You're absolutely right. It's not FUD: training for a different platform is expensive.
In fact, that's exactly why a lot of companies are still using Windows 98. It works, and the cost of switching just isn't worth it.
However, as security issues add up and we decide we want new features, we're soon going to have the choice between Longhorn and Linux. I'm betting a lot of people, when forced to upgrade, will consider Linux.
Funny you should mention the HTML version. That guy Steve Fox you apparently work for had this to say in the first paragraph of the article:
I feel confident in predicting that our seventh annual compensation survey will be the most widely read, frequently downloaded, and broadly circulated article we'll publish all year. There's no voodoo involved in making such a prediction; according to our Web stats, the survey is the overwhelming traffic winner, year after year. After all, how much money you and your peers make -- and by extension, what you can hope to make in the future -- is a subject that never fails to fascinate.
Since you're on/., did you explain to him what 43k of html *100k readers does to your servers? Or that 3.4M*100k is more than you can shake a stick at? Can we safely assume he's a PHB, and didn't quite understand or care? I mean... the guy _knew_ there would be hordes of visitors- maybe he tuned out after that?
The productivity boost is by far the most important factor. Improving reading speed (and detecting typos in your code), even if you save 10 minutes a day... well, say a $60k base salary... 50 minutes * 48 weeks = 40 hours ==> $1,200.
What's the difference in cost between a CRT and an LCD?
Many workers also report far less eye strain with LCDs- I can stare at an LCD for hours, but 45 minutes max with a CRT. If a PHB wants to save pennies by not buying LCDs, they'll lose dollars on my productivity.
Also, if you want to look only at the energy costs, you should consider the cost of air-conditionning- CRTs produce much more heat. 100w of waste heat can cost more than 100w in HVAC to remove.
And then, if you have a UPS to buy, there's another little bit of money you can squeeze- say 200w to include some of the HVAC... per computer.
Last but not least, CRTs are more of an environmental hazard.
No knowledge worker should still be working with a CRT!
So, Al-Queda crashing a plane into the Pentagon would be one thing. Hell, crashing a plane into Wall Street would be an interesting move. But bringing down the WTC didn't actually accomplish anything; it was a symbolic strike. It was bearding the lion, so to speak. Well, all that usually gets you is a lion which is beardless, perhaps, but very, very pissed. And cold.
I'm sure that if they had targetted Wall Street, you'd be complaining that it was only a symbolic strike. I should remind you that many foreign corporations - including French ones- lost their entire presense on US soil. People did not hang out at the WTC for fun- they worked there. It had a strategic importance in the day-to-day business of the US economy, and IIRC, some intel operations. Therefore it could have given a military advantage.
It's not all about you, either. Targetting the WTC meant they could boost the morale of their combattants. That could make it militarily justified... though not morally so.
If the US hadn't bombed a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, or embassies, hospitals and media outlets... I'd have more sympathy. But as it is, the other side is fighting a lawless enemy that is willing to bomb their civilian infrastructure.
Don't confuse bombing City X to destroy the railyards, or the industrial factories, or the dam, or whatever, and bombing City X to kill civilians in an attempt to weaken their will to oppose you.
Unfortunately, to the victims, it's all the same.
Pfft... I'm not confusing them. There are shades of grey, to be sure. Neither side is good in this affair. If this was just about posturing and imposing your will, there would be no reason to make moral distinctions between psychological and industrial targets. As it is, WTC attacks are morally akin to Shock and Awe, yet war remains the supreme crime.
As someone who predicted terrorist attacks against the white house (by remote controlled plane, I thought...) one month before 9/11, let me tell you this: your country is so filled with people that are so damned self-righteous, that have no clue what the enemy wants (it isn't all that irrational), and are shockingly ignorant as to your vulnerability.... unless you guys wake up a bit and see it from a different perspective, you're pretty much doomed to see more attacks. And you can't possibly win against terrorists by becoming like them.
So maybe this is why I'm tearing my hair here... your distinctions between legit war and terrorism are like theological discussions of how many angels you can fit on a pin-head. They're going to get your country hurt, and some of us would rather that not happen. And believe you me, you are more vulnerable than most imagine.
