The other difference is that you've got a whole mass of them coming in all at once and who have a history of management (wipro not necessarily sun) of pushing for "results" to early in the process. I don't know if wipro is SEI certified, but even that can't help if you've got management that doesn't understand the limitations of the people they are managing and therefore fail to plan appropriately.
Luis, you've got your work cut out for you. I've seen the effect of outsourcing development and even just maintence work to third world countries. Typically the programmers jump in and start producing patches way before they have enough domain experience to know WTF they are doing. I've seen companies blindly trust the 3rd world developers to do things right and let them check into the tree themselves. Worst mistake those companies have ever made, at least one company spent 3 months just trying to recover from it.
You guys are going to have to be exceptionally vigilant in dealing with the output from wipro's people. I expect that for the first year or so, while they are getting up to speed, their contribution will be net negative because of all the work everyone else has to do make sure they don't F it up.
I believe GSM is dominant in Europe and Asia because of the higher population densities. GSM works great when you have a high concentration of users in a limited area. It isn't quite so great for the wide-open rural spaces that are so common in America. So GSM doesn't do you much good for 95% of American real estate and probably 40-50% of the American population.
Perhaps verizon is doing spam filtering. Lots of ISPs do it without telling their users. Makes you wonder what legit messages get silently filtered too.
Mach, especially micro-kernel mach, had sucktastic latencies. On the order of milliseconds to make a system call that, on a regular unix, would take microseconds. But, OS X is not micro-kernel, and being a multi-media machine, it is reasonable to assume that Apple tweaked it up for decent latencies. However, don't be surprised if the 2.5.x series was substantially fast than OS X. Predecessors to the low-latency work currently in the kernel were measured as providing better latency than BeOS on the same hardware and BeOS was famed for its low latency abilities.
Well - it worked for Dolby Digital EX (or whatever the version of 6.1 is called for theaters) and TPM. Though a new projection system probably costs more than a new audio system.
When I was a kid, we used to go dumpster diving at the local convenience store once a month when they threw out the playboys without covers. I don't know how we first discovered it, but it was like clockwork, same day of the month, there they would be - a pile of magainzes without covers full of gorgeous women uncovered. It was an odd, but appropriate symmetry.
They are probably double-sided single-layer for only ~4.8GB total. You can tell if a disc is dual-layer because it will have a goldish tinge to it, any other color (like silver or blue/green) almost always means it is single-layer. That's a bit more than 2 hours plus extras per disc. Which is about equal to a regular movie + extras on a single-sided dual-layer disc.
The Magi are still there, the results of their creations are just physically smaller. The kind of engineering that goes into the high-end boxes from all the major vendors, and the botique ones too, today is on par with what went into the high-end boxes of yesteryear.
That is the right idea, if expressed a bit frivolously. Open source is a huge business opportunity for independent developers/contractors/consultants. RMS totally understands this himself - in the past (and currently for all I know) he bills at a fairly high hourly rate to do custom work on GPL'd software for specific customers. Of course the work he does then goes back into the tree -- GPL and all, but he gets paid well, the customer gets a solution and the rest of the world gets to "stand on the shoulders of giants."
If I were in the same situation I would have treated it like an enormous business opportunity. Instead of getting torqued off by all the hassling, I would have worked up a quick and simple website advertising my services wrt consulting on development of work related to the program in question (a cheap method of legitimizing yourself as a business rather than joe random hacker in his basement). Then I would have responded to any inquiries from the company that lifted your code with an offer to work on their version of the system on a time and materials basis and with the stipulation that any work done is also licensed under the terms of the original license that they 'exploited' in the first place. Similarly for any of their customers that had managed to track me down. If there was some sort of mailing list of users I would have become a visible if not active participant with a link to the website advertising my business in my.sig in any messages posted to the mailing list.
Also, FWIW, $100/hr is nothing in a situation like that. Depending on the size of the companies involved and the size of their need for their product to be fixed, $200/hr ought to be easily attainable for a smart businessman in that kind of situation. When the big names like Oracle, Sun, HP, IBM and the Big 5 consulting firms bill their people out in the $300-$500/hr range that gives an independent expert lots of headroom to set a high billing rate and not have to burn most of it on overhead like those guys do.
