The problem with canning the program is that it's been done already, several times.
This is about the 15th time the IRS has tried to "modernize" their computer systems and failed in the attempt, wasting Billions each time.
Every couple of years they change the old project's goals and pitch a new one to Congress asking for more money.
The only easy solution is to abolish the income tax and with it the IRS. All the rest of the possible solution sets include trying to get unmotivated IRS bureaucrats to actually do their job without falling afoul of civil service union regulations, a task that may not be possible.
Commodore BBSs were such fun for cracker sysops. Since they stored user passwords in the clear for any sysop to read, once you had sysop access on two different popular BBSs, you could tell who used the same password on all their accounts everywhere.
Once upon a time, there was even a BBS owner/sysop I knew who didn't bother to use more than one password.
Need I say more?
Re:The bad side of course...
on
Weapons in Space
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Education is the responsibility of the child's parents, not the State or the national government.
The other problem is that the UN is by no stretch of the imagination a "global government". It's a club for dictators to grand-stand while the powers from the end of WW II watch with their veto powers.
The market wasn't deregulated at all, the monopoly was. Don't confuse a monopoly industry with a market. There isn't currently a market for cable tv in most parts of the U.S., although having a minor market for tv in general (adding a couple satellite providers) has helped.
This guy (grandparent poster) knows even less about Windows than he does about OpenBSD.
[...] he decided to change all of the Computer Administrator passwords on a few of the XP Professional boxes sitting around in the server room. This caused absolute havoc, as Dell had failed to send along administrator passwords for the new boxes. Our company could not make use of these computers for three days. It took Dell that long to get us the administrator passwords.
So, they got "new boxes" from Dell without administrator passwords and Dell could send them administrator passwords after their employee had changed them? My head spins with the multitude of ways this story contradicts itself.
New boxes don't come with administrator passwords preset.
If they did, their employee couldn't have changed them without knowing them.
If they are new boxes, why would it cause havoc?
If they're smart enough to use OpenBSD, why aren't they smart enough to know to just burn something like knoppix and boot the servers that way to reset the local administrator password?
Or, since they were "new" boxes, just boot from the install media, format and reload them?
Does this guy really think people are dumb enough to fall for such obvious inconsistencies?
Industries that turned into re-dos of old ideas with only a small number of new ideas long ago, but don't seem to have hurt very much financially from it:
Books Movies Music Magazines
I'm sure you can think of even more if you take a few minutes. I think the article is a little premature to say the gaming industry will shrink if we don't see more creativity. They don't seem to have any evidence of that beyond one developer's opinion. If you look at the hard numbers, I'd suspect that the overall industry continues to grow as more PCs and game consoles are sold to new households around the world.
Telephone: Every heard of a public utility commission? That's the government group you have to get permission from to start a phone company. They'll be the ones telling you what services you are allowed to offer at what rates, if they allow you to do anything at all. Long-distance telephone has gotten better recently, but while deregulation efforts have started in some areas to get rid of the monopoly, in many parts of the U.S. there is only one choice for your phone company simply because the government still says so.
Electricity: Very similar to the phone monopolies, a little deregulation in some aspects, but still largely a monopoly with no choice of local carrier enforced by the government. In fact, in many places, electricity and water are provided directly by the local government.
Cable: Sorry, but if you tried to start a new local cable company, your local government would stop you. A quick Google on "cable television monopoly" reveals plenty of sources. Try the one from an attorney challenging cities ability to award a cable monopoly.
All of your listed companies except Microsoft are government created monopolies. Microsoft is easily the most customer-oriented of your list, even if in some ways the screw people.
So blame the main source of the problem, too much government intervention and control, leading to bought politicians to excercise it on someone's behalf.
The problem is that as we allow the government to gain more and more power over our lives, people who want to use that power for something are more and more attracted to controlling the government and it's leaders.
The excuse is always that the government will be able to "help" solve a problem, but just needs to excercise some more power, so that well-intentioned individuals go along with it. Of course, then they go home and those with vital interests at stake take over the power-wielding functionaries.
