What if the company would have researched the same or very similar idea and thus You'd only bring them some minor enhancements? Would they have to pay You? And if they decided that the price in the contract is too high for the enhancements and wouldn't use Your work, only their own research, would they have to pay?
The first contact between the person with an idea and a company willing to listen would be such that neither party would be paying anything for the other party. You could sign NDAs (both ways), and the person would then tell the rough version - the idea, and why it's worth something.
Only then could the company consider the idea, and whether they already have research done on a subject similar to that idea. And, if they decide to rather use their own research than whatever the person could provide, they can call it quits knowing that the person can now go to another company and if the other company listens, they may be ready with a product similar to what the company had considered pretty much the same time this company can. Which would mean competition.
So, it may be worth to buy the idea just to keep it out of other companies' hands. But, if one company has considered it, and some individual has come up with it, how likely is it that a competitor in the same business area has considered it already?
You may have optimized the size, but that doesn't really prove anything as the size of Your entry in such format that it would be maintainable is a lot more.
Can You provide documentation to the entry in under 5k?
In Europe billion is 10^12 (trillion 10^18). We have milliard (10^9), but beside that, every magnitude above thousand is 10^(6*x) where x comes from greek or latin.
I think US uses trillion for what we Europeans use billion for. I don't think US can do anything where trillions of dollars are an issue.. Of course it may be that journalists are the blame in this case.
Nice deal, but not very big. Consider that it's 1.2M for two year project.. 600k/year pays for perhaps two programmers (100-120k salaries * 5-6 for other costs and profit). Or a top-notch researcher working part-time in the project. Or something between - the most likely choice.
Without the specifics of the deal, it's of course hard to say, but as it's about Linux security and cryptography commercial/NSA joint project and, from reading the press release, there are more partners in this project, the total impact is likely to be big.
However, I don't remember if mandatory access control framework was generally accepted as a target for 2.5 development by the kernel guys. And, being a big change, I think it's either one of the main targets, or it's going to wait for the next development cycle. Which might fit nicely for the 2-year project deadline;)
As usual, the advice not to write software when employed by someone else is both correct and incorrect.
It's correct in that anything You write may belong to the employer. Incorrect in that it might not belong to the employer.
Correct answer would be to get it written from the employer, either in employment contract or (actually preferable even if mentioned in contract) for each project.
In my contract there is a specific mention regarding working for other parties. And, for each project, I get an agreement from my boss.
This, however, covers only working, not writing software for any other purpose.
Of course the legalese differs from country to country, but I try to get agreement for whatever I decide to do that might coincide with my employers business. For me it's pretty easy, because we've agreed what's mine and what's theirs, in general terms, and thus specifics are easy to handle.
I've been successfull in deducting phone bills in personal income tax by writing a nice letter telling the Finnish IRS that I need to access internet and use fax due to my work (I deducted bills for only two phone lines, data and fax).
Same with many other issues. A computer, too, deductable in three years.
However, with a company, I've been able to deduct a lot more. As I'm not the sole owner of the company (it's a real company that does real work), I can't of course bill everything from the company. But quite a lot, if I do my tax planning right and work a good deal with the other owners.
Still, last computer purchase was a lease. Because I didn't see any point in buying computers any more, even if the company is in IT sector.. Of course if You own the computers, many upgrades can be deducted at once, but there's a limit to upgrading, too.
However, when You use computers to the very end of their lifespan, owning may be cheaper. In such case I'd advice to check if You can get a good lease with an option to buy after the lease period. For me, about two years seems to be the "desktop" period of a new computer, after which it moves to some server duty, ending it's lifespan when I don't need another router or whatnot and thus don't have a suitable placement for it anymore.
I haven't personally contacted any CA for any purpose, but from offhand discussions with those who have, at least Thawte requires original official stamped and signed papers of corporate identity (don't know what those papers are called in English or US Legalese) and proof that the domain has been registered to that specific company.
To me that looks like enough to trust certificates issued by Thawte - if they really, really require that always and make no exceptions. And if the papers proving that information are issued by an authority that can be trusted (which governments do we trust?) and if we can trust that those papers aren't forged.
I believe verifying that information isn't easy. I certainly hope that Thawte does verify that information, by contacting authorities that issued those papers and verifying that the issuer is authoritative within the jurisdiction in which the paper was issued, and so on.