FWIW mapquest is owned by AOL. I certainly haven't tracked the address book features, but it really sounds like AOL wanted that particular featurette in there, just cuz. I don't begrudge them a doodad or two like that seeing as how they are responsible for the largest chunk of funding on the project.
I totally agree. When an ad slips through my ad filters there is about a 25% chance that I will actually want to read it. But, I usually only look at such ads as I am leaving the page. So, I have to hit back to return to the page with the ad I was interested in. But, with this no-cache baloney 9 times out of 10 the ad I was interested in is now gone and replaced by some new ad that I don't care about, and I don't have any way to find the original.
The problem is that ARM does not support floating point and the standard, free ogg implementation is heavily reliant on floating point. There is, apparently, a non-free implementation of ogg that is integer only. But, being non-free it isn't freely available.
This lack of an integer Ogg codec is a major problem because the vast majority of dedicated mp3 devices are ARM based. Until integer Ogg is freely available, we aren't going to see much support for Ogg beyond our computers.
Obsessed is right. It sure seems like the RIAA would rather have 100% of a market than, say, *only* 20% -- even if acquiring 100% of the market means limiting it to $100M when going with *only* 20% would allow the market to grow to over $1B.
It is called "sunshine dollars" and if you are currently working in Silicon Valley you can expect your salary to be reduced by at least 75% if you come to Hawaii and cost of living will remain the same or probably go up. Hawaiian business is about tourism, the need for computer people is miniscule, the hotels don't need much and most of them are part of a chain with mainland IT anyway -- but everyone wants to live in paradise. Low demand, high supply == crappy pay. I grew up in Hawaii and had to leave in order to make a living as a computer guy. I'd move back in a heartbeat if I could maintain a semblence of my current standard of living, but as long as computers are my profession, it ain't going to happen.
As one of the usual paranoids I'd like to step and say that I have little to no problem with this kind of justified vigiliantisim. As long as the Evil-Goverment-Electronic-Surveilance systems are in place doing their thing those systems will be subject to compromise - either through technical measure like cracking and hacking or social engineering like sweet-talking and bribing.
The less big-brother databases there are (evil-government AND evil-megalocorp) the less vigilantes like this will be able to act outside of the law. Reduce and expunge those databases and vigilantism like this goes away. Until then you can't blame people for making use of the resources that are out there, that's just human nature.
Windows is based on threads, while UNIX is based on pipes.
Don't forget:
MacOS is based on yarn.
AmigaOS is based on wires.
DOS is based on twisty-ties.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
Re:Abuse of the word lossy. [WRONG]
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
·
· Score: 1
That definition of "lossy" applies to all digital forms of music (and any other translation of analog information into digital). Even a CD is lossy because if you play it back, the sound-waves are not identical to the originally recorded sound waves. They may be pretty close, but they are going to be limited by the sampling rate. What goes into the Analog-to-Digital Converter will be a smooth waveform, what comes out of the Digital-to-Analog Converter will look like a step function where the size of the steps is delimited by the bit-width and rate of sampling.
Another way to look at it is:
Original Performance -> CD1 -> Playback to Analog -> CD2
CD1 and CD2 will not be bit-for-bit identical.
Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR
on
Xfree86 4.2.0 Out
·
· Score: 3, Informative
As a minor player in the original XFree86 work (back when it was X386) I can say you are wrong. The work started before linux was a viable platform, instead it was SVR4 on 386's - but one of the earliest goals of the project was, and continues to be, mutli-platform compatibility. That's why you can run XFree86 on SCO, SVR4, *BSD, Solaris and Linux. Just because they don't focus *ALL* their efforts on linux doesn't mean they were stuck up snobs - if anything you are the stuck up snob for suggesting that they should dedicate themselves to Linux alone. A monoculture - whether it is microsoft or Linux is not a healthy environment.
If you use something like dscaler to watch TV and combine that with a window resizing program that can stretch windows off-screen like YxY, then it would be trivial to stretch the image back to the right proportion and then put the "ad-bar" off the bottom of the screen. If you don't watch TV on your computer you are probably SOL, but lots of people have got them hooked up to their projection systems and HDTV sets. This is an MS-Windows based solution though....
Slashdot Mirror
The other difference is that you've got a whole mass of them coming in all at once and who have a history of management (wipro not necessarily sun) of pushing for "results" to early in the process. I don't know if wipro is SEI certified, but even that can't help if you've got management that doesn't understand the limitations of the people they are managing and therefore fail to plan appropriately.