9/11 I was surprised by the audacity and brilliance of the execution. I wasn't surprised like many of your country-folk that terrorists attacked, nor did I hold any absurd belief that it was because you're free and prosperous that people somehow hate you. I'll be surprised by the means, but not that they carried out another attack. Trans-Alaska pipeline? SPR? Dirty bomb? Those aren't even the most nightmarish!
Anyhow, I'll stop my rant now... must get to work and learn about XUL:)
There are a couple things in that test I don't like... 1- it's US based, and I answered as though I was in Canada for the first few questions. 2- It requires registration...
Whether the bombing was necessary is open to question.
Lots of infrastructure, but removing infrastructure is valid military strategy. Besides, it was shown both in the blitzes against Britan, and the firebombing of Dresden that, curiously enough, that sort of terror attack on civilian populaces simply doesn't really work.
Look, if it's militarily useless, it can't be valid military strategy. Have you any idea how many electric generation plants we bombed in Iraq in GW1, and ever since? Or water treatment plants, sewerage, hospitals, etc? Shock and Awe was more of the same against an already decimated infrastructure. If it had no military use, it was an attempt at posturing much like you describe it with wolves. Worse, it's militarily deadly if you later have to occupy the country: had the US not decimated the infrastructure, they might have been able to win the peace.
That's a very subjective viewpoint. Through diplomatic back-channels, it was communicated that Japan was ready to capitulate. Shock and Awe is another way to say terrorism. How many civilians? How much infrastructure was bombarded? Was not the objective to paralyze them through fear, aka terror?
The "terrorists" sought to demonstrat in 9/11 strikes that they had courage - which they claim you lack. They claim the people killed were incidental to the destruction of the symbols that were targetted.
War is politics by other means. You can always find justifications for your own side, and dismiss those of the adversary. Your first definition is 'bang-on'
Both figthing sides are terrorists and murderers.
Re:At least they didn't load them with bio-weapons
on
Japanese Balloon Battle
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It wasn't terrorism, it was war.
Who gets to decide whether something is a war or terrorism?
After 9/11, Bush talked about a crusade -a war, a religious war- and before 9/11 there had been attacks against the US. Al-Qaeda saw it as a war... a religious war.
So I guess all this is just OK, since it's not really terrorism, but just war, right?
I'm not saying this to troll, I just want to point out that language is an important part of this, and the definitions are fuzzy.
Trying to make a distinction between war and terrorism will lead us to a path of justifying mass murder that is meant to only kill, while condemning mass murder that is meant to paralyze by fear. You could say both feed the other, but they are not always very easily distinguished. Could we commit mass murder without scaring people? Will we really scare people if we reassure them we don't want to kill or hurt them?
It's a lot easier in my mind... I view war as inherently wrong, an obsolete way of dealing with conflicts, which are a natural part of human society. Not all conflicts are bad or avoidable, but organized violence shows a monumental failure to manage and/or transform them.
Besides, the re-training thing is just as bad when switching from Windows 98/NT to Windows XP anyway....
A very good point- switching to Longhorn is not going to be cheap either, so organizations might as well choose now to keep their options open.
It's not the change of OS that is most scary to me. It's thousands of users using a new productivity suite, and 7,000 macros that have to work like they did previously.
How will the 'traditional' vision/scope> requirements> features> >recode> retest> demo> cycle expand to include the user community in the financing?
Other people have suggested solutions that would include this before: The open code market was mentionned on slashdot a while back, and similar ideas were posted here as early as '99.
But NO... these people will use a bounty, leading to perhaps many people competing for a puny amount of cash -duplication, anyone? And who wants to bet we'll end up with horribly unmaintainable spaghetti code everyone would rather re-write from scratch than reverse engineer because it lacks comments? Haven't we all kvetched about the horrible code that was shipped out to meet deadline with no regards to readability? A bounty would only make this worse.
Interesting... that is indeed faster. Thanks for the tip!
