I do not think Lockheed is replacing desktops used for word processing and simple spreadsheets.
I think they are replacing workstations used for high end design, modeling and simulation. This includes CAD programs such as proE, Modelimng programs such as Matlab and also finite element modeling software. These programs do have native Linux versions.
We had a couple of guys born, raised and educated in the U. S. A.. Both are talented. One was brilliant. But they were bad programmers. They were artists instead of engineers. They never finished the job. Every 9 months we got a new code set that did 60% of what the last one did. Then we had to enter into protracted negotiations to try to get to something that could be a product.
We ended up with a beautiful code set that was lacking in functionality. We finally put bandaids on the worst functinal deficiencies and moved on.
The guy from India just works circles around these U. S. guys. He is not burdened by a need to write the worlds most beautiful code set so he gets the job done.
Perhaps some of this outsourcing is due to a search for young software engineers who are adults instead of Prima Donnas.
discaimer: I am born and raised in the U.S.A. and like many many U. S. Citizens my ancestors are from Europle
SCOX has been suing former costomers. Look at the Daimler-Chrysler case. DC had not used SCOX software for 7 years. Now 7 years later they still have SCOX in their shorts because of the damned license. A GPL license would not have software vendors jacking you around years after the fact.
This FUDsuit demonstates how the licensing terms for proprietary software are actually rather abusive. Microsoft does not want us to see the downside of these licenses. I think this is why Microsoft would like to pull the plug on this fiascot.
From the New York Times article: "Stock options are the most powerful incentive we have to attract employees," Andy Bechtolsheim, a founder of several Silicon Valley companies, including Sun Microsystems, told the demonstrators. "Why else would someone leave a large company and take the risk" of joining a start-up firm?
Without options, three out of four start-ups that succeeded in Silicon Valley would have failed, because they would not have been able to attract high-quality employees, Mr. Bechtolsheim said.
This does not make sense!
A start up is not public. They do not have to put out a report to the public every quarter. Expensing options do not have much of an impact on start ups.
And companies can still give stock options if they expense them. They just will not look quite as profitable on those quarterly statements.
I can see where options dilute shareholder value. When the options are exercised, there are more shares to go across the same company. The value per share is reduced. When the optionee pays money the value of the company is increased. The overall loss to the long term shareholders is the market value of the stock minus the excersize price.
But how do you simply and accurately account for this?
Is it just a loss when the shares are exercised?
Do you account for the unexercised option on the balance sheet?
When the stock price is high, the options are a big liability. When the stock price is low, they do not matter.
Are there any accountants out there who can help me out?
Sometime semantics is important. Spinners for the record companies use the word "theft" for IP infringement because it carries more emotional heft. From this I conclude the record companies do not want us to think rationaly about this.
Windows boxes on corporate networks now have the remote pushes for patches and antivirus updates. A few years ago it was not like this. But now it is not possible to have a large network of Windows boxes without this.
Without the forced patching, a windows network would just be a cesspool of viruses, trojans etc.
The only choices are these:
-No campus network.
-No Windows boxes on the network.
-Forced patching of Windows boxes on the campus network.
Aside from banning outlook (our biggest problem is with mass-mailing viruses) on campus, does anyone have a cost effective solution that a small private college can implement?
To be fair we have to give credit for getting the complex projects out. It is very very hard to get a large team to deliver a product and not get derailed.
But we all know Microsoft software has some severe problems. Security - gets viruses, spyware, trojans easily. Crashes.
Is this because of the design process or for other reasons? Here are a couple reasons why Microsoft software could have all these problems in spite of a good design process:
- Keeping backward compatability at all costs. This has been a key to Microsoft's success. It makes for ugly code but it keeps customers. It also leads to security vulnerabilities. If the internet ready version windows was designed fromt he ground up for security, it would have been a lot different.
- Hairballing stuff together that should be seperate. IE is hairballed into to OS to work around anti-trust law. Now the media player is hairballed into the OS for the same reason.
I agree. Fluorescent lights are an abomination. Some buildings - usually older ones have a sawtooth shaped roof with rows of vertical walls facing north. These noth facing panels are all windows to let in the natural light from the sky without letting in the direct sunlight. My ideal office would have one of these roofs. I would also have incandescent lighting.
I also want real winodws - That open and let outside air into the building.
1) Hide behind a NAT router - Install windows disconnected from networks. Find someone with DSL and a NAT router. Intall all the patches from the safety of their home network.
2) Before installing windows, format the disk to have a FAT partition. Boot Knoppix Linux from a CD. get on the internet and download the patches to the FAT partion. Boot Windows - install patches.
if you grabbed a large quantity of people who code for a living and put them in a room and said, "All of the good coders go to this side and all of the bad ones go to that side."
I would go to the bad side of the room! But I am a hardware engineer who sometimes writes code.
In my defense, I have seen a lot of code that is much uglier even than the stuff I write!
SuSE 9.1 professional comes with a DVD that supports the iAMD64 instruction set.
SuSE
nVidia support the iAMD64 instruction set for Linux in their klunky closed source way. I do not know if YAST will grab iAMD64 nVidia drivers from their web site with a click of a button or if more geeking is needed to get it to work.
nVidia
I remember when just the box part was $1600. Now you can get a very good box for $600. I can go to Fry's and get a low end box (With a Linux distro I would never use) for $200.
Micosoft does need us to think we need powerfull hardware so we will not notice how much we are paying for the software.
If Longhorn does not need such expensive hardware, we will buy a modest machine with just a 4GHz pentium and only 1 Gbyte of RAM. In 2007 this will be a very modest machine. We may not even be able to buy such a slow processor.