That's why the certificate costs money. Why do different certs cost different amounts? The verification job is the same anyway.. There probably isn't any other justification except "those who want better certs are willing to pay more and then we make more money".
Now, is there any public repository of knowledge regarding how these CAs act, how they verify and what, and so on? Hopefully one that is trusted to verify the information stored, which leads to a very hard problem.. How would we trust THAT information?
There's no way even half of the western countries could agree on single legislation that would cover the net. Remember US-EU banana wars? Let alone French an German Nazi and hate-speech laws. Or French and US cryptography laws. Or UK cryptography laws, for the matter. All the while leaving aside the rest of the world, which comprises of many more countries than the EU + North America together.
No, internet can't be covered by a single jurisdiction. We'll just have to continue living and understand that local jurisdiction covers whoever has presence or does business in the particular country or state.
And what's the actual problem with that? You probably have grown used to local laws already? Just act as usual. And if You want to drive faster than the speed limit, order illegal materials from abroad (hoping that it'll not be opened in the customs post office), lie to police officers, and whatever, You already know how to circumvent local laws. Internet may make that easier in some cases, but most every real transaction relates to physical goods that have to be transported and thus risk being caught at the border.
Now, I'd like to note that even the western world consists of many countries with different views towards the net. Not all are as close-minded as the French, USA, UK, Germany, and Italy. Checking that list You might also note that they are the bigger ones, ones with bad memories from WWII and WWI, ones that have been world powers at one time or another, and haven't gotten over it yet. Don't expect them to be liberal until 2-3 generations down the road.
8 drives in 11 years. Out of perhaps about 60 drives. Oldest drive I have in use is about 4 years, as I do dump drives that are too small for anything anymore (and in cases where I could do with small drives, I don't trust a 4-year old drive enough).
Hard drives are unreliable. That's why I always have a hot spare even for a mirror set (3 drives, once the capacity, but at least I sleep well) if the system doesn't need more space than that.
Actually RFC 2045-2049 (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) defines multipart/alternative, which allows sending email in several formats. And, the headers may specify content-type other than text for the main content, too.. It's possible to send eg. a picture without any text (the picture being the content of the message).
What You're referring to with "The email RFC" I don't know. RFC822 (Standard for the format of ARPA Internet text messages) specifies the headers and how they're separated from the body, but not the format of the body.
Of course I'd expect all messages to have textual content and if the message contains the same content in HTML, too, that's OK.
What Linus said was essentially just that for the next few months developers should concentrate on making sure that any bugs that come up in 2.4 get fixed, do more testing and fixing, etc.
The wording "I don't even want to plan 2.5.x or 3.0 at this point yet." may scare those who take that to mean "I don't have any plans for future", of course. It could, of course, mean that Linus doesn't want to write the roadmap for the next release until he's taken a break and seen that 2.4 is stable and works well. Not just on 10000 developer workstations, but on a couple of million other computers, too.
Now, as Linus stated in the interview, he's not making press releases or alike. That's for companies to do. He's not talking with soothing voice, treating the IT managers like babies scared of dark who need mommy and papa to check that there are no grues under the bed. He's talking like a developer who's got one project released and can take a short break not needing to think about work for a few days.
I would of course also hope that there aren't all that many "IT manager morons" in important positions.
Linux already is in embedded market. Most applications there won't have a graphical user interface, usually not textual either.
Still, some embedded Linux products have X (and XF86 even) in them. While others may have eg. W Window System, which is considerably lighter than X. But mostly they do with serial console which is partially or fully disabled when going from development to production.
And I do remember running X on Linux with 2 megs of RAM. It was sluggish, but when the amount of RAM was raised to 6MB, it flew. That was around '92 I think.
Perhaps, even if I wouldn't care about the security of my mailbox concerning private email, there are other needs and concerns..
Like, what if I have signed an NDA with a multinational corporation and agreed that all conversation where said corporation and I are both parties regarding subjects covered by the NDA are confidential and if in electronic form, must be encrypted with algorithms and keylengths agreed upon to provide required security.
What does the government do? I can't give the key without breaking the NDA, so I must ask the government that if I am to give the key, it will be done in presence of said corporation and that the officials who will have the key will probably have to sign NDAs with said corporation to cover corporate security and trade secrets which would otherwise be compromised by giving the key to a third party.
Have You ever needed to upgrade firmware of any hardware component in Your computer? I've done it several times. Usually it helps. It's also one of the first pieces of advice given to me after the support notices that I won't be content with "Reboot Windows" -type answers..
