I don't know of any places to point you to, but I can give you some pointers: the major book companies are look for people to write books for them all the time. They almost all want you to write an outline of the proposed book and a sample chapter first, before giving you a contract. Then they forward you some money which will be taken out of your royalties.
I don't know what typical is. When I wrote for the Waite Group Press in 1997, typical was 7.5% with a 5K forward, but you can get better than that. The percentage is out of the wholesale price, figure it from ~half the cover price.
My suggestion, go to the computer book companies' websites. Find their contact information and write them saying you want to write for them. Sometimes they have projects they are looking for people to write on. Sometimes they'll say they don't have any projects, but will send you a starter guide, and example outline and sample chapter from one of their books.
So basically that requires an administrator that composes his own distribution (I'd like the debian people to do that sort of thing). In the real world administrators don't have time for that sort of hobbyism.
No, in the real world, this is a job requirement. Real corporate environments don't let users install whatever they want. Admins purchase software and then install it on machines. This is the same model that is used now, only there is more automation to it (I won't say it's completely automated. That is a pipe dream).
What do you call it when you have a network of windows machines with all the same versions of Internet Explorer, all the same versions of Office, all the same ftp software, all the same database apps: it's a windows distribution, maintained by the administrator. I fail to see the difference, and I certainly fail to see how you think that having the computers sync to an outside source is appropriate. Yes, the admin will have to keep on top of the security patches that are put out, just like a windows admin needs to put service packs in place. Yes, the admin will have to download the new versions of the software used on the network, just like a windows admin. These procedures are in place for security, however, not because "it's the way it is".
Debian is no option for somebody who wants to use a linux desktop in a production environment.
I actually believe the exact opposite. Debian is the best environment for workstations. The default listings in/etc/apt/sources.list are just defaults. Because of this, you can change them to point to an internal server. Then an admin updates packages on the single internal server (once tested) and they get pushed out to the workstations. Individual workstations can be rolled back if need be.
Note that I am talking more along the lines of where there are 100+ workstations or where security is a real concern.
Manufacturing is more akin to installation of software, than creations of it. Creation of software is more like the engineering of the thing to be manufactured (design) and it's manufacturing process (implemenation).
When creating a new piece of software, there is a very large amount of discovery. It is impossible to estimate how long discovery will take, it would be akin to setting deadline for the cure for cancer. It is even impossible to know between two people which will get it done faster.
In addition, it is almost certain the case that somewhere in the design or implementation phases, a conflict in requirements is found or requirements are found to be incomplete. Because of this, the requirements must change. A change in requirements becomes a change in estimation.
Then there are people details, such as burnout, roll over, yank factor, procrastination, and dicipline. These things happen with different people at different times. The result is more uncertainty.
Personally, I like XP's method of handling estimation: the user stories (requirements from the customer) are broken into tasks by the developers working on the story. The tasks are estimated in the best possible scenario by the developers working on the task. No task should be longer than 3 days (if it is break it up). Then you use a previous measurement of how quickly you finished tasks to limit how many ideal days there are in a time frame.
The cental thoughts to this method is that A) only the people doing the work can estimate for themselves; B) the accuracy of estimation is inversely proportional to the length estimated. If a developer says something will take 6 weeks, they likely don't actually know how long it will take, but are picking a seemingly large number to give them wiggle (I call it "Scotty padding", refering to how Scotty would overestimate the time to repair the Enterprise so that he looked like a miracle worker); and C) using precious measurements adds a reality factor to how off your estimates are.
But there are problems with this method. The main one is that tasks can be unrealized until implementation. No matter how well you plan, something will likely get left out. Another problem is that is doesn't work over a long period of time. This method is used for planning an iteration (about 1-2 months). Longer than that the estimations will go wonky because the estimations for an individual task will vary greatly as more work is done. At the start of a project, it is easy to add a feature, but later on it may be easier, because you have supporting classes in place, or harder, because you need to update a large part of the system.
So I'd say it more like the weather. You can estimate well up to a certain point, but after that, you're just throwing darts.
So you're saying you ment to say "as a professional software developer I need to at least be aware of how the MacOS works, and what it does"? I'm not understanding your point.
It would be a bad thing for DVDs if they are found to be software. Raising the price of their rental will change their course to be a marginalized technology such as laser disc. If a consumer has the choice between the VHS version for even half the cost, I think most will go back to VHS.
