It Is Not About The 90's
on
Time To Dump XP?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The question of migration is not about staying in the 90's. Ask yourself this, "If it were your money, what would you do?". Your answer would probably be, if you were a successful business, you would look at the cost-benefit of the switch. So, citing training costs is a factor. Another factor might be whether you develop application that run on Windows, or do you just use Windows as development platform at all, or just a casual Business user? In the end, if the switch will cost you (the company) thousands of dollars and you gain nothing, surely you would not want to switch because Microsoft is forcing the switch. From a training perspective, one would want to push off the switch for as long as possible to allow the market (end users) to get the familiarity with the new Windows and Office on their home PCs so that training is minimal at the work place. If you personally upgrade your home PC, which a lot of people will do, and use it for a year or three, when your Office does the switch it (the new Windows) will be old hat, and that means less training on the company dime.
In the picture titled "Meeting the President at the Falcon 9 launch site, from left: Neil G. Hicks, Florence Li, Brian Mosdell,
President Obama, Leslie Woods Jr., and Elon Musk. Credit: Getty Images"
What's up with that chics handshake? Reminds me of that episode of King of The Hill when hank meets the president and gets distressed about the weak handshake...
According TFA: "You don't have to worry about procuring rare metals. Titanium oxide is cheap and safe, already being used in many products ranging from face powder to white paint"
This information is great and all, but now what? Sure, the governments could be responsible and dust off the ol' disaster plans and have more frequent drills, but honestly, the day that the big one (earthquake, or, earthquake plus tidal wave) hits, the situation is going to be FUBAR no matter what people do. Sure, some preparedness will result in minor differences in life loss, etc. but in the grand scheme of things the same net effect will occur: total destruction. Therefore, the government, the people, anyone will do nothing but scoff at the prediction, until it happens, and then will cry "why didn't anyone tell me about this or do anything".
Even though TFA states "all software ideas are now potentially patentable as long as they are innovative from a purely formal point of view, meaning they're at least marginally different from how a technical problem was solved before", many standard design patterns used could be in trouble. For example implementing the well-known Observer pattern using non-OO language constructs, in say Ada83, could be a patentable thing. I mean, this is really bad precedence here and something every software engineer, hell, every company should care about.
Who would have thought 2010 was going to be a big deal. We just had a 2010 programming problem at work. Everything worked great in December then in January our software simulation stopped sending the correct time to our hardware. Turns out the simulation handles 2010 incorrectly. We now have to set our PC clocks to 2009 until the team gets a fix out. I bet we see more of this.
So the perception is that your coworkers waste "hours" of time. Well, that is your perception, but may not be reality. Do you follow them home? Do you know when they get in or leave? How about when that fire hits and they solve the problem no one else could solve. Are there tasks that should take hours to complete but these people get them done in less time? See, a person's value can not be measured by how much time he/she sits in front of their desk pounding keys. It is best to not worry about how much time they are "wasting" and mind your own business. Be grateful that you have a job and the environment is laid back. Worry about getting your projects done and making sure you know who is responsible for what. The real slacker will miss deadlines, produce crap work, and be slick enough to shift blame or avoid responsibility. Just make sure you have clear communication with people so they know you are counting on them and that your superiors know what you were supposed to do and what they were supposed to do. On team efforts where someone else is supposed to handle something and they are dropping the ball you can send a polite email offering assistance or asking about status if it is something that hinders you. Make sure you 'cc the appropriate people. Good luck.
22 fires out of how many millions of flights, of which none resulted in any catastrophe.. I think I am more worried about pilots updating their facebook pages and overshooting their destination airport by 150 miles.
After reading this I realize the not-so-obvious benefit of real planes flying around patrolling and bombing the enemy... The fear factor. As stated in the summary " Al Qaeda claims it's not all that scared of drones", which makes sense, a little spec in the sky orbiting quietly does not put the fear of God, oh sorry Allah, into the enemy. Get a couple of F35s, A10s or Apaches cruising about voila, fear is back. Intimidation is back factor in warfare. Never really thought about that aspect of an all-drone airforce...
Agreed! Maybe we do need research; a contest on who can turn the most "innocent" robot into something sinister with a prize going to the most sinister robot. Only then will we know our true risk and get attention paid to the subject.
Did we really need to research this, we know the answer... VERY! Of course, this depends on the robot of course.
Robot A is tasked with going into a nuclear reactor and removing spent fuel rods. If Robot A is hacked and re-programmed to smash the shit out of the reactor, this might be dangerous.