The only long-term solution is to strictly only allow a government enough power to enforce basic protection of individual freedoms and nothing more. Otherwise, the excercise of power "for good" invariably becomes simply the excercise of power for the highest bidder or the most interested.
Right, because after all, the U.S. Agriculture Department says America has 749 million acres of forestland. In 1920, we had 735 million acres of forest.
Only 7% of current U.S. forestland has been planted by man, so I suppose that only leaves 687 million acres of old growth forest. Yep, sure sounds like it's almost all gone.
You'd be surprised. I've read about 8000-9000 books and still manage to average one or two a day even with working full-time and posting on slashdot. (Ok, sometimes the posting overlapps with the working full-time...)
Of course, I tend to read in the bath (showers don't work as well), while eating, while exercising, pretty much anytime my mind doesn't have something else to think about.
That being said, I hate reading books on a computer screen and suspect this device won't be much of an improvement.
Yeah, lazy (which isn't always a bad thing, some kinds of laziness are good for efficiency) programmers who fly by the seat of their pants trying not to get too close to the sun (ok, a couple cliches and puns there...) have always existed, but now they get to call themselves XtremeProgramming specialists on their resume.
The resume they'll need badly once they manage to almost fully implement XP...
If you can be 100% sure that you can deliver to requirements in 2 months, but estimate 4 months, that's a lie, but any experienced project manager knows that people (developers and management and sales) tend to seriously underestimate how long things actually take.
You don't say "Yeah, it's _possible_ to do it in 1 month, but not likely." if you can't be sure of that, because they are going to hold you to your estimate. Doubling the people's involved original estimate seems to generally work to get a realistic estimate.
The grandparent comment was directed to the reality that in many companies, they're going to have set the deadline before they ask for an estimate. Then when your realistic estimate based on the original scope is longer than they thought, they're going to tell everyone to work weekends and evenings to get it done and sacrifice any quality along the way. Of course, they may actually agree that maybe the scope is too large for they deadline they set...
The 60% cut isn't because the original estimate wasn't realistic, but that the deadline can be set in stone by promises from management or sales, regardless of your realistic estimate.
If you gave them a realistic estimate in the first place, the pressure will still be there to cut it, but at least you can start pointing out the loss in quality, scope, etc... that is due to the deadline they commited themselves to. If you squeezed all the original guesses about time into a schedule that if everything goes 100% perfectly you'll be able to maybe meet, but it's not realistic to expect, you and the project are totally screwed because they won't believe that you have to cut anything to meet their deadline, instead it will all come out when the QA and bug fix ends up starting as their deadline comes due.
It might be interesting to combine this with the systems of broadband over power lines currently in use.
Having sensors at remote locations that can use the power lines themselves to communicate with each other much like routers do over the larger Internet would seem to make this more feasible and not a toy.
Of course, broadband to your sensor might just encourage the crackers to attack them as noted in earlier posts...
I mean, after all, anyone who can figure Photoshop out can probably figure out any other program in existence.
(Yeah, this is a backwards way of saying that I think Photoshop has always been the least intuitive program I've ever used, somehow managing to beat the various old DOS CAD/CAM software for that title.)
The smallest unit of code that is going to be monitored will always take about two weeks. Ask any contractor.
When you get the final total adding all those two weeks up, double that and present it as your estimate of the development time. Allow an identical amount of time for QA testing and bug fixes.
Then, when the PHBs tell you that you have to cut 60% from the schedule you came up with, you'll still be able to get the job done and have time for proper QA and bug fixing.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with canning the program is that it's been done already, several times.
This is about the 15th time the IRS has tried to "modernize" their computer systems and failed in the attempt, wasting Billions each time.
Every couple of years they change the old project's goals and pitch a new one to Congress asking for more money.
The only easy solution is to abolish the income tax and with it the IRS. All the rest of the possible solution sets include trying to get unmotivated IRS bureaucrats to actually do their job without falling afoul of civil service union regulations, a task that may not be possible.
