Reasoning by analogy is always fraught with pitfalls.
Amen, brother. IBM thinks that if you replace 20-30 Intel CPUs , all running at 5% utilization, with a single zSeries CPU running at 85-90% utilization, you'll save money and aggravation. On the other hand, if those 20-30 Intel CPUs are rendering CGI for a film, or modeling a jet engine (and thus running near 100% load), a zSeries CPU would only be able to take on the work of 4-5 Intel CPUs, if that.
The problem with economies of scale, quite frankly, is that the concept doesn't scale. You go though an enormous hassle to implement something that will save you peanuts (relatively speaking). And every subsequent EoS gets you less and less of an edge.
Beware of getting locked into a solution that forces you to trade flexibility for a temporary speed/price advantage. Mainframes depreciate at just the same price of PCs, but when you no longer need it, the mainframe can't easily be recycled as a cheap testing machine or be given to a local school.
I think you don't get the gift culture. IBM use the little coder's code, the little coder use IBM code, everybody is happy about it ! That's the point of open-Source : sharing. It goes both way.
That hasn't worked in 90% of the cases. In most cases, the company contributes some software, the OSS community uses it for free, all the time bragging about how the company should be grateful to them, the company starts to lose money and they come out with a non-free special edition, the OSS community gets bitter and puts out a 100% free version, and the company goes out of business.
As for IBM, they are not the first to try to ride the OSS bucking bronco. We shall see what there attitude is in a few years. This article (well page 7 at least) reminded me of the infamous Netscape list of business cases that was posted to/. maybe 4-5 years ago. I think at least that IBM is more cynical than that. I also find it funny that the author even cited VA Linux in its list of business cases.
Hehe... this should be funny. Slashdotters explaining business cases. (Because when I'm looking for business advice, Slashdotters are always the first ones I turn to.) Let me guess... in 50 years, we'll be arguing on/. about whether companies can "own" an asteroid.
They plan to cut IT costs in half, but are still keeping some servers running NT and Solaris. Plus there is the cost of hardware, bandwidth, etc. So how much of the $750 million do they plan to spend on OSS?
MS may never give us open source/libre software, but if they produce good software vs "good enough" software, the world will be that much better.
Hey wait, isn't that MS's current advertising catchphrase? (at least on the radio)
"You know the type. Everything's good enough. No matter what the problem is, it's good enough. But while that approach may be okay for an old AC unit, it's definitely not okay for an OS. Now's the time to upgrade to Windows XP professional."
Little do you know, but the real prize is RMS coming to your front door with the FSF Source Patrol van, carrying an oversized copy of the GPL.
That would be funny... especially if you lived in Norway or something. "Hi, this is Richard Stallman. I just spent 15 hours and $5,000 travelling across the world to give you this $300 check."
Seriously... the top prize is $2,000. A decent programmer makes that in a week. This contest is lame.
I wonder why doesn't some philanthropist wanting to donate to charity or some rich guy wanting to support Linux just give a couple of hundred thousand dollars, or may be a few millions, in prize money - so that it can support a critical mass of programmers that can devote a decent amount of time
It's common sense. Most people with $1 million to spare didn't get rich by giving their money away. Also, very few of them got rich by giving away their product for free.
Thanks... I was trying to figure out whether this was the EFF lawyer I saw make an ass of herself on CNN a few weeks ago defending file sharing, and it was.
I have to say, I always thought that being a lawyer required a modicum of public speaking skills, but she has none. She stuttered incoherently for a couple of minutes and made the RIAA guy look good.
The key to being successful is networking. Quick tip for those with a bit of free time. Pick up a networking book such as Masters of Networking. Figure out who you know and who you can sell to. Put yourself in situations where you are forced to meet new people - preferably 10 a day. This is not selling in the pure sense. It's not cold calling. Just go and get involved in activities that involve other business people.
The problem with this approach is, quite frankly, that it's a lot of work. A couple of years ago, I was working 8 or 9 hours a day and the rest of my time was free. I didn't have to go to any boring social events or pretend to be interested in some guy's life story. Now you're telling me that I should be spending most of my free time digging up leads just so that I can spend the rest of it working? No thanks. I'd rather be unemployed.
Not that networking doesn't work. (I found my current job through a friend of a friend.) But I didn't have to go around selling myself to do it. Basically: do a good job, earn the respect of your peers, be friendly towards your co-workers, don't get involved in office politics. When an opportunity comes along, your friends will recommend you.
From what I remember, you can learn everything you would *want* to know about a course just by reading a book. What you often can't learn is what you *need* to know (i.e. what's going to be on the exam).
Of course it is fully possible that they expect you to work 70 hours per week for the price of 40. This is against labour laws, so they're not going to admit it.
You need to do what others have suggested, which is to explain that the work is not doable in 40 hours per week, so they need to either hire someone else or prioritize the work. If they do so, fine. If not, they may be forced to admit that they require you to work 70 hours a week, in which case you have something to hang over their heads (at least until Dubya amends the law or something). If they lay you off, that's fine, but you probably don't want to quit or get fired with cause.