Do I think they may be software? Well, a lot of DVDs do have those crappy games and such attached to them. But even some music CDs have this. It's a tough call.
What I did this halloween
on
All Hallow's Eve
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· Score: 1, Insightful
When I went out of my building at work, I saw a black cat. Of course I went up to it and started to pet it. When my wife arrived in the car to pick me up, I went to grab it. You see, there are some sickos in this country (and not just this country) that will see a black cat on hallowe'en and kill it or perform other forms of torture.
One hour later, we got it into the car. Now we're setting up a living space for it for the night. We've named it "Ween".
I have better things to do than to go through all of the digital photos and keep the ones I want. I'd rather just copy them all over. It's much faster, and storage is cheap and will be cheaper
Does anyone else think that the "wait 20 seconds" between hitting the "reply" link and the "submit" button is kind of a strange way to moderate the utility of responses, and unfairly penalizes fast typers?
The point is that we don't actually know if he did they work that was laid out for him or if he just went off an did whatever he felt like. FT doesn't was the copyright to his work, they want him to remove his changelog that blasts them. While I think that is silly (unless there is real slander in there), we can't all immediately think that mosfet is in the right in the transaction.
If you want to try it out and your computer has a perminant fast internet connection, I suggest just downloading the 6 diskette images from their site. Only the packages you install will be downloaded, and you can easily add more through dselect and apt. This DVD is really more for an evironment where you have multiple systems you have to install it on or for a slowly connected server, thus reducing the downloading.
Re:NOT Debian unstable!
on
Debian On DVD
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· Score: 2
But by having a slow disk, you end up spending more time paging. The disk I/O is the largest bottleneck on a workstation. Followed by the RAM I/O 1.7GHz is good for most tasks these days. Without addressing the other part of your system, upgrading a processor is going to have a more marginal effect.
I fully agree. When you change your user agent, you change it for all of the sites you visit. This is just a way to get even more people to look like they are IE users, so that they can make more claims as to the popularity of their browser.
My.yahoo.com just became my new default homepage (I'm using IE). It's not as good for content as MSN, but this is just one more piece of bullshit that is sitting on the camels back.
Even if you are using a desktop model, you can have only one installation by either having the executable served from one machine, or actually run on a single machine. There are many ways to only have a single installation while at the same time each user has their own machine. However, when I wrote the message, it was more in reference to a solution like the article was talking about (where you have sunrays off a big server. In the case of linux, you can't use sunrays, but you can use XTerms).
But, honestly, I don't think it would play out this way. Porn sites WANT to be found.
How can you paint such a broad stroke across all porn sites. Sure the commericial porn sites want to be found by adults who are likely to have a credit card, but what about a porn site that is set up by a teenager? When I was 16, I had set up a program that would pull porn off of usenet and gave all my friends access. There was one BBS I remember run by another 16 year old that had a healthy porn trading section available to the trusted. If I had a 24/7 connection and http was in public release with an Amiga server (this was 1993), then I probably would have put up a porn site. Hell, if I had my own phone line I would have had a BBS.
There are many free porn sites out there by people who just like and wnat to share porn. One file sharing site I go to often has porn posted to it (although the majority is other files). It's not a commercial site at all. How do you get it to comply to the rating system? If they rate themselves as porn, the teens can't go there, and if they don't rate themselves, maybe they will be blocked. What is the motivation to opt in to a true rating?
But why cover it so much? It's giving the channel a creepy feeling. "I don't have add banners, but our articles are written by our sponsors" kind of feeling.
His problem is that he is not the same poster as the originator of the thread (d.valued). Using d.valued's statements against him are not going to solve the argument.
His other problem is that he was talking about his system having to be restarted once a week, and since yours does get the restarts it requires because of the crashes due to the buggy driver. Basically you are saying "My machine is stable. It may crash once and a while, but I never have to reboot it". Well, a crash requires a reboot and takes care of the other problems you probably haven't been noticing.
I use Win2K at work and, while I wouldn't call it unstable, I wouldn't say it's a "rock" either. There are memory problems where every so often I need to reboot to clear them up. I also get odd display problems that occur around the same time. I can kill all my tasks in the task manager and it won't help me. The next step is to try a few tasks I don't recognize (like mspmspsv.exe) that come up on boot. But I don't know what these tasks are for nor if they are necessary and the ones I have tried didn't solve anything, so I need to reboot.