While some components in the computers are "pure hardware" in such way that their software can't be upgraded by the end user or a retailer techie, the trend seems to be towards upgradeable software in hardware components, too.
The hardest to diagnose properly problem I've had was with SCSI channel that seemed to have termination problems (bad cable or terminator) - upgraded firmware and it started to work OK. I was sure that the cable and terminator were good, because they worked with different SCSI host adapters - 4 distinct models from two companies.
Yes, I agree with the closing statement, too. Have You ever tried to convince any manager that while it might seem that producing better quality is more expensive, it will in the end produce higher profits? How many managers see more than the next 12 months?
Even when the management agrees that the procedures to produce quality will lead to higher profits, there are customer requirements: everything, now, cheap. Even if we manage to do quality work cheap, it will take time. That's the hardest problem..
And how much would newfound productivity in other functions affect this? Could it be that we'd get better products, cheaper, overall?
OK, what could the people who're no longer needed to patch the crap put out by computer industry do?
People writing the Dummies books are useless anyway, but perhaps they could write material for teaching to use the software efficiently..
Tech support would still be needed, but the personnel would need to be trained with focus on other aspects of the software than just "Reboot Windows". And as they know the sofware (or other product) quite well, there are certainly positions where they would fit nicely.
I don't think having quality software would really cause this massive unemployment some people predict. It's the same with many other issues: if this or that would be done differently, there would be massive unemployment because the people who currently do the job wouldn't be needed anymore. I'd guess they would find new jobs, and any restructuring would create new jobs. Rising productivity would mean that companies could afford to pay decent salary for jobs that don't exist now because they would be too expensive.
5 Programmers need support staff
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No more than half the employees can be programmers. And five is enough to drive even one project manager nuts, fill the inbox of one techwriter, and use up one office assistant, not to forget that single person trying to manage the dozen servers the programmers are abusing (and the workstations of the staff, too). They could easily do with just one financial clerk, but that one director that tried to get money to the company would require the rest of the worktime of said clerk.
That makes it a minimum of 11, of which five were programmers.
Oh yes, did You want quality software? One of those programmers will just keep hitting his head against the wall with massive amount of diagrams about the software, another keeps comforting him and trying to tell the three to keep working while he translates some of those diagrams to APIs written in chosen programming language.
That left three. Sounds like it's total of 2 management (director and financial clerk), 2 office/administrative (office assistant and system administrator), 1 project manager, 1 techwriter, 1 software architect, one senior programmer, and three hackers.
If they would sell each disc in each region (coded for that region), I'd have less problems with that.
What I do have problems with is that I can't get what I want because somebody thinks it's not profitable enough to sell it in Europe. Because of that, I couldn't get it for any price without ordering it from another region.
And I would pay much more if I could get the same disc from within Europe, since shipping and taxes add up quite a lot - enough that if the title IS available in Finland, it's almost certainly a lot cheaper than it'd be ordered from any of the 30+% off webshops.
I hadn't ever even considered a DVD player that isn't region free. Now that I already have several discs (R1 and regionless titles) I think I at last have to get a player (I've managed up to date by asking friends with players whether they wanted to watch some title I happened to have).
If I had to choose a single-region player, it'd be R1 anyway, as even though Japan is R2, I can't find any anime in Finland, so I order English subs from USA.
But, it's clear here that a DVD player is region-free. Big shops sell region-free players. They advertise them (including "region-free").
Even earlier I thought I don't want an automatic but a manual region changing, because that was a clear threat - the disc can eg. ask the player for several regions and only accept a player that answers yes on only one region (note that there are also discs that work on several regions, eg 1-4), or some other way to do it.
1. You can easily use the bandwidth of the bus, just attach a couple of drives to it. You don't need many - SCSI drives can pump data faster than IDE drives.
3. But of course You don't want to attach many devices of different revisions from different manufacturers to the bus. You want different buses for fast and slow devices, and with many devices, even more channels for the devices to be able to run at full speed. I don't want that CD-burner to take the channel down to crawl - I put it on a different channel from my disks. And I've seen at least three generations of devices from four manufacturers on a single channel - working as well as can be expected (the new, fast drives were then moved to a separate channel).
4. At least tapes do disconnect. And it's good they do - I've seen what happens when they don't due to buggy driver, and it ain't pretty.