If you are going to lump all women over the age of 18 together and compare that to middle school and high school boys, I guess you could say that the numbers add up in favor of the disproportionately large population.
I read the story and then immediately checked the comments, expecting this to be pointed out within the first 2-3 posts, with the usual complaints about the editors being incompetant. I find it pretty disturbing that no one bothered to point this out until now.
What, a bad astronomy site with no Velikovsky links? Velikovsky was a famous crank who believed that many important historical events can be explained by near collisions with Mars and Venus. For example, when Moses led his people out of Egypt, one of the ten plagues was that the rivers ran red with blood. Naturally, Velikovsky argued that this was actually Mars dust. He became famous partly because Einstein actually bothered to reply to his letters.
To some extent, regexps suffer from the same problem many Free Software projects do, and it's that a lot of people simply don't want to get very far along the learning curve. Imagine how much efficiency could be gained from teaching at least some basic regexp skills to secretaries, just to mention one example. Actually, many of us who use regexps everyday, still do it poorly sometimes.
Or maybe the problem is that regexp syntax is just ridiculous? I would describe myself as a reluctant hacker. I create scripts to optimize routine tasks, not because it saves me time, but because I dislike mundane tasks. It rarely saves me time in the long run because the script never works the first time (or the second, or the third).
All these hacker utilities, from regexp to bash, they all trade off obfuscation in favour of saving keystrokes. Certain characters need to be escaped in some circumstances and not in others. (Even worse is when you want to write a script to create a regexp.) Compare this to C strings, where only two printable characters need to be escaped.
It is possible that the value is available but the distribution system for the wealth breaks down. That's sort of what happened during the great depression.
The profit is only going to come from the industries where there is a barrier to entry.
Shouldn't that be Some or Most/. users can't handle fuzzy logic? The way you've got it now sounds very Aristotlian. And wrong.
Whatever. It's basically a headline, like in a newspaper. It's supposed to grab your attention so you read the rest of the story. The headline is not supposed to be the story.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems to me that your perception of economics is stuck at a permanent grade 2 level.
-a
Reasoning by analogy is always fraught with pitfalls.
Amen, brother.
IBM thinks that if you replace 20-30 Intel CPUs , all running at 5% utilization, with a single zSeries CPU running at 85-90% utilization, you'll save money and aggravation. On the other hand, if those 20-30 Intel CPUs are rendering CGI for a film, or modeling a jet engine (and thus running near 100% load), a zSeries CPU would only be able to take on the work of 4-5 Intel CPUs, if that.
The problem with economies of scale, quite frankly, is that the concept doesn't scale. You go though an enormous hassle to implement something that will save you peanuts (relatively speaking). And every subsequent EoS gets you less and less of an edge.
Beware of getting locked into a solution that forces you to trade flexibility for a temporary speed/price advantage. Mainframes depreciate at just the same price of PCs, but when you no longer need it, the mainframe can't easily be recycled as a cheap testing machine or be given to a local school.
-a
I think you don't get the gift culture. IBM use the little coder's code, the little coder use IBM code, everybody is happy about it ! That's the point of open-Source : sharing. It goes both way.
That hasn't worked in 90% of the cases. In most cases, the company contributes some software, the OSS community uses it for free, all the time bragging about how the company should be grateful to them, the company starts to lose money and they come out with a non-free special edition, the OSS community gets bitter and puts out a 100% free version, and the company goes out of business.
As for IBM, they are not the first to try to ride the OSS bucking bronco. We shall see what there attitude is in a few years. This article (well page 7 at least) reminded me of the infamous Netscape list of business cases that was posted to
-a
Hehe... this should be funny. Slashdotters explaining business cases. (Because when I'm looking for business advice, Slashdotters are always the first ones I turn to.) Let me guess... in 50 years, we'll be arguing on /. about whether companies can "own" an asteroid.
-a
Hmm... makes sense. And then, instead of Mandake ProSuite, we can have Womandrake ProStitute.
(That's how I read it as I was scrolling past anyway.)
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They plan to cut IT costs in half, but are still keeping some servers running NT and Solaris. Plus there is the cost of hardware, bandwidth, etc. So how much of the $750 million do they plan to spend on OSS?
-a
MS may never give us open source/libre software, but if they produce good software vs "good enough" software, the world will be that much better.
Hey wait, isn't that MS's current advertising catchphrase? (at least on the radio)
"You know the type. Everything's good enough. No matter what the problem is, it's good enough. But while that approach may be okay for an old AC unit, it's definitely not okay for an OS. Now's the time to upgrade to Windows XP professional."
-a
Hey, right. That would be like delousing it.
-a
Little do you know, but the real prize is RMS coming to your front door with the FSF Source Patrol van, carrying an oversized copy of the GPL.