Robot B is tasked with preventing people from entering into an access point in a secure building by 'restraining' them. If Robto B is hacked and re-programmed to 'hack' the people at random then this might be dangerous.
Hacking a roomba to spell your name in the carpet is not dangerous... It is all about what the level of responsibility of the robot is. It is funny that we needed research on this.
I use a lot of Ada in my job. There was one control feature that had to be hacked in such that event X in process X needed to terminate a condition in another process. Rather than putting in the traditional communication events through the RTOS with appropriate procedure/function handlers, this is what was done (it needed to be done *NOW*, apparently):
procedure foo is
type state_type is ( message_on, message_off );
-- This is the same state the message can be in package Y
state : state_type;
pragma import (Ada, state , "packagey_message_x_state");
begin
state:= message_off;
end foo;
The pragma import is like doing an extern in C. Basically this procedure just aliased ton the internal state variable and cleared it. Nasty, nasty code.
The summary doesn't cover one topic that everyone who uses Joomla is aware of: Lack of access control that allow groups and sub-groups to be setup that control content and menu access. Joomla 1.5 did not do anything to add this from 1.0.x. Granted, there are several add-ons that try to bolt access control on to the core, but they all fall short in some way. I still use Joomlla 1.0.x because the one extension that really did an OK job changed it's licensing for 1.5. I wonder if the book goes into any detail about this lack of support and whether it offers any solutions (i.e. recommendation of a 3rd party and maybe some help). I eagerly await Joomla 1.6, which is in Alpha, and hope they actually add better access control like they say they are. Other than that, I love Joomla! It is a great CMS system.
According to this 5000 respondent survey the failure rate is 54.2%, but the article points out that over 30 million consoles have been sold. I would place little confidence in the 5000 person survey. Who knows what this survey consisted of, was it a simple cookie-based web browser poll where the same person can vote over and over again? Do you really think retailers would put up with 1 out of 2 people returning the XBOX they bought there? And honestly using a blanket percentage for failure rate is just plain ol misleading. We need to know the Mean-Time-Before-Fail figure to really get a handle on the quality. So, I call BS on this whole thing.
Exactly! Case in point: My buddy has encryption running on his laptop to encrypt files for work (financial spreadsheets, etc.). I bet him a six pack I could pull up a spreadsheet. So I basically ran a file recovery program (he was smart enough to "delete" the unencrypted file after use) and pulled up a spreadsheet of his. After I took part in my reward I showed him what I did and then gave him a shredder program that decreases the chance of file recovery. I am sure some crypto programs have this whole process integrated, but he was just using a stand alone program. This is a very good point, most people seem to forget about what happens to the unencrypted file after its use.
Seems like any camera phone should be able to snap a picture of a check and send it to the appropriate online location. In any case, sounds like a whole lot of risk for something that, at least in my current situation, is not very common. The last time I deposited a check was months ago.
After reading the article and the posts, I see a very common theme: "Oh the union guy this, oh now he won't get paid, etc.". The fact of the matter is the Union, if one existed, would have been paid anyway. The airline would happily pay it too!. The union contract would mandate the worker be paid "book time" for the job. The fact that some other Joe was there to do the repair would not mean squat; he just saved schedule. In fact if you add up the time the crew spent sitting there, the gate time rental fees, passenger compensation for rebooking flights and/or hotel stays, I figure this guy saved a shit-ton of money for that airline in the Union scenario, even accounting for what the Union bill would be for work they didn't do.
C'mon, calling these things trees is ridiculous. They don't transform the "bad" CO2 into "good" O2 and H2O, they simply capture it and store it. Wow. BFD. The claim that these "trees" collect CO2 at about 1000 times faster is crap. Real trees actually transform the CO2. Lame! They should try to genetically modify trees/plants to perform more active photosynthesis in order to make them capable of pulling more CO2 out of the air in a useful manner...
I wonder if this would help keep kids on the books and off the pipe or off the corner selling dope... I mean if you could earn $500 for getting a good grade then it might not be so desirable for the kids to seek out gangs and drugs as a source of income... The situation is much more complicated, but it does eliminate some of the argument from the inner city kids who state that studying ain't gonna put food on the table. I know, many people are yelling "That is the parents job", but that is not reality for an inner-city kid with 4 siblings and 1 parent who is addicted to booze and/or drugs and spends any state/fed assistance on their habit....