Moores law has been predictable for a few decades. If anything it is showing signs of slowing down. The Prescott is slower than the Northwood. The speed improvements are just not happening that fast. This dual processor 4 GHz 2 Gbyte machine will be bloody expensive even in 2006.
Slashdot Mirror
I buy a coffee and a pastry. Then I plug in -- unless I brought the dog and have to stay outside.
I think they are replacing workstations used for high end design, modeling and simulation. This includes CAD programs such as proE, Modelimng programs such as Matlab and also finite element modeling software. These programs do have native Linux versions.
We had a couple of guys born, raised and educated in the U. S. A.. Both are talented. One was brilliant. But they were bad programmers. They were artists instead of engineers. They never finished the job. Every 9 months we got a new code set that did 60% of what the last one did. Then we had to enter into protracted negotiations to try to get to something that could be a product.
We ended up with a beautiful code set that was lacking in functionality. We finally put bandaids on the worst functinal deficiencies and moved on.
The guy from India just works circles around these U. S. guys. He is not burdened by a need to write the worlds most beautiful code set so he gets the job done.
Perhaps some of this outsourcing is due to a search for young software engineers who are adults instead of Prima Donnas.
discaimer: I am born and raised in the U.S.A. and like many many U. S. Citizens my ancestors are from Europle
And Great Hackers do not do mundane things such as meeting the needs of the customers!
This FUDsuit demonstates how the licensing terms for proprietary software are actually rather abusive. Microsoft does not want us to see the downside of these licenses. I think this is why Microsoft would like to pull the plug on this fiascot.
Are you a Linux geek?
"Stock options are the most powerful incentive we have to attract employees," Andy Bechtolsheim, a founder of several Silicon Valley companies, including Sun Microsystems, told the demonstrators. "Why else would someone leave a large company and take the risk" of joining a start-up firm?
Without options, three out of four start-ups that succeeded in Silicon Valley would have failed, because they would not have been able to attract high-quality employees, Mr. Bechtolsheim said.
This does not make sense!
A start up is not public. They do not have to put out a report to the public every quarter. Expensing options do not have much of an impact on start ups.
And companies can still give stock options if they expense them. They just will not look quite as profitable on those quarterly statements.
But how do you simply and accurately account for this?
Is it just a loss when the shares are exercised?
Do you account for the unexercised option on the balance sheet?
When the stock price is high, the options are a big liability. When the stock price is low, they do not matter.
Are there any accountants out there who can help me out?
Sometime semantics is important. Spinners for the record companies use the word "theft" for IP infringement because it carries more emotional heft. From this I conclude the record companies do not want us to think rationaly about this.
"We installed DRM software into RAM but we did not install it onto the computer"
"I smoked pot, but I did not inhale."
"I did not have sex with that woman."
Without the forced patching, a windows network would just be a cesspool of viruses, trojans etc.
The only choices are these:
-No campus network.
-No Windows boxes on the network.
-Forced patching of Windows boxes on the campus network.
Why not ban Outlook?
A bug is a bug is a bug.
...
or
A defect by any other name is still fucked up!
But we all know Microsoft software has some severe problems. Security - gets viruses, spyware, trojans easily. Crashes.
Is this because of the design process or for other reasons? Here are a couple reasons why Microsoft software could have all these problems in spite of a good design process:
- Keeping backward compatability at all costs. This has been a key to Microsoft's success. It makes for ugly code but it keeps customers. It also leads to security vulnerabilities. If the internet ready version windows was designed fromt he ground up for security, it would have been a lot different.
- Hairballing stuff together that should be seperate. IE is hairballed into to OS to work around anti-trust law. Now the media player is hairballed into the OS for the same reason.
I also want real winodws - That open and let outside air into the building.
1) Hide behind a NAT router - Install windows disconnected from networks. Find someone with DSL and a NAT router. Intall all the patches from the safety of their home network.
2) Before installing windows, format the disk to have a FAT partition. Boot Knoppix Linux from a CD. get on the internet and download the patches to the FAT partion. Boot Windows - install patches.
I would go to the bad side of the room! But I am a hardware engineer who sometimes writes code.
In my defense, I have seen a lot of code that is much uglier even than the stuff I write!
The X clipboard that nabs anything highlighted and pastes with the middle button.
KDE (or is it Qt?) has a clipboard that works in more the way we think it should work.
Gnome ( or is it GTk ? ) seems to have it's own clipboard too!
This guy spends all his free time snooping around area 51 and nabs morion sensors. This guy needs a girlfriend!
nVidia support the iAMD64 instruction set for Linux in their klunky closed source way. I do not know if YAST will grab iAMD64 nVidia drivers from their web site with a click of a button or if more geeking is needed to get it to work. nVidia
Are you using the 2.4 or the 2.6 kernel?
Will we have to use kernels built for Symetic Multi-Processors? Some of the Linux hardware modules are not written for SMP!
The shorts are holding up the stock price. They have to buy to cover their stock. They put a lot of upward pressure on the stock price.
Micosoft does need us to think we need powerfull hardware so we will not notice how much we are paying for the software.
If Longhorn does not need such expensive hardware, we will buy a modest machine with just a 4GHz pentium and only 1 Gbyte of RAM. In 2007 this will be a very modest machine. We may not even be able to buy such a slow processor.
Moores law has been predictable for a few decades. If anything it is showing signs of slowing down. The Prescott is slower than the Northwood. The speed improvements are just not happening that fast. This dual processor 4 GHz 2 Gbyte machine will be bloody expensive even in 2006.