8. You can find SCSI cables, terminators, different kinds of adapters, host adapters, and more from many shops. Though not all of them have the more expensive hardware on shelf but can get it in two days usually. And the cable length is essential - You just can't connect many devices to IDE channel due to cable length, let alone external devices.. I think my SCSI channels are all between 1.5m and 4m.
And yes, of course my main workstation at the office has a single 240MB IDE drive - it's just an X terminal, afterall. I need SCSI at home where I need more than just an X terminal.
One problem with not allowing free webmail addresses is that not everyone has a real email address. And even those who do might not always be able to read email to that address (damn hardware) even though they might have usable web connection.
Eg. in Finland You can use computers at libraries for net connection. And use hotmail or whatever for email. Not everyone has internet connection at home or at work. And these people may very well be excellent participants in public and semi-public forums.
Also, it's easy to get email addresses. Just register a domain (any domain) and have them forward all email to anything@your.domain to you@hotmail.com or whatever. Or use a less well known free email system.
Deeper would mean it requires deeper rack to have cabling and airflow space. And because many computer cases are about the same depth, making it rather high than deep means it's going to fit into same racks and the usual PCs.
Anyway, who's going to put them into some rented server room? They don't seem like webservers to me..
It's rackmounted. So, the width is set by mounting. It's not very deep, so even if installed in 600mm deep rack (480mm max install depth), it has some space for cables and air flow. It's 10U high. Probably it just didn't fit into 8U case being only 16.6" deep.
Not everything needs to be cube because it was original some day, it may be a cube because the parts happen to fit best into that kind of case.
Assign reference to an anonymous variable into a typeglob. Not a constant either, and according to the article, typeglobs may be removed.
Perl really doesn't have a way to declare a constant other than by creating a subroutine that consists of returning an anonymous variable - either with usual sub foo { bar; } or use constant foo => bar; I think that subroutine call that obviously (to the interpreter) does nothing but returns the same value every time it's called is optimized into an effective anonymous variable.
But, as none of these really produces a constant - an immutable variable initialized in declaration - we can only hope it'll be added.
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Companies won't sign blanket contracts.
What if the company would have researched the same or very similar idea and thus You'd only bring them some minor enhancements? Would they have to pay You? And if they decided that the price in the contract is too high for the enhancements and wouldn't use Your work, only their own research, would they have to pay?
The first contact between the person with an idea and a company willing to listen would be such that neither party would be paying anything for the other party. You could sign NDAs (both ways), and the person would then tell the rough version - the idea, and why it's worth something.
Only then could the company consider the idea, and whether they already have research done on a subject similar to that idea. And, if they decide to rather use their own research than whatever the person could provide, they can call it quits knowing that the person can now go to another company and if the other company listens, they may be ready with a product similar to what the company had considered pretty much the same time this company can. Which would mean competition.
So, it may be worth to buy the idea just to keep it out of other companies' hands. But, if one company has considered it, and some individual has come up with it, how likely is it that a competitor in the same business area has considered it already?
You may have optimized the size, but that doesn't really prove anything as the size of Your entry in such format that it would be maintainable is a lot more.
Can You provide documentation to the entry in under 5k?
In Europe billion is 10^12 (trillion 10^18). We have milliard (10^9), but beside that, every magnitude above thousand is 10^(6*x) where x comes from greek or latin.
I think US uses trillion for what we Europeans use billion for. I don't think US can do anything where trillions of dollars are an issue.. Of course it may be that journalists are the blame in this case.
Nice deal, but not very big. Consider that it's 1.2M for two year project.. 600k/year pays for perhaps two programmers (100-120k salaries * 5-6 for other costs and profit). Or a top-notch researcher working part-time in the project. Or something between - the most likely choice.
;)
Without the specifics of the deal, it's of course hard to say, but as it's about Linux security and cryptography commercial/NSA joint project and, from reading the press release, there are more partners in this project, the total impact is likely to be big.
However, I don't remember if mandatory access control framework was generally accepted as a target for 2.5 development by the kernel guys. And, being a big change, I think it's either one of the main targets, or it's going to wait for the next development cycle. Which might fit nicely for the 2-year project deadline
As usual, the advice not to write software when employed by someone else is both correct and incorrect.
It's correct in that anything You write may belong to the employer. Incorrect in that it might not belong to the employer.
Correct answer would be to get it written from the employer, either in employment contract or (actually preferable even if mentioned in contract) for each project.
