So the move to outsourcing will require much better BA's to write the specs, no? This will put a premium on good BA's, raising their profile and of course, their price.
BA's become worth their weight in gold, like good programmers once were. Naturally, they'll be a candidate for overseas outsourcing themselves when they become such a readily identifiable cost.
Next step, the entire group will be outsourced to a third party vendor. From there, the division.
The most finely wrought irony will be when Board of Directors themselves are outsourced, and the company trades only on the stock exchange of the country that bought them for the bargain price of a few subsidised workers.
Cost can favour lower-efficiency silicas
on
Solar Window Panes
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· Score: 1
I read in Scientific American some few years back about amorphous silicate solar cells -- basically, solar cells on glass. Efficiencies were much lower than standard silicon based solar cells -- the microreceptor failure rate was much higher, but the cost per square metre was not a lot more expensive than ordinary window glass. Has anything been done in that direction lately?
I think you missed a key point - he's not talking about mileage, he's talking about a REALTIME miles-per-gallon display. That is the instantaneous mpg your vehicle is traveling at a moment in time. I have a 2000 Jetta with every option, and unless he added it afterwards, your brother does NOT have this option.:)
Um, realtime MPG displays have been around for at least one geological epoch. Of course they were analog items though -- based on manifold vacuum. Worked.
Is this equivalent to "certifiably Communist-free", or "certifiably Jew-free"?
Jeez, people, do we have to repeat the whole 20th century again?
It seems to me that good-sounding policies underpinned by vague premises, broad (though justifiable) fear are symptomatic of a trend toward heavy, popular repression of some single group of people, chosen because they're an easy scapegoat. The next logical step would be global-scale ethnic cleansing, wouldn't it?
I have no interest in supporting terrorism in any form, but I worry that we'll embrace a cure worse than the disease by painting a people with too broad a brush.
Terrorists are animals, but let's not turn the tag into an easy way to lump a whole people into an easy-to-nuke corral.
Treating any group of people as objects is the first step toward the new Auschwitz.
Java's only real problem is Sun
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Java vs .NET
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· Score: 1
Java's problem is neither it's own complexity nor competition with.NET -- the real challenge is that it's tied to Sun Microsystems, not the healthiest of companies.
Sun has some nice hardware -- acquired from Cray -- but a business model based on selling an OS and application suites available elsewhere for free is badly flawed.
Check the SUNM stock price over the last few years, and tell me who will manage J2EE when the company that owns the standard falls off a cliff?
Actually, they'll save about $1.5B in licensing costs over three years, by my last count. I know that they'll be wanting to slow down the replacement rate of their 45,000 desktops by going thin client.
A huge amount of stuff is going to need to be converted to a web services architecture, so I suspect they'll need to spend big to save big; that means work for internal developers, big time. Since they've been so COTS oriented they have a lot fewer real programmers than they need.
I've worked there, and I know a lot of projects are constantly being re-written because of slow waves of moderninsing change across their architecture, sort of like painting the Sydney Harbour Bridge -- finish at one end and you're ready to start on the other again. They've got so far to go before they look like a coherent services firm that only a standards-based WS buildout on their architecture holds any hope.
It can actually be fairly cheap to launch from the moon, once you've covered the capital costs of setting up the launcher. You don't have to launch straight up; a tangent to the surface would do nicely. A very long solar-powered linear accelerator is practical on the lunar surface, because there's no air to provide drag. You might even be able to supercool / superconduct the electromagnets by tapping into the ground in a shadow zone. Not new, either -- read your Heinlein.
Um yes, but a bit simplistic. Clusters share locks, require fast IO (shared backplane sometimes) to share duplicate lock tables, can handle stateful transactions well. Database servers. Load-balanced servers (e.g. web servers) use slower, cheaper, often client based methods for maintaining state (i.e. session cookies). There are some very good transaction managers for PC's (Tuxedo, etc.). Read up on OLTP for a real dose of speed.
Forgot to mention - hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico.
I'm probably too far away now to get sued, but I won't post the customer's name anyway. They're the firm who put their largest domestic air conditioner into the little warehouse computer room. Right BTU count, etc. Didn't work terribly well though -- kept heating the place up. They'd mounted the air intake in the same room with the outflow, no vents. Cool - not.
Working at (now defunct) Logisticon in Sunnyvale I worked on a General Automation mini, a GA 16/440 with the unfortunate front label "Jumbo GA". The Jumboga ran on about 600 thousand lines of Fortran II with a structured preprocessor.
One morning on new year's day about 2am, celebrating a delivery with a few beers at Denny's (no life) my support chief and I were well into our cups when the pager started spinning on the table. An hour later after talking to the less than totally clued user (try phone diagnosis with nothing but a hex keypad at the other end) at the other end of the phone in Florida, I determined it really was a hardware problem and handed the phone back to Mike. After trying to convince the operator that she didn't have to worry, he'd send an engineer out on the next flight & it was all paid for etc. she said no, you can't fly an engineer into Miami.
"Why not?" the innocent question.
"The airports are closed. In fact, there's two feet of water in the computer room right now."
OK to e-mail me for corroboration, I will back the story up with further detail if needed.
I remember in the early days of Vax/VMS (almost a mainframe) there was a sysgen parameter called "IOTA", an invented statistic that accounted for CPU time from asynch QIO's out of (billable) process band. The metric was listed as "microfortnights", or one millionth of a two-week pay cycle.
Incidentally, there were a lot of VMS sysgen parameters and data structures that made it into WNT, which was only a single-letter increment per character after all. Not strange, same architect -- but I wish Dave Cutler had thought to retain DCL, batch queues and ACL's.
