Re:This sort of thing...
on
RIAA Sues a Child
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· Score: 2, Insightful
That is all cool and well, but in no way changes the fact that your previous statement is false.
Many people (I am not going to argue if it is the majority or not) who download stuff illegally, also buy music, and will even buy the exact music they downloaded. The consequence is that arguing that illegal downloads (see, I do call them illegal) always result in loss of income for record companies is wrong, and there are in fact signs that the opposite is true.
Stop confusing the issue by just dragging in new and unrelated things, the fact that a legal service exists that allows this in no way changes the consequences of illegal downloads, it merely gives an alternative for those who can use it.
Oh, and give me a break, I have to pay for record companies doing their promotion? I thought that that promotion is what they claim they need al this money for, so a sampling service that actually costs money is bullshot.
You of course ignore people who download music to sample it, and then go out and buy it when they like it. I do that, with me there are quite some more peope doing that, and research points at that that is not a small group either (as the GP already pointed out).
After all, it is just the VM implementor that needs to understand how to optimize the memory management, not the application developers.
They will still need some understanding of how it works, if they don't have that they are bound to use it in the most inefficient way possible...
So yes, where the time is spent is shifted but also the amount of total execution time spent on memory management can be reduced -- because the task is managed differently.
It is possible to do it more efficient with a GC when compared to a crappy non-GC based solution, but when you just write out what has to happen to make the GC possible, you will see that it is never the most efficient solution, and what is more, that the typical solution in C is often faster then the best optimized GC solution because it is a lot less work. Garbage collection saves work and time for the programmer and prevents a certain type of bugs. It comes at a price however. As mentioned, performance is likely worse, and what is often worse, you cannot make good predictions about where and when time is going to be spent on memory management, making it a lot more difficult to find and eliminate memory management related performance issues.
Both aim for delivering individually tailored ads to people, but there are some subtle differences.. Google provides those people with a service while doubleclick does not. Google has a pretty good track record with regards to selling your info to others, Doubleclick has not,. I think you get the idea here.
That said, Google is a company that is there to make money, every other thing they do ultimately serves that purpose.
Hey cool, didn't know they got to make that. Yet another thing to go look for in bargain bins and such.
Re:Palm Cost$ too much, delivers little
on
Palm's Mistakes
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· Score: 1
Hmm.. while I like the color screens of modern palmtops, and they make quite a few new applications an option, for my basic PDA needs, those seemed to be overkill, and a battery drain, and by that actually prevent other applications.
I used to use my old Palm III as a bookreader for quite a bit, something which was hindered a bit by limited memory, but in general worked very well. Batteries seemed to last forever almost, and were easily replaced, and there were few conditions where the screen would be unreadable (the screen of my current Zire is nice when light is not too strong, but is wastes an insane amount of energy, and the screen of my old m505 was hard to use without proper light, and colors only look somewhat right when using backlit, again wasting a lot of energy)
Once I got my m505 (with SD bluetooth card, which was more expensive then the device itself.. *boggle*), the bookreader was no longer a real option, but using it as a webbrowser became a good option (together with my bluetooth equipped gsm/gprs phone).
I would still like to have something like a Palm III, but with more (and replacable) memory (sd card preferably) and a somewhat faster CPU. green or b/w screen? well, if it gets me 50% better battery life then I am all for it (but then, I also use a mobile with a tiny green/black screen still)
It seems it depends a lot on how you want to use it.
ok, how about not worrying about SUVs when there have been 1) locomotives (in the past which were an integral part pollutions early roots),
Your typical locomotive, esp. nowadays uses very little fuel for what it transports, esp. when compared to other ways of transporting things. Improvement would be most welcome here still of course.
2) Tractor-trailers & 3) the smog put out by practically every company in north jersey.
The fact that there are possibly worse problems does not mean that you should not solve a problem you can do something about yourself.
im really a little more than annoyed at people who bash the SUV to no end while at the same time - over looking the trucks that carry 90% of americas goods through the country. even if SUV's dissappeared tomorrow - we'd still have a incredible amount of tractor-trailers... and they'd still be putting out smog and using gas in quantities that make SUVs look like the dream solution to polution.
Doing away with trucks and using a better, cleaner form of transport would be an excelent idea indeed..
how about we stop putting the blame on commonplace people and give it back to who it belongs to - the companys whos business relies almost exclusively on trucking and burning oil.
1. Those are seperate issues which both happen to polute things. 2. For the large majority of people, a SUV is a luxory. There are exceptions, but those are that, exceptions. Many industries are a lot more then a luxory. SUVs are a directly solvable problem, poluting industries are not.
Fix the problems you can solve easily first and then go on to the more difficult to solve problems. That way you do get the best result.
Re:Palm Cost$ too much, delivers little
on
Palm's Mistakes
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· Score: 2, Interesting
They did not see that the Palm cost too much and delivers too little. I don't think anyone likes to write with a Palm stylus either, it was just too slow and difficult. Cell phones were being given away, Palm prices stayed high and could not communicate with each other easily. Innovate quickly or die seems to be the motto in this industry.
