Yeh, but then you'd have to discount Pascal, Delphi, and TSQL, simply because they use verbose syntax.
Good idea.
Pascal was a teaching language not actually designed for commercial development, but to teach people to program.
Delphi is based on Pascal.
TSQL is designed to encourage you to use the full development tools (IE - Visual Studio and Query Mangler) in order to construct statements rather than write them by hand.
People who espouse your point of view are usually naive little students who are still living off mommy and daddy. After glancing at your blog long enough to notice a typo in the first paragraph I can see that is probably not the case.
The reality is that DRM is forced upon nokia by the mobile phone companies who subsidise all their products. Mobile phones are not free to manufacture, they are paid for by AT&T, Singular, Vodaphone, Orange and all the other networks. they pay for them, so they choose the features that the phones include.
From the page you linked to on wikipedia I found this quote:
"In the technical sense, glass is an inorganic product of fusion which has been cooled to a rigid condition without crystallising."
That is why glass is recognised among physicists as being a liquid, because it has not crystallized. Maybe you should have read the whole page before you linked to it. This is actually a contentions subject but since not enough people here have a phd in crystallography or thermodynamics we are not going to resolve it.
It is also worth remembering that the Nazis operated a scorched earth policy with regard to communists / russians. The first people to die in the concentration camps before the Jews were the socialists from within germany. The people they rolled over in the push into Russia had a fair idea what lay in store for them and very rarely gave up. The ones that did give up were shot on sight.
The whole idea of blitzkrieg as practised by the Nazis was that everyone was the enemy, civilians included. The Nazi party had been fighting socialists since long before they even came to power and Hitler always dreamed of an alliance with England against the Communists. As it was he screwed that up since we would not play ball (I am English).
With this history in mind the Germans were never going to get great treatment at the end of the war. The only reason we were as nice to them as we were after they surrendered was because of the accepted view that we had been too harsh at the end of the first world war and because we had already levelled entire cities with our firebombing before the war ended but after they were beaten. Both Dresden and Hamburg were utterly destroyed by us. The general we put in charge of this effort was actually disappointed he could not carry on with every other city in Germany when Churchill stopped him.
The US has never had to live with the real fear that a foreign power could invade in the same way as Europe did since you threw off British rule over 100 years ago. This does not compare to the horror that was the V1 and V2. The indiscriminate bombing of a civilian population will never convert a single heart and mind to your cause, far from it. It shapes a nations psyche in a way that nothing else can.
One of the reasons Israel behaves the way it does is due to the horrendous treatment the Jews received in Europe during the war. Even us British interned them if they escaped here since we were so scared of German spies. This was one of our colossal mistakes but we were so close to defeat since the British Expeditionary Force had to leave most of its equipment in France. Hopefully we will never understand what our parents had to survive in order to preserve the British way of life.
This is the lesson here. Don't contribute to projects that claim ownership of your code as a condition of contributing. Fork the project first. This is exactly what he recommends not doing for some strange reason, I wonder why? (Joke)
On a more serious note he does raise some valid points. The reality is that without a certain amount of support from business to fight legal battles for us it is entirely possible that open source could be outlawed. Most of the population would not understand why this was a bad thing and might just go along with it if you could portray all open source contributors as fanatics who wanted to undermine the capitalist system.
The point he seems to miss is that load of open source developers to embrace DRM. Generally it is embraced fairly quickly as a challenge and then circumvented within a few days. This seems to be the central point he completely misses, if we were willing to play by the rules we would all probably be using windows or something.
The main point of your post however seems to be that nobody should ever contribute to open source projects unless they are GPL and this does make me very nervous. There are a number of times when the BSD licence can be a very valuable tool for bringing companies to the table. They might be able to fork these projects into a closed source product, but as he says that does not do you any favours if the original developers then make loads of improvements that you are unable to use due to technical differences in the code they have created since forking the project. You want to absorb what could be a minor improvement into your closed source fork but you have to either duplicate the entire OSS communities effort or re-fork the project and duplicate all your original effort (ie - expenditure).
When companies have to do this repeatedly they usually start to ask questions like why? Why not just use the open source project directly if you can and distribute the source. The main reason why he is unable to do this is commercial agreements that preclude it.
In the mobile phone there is an obvious example: Currently handsets are heavily subsidised by the networks, in return for this subsidy they ask the manufacturers (like Nokia) for certain concessions. The main concession is that your device will accidentally make calls, send blank texts or the current favourite of send crap loads of data over the airwaves. Some of these things Nokia can change, some he just has to live with since most of the public will not pay the full price of a mobile phone.
