different results.
It would be much more effective by
while(true)
wget http://www.sco.com/support/linux_info.html
Of course this is rudimentary DOS attack, so be carefull.
Dunno if radio has syndication or what.
NPR is nationally syndicated to just about every market in the US. Member stations have to pay for that content. NPR News, This American Life, Fresh Air, Market Place etc., costs public radio stations a large part of their budget. Rising costs of radio production are a big reason why public radio stations have more member drives than they used to.
During the North East Blackout were more people listening to their car/battery powered radio or surfing the internet? Yes, one radio station is a single point of failure. But with radio you don't have to worry about infrastructure in between source and destination. Also, the less it takes to bring down something the less it takes to bring it up again.
Or search engines that abide by the rules of robots.txt. Anybody could write a search engine that archives specifically what is in robots.txt.
Anyway, maybe the Whitehouse doens't want to be the number 1 hit when searching for "iraq" in google. Kinda hints at that whole "occupier" vs. "rebuilder" dilema if you search for iraq and get all sites from whitehouse.gov.
Or maybe the content changes so frequently that any archives would be almost immediately out-of-date. Of course it could be something more nefarious, but it just sounds like some below-the-radar PR to me.
please, none sponsored by the UN... no offense, but they're a bunch of tree-hugging hippies
Care to give some examples?
that would twist and distort facts to suit their own purposes
Um... you mean the goals of the entire global community? That's who the UN represents(aside from the security council, but that's on non-economic issues anyway). And as such there is no coherant 'purpose' of the UN because it's members and therefore opinions is so diverse. Really, your opinion of the UN is assine and ignorant. Name one policy or action that is fool-heartedly 'hippie'
However, if anyone has a link to a study that shows exactly when we're destined to run out of oil
Global oil estimates vary from widely from a few decades to around 150-200 years. Global estimates seem to be only 14 times what what we have already extracted. Add to that an ever-climbing consupmtion rate How about 284 years at present consumption rates, and much less than that given the inevitable increate in consumption rates. I give it ~100 yrs before oil becomes scarce enough to drive it off the market.
Oh, and that survey is by the USGS, I hope that meets your exacting standards. Their estimates are liberal If even the USGS is not sufficient, propose a competeing estimate.
The truth is, unless we find that the core of the earth is made of oil, we're going to run out in a matter of decades (probably 10-20) instead of thousands of years.
Errr... I agree with the subject of most of your post, but your math is a little, um, dubious. If sales drop by 90% thats only, say, 100000 CDs instead of one million. Thus the artist sees $1mil vs. $500000 at the lower distribution rates even at $5 per cd, a 50% decline in revenue.
I do believe, however, that the music industry is outdated. The CD rush was brought on by a lot of people buying music they already had but wanted in CD form. People rebought and reestablished their entire music libraries.
The problem is that once market saturation occurs, sales are going to drop significantly. The RIAA would argue that even new music sales are taking a hit, and I would respond that it still isn't piracy that hold the majority of the responsibility. Why spend $17 for a soundtrack, when you can buy the DVD of the movie (which alot include the soundtrack) for only $3 more? When the industrialized pop stars fail to pump out innovative material and the whole boy band/diva girl/rap-rock thing is getting old cd sales of new music are going to go down.
The solution is to introduce tons of new and different music (and don't say alternative because alternative rock is mainstream). Music companies don't like this option because it wouldn't be profitable for them. They make all of their money from a small-set of over-hyped mega stars. So let the RIAA companies die, I won't miss them and their death won't be the end of music.
It shouldn't cost a million dollars to record a CD. $100000 buys a lot of studio time and post work ($100/hr is still 1000 hrs or six months full time). Only need to sell 10000 copies at $10 dollars a pop to break even. $100000 too expensive? Build your own in-home studio for $10000 dollars. Produce it yourself or pay another $10000 for a professional. Most music doesn't require teams of sound engineers or producers. Now we are talking 4000 (at $5) copies to break even. Say you sell your own CDs at gigs you have. You can take 100% of the profit. Charge $10 and sell 2000 and you've broken even, not to mention gig money. Sell 50 cds at every gig and you'll break even after 40 gigs.
Don't throw RIAA type arguments at me, there are too many hands in the pot. Do what other companies do and reestablish your profit model. Gas companies took a tremendous hit at the advent of electric light. Did they try to ban electricity? No, they found another profit model in something else. Cars. Now I'm not saying that pirating is moral, just nobody can ever stop it. Adapt. Move on.
