Andy Singleton is president of Needham, Mass.-based Assembla, which brings "inspired by open source" applications and development processes to enterprise software.
His business is implementing enterprise open source software. Of course he's going to say that that's the future.
small, overworked and understaffed IT department at a profitable business. We recently got the news that we needed to cut costs.
If you're profitable and your IT staff really is understaffed, why are they cutting costs ?
CEOs usually view IT as a cost, like rent or the electric bill. Geeks are something they're forced to have, but they're not crazy about.
You (or your boss) need to defend the business case for having IT. Look into exactly who does what with the tools you provide and how much more efficient you make them. Build an ROI case and show it to the CEO. If you really are understaffed, it's possible your company has held off on IT projects which would save them money in the long term. In that case, they'd be better off spending _more_ on IT.
Doing manned missions a ton more expensive than unmanned ones. For purely increasing the (science / $$$) ratio, the most effective thing to do is get rid of astronauts; they're the bigest frill.
No one ever asked movie companies to give out free backup copies. What we want is to not get sued or put in jail if we copy a DVD, or rip it to an mp4 on our laptop to take on vacation, or do any number of things with the DVD we just bought.
Bascially, we'd like to be treated the same as when we buy a set of glasses: once, we've bought it, we can do anything we want with it. Glassmakers don't try to have people put in jail for post articles on how to blow glass.
In college, I was having a futon delivered. The guy carrying it in saw some code on my screen and asked if I knew about computers. I said I did and he asked if I knew how to create a form on his website so that people could fill in their information and have it mailed to him. I said sure; it's pretty simple to do in perl and that I'd email it to him with instructions on how to set it up when I had a chance. He said that if I did that, the futon was on the house. 10 minutes of whipping up some HTML and customizing formmail.pl and I had myself futon.
The different formats don't simply limit the frequencies stored. A given compression format will change the sound in different ways depending on what input soundfile is. Some codecs perform well with some types of sounds, but poorly with others (for example, the compression your cell phone uses is good at speech but lousy at music).
Also, all frequencies aren't of equal importance to a our ears. Our hearing is best in the middle range (near where the important elements of speech are), and taper off above and below. And, if there are multiple sounds occuring at the same time (a loud guitar and soft violin), our ears don't hear the softer sounds as well.
You can't simply do a FFT of all of input and output files and simple add up the differences, as all the differences aren't created equally.
..or they just decided to do it on their own. It's not like that's a new idea; tons of free sites allow one to buy a subscription which allows one to skips the ads.
That's the problem I have with most of the things Wired attributes to Mossberg's doing; they're obvious suggestions that the companies probably would've done anyway.
I think lists like smaller, public Craigslists are a much better option to places like Monster. As anyone who used it can tell you, any job listed on Monster will get flooded with resumes, 90% of whom are completely unqualified. Many companies (my current one included) have gone back to using headhunters and internal networking as a result; we just don't have time to sift through 1,500 resumes for each opening.
With small mailing lists, employers don't get deluged with resumes of people "job surfing". And, by the same token, most of the time the listings are placed by the person doing the hiring (not HR), so the applicant knows his resume is going to the right person.
During my most recent job search, I used Monster, Hotjobs, a headhunter, and a number of lists like Craigslist. I got the most, relevant interviews from the latter, though the headhunter was close. Even though I applied for ~300 jobs on Monster and Hotjobs, I didn't receive 1 interview. The job I ended up taking I found on a list for people who are interested in startups in my area. I think using resources like that (and networking) are a much better option than a bulk job listing site like Monster; for the hiring company and the candidate.
This is a dealbreaker for me. I was actually about to upgrade my Palm M505 to something newer/fancier, but if it doesn't work my iBook, that's it.
It also makes you wonder about the health of Palm as a company; are the Windows CE devices finally starting to take over the market and push Palm out ?
So the software didn't raise alarms as it should've. That's bad. But it seems to me that the software is being made a scape goat here. It's much easier to blame "that #$@&@$ computer" than "FirstEnergy's failure to trim back trees encroaching on high-voltage power lines" or the fact that the infrastructure for the powergrid is old and poorly setup such that one failure can bring down the whole system. There's no reason why a failure in Ohio should blackout New York and there's nothing software can do to fix that.