Maybe I shouldn't use the Windows hibernate feature so often, and instead shutdown and then restart later. But we are talking about long term uptimes here. So, I agree with what the poster said. It's okay for workstations. If you can shutdown (or crash) the OS every so often, then it's fine for that use. I 100% agree that Windows stability is "good enough". Maybe XP will be a valhalla, but I'm not holding my breath.
ii) I believe they get to write off those licenses at full retail.
No they don't. Or if they do it doesn't matter. It works like this. They can write off the licenses at $10000 per license if they want to. But then they have to claim a ($10000-cost of materials) gain in revenue.
If you make $50000 in a year, make a painting for $10 and give it to a charity, you can't claim a $50000 donation and $50000 income, giving no tax liability. If you do claim $50000 donation, you have to claim that you made $99990, as the painting you made for $10 appreciated to $50000. It's part of capital gains.
This is the same for Microsoft. They can claim the materials they used to produce the CDs appreciated to $10000/CD, which they then donated, but then they have to increase their revenue. This is probably why they only give one set of disks whith the licenses: because that part actually costs them money, and while they can write that loss off as a donation, write offs only give back the taxable percentage of the loss (e.g. they'll get back only 20-40% of their loses by not having to pay tax on them).
Lastly, I think even the above procedue is against accounting rules. Otherwise companies could just inflate the costs of their donations, claim the capital gains, and show how much revenue (not profit, revenue) they have. Maybe, just maybe, Microsoft can use their standard pricing structure, but I don't know much about accounting laws, just how taxation works. Also, doing this would make it look bad to institutional investors who don't like weird anomolies like this in their due diligence. Finally, if they did do this, it would suck for the univerisities since they would then have to claim a large gain by donation. This can screw over their accounting in ways I've only heard about.
The first rule of business taxes: if there is no receipt it didn't happen.
Second rule of business taxes: if someone gives someone a receipt, it indicates income.
Figure out where the receipts are in your system, and you'll see there is no corporate welfare going on (at least not there).
When you are going for TCO (something that Windows pundits like to pull up since linux is a free license), it is cheaper to administrate a single VMWare installation, even though you have to have a windows license for each user.
I was surprised that NPR was giving XP a positive review of XP. They had a person on there from some large compute chain (like CompUSA, but I don't remember which), sayig that is is definitely easier to use, and it looks better. He then went on to say some odd things like "it will be able to copy pictures off your digital camera without you having to install any software" and a bunch of other things. When asked about the fact that you have to buy one copy for your laptop and one for your desktop, the guy said "this has always been the case" and just now they have the product activation. This morning, they were talking it up again, although they had one analyst say that which it is a great operating system, it isn't going to cause a resurgence in computer hardware sales, and the amount of money Microsoft has slated for advertising is indicative of the fact that while it is better, it's only marginally better. The only bad thing I have read so far is that you may not be able to play the Snow White DVD, but there will be a patch soon.
One thing I noticed that was lacking was any statement like "your license will expire in 2 years". Is this still on for the retail/OEM version? I remember that they pushed it back for businesses because of the budgetary planning issues, but how about the retail. Anyone have any links?
Incidentally, yes, it is possible that NPR is giving such a review because it is in fact better. I just don't like the form they are giving it in. They are having a guy, who obviously stands to gain if people go any buy XP at his chain, make extremely broad statements that in some cases don't make sense (how can it know all future digital cameras. Does it really even know all current ones? Even ones that have been off the market for 3 years, like my QV-11). I listen to NPR to get away from commerical radio.
Believe it. This isn't that odd to me. I had to write some routines for a wireless base station for one of the first PCS systems, which had only 128 bytes of RAM. You had to do everything in this, including your stack. Plus the chip did not have multiplication as a native operator, so if you wanted to multiply two words, it would be 8 bytes on the stack (4 for the pc and tos, and the two words. The routine I did didn't take any more than that). We had 128K, though, not 4K. This was also problematic when it came to ram because calling from one 64K area to the other took an extra 5 bytes (multiply was in both sections).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know of any places to point you to, but I can give you some pointers: the major book companies are look for people to write books for them all the time. They almost all want you to write an outline of the proposed book and a sample chapter first, before giving you a contract. Then they forward you some money which will be taken out of your royalties.