With a gift of essentially free energy for a couple of decades, I'm sure some of 2+ million (700000 gallons at $3+ per gallon) they spend on gas (for generators) annually could be spend bringing in security personelle.
A million plus dollars buys a security force more than able to gaurd the perimeter around a complex not larger than a school building. Security is then essentially free for these people, and in fact they are still saving a lot of money per year in energy costs. Plus they are paying for a service in their community to people that will be living in their community. And those security people will spend money somewhere.
This solution may not be fesible when there are cheaper fuel alternatives, but out there it seems to make a lot of sense.
Yes, but patches that fix exploitable bugs are very time sensitive. One can ususally wait until 3:00 am or the weekend for a power cycle. If you need machines working 24-7, round robin the restarts so you have continous functionality (as suggested by another in this thread).
If you are running a critical 24-7 service on one machine then that's bad implementation. Also, plan on outages in advance so you have a time to fix something, (also suggested earilier in this thread). A lot of servers plan an hour of down time every week. This will screw up your 5 nines uptime, but if it saves you from having unscheduled downtime then it is worth it. Plus it makes you comfortable with the process of fixing stuff and rebooting. If there is an unexpected outage (and there will be) then you will get it back up faster becasue you reboot machines every week. s/week/month/ if need be. YMMV.
Administrators Commandment #1 - plan for failure.
not to sound ignorant or anything, but what are the mm patches? Memory management optimizations? Why aren't they included in the kernel?
Well, I forget how they accomplish it here on our unix boxen (HP-UX, solaris, Linux) but there is a network available user identification service so that I only have to use one user/password no matter what type of box I telnet into. Password changes and new users are reflected immediately, and the home directories are all remotely mounted so you have access to them no matter what box I am on. This is what interoperability is about.
<rant>We have a network appliance here called a filer so that there is "transparent" access to our home directories on the windows side. Permissions here are a nightmare as permissions set on one side rarely set up correctly on the other. Admins frequently forbar permissions up to half fix problems. I'll come in in the morning and find that while I can delete files in my home directory, I can not create a new folder. Line ending are forever being screwed up to the point that I have a cron job to 'unixify' all text files.</rant>
We've been working in a heterogenous environment here for a decade and the only reason we had to add IT staff was because they decided to move to windows boxen (for those neat office programs!) instead of unix workstations. Unicies have been interoperating for decades. Apple made the move. When will microsoft learn?
Err.. with the exception of video games, because the Mac platfrom still lacks significantly in that department, Macs and unix based systems in general take actually using them to gauge their effectiveness.
First off, isn't the fact that Macs are industry standard in music and video editing mean anything to you?
Secondly, power users are limited by GUIs and mouse clicking. The unix philosophy of the CLI and small utilities that do their job well has eased the jobs of developers for decades. You simply lose time by taking your hands off of the keyboard.
Include the fact that Apple is an idustry leader is user interfaces and you get the best of both worlds. Try a Mac, learn to use it, then ask yourself what you can do. No one can fully explain it to you. As a developer/programmer it is your responsibility to learn new tools to remain effective. Anyone who says they are a windows programmer is nothing more than a trained code monkey. Real programmers would say I'm a programmer with working experience in Windows, but I also have all this non-work related experience working with other systems.
In conclusion, don't assume you aren't getting your money worth until you try it. As a computer "professional" you owe it to yourself to at least try. Why do so many people think Macs are th bomb? Answer that one yourself.
Actually, I don't think SCO stock is going to collapse immediately. Many of the people who bought SCO stock in the past few month were shorting it. The idea is somebody promises you the right to sell a stock at a the current price. If the price falls, you short it and pocket the difference.
But if the stock is saturated with shorts because everybody thinks it will go down, then poeple won't sell because they are waiting for the price to go down.
Then all it takes is one big sell, like one of the execs selling offs. Then shorts all see the downward movement and dump all at once. But basically stock price gets very unpredicable when a stock is extremely overvalued.
I was wondering why you put put this up on your own page instead of submitting it as a feature article on slashdot. No slashdot effect to worry about.
./ effect graphs (which in turn would be ./'ed). But really, more people need to realize that they can submit feature articles.
On the other hand, it would have been nice to see some
The publishers are not worrked that the technically literate can work around the restrictions
They should be, it only take one copy to put it up onto KaZaa or whatever. There anybody half familiar can download it. What they are doing is preventing fair use for people who like to rip their music and play it on their iPod (like me). I bought it, and as long as I don't give it to anybody else, then god damn it, I'm going to do whatever I feel like with it.