Go to here and look at some of the prices for a phone without a connection and tell me that mobile phone manufacturers would sell the same volumes without that network subsidy:
If less people buy high end mobile phones they will be more expensive for the rest of us due to the economies of scale in hi tech manufacturing. Nokia will also make less money since people would use their phones for longer before getting a replacement. Maybe both of these outcomes are inevitable but he needs time to adjust his business model so they do not go broke in the transition.
Rather less than it used to since Tony Blair replaced most of the Lords with hand-picked cronies..... This was actually part of his manifesto though from before he was elected so it not like we the British public can say he sprung it on us. We knew he was going to remove most of the hereditary peer and most people I know fully supported this.
The hereditary peers were mostly just old members of the British aristocracy whose great great great granddad had done something that amassed them huge amounts of wealth, probably at the expense of the common British people of the time. Those that did not get rich by screwing the common British people got rich by screwing the common people in foreign lands and built us an empire instead.
I know that the House of Lord performs a valuable function as a check on the power of parliament and often prevents ridiculous laws from being rushed through on a wave of hysteria whipped up by the press, however it can do that just as well without being full of people whose only contribution to modern society is being vastly rich. The House of Lords as it now stands is mostly full of retired politicians, senior lawyers and a few remaining hereditary peers so I think performs its function much better than it used to.
The technical lead can let the user of the PC drive. Most of the time this is the best idea so the owner of the PC learns more and actually pays attention to what the lead is taking them through but sometimes this is not possible when the lead is seriously overworked. In my experience technical leads often are.
Then review the code with the editor you are comfortable with. Once again, this is the best policy but the lead may simply not have time.
Almost all editors allow this to be configurable. Almost being the operative word in that sentence. I gave an example from memory so I can state it is not all.
This completely ignores that editors can also come with script engines to allow users to greatly enhance their own productivity. Changing editors can often cause the loss of many other valuable tools. This had not occurred to me but it is also one more reason why teams should standardise on a single IDE. There is no duplicated effort of creating these tools for different editors since more than one person on the team will probably have a need to do similar tasks. If these tools are so valuable why develop them twice? If they do not need to be developed twice then the tools are probably transferable between the two anyway. It is very rare that there is no overlap in what different devs do in a single team since this causes problems when one wants to go on holiday.
Now we're going to rule out the possibility of improvement and elevate the lead to prima donna status?!? Sorry, you seem to have completely misunderstood my point. I was saying that when a new developer joins a team he will initially be fairly unproductive compared to other more established members. This is not ruling out improvement, this saying that they will improve with time, but that time has not passed yet. It takes time to learn your way around a codebase and adapt to company procedures and source control software. Since this is often unavoidable (Source control is a communal system they all have to share) and has been factored in to the cost of employing a new staff member why not drop a new IDE in at the same time.
In regard to the lead having prima donna status I have no idea where that came from, but they are usually expected to be far more productive than a new recruit. It is highly unlikely that a new member of staff will come in and be more productive than the lead developer, if that does happen then you would need to look at why. Any speculation as to why and possible solutions is getting too off topic for this reply since it could go on forever.
If the are truly unique in their skills set then they probably work at Google already. ... and insult the whole of the non-Google software developers? This was really a flippant comment since I am a professional developer and system admin who does not work at google. Note that when I say professional I mean I work as part of a development team so do have first hand experience of these issues.
Are you a less capable developer or a manager trying to protect your bottom line?;-) Hopefully this is your version of a flippant comment or a joke judging by the winking smillie. I already answered the question above if you are actually interested.
You also mentioned that I ignored all data on software productivity. Can you post a link or provide any more information on this data you are talking about? I presume it was from some sort of recent workplace study so I am genuinely curious to the methodology used.
I made several references in my post to people skills but these seem to dramatically absent from this last comment since it could be construed as being highly offensive. This is exactly the sort of comment that can alienate you from your colleagues and land you in deep shit with management if it is taken the wrong way.
Why would one force a developer to use a specific editor? The main reason I can think of from the top of my head it if the technical lead needs to show you something quickly on your PC. If you have a team of 15 developers who all use different IDE's it can get very difficult to see errors in code if the syntax highlighting is different for each since pattern recognition is often an important part of debugging.
Another reason may be that the different editors deal with a mix of windows / unix carriages returns differently. If you have one editor that converts all windows carriages returns to unix or vice versa and a different editor that always puts in unix carriage returns this can result in difficulties with certain source control programs (eg - TortioseSVN). When you view the differences from the first editor it looks like the entire file changed when it was actually only one line.
I am not saying that it is always necessary to standardise a team on one IDE, but in some cases it can reap massive rewards.