In my contract there is a specific mention regarding working for other parties. And, for each project, I get an agreement from my boss.
This, however, covers only working, not writing software for any other purpose.
Of course the legalese differs from country to country, but I try to get agreement for whatever I decide to do that might coincide with my employers business. For me it's pretty easy, because we've agreed what's mine and what's theirs, in general terms, and thus specifics are easy to handle.
Not just Americans.
I've been successfull in deducting phone bills in personal income tax by writing a nice letter telling the Finnish IRS that I need to access internet and use fax due to my work (I deducted bills for only two phone lines, data and fax).
Same with many other issues. A computer, too, deductable in three years.
However, with a company, I've been able to deduct a lot more. As I'm not the sole owner of the company (it's a real company that does real work), I can't of course bill everything from the company. But quite a lot, if I do my tax planning right and work a good deal with the other owners.
Still, last computer purchase was a lease. Because I didn't see any point in buying computers any more, even if the company is in IT sector.. Of course if You own the computers, many upgrades can be deducted at once, but there's a limit to upgrading, too.
However, when You use computers to the very end of their lifespan, owning may be cheaper. In such case I'd advice to check if You can get a good lease with an option to buy after the lease period. For me, about two years seems to be the "desktop" period of a new computer, after which it moves to some server duty, ending it's lifespan when I don't need another router or whatnot and thus don't have a suitable placement for it anymore.
I haven't personally contacted any CA for any purpose, but from offhand discussions with those who have, at least Thawte requires original official stamped and signed papers of corporate identity (don't know what those papers are called in English or US Legalese) and proof that the domain has been registered to that specific company.
To me that looks like enough to trust certificates issued by Thawte - if they really, really require that always and make no exceptions. And if the papers proving that information are issued by an authority that can be trusted (which governments do we trust?) and if we can trust that those papers aren't forged.
I believe verifying that information isn't easy. I certainly hope that Thawte does verify that information, by contacting authorities that issued those papers and verifying that the issuer is authoritative within the jurisdiction in which the paper was issued, and so on.
That's why the certificate costs money. Why do different certs cost different amounts? The verification job is the same anyway.. There probably isn't any other justification except "those who want better certs are willing to pay more and then we make more money".
Now, is there any public repository of knowledge regarding how these CAs act, how they verify and what, and so on? Hopefully one that is trusted to verify the information stored, which leads to a very hard problem.. How would we trust THAT information?
There's no way even half of the western countries could agree on single legislation that would cover the net. Remember US-EU banana wars? Let alone French an German Nazi and hate-speech laws. Or French and US cryptography laws. Or UK cryptography laws, for the matter. All the while leaving aside the rest of the world, which comprises of many more countries than the EU + North America together.
No, internet can't be covered by a single jurisdiction. We'll just have to continue living and understand that local jurisdiction covers whoever has presence or does business in the particular country or state.
And what's the actual problem with that? You probably have grown used to local laws already? Just act as usual. And if You want to drive faster than the speed limit, order illegal materials from abroad (hoping that it'll not be opened in the customs post office), lie to police officers, and whatever, You already know how to circumvent local laws. Internet may make that easier in some cases, but most every real transaction relates to physical goods that have to be transported and thus risk being caught at the border.
Now, I'd like to note that even the western world consists of many countries with different views towards the net. Not all are as close-minded as the French, USA, UK, Germany, and Italy. Checking that list You might also note that they are the bigger ones, ones with bad memories from WWII and WWI, ones that have been world powers at one time or another, and haven't gotten over it yet. Don't expect them to be liberal until 2-3 generations down the road.
8 drives in 11 years. Out of perhaps about 60 drives. Oldest drive I have in use is about 4 years, as I do dump drives that are too small for anything anymore (and in cases where I could do with small drives, I don't trust a 4-year old drive enough).
Hard drives are unreliable. That's why I always have a hot spare even for a mirror set (3 drives, once the capacity, but at least I sleep well) if the system doesn't need more space than that.
Actually RFC 2045-2049 (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) defines multipart/alternative, which allows sending email in several formats. And, the headers may specify content-type other than text for the main content, too.. It's possible to send eg. a picture without any text (the picture being the content of the message).
What You're referring to with "The email RFC" I don't know. RFC822 (Standard for the format of ARPA Internet text messages) specifies the headers and how they're separated from the body, but not the format of the body.
Of course I'd expect all messages to have textual content and if the message contains the same content in HTML, too, that's OK.