I partially agree with you, they were too expensive. I wouldn't say too late, more like wrong functionality.
The last Palm device that I have been satisfied with was a m505, but only because I bought it after the price dropped substantially due to the introduction of newer models (Tungston, Zire). The Zire I have now works sortof, but it has features that I really don't need (wtf do I need yet another crappy digicam for? like the crappy one in the typical phone isn't enough already, while lacking any out of the box connectivity other then IR, gimem a brak, IR only in 2004??)
With a little practise the handwriting on traditional (upto m series) palms worked very well however. I learned it when I got my frst Palm Pilot (pre Palm III), and got very profficient with it. I strongly prefer it over any type of mini keyboard simply because I do not have to look at the screen for taking notes etc. It makes it far more acceptable to use during a conversation for example.
With regards to the article, is there a beginning and end to it? to me it just reads like a random collection of things that were already known to about anyone interested in such devices.
My take at why they failed is:
- they had no clue what their market was and ended up with overpriced devices that were somewhat decent, and cheap devices that were utter crap, all of them having features people don't need, while lacking features people want. - quality control went out of the window with the low end m series and anything after that (the m5xx and m7xx are imho the last high quality devices they made) - After OS 4, they failed to properly develop the OS. - A general lack of sense of direction.
It is too bad, I really enjoyed using the Pilot, Palm III and m505 that I had (the III is still working, my girlfriend has it now, the m505 gave up due to a failing battery), but as it is now, will not buy a new device from them.
Did not mean to imply they were not used, only that they were used overseas. Such a great way to get rid of otherwise troublesome waste.
Ah well, so it wasn't a direct neighbor in this case, its the neighbbor of those who the USA has been claiming to be their friends. Its on the territory where people live that the USA claims to be helping to get freedom and democracy etc.. Iraq shares a pretty bit of border with Turkey also, and Bosnia is pretty much in the back garden of Europe. Do you think it strange that I am utterly cynical about this and really see no reason whatsoever why such a thing would not happen in say Mexico?
Actually, the only logical domestic use of a nuke I can fathom would be some scenario involving military units against other military units in some kind of civil war. I don't think they would ever be useful in a situation of the military versus a (lightly) armed citizenry. But in any case dealing with the aftereffects is such a pain in the ass it's not an attractive weapon.
In a scenario such as I described, it would not just be light civilian forces, but most likely involve foreign military forces. I do see the USA blowing up itself and surroundings before giving another a chance to take over.
Speaking of biologicals, we can probably point to some specific bioweapons which nobody stockpiles anymore and went completely unused. Which isn't a great answer to your question.
Well, there is of course a difference also between having a biological agent that is suitable for weapons use, and having it in a deployable weapon. This is similar to having weapons grade plutonium vs having an actually deployable bomb.
That said, we have seen bio weapons being used, and they are actually the oldest and most often used type of WMD. documented use goes back to at least Roman times, and possibly earlier. Not every variation on the concept has been used of course, but then, many strategic experts will argue that it is not a very effective weapon unless you want to cause panic among a population, which incidentely is also how it has been used at least once, and I believe twice in recent times.
Like depleted uranium slugs, you'll probably just see that stuff used overseas, if at all.
Uh.. those have been used intensively, as people in for example Iraq and Bosnia can testify. (both of which happen to not be overseas from where I live btw)
I think I can make a prediction, that if we see that kind of "short-range" stuff used in our lifetime, it'll be by Israel, against invading armor. But a lot would have to go wrong in the mean time
That is the more predictable scenario indeed.
But lets look at an entirely different scenario:
Lets say that the current government in the USA declines into real facism, and people decide to try to do something about it. How would the US military respond? Is this unlikely? Well, it is not the most likely thing to happen for sure, but it is far from impossible, just judging from the amount of people who in the last 4 years blindly fell for the "make people feel so they don't think" policies of the current government. This scenario, while not too likely is still far from impossible.
Part of the reason why I thought the rise of nation-states, among other things, to be pretty important government and culture can actually shape human behavior. As can richness or scarcity of natural resources. That's the danger of historical examples: they aren't necessarily relevant to the current situation.
You can see historical examples of governments and cultures that shape people to make them more or less ready to fight their neighbors. Nations in modern Europe are a lot less likely to fight one another than cities in ancient Greece, for example.
At this moment? indeed. But unless Europe manages to integrate further, I am not going to predict anything about what happens 50 years from now. A century of peace has happened in Europe before, but it has always been temporarely, and only lasted untill the empire that happened to unite the continent collapsed.
It's a fact of life - regardless of if someone likes it or not.
No, it is a matter of choice.
When a project development effort gets behind schedule or an important customer has serious problems, the developer who continues to work 5 days a week, 9 hours a day due to outside obligations just isn't as valuable as a similarly skilled and experienced one who puts in the extra time to address the customer problem and/or help deliver the release (with the essential functions intact and working properly) on time.
That is true, and complete lack of flexibility on either side in this is bad.