The programmer is more productive with an editor (s)he is familiar with. Only for a few weeks. In a few weeks doing full time development you should be able to learn you way round any editor. This minor drop in productivity for a few weeks can be made up in no time in productivity gains by the team as a whole.
New staff should always be forced to use the same IDE as the lead developer. Partly so to make the leads job easier as his time is far more valuable and new staff are not expected to be very productive initially anyway.
Another reason is to see how receptive new staff are to a minor change. One of the most important skills in any job is flexibility. The precious flower developers someone else mentioned are usually a pain to work with for other members of the team. Unless they are truly unique you are better off not becoming reliant on them. If the are truly unique in their skills set then they probably work at Google already.
The day of the antisocial programming geek ruling the market are over, most companies would rather hire less capable developers who can work well with their peers and relate to management more easily since technical skills are more easily taught than people skills. I know this is going to go down very badly with a lot of angry slashdot geeks, but you might as well learn this early in life when it is easier to change your outlook.
There is a HUGE difference between "somehow able to communiate in English" and "being able to enjoying an english piece of media" I am british so I speak english pretty well as it is my first language. Most non-english europeans I have spoken to learned to speak english by digesting our media actually. British pop music such as the beatles, rolling stones, etc drove an entire generation to gain a very good understanding of english.
I could also pop out and but a wii tomorrow as there is no shortfall here at all.
I had an entirely different problem with Doom3 that prevented me from playing it all the way through. I did play it in a darkened room on a 6800gtx bought just for the purpose so everything was smooth and I could appreciate the scenery. The problem was that it scared the hell out of me. I found it too atmospheric so I could only play it for an hour or so then I needed a break.
If anything I think they did too good a job on the level design so it made me fell slighty claustrophobic. It reminded me of the first Alien movie where they really nailed how it must feel to spend time in a cramped, sealed environment in space.
It would solve the quality problem because schools would be competing with other schools. Nobody wants to send their kids to a bad school, so the schools would get better or they'd go out of business. The problem with this approach is that it results in only rich parents sending their kids to the best schools. As you mention it happens already but this will make it more prevalent, not less.
The other problem is that the schools start trying to find loopholes. The most obvious loophole is expelling the kids likely to to do worst on trumped up disciplinary charges before they get bad grades and effect your ranking in the school league tables.
This is what capitalism is all about: Make more money for less investment. In some circumstances you can invest less by investing the money you have more wisely but in some circumstances the only way to invest less is to cut corners. It is also usually easier to save money by cutting corners than it is to look for areas where an existing system can be improved.
Personally I think that both education and healthcare are best left in non-profit driven hands. It might make it less efficient but it does make it more accessible to people from all backgrounds and results in the average level of care or education people receive being higher. I fully acknowledge this means the rich fall short of what they can get in private schools or hospitals but they can pay for these if the choose, it just should not be subsidised by the state.
Some dipshits who can't see that is nothing new, and can't resist tunring an ordinary thing into yet another opportunity to flog their fringe political positions is all too common. So are you saying that taking non-christians into account when planning an event that is not christian in focus is a fringe position? Or is not being christian a fringe position in the first place?
All after identifying myself, that is, which I'd much rather do than watch some condescending guard pull on yet another pair of blue surgical gloves. (Seriously, why do they wear these things? It's not like they give me a rectal exam...) I always wondered this as well. Its actually in case you bleed on him and give him some contagious disease. This is actually yet another piece of "Security Theatre" designed to make him feel better about searching people who look like they would be infectious.
7 reasons a geek should buy OSX, off the top of my head: All the real geeks run gentoo, the rest of you are just pretending:)
Re:Jumped the shark?
on
I Will Derive
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I know I could browse utube and all the other similar sites for interesting videos if I wanted, but I don't have time to look for stuff I may find amusing amongst all the other crap.
This is not that different from news. I could read all the news sites that are feature on slashdot, but I don't have time to so I quite like someone else picking stuff thats vaguely geek related and putting it in one place.
I always see some stuff on slashdot I am not interested in. My solution is simple: I don't click on the read more link and skip to the next article. Its not like there are so many stories on slashdot that you cant see all the previews easily yet and there is no need to read every single thing thats gets posted to the front page even if the summary indicates you won't like it.
In this case what were you all expecting when you clicked on a summary which told you that it linked to a utube video featuring maths and crap dancing?
As a European (British) I would like to point out there is no chance of most of Europe turning into a muslim state. Most of us over here supported the authors of those comics, as did our governments. There were lots of loony Muslims out campaigning for some stupid fatwa or something, but who cares. That is the joy of free speech, getting to ignore pathetic hatemongering individuals who don't understand that without it they would be unable to open their mouths at all.