I don't know what typical is. When I wrote for the Waite Group Press in 1997, typical was 7.5% with a 5K forward, but you can get better than that. The percentage is out of the wholesale price, figure it from ~half the cover price.
My suggestion, go to the computer book companies' websites. Find their contact information and write them saying you want to write for them. Sometimes they have projects they are looking for people to write on. Sometimes they'll say they don't have any projects, but will send you a starter guide, and example outline and sample chapter from one of their books.
Possibly it was one of 1500 web pages?
So basically that requires an administrator that composes his own distribution (I'd like the debian people to do that sort of thing). In the real world administrators don't have time for that sort of hobbyism.
No, in the real world, this is a job requirement. Real corporate environments don't let users install whatever they want. Admins purchase software and then install it on machines. This is the same model that is used now, only there is more automation to it (I won't say it's completely automated. That is a pipe dream).
What do you call it when you have a network of windows machines with all the same versions of Internet Explorer, all the same versions of Office, all the same ftp software, all the same database apps: it's a windows distribution, maintained by the administrator. I fail to see the difference, and I certainly fail to see how you think that having the computers sync to an outside source is appropriate. Yes, the admin will have to keep on top of the security patches that are put out, just like a windows admin needs to put service packs in place. Yes, the admin will have to download the new versions of the software used on the network, just like a windows admin. These procedures are in place for security, however, not because "it's the way it is".
Debian is no option for somebody who wants to use a linux desktop in a production environment.
/etc/apt/sources.list are just defaults. Because of this, you can change them to point to an internal server. Then an admin updates packages on the single internal server (once tested) and they get pushed out to the workstations. Individual workstations can be rolled back if need be.
I actually believe the exact opposite. Debian is the best environment for workstations. The default listings in
Note that I am talking more along the lines of where there are 100+ workstations or where security is a real concern.
Manufacturing is more akin to installation of software, than creations of it. Creation of software is more like the engineering of the thing to be manufactured (design) and it's manufacturing process (implemenation).
When creating a new piece of software, there is a very large amount of discovery. It is impossible to estimate how long discovery will take, it would be akin to setting deadline for the cure for cancer. It is even impossible to know between two people which will get it done faster.
In addition, it is almost certain the case that somewhere in the design or implementation phases, a conflict in requirements is found or requirements are found to be incomplete. Because of this, the requirements must change. A change in requirements becomes a change in estimation.
Then there are people details, such as burnout, roll over, yank factor, procrastination, and dicipline. These things happen with different people at different times. The result is more uncertainty.
Personally, I like XP's method of handling estimation: the user stories (requirements from the customer) are broken into tasks by the developers working on the story. The tasks are estimated in the best possible scenario by the developers working on the task. No task should be longer than 3 days (if it is break it up). Then you use a previous measurement of how quickly you finished tasks to limit how many ideal days there are in a time frame.
The cental thoughts to this method is that A) only the people doing the work can estimate for themselves; B) the accuracy of estimation is inversely proportional to the length estimated. If a developer says something will take 6 weeks, they likely don't actually know how long it will take, but are picking a seemingly large number to give them wiggle (I call it "Scotty padding", refering to how Scotty would overestimate the time to repair the Enterprise so that he looked like a miracle worker); and C) using precious measurements adds a reality factor to how off your estimates are.
But there are problems with this method. The main one is that tasks can be unrealized until implementation. No matter how well you plan, something will likely get left out. Another problem is that is doesn't work over a long period of time. This method is used for planning an iteration (about 1-2 months). Longer than that the estimations will go wonky because the estimations for an individual task will vary greatly as more work is done. At the start of a project, it is easy to add a feature, but later on it may be easier, because you have supporting classes in place, or harder, because you need to update a large part of the system.
So I'd say it more like the weather. You can estimate well up to a certain point, but after that, you're just throwing darts.
So you're saying you ment to say "as a professional software developer I need to at least be aware of how the MacOS works, and what it does"? I'm not understanding your point.
It would be a bad thing for DVDs if they are found to be software. Raising the price of their rental will change their course to be a marginalized technology such as laser disc. If a consumer has the choice between the VHS version for even half the cost, I think most will go back to VHS.