Commodore BBSs were such fun for cracker sysops. Since they stored user passwords in the clear for any sysop to read, once you had sysop access on two different popular BBSs, you could tell who used the same password on all their accounts everywhere.
Once upon a time, there was even a BBS owner/sysop I knew who didn't bother to use more than one password.
Need I say more?
Education is the responsibility of the child's parents, not the State or the national government.
Nice to see privacy winning one for a change.
Now if we can get the U.S. Supreme court to rule the same way.
After all, they've been using foreign court rulings more and more recently.
The other problem is that the UN is by no stretch of the imagination a "global government". It's a club for dictators to grand-stand while the powers from the end of WW II watch with their veto powers.
The market wasn't deregulated at all, the monopoly was. Don't confuse a monopoly industry with a market. There isn't currently a market for cable tv in most parts of the U.S., although having a minor market for tv in general (adding a couple satellite providers) has helped.
So, they got "new boxes" from Dell without administrator passwords and Dell could send them administrator passwords after their employee had changed them? My head spins with the multitude of ways this story contradicts itself.
New boxes don't come with administrator passwords preset.
If they did, their employee couldn't have changed them without knowing them.
If they are new boxes, why would it cause havoc?
If they're smart enough to use OpenBSD, why aren't they smart enough to know to just burn something like knoppix and boot the servers that way to reset the local administrator password?
Or, since they were "new" boxes, just boot from the install media, format and reload them?
Does this guy really think people are dumb enough to fall for such obvious inconsistencies?
Yeah, I tried to call 911 to report the outage, but couldn't get through for some reason...
Industries that turned into re-dos of old ideas with only a small number of new ideas long ago, but don't seem to have hurt very much financially from it:
Books
Movies
Music
Magazines
I'm sure you can think of even more if you take a few minutes. I think the article is a little premature to say the gaming industry will shrink if we don't see more creativity. They don't seem to have any evidence of that beyond one developer's opinion. If you look at the hard numbers, I'd suspect that the overall industry continues to grow as more PCs and game consoles are sold to new households around the world.
I don't live in Utah, but I know plenty of people who aren't happy with Hatch who do. At least Levitt is out of there.
Hatch spends more time co-sponsoring bills with Teddy Kennedy than working on his constituents issues.
Telephone: Every heard of a public utility commission? That's the government group you have to get permission from to start a phone company. They'll be the ones telling you what services you are allowed to offer at what rates, if they allow you to do anything at all. Long-distance telephone has gotten better recently, but while deregulation efforts have started in some areas to get rid of the monopoly, in many parts of the U.S. there is only one choice for your phone company simply because the government still says so.
Electricity: Very similar to the phone monopolies, a little deregulation in some aspects, but still largely a monopoly with no choice of local carrier enforced by the government. In fact, in many places, electricity and water are provided directly by the local government.
Cable: Sorry, but if you tried to start a new local cable company, your local government would stop you. A quick Google on "cable television monopoly" reveals plenty of sources. Try the one from an attorney challenging cities ability to award a cable monopoly.
I'm just trying to figure out why this article is from the 332167 department....
There's another simularity you're missing.
All of your listed companies except Microsoft are government created monopolies. Microsoft is easily the most customer-oriented of your list, even if in some ways the screw people.
So blame the main source of the problem, too much government intervention and control, leading to bought politicians to excercise it on someone's behalf.
The problem is that as we allow the government to gain more and more power over our lives, people who want to use that power for something are more and more attracted to controlling the government and it's leaders.
The excuse is always that the government will be able to "help" solve a problem, but just needs to excercise some more power, so that well-intentioned individuals go along with it. Of course, then they go home and those with vital interests at stake take over the power-wielding functionaries.
The only long-term solution is to strictly only allow a government enough power to enforce basic protection of individual freedoms and nothing more. Otherwise, the excercise of power "for good" invariably becomes simply the excercise of power for the highest bidder or the most interested.