Most hardware manufacturers have been fighting this. So much so that Disney feels the need to blame them for "preventing progress."
= &t hreadid=109285&pagenumber=2
See Preston Padden, VP at Disney play spin doctor on this one right here:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s
Luis, you've got your work cut out for you. I've seen the effect of outsourcing development and even just maintence work to third world countries. Typically the programmers jump in and start producing patches way before they have enough domain experience to know WTF they are doing. I've seen companies blindly trust the 3rd world developers to do things right and let them check into the tree themselves. Worst mistake those companies have ever made, at least one company spent 3 months just trying to recover from it.
You guys are going to have to be exceptionally vigilant in dealing with the output from wipro's people. I expect that for the first year or so, while they are getting up to speed, their contribution will be net negative because of all the work everyone else has to do make sure they don't F it up.
Why would your prof be unhappy? You are at school, not working as some intern with NDAs coming out your ears.
History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government." T. Jefferson
Lawyers are the new priesthood of America - Me
I believe GSM is dominant in Europe and Asia because of the higher population densities. GSM works great when you have a high concentration of users in a limited area. It isn't quite so great for the wide-open rural spaces that are so common in America. So GSM doesn't do you much good for 95% of American real estate and probably 40-50% of the American population.
Perhaps verizon is doing spam filtering. Lots of ISPs do it without telling their users. Makes you wonder what legit messages get silently filtered too.
Mach, especially micro-kernel mach, had sucktastic latencies. On the order of milliseconds to make a system call that, on a regular unix, would take microseconds. But, OS X is not micro-kernel, and being a multi-media machine, it is reasonable to assume that Apple tweaked it up for decent latencies. However, don't be surprised if the 2.5.x series was substantially fast than OS X. Predecessors to the low-latency work currently in the kernel were measured as providing better latency than BeOS on the same hardware and BeOS was famed for its low latency abilities.
Well - it worked for Dolby Digital EX (or whatever the version of 6.1 is called for theaters) and TPM. Though a new projection system probably costs more than a new audio system.
When I was a kid, we used to go dumpster diving at the local convenience store once a month when they threw out the playboys without covers. I don't know how we first discovered it, but it was like clockwork, same day of the month, there they would be - a pile of magainzes without covers full of gorgeous women uncovered. It was an odd, but appropriate symmetry.
They are probably double-sided single-layer for only ~4.8GB total. You can tell if a disc is dual-layer because it will have a goldish tinge to it, any other color (like silver or blue/green) almost always means it is single-layer. That's a bit more than 2 hours plus extras per disc. Which is about equal to a regular movie + extras on a single-sided dual-layer disc.
The Magi are still there, the results of their creations are just physically smaller. The kind of engineering that goes into the high-end boxes from all the major vendors, and the botique ones too, today is on par with what went into the high-end boxes of yesteryear.
That is the right idea, if expressed a bit frivolously. Open source is a huge business opportunity for independent developers/contractors/consultants. RMS totally understands this himself - in the past (and currently for all I know) he bills at a fairly high hourly rate to do custom work on GPL'd software for specific customers. Of course the work he does then goes back into the tree -- GPL and all, but he gets paid well, the customer gets a solution and the rest of the world gets to "stand on the shoulders of giants."
.sig in any messages posted to the mailing list.
If I were in the same situation I would have treated it like an enormous business opportunity. Instead of getting torqued off by all the hassling, I would have worked up a quick and simple website advertising my services wrt consulting on development of work related to the program in question (a cheap method of legitimizing yourself as a business rather than joe random hacker in his basement). Then I would have responded to any inquiries from the company that lifted your code with an offer to work on their version of the system on a time and materials basis and with the stipulation that any work done is also licensed under the terms of the original license that they 'exploited' in the first place. Similarly for any of their customers that had managed to track me down. If there was some sort of mailing list of users I would have become a visible if not active participant with a link to the website advertising my business in my
Also, FWIW, $100/hr is nothing in a situation like that. Depending on the size of the companies involved and the size of their need for their product to be fixed, $200/hr ought to be easily attainable for a smart businessman in that kind of situation. When the big names like Oracle, Sun, HP, IBM and the Big 5 consulting firms bill their people out in the $300-$500/hr range that gives an independent expert lots of headroom to set a high billing rate and not have to burn most of it on overhead like those guys do.