If we do anything else in regards to stopping religious loonies being able to practice, march or gather in public places we begin curtailing the freedoms that we hold so dear to begin with and are no better than them. Anyway, watching them whine and burn effegies of some guy who only drew a cartoon gives alot of us even more reason to poke fun at some peoples serious lack of perspective.
The following quote is one I have always identified with in matters such as these:
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
I have tried to siphon gas in this manner from a 1970s car. I did succeed in getting so out of it that the fuel was no longer needed since I was clearly unfit to drive so went back to bed and observed the strange things flying of the ceiling. Gasoline vapour make you hallucinate quite vividly from what I remember.
Better - show that they would be able to access other customers data and shout "Data Protection Act" as often as possible during demonstration. The problem with this approach is that you come across as a rubbish DBA. Any DBA worth his salt can set permissions that only allow specific user accounts access to specific tables or views. I have never used Oracle but I do admin several MySQL databases (v4) and even they allow me to limit a particular user in this manner. If you are going to tell me Oracle does not support table level permissions I would be very surprised.
Further down this thread people start mentioning the silly query overloading the server issue. Now this is a real issue but it can be made to work either way you want. We had a similar request from a customer several years ago but we were not so opposed to giving them read only access if it could be done safely. We choose to set up a separate replicated server that they could query directly. If they wipe out the server with a silly query, who cares since it only effects them. The work involved in setting this up, its maintenance and hosting were all chargeable thereby making us more profit. This keeps them happy, the management team happy and me happy since my company operates a profit sharing scheme.
If you still are unable to see the benefit of giving them access then the best bet might be an intellectual property argument. Depending on whether you or they own the IP of the system you provide you may be able to argue that the database structure is a proprietary work and that exposing it would be against company policy in that regard.
Somewhere I used to work had a less than optimal database structure we all inherited from the previous developers who build the system. We knew how bad the design was but changing it was a huge job that we could not make the time to do as we were busy on paid work for other clients. We successfully avoided letting the customer see how awful the design was until the contract ended (it was a fixed term job that could not be extended) by making the IP argument.
There are a number of things they can do to to minimize damages (only root computers in enemy nations) etc, but, if they really do put rootkits on people's PCs as 'weapons of war' then there are a lot of things the international community can do as a result... Like what? The US already ignores Geneva conventions on torture via the rendition program. The US illegally detains foreign citizens without trial in Guantanamo Bay. The US generally refuses to be bound by any international treaty unless it suits the US government at the time.
The reality is that with the huge US defence budget you are capable of conquering any country you choose in a conventional engagement. This is without using the vast supply of Nuclear weapons that the US has at its disposal. This leaves no option to another nation that feels strongly about a potential issue.
This is also the biggest cause of terrorism in the world since other nations are incapable of swaying the US Government the only people who can saw them are you the US citizens. Not that killing US citizens is ever likely to convince other US citizens that the terrorists cause is just.
Where I live we had to put up with a terrorist campaign (the IRA) for years. They obtained most of their funding overseas in the US. Although the US government did not actively fund the IRA they did allow the IRA to raise funds from private individuals on US soil. We solved the problem not by invading the US (we never would have stood a chance), but instead by actually listening to the terrorists demands and starting a dialogue with them. This has now succeeded in getting the IRA to renounce violence even though Northern Ireland is still not unified with the south and still ruled by Great Britain.
This is the only solution that will end the current war on terror. Hopefully the next US government will take this on board more than the current one.
In england in particular, consented assault is only criminal when the resulting injuries are extremely severe, and you can prove that this injuries escape some pre-arranged form of consent (like the limits imposed by the rules of a game). Err, no. The charge of Common Assault only applies when there are no injuries to the victim. If there are any injuries of any kind it becomes Actual Bodily Harm (ABH). If there are severe injuries the charge becomes Grievous Bodily Harm.
Time for a serious reply: "Having engaged in it consensually would not be a crime, but to have a photograph of it in one's possession would be a crime." Sorry to disappoint you, but you cannot engage in a criminal activity even if you have consent from the victim. In other words, even if your girlfriend gives you permission to hit her with a whip, it is still common assault under british law.
Interesting point about it being platform independent, but not strictly true.
I admin a load of web and database servers. Most are Linux boxes but 2 are IIS servers. One of our partners sent us a link regarding this attack becuase it had just effected them and I was immediately tasked with assessing our exposure.
Thankfully we use MySQL (v4.0) as an underlying database so our exposure was zero. We are unable to use prepared statements, but we also have no declare, no exec, and ODBC drivers that refuse to execute multiple statements in one (no semicolons). So we are completely immune to this attack.