I thought the following was equivalent to what you were proposing:
for (int i=0; i<n; i++)
{
str.append("hello\n".toCharArray());
}
But it's actually much slower than any solution except the original, whereas your solution -declaring a char[], then appending it- is some 20 milliseconds faster than simply appending the String. I thought it exceedingly weird, so I took a look at the source code for some of the classes involved.
public synchronized StringBuffer append(String str) {
if (str == null) {
str = String.valueOf(str);
}
int len = str.length();
int newcount = count + len;
if (newcount > value.length)
expandCapacity(newcount);
str.getChars(0, len, value, count);
count = newcount;
return this;
}
public synchronized StringBuffer append(char str[]) {
int len = str.length;
int newcount = count + len;
if (newcount > value.length)
expandCapacity(newcount);
System.arraycopy(str, 0, value, count, len);
count = newcount;
return this;
}
It's no wonder that appending a char[] is faster! Checking to see if a String is null (and re-casting as object and then appending "null" if it is) obviously slows things down. This may not be a surprise to you, but it was to me... and quite relevant since I have code that makes heavy use of StringBuffers in long loops, so this will come in handy.
Especially when opening a lot of sites in different tabs, it's annoying when some don't load and you can't just hit F5. That default really should be true.
The article mentions Lea modified the String concatenation code, although Java still lost to C++ in that test. He unfortunately didn't do a great job:
import java.io.*; import java.util.*;
public class strcat {
public static void main(String args[]) throws IOException {
int n = Integer.parseInt(args[0]);
StringBuffer str = new StringBuffer();
for (int i=0; i<n; i++) {
str.append("hello\n");
}
System.out.println(str.length());
} }
Instantiating the StringBuffer with an approximate size would prevent it from having to reassign a char array every time it runs out of space. new StringBuffer(n*6) for n=10000000 as used in his test should have a pretty large impact.
I could not run the test for 10M, but ran it for up to 1M. 541 milliseconds in one case, 280 in the other. Here's the code I used (I had to modify the timing cause I'm running XP):
public class Strcat2 {
public static void main(String args[]) throws IOException
{
long start, elapsed;
start = System.currentTimeMillis();
int n = Integer.parseInt(args[0]);
StringBuffer str = new StringBuffer(n*6);
for (int i=0; i<n; i++)
{
str.append("hello\n");
}
The only difference in the class Strcat besides the class name is the instantiation of StringBuffer.
NB: I'm not accusing the author of bias against Java, nor am I ignorant of the fact a bunch of/.'ers could kick my ass in C++ optimization. It would be interesting however to have a distributed benchmark, where in the true spirit of OSS we could fiddle with it until we could not wring any more performance gains.
Why are more and more people getting their news from amateur websites called blogs? Because they're fast, funny and totally biased
You have to hand it to them... even when they discover blogs, and in fact do a fairly good job of covering their history and name-dropping the most popular blogs, they still don't get the WHY. Le'ts break down the arguments from the byline:
FAST: If I want yesterday's news, I'll read a paper. If you read a blog, it's often the news that appeared in yesterday's newspaper. As for the time I spend reading/., it would be faster to read news.com.com every day. Either way, reading blogs is not a fast way of getting news.
FUNNY: Imagine a beowulf cluster in russia... well, ok, sometimes they're funny. Sure as hell is funnier than all the idiotic talking heads and pseudo-intellectual writings of Time. So I'll concede blogs as funnier than mainstream media.
TOTALLY BIASED: Russ Kick is biased if he shows photos of coffins but mainstream media's silence is a sign of impartiality? Pot, meet kettle:)
So the author gets a 1/3 in the byline. Some of the arguments in the article are shoddy too, but perhaps the most surreal thing was reading that "the little guy is a lot smarter than big media might have you think." Is that condescension masquerading as humility?
Just this week a local government department released an RFP for a high-value (>CAD$50k) project which requires exactly what EZRO offers. Odd, isn't it?
In the answer to this RFP, you must indicate if your solution already implements a series of features, or whether it can be accomplished in the next 3 months. So that's 3 months and at least $50k to add features to an OSS project...
It seems very odd to me that we should insist that it is the government that should release the software, when it is much simpler to sell them modifications to software that's already open.
I'm not 100% clear how to accomplish that goal yet.
Looking for RFP's to bid on doesn't give you much time to research existing projects and get used to the codebase and start contributing features. Trying to get a good comparison of various projects -assuming you managed to find enough to compare- is often like trying to understand theological arguments.