My gf calls me while I'm gaming and a I talk and play. Some games work better than others for this, but you have to make sacrifices for a relationship to work.
Had you or I cracked into these systems, we'd be going to jail. For a long time. Why aren't charges being files ? Are Republicans above their own laws ?
In spite of what MSNBC says (nice job moderators; linking to a story written by an obivously biased news source...), the court order doesn't require MS to stop distributing these products. The court order says that MS has to ship Windows with a Java VM (and not the MS "Java" VM which is not really Java). They've known this was coming for years; they could've updated the products to use a real JVM (as they did with many other products/verions), but, instead decided to stop distributing these old products. Blaming the court order is ridiculous.
It was only during these late-night matches that I realized that we MechAssault players were part of something new.
What's new about that ? Sounds exactly like any of the other online, first-person shooters (Quake, Duke Nukem, Half Life,...) which have be around since the mid 90s, each of which has its own community. Quake alone has countless numbers of clans. If this a good game that works well online, great, but it's hardly revolutionary.
>McFact #5: Since the lawsuit, McDonald's has > reduced the temperature of their coffee from 185 > degrees to 158 degrees. They knew 185 wasn't safe > before, but served the coffee at those > temperatures anyway. This is precisely why we > have punitive damages.
If 185 degrees isn't safe, then I don't want safe coffee. 158 is way too cool. According to the Specialty Coffee Association of America, the optimal water temperature for coffee is 92 - 96C (197.6 - 204.8F).
I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in a country in which chainsaws and nail guns are outlawed and everyone drinks luke warm coffee and uses plastic knives. Some things I buy I can hurt myself with; I accept this risk as a part of life. It's not the government's job to protect me from my own stupidity.
Given that the courts are willing to grant patents for simple, obvious features which have been around for years, why wouldn't they go get a patent on it ?
There's something that's bothered me about these lawsuits since the beginning: what proof does the RIAA have that a given person shared a file ? They're simply using logs of their software. But how is this being verified ? A log, afterall, is just a textfile; I can make one now that says Lars Ulrich was sharing my copyrighted works.
Not to mention they're also relying on the DHCP logs of the sharer's ISP. These were designed to aid admins, not to be 100% accurate. And, even if we assume that the RIAA's and the ISP's logs are accurate, most people these days have multiple machines on their home networks and often wireless access points. How can could one possibly prove that the internnet account holder did the sharing and not a neighbor sneaking on via wireless or a friend who stopped by with a laptop or a roommate ?
IANAL, but I don't see how any of these cases could possibly stand up in court, with or without security holes.
With all due respect, Greenspun's students don't know what they're doing and Greenspun's as clueless about J2EE development as they are (and his ignorance has cost them much extra development time). He writes:
[JSP] still seems to be too complex for seniors and graduate students in the MIT computer science program, despite the fact that they all had at least one semester of Java experience in 6.170.
First off, I bet 6.170 never covered JSPs, so the students are newbies to this and having to pick it up.
Secondly, JSP is for building the presentation layer only and should contain only custom tags and no business logic. As any J2EE developer knows, business logic should be kept in Java and exposed to JSPs via custom tags and servlets. Trying to do it all in JSPs is asking for trouble (as his poor students have found).
I think before he makes any more grand statements about J2EE, Greenspun should learn how to use it.
Only the truly masochistic would manage to pull themselve through the end of Knuth. Not that the work isn't brilliant in its own way; but the prose isn't exactly sparkling.
_The Art of Computer Programming_ is a book for those interested in purely programming. Not managers, industry analysts, tech sales people, etc. The prose is written with this in mind and, like many mathematics texts, is geared towards preventing it from being misunderstood rather than making it approachable.