We were recently audited by a specialist security company who spent 3 weeks attacking our web based application looking for exploits. They found some, we fixed them. The money paid for them was worth every penny. Here is a blatant plug for their site: http://www.dns.co.uk/
Given a choice I'd rather live a short life as a Free man than a long healthy one as a slave but the whole idea is that Democrats want to make the decision for me at gunpoint. There won't BE any opt out, accepting payment for medical services outside of Hillarycare will be a felony. This sounds like rather an extreme view of a public health care system. I live in Britain, we already have one called the NHS. The system over here I think strikes fairly good balance. If I brake my arm (or metacarples as I did a few years ago) I can go to a hospital and get treated straight away. They will operate to fix everything as soon as possible and get me back to work.
I hate to wait for 12 hours overnight in casualty until my operation. I never saw the doctor who operated on me. The X-ray they took of my hand was taken by a nurse. The only explanation I ever got was the nurse saying what was wrong. I was knocked out by an aneasthetist who I think may also have been a nurse. When I came to my hand was already in plaster and I was discharged within a few hours. I had no physiotherapy afterwards as I was deemed to not need it since I was very active and in my late twenties.
The entire process was very much like a production line designed to get me out of hospital as quickly as possible. If I had private healthcare I would have been given a bed straight away. I also would have spoken to a doctor the next day who would have told me what was wrong before I had the operation. He might even have come to visit me after the operation in my hospital bed. I certainly would have then got another night in a bed before being discharged. Then afterwards I would have got extensive physiotherapy to help me recover.
All these things would have been very nice, but they are luxuries that I could live without. At the time I was a student so there was no way I was paying for private healthcare. Now I work I have the option to and once I finished paying for my education I might start.
A great many people in Britain have private health insurance not because they have to, but because they want to. They usually to pay to go private to avoid the waiting lists associated with the NHS and to get a more human friendly approach.
Associating public healthcare with the banning of all private healthcare is ridiculous since public healthcare will never be well enough funded to do all the hand holding associated with private hospitals.
I have just read the article linked to and it does not mention anything about the MP3s having come from a CD. Are you assuming that all MP3s come from CD do you have more info from some other source?
If my reading is correct and they are also talking about MP3s that you buy from legal online music resellers then I would be permanently in breach of the law since every single one of my machines is accessible from the internet via SSH.
Are they singling out online file storage where the internet pipe (sorry, tube) is above a certain size or does the number or users who share their files separately on the same system matter?
I choose not use any online file sharing of this type because I find it more useful to run my home network on a static IP and leave SSH running. Since I use a linux box as a router this is easy for me to keep secure and gives me much greater flexibility but does this also make me an illegal file sharing site just because I also allow my flatmate to have an account to access his machine remotely?
Slashdot Mirror
Bagel worm required you to use outlook.
Yeh, but then you'd have to discount Pascal, Delphi, and TSQL, simply because they use verbose syntax.
Good idea.
Pascal was a teaching language not actually designed for commercial development, but to teach people to program.
Delphi is based on Pascal.
TSQL is designed to encourage you to use the full development tools (IE - Visual Studio and Query Mangler) in order to construct statements rather than write them by hand.
People who espouse your point of view are usually naive little students who are still living off mommy and daddy. After glancing at your blog long enough to notice a typo in the first paragraph I can see that is probably not the case.
The reality is that DRM is forced upon nokia by the mobile phone companies who subsidise all their products. Mobile phones are not free to manufacture, they are paid for by AT&T, Singular, Vodaphone, Orange and all the other networks. they pay for them, so they choose the features that the phones include.
From the page you linked to on wikipedia I found this quote:
"In the technical sense, glass is an inorganic product of fusion which has been cooled to a rigid condition without crystallising."
That is why glass is recognised among physicists as being a liquid, because it has not crystallized. Maybe you should have read the whole page before you linked to it. This is actually a contentions subject but since not enough people here have a phd in crystallography or thermodynamics we are not going to resolve it.
It is also worth remembering that the Nazis operated a scorched earth policy with regard to communists / russians. The first people to die in the concentration camps before the Jews were the socialists from within germany. The people they rolled over in the push into Russia had a fair idea what lay in store for them and very rarely gave up. The ones that did give up were shot on sight.
The whole idea of blitzkrieg as practised by the Nazis was that everyone was the enemy, civilians included. The Nazi party had been fighting socialists since long before they even came to power and Hitler always dreamed of an alliance with England against the Communists. As it was he screwed that up since we would not play ball (I am English).