The issue is that in many companies I have seen this quickly turn into an almost mandatory 10+ hours workday, and 7 days/week being more the rule then the exception as a result of management actually counting on this already with their planning.
Companies where I saw that include Electronic Arts, Siemens, GM, Pixelworks, Intel and some other less known ones.
The problem with this is that someone who is not able to keep up a normal social life, get enough rest and distraction etc, is after a while going to bve less productive and less creative, which just increases the chance of not delivering in time or not meeting the functional requirements.
If it is the exception then it is no problem at all, especially not when a company also compensates for it when things are less stressed.
As a manager, I try to be as flexible as possible to accommodate developers' outside obligations. But, if a developer is routinely unable to respond to a customer crisis or figure out a way to adjust their personal schedule so they can work with other team members to resolve critical path problems in development, obviously at review time (and off-shoring time, and cost reduction time) this developer is remembered as one that I can't rely on as much.
In my experience, this is really rarely a problem since the best developers truly enjoy what they do and are engaged and want to do the best job they can and figure out how to juggle their personal and professional lives.
As long as you keep a proper balance between such demands and also giving people a bit of extra time for themselves when things are more quiet, don't use it as an integrated part of your planning (hello EA) and it is indeed the exception for emergency cases, then it can work very well for both sides.
One needs to think both short and long term. The only ways I know of to meet all schedules every time without extra work is to either sandbag schedules or to refuse to commit to a schedule until a substantial percentage of the project's development budget has been expended on detailed design. Neither is efficient or practical.
This is a perception problem that only persists because people accept it being there. You cannot tell for sure initially, so do not act as if you can. That solves the problem pretty well.
Some jobs of course don't require additional effort beyond 5/8 - but the one time I worked at such a place (a major aerospace firm over 25 years ago when I was still in school), I was bored stiff and left for a more interesting job in a more dynamic environment - YMMV.
Dynamic is fun I think, and I work at very odd times often. I do however make sure that my average stays at around 40 hours/week and that I do normally have a weekend. There are exceptions, but those are exactly that, exceptions.
They can run thousands of applications concurrently while a technician replaces a failed processor (which statistically happens once every 40+ years) without those applications suffering the slightest bit of inconvenience or interruption. Linux included. PCs...can't.:-)
A single PC usually can't.. a few PCs running something like XEN however come very close and may even be able to fully do that, for a fraction of the hardware cost.
This kind of technology is still pretty new for the PC world, but it is rapidly developing into a solution that at least on the level of reliability can rival that of current mainframes (due to lots of redundancy, not due to quality)
Well, the "in the end" part turns your assertion into kind of a boring tautology. If you wait long enough on a historical scale, extremely bad things are bound to happen, but that's not much of an insight.
True of course..
Which countries invade their neighbors? Why? I contend it's not JUST because they have the ability to do it.
Well, to give one example, Germany invaded France twice in the previous century, not to mention all their other neighbors. Why? We can have a very long debate about the sequence of events that resulted in that, but I doubt anyone can come with a valid excuse for either case, other then that they could and that they wanted to, conquer the territory and resources. While invading, they definitely made good use of their military technological and strategic superiority, and unleashed a nice array of new and better weapons that initially noone had a real answer to.
Partially I wonder if I misunderstood you because you used the word "neighbor"? Let's be honest: if your method is nuclear war, attacking a country far away, ideally in another hemisphere, is pretty much the way to go. Not a neighboring country.
I understand your point about nukes, and partially agree with you, it would be silly to use them on someone nearby.. and yet there are quite a few nuclear weapons around that are explicitly made for short range use.
And frankly I believe a hypothetical country that came to rely on nuclear weapons and push-button warfare at the cost of its conventional forces would be much less likely to invade a neighboring country. (The US isn't really at that point yet, since we can buy lots of nukes and a big army, but it will be interesting to see what happens when we are.)
Absolutely, but that just increases the risk I would think.
Regardless, tell me about a weapon that was invented and proven to be effective, that went unused.
I do extrapolate from history and apply it to the future, which is indeed a mere guess. But I believe it is a guess that is very much in line with the past and with what I would consider typical human behavior.
they sometimes pick up more family obligations which result in them being less willing/able to work the seventh day of the week or the 15th hour of the day - to the extent that their experience doesn't compensate for this tendency, the more experienced developers lose out.
Ah yes, god forbid that employees have a life, and actually also take the much needed break at regular intervals...
If you really believe what you just wrote then I bet that you never look further then a few weeks or at best months.
Interestingly enough, my currently biggest customer insists on documentation (and I fully agree with them opf course).
They have a well working process for creating, reviewing and maintaining it, assigned backup owners of all documents, and are generally prepared to pay for it. For my latest project there, they reserved almost 30% of the budget for it even.
But well.. they are exceptional in this, for most of my customers documentation is an afterthought at best, scary when realizing that they are leaving implementation to contractors like me who will be gone once the project is done and things run (tho it is in a way good for me, they often have to get back to me when wanting to change things, and that means extra hours to bill for me:)
No, I don't think audio does it. Consider that 1TB will hold over six *thousand* hours of FLAC-compressed CD-quality audio. Unless you're a professional recording studio, there's no way you'll have multiple terabytes of audio.