Do I think they may be software? Well, a lot of DVDs do have those crappy games and such attached to them. But even some music CDs have this. It's a tough call.
When I went out of my building at work, I saw a black cat. Of course I went up to it and started to pet it. When my wife arrived in the car to pick me up, I went to grab it. You see, there are some sickos in this country (and not just this country) that will see a black cat on hallowe'en and kill it or perform other forms of torture.
One hour later, we got it into the car. Now we're setting up a living space for it for the night. We've named it "Ween".
I have better things to do than to go through all of the digital photos and keep the ones I want. I'd rather just copy them all over. It's much faster, and storage is cheap and will be cheaper
I'm guessing the previous poster meant to respond to this post
Does anyone else think that the "wait 20 seconds" between hitting the "reply" link and the "submit" button is kind of a strange way to moderate the utility of responses, and unfairly penalizes fast typers?
I would say "yes", but I can type that too fast.
The point is that we don't actually know if he did they work that was laid out for him or if he just went off an did whatever he felt like. FT doesn't was the copyright to his work, they want him to remove his changelog that blasts them. While I think that is silly (unless there is real slander in there), we can't all immediately think that mosfet is in the right in the transaction.
I'm guessing from the lack of moderation that nobody gives a shit.
and never seen a Macintosh PowerBook Duo with an Intel CPU
It's not just the chip. It has aPCI bus. But then, you already knew that.
Risc architecture is going to change everything.
If you want to try it out and your computer has a perminant fast internet connection, I suggest just downloading the 6 diskette images from their site. Only the packages you install will be downloaded, and you can easily add more through dselect and apt. This DVD is really more for an evironment where you have multiple systems you have to install it on or for a slowly connected server, thus reducing the downloading.
But by having a slow disk, you end up spending more time paging. The disk I/O is the largest bottleneck on a workstation. Followed by the RAM I/O 1.7GHz is good for most tasks these days. Without addressing the other part of your system, upgrading a processor is going to have a more marginal effect.
I fully agree. When you change your user agent, you change it for all of the sites you visit. This is just a way to get even more people to look like they are IE users, so that they can make more claims as to the popularity of their browser.
My.yahoo.com just became my new default homepage (I'm using IE). It's not as good for content as MSN, but this is just one more piece of bullshit that is sitting on the camels back.
Even if you are using a desktop model, you can have only one installation by either having the executable served from one machine, or actually run on a single machine. There are many ways to only have a single installation while at the same time each user has their own machine. However, when I wrote the message, it was more in reference to a solution like the article was talking about (where you have sunrays off a big server. In the case of linux, you can't use sunrays, but you can use XTerms).
How can you paint such a broad stroke across all porn sites. Sure the commericial porn sites want to be found by adults who are likely to have a credit card, but what about a porn site that is set up by a teenager? When I was 16, I had set up a program that would pull porn off of usenet and gave all my friends access. There was one BBS I remember run by another 16 year old that had a healthy porn trading section available to the trusted. If I had a 24/7 connection and http was in public release with an Amiga server (this was 1993), then I probably would have put up a porn site. Hell, if I had my own phone line I would have had a BBS.
There are many free porn sites out there by people who just like and wnat to share porn. One file sharing site I go to often has porn posted to it (although the majority is other files). It's not a commercial site at all. How do you get it to comply to the rating system? If they rate themselves as porn, the teens can't go there, and if they don't rate themselves, maybe they will be blocked. What is the motivation to opt in to a true rating?
But why cover it so much? It's giving the channel a creepy feeling. "I don't have add banners, but our articles are written by our sponsors" kind of feeling.
His problem is that he is not the same poster as the originator of the thread (d.valued). Using d.valued's statements against him are not going to solve the argument.
His other problem is that he was talking about his system having to be restarted once a week, and since yours does get the restarts it requires because of the crashes due to the buggy driver. Basically you are saying "My machine is stable. It may crash once and a while, but I never have to reboot it". Well, a crash requires a reboot and takes care of the other problems you probably haven't been noticing.