With this history in mind the Germans were never going to get great treatment at the end of the war. The only reason we were as nice to them as we were after they surrendered was because of the accepted view that we had been too harsh at the end of the first world war and because we had already levelled entire cities with our firebombing before the war ended but after they were beaten. Both Dresden and Hamburg were utterly destroyed by us. The general we put in charge of this effort was actually disappointed he could not carry on with every other city in Germany when Churchill stopped him.
The US has never had to live with the real fear that a foreign power could invade in the same way as Europe did since you threw off British rule over 100 years ago. This does not compare to the horror that was the V1 and V2. The indiscriminate bombing of a civilian population will never convert a single heart and mind to your cause, far from it. It shapes a nations psyche in a way that nothing else can.
One of the reasons Israel behaves the way it does is due to the horrendous treatment the Jews received in Europe during the war. Even us British interned them if they escaped here since we were so scared of German spies. This was one of our colossal mistakes but we were so close to defeat since the British Expeditionary Force had to leave most of its equipment in France. Hopefully we will never understand what our parents had to survive in order to preserve the British way of life.
On a more serious note he does raise some valid points. The reality is that without a certain amount of support from business to fight legal battles for us it is entirely possible that open source could be outlawed. Most of the population would not understand why this was a bad thing and might just go along with it if you could portray all open source contributors as fanatics who wanted to undermine the capitalist system.
The point he seems to miss is that load of open source developers to embrace DRM. Generally it is embraced fairly quickly as a challenge and then circumvented within a few days. This seems to be the central point he completely misses, if we were willing to play by the rules we would all probably be using windows or something.
The main point of your post however seems to be that nobody should ever contribute to open source projects unless they are GPL and this does make me very nervous. There are a number of times when the BSD licence can be a very valuable tool for bringing companies to the table. They might be able to fork these projects into a closed source product, but as he says that does not do you any favours if the original developers then make loads of improvements that you are unable to use due to technical differences in the code they have created since forking the project. You want to absorb what could be a minor improvement into your closed source fork but you have to either duplicate the entire OSS communities effort or re-fork the project and duplicate all your original effort (ie - expenditure).
When companies have to do this repeatedly they usually start to ask questions like why? Why not just use the open source project directly if you can and distribute the source. The main reason why he is unable to do this is commercial agreements that preclude it.
In the mobile phone there is an obvious example: Currently handsets are heavily subsidised by the networks, in return for this subsidy they ask the manufacturers (like Nokia) for certain concessions. The main concession is that your device will accidentally make calls, send blank texts or the current favourite of send crap loads of data over the airwaves. Some of these things Nokia can change, some he just has to live with since most of the public will not pay the full price of a mobile phone.
Go to here and look at some of the prices for a phone without a connection and tell me that mobile phone manufacturers would sell the same volumes without that network subsidy:
http://www.expansys.com/
http://www.expansys-usa.com/
If less people buy high end mobile phones they will be more expensive for the rest of us due to the economies of scale in hi tech manufacturing. Nokia will also make less money since people would use their phones for longer before getting a replacement. Maybe both of these outcomes are inevitable but he needs time to adjust his business model so they do not go broke in the transition.
The hereditary peers were mostly just old members of the British aristocracy whose great great great granddad had done something that amassed them huge amounts of wealth, probably at the expense of the common British people of the time. Those that did not get rich by screwing the common British people got rich by screwing the common people in foreign lands and built us an empire instead.
I know that the House of Lord performs a valuable function as a check on the power of parliament and often prevents ridiculous laws from being rushed through on a wave of hysteria whipped up by the press, however it can do that just as well without being full of people whose only contribution to modern society is being vastly rich. The House of Lords as it now stands is mostly full of retired politicians, senior lawyers and a few remaining hereditary peers so I think performs its function much better than it used to.
In regard to the lead having prima donna status I have no idea where that came from, but they are usually expected to be far more productive than a new recruit. It is highly unlikely that a new member of staff will come in and be more productive than the lead developer, if that does happen then you would need to look at why. Any speculation as to why and possible solutions is getting too off topic for this reply since it could go on forever. If the are truly unique in their skills set then they probably work at Google already. ... and insult the whole of the non-Google software developers? This was really a flippant comment since I am a professional developer and system admin who does not work at google. Note that when I say professional I mean I work as part of a development team so do have first hand experience of these issues. Are you a less capable developer or a manager trying to protect your bottom line?
You also mentioned that I ignored all data on software productivity. Can you post a link or provide any more information on this data you are talking about? I presume it was from some sort of recent workplace study so I am genuinely curious to the methodology used.