First of all, I know quite a few people who do have that much music around, you obviously are not among those.
Second, I don't have to be a professional recording studio for doing things like uncompressed multitrack recording, one of the very cool things about modern computers and sound hardware is that high-end multitrack recording is available to any amateur band, and those just interested in playing with digital audio.
An hour of 16 track 48khz recording makes for a nice 4GB already. When doing a recording, its seldom right at the first take, and usually you end up with some 10 or more takes and then go on mixing them down and combining them. Have more then a single project? well..
Video is different, but it still requires a *lot* to push the limits.
Go try editing a raw video stream someday, you will see how wrong you are.
I do that, actually. Although with Gig-E I'm preferring instead to migrate the storage to a central location. With a fast LAN there's no difference between local and remote storage and it's easier to manage when it's all in one place.
There is a definite difference in responsiveness due to latency. Not important for many uses, very important for others.
On another note, unless you netboot all your machines, using your central storage is not going to help getting your computer running really.
doubt that. Not for home and even small office use. Professional video, audio and graphics work are a different story. But for those applications it's reasonable to spend thousands on network storage appliance devices which can provide massive amounts of storage.
You disregard home studios, people who like fuddling with video as a hobby etc etc.
You seem to be making the mistake that what you do not do at home is also not something others might be doing at home.
Come on. There's no proof of this. You're making a guess based on your understanding of history. When you hang a percentage on such inductive reasoning you are just hurting your case by making it harder to take you seriously.
It is a guess indeed..
You claim to be basing your reasoning on history, but nukes are something entirely new. They haven't been around 3000 years. Neither have nation-states and any number of other seemingly relevant things.
Nukes are new in technology, but bottomline they are just a much bigger bomb. Having a much more effective way to destroy your opponent is not something that all of a sudden occured when nukes were invented, it is something that has been strived for and achieved again and again for as long as humans had an urge to fight eachother.
Nation states? Why is it relevant at all if those existed in a form we recognize nowadays? There were definitely organiyed groups of people following the same leadership or government and putting claim on a territory 3000 years ago, and they also did fight eachother. Modern nation states haven't made any difference there.
Let me try to make my original statement more clear: Every group of humans having access to better ways to destroy a potential enemy then their neighbors have in the end turned such methods on their neighbors. It does not matter what form of organisation those humans have, it does not matter what kind of technology we are talking about, the patern repeats itself throughout known history.
Unless your needs include very large amounts of video, I disagree. Disks are so large these days that it's pretty easy to stay ahead. When I can start ripping HD video from Blu-Ray disks, then you may have a point. Then again, perhaps fixed disk storage will keep up. Or not lag too far behind.
Or when your needs include saydoing multitrack audio recording? or you want a library of your music in a non-lossy format on your disks, and you happen to have a somwhat substantial amount of music?
Or you happen to be among those weird people who actually make backups of their machines to a more centralized place?
There are quite a lot of other siituations that I can think off and that are pretty realistic to occur that can end up requiring many terabytes of storage.
They DID show these trucks in satellite pictures. They showed them on LIVE television, too, as we looked for our smoking gun and expected these to be it. What kind of farming refinement is done in a hidden part of a truck
Ah, so those 'hidden' compartments were so well hidden that you could pick them out on satelite images and live TV? Those must have been well hidden there.
It also never occured to you that the whole setup of having easy to pickout trucks moving around as secret WMD labs simply makes no sense at all?
And you call me pathetic? Any idea at all btw what that word hidden means?
Yes, Iraq DID have WMDs, in the early 90s and before. We can be sure about that, the west sold the ingredients to him, and we saw him use those WMDs on his own population as well as in Iran.
We also know that in the decade after that, all of the facilities we have known about have been destroyed, either during or after the first gulf war. Did we know about all facilities? probably not, but we knew about most of them.
Proving that something is not there at all is a logical impossibility, demanding it is looking for a stick to hit with.
Saddam was a rather bad guy, and not to be trusted, that I completely agree with, but so far there has been no proof that by the late 90s he was still actively developing and producing WMDs. There was proof of the existance of some things in Iraq that could have served many purposes, including possibly the development of WMDs. Again, that is the same argument as saying that the USA having equipment for growing antrax is proof of them developing biological weapons. Sure, it can point at it, but it is no proof. And don't give me the BS about how the USA is to be trusted while Iraq was not. While I agree about the later, I do not agree about the first. Fabricating proof and arguments to invade a country, kill over a 100000 civilians, and then still claiming moral superiority and insisting that people should believe you on your word is pretty silly to put it mildly.
How about the argument of removing Saddam from power and trying to establish democracy there then? That would have been a valid argument, and even believable if there had been a plan to stabilize the country after the invasion. It is pretty evident from just looking at the current situation that there was no such plan, or if it was there at all, it was extremely badly conceived and hidden for the world.
Slashdot Mirror
That is all cool and well, but in no way changes the fact that your previous statement is false.
