Try contacting one of the outsourcers and offer to be their 'point man' with the clients. I tried this, but without anly luck. They seem to prefer an H1B visa holder to bridge the gap between US clients and their off shore centers.
I was just curiuous to know if you know people that have tried what you suggest.
The Louisiana Purchase purchased a lot more than the state of Louisiana. It includes basically the entire Mississippi and Misouri river basins. It extended north to what is today Minnesota, across to Montana and south to the Gulf of Mexico. I think it includes land in about 9 states (Minnesota, Iowa, Misouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, North and South Dakota, Montana, Nebraska, Kansas)
The more serious question is why France and the US thought they could buy and sell land that others had inhabited for thousands of years.
Writing code for coders is a Good Idea. Its like making blueprints for engineers and contractors. Writing code for the end user is a good idea. The paying client is more likely to be impressed by the four color photorealistic image of their project, and that image may help the architect and the client come to an agreement. But it is critical that the architect produce a blueprint with the engineers that can be shared with the contractors who have to do the work. This isn't an 'either/or' proposition. You need both: you need to architect to meet the client's needs AND you need to architect to best enginnering practices. In any field other than software engineering, treating these as 'either/or' would amount to malpractice.
Go to any school of engineering any anounce that you want to design for the client but ignore best practices. The next day, anounce that you have learned from your mistake and that you want to adopt best practices but you don't care if it meets the needs of a paying client. You would quickly learn that you are still mistaken. Engineers must do both. Joel, great software requires that you address users and software engineering practices... these are two sides of a coin, not gulf between communities. Perhaps this is why great software takes ten years;-)
I find that the Microsoft documentation is fine if you want to get the common case of something to work. But if you want to go beyond that, it can be quite frustrating. Visual Basic supports Try... Catch style error handling, but try to find a list of Exceptions that can be thown by a given function. Java does a much better job of documenting this sort of detail.
My theory about this is that 1) many VB programmers don't bother with error handling, 2) those that are required to have error handling just catch all exceptions, peel off the error message, put it into a Message Box, close the application and check off the 'add error handling' task. I don't mean to attack the VB programmers (as I am one one from time to time), but they are usually not given time to do much more than that by clients that don't want to pay for best practices.
So does Contax, the N1 Digital was the first with a full frame detector. However, most digitals have a multiplication factor of 1.5 or 1.6.
The other problem with wide angle lenses is that light strikes the detector at an angle far from normal. The detctors seem to have a problem with this, at least that is the conventional wisdom that I have picked up on the digital photography forums.
If the sensors can handle oblique rays, I would love to see a full frame CMOS sensor in non-SLR camara (e.g. a rangefinder). If you can get rid of the SLR mirror, you can move the lens very close to the film plane. This is a huge advantage for wide angle lenses (like the legendary Zeiss Biogen). Without the need for a 'retrofocus' design, the Biogens are nearly distortion free and they are also very compact, something that is definantly not true of wide angle lens for an SLR.
But with digital, he could have used his beloved zone system on color. I don't know if this would have excited him or not, but I'll bet he would have at least investigated the technical side. He would have fully characterized the 'gamma' of a digtal detector and he would have used something like Photoshop to control the tones in the print.
This isn't quite true. You cannot use the Nikon F lenses (effectivley at any rate) on any new Nikon - film or digital.
The second point is that the smaller size of the digital detector really screws you with respect to wide angle lenses. I would be so happy if someone like Cosina would make a digital camara that would couple to the 'classic' lenses - the Leica screw mounts, the Nikon F's, the Canon breech mounts, the Contax C/Y mounts, even the Contax rangefinders. Photography is more about optics than either chemisty/electronics (Analog/Digital). There is some great optics in these families of 'classic 35mm systems' that will clober any of the modern 'prosumer' zoom optics. (Look at the MTF curves and see for yourself. www.photodo.com has them for hundreds of lenses.)
I agree with most of this. However, the government didn't take control. The citizens of the US seized control and formed a government. If we allow ourselves to think that 'the government' does things without our consent, we must fight so that the electorate keeps its control. The government must DERIVE its power from us.