That would be funny... especially if you lived in Norway or something. "Hi, this is Richard Stallman. I just spent 15 hours and $5,000 travelling across the world to give you this $300 check."
Seriously... the top prize is $2,000. A decent programmer makes that in a week. This contest is lame.
-a
I wonder why doesn't some philanthropist wanting to donate to charity or some rich guy wanting to support Linux just give a couple of hundred thousand dollars, or may be a few millions, in prize money - so that it can support a critical mass of programmers that can devote a decent amount of time
It's common sense. Most people with $1 million to spare didn't get rich by giving their money away. Also, very few of them got rich by giving away their product for free.
-a
Thanks... I was trying to figure out whether this was the EFF lawyer I saw make an ass of herself on CNN a few weeks ago defending file sharing, and it was.
I have to say, I always thought that being a lawyer required a modicum of public speaking skills, but she has none. She stuttered incoherently for a couple of minutes and made the RIAA guy look good.
-a
The key to being successful is networking. Quick tip for those with a bit of free time. Pick up a networking book such as Masters of Networking. Figure out who you know and who you can sell to. Put yourself in situations where you are forced to meet new people - preferably 10 a day. This is not selling in the pure sense. It's not cold calling. Just go and get involved in activities that involve other business people.
The problem with this approach is, quite frankly, that it's a lot of work. A couple of years ago, I was working 8 or 9 hours a day and the rest of my time was free. I didn't have to go to any boring social events or pretend to be interested in some guy's life story. Now you're telling me that I should be spending most of my free time digging up leads just so that I can spend the rest of it working? No thanks. I'd rather be unemployed.
Not that networking doesn't work. (I found my current job through a friend of a friend.) But I didn't have to go around selling myself to do it. Basically: do a good job, earn the respect of your peers, be friendly towards your co-workers, don't get involved in office politics. When an opportunity comes along, your friends will recommend you.
-a
From what I remember, you can learn everything you would *want* to know about a course just by reading a book. What you often can't learn is what you *need* to know (i.e. what's going to be on the exam).
-a
IANAL, but your unfounded speculation and innuendo is no match for mine.
-a
As I recall, the exempt status is based mostly on annual salary, although Dubya is trying to change that.
-a
Of course it is fully possible that they expect you to work 70 hours per week for the price of 40. This is against labour laws, so they're not going to admit it.
You need to do what others have suggested, which is to explain that the work is not doable in 40 hours per week, so they need to either hire someone else or prioritize the work. If they do so, fine. If not, they may be forced to admit that they require you to work 70 hours a week, in which case you have something to hang over their heads (at least until Dubya amends the law or something). If they lay you off, that's fine, but you probably don't want to quit or get fired with cause.
-a
If you are going to lump all women over the age of 18 together and compare that to middle school and high school boys, I guess you could say that the numbers add up in favor of the disproportionately large population.
I read the story and then immediately checked the comments, expecting this to be pointed out within the first 2-3 posts, with the usual complaints about the editors being incompetant. I find it pretty disturbing that no one bothered to point this out until now.
-a
What, a bad astronomy site with no Velikovsky links? Velikovsky was a famous crank who believed that many important historical events can be explained by near collisions with Mars and Venus. For example, when Moses led his people out of Egypt, one of the ten plagues was that the rivers ran red with blood. Naturally, Velikovsky argued that this was actually Mars dust. He became famous partly because Einstein actually bothered to reply to his letters.
-a
To some extent, regexps suffer from the same problem many Free Software projects do, and it's that a lot of people simply don't want to get very far along the learning curve. Imagine how much efficiency could be gained from teaching at least some basic regexp skills to secretaries, just to mention one example. Actually, many of us who use regexps everyday, still do it poorly sometimes.
Or maybe the problem is that regexp syntax is just ridiculous? I would describe myself as a reluctant hacker. I create scripts to optimize routine tasks, not because it saves me time, but because I dislike mundane tasks. It rarely saves me time in the long run because the script never works the first time (or the second, or the third).
All these hacker utilities, from regexp to bash, they all trade off obfuscation in favour of saving keystrokes. Certain characters need to be escaped in some circumstances and not in others. (Even worse is when you want to write a script to create a regexp.) Compare this to C strings, where only two printable characters need to be escaped.
-a
It is possible that the value is available but the distribution system for the wealth breaks down. That's sort of what happened during the great depression.
The profit is only going to come from the industries where there is a barrier to entry.
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Shouldn't that be Some or Most
Whatever. It's basically a headline, like in a newspaper. It's supposed to grab your attention so you read the rest of the story. The headline is not supposed to be the story.
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And my point is that the crash of 29 was really very similar to the crash of 01. "Irrational exuberance," anyone?
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be joining all the others looking for work - trying to compete with India and China.
And whose fault is that?
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Ummm.... What was the rumour in 1929? The rumour that the value of every company was inflated beyond its worth?
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This is exactly why people shouldn't run public services for free.
How come no one is complaining about the lack of security in NTP?
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