What Linus said was essentially just that for the next few months developers should concentrate on making sure that any bugs that come up in 2.4 get fixed, do more testing and fixing, etc.
The wording "I don't even want to plan 2.5.x or 3.0 at this point yet." may scare those who take that to mean "I don't have any plans for future", of course. It could, of course, mean that Linus doesn't want to write the roadmap for the next release until he's taken a break and seen that 2.4 is stable and works well. Not just on 10000 developer workstations, but on a couple of million other computers, too.
Now, as Linus stated in the interview, he's not making press releases or alike. That's for companies to do. He's not talking with soothing voice, treating the IT managers like babies scared of dark who need mommy and papa to check that there are no grues under the bed. He's talking like a developer who's got one project released and can take a short break not needing to think about work for a few days.
I would of course also hope that there aren't all that many "IT manager morons" in important positions.
Linux already is in embedded market. Most applications there won't have a graphical user interface, usually not textual either.
Still, some embedded Linux products have X (and XF86 even) in them. While others may have eg. W Window System, which is considerably lighter than X. But mostly they do with serial console which is partially or fully disabled when going from development to production.
And I do remember running X on Linux with 2 megs of RAM. It was sluggish, but when the amount of RAM was raised to 6MB, it flew. That was around '92 I think.
Perhaps, even if I wouldn't care about the security of my mailbox concerning private email, there are other needs and concerns..
Like, what if I have signed an NDA with a multinational corporation and agreed that all conversation where said corporation and I are both parties regarding subjects covered by the NDA are confidential and if in electronic form, must be encrypted with algorithms and keylengths agreed upon to provide required security.
What does the government do? I can't give the key without breaking the NDA, so I must ask the government that if I am to give the key, it will be done in presence of said corporation and that the officials who will have the key will probably have to sign NDAs with said corporation to cover corporate security and trade secrets which would otherwise be compromised by giving the key to a third party.
Lawsuits, anywhere?
Have You ever needed to upgrade firmware of any hardware component in Your computer? I've done it several times. Usually it helps. It's also one of the first pieces of advice given to me after the support notices that I won't be content with "Reboot Windows" -type answers..
While some components in the computers are "pure hardware" in such way that their software can't be upgraded by the end user or a retailer techie, the trend seems to be towards upgradeable software in hardware components, too.
The hardest to diagnose properly problem I've had was with SCSI channel that seemed to have termination problems (bad cable or terminator) - upgraded firmware and it started to work OK. I was sure that the cable and terminator were good, because they worked with different SCSI host adapters - 4 distinct models from two companies.
Yes, I agree with the closing statement, too. Have You ever tried to convince any manager that while it might seem that producing better quality is more expensive, it will in the end produce higher profits? How many managers see more than the next 12 months?
Even when the management agrees that the procedures to produce quality will lead to higher profits, there are customer requirements: everything, now, cheap. Even if we manage to do quality work cheap, it will take time. That's the hardest problem..
And how much would newfound productivity in other functions affect this? Could it be that we'd get better products, cheaper, overall?
OK, what could the people who're no longer needed to patch the crap put out by computer industry do?
People writing the Dummies books are useless anyway, but perhaps they could write material for teaching to use the software efficiently..
Tech support would still be needed, but the personnel would need to be trained with focus on other aspects of the software than just "Reboot Windows". And as they know the sofware (or other product) quite well, there are certainly positions where they would fit nicely.
I don't think having quality software would really cause this massive unemployment some people predict. It's the same with many other issues: if this or that would be done differently, there would be massive unemployment because the people who currently do the job wouldn't be needed anymore. I'd guess they would find new jobs, and any restructuring would create new jobs. Rising productivity would mean that companies could afford to pay decent salary for jobs that don't exist now because they would be too expensive.
No more than half the employees can be programmers. And five is enough to drive even one project manager nuts, fill the inbox of one techwriter, and use up one office assistant, not to forget that single person trying to manage the dozen servers the programmers are abusing (and the workstations of the staff, too). They could easily do with just one financial clerk, but that one director that tried to get money to the company would require the rest of the worktime of said clerk.
That makes it a minimum of 11, of which five were programmers.
Oh yes, did You want quality software? One of those programmers will just keep hitting his head against the wall with massive amount of diagrams about the software, another keeps comforting him and trying to tell the three to keep working while he translates some of those diagrams to APIs written in chosen programming language.
