The cycle in XP is the customers create the features by means of User Stories. The Programmers break the user stories up into tasks and estimate the time it will take to complete the task (and then multiply their estimate by their load factor), adding it up to the total for the user story. If a customer creates the "the user presses a button and figures out if they program will halt" user story, then the programmers can estimate that to take an infinite amount of time.
The the customer views the estimates and at that point decides which ones are worth more to them, given their cost/benefit. It is doubtful they will select a story with finite benefit and infinite cost, but they might. It's the customer's choice how they spend their money.
This example adheres strictly to XP. XP is a human process, however, and the programmers may just say "it can't be done". They can't snowjob the customer, though.
There is a fundamental difference between user and customer.
Re:Everybody's not above average!
on
IT Unions?
·
· Score: 1
Not to pick nits, but in you example the median is 100, so you still only have 20% below the median.
You actually have at least 50% at or below the median and at least 50% at or above the median. Another, more common example where this definition applies is where you have an odd numebr of samples.
If you are talking servers then right now the 'winner' of that 'battle' is clearly Solaris and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. If you want to know why, it's all to do with scaling.
You can't just hands down say that Solaris is always the best choice of a server for the job because of "scalability". It's very dependant on what the server is for, and what the budget contraints are.
For example, if you are deploying a J2EE application, the scalability of Solaris is moot: you rely on the scalability of the application server.
For another example, if you are deploying a departmental application, then there is no valid reason to purchase enterprise class hardware.
As long as the Agenda is a good $50 less than a handspring, it has a market. Maybe not for consumers, but for custom PDA solutions. When I was discussing the options between Handsprings, Palms and WinCE to the administration of a hospital we were doing a palm solution for, they went with Handspring. Sure it's not as featureful as the WinCEs and doesn't have the Palm brand, but it was cheaper. A lot cheaper than the CEs and somehwat cheaper than the Palms. When you are fitting 500 people with these things, $50 adds up.
Re:Money, ideology, conviction, ego ...
on
Coder on the Cross
·
· Score: 2
Example of conviction motivated work (citatioation anyone?) was hersay about someone who released some gee-whiz tools (implmeneted nearly single-handedly) just for genomic analysis purely because he didn't want the for-profit group to do it first and fence off that intellectual common
The net effect isn't always the same. They can process data for you, and give you back the processed data. After that, it's prefered that they forget the orginal data as well as the output.
Another revenue model is to have free web pages, but twice a year remove most content and beg for donations for two weeks, complete with charts of progress toward goal and gifts.
This would only work for certain sites (like The Onion), but it's a great idea.
You aren't asking them to switch. You are asking them to run them both. I run MSN Messenger, ICQ, and Yahoo to talke to different people. Plus, some of my friends are on 2 or all 3 of these which is handy when one starts flaking out (and they all flake out).
Where is it written that you should only run one IM?
Yes, bu tthen you would have to claim the $20000 on your income, if the value of the painting increased while it was in your posession. It's capital gains.
Once it is appraised, you will be taxed on the increase in value on the appraisal. This is similar to the government taxing you on an increase in the value of your home (and how you can write off a decrease in the value of your home). You can think of the art as an investment, and the appraisal establishing your investments gain.
But the Red Cross isn't going to give you a receipt for $1000. And even if they did, it's like a previous poster stated, the IRS will then ask you to claim the $1000 on you 1040.
There are ways that you could reduce yur taxable income using this, but don't expect to get 100% of your taxable income (which for me would be 29% of the machine cost) back. If you were to do the work, and then donate the machne, so you get no after benefit, or if the work took the amount of time it takes for the machine to depreciate fully, and you don't use the machine for anything else, then you may be able to deduct that.