See The Road to Serfdom.
Right, because after all, the U.S. Agriculture Department says America has 749 million acres of forestland. In 1920, we had 735 million acres of forest.
Only 7% of current U.S. forestland has been planted by man, so I suppose that only leaves 687 million acres of old growth forest. Yep, sure sounds like it's almost all gone.
You'd be surprised. I've read about 8000-9000 books and still manage to average one or two a day even with working full-time and posting on slashdot. (Ok, sometimes the posting overlapps with the working full-time...)
I also run several book review websites, so may not be a typical example.
Of course, I tend to read in the bath (showers don't work as well), while eating, while exercising, pretty much anytime my mind doesn't have something else to think about.
That being said, I hate reading books on a computer screen and suspect this device won't be much of an improvement.
Yeah, lazy (which isn't always a bad thing, some kinds of laziness are good for efficiency) programmers who fly by the seat of their pants trying not to get too close to the sun (ok, a couple cliches and puns there...) have always existed, but now they get to call themselves XtremeProgramming specialists on their resume.
The resume they'll need badly once they manage to almost fully implement XP...
It's called setting proper expectations.
If you can be 100% sure that you can deliver to requirements in 2 months, but estimate 4 months, that's a lie, but any experienced project manager knows that people (developers and management and sales) tend to seriously underestimate how long things actually take.
You don't say "Yeah, it's _possible_ to do it in 1 month, but not likely." if you can't be sure of that, because they are going to hold you to your estimate. Doubling the people's involved original estimate seems to generally work to get a realistic estimate.
The grandparent comment was directed to the reality that in many companies, they're going to have set the deadline before they ask for an estimate. Then when your realistic estimate based on the original scope is longer than they thought, they're going to tell everyone to work weekends and evenings to get it done and sacrifice any quality along the way. Of course, they may actually agree that maybe the scope is too large for they deadline they set...
The 60% cut isn't because the original estimate wasn't realistic, but that the deadline can be set in stone by promises from management or sales, regardless of your realistic estimate.
If you gave them a realistic estimate in the first place, the pressure will still be there to cut it, but at least you can start pointing out the loss in quality, scope, etc... that is due to the deadline they commited themselves to. If you squeezed all the original guesses about time into a schedule that if everything goes 100% perfectly you'll be able to maybe meet, but it's not realistic to expect, you and the project are totally screwed because they won't believe that you have to cut anything to meet their deadline, instead it will all come out when the QA and bug fix ends up starting as their deadline comes due.
It might be interesting to combine this with the systems of broadband over power lines currently in use.
Having sensors at remote locations that can use the power lines themselves to communicate with each other much like routers do over the larger Internet would seem to make this more feasible and not a toy.
Of course, broadband to your sensor might just encourage the crackers to attack them as noted in earlier posts...
I think your study may have had a flawed premise.
I mean, after all, anyone who can figure Photoshop out can probably figure out any other program in existence.
(Yeah, this is a backwards way of saying that I think Photoshop has always been the least intuitive program I've ever used, somehow managing to beat the various old DOS CAD/CAM software for that title.)
Am I the only one who started picturing little lawn ornament men being caught in embarrassing positions?
Shades of Toy story....
Great, now I can't get the song
Does anybody really know what time it is? out of my head...
Simple rules of thumb.
The smallest unit of code that is going to be monitored will always take about two weeks. Ask any contractor.
When you get the final total adding all those two weeks up, double that and present it as your estimate of the development time. Allow an identical amount of time for QA testing and bug fixes.
Then, when the PHBs tell you that you have to cut 60% from the schedule you came up with, you'll still be able to get the job done and have time for proper QA and bug fixing.
With my magic desktop borders that expand as I scroll to the side, I want a mini-map so I can find stuff again!
Wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to just buy a multi-processor box, rather than invest in all this gear to make one cpu run even twice as fast?
I mean, there's only so far Hyperthreading will take you...