Exercise your power by writing to your representatives. If that is not enough, do more. We dare not expect the government to act unless we do.
I'll agree with this. You can get some pretty good deals on the RTS and cameras of that age. The quality of the glass is stunning. Photography is determined more by the lens than the camera body. Film vs. Digital is starting to favor digital, but film is still a great deal.
I'm really hoping that somebody (like Cosina) will build a series of Digital SLR's that can mount to the 'classic' SLR mounts - The Nikon F, the Canon breech mounts, the Contax/Yashica, and the Pentax screw mounts. There is some fabulous old glass that is very cheap. Any 'fast 50 mm' lens from the 70's or 80's will blow away any prosumer zoom lens. If there was a digital body that could mount them, you could have a nice system for enthusiasts.
Slashdot readers, I think this is an important article. The main press is starting to grok why open source matters. I urge you to read this article. If you agree with it, please send Mr. Spotts a thank you letter. The open source community, when they are covered at all, is often derided as anti-Microsoft zealots that sit in dorm rooms and turn out substandard code that results in 'free, as in puppy' software and tell all newbies to RTFM. Mr. Spotts reports otherwise. More importantly, he explains why open source is important to the developing nations.
Now lets have backers of open source demonstrate a better image by writting thank you letters. If he , and his editors, see that this is popular, they are more likely to continue writing favorably about our community.
I didn't know about FatWallet until I read this story. This site seems like a useful way to find good deals. Sometimes, a lawsuit is better than advertising.
How long would it take Google to switch to a BSD? Both NetBSD and FreeBSD seem to have similar performance, at least with respect to single processor x86 servers.
From "Google Keeps Pace With Demand" by
Mitch WAGNER in the 7 May 2001 issue of Internet Week...
Google is one of the biggest enterprises using the increasingly popular server farm approach to scalability. As the prices and size of Intel-architecture servers shrink, enterprises scale by using large numbers of cheap, low-powered servers. Google, like many other companies using this approach, runs the Linux operating system.
"You don't need one enormous 64-way system as long as you have truckloads of small systems," said D.H. Brown Associates analyst Rich Partridge. "Google is taking a trend that others are doing and taking it out to an extreme."
Many of Google's storage devices are outfitted with 80-GB Maxtor hard drives, with a single controller per hard drive and two hard drives per PC. In some cases, the company uses PCs that are twice as big, with four controllers, four hard drives, two processors and twice the RAM of the smaller units.
Does anyone know if this is strill true of Google? If they are using a bunch of cheap single CPU servers in a farm, they may be able to switch platforms if push comes to shove. I know SCO is threatening the BSD's as well, but that is a much harder legal challenge for SCO's team. I don't think that Google will be scared and run from SCO. I just wanted to point out that even Google has options. They do have a rather substantial liability. If their farms have 10,000 linux servers at $600 a box, they are looking a $ 6 million. That is certainly not a showstopper, but it would make me consider options.
From the home page of Spam Assassin: Razor: Vipul's Razor is a collaborative spam-tracking database, which works by taking a signature of spam messages. Since spam typically operates by sending an identical message to hundreds of people, Razor short-circuits this by allowing the first person to receive a spam to add it to the database -- at which point everyone else will automatically block it.
From the review:
All the products except Brightmail and SpamAssassin allow end-users to add senders to the domain whitelist themselves. Brightmail allows users to forward misidentified e-mails to the administrator, who can choose to add the sender to the whitelist. SpamAssassin allows only the administrator to add to the whitelist, with no direct access for users.
Who is missing something here? Me or the reviewer? It looks like Razor does exactly what he wants to do and claims that SpamAssassin doesn' t do. It seems to me you are right... selectively comparing old OS with newer commercial software so that he can make claims that are factually correct about SpamAssassin 2.44 but completely missleading about the current version.
Because in the US, we have different ballots for each locality. For each election, you may write in a candidate. Each year, there are people that vote for Mickey Mouse and Snoopy. There is ONE ballot for federal, state and local elections. In addition, we typically have constitutional amendments (typically at the state level) and referenda. Because of all this, the ballots are complex and you need a seperate printing for each locality.