I made several references in my post to people skills but these seem to dramatically absent from this last comment since it could be construed as being highly offensive. This is exactly the sort of comment that can alienate you from your colleagues and land you in deep shit with management if it is taken the wrong way.
Another reason may be that the different editors deal with a mix of windows / unix carriages returns differently. If you have one editor that converts all windows carriages returns to unix or vice versa and a different editor that always puts in unix carriage returns this can result in difficulties with certain source control programs (eg - TortioseSVN). When you view the differences from the first editor it looks like the entire file changed when it was actually only one line.
I am not saying that it is always necessary to standardise a team on one IDE, but in some cases it can reap massive rewards. The programmer is more productive with an editor (s)he is familiar with. Only for a few weeks. In a few weeks doing full time development you should be able to learn you way round any editor. This minor drop in productivity for a few weeks can be made up in no time in productivity gains by the team as a whole.
New staff should always be forced to use the same IDE as the lead developer. Partly so to make the leads job easier as his time is far more valuable and new staff are not expected to be very productive initially anyway.
Another reason is to see how receptive new staff are to a minor change. One of the most important skills in any job is flexibility. The precious flower developers someone else mentioned are usually a pain to work with for other members of the team. Unless they are truly unique you are better off not becoming reliant on them. If the are truly unique in their skills set then they probably work at Google already.
The day of the antisocial programming geek ruling the market are over, most companies would rather hire less capable developers who can work well with their peers and relate to management more easily since technical skills are more easily taught than people skills. I know this is going to go down very badly with a lot of angry slashdot geeks, but you might as well learn this early in life when it is easier to change your outlook.
I could also pop out and but a wii tomorrow as there is no shortfall here at all.
I had an entirely different problem with Doom3 that prevented me from playing it all the way through. I did play it in a darkened room on a 6800gtx bought just for the purpose so everything was smooth and I could appreciate the scenery. The problem was that it scared the hell out of me. I found it too atmospheric so I could only play it for an hour or so then I needed a break.
If anything I think they did too good a job on the level design so it made me fell slighty claustrophobic. It reminded me of the first Alien movie where they really nailed how it must feel to spend time in a cramped, sealed environment in space.
The other problem is that the schools start trying to find loopholes. The most obvious loophole is expelling the kids likely to to do worst on trumped up disciplinary charges before they get bad grades and effect your ranking in the school league tables.
This is what capitalism is all about: Make more money for less investment. In some circumstances you can invest less by investing the money you have more wisely but in some circumstances the only way to invest less is to cut corners. It is also usually easier to save money by cutting corners than it is to look for areas where an existing system can be improved.
Personally I think that both education and healthcare are best left in non-profit driven hands. It might make it less efficient but it does make it more accessible to people from all backgrounds and results in the average level of care or education people receive being higher. I fully acknowledge this means the rich fall short of what they can get in private schools or hospitals but they can pay for these if the choose, it just should not be subsidised by the state.
I know I could browse utube and all the other similar sites for interesting videos if I wanted, but I don't have time to look for stuff I may find amusing amongst all the other crap.
This is not that different from news. I could read all the news sites that are feature on slashdot, but I don't have time to so I quite like someone else picking stuff thats vaguely geek related and putting it in one place.
I always see some stuff on slashdot I am not interested in. My solution is simple: I don't click on the read more link and skip to the next article. Its not like there are so many stories on slashdot that you cant see all the previews easily yet and there is no need to read every single thing thats gets posted to the front page even if the summary indicates you won't like it.
In this case what were you all expecting when you clicked on a summary which told you that it linked to a utube video featuring maths and crap dancing?
As a European (British) I would like to point out there is no chance of most of Europe turning into a muslim state. Most of us over here supported the authors of those comics, as did our governments. There were lots of loony Muslims out campaigning for some stupid fatwa or something, but who cares. That is the joy of free speech, getting to ignore pathetic hatemongering individuals who don't understand that without it they would be unable to open their mouths at all.
If we do anything else in regards to stopping religious loonies being able to practice, march or gather in public places we begin curtailing the freedoms that we hold so dear to begin with and are no better than them. Anyway, watching them whine and burn effegies of some guy who only drew a cartoon gives alot of us even more reason to poke fun at some peoples serious lack of perspective.
The following quote is one I have always identified with in matters such as these:
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
I have tried to siphon gas in this manner from a 1970s car. I did succeed in getting so out of it that the fuel was no longer needed since I was clearly unfit to drive so went back to bed and observed the strange things flying of the ceiling. Gasoline vapour make you hallucinate quite vividly from what I remember.