This is based on the rules for business. The iffy thing is that in this case it's not an expense of the business but an expense of the donation. My understanding of the tax system is that you can write it off (since you lost the money to make the donation, effectively donating that amount), but charities work a little differently than business expenses. You'd have to get something from the charity that says they "received" the donation of the depreciation. Once you go there, things get very tricky, because without donating the whole machine and letting it depreciate on their accounting, how do you account for the machine on two different books. The IRS isn't really set up to allow you to donate 1/6th of a machine, and then let that 1/6th be the first to depreciate, while the rest is entact. Typically shared equity (like in a partnership) depreciates evenly across all the partners. So if you did donate 1/6th of a machine, and it depreciates 1/6th, your portion would have depreciated 1/6th (worth, now 25/36ths of its orginal value), and the FSF's portion is worth 5/36ths of the value. This leaves them with a stake in the machine.
This I would talk to a tax attorney about, and you would have to get a buy in from the charitable organization in question, since it is ultiately their receipt of donation that will allow you to write it off.
If the Blue Cross sells it at an auction, the artist doesn't get a receipt. Why would they? They gave the painting up for free.
And if the artist did get a receipt for that amount, then the IRS will ask why he didn't claim that income on his/her 1040. If the artist did claim the amount of the 1040, then the result is at least as much tax as s/he can write off.
I knwo about the car donation thing. You have to pay for the car. You have to show that it is worth that much.
You can't deduct the time because you didn't earn anything. If you do deduct some amount, you had better have a receipt for the amount you are claiming. And if you are claiming it as a donation, you had better claim it as income on your 1040. You can't donate something you didn't earn.
How about this. You read my comments that I link to first. Then you would see my comments on the problems with this. Then you read my comment which talks about the same issues you bring up, but reserves judgement in lieu of actual performance testing (as opposed to armchair performance testing that programmers are want to do). Then read the suggestion that might remove some of the problems.
Incidentally. I figured out how the DOS attack above won't work. You just lock the machine down for that IP. So it will end up locking out the attacker from the services, but not the rest of the world. This is pretty cool stuff, and it can work. You can even set one of these up at home (my cable IP is semi static, so I can us it as a DNS server). I'll raise my rating to a B-. Very good for home use. Possibly feasible for corporate use, but you would want to manage your own waypoints/DNS (to control load issues). You are still open to DOS (just from people trying to flood your waypoints), but not as open as I originally said.
wine: We're shipping it on Powertools.
Putting a lot of resources into wine wouldn't make much sense. First of all, there's two sides to wine. Of course it's nice that I can run a Windoze application on Linux if I need to (I'm doing my tax declarations with wine, for example), but if it runs too well, companies won't see a need to write native Linux applications ("But our Windows version works for you, why should we do anything else?").
Second, the desktop isn't our primary target, and there's no reason whatsoever to run wine on a server or embedded device.
I've read this argument a lot on/. and I have to say I still don't buy it. Why do I think a standard wine installation is a good thing? Because it may make Windows developers seek to be able to run their application on Linux. If there is a layer like wine, that provides 99% of the functionality of windows, then Windows developers may decide to target that 99%. In the extreme case, they will develop under Wine, but in other cases, they will add Wine to their QA cycles.
I don't honestly see an advantage to having companies port their products to linux, when porting them (or designing them) to wine will sufice. At this point, wine can only strengthen our position by giving us more applications. If linux runs 100% of all windows apps, then linux runs more apps than windows (well, apparently there is a linux layer for windows now).
A standard installation and configuration of Wine would really help out.
Ack. I just figured out a problem with this that lowers my grade to D+, and retracts my international company from using this system.
I am going to begin speaking as if you have read the "How does AVES work" page. If you haven't, do it now. When I say "locks up", I mean the waypoint won't be able to create new connections to a different NATed machine.
Essentially the problem is that there is a very easy DOS attack, that cannot be removed by the design of the system.
Basically, what you do is you make a bunch of DNS requests without ever making a connection. This will allocate all of the waypoints. If my understanding of this system is correct, a DNS lookup will allocate the waypoint to the specific machine for quite at least a few seconds (so that the proxy can form) if not longer (otherwise it may have problems with applications that cache the IP address, like IE, which don't do a DNS lookup for each connection).