Under this condition, a programable device certainly looks apealling. Printing and hand counting under these conditions is an expensive task that seems like a natural place to use a reliable computer.
Having said that, I wish we could have seperate ballots for state, federal and local elections. We could then mass publish the federal ballots and everyone would see exactly the same ballot. The current system of having poorer localities using less legible ballots is a disgrace. The federal and state ballots could then be automatically counted (with write-in's sent to a special queue where a person could read the ballot). I think most write-ins occur at the local level.
Java has 376 hits. And Java does have some other meanings. Borneo has 210961 hits. And 1845 of those hits for "Borneo Python". So that brings us to another language.
Python has 36 hits, and some of those are for Monty and the snakes! However, "Guido van Rossum" gets 9868 hits. The first 45 hits are all about the benevolent dictator of Python (I got bored after that, its probably a lot more).. I wonder what he was talking about, must not have been his language.
This is fun... we can now quantify how badly Bill hates you - The Google/MSN Ratio (GRM)
Technology Google MSN GMR
Python 9.9M 36 275000
Java 53.7M 376 142819
OpenBSD 3.5M 251143 13 (sob)
NetBSD 4.76M 191501 25
Linux 97M 365 265753
---------------
So for now, Python still has a higer GMR ratio than Linux.
This is the sort of flaming that gives the Coward family a bad name. Read the frequently asked questions for OpenBSD. This is isue 8.18. In any case, why would this issue cause you to swear about the OS? Try it and see what you think. I found it to be very stable. I didn't use it in a situation that would tax its scalaiblity. The world is full of servers that are used at 10% of capacity, but are hit by viruses and other attacks. For these servers, OpenBSD would be great. Besides, there is pretty good cross fertilizaton between the BSDs. If the others can move from O(n) to O(1), I'll bet the OpenBSD folks can do it too. It just may take them a while to do a full security audit of the code.
some aspects of Windows that are copies of some unix idea get greatly mutated
And sometimes they are not even mutated that much. Open C:\Windows\System32\ftp.exe in Notepad and search for 'copyright'. You will find Universty of California, not Microsoft. It looks like somebody has been using BSD code & I don't recall that fact being mentioned in my EULA for Windows (C:\Windows\System32\eula.txt). After looking at the BSD license, I'm wondering if the second condition was violated.
I think you underestimate the hyprocracy of the US. We advocate free trade, but we often change the rules to suit our political needs. So there is indeed "Lawlessness", but it is not by the Vietnamese. Consider the aluminium cartel we set up to protect Alcoa from Russian dumping. Consider the subsidies we offer farmers - allowing them to undercut the desperately poor of the third world that wish to sell agricultural goods in a global market. There are may examples of this that have been documented by the 2001 Nobel laureate in economics who once worked for the World Bank. See Globalization and Its Discontents by by Joseph E. Stiglitz.
Well actually, its more of a nightmare. Our processed food will be laced with RFID tags. As they pass the sewage treatment plants, we will be assessed a 'usage fee' in proportion to the s**t we produce. Environmentalists on the left will view this as a green policy while free market conservatives will applaud that you only pay for the services you use. People that cannot afford the s**t tax will be required to go on diets.
Gardening will be viewed as tax evansion, since gardeners will not have government approved rfid tags in thier unprocessed food.
The rfid tags will also be vitamin-fortified and will be accompanied by nano heart worm robots that will swin in our blood supply eating cholesterol.
At least they didn't loose to Eolas in the marketing department. Any company that is one letter from a gruesome death (the plural of ebola) must not take marketing very seriously. If course, they don't need to market if they can get half a billion from a lawsuit.. on second thought, being one letter from a gruesome death may be appropriate.
Slashdot Mirror
I was just curiuous to know if you know people that have tried what you suggest.
The more serious question is why France and the US thought they could buy and sell land that others had inhabited for thousands of years.