The fact that a non-programmer found it difficult doesn't say anything about the book (the same way a great medical text would be difficult for one without a background in medicine). Most of its intended audience/enjoy/ working through it and find that Knuth elegantly presents many very interesting ideas.
um.. my linux box is a/4/ year old PII, which is equivalent to a 3 year old Celeron, more or less (mine is a 400 Mhz PII with 256 MB RAM and an 8 MB video card). no it's not blazing, but it's more than enough for doing most things I do (web browsing, mail, writing code with emacs, even playing quake) and functions as a server as well (tomcat java servlets, PostgreSQL, sshd). it's also whisper quiet because the CPU has no fan (just a heat sync) and the box has only 1 quiet fan.
so, as someone who uses a machine equivalent to these Walmart boxes, i can say they're plenty of power for most people.
It looks like Bitkeeper is getting a little microsoftian about what type of project they 'allow' you to use with their product.
No, they're getting a little microsoftian about what type of produt they 'allow' you to use with the free version of their product. This is entirely reasonably; if your product competes with BitKeeper and you really want to use it, you have to buy a license.
I have repeated it a few times (usually unintentially - I can always tell when a new apartment I go to has wireless ethernet;-(), but
even that doesn't scientifically prove anything. But that's besides the point..
It is what is: anecdotal evidence. The point is that we don't know the effects of all of these new devices that are quickly springing up everywhere, and there are things which suggest that they might be doing bad things.
It's not a reason to ban them, for sure, but it is a reason to study them and make sure we understand all of the effects of the radiation which is constantly hitting us.
All I'm saying, as the subject of my post says, is let's not dismiss this guy out of hand until we know for sure what the effects of these devices are.
It looks like the/. community immediately assumed this guy is looney.
I don't know if all of his symptoms are real or imagined, but I will say that using a cell phone or coming close to a wireless ethernet card gives me a migraine every time, and this has been verified in a blind test (friend plugged in card, brought me into the room without telling me it's state; migraine. next day unplugged in card, brought me into the room; no migraine).
Maybe these kinds of radiation aren't harmful to most people, but let's not immediately dismiss this; I think, if nothing else, this issue should be studied by public researchers because Sprint, AT&T, etc. certaintly aren't going to do anything that would in anyway hurt their profits (cf.tabacco companies and the harmful effects of tabacco).
so let's not dismiss this out of hand; it's a reasonable question.
Slashdot Mirror
Read the author's bio:
Andy Singleton is president of Needham, Mass.-based Assembla, which brings "inspired by open source" applications and development processes to enterprise software.
His business is implementing enterprise open source software. Of course he's going to say that that's the future.
small, overworked and understaffed IT department at a profitable business. We recently got the news that we needed to cut costs.
If you're profitable and your IT staff really is understaffed, why are they cutting costs ?
CEOs usually view IT as a cost, like rent or the electric bill. Geeks are something they're forced to have, but they're not crazy about.
You (or your boss) need to defend the business case for having IT. Look into exactly who does what with the tools you provide and how much more efficient you make them. Build an ROI case and show it to the CEO. If you really are understaffed, it's possible your company has held off on IT projects which would save them money in the long term. In that case, they'd be better off spending _more_ on IT.
Doing manned missions a ton more expensive than unmanned ones. For purely increasing the (science / $$$) ratio, the most effective thing to do is get rid of astronauts; they're the bigest frill.
No one ever asked movie companies to give out free backup copies. What we want is to not get sued or put in jail if we copy a DVD, or rip it to an mp4 on our laptop to take on vacation, or do any number of things with the DVD we just bought.
Bascially, we'd like to be treated the same as when we buy a set of glasses: once, we've bought it, we can do anything we want with it. Glassmakers don't try to have people put in jail for post articles on how to blow glass.
In college, I was having a futon delivered. The guy carrying it in saw some code on my screen and asked if I knew about computers. I said I did and he asked if I knew how to create a form on his website so that people could fill in their information and have it mailed to him. I said sure; it's pretty simple to do in perl and that I'd email it to him with instructions on how to set it up when I had a chance. He said that if I did that, the futon was on the house. 10 minutes of whipping up some HTML and customizing formmail.pl and I had myself futon.
The different formats don't simply limit the frequencies stored. A given compression format will change the sound in different ways depending on what input soundfile is. Some codecs perform well with some types of sounds, but poorly with others (for example, the compression your cell phone uses is good at speech but lousy at music).