Slashdot Mirror
The question of migration is not about staying in the 90's. Ask yourself this, "If it were your money, what would you do?". Your answer would probably be, if you were a successful business, you would look at the cost-benefit of the switch. So, citing training costs is a factor. Another factor might be whether you develop application that run on Windows, or do you just use Windows as development platform at all, or just a casual Business user? In the end, if the switch will cost you (the company) thousands of dollars and you gain nothing, surely you would not want to switch because Microsoft is forcing the switch. From a training perspective, one would want to push off the switch for as long as possible to allow the market (end users) to get the familiarity with the new Windows and Office on their home PCs so that training is minimal at the work place. If you personally upgrade your home PC, which a lot of people will do, and use it for a year or three, when your Office does the switch it (the new Windows) will be old hat, and that means less training on the company dime.
In the picture titled "Meeting the President at the Falcon 9 launch site, from left: Neil G. Hicks, Florence Li, Brian Mosdell, President Obama, Leslie Woods Jr., and Elon Musk. Credit: Getty Images"
What's up with that chics handshake? Reminds me of that episode of King of The Hill when hank meets the president and gets distressed about the weak handshake...
According TFA: "You don't have to worry about procuring rare metals. Titanium oxide is cheap and safe, already being used in many products ranging from face powder to white paint"
Really? Several articles have linked TiO2 to cancer. Yeah, real safe.
This information is great and all, but now what? Sure, the governments could be responsible and dust off the ol' disaster plans and have more frequent drills, but honestly, the day that the big one (earthquake, or, earthquake plus tidal wave) hits, the situation is going to be FUBAR no matter what people do. Sure, some preparedness will result in minor differences in life loss, etc. but in the grand scheme of things the same net effect will occur: total destruction. Therefore, the government, the people, anyone will do nothing but scoff at the prediction, until it happens, and then will cry "why didn't anyone tell me about this or do anything".
"It was all a dream" Classic final ending plot. The show had too many loose ends to properly tie up.
Even though TFA states "all software ideas are now potentially patentable as long as they are innovative from a purely formal point of view, meaning they're at least marginally different from how a technical problem was solved before", many standard design patterns used could be in trouble. For example implementing the well-known Observer pattern using non-OO language constructs, in say Ada83, could be a patentable thing. I mean, this is really bad precedence here and something every software engineer, hell, every company should care about.
Who would have thought 2010 was going to be a big deal. We just had a 2010 programming problem at work. Everything worked great in December then in January our software simulation stopped sending the correct time to our hardware. Turns out the simulation handles 2010 incorrectly. We now have to set our PC clocks to 2009 until the team gets a fix out. I bet we see more of this.
So the perception is that your coworkers waste "hours" of time. Well, that is your perception, but may not be reality. Do you follow them home? Do you know when they get in or leave? How about when that fire hits and they solve the problem no one else could solve. Are there tasks that should take hours to complete but these people get them done in less time? See, a person's value can not be measured by how much time he/she sits in front of their desk pounding keys. It is best to not worry about how much time they are "wasting" and mind your own business. Be grateful that you have a job and the environment is laid back. Worry about getting your projects done and making sure you know who is responsible for what. The real slacker will miss deadlines, produce crap work, and be slick enough to shift blame or avoid responsibility. Just make sure you have clear communication with people so they know you are counting on them and that your superiors know what you were supposed to do and what they were supposed to do. On team efforts where someone else is supposed to handle something and they are dropping the ball you can send a polite email offering assistance or asking about status if it is something that hinders you. Make sure you 'cc the appropriate people. Good luck.
22 fires out of how many millions of flights, of which none resulted in any catastrophe.. I think I am more worried about pilots updating their facebook pages and overshooting their destination airport by 150 miles.
After reading this I realize the not-so-obvious benefit of real planes flying around patrolling and bombing the enemy... The fear factor. As stated in the summary " Al Qaeda claims it's not all that scared of drones", which makes sense, a little spec in the sky orbiting quietly does not put the fear of God, oh sorry Allah, into the enemy. Get a couple of F35s, A10s or Apaches cruising about voila, fear is back. Intimidation is back factor in warfare. Never really thought about that aspect of an all-drone airforce...
Agreed! Maybe we do need research; a contest on who can turn the most "innocent" robot into something sinister with a prize going to the most sinister robot. Only then will we know our true risk and get attention paid to the subject.
Did we really need to research this, we know the answer... VERY! Of course, this depends on the robot of course.
Robot A is tasked with going into a nuclear reactor and removing spent fuel rods. If Robot A is hacked and re-programmed to smash the shit out of the reactor, this might be dangerous.
Robot B is tasked with preventing people from entering into an access point in a secure building by 'restraining' them. If Robto B is hacked and re-programmed to 'hack' the people at random then this might be dangerous.
Hacking a roomba to spell your name in the carpet is not dangerous... It is all about what the level of responsibility of the robot is. It is funny that we needed research on this.