Go to any school of engineering any anounce that you want to design for the client but ignore best practices. The next day, anounce that you have learned from your mistake and that you want to adopt best practices but you don't care if it meets the needs of a paying client. You would quickly learn that you are still mistaken. Engineers must do both. Joel, great software requires that you address users and software engineering practices... these are two sides of a coin, not gulf between communities. Perhaps this is why great software takes ten years ;-)
My theory about this is that 1) many VB programmers don't bother with error handling, 2) those that are required to have error handling just catch all exceptions, peel off the error message, put it into a Message Box, close the application and check off the 'add error handling' task. I don't mean to attack the VB programmers (as I am one one from time to time), but they are usually not given time to do much more than that by clients that don't want to pay for best practices.
The other problem with wide angle lenses is that light strikes the detector at an angle far from normal. The detctors seem to have a problem with this, at least that is the conventional wisdom that I have picked up on the digital photography forums.
If the sensors can handle oblique rays, I would love to see a full frame CMOS sensor in non-SLR camara (e.g. a rangefinder). If you can get rid of the SLR mirror, you can move the lens very close to the film plane. This is a huge advantage for wide angle lenses (like the legendary Zeiss Biogen). Without the need for a 'retrofocus' design, the Biogens are nearly distortion free and they are also very compact, something that is definantly not true of wide angle lens for an SLR.
But with digital, he could have used his beloved zone system on color. I don't know if this would have excited him or not, but I'll bet he would have at least investigated the technical side. He would have fully characterized the 'gamma' of a digtal detector and he would have used something like Photoshop to control the tones in the print.
The second point is that the smaller size of the digital detector really screws you with respect to wide angle lenses. I would be so happy if someone like Cosina would make a digital camara that would couple to the 'classic' lenses - the Leica screw mounts, the Nikon F's, the Canon breech mounts, the Contax C/Y mounts, even the Contax rangefinders. Photography is more about optics than either chemisty/electronics (Analog/Digital). There is some great optics in these families of 'classic 35mm systems' that will clober any of the modern 'prosumer' zoom optics. (Look at the MTF curves and see for yourself. www.photodo.com has them for hundreds of lenses.)
Exercise your power by writing to your representatives. If that is not enough, do more. We dare not expect the government to act unless we do.
I'm really hoping that somebody (like Cosina) will build a series of Digital SLR's that can mount to the 'classic' SLR mounts - The Nikon F, the Canon breech mounts, the Contax/Yashica, and the Pentax screw mounts. There is some fabulous old glass that is very cheap. Any 'fast 50 mm' lens from the 70's or 80's will blow away any prosumer zoom lens. If there was a digital body that could mount them, you could have a nice system for enthusiasts.
Open your head just a little. The Monitor is a reputable journal.
Now lets have backers of open source demonstrate a better image by writting thank you letters. If he , and his editors, see that this is popular, they are more likely to continue writing favorably about our community.
This is straight from the man, it is definantly Socialist!
This sounds a little like what drug companies do... Fleece the US consumer and let the rest of the world get a discont.
I didn't know about FatWallet until I read this story. This site seems like a useful way to find good deals. Sometimes, a lawsuit is better than advertising.
There is a reason an Anonymous Coward doesn't have mod points. Put your name on this or shut up, or I guess you really are an anonymous coward.
From "Google Keeps Pace With Demand" by Mitch WAGNER in the 7 May 2001 issue of Internet Week...
Does anyone know if this is strill true of Google? If they are using a bunch of cheap single CPU servers in a farm, they may be able to switch platforms if push comes to shove. I know SCO is threatening the BSD's as well, but that is a much harder legal challenge for SCO's team. I don't think that Google will be scared and run from SCO. I just wanted to point out that even Google has options. They do have a rather substantial liability. If their farms have 10,000 linux servers at $600 a box, they are looking a $ 6 million. That is certainly not a showstopper, but it would make me consider options.
Razor: Vipul's Razor is a collaborative spam-tracking database, which works by taking a signature of spam messages. Since spam typically operates by sending an identical message to hundreds of people, Razor short-circuits this by allowing the first person to receive a spam to add it to the database -- at which point everyone else will automatically block it.