Alternatively, you could just specialize in or start an OSS project that you knew was going to be needed by many agencies (Collision information management system, electronic medical record...), get a team together and bid on all RFPs on the subject, starting with the ones requiring the least features/customization.
Either way, there are low-hanging fruits here where we can underbid the commercial vendors with technically superior solutions.
Has anyone tried this kind of approach? Are there any domains you know that are ripe for an OS solution?
{Dons asbestos underwear. It's only flamebait if you lack a sense of humour:P}
Imagine Cuba developping voting machines using OSS. And then offering technological assistance to the US.
I know this sounds crazy, but as it is the US leadership obviously doesn't seem terribly interested in the idea of having decent voting machines. Maybe they need to be shamed by another country like Cuba into having real elections:)
IANAL, but many statements in that forum appear libellous to me, although it falls short of actually telling people to go out and kill muslims.
I know muslims who are getting the hell out of the US because they've had it trying to explain to idiots that not all muslims are evil. Those are still teachable moments though...
As alex_tibbles pointed out to me: Or even better(?), check out Political Survey, the open source equivalent, where the methodology is open to all to inspect and criticise.
there is a difference between expressing anger and calling for killing everyone who has different views than yours. That's the kind of hate I was talking about.
You are not protected by the first amendment for blatant calls to murder. Not only does nothing need to be changed on the books, but people will be very concerned about any attempt at doing so, because it's easy to go towards a totalitarian state without noticing. Hell, I'd argue that the US is pretty damned close to that already.
This guy asks Dr. Badawi to respond to points if he comes across them. What ever happened to actually emailing or calling him? That Imam is not hard to reach; he teaches business and religion at St Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
For it should be clear by now that simply to assert flatly that the Qur'an teaches peace isn't enough: the people who really need convincing aren't Western non-Muslims, but the radical Muslims who are convinced that it teaches violence.
Wow, what a compelling argument! Which conveniently leaves out the fact that he teaches muslims every friday, and is constantly travelling around the world carrying that very message.
There are a bunch of people trying to paint all of Islam as a violent religion without looking at all the facts. To advance their arguments serves no purpose but to further confuse people and promote hate.
You don't have to be convicted of a crime to be deported. All it takes is a determination that your continued presence is not in the interests of the United States.
I'd like to know how the government determines this. Since fewer grad students are coming to study in the US, and fewer are staying after their studies, you're going to be in trouble. You'd figure the continued presence of someone finishing a PhD might actually be good for the economy...
Slashdot Mirror
You're absolutely right. It's not FUD: training for a different platform is expensive.
In fact, that's exactly why a lot of companies are still using Windows 98. It works, and the cost of switching just isn't worth it.
However, as security issues add up and we decide we want new features, we're soon going to have the choice between Longhorn and Linux. I'm betting a lot of people, when forced to upgrade, will consider Linux.
Since you're on
Meh, would have to disagree.
The productivity boost is by far the most important factor. Improving reading speed (and detecting typos in your code), even if you save 10 minutes a day... well, say a $60k base salary... 50 minutes * 48 weeks = 40 hours ==> $1,200.
What's the difference in cost between a CRT and an LCD?
Many workers also report far less eye strain with LCDs- I can stare at an LCD for hours, but 45 minutes max with a CRT. If a PHB wants to save pennies by not buying LCDs, they'll lose dollars on my productivity.
Also, if you want to look only at the energy costs, you should consider the cost of air-conditionning- CRTs produce much more heat. 100w of waste heat can cost more than 100w in HVAC to remove.
And then, if you have a UPS to buy, there's another little bit of money you can squeeze- say 200w to include some of the HVAC... per computer.
Last but not least, CRTs are more of an environmental hazard.
No knowledge worker should still be working with a CRT!
And I think some mods here need to get laid more often. OK, I know, this is
It's not all about you, either. Targetting the WTC meant they could boost the morale of their combattants. That could make it militarily justified... though not morally so.
If the US hadn't bombed a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, or embassies, hospitals and media outlets... I'd have more sympathy. But as it is, the other side is fighting a lawless enemy that is willing to bomb their civilian infrastructure.