So, find a bunch of unique DNSs (if you use the same DNS, the system can just reuse the same locked machine) that use the same service, and begin allocating. Pretty soon, no one will be able to make a connection to any subscriber.
Note that it is the whole machine that locks up waiting to form the bridge, because the DNS server can't know what port the remote application is going to try to use.
This goes back to the reason why I wouldn't use this system for web servers: there are other ways of having multiple machines as web servers behind a NAT that give you more control over the load.
I would limit this to home use, and even then, expect some script kiddies to knock out your service now and then.
I've gripped about this topic before on./ in this comment. In this comment, I propose a solution that essentially adds a layer between TCP and IP. While this ia a very Good Solution, it has almost negative probability of occurring.
The one listed in this article is pretty reasonable for a lot of uses. The article talks about web servers etc. That isn't one of the uses that this would be good for. You will almost always have packets doing some backtracking from the waypoint. This backtracking represents a slowdown. If there are only waypoints in the U.S., imagine a two Europeans trying to use this system. It also represents a cost on behalf of the waypoint. This cost will be passed on to you, as the subscriber. If you are running a heavy, multiserver farm. I'm willing to bet that that cost will be more than buying your own IPs.
Besides, there are way easier ways to have multiple webservers behind a NAT which give you more control over the load.
I guess if your ISP (in my case AT&T broadband) set this up, then there would be no or negligable backtracking. ISPs can then entice newer subscribers by allowing them to do this (possibly for an extra fee). I would probably switch ISPs, if there were a broadband ISP that offered this.
What it might be good for is for a home user with a multinode network behind a NAT who ocassionally P2P things, like network gaming and telephony. With this system, each computer could have a copy of Net2Phone running, and can be called by entering the machine's DNS into that product. Similarily, you might be able to do this in games (not in Alien vs Predator, where you can only give an IP, but some games allow DNS).
Where I am skeptical of the above is the speed costs. I said above there would be backtracking. There is also costs in the routing. Telephony doesn't require a low ping, but it is better without it. Gaming requires a low ping.
This might also work well with the file sharing thing. This adds one last bit of skepticism. There is nothing in ICQ that lets me set my DNS. I don't think there is anything in Napster to specify a DNS. Napster and ICQ "know" how to contact you by the IP address you use when connecting to the central server. There is no way to tell htem how to use this system.
Which brings us back to web servers, ftp servers, telephony, and gaming. Don't get me wrong. If telephony worked with this, and I were an international business, I would use this at the very least for intracompany calling/conferencing. I might even have my employees put their machine DNS on their business cards to promote other companies to use telephony.
The chances that the applications will change to allow a DNS field are much higher than the chances of everyone changing to my NATCP idea above. Software, even that much software, is much cheaper to change than all that routing hardware.
I give it a B+ for solving the problem. It may be the best mark I give.
There seems to be some confusion among the people on Slashdot as to when you qualify for tax credits/writeoffs. The only way you can qualify for a tax credit/writeoff is if you have earned the money that it applies to.
Someone posted an urban legend about a person making a painting, valuing it at $1000 and donating it to the Red Cross, claiming a tax writeoff. While this could happen, the artist would not be writing off $1000, s/he would be writing off the cost of the materials to make the painting. The IRS runs itself bookkeeping on reciepts. What reciepts are there in this picture? There is no $1000 receipt (unless the painting materials cost $1000). If you honestly think you can look at an IRS agent and claim $1000 without a receipt backing it, you deserve the fraud charges they will lay on you.
One other thing that should be pointed out is that even though the painter writes of the cost of the materials, that doesn't mean he gets the cost of the materials back from the Government. It's not like the government is paying him to make paintings for the Red Cross. It just means that his taxable income will be reduced. I paid about 29% on my taxes (no state tax in Florida), which means I would get 29% of the material cost back.
Bringing this back to the task at hand: the tax credits are based on the cost of developing the software. This makes sense when you look at other things the IRS allows businesses partially deduct. If a business cannot find shrinkwrap software to fulfill it needs, and it spends money to develop software, then part of the money it spends can be deducted. If someone pays you to develop open source code for their internal use, then they can deduct some of that cost.