Also, all frequencies aren't of equal importance to a our ears. Our hearing is best in the middle range (near where the important elements of speech are), and taper off above and below. And, if there are multiple sounds occuring at the same time (a loud guitar and soft violin), our ears don't hear the softer sounds as well.
You can't simply do a FFT of all of input and output files and simple add up the differences, as all the differences aren't created equally.
..or they just decided to do it on their own. It's not like that's a new idea; tons of free sites allow one to buy a subscription which allows one to skips the ads.
That's the problem I have with most of the things Wired attributes to Mossberg's doing; they're obvious suggestions that the companies probably would've done anyway.
I think lists like smaller, public Craigslists are a much better option to places like Monster. As anyone who used it can tell you, any job listed on Monster will get flooded with resumes, 90% of whom are completely unqualified. Many companies (my current one included) have gone back to using headhunters and internal networking as a result; we just don't have time to sift through 1,500 resumes for each opening.
With small mailing lists, employers don't get deluged with resumes of people "job surfing". And, by the same token, most of the time the listings are placed by the person doing the hiring (not HR), so the applicant knows his resume is going to the right person.
During my most recent job search, I used Monster, Hotjobs, a headhunter, and a number of lists like Craigslist. I got the most, relevant interviews from the latter, though the headhunter was close. Even though I applied for ~300 jobs on Monster and Hotjobs, I didn't receive 1 interview. The job I ended up taking I found on a list for people who are interested in startups in my area. I think using resources like that (and networking) are a much better option than a bulk job listing site like Monster; for the hiring company and the candidate.
This is a dealbreaker for me. I was actually about to upgrade my Palm M505 to something newer/fancier, but if it doesn't work my iBook, that's it.
It also makes you wonder about the health of Palm as a company; are the Windows CE devices finally starting to take over the market and push Palm out ?
So the software didn't raise alarms as it should've. That's bad. But it seems to me that the software is being made a scape goat here. It's much easier to blame "that #$@&@$ computer" than "FirstEnergy's failure to trim back trees encroaching on high-voltage power lines" or the fact that the infrastructure for the powergrid is old and poorly setup such that one failure can bring down the whole system. There's no reason why a failure in Ohio should blackout New York and there's nothing software can do to fix that.
My gf calls me while I'm gaming and a I talk and play. Some games work better than others for this, but you have to make sacrifices for a relationship to work.
They're biased against SCO because every one of SCO's claim which they research turns out to be false.
Had you or I cracked into these systems, we'd be going to jail. For a long time. Why aren't charges being files ? Are Republicans above their own laws ?
In spite of what MSNBC says (nice job moderators; linking to a story written by an obivously biased news source...), the court order doesn't require MS to stop distributing these products. The court order says that MS has to ship Windows with a Java VM (and not the MS "Java" VM which is not really Java). They've known this was coming for years; they could've updated the products to use a real JVM (as they did with many other products/verions), but, instead decided to stop distributing these old products. Blaming the court order is ridiculous.
It was only during these late-night matches that I realized that we MechAssault players were part of something new.
...) which have be around since the mid 90s, each of which has its own community. Quake alone has countless numbers of clans. If this a good game that works well online, great, but it's hardly revolutionary.
What's new about that ? Sounds exactly like any of the other online, first-person shooters (Quake, Duke Nukem, Half Life,
>McFact #5: Since the lawsuit, McDonald's has
> reduced the temperature of their coffee from 185
> degrees to 158 degrees. They knew 185 wasn't safe
> before, but served the coffee at those
> temperatures anyway. This is precisely why we
> have punitive damages.
If 185 degrees isn't safe, then I don't want safe coffee. 158 is way too cool. According to the Specialty Coffee Association of America, the optimal water temperature for coffee is 92 - 96C (197.6 - 204.8F).
I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in a country in which chainsaws and nail guns are outlawed and everyone drinks luke warm coffee and uses plastic knives. Some things I buy I can hurt myself with; I accept this risk as a part of life. It's not the government's job to protect me from my own stupidity.