Pfft... I'm not confusing them. There are shades of grey, to be sure. Neither side is good in this affair. If this was just about posturing and imposing your will, there would be no reason to make moral distinctions between psychological and industrial targets. As it is, WTC attacks are morally akin to Shock and Awe, yet war remains the supreme crime.
As someone who predicted terrorist attacks against the white house (by remote controlled plane, I thought...) one month before 9/11, let me tell you this: your country is so filled with people that are so damned self-righteous, that have no clue what the enemy wants (it isn't all that irrational), and are shockingly ignorant as to your vulnerability.... unless you guys wake up a bit and see it from a different perspective, you're pretty much doomed to see more attacks. And you can't possibly win against terrorists by becoming like them.
So maybe this is why I'm tearing my hair here... your distinctions between legit war and terrorism are like theological discussions of how many angels you can fit on a pin-head. They're going to get your country hurt, and some of us would rather that not happen. And believe you me, you are more vulnerable than most imagine.
9/11 I was surprised by the audacity and brilliance of the execution. I wasn't surprised like many of your country-folk that terrorists attacked, nor did I hold any absurd belief that it was because you're free and prosperous that people somehow hate you. I'll be surprised by the means, but not that they carried out another attack. Trans-Alaska pipeline? SPR? Dirty bomb? Those aren't even the most nightmarish!
Anyhow, I'll stop my rant now... must get to work and learn about XUL
There are a couple things in that test I don't like... 1- it's US based, and I answered as though I was in Canada for the first few questions. 2- It requires registration...
Whether the bombing was necessary is open to question.
Look, if it's militarily useless, it can't be valid military strategy. Have you any idea how many electric generation plants we bombed in Iraq in GW1, and ever since? Or water treatment plants, sewerage, hospitals, etc? Shock and Awe was more of the same against an already decimated infrastructure. If it had no military use, it was an attempt at posturing much like you describe it with wolves. Worse, it's militarily deadly if you later have to occupy the country: had the US not decimated the infrastructure, they might have been able to win the peace.
That's a very subjective viewpoint. Through diplomatic back-channels, it was communicated that Japan was ready to capitulate. Shock and Awe is another way to say terrorism. How many civilians? How much infrastructure was bombarded? Was not the objective to paralyze them through fear, aka terror?
The "terrorists" sought to demonstrat in 9/11 strikes that they had courage - which they claim you lack. They claim the people killed were incidental to the destruction of the symbols that were targetted.
War is politics by other means. You can always find justifications for your own side, and dismiss those of the adversary. Your first definition is 'bang-on'
Both figthing sides are terrorists and murderers.
After 9/11, Bush talked about a crusade -a war, a religious war- and before 9/11 there had been attacks against the US. Al-Qaeda saw it as a war... a religious war.
So I guess all this is just OK, since it's not really terrorism, but just war, right?
I'm not saying this to troll, I just want to point out that language is an important part of this, and the definitions are fuzzy.
Trying to make a distinction between war and terrorism will lead us to a path of justifying mass murder that is meant to only kill, while condemning mass murder that is meant to paralyze by fear. You could say both feed the other, but they are not always very easily distinguished. Could we commit mass murder without scaring people? Will we really scare people if we reassure them we don't want to kill or hurt them?
It's a lot easier in my mind... I view war as inherently wrong, an obsolete way of dealing with conflicts, which are a natural part of human society. Not all conflicts are bad or avoidable, but organized violence shows a monumental failure to manage and/or transform them.
It's not the change of OS that is most scary to me. It's thousands of users using a new productivity suite, and 7,000 macros that have to work like they did previously.
It would be nice if they actually did not require people register with them just to see what they have.
But NO... these people will use a bounty, leading to perhaps many people competing for a puny amount of cash -duplication, anyone? And who wants to bet we'll end up with horribly unmaintainable spaghetti code everyone would rather re-write from scratch than reverse engineer because it lacks comments? Haven't we all kvetched about the horrible code that was shipped out to meet deadline with no regards to readability? A bounty would only make this worse.