You cannot just say "I bill at 150/hr, and worked 1000 hours on this open source project, so I'll deduct 150,000 dollars from my income". Think of it this way, you didn't loose the 150,000, you just didn't gain it. Since you didn't gain it, it wasn't taxed anyway. Since it wasn't taxed, it isn't subject to a deduction/writeoff/credit.
This all stems around the two immutable facts: the IRS taxes income, and you cannot get more money back from the IRS than you put in*.
*: actually this isn't totally true. There are certain rebates that you may qualify for that will have them sending you money, even if (especially if) you made no income that year. But they are always a fixed amount, and very little (on the order of hundreds).
and I'm really annoyed that Blue Man Group sold out and is now doing the Intel commercials. I LOVE BMG and I'm sad to see them shilling for these Intel jerks
I don't know if you are aware, but there isn't just one BMG. There are at least 4 of them (one for New York, Las Vegas, Boston, and Chicago), which are made up of more than 3 blue men (although only 3 play at a time). I don't know if any of the people who do these shows do the Intel spots or if it's yet another set. BMG is more of a franchise. It's not like there are only 3 guys, and Intel has stolen them up.
Slashdot Mirror
The the customer views the estimates and at that point decides which ones are worth more to them, given their cost/benefit. It is doubtful they will select a story with finite benefit and infinite cost, but they might. It's the customer's choice how they spend their money.
This example adheres strictly to XP. XP is a human process, however, and the programmers may just say "it can't be done". They can't snowjob the customer, though.
There is a fundamental difference between user and customer.
You actually have at least 50% at or below the median and at least 50% at or above the median. Another, more common example where this definition applies is where you have an odd numebr of samples.
You can't just hands down say that Solaris is always the best choice of a server for the job because of "scalability". It's very dependant on what the server is for, and what the budget contraints are.
For example, if you are deploying a J2EE application, the scalability of Solaris is moot: you rely on the scalability of the application server.
For another example, if you are deploying a departmental application, then there is no valid reason to purchase enterprise class hardware.
As long as the Agenda is a good $50 less than a handspring, it has a market. Maybe not for consumers, but for custom PDA solutions. When I was discussing the options between Handsprings, Palms and WinCE to the administration of a hospital we were doing a palm solution for, they went with Handspring. Sure it's not as featureful as the WinCEs and doesn't have the Palm brand, but it was cheaper. A lot cheaper than the CEs and somehwat cheaper than the Palms. When you are fitting 500 people with these things, $50 adds up.
I read it on /. so it must be true.
The net effect isn't always the same. They can process data for you, and give you back the processed data. After that, it's prefered that they forget the orginal data as well as the output.
And you thought your air time was expensive.
Object o=new Object(); java.lang.reflect.Method hashcode=o.getClass().getDeclaredMethod("hashCode" ,new Class[0]);
Integer hc=(Integer)hashcode.invoke(o,new Object[0]);
System.out.println(hc);
Now you try.
This would only work for certain sites (like The Onion), but it's a great idea.
Where is it written that you should only run one IM?
He put his email address. Use Pay Pal.
Yes, bu tthen you would have to claim the $20000 on your income, if the value of the painting increased while it was in your posession. It's capital gains.
Once it is appraised, you will be taxed on the increase in value on the appraisal. This is similar to the government taxing you on an increase in the value of your home (and how you can write off a decrease in the value of your home). You can think of the art as an investment, and the appraisal establishing your investments gain.
But the Red Cross isn't going to give you a receipt for $1000. And even if they did, it's like a previous poster stated, the IRS will then ask you to claim the $1000 on you 1040.