Many people (I am not going to argue if it is the majority or not) who download stuff illegally, also buy music, and will even buy the exact music they downloaded. The consequence is that arguing that illegal downloads (see, I do call them illegal) always result in loss of income for record companies is wrong, and there are in fact signs that the opposite is true.
Stop confusing the issue by just dragging in new and unrelated things, the fact that a legal service exists that allows this in no way changes the consequences of illegal downloads, it merely gives an alternative for those who can use it.
Oh, and give me a break, I have to pay for record companies doing their promotion? I thought that that promotion is what they claim they need al this money for, so a sampling service that actually costs money is bullshot.
You of course ignore people who download music to sample it, and then go out and buy it when they like it. I do that, with me there are quite some more peope doing that, and research points at that that is not a small group either (as the GP already pointed out).
After all, it is just the VM implementor that needs to understand how to optimize the memory management, not the application developers.
They will still need some understanding of how it works, if they don't have that they are bound to use it in the most inefficient way possible...
So yes, where the time is spent is shifted but also the amount of total execution time spent on memory management can be reduced -- because the task is managed differently.
It is possible to do it more efficient with a GC when compared to a crappy non-GC based solution, but when you just write out what has to happen to make the GC possible, you will see that it is never the most efficient solution, and what is more, that the typical solution in C is often faster then the best optimized GC solution because it is a lot less work. Garbage collection saves work and time for the programmer and prevents a certain type of bugs. It comes at a price however. As mentioned, performance is likely worse, and what is often worse, you cannot make good predictions about where and when time is going to be spent on memory management, making it a lot more difficult to find and eliminate memory management related performance issues.
Nah, we have the friendly companies of Phillips and Siemens and the like :P
:)
Different culture, different symptoms, different names, but bottomline the same problemn
Both aim for delivering individually tailored ads to people, but there are some subtle differences.. Google provides those people with a service while doubleclick does not. Google has a pretty good track record with regards to selling your info to others, Doubleclick has not,. I think you get the idea here.
That said, Google is a company that is there to make money, every other thing they do ultimately serves that purpose.
Hey cool, didn't know they got to make that. Yet another thing to go look for in bargain bins and such.
Hmm.. while I like the color screens of modern palmtops, and they make quite a few new applications an option, for my basic PDA needs, those seemed to be overkill, and a battery drain, and by that actually prevent other applications.
I used to use my old Palm III as a bookreader for quite a bit, something which was hindered a bit by limited memory, but in general worked very well. Batteries seemed to last forever almost, and were easily replaced, and there were few conditions where the screen would be unreadable (the screen of my current Zire is nice when light is not too strong, but is wastes an insane amount of energy, and the screen of my old m505 was hard to use without proper light, and colors only look somewhat right when using backlit, again wasting a lot of energy)
Once I got my m505 (with SD bluetooth card, which was more expensive then the device itself.. *boggle*), the bookreader was no longer a real option, but using it as a webbrowser became a good option (together with my bluetooth equipped gsm/gprs phone).
I would still like to have something like a Palm III, but with more (and replacable) memory (sd card preferably) and a somewhat faster CPU. green or b/w screen? well, if it gets me 50% better battery life then I am all for it (but then, I also use a mobile with a tiny green/black screen still)
It seems it depends a lot on how you want to use it.
ok, how about not worrying about SUVs when there have been 1) locomotives (in the past which were an integral part pollutions early roots),
Your typical locomotive, esp. nowadays uses very little fuel for what it transports, esp. when compared to other ways of transporting things. Improvement would be most welcome here still of course.
2) Tractor-trailers & 3) the smog put out by practically every company in north jersey.
The fact that there are possibly worse problems does not mean that you should not solve a problem you can do something about yourself.
im really a little more than annoyed at people who bash the SUV to no end while at the same time - over looking the trucks that carry 90% of americas goods through the country. even if SUV's dissappeared tomorrow - we'd still have a incredible amount of tractor-trailers... and they'd still be putting out smog and using gas in quantities that make SUVs look like the dream solution to polution.
Doing away with trucks and using a better, cleaner form of transport would be an excelent idea indeed..
how about we stop putting the blame on commonplace people and give it back to who it belongs to - the companys whos business relies almost exclusively on trucking and burning oil.
1. Those are seperate issues which both happen to polute things.
2. For the large majority of people, a SUV is a luxory. There are exceptions, but those are that, exceptions. Many industries are a lot more then a luxory. SUVs are a directly solvable problem, poluting industries are not.
Fix the problems you can solve easily first and then go on to the more difficult to solve problems. That way you do get the best result.
They did not see that the Palm cost too much and delivers too little. I don't think anyone likes to write with a Palm stylus either, it was just too slow and difficult. Cell phones were being given away, Palm prices stayed high and could not communicate with each other easily. Innovate quickly or die seems to be the motto in this industry.
I partially agree with you, they were too expensive. I wouldn't say too late, more like wrong functionality.