Given that the courts are willing to grant patents for simple, obvious features which have been around for years, why wouldn't they go get a patent on it ?
If nothing else, it protects them from other companies doing this and suing them over the ridiculous patent.
The people to blame here are the patent office ad the US courts for continuing to not only grant these patents but also to enforce them.
There's something that's bothered me about these lawsuits since the beginning: what proof does the RIAA have that a given person shared a file ? They're simply using logs of their software. But how is this being verified ? A log, afterall, is just a textfile; I can make one now that says Lars Ulrich was sharing my copyrighted works.
Not to mention they're also relying on the DHCP logs of the sharer's ISP. These were designed to aid admins, not to be 100% accurate. And, even if we assume that the RIAA's and the ISP's logs are accurate, most people these days have multiple machines on their home networks and often wireless access points. How can could one possibly prove that the internnet account holder did the sharing and not a neighbor sneaking on via wireless or a friend who stopped by with a laptop or a roommate ?
IANAL, but I don't see how any of these cases could possibly stand up in court, with or without security holes.
With all due respect, Greenspun's students don't know what they're doing and Greenspun's as clueless about J2EE development as they are (and his ignorance has cost them much extra development time). He writes:
[JSP] still seems to be too complex for seniors and graduate students in the MIT computer science program, despite the fact that they all had at least one semester of Java experience in 6.170.
First off, I bet 6.170 never covered JSPs, so the students are newbies to this and having to pick it up.
Secondly, JSP is for building the presentation layer only and should contain only custom tags and no business logic. As any J2EE developer knows, business logic should be kept in Java and exposed to JSPs via custom tags and servlets. Trying to do it all in JSPs is asking for trouble (as his poor students have found).
I think before he makes any more grand statements about J2EE, Greenspun should learn how to use it.
So when do we get to launch our DDoS against the spammers again?
Let's send them tons of unwanted emails advertising p0rn and herbal supplements.
Only the truly masochistic would manage to pull themselve through the end of Knuth. Not that the work isn't brilliant in its own way; but the prose isn't exactly sparkling.
_The Art of Computer Programming_ is a book for those interested in purely programming. Not managers, industry analysts, tech sales people, etc. The prose is written with this in mind and, like many mathematics texts, is geared towards preventing it from being misunderstood rather than making it approachable.
The fact that a non-programmer found it difficult doesn't say anything about the book (the same way a great medical text would be difficult for one without a background in medicine). Most of its intended audience
um.. my linux box is a
so, as someone who uses a machine equivalent to these Walmart boxes, i can say they're plenty of power for most people.
It looks like Bitkeeper is getting a little microsoftian about what type of project they 'allow' you to use with their product.
No, they're getting a little microsoftian about what type of produt they 'allow' you to use with the free version of their product. This is entirely reasonably; if your product competes with BitKeeper and you really want to use it, you have to buy a license.
I have repeated it a few times (usually unintentially - I can always tell when a new apartment I go to has wireless ethernet
even that doesn't scientifically prove anything. But that's besides the point..
It is what is: anecdotal evidence. The point is that we don't know the effects of all of these new devices that are quickly springing up everywhere, and there are things which suggest that they might be doing bad things.
It's not a reason to ban them, for sure, but it is a reason to study them and make sure we understand all of the effects of the radiation which is constantly hitting us.
All I'm saying, as the subject of my post says, is let's not dismiss this guy out of hand until we know for sure what the effects of these devices are.
Drew
It looks like the
I don't know if all of his symptoms are real or imagined, but I will say that using a cell phone or coming close to a wireless ethernet card gives me a migraine every time, and this has been verified in a blind test (friend plugged in card, brought me into the room without telling me it's state; migraine. next day unplugged in card, brought me into the room; no migraine).
Maybe these kinds of radiation aren't harmful to most people, but let's not immediately dismiss this; I think, if nothing else, this issue should be studied by public researchers because Sprint, AT&T, etc. certaintly aren't going to do anything that would in anyway hurt their profits (cf.tabacco companies and the harmful effects of tabacco).
so let's not dismiss this out of hand; it's a reasonable question.
Drew