Reminds me of a quote in the Malloreon. Belgarath had just morphed from being a large pike: "Fish don't eat because they're hungry. Fish eat to keep other fish from getting the food."
Maybe Microsoft isn't really hungry, just subsidises all that software to keep the churlish SME's from making a buck.
Common theme in good SF. Study Niven, Heinlein for some good insights.
Question: since an elevator would be tethered, does this affect the minimum stable height? Would you have to go all the way to normal geosync orbit? Remember vacuum is only 100 miles up or so, you could find a safe desert anchor point for that sort of length.
Would be interesting to know if we'd end up with a permanent oscillation, sort of a Foucalt pendulum effect. Anybody know?
Laser systems are already shooting down missles, ref earlier/.
Slashdot Mirror
BA's become worth their weight in gold, like good programmers once were. Naturally, they'll be a candidate for overseas outsourcing themselves when they become such a readily identifiable cost.
Next step, the entire group will be outsourced to a third party vendor. From there, the division.
The most finely wrought irony will be when Board of Directors themselves are outsourced, and the company trades only on the stock exchange of the country that bought them for the bargain price of a few subsidised workers.
I read in Scientific American some few years back about amorphous silicate solar cells -- basically, solar cells on glass. Efficiencies were much lower than standard silicon based solar cells -- the microreceptor failure rate was much higher, but the cost per square metre was not a lot more expensive than ordinary window glass. Has anything been done in that direction lately?
Truth is, Spider Robinson is a science and science fiction fan who writes literature.
Um, realtime MPG displays have been around for at least one geological epoch. Of course they were analog items though -- based on manifold vacuum. Worked.
I guess that's cool if you want to live in an anger-based economy.
Jeez, people, do we have to repeat the whole 20th century again?
It seems to me that good-sounding policies underpinned by vague premises, broad (though justifiable) fear are symptomatic of a trend toward heavy, popular repression of some single group of people, chosen because they're an easy scapegoat. The next logical step would be global-scale ethnic cleansing, wouldn't it?
I have no interest in supporting terrorism in any form, but I worry that we'll embrace a cure worse than the disease by painting a people with too broad a brush.
Terrorists are animals, but let's not turn the tag into an easy way to lump a whole people into an easy-to-nuke corral.
Treating any group of people as objects is the first step toward the new Auschwitz.
Sun has some nice hardware -- acquired from Cray -- but a business model based on selling an OS and application suites available elsewhere for free is badly flawed.
Check the SUNM stock price over the last few years, and tell me who will manage J2EE when the company that owns the standard falls off a cliff?
A huge amount of stuff is going to need to be converted to a web services architecture, so I suspect they'll need to spend big to save big; that means work for internal developers, big time. Since they've been so COTS oriented they have a lot fewer real programmers than they need.
I've worked there, and I know a lot of projects are constantly being re-written because of slow waves of moderninsing change across their architecture, sort of like painting the Sydney Harbour Bridge -- finish at one end and you're ready to start on the other again. They've got so far to go before they look like a coherent services firm that only a standards-based WS buildout on their architecture holds any hope.
It can actually be fairly cheap to launch from the moon, once you've covered the capital costs of setting up the launcher. You don't have to launch straight up; a tangent to the surface would do nicely. A very long solar-powered linear accelerator is practical on the lunar surface, because there's no air to provide drag. You might even be able to supercool / superconduct the electromagnets by tapping into the ground in a shadow zone. Not new, either -- read your Heinlein.
-- Eldergeek
It's a treat to beat your feet in the missedthepointand mod
Um yes, but a bit simplistic. Clusters share locks, require fast IO (shared backplane sometimes) to share duplicate lock tables, can handle stateful transactions well. Database servers. Load-balanced servers (e.g. web servers) use slower, cheaper, often client based methods for maintaining state (i.e. session cookies). There are some very good transaction managers for PC's (Tuxedo, etc.). Read up on OLTP for a real dose of speed.
Forgot to mention - hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. I'm probably too far away now to get sued, but I won't post the customer's name anyway. They're the firm who put their largest domestic air conditioner into the little warehouse computer room. Right BTU count, etc. Didn't work terribly well though -- kept heating the place up. They'd mounted the air intake in the same room with the outflow, no vents. Cool - not.
One morning on new year's day about 2am, celebrating a delivery with a few beers at Denny's (no life) my support chief and I were well into our cups when the pager started spinning on the table. An hour later after talking to the less than totally clued user (try phone diagnosis with nothing but a hex keypad at the other end) at the other end of the phone in Florida, I determined it really was a hardware problem and handed the phone back to Mike. After trying to convince the operator that she didn't have to worry, he'd send an engineer out on the next flight & it was all paid for etc. she said no, you can't fly an engineer into Miami.
"Why not?" the innocent question.
"The airports are closed. In fact, there's two feet of water in the computer room right now."
OK to e-mail me for corroboration, I will back the story up with further detail if needed.
Incidentally, there were a lot of VMS sysgen parameters and data structures that made it into WNT, which was only a single-letter increment per character after all. Not strange, same architect -- but I wish Dave Cutler had thought to retain DCL, batch queues and ACL's.
Maybe Microsoft isn't really hungry, just subsidises all that software to keep the churlish SME's from making a buck.
Question: since an elevator would be tethered, does this affect the minimum stable height? Would you have to go all the way to normal geosync orbit? Remember vacuum is only 100 miles up or so, you could find a safe desert anchor point for that sort of length.
Would be interesting to know if we'd end up with a permanent oscillation, sort of a Foucalt pendulum effect. Anybody know?
Laser systems are already shooting down missles, ref earlier /.