That left three. Sounds like it's total of 2 management (director and financial clerk), 2 office/administrative (office assistant and system administrator), 1 project manager, 1 techwriter, 1 software architect, one senior programmer, and three hackers.
No, I haven't experienced this myself.
If they would sell each disc in each region (coded for that region), I'd have less problems with that.
What I do have problems with is that I can't get what I want because somebody thinks it's not profitable enough to sell it in Europe. Because of that, I couldn't get it for any price without ordering it from another region.
And I would pay much more if I could get the same disc from within Europe, since shipping and taxes add up quite a lot - enough that if the title IS available in Finland, it's almost certainly a lot cheaper than it'd be ordered from any of the 30+% off webshops.
I hadn't ever even considered a DVD player that isn't region free. Now that I already have several discs (R1 and regionless titles) I think I at last have to get a player (I've managed up to date by asking friends with players whether they wanted to watch some title I happened to have).
If I had to choose a single-region player, it'd be R1 anyway, as even though Japan is R2, I can't find any anime in Finland, so I order English subs from USA.
But, it's clear here that a DVD player is region-free. Big shops sell region-free players. They advertise them (including "region-free").
Even earlier I thought I don't want an automatic but a manual region changing, because that was a clear threat - the disc can eg. ask the player for several regions and only accept a player that answers yes on only one region (note that there are also discs that work on several regions, eg 1-4), or some other way to do it.
Perhaps it's time to patent 1-Click selling now..
1. You can easily use the bandwidth of the bus, just attach a couple of drives to it. You don't need many - SCSI drives can pump data faster than IDE drives.
3. But of course You don't want to attach many devices of different revisions from different manufacturers to the bus. You want different buses for fast and slow devices, and with many devices, even more channels for the devices to be able to run at full speed. I don't want that CD-burner to take the channel down to crawl - I put it on a different channel from my disks. And I've seen at least three generations of devices from four manufacturers on a single channel - working as well as can be expected (the new, fast drives were then moved to a separate channel).
4. At least tapes do disconnect. And it's good they do - I've seen what happens when they don't due to buggy driver, and it ain't pretty.
8. You can find SCSI cables, terminators, different kinds of adapters, host adapters, and more from many shops. Though not all of them have the more expensive hardware on shelf but can get it in two days usually. And the cable length is essential - You just can't connect many devices to IDE channel due to cable length, let alone external devices.. I think my SCSI channels are all between 1.5m and 4m.
And yes, of course my main workstation at the office has a single 240MB IDE drive - it's just an X terminal, afterall. I need SCSI at home where I need more than just an X terminal.
One problem with not allowing free webmail addresses is that not everyone has a real email address. And even those who do might not always be able to read email to that address (damn hardware) even though they might have usable web connection.
Eg. in Finland You can use computers at libraries for net connection. And use hotmail or whatever for email. Not everyone has internet connection at home or at work. And these people may very well be excellent participants in public and semi-public forums.
Also, it's easy to get email addresses. Just register a domain (any domain) and have them forward all email to anything@your.domain to you@hotmail.com or whatever.
Or use a less well known free email system.
Deeper would mean it requires deeper rack to have cabling and airflow space. And because many computer cases are about the same depth, making it rather high than deep means it's going to fit into same racks and the usual PCs.
Anyway, who's going to put them into some rented server room? They don't seem like webservers to me..
That's exactly where the submission linked.
Not the first time a submission is the first two paragraphs of the article it links to.
It's rackmounted. So, the width is set by mounting.
It's not very deep, so even if installed in 600mm deep rack (480mm max install depth), it has some space for cables and air flow.
It's 10U high. Probably it just didn't fit into 8U case being only 16.6" deep.
Not everything needs to be cube because it was original some day, it may be a cube because the parts happen to fit best into that kind of case.
> use constant FOO => 1;
Is same as
sub FOO { 1; }
> *PI = \3.1415927;
Assign reference to an anonymous variable into a typeglob. Not a constant either, and according to the article, typeglobs may be removed.
Perl really doesn't have a way to declare a constant other than by creating a subroutine that consists of returning an anonymous variable - either with usual sub foo { bar; } or use constant foo => bar;
I think that subroutine call that obviously (to the interpreter) does nothing but returns the same value every time it's called is optimized into an effective anonymous variable.
But, as none of these really produces a constant - an immutable variable initialized in declaration - we can only hope it'll be added.