There is a difference between using Word for a ten or twenty page papaer, and when you start writing hundreds of pages. Those minutes add up quickly. Then you have to worry about consistancy, and look. Not to mention that formatting 300 pages by hand (and making sure that it is consistant) is very tedious. Then you get into stylesheets and wind up spending three days programming rather than writing. You become not just the writer, but the copy-editor and become adept at desktop publishing (which by the way, word is horrible at, try Framemaker). Then you realize your behind schedule and over budget and decide to simplify, simplify, simplify.
Real professional writers need simplicity and ease . Other people take care of formatting for them. That's why I've always used vi as the editor and sometimes LaTeX.
Even for high school students, you should try a thin editor and use no formating other than tabs and see how much quicker you write when you don't have to worry about bullets, auto-correct, margins, pagination etc.
Uh, well you could just give them a choice about what to use somewhat like all major distributions do.
Computer starts up... what desktop enivronment you want to use? (kde/gnome/icewm). Have mozilla and openoffice apps on the app bar but call them internet/email and word processing etc a la redhat. Under the 'start' menu, list the alternate apps, but only under an advanced setting.
This way normal users get a less confusing well laid out one choice for what they want to do, and users that know about the other apps will be able to hit advanced and change the default app.
It would take a single programmer just a week to come up with something customized like this. Further more, you can have all of the other variations of the software on a second cd. They don't take up a lot of space. Look at the plethoria of apps that you get with multiple cd distros.
From your reply I'm guessing that you and I have different definitions of the term 'newbie'. I'm thinking of someone who has a year or under of actual experience, not including the time it takes to get comfortable with the company's software dev. process and dev environment (which can easily take a month, I know it did for me.)
I'm guessing you're talking about just-walked-in-the-door fresh green programmer, in which case I'd be more inclined to agree with you. Greens need a couple months to get up to speed, at which point I would then consider them a newbie.
The ADPT thing is you deciding how long you think it will take him to do it, not asking him how long it will take. Two different things.
ADPT works best when both parties know it. Also with newbies they try to impress by estimating the least possible time it could take them to get it done. Managers and programming leads need to stress over-estimation over under-estimation, and the importance of a right estimate over a quick one. When you have a good ADPT, the programmer should be able to give a reasonable estimate which you shouldn't really have to pad, especially if they are experienced or 1337. If not, your programmers need to take time management classes.
Tell that to the guys working on Doom III, Duke Nukem Forever, Team Fortress 2. They are pretty senior dev teams with successful projects behind them and all are running easily 2x as long as they had projected.
Video games are under different stresses. There is the pressure to always stay state of the art and redesigns are common when projects stray too long. Also, the actual programmatic part is usually done pretty early, the rest is art work, level design, game play testing/balancing. Those topics are notoriously hard to estimate which is why so many games run over schedule. It's a whole other can of worms.
I believe I will somewhat concur with the 1.2 per person calculation, I find the rest of your estimations completely bullshit. Newbies may not have the skill to estimate acurately, but 8x? So your saying if a newbie programmer think it'll take a month to do something, it really takes eight? That is not an acceptable time schedule.
Programmers working on large projects estimate large chunks of time. If these people estimate one year, I would at most epect not more than one year and a half.
You may have meant shorter term estimations, and while they are more prone to double, saying that a you should expect a newbie to take a week to get a one day assignment done is completely rediculous.
A much more resonable device to aid estimations is to compute average daily project time. Too many people assume you can work eight hours a day on something. For sysadmins, ADPT is less than it is for dedicated programmers. 4 hours ADPT is about right for someone to can have tasks spontaneously added. For those who have a more concrete schedule, it is still dangerous to assume more than 6 hours.
Of course, it will take a couple months of careful monitoring to compute a good ADPT, but then project estimations tend to be much more realistic when people actually realize how long they actually can work on one project in any given day.
No. You know that it was pirated and it's against the law. But if Joe Blow is selling Windows Server in violation of the law/license agreement and you don't know this, you would not be held accountable.
BitTorrent is designed to distribute large files, not HTML web pages and small images and other files. Right now the overhead with running trackers for each component (which generate a non-nominal amount of traffic) would probably offset the advantages of BitTorrent. You could distribute the trakers or have a "traker traker", but you would probably wind up with the same inefficiency as direct HTTP. Furthermore, only a tiny percentage of web surfers even know what BitTorrent is, let alone have python and the correct python libraries installed.
In short, there is virtually no reson why any high traffic site would run BT to serve pages, where just load-balancing and bandwidth controls would be sufficient.