Soon all those that flock to the VOIP will find out how unlimited the AT&T unlimited plan really is. I am sure they will find a way to make money.
Iran already has an intercontinental Delivery system what do you think that phoney satellite launch earlier this year was all about.
It is called the suicide bomber.
I use a lot of Ada in my job. There was one control feature that had to be hacked in such that event X in process X needed to terminate a condition in another process. Rather than putting in the traditional communication events through the RTOS with appropriate procedure/function handlers, this is what was done (it needed to be done *NOW*, apparently):
:= message_off;
procedure foo is
type state_type is ( message_on, message_off );
-- This is the same state the message can be in package Y
state : state_type;
pragma import (Ada, state , "packagey_message_x_state");
begin
state
end foo;
The pragma import is like doing an extern in C. Basically this procedure just aliased ton the internal state variable and cleared it. Nasty, nasty code.
The summary doesn't cover one topic that everyone who uses Joomla is aware of: Lack of access control that allow groups and sub-groups to be setup that control content and menu access. Joomla 1.5 did not do anything to add this from 1.0.x. Granted, there are several add-ons that try to bolt access control on to the core, but they all fall short in some way. I still use Joomlla 1.0.x because the one extension that really did an OK job changed it's licensing for 1.5. I wonder if the book goes into any detail about this lack of support and whether it offers any solutions (i.e. recommendation of a 3rd party and maybe some help). I eagerly await Joomla 1.6, which is in Alpha, and hope they actually add better access control like they say they are. Other than that, I love Joomla! It is a great CMS system.
According to this 5000 respondent survey the failure rate is 54.2%, but the article points out that over 30 million consoles have been sold. I would place little confidence in the 5000 person survey. Who knows what this survey consisted of, was it a simple cookie-based web browser poll where the same person can vote over and over again? Do you really think retailers would put up with 1 out of 2 people returning the XBOX they bought there? And honestly using a blanket percentage for failure rate is just plain ol misleading. We need to know the Mean-Time-Before-Fail figure to really get a handle on the quality. So, I call BS on this whole thing.
Exactly! Case in point: My buddy has encryption running on his laptop to encrypt files for work (financial spreadsheets, etc.). I bet him a six pack I could pull up a spreadsheet. So I basically ran a file recovery program (he was smart enough to "delete" the unencrypted file after use) and pulled up a spreadsheet of his. After I took part in my reward I showed him what I did and then gave him a shredder program that decreases the chance of file recovery. I am sure some crypto programs have this whole process integrated, but he was just using a stand alone program. This is a very good point, most people seem to forget about what happens to the unencrypted file after its use.
One of many BIG questions I have: How does this thing provide heating/cooling and what impact does running these systems have on said MPG performance?
Seems like any camera phone should be able to snap a picture of a check and send it to the appropriate online location. In any case, sounds like a whole lot of risk for something that, at least in my current situation, is not very common. The last time I deposited a check was months ago.
Classic games. They both need a good upgrade!
After reading the article and the posts, I see a very common theme: "Oh the union guy this, oh now he won't get paid, etc.". The fact of the matter is the Union, if one existed, would have been paid anyway. The airline would happily pay it too!. The union contract would mandate the worker be paid "book time" for the job. The fact that some other Joe was there to do the repair would not mean squat; he just saved schedule. In fact if you add up the time the crew spent sitting there, the gate time rental fees, passenger compensation for rebooking flights and/or hotel stays, I figure this guy saved a shit-ton of money for that airline in the Union scenario, even accounting for what the Union bill would be for work they didn't do.
C'mon, calling these things trees is ridiculous. They don't transform the "bad" CO2 into "good" O2 and H2O, they simply capture it and store it. Wow. BFD. The claim that these "trees" collect CO2 at about 1000 times faster is crap. Real trees actually transform the CO2. Lame! They should try to genetically modify trees/plants to perform more active photosynthesis in order to make them capable of pulling more CO2 out of the air in a useful manner...
I wonder if this would help keep kids on the books and off the pipe or off the corner selling dope... I mean if you could earn $500 for getting a good grade then it might not be so desirable for the kids to seek out gangs and drugs as a source of income... The situation is much more complicated, but it does eliminate some of the argument from the inner city kids who state that studying ain't gonna put food on the table. I know, many people are yelling "That is the parents job", but that is not reality for an inner-city kid with 4 siblings and 1 parent who is addicted to booze and/or drugs and spends any state/fed assistance on their habit....
Maybe it was, heaven forbid, some Windows fanboy defending the latest incarnation from MS.