The last Palm device that I have been satisfied with was a m505, but only because I bought it after the price dropped substantially due to the introduction of newer models (Tungston, Zire). The Zire I have now works sortof, but it has features that I really don't need (wtf do I need yet another crappy digicam for? like the crappy one in the typical phone isn't enough already, while lacking any out of the box connectivity other then IR, gimem a brak, IR only in 2004??)
With a little practise the handwriting on traditional (upto m series) palms worked very well however. I learned it when I got my frst Palm Pilot (pre Palm III), and got very profficient with it. I strongly prefer it over any type of mini keyboard simply because I do not have to look at the screen for taking notes etc. It makes it far more acceptable to use during a conversation for example.
With regards to the article, is there a beginning and end to it? to me it just reads like a random collection of things that were already known to about anyone interested in such devices.
My take at why they failed is:
- they had no clue what their market was and ended up with overpriced devices that were somewhat decent, and cheap devices that were utter crap, all of them having features people don't need, while lacking features people want.
- quality control went out of the window with the low end m series and anything after that (the m5xx and m7xx are imho the last high quality devices they made)
- After OS 4, they failed to properly develop the OS.
- A general lack of sense of direction.
It is too bad, I really enjoyed using the Pilot, Palm III and m505 that I had (the III is still working, my girlfriend has it now, the m505 gave up due to a failing battery), but as it is now, will not buy a new device from them.
How about getting rid of that extremely inefficient and polluting piece of outdated technology instead?
Did not mean to imply they were not used, only that they were used overseas. Such a great way to get rid of otherwise troublesome waste.
Ah well, so it wasn't a direct neighbor in this case, its the neighbbor of those who the USA has been claiming to be their friends. Its on the territory where people live that the USA claims to be helping to get freedom and democracy etc.. Iraq shares a pretty bit of border with Turkey also, and Bosnia is pretty much in the back garden of Europe. Do you think it strange that I am utterly cynical about this and really see no reason whatsoever why such a thing would not happen in say Mexico?
Actually, the only logical domestic use of a nuke I can fathom would be some scenario involving military units against other military units in some kind of civil war. I don't think they would ever be useful in a situation of the military versus a (lightly) armed citizenry. But in any case dealing with the aftereffects is such a pain in the ass it's not an attractive weapon.
In a scenario such as I described, it would not just be light civilian forces, but most likely involve foreign military forces. I do see the USA blowing up itself and surroundings before giving another a chance to take over.
Speaking of biologicals, we can probably point to some specific bioweapons which nobody stockpiles anymore and went completely unused. Which isn't a great answer to your question.
Well, there is of course a difference also between having a biological agent that is suitable for weapons use, and having it in a deployable weapon. This is similar to having weapons grade plutonium vs having an actually deployable bomb.
That said, we have seen bio weapons being used, and they are actually the oldest and most often used type of WMD. documented use goes back to at least Roman times, and possibly earlier. Not every variation on the concept has been used of course, but then, many strategic experts will argue that it is not a very effective weapon unless you want to cause panic among a population, which incidentely is also how it has been used at least once, and I believe twice in recent times.
Like depleted uranium slugs, you'll probably just see that stuff used overseas, if at all.
Uh.. those have been used intensively, as people in for example Iraq and Bosnia can testify. (both of which happen to not be overseas from where I live btw)
I think I can make a prediction, that if we see that kind of "short-range" stuff used in our lifetime, it'll be by Israel, against invading armor. But a lot would have to go wrong in the mean time
That is the more predictable scenario indeed.
But lets look at an entirely different scenario:
Lets say that the current government in the USA declines into real facism, and people decide to try to do something about it. How would the US military respond? Is this unlikely? Well, it is not the most likely thing to happen for sure, but it is far from impossible, just judging from the amount of people who in the last 4 years blindly fell for the "make people feel so they don't think" policies of the current government. This scenario, while not too likely is still far from impossible.
Part of the reason why I thought the rise of nation-states, among other things, to be pretty important government and culture can actually shape human behavior. As can richness or scarcity of natural resources. That's the danger of historical examples: they aren't necessarily relevant to the current situation.
You can see historical examples of governments and cultures that shape people to make them more or less ready to fight their neighbors. Nations in modern Europe are a lot less likely to fight one another than cities in ancient Greece, for example.
At this moment? indeed. But unless Europe manages to integrate further, I am not going to predict anything about what happens 50 years from now. A century of peace has happened in Europe before, but it has always been temporarely, and only lasted untill the empire that happened to unite the continent collapsed.
Its all a Rat Race anyway..
It's a fact of life - regardless of if someone likes it or not.
No, it is a matter of choice.
When a project development effort gets behind schedule or an important customer has serious problems, the developer who continues to work 5 days a week, 9 hours a day due to outside obligations just isn't as valuable as a similarly skilled and experienced one who puts in the extra time to address the customer problem and/or help deliver the release (with the essential functions intact and working properly) on time.
That is true, and complete lack of flexibility on either side in this is bad.
The issue is that in many companies I have seen this quickly turn into an almost mandatory 10+ hours workday, and 7 days/week being more the rule then the exception as a result of management actually counting on this already with their planning.