FWIW mapquest is owned by AOL. I certainly haven't tracked the address book features, but it really sounds like AOL wanted that particular featurette in there, just cuz. I don't begrudge them a doodad or two like that seeing as how they are responsible for the largest chunk of funding on the project.
I totally agree. When an ad slips through my ad filters there is about a 25% chance that I will actually want to read it. But, I usually only look at such ads as I am leaving the page. So, I have to hit back to return to the page with the ad I was interested in. But, with this no-cache baloney 9 times out of 10 the ad I was interested in is now gone and replaced by some new ad that I don't care about, and I don't have any way to find the original.
The problem is that ARM does not support floating point and the standard, free ogg implementation is heavily reliant on floating point. There is, apparently, a non-free implementation of ogg that is integer only. But, being non-free it isn't freely available.
This lack of an integer Ogg codec is a major problem because the vast majority of dedicated mp3 devices are ARM based. Until integer Ogg is freely available, we aren't going to see much support for Ogg beyond our computers.
Obsessed is right. It sure seems like the RIAA would rather have 100% of a market than, say, *only* 20% -- even if acquiring 100% of the market means limiting it to $100M when going with *only* 20% would allow the market to grow to over $1B.
It is called "sunshine dollars" and if you are currently working in Silicon Valley you can expect your salary to be reduced by at least 75% if you come to Hawaii and cost of living will remain the same or probably go up. Hawaiian business is about tourism, the need for computer people is miniscule, the hotels don't need much and most of them are part of a chain with mainland IT anyway -- but everyone wants to live in paradise. Low demand, high supply == crappy pay. I grew up in Hawaii and had to leave in order to make a living as a computer guy. I'd move back in a heartbeat if I could maintain a semblence of my current standard of living, but as long as computers are my profession, it ain't going to happen.
Amen - don't feel bad for other people when they get burned for being maliciously stupid. It's just social Darwinism in action.
As one of the usual paranoids I'd like to step and say that I have little to no problem with this kind of justified vigiliantisim. As long as the Evil-Goverment-Electronic-Surveilance systems are in place doing their thing those systems will be subject to compromise - either through technical measure like cracking and hacking or social engineering like sweet-talking and bribing.
The less big-brother databases there are (evil-government AND evil-megalocorp) the less vigilantes like this will be able to act outside of the law. Reduce and expunge those databases and vigilantism like this goes away. Until then you can't blame people for making use of the resources that are out there, that's just human nature.
Windows is based on threads, while UNIX is based on pipes.
Don't forget:
MacOS is based on yarn.
AmigaOS is based on wires.
DOS is based on twisty-ties.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
That definition of "lossy" applies to all digital forms of music (and any other translation of analog information into digital). Even a CD is lossy because if you play it back, the sound-waves are not identical to the originally recorded sound waves. They may be pretty close, but they are going to be limited by the sampling rate. What goes into the Analog-to-Digital Converter will be a smooth waveform, what comes out of the Digital-to-Analog Converter will look like a step function where the size of the steps is delimited by the bit-width and rate of sampling.
Another way to look at it is:
Original Performance -> CD1 -> Playback to Analog -> CD2
CD1 and CD2 will not be bit-for-bit identical.
As a minor player in the original XFree86 work (back when it was X386) I can say you are wrong. The work started before linux was a viable platform, instead it was SVR4 on 386's - but one of the earliest goals of the project was, and continues to be, mutli-platform compatibility. That's why you can run XFree86 on SCO, SVR4, *BSD, Solaris and Linux. Just because they don't focus *ALL* their efforts on linux doesn't mean they were stuck up snobs - if anything you are the stuck up snob for suggesting that they should dedicate themselves to Linux alone. A monoculture - whether it is microsoft or Linux is not a healthy environment.
If you use something like dscaler to watch TV and combine that with a window resizing program that can stretch windows off-screen like YxY, then it would be trivial to stretch the image back to the right proportion and then put the "ad-bar" off the bottom of the screen. If you don't watch TV on your computer you are probably SOL, but lots of people have got them hooked up to their projection systems and HDTV sets. This is an MS-Windows based solution though....
dscaler
YxY
(you might not even need YxY with the more recent versions of dscaler).
Aren't most traffic violations civil and not criminal?