From the review:
All the products except Brightmail and SpamAssassin allow end-users to add senders to the domain whitelist themselves. Brightmail allows users to forward misidentified e-mails to the administrator, who can choose to add the sender to the whitelist. SpamAssassin allows only the administrator to add to the whitelist, with no direct access for users.
Who is missing something here? Me or the reviewer? It looks like Razor does exactly what he wants to do and claims that SpamAssassin doesn' t do. It seems to me you are right ... selectively comparing old OS with newer commercial software so that he can make claims that are factually correct about SpamAssassin 2.44 but completely missleading about the current version.
I think ICANN prepare for bad jokes
Under this condition, a programable device certainly looks apealling. Printing and hand counting under these conditions is an expensive task that seems like a natural place to use a reliable computer.
Having said that, I wish we could have seperate ballots for state, federal and local elections. We could then mass publish the federal ballots and everyone would see exactly the same ballot. The current system of having poorer localities using less legible ballots is a disgrace. The federal and state ballots could then be automatically counted (with write-in's sent to a special queue where a person could read the ballot). I think most write-ins occur at the local level.
Java has 376 hits. And Java does have some other meanings. Borneo has 210961 hits. And 1845 of those hits for "Borneo Python". So that brings us to another language. Python has 36 hits, and some of those are for Monty and the snakes! However, "Guido van Rossum" gets 9868 hits. The first 45 hits are all about the benevolent dictator of Python (I got bored after that, its probably a lot more) .. I wonder what he was talking about, must not have been his language.
This is fun ... we can now quantify how badly Bill hates you - The Google/MSN Ratio (GRM)
Technology Google MSN GMR
Python 9.9M 36 275000
Java 53.7M 376 142819
OpenBSD 3.5M 251143 13 (sob)
NetBSD 4.76M 191501 25
Linux 97M 365 265753
---------------
So for now, Python still has a higer GMR ratio than Linux.
This is the sort of flaming that gives the Coward family a bad name. Read the frequently asked questions for OpenBSD. This is isue 8.18. In any case, why would this issue cause you to swear about the OS? Try it and see what you think. I found it to be very stable. I didn't use it in a situation that would tax its scalaiblity. The world is full of servers that are used at 10% of capacity, but are hit by viruses and other attacks. For these servers, OpenBSD would be great. Besides, there is pretty good cross fertilizaton between the BSDs. If the others can move from O(n) to O(1), I'll bet the OpenBSD folks can do it too. It just may take them a while to do a full security audit of the code.
some aspects of Windows that are copies of some unix idea get greatly mutated
And sometimes they are not even mutated that much. Open C:\Windows\System32\ftp.exe in Notepad and search for 'copyright'. You will find Universty of California, not Microsoft. It looks like somebody has been using BSD code & I don't recall that fact being mentioned in my EULA for Windows (C:\Windows\System32\eula.txt). After looking at the BSD license, I'm wondering if the second condition was violated.
I think you underestimate the hyprocracy of the US. We advocate free trade, but we often change the rules to suit our political needs. So there is indeed "Lawlessness", but it is not by the Vietnamese. Consider the aluminium cartel we set up to protect Alcoa from Russian dumping. Consider the subsidies we offer farmers - allowing them to undercut the desperately poor of the third world that wish to sell agricultural goods in a global market. There are may examples of this that have been documented by the 2001 Nobel laureate in economics who once worked for the World Bank. See
Globalization and Its Discontents by by Joseph E. Stiglitz.
Gardening will be viewed as tax evansion, since gardeners will not have government approved rfid tags in thier unprocessed food.
The rfid tags will also be vitamin-fortified and will be accompanied by nano heart worm robots that will swin in our blood supply eating cholesterol.
At least they didn't loose to Eolas in the marketing department. Any company that is one letter from a gruesome death (the plural of ebola) must not take marketing very seriously. If course, they don't need to market if they can get half a billion from a lawsuit .. on second thought, being one letter from a gruesome death may be appropriate.