Companies where I saw that include Electronic Arts, Siemens, GM, Pixelworks, Intel and some other less known ones.
The problem with this is that someone who is not able to keep up a normal social life, get enough rest and distraction etc, is after a while going to bve less productive and less creative, which just increases the chance of not delivering in time or not meeting the functional requirements.
If it is the exception then it is no problem at all, especially not when a company also compensates for it when things are less stressed.
As a manager, I try to be as flexible as possible to accommodate developers' outside obligations. But, if a developer is routinely unable to respond to a customer crisis or figure out a way to adjust their personal schedule so they can work with other team members to resolve critical path problems in development, obviously at review time (and off-shoring time, and cost reduction time) this developer is remembered as one that I can't rely on as much.
In my experience, this is really rarely a problem since the best developers truly enjoy what they do and are engaged and want to do the best job they can and figure out how to juggle their personal and professional lives.
As long as you keep a proper balance between such demands and also giving people a bit of extra time for themselves when things are more quiet, don't use it as an integrated part of your planning (hello EA) and it is indeed the exception for emergency cases, then it can work very well for both sides.
One needs to think both short and long term. The only ways I know of to meet all schedules every time without extra work is to either sandbag schedules or to refuse to commit to a schedule until a substantial percentage of the project's development budget has been expended on detailed design. Neither is efficient or practical.
This is a perception problem that only persists because people accept it being there. You cannot tell for sure initially, so do not act as if you can. That solves the problem pretty well.
Some jobs of course don't require additional effort beyond 5/8 - but the one time I worked at such a place (a major aerospace firm over 25 years ago when I was still in school), I was bored stiff and left for a more interesting job in a more dynamic environment - YMMV.
Dynamic is fun I think, and I work at very odd times often. I do however make sure that my average stays at around 40 hours/week and that I do normally have a weekend. There are exceptions, but those are exactly that, exceptions.
They can run thousands of applications concurrently while a technician replaces a failed processor (which statistically happens once every 40+ years) without those applications suffering the slightest bit of inconvenience or interruption. Linux included. PCs...can't. :-)
A single PC usually can't.. a few PCs running something like XEN however come very close and may even be able to fully do that, for a fraction of the hardware cost.
This kind of technology is still pretty new for the PC world, but it is rapidly developing into a solution that at least on the level of reliability can rival that of current mainframes (due to lots of redundancy, not due to quality)
Interesting, IBM did quite a bit of efford to retain me there when I left after 11 years of employment...
Well, the "in the end" part turns your assertion into kind of a boring tautology. If you wait long enough on a historical scale, extremely bad things are bound to happen, but that's not much of an insight.
True of course..
Which countries invade their neighbors? Why? I contend it's not JUST because they have the ability to do it.
Well, to give one example, Germany invaded France twice in the previous century, not to mention all their other neighbors. Why? We can have a very long debate about the sequence of events that resulted in that, but I doubt anyone can come with a valid excuse for either case, other then that they could and that they wanted to, conquer the territory and resources. While invading, they definitely made good use of their military technological and strategic superiority, and unleashed a nice array of new and better weapons that initially noone had a real answer to.
Partially I wonder if I misunderstood you because you used the word "neighbor"? Let's be honest: if your method is nuclear war, attacking a country far away, ideally in another hemisphere, is pretty much the way to go. Not a neighboring country.
I understand your point about nukes, and partially agree with you, it would be silly to use them on someone nearby.. and yet there are quite a few nuclear weapons around that are explicitly made for short range use.
And frankly I believe a hypothetical country that came to rely on nuclear weapons and push-button warfare at the cost of its conventional forces would be much less likely to invade a neighboring country. (The US isn't really at that point yet, since we can buy lots of nukes and a big army, but it will be interesting to see what happens when we are.)
Absolutely, but that just increases the risk I would think.
Regardless, tell me about a weapon that was invented and proven to be effective, that went unused.
I do extrapolate from history and apply it to the future, which is indeed a mere guess. But I believe it is a guess that is very much in line with the past and with what I would consider typical human behavior.
Can the skilled workers get into this country?
h1b?
Can the job be exported?
Offshoring?
they sometimes pick up more family obligations which result in them being less willing/able to work the seventh day of the week or the 15th hour of the day - to the extent that their experience doesn't compensate for this tendency, the more experienced developers lose out.
Ah yes, god forbid that employees have a life, and actually also take the much needed break at regular intervals...
If you really believe what you just wrote then I bet that you never look further then a few weeks or at best months.
Interestingly enough, my currently biggest customer insists on documentation (and I fully agree with them opf course).
:)
They have a well working process for creating, reviewing and maintaining it, assigned backup owners of all documents, and are generally prepared to pay for it. For my latest project there, they reserved almost 30% of the budget for it even.
But well.. they are exceptional in this, for most of my customers documentation is an afterthought at best, scary when realizing that they are leaving implementation to contractors like me who will be gone once the project is done and things run (tho it is in a way good for me, they often have to get back to me when wanting to change things, and that means extra hours to bill for me
In short, they're a solution looking for a problem.
Seeing how much they are being used, I would say they already found the problem...