This is based on the rules for business. The iffy thing is that in this case it's not an expense of the business but an expense of the donation. My understanding of the tax system is that you can write it off (since you lost the money to make the donation, effectively donating that amount), but charities work a little differently than business expenses. You'd have to get something from the charity that says they "received" the donation of the depreciation. Once you go there, things get very tricky, because without donating the whole machine and letting it depreciate on their accounting, how do you account for the machine on two different books. The IRS isn't really set up to allow you to donate 1/6th of a machine, and then let that 1/6th be the first to depreciate, while the rest is entact. Typically shared equity (like in a partnership) depreciates evenly across all the partners. So if you did donate 1/6th of a machine, and it depreciates 1/6th, your portion would have depreciated 1/6th (worth, now 25/36ths of its orginal value), and the FSF's portion is worth 5/36ths of the value. This leaves them with a stake in the machine.
This I would talk to a tax attorney about, and you would have to get a buy in from the charitable organization in question, since it is ultiately their receipt of donation that will allow you to write it off.
And if the artist did get a receipt for that amount, then the IRS will ask why he didn't claim that income on his/her 1040. If the artist did claim the amount of the 1040, then the result is at least as much tax as s/he can write off.
I knwo about the car donation thing. You have to pay for the car. You have to show that it is worth that much.
You can't deduct the time because you didn't earn anything. If you do deduct some amount, you had better have a receipt for the amount you are claiming. And if you are claiming it as a donation, you had better claim it as income on your 1040. You can't donate something you didn't earn.
Incidentally. I figured out how the DOS attack above won't work. You just lock the machine down for that IP. So it will end up locking out the attacker from the services, but not the rest of the world. This is pretty cool stuff, and it can work. You can even set one of these up at home (my cable IP is semi static, so I can us it as a DNS server). I'll raise my rating to a B-. Very good for home use. Possibly feasible for corporate use, but you would want to manage your own waypoints/DNS (to control load issues). You are still open to DOS (just from people trying to flood your waypoints), but not as open as I originally said.
I've read this argument a lot on /. and I have to say I still don't buy it. Why do I think a standard wine installation is a good thing? Because it may make Windows developers seek to be able to run their application on Linux. If there is a layer like wine, that provides 99% of the functionality of windows, then Windows developers may decide to target that 99%. In the extreme case, they will develop under Wine, but in other cases, they will add Wine to their QA cycles.
I don't honestly see an advantage to having companies port their products to linux, when porting them (or designing them) to wine will sufice. At this point, wine can only strengthen our position by giving us more applications. If linux runs 100% of all windows apps, then linux runs more apps than windows (well, apparently there is a linux layer for windows now).
A standard installation and configuration of Wine would really help out.
I am going to begin speaking as if you have read the "How does AVES work" page. If you haven't, do it now. When I say "locks up", I mean the waypoint won't be able to create new connections to a different NATed machine.
Essentially the problem is that there is a very easy DOS attack, that cannot be removed by the design of the system.
Basically, what you do is you make a bunch of DNS requests without ever making a connection. This will allocate all of the waypoints. If my understanding of this system is correct, a DNS lookup will allocate the waypoint to the specific machine for quite at least a few seconds (so that the proxy can form) if not longer (otherwise it may have problems with applications that cache the IP address, like IE, which don't do a DNS lookup for each connection).
So, find a bunch of unique DNSs (if you use the same DNS, the system can just reuse the same locked machine) that use the same service, and begin allocating. Pretty soon, no one will be able to make a connection to any subscriber.
Note that it is the whole machine that locks up waiting to form the bridge, because the DNS server can't know what port the remote application is going to try to use.
This goes back to the reason why I wouldn't use this system for web servers: there are other ways of having multiple machines as web servers behind a NAT that give you more control over the load.
I would limit this to home use, and even then, expect some script kiddies to knock out your service now and then.
The one listed in this article is pretty reasonable for a lot of uses. The article talks about web servers etc. That isn't one of the uses that this would be good for. You will almost always have packets doing some backtracking from the waypoint. This backtracking represents a slowdown. If there are only waypoints in the U.S., imagine a two Europeans trying to use this system. It also represents a cost on behalf of the waypoint. This cost will be passed on to you, as the subscriber. If you are running a heavy, multiserver farm. I'm willing to bet that that cost will be more than buying your own IPs. Besides, there are way easier ways to have multiple webservers behind a NAT which give you more control over the load.