I thought the following was equivalent to what you were proposing:But it's actually much slower than any solution except the original, whereas your solution -declaring a char[], then appending it- is some 20 milliseconds faster than simply appending the String. I thought it exceedingly weird, so I took a look at the source code for some of the classes involved.It's no wonder that appending a char[] is faster! Checking to see if a String is null (and re-casting as object and then appending "null" if it is) obviously slows things down. This may not be a surprise to you, but it was to me... and quite relevant since I have code that makes heavy use of StringBuffers in long loops, so this will come in handy.
I guess I need to read source code more often
Thank you!
Especially when opening a lot of sites in different tabs, it's annoying when some don't load and you can't just hit F5. That default really should be true.
I could not run the test for 10M, but ran it for up to 1M. 541 milliseconds in one case, 280 in the other. Here's the code I used (I had to modify the timing cause I'm running XP):The only difference in the class Strcat besides the class name is the instantiation of StringBuffer.
NB: I'm not accusing the author of bias against Java, nor am I ignorant of the fact a bunch of
I really don't care whether C++ is faster than Java to execute, as long as my apps are fast enough.
FAST:
If I want yesterday's news, I'll read a paper. If you read a blog, it's often the news that appeared in yesterday's newspaper.
As for the time I spend reading
FUNNY:
Imagine a beowulf cluster in russia... well, ok, sometimes they're funny. Sure as hell is funnier than all the idiotic talking heads and pseudo-intellectual writings of Time. So I'll concede blogs as funnier than mainstream media.
TOTALLY BIASED:
Russ Kick is biased if he shows photos of coffins but mainstream media's silence is a sign of impartiality? Pot, meet kettle
So the author gets a 1/3 in the byline. Some of the arguments in the article are shoddy too, but perhaps the most surreal thing was reading that "the little guy is a lot smarter than big media might have you think." Is that condescension masquerading as humility?
Just this week a local government department released an RFP for a high-value (>CAD$50k) project which requires exactly what EZRO offers. Odd, isn't it?
In the answer to this RFP, you must indicate if your solution already implements a series of features, or whether it can be accomplished in the next 3 months. So that's 3 months and at least $50k to add features to an OSS project...
It seems very odd to me that we should insist that it is the government that should release the software, when it is much simpler to sell them modifications to software that's already open.
I'm not 100% clear how to accomplish that goal yet.
Looking for RFP's to bid on doesn't give you much time to research existing projects and get used to the codebase and start contributing features. Trying to get a good comparison of various projects -assuming you managed to find enough to compare- is often like trying to understand theological arguments.
Alternatively, you could just specialize in or start an OSS project that you knew was going to be needed by many agencies (Collision information management system, electronic medical record...), get a team together and bid on all RFPs on the subject, starting with the ones requiring the least features/customization.
Either way, there are low-hanging fruits here where we can underbid the commercial vendors with technically superior solutions.
Has anyone tried this kind of approach? Are there any domains you know that are ripe for an OS solution?
{Dons asbestos underwear. It's only flamebait if you lack a sense of humour :P}
:)
Imagine Cuba developping voting machines using OSS. And then offering technological assistance to the US.
I know this sounds crazy, but as it is the US leadership obviously doesn't seem terribly interested in the idea of having decent voting machines. Maybe they need to be shamed by another country like Cuba into having real elections
IANAL, but many statements in that forum appear libellous to me, although it falls short of actually telling people to go out and kill muslims.
I know muslims who are getting the hell out of the US because they've had it trying to explain to idiots that not all muslims are evil. Those are still teachable moments though...
As alex_tibbles pointed out to me:
Or even better(?), check out Political Survey, the open source equivalent, where the methodology is open to all to inspect and criticise.
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/
You are not protected by the first amendment for blatant calls to murder. Not only does nothing need to be changed on the books, but people will be very concerned about any attempt at doing so, because it's easy to go towards a totalitarian state without noticing. Hell, I'd argue that the US is pretty damned close to that already.
This guy asks Dr. Badawi to respond to points if he comes across them. What ever happened to actually emailing or calling him? That Imam is not hard to reach; he teaches business and religion at St Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Wow, what a compelling argument! Which conveniently leaves out the fact that he teaches muslims every friday, and is constantly travelling around the world carrying that very message.
There are a bunch of people trying to paint all of Islam as a violent religion without looking at all the facts. To advance their arguments serves no purpose but to further confuse people and promote hate.