I use Win2K at work and, while I wouldn't call it unstable, I wouldn't say it's a "rock" either. There are memory problems where every so often I need to reboot to clear them up. I also get odd display problems that occur around the same time. I can kill all my tasks in the task manager and it won't help me. The next step is to try a few tasks I don't recognize (like mspmspsv.exe) that come up on boot. But I don't know what these tasks are for nor if they are necessary and the ones I have tried didn't solve anything, so I need to reboot.
Maybe I shouldn't use the Windows hibernate feature so often, and instead shutdown and then restart later. But we are talking about long term uptimes here. So, I agree with what the poster said. It's okay for workstations. If you can shutdown (or crash) the OS every so often, then it's fine for that use. I 100% agree that Windows stability is "good enough". Maybe XP will be a valhalla, but I'm not holding my breath.
No they don't. Or if they do it doesn't matter. It works like this. They can write off the licenses at $10000 per license if they want to. But then they have to claim a ($10000-cost of materials) gain in revenue.
If you make $50000 in a year, make a painting for $10 and give it to a charity, you can't claim a $50000 donation and $50000 income, giving no tax liability. If you do claim $50000 donation, you have to claim that you made $99990, as the painting you made for $10 appreciated to $50000. It's part of capital gains.
This is the same for Microsoft. They can claim the materials they used to produce the CDs appreciated to $10000/CD, which they then donated, but then they have to increase their revenue. This is probably why they only give one set of disks whith the licenses: because that part actually costs them money, and while they can write that loss off as a donation, write offs only give back the taxable percentage of the loss (e.g. they'll get back only 20-40% of their loses by not having to pay tax on them).
Lastly, I think even the above procedue is against accounting rules. Otherwise companies could just inflate the costs of their donations, claim the capital gains, and show how much revenue (not profit, revenue) they have. Maybe, just maybe, Microsoft can use their standard pricing structure, but I don't know much about accounting laws, just how taxation works. Also, doing this would make it look bad to institutional investors who don't like weird anomolies like this in their due diligence. Finally, if they did do this, it would suck for the univerisities since they would then have to claim a large gain by donation. This can screw over their accounting in ways I've only heard about.
The first rule of business taxes: if there is no receipt it didn't happen.
Second rule of business taxes: if someone gives someone a receipt, it indicates income.
Figure out where the receipts are in your system, and you'll see there is no corporate welfare going on (at least not there).
When you are going for TCO (something that Windows pundits like to pull up since linux is a free license), it is cheaper to administrate a single VMWare installation, even though you have to have a windows license for each user.
I was surprised that NPR was giving XP a positive review of XP. They had a person on there from some large compute chain (like CompUSA, but I don't remember which), sayig that is is definitely easier to use, and it looks better. He then went on to say some odd things like "it will be able to copy pictures off your digital camera without you having to install any software" and a bunch of other things. When asked about the fact that you have to buy one copy for your laptop and one for your desktop, the guy said "this has always been the case" and just now they have the product activation. This morning, they were talking it up again, although they had one analyst say that which it is a great operating system, it isn't going to cause a resurgence in computer hardware sales, and the amount of money Microsoft has slated for advertising is indicative of the fact that while it is better, it's only marginally better. The only bad thing I have read so far is that you may not be able to play the Snow White DVD, but there will be a patch soon.
One thing I noticed that was lacking was any statement like "your license will expire in 2 years". Is this still on for the retail/OEM version? I remember that they pushed it back for businesses because of the budgetary planning issues, but how about the retail. Anyone have any links?
Incidentally, yes, it is possible that NPR is giving such a review because it is in fact better. I just don't like the form they are giving it in. They are having a guy, who obviously stands to gain if people go any buy XP at his chain, make extremely broad statements that in some cases don't make sense (how can it know all future digital cameras. Does it really even know all current ones? Even ones that have been off the market for 3 years, like my QV-11). I listen to NPR to get away from commerical radio.
Believe it. This isn't that odd to me. I had to write some routines for a wireless base station for one of the first PCS systems, which had only 128 bytes of RAM. You had to do everything in this, including your stack. Plus the chip did not have multiplication as a native operator, so if you wanted to multiply two words, it would be 8 bytes on the stack (4 for the pc and tos, and the two words. The routine I did didn't take any more than that). We had 128K, though, not 4K. This was also problematic when it came to ram because calling from one 64K area to the other took an extra 5 bytes (multiply was in both sections).