Further down this thread people start mentioning the silly query overloading the server issue. Now this is a real issue but it can be made to work either way you want. We had a similar request from a customer several years ago but we were not so opposed to giving them read only access if it could be done safely. We choose to set up a separate replicated server that they could query directly. If they wipe out the server with a silly query, who cares since it only effects them. The work involved in setting this up, its maintenance and hosting were all chargeable thereby making us more profit. This keeps them happy, the management team happy and me happy since my company operates a profit sharing scheme.
If you still are unable to see the benefit of giving them access then the best bet might be an intellectual property argument. Depending on whether you or they own the IP of the system you provide you may be able to argue that the database structure is a proprietary work and that exposing it would be against company policy in that regard.
Somewhere I used to work had a less than optimal database structure we all inherited from the previous developers who build the system. We knew how bad the design was but changing it was a huge job that we could not make the time to do as we were busy on paid work for other clients. We successfully avoided letting the customer see how awful the design was until the contract ended (it was a fixed term job that could not be extended) by making the IP argument.
The reality is that with the huge US defence budget you are capable of conquering any country you choose in a conventional engagement. This is without using the vast supply of Nuclear weapons that the US has at its disposal. This leaves no option to another nation that feels strongly about a potential issue.
This is also the biggest cause of terrorism in the world since other nations are incapable of swaying the US Government the only people who can saw them are you the US citizens. Not that killing US citizens is ever likely to convince other US citizens that the terrorists cause is just.
Where I live we had to put up with a terrorist campaign (the IRA) for years. They obtained most of their funding overseas in the US. Although the US government did not actively fund the IRA they did allow the IRA to raise funds from private individuals on US soil. We solved the problem not by invading the US (we never would have stood a chance), but instead by actually listening to the terrorists demands and starting a dialogue with them. This has now succeeded in getting the IRA to renounce violence even though Northern Ireland is still not unified with the south and still ruled by Great Britain.
This is the only solution that will end the current war on terror. Hopefully the next US government will take this on board more than the current one.
Some links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actual_bodily_harm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievous_bodily_harm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_assault
Interesting point about it being platform independent, but not strictly true.
I admin a load of web and database servers. Most are Linux boxes but 2 are IIS servers. One of our partners sent us a link regarding this attack becuase it had just effected them and I was immediately tasked with assessing our exposure.
Thankfully we use MySQL (v4.0) as an underlying database so our exposure was zero. We are unable to use prepared statements, but we also have no declare, no exec, and ODBC drivers that refuse to execute multiple statements in one (no semicolons). So we are completely immune to this attack.
We were recently audited by a specialist security company who spent 3 weeks attacking our web based application looking for exploits. They found some, we fixed them. The money paid for them was worth every penny. Here is a blatant plug for their site: http://www.dns.co.uk/
I hate to wait for 12 hours overnight in casualty until my operation. I never saw the doctor who operated on me. The X-ray they took of my hand was taken by a nurse. The only explanation I ever got was the nurse saying what was wrong. I was knocked out by an aneasthetist who I think may also have been a nurse. When I came to my hand was already in plaster and I was discharged within a few hours. I had no physiotherapy afterwards as I was deemed to not need it since I was very active and in my late twenties.
The entire process was very much like a production line designed to get me out of hospital as quickly as possible. If I had private healthcare I would have been given a bed straight away. I also would have spoken to a doctor the next day who would have told me what was wrong before I had the operation. He might even have come to visit me after the operation in my hospital bed. I certainly would have then got another night in a bed before being discharged. Then afterwards I would have got extensive physiotherapy to help me recover.
All these things would have been very nice, but they are luxuries that I could live without. At the time I was a student so there was no way I was paying for private healthcare. Now I work I have the option to and once I finished paying for my education I might start.
A great many people in Britain have private health insurance not because they have to, but because they want to. They usually to pay to go private to avoid the waiting lists associated with the NHS and to get a more human friendly approach.
Associating public healthcare with the banning of all private healthcare is ridiculous since public healthcare will never be well enough funded to do all the hand holding associated with private hospitals.
I have just read the article linked to and it does not mention anything about the MP3s having come from a CD. Are you assuming that all MP3s come from CD do you have more info from some other source?
If my reading is correct and they are also talking about MP3s that you buy from legal online music resellers then I would be permanently in breach of the law since every single one of my machines is accessible from the internet via SSH.
Are they singling out online file storage where the internet pipe (sorry, tube) is above a certain size or does the number or users who share their files separately on the same system matter?
I choose not use any online file sharing of this type because I find it more useful to run my home network on a static IP and leave SSH running. Since I use a linux box as a router this is easy for me to keep secure and gives me much greater flexibility but does this also make me an illegal file sharing site just because I also allow my flatmate to have an account to access his machine remotely?