I guess if your ISP (in my case AT&T broadband) set this up, then there would be no or negligable backtracking. ISPs can then entice newer subscribers by allowing them to do this (possibly for an extra fee). I would probably switch ISPs, if there were a broadband ISP that offered this.
What it might be good for is for a home user with a multinode network behind a NAT who ocassionally P2P things, like network gaming and telephony. With this system, each computer could have a copy of Net2Phone running, and can be called by entering the machine's DNS into that product. Similarily, you might be able to do this in games (not in Alien vs Predator, where you can only give an IP, but some games allow DNS).
Where I am skeptical of the above is the speed costs. I said above there would be backtracking. There is also costs in the routing. Telephony doesn't require a low ping, but it is better without it. Gaming requires a low ping.
This might also work well with the file sharing thing. This adds one last bit of skepticism. There is nothing in ICQ that lets me set my DNS. I don't think there is anything in Napster to specify a DNS. Napster and ICQ "know" how to contact you by the IP address you use when connecting to the central server. There is no way to tell htem how to use this system.
Which brings us back to web servers, ftp servers, telephony, and gaming. Don't get me wrong. If telephony worked with this, and I were an international business, I would use this at the very least for intracompany calling/conferencing. I might even have my employees put their machine DNS on their business cards to promote other companies to use telephony.
The chances that the applications will change to allow a DNS field are much higher than the chances of everyone changing to my NATCP idea above. Software, even that much software, is much cheaper to change than all that routing hardware.
I give it a B+ for solving the problem. It may be the best mark I give.
Then post date the cheque
Someone posted an urban legend about a person making a painting, valuing it at $1000 and donating it to the Red Cross, claiming a tax writeoff. While this could happen, the artist would not be writing off $1000, s/he would be writing off the cost of the materials to make the painting. The IRS runs itself bookkeeping on reciepts. What reciepts are there in this picture? There is no $1000 receipt (unless the painting materials cost $1000). If you honestly think you can look at an IRS agent and claim $1000 without a receipt backing it, you deserve the fraud charges they will lay on you.
One other thing that should be pointed out is that even though the painter writes of the cost of the materials, that doesn't mean he gets the cost of the materials back from the Government. It's not like the government is paying him to make paintings for the Red Cross. It just means that his taxable income will be reduced. I paid about 29% on my taxes (no state tax in Florida), which means I would get 29% of the material cost back.
Bringing this back to the task at hand: the tax credits are based on the cost of developing the software. This makes sense when you look at other things the IRS allows businesses partially deduct. If a business cannot find shrinkwrap software to fulfill it needs, and it spends money to develop software, then part of the money it spends can be deducted. If someone pays you to develop open source code for their internal use, then they can deduct some of that cost.
You cannot just say "I bill at 150/hr, and worked 1000 hours on this open source project, so I'll deduct 150,000 dollars from my income". Think of it this way, you didn't loose the 150,000, you just didn't gain it. Since you didn't gain it, it wasn't taxed anyway. Since it wasn't taxed, it isn't subject to a deduction/writeoff/credit.
This all stems around the two immutable facts: the IRS taxes income, and you cannot get more money back from the IRS than you put in*.
*: actually this isn't totally true. There are certain rebates that you may qualify for that will have them sending you money, even if (especially if) you made no income that year. But they are always a fixed amount, and very little (on the order of hundreds).
I don't know if you are aware, but there isn't just one BMG. There are at least 4 of them (one for New York, Las Vegas, Boston, and Chicago), which are made up of more than 3 blue men (although only 3 play at a time). I don't know if any of the people who do these shows do the Intel spots or if it's yet another set. BMG is more of a franchise. It's not like there are only 3 guys, and Intel has stolen them up.
X-box isn't the release name, is it? I thought it was just the "working name", like Chicago.