No, I don't think audio does it. Consider that 1TB will hold over six *thousand* hours of FLAC-compressed CD-quality audio. Unless you're a professional recording studio, there's no way you'll have multiple terabytes of audio.
First of all, I know quite a few people who do have that much music around, you obviously are not among those.
Second, I don't have to be a professional recording studio for doing things like uncompressed multitrack recording, one of the very cool things about modern computers and sound hardware is that high-end multitrack recording is available to any amateur band, and those just interested in playing with digital audio.
An hour of 16 track 48khz recording makes for a nice 4GB already. When doing a recording, its seldom right at the first take, and usually you end up with some 10 or more takes and then go on mixing them down and combining them. Have more then a single project? well..
Video is different, but it still requires a *lot* to push the limits.
Go try editing a raw video stream someday, you will see how wrong you are.
I do that, actually. Although with Gig-E I'm preferring instead to migrate the storage to a central location. With a fast LAN there's no difference between local and remote storage and it's easier to manage when it's all in one place.
There is a definite difference in responsiveness due to latency. Not important for many uses, very important for others.
On another note, unless you netboot all your machines, using your central storage is not going to help getting your computer running really.
doubt that. Not for home and even small office use. Professional video, audio and graphics work are a different story. But for those applications it's reasonable to spend thousands on network storage appliance devices which can provide massive amounts of storage.
You disregard home studios, people who like fuddling with video as a hobby etc etc.
You seem to be making the mistake that what you do not do at home is also not something others might be doing at home.
Come on. There's no proof of this. You're making a guess based on your understanding of history. When you hang a percentage on such inductive reasoning you are just hurting your case by making it harder to take you seriously.
It is a guess indeed..
You claim to be basing your reasoning on history, but nukes are something entirely new. They haven't been around 3000 years. Neither have nation-states and any number of other seemingly relevant things.
Nukes are new in technology, but bottomline they are just a much bigger bomb. Having a much more effective way to destroy your opponent is not something that all of a sudden occured when nukes were invented, it is something that has been strived for and achieved again and again for as long as humans had an urge to fight eachother.
Nation states? Why is it relevant at all if those existed in a form we recognize nowadays? There were definitely organiyed groups of people following the same leadership or government and putting claim on a territory 3000 years ago, and they also did fight eachother. Modern nation states haven't made any difference there.
Let me try to make my original statement more clear: Every group of humans having access to better ways to destroy a potential enemy then their neighbors have in the end turned such methods on their neighbors. It does not matter what form of organisation those humans have, it does not matter what kind of technology we are talking about, the patern repeats itself throughout known history.
Unless your needs include very large amounts of video, I disagree. Disks are so large these days that it's pretty easy to stay ahead. When I can start ripping HD video from Blu-Ray disks, then you may have a point. Then again, perhaps fixed disk storage will keep up. Or not lag too far behind.
Or when your needs include saydoing multitrack audio recording? or you want a library of your music in a non-lossy format on your disks, and you happen to have a somwhat substantial amount of music?
Or you happen to be among those weird people who actually make backups of their machines to a more centralized place?
There are quite a lot of other siituations that I can think off and that are pretty realistic to occur that can end up requiring many terabytes of storage.
They DID show these trucks in satellite pictures. They showed them on LIVE television, too, as we looked for our smoking gun and expected these to be it. What kind of farming refinement is done in a hidden part of a truck
Ah, so those 'hidden' compartments were so well hidden that you could pick them out on satelite images and live TV? Those must have been well hidden there.
It also never occured to you that the whole setup of having easy to pickout trucks moving around as secret WMD labs simply makes no sense at all?
And you call me pathetic? Any idea at all btw what that word hidden means?
Yes, Iraq DID have WMDs, in the early 90s and before. We can be sure about that, the west sold the ingredients to him, and we saw him use those WMDs on his own population as well as in Iran.
We also know that in the decade after that, all of the facilities we have known about have been destroyed, either during or after the first gulf war. Did we know about all facilities? probably not, but we knew about most of them.
Proving that something is not there at all is a logical impossibility, demanding it is looking for a stick to hit with.
Saddam was a rather bad guy, and not to be trusted, that I completely agree with, but so far there has been no proof that by the late 90s he was still actively developing and producing WMDs. There was proof of the existance of some things in Iraq that could have served many purposes, including possibly the development of WMDs. Again, that is the same argument as saying that the USA having equipment for growing antrax is proof of them developing biological weapons. Sure, it can point at it, but it is no proof. And don't give me the BS about how the USA is to be trusted while Iraq was not. While I agree about the later, I do not agree about the first. Fabricating proof and arguments to invade a country, kill over a 100000 civilians, and then still claiming moral superiority and insisting that people should believe you on your word is pretty silly to put it mildly.
How about the argument of removing Saddam from power and trying to establish democracy there then? That would have been a valid argument, and even believable if there had been a plan to stabilize the country after the invasion. It is pretty evident from just looking at the current situation that there was no such plan, or if it was there at all, it was extremely badly conceived and hidden for the world.