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Slashdot | Linux At the Point of Sale

Re:Your boss has responded (Score:5, Insightful)

by holophrastic (221104) on Sunday February 24, @06:38PM (#22539686)

Actually, quite the opposite. In that situation, the manager now needs to pay the programmer a much larger wage to keep working on it, or to train someone new.

You guys always think of the client’s interests, but you seem to forget that the client’s interests fall into five areas — not spending money, not spending time, not spending effort, not learning anything new, and still getting lots of work out of the vendor. That’s business.

The trick with any lock-in style effort is to balance the client’s interests with the vendor’s interests in order to achieve a relationship that grows both businesses, ultimately giving each side more money with less effort down the road.

There’s nothing wrong with supplying a solution that requires a compatent and trained individual to maintain it. And there’s nothing wrong with the original vendor being in the significantly better position to do so. In can actually be a great thing for the client when you consider the extra work that a vendor can do when the vendor knows it’s a long-term commitment.

In my company, we call it “aligned interests”. It’s the “you lose, we lose; you win, we win” philosophy that ultimately penalizes everyone should either party quit at any stage, and rewards everyone each time either party continues forward.

It’s also called being proud of and empassioned in your work.

What you guys keep suggesting, by favouring the client in every stage, is more of a “you lose, we lose; you win, we lose” scenario because when everything pans out perfectly for the client, and the solution works, and their business grows, the original vendor is undoubtedly replaced by someone cheaper — or no one at all.

Long-term business just doesn’t work that way. The business world isn’t the cosumer world where you sell a product, and hope to never pseak with the customer again — because customer service and technical support are expensive to supply — and hope the product breaks just after the warranty period — so the customer comes and buys another.

The idea of “aligned interests” is that the client and the vendor both want the same thing and both benefit from that thing. The client wants a solution that lasts forever. The vendor needs to want that too. The client wants to get the best quality parts. The vendow needs to want that too. Otherwise you get today’s consumer computers — cheap parts, low-quality components, crap customer service, worse techincal support, and really easy to purchase a new one. The companies tend to start with the letters “D”, “G”, “A”, or “H”. And of course that’s the case, they spend less money, charge more, and profit more. The only people who get screwed are the customers — who’ve come to expect the products to be crap, but don’t realize why.

In the business world, you can’t throw out your iPod and get a new one when it breaks. In the business world you can’t sell an iPod and replace it when it breaks. In the business world, you have to take the broken iPod and not only replace the device, but also replace the data stored on the device. Your clients are not consumers — they don’t consume your product/service. In the business world, the solution that you provide to your clients needs to be reliable enough for your client to base his business on — if that solution is integral to their business, obviously

From Slashdot | Pakistan Blocks YouTube

Re:Religion and its leaders (Score:5, Insightful)

by Deadstick (535032) on Sunday February 24, @02:03PM (#22536874)

Here in The Netherlands we had a nice one last night, around 01:00 in the night one of the public broadcasters decided to air the old Deep Throat movie, in (eager?) anticipation quite a few religious leaders protested as if they did not have an off button on their TV

They knew perfectly well they had an off button on their TV. They were angry because they didn’t have an off button connected to your TV.

rj

From Slashdot | Australian Internet Filter Enters Trial Phase

Re:No, no, a thousand times no. (Score:5, Informative)

by hool5400 (257022) on Tuesday February 26, @12:56PM (#22560910)

The stupid thing is, they already provide free filtering software to download. The government has paid for it, on our behalf.

The licence for the filter software cost them $AUD 85M, with only 145000 downloads of the software, and no doubt even less active users. Those that want it, have it. But it seems not many people care.

Dan Rutter brings some light on the insanity here [blogsome.com].

From Slashdot | Getting The Public To Listen To Good Science

Re:Don’t let facts get in the way of good fun (Score:5, Insightful)

by johnsonav (1098915) on Monday February 25, @09:29PM (#22554190)

I would argue that the USA’s peak of scientific interest was during the late 1960s when the space program was a national obsession and every second kid had a Nasa poster on their bedroom wall.

You’re probably right. But, I’m sure there were plenty of people back then that thought there were too many kids interested in The Beatles, not science. If anything, I believe that what has been lost is a generation of physicists and biologists to the siren’s song of computer science. If the Apollo program was what drew them in the ’60s, then dot-coms and OSS draw them now. There is no other field today where the barriers to entry are so low that almost anyone can make a real contribution.

The first step towards solving the problem, in my opinion, is stop making college degrees the minimum requirement for employment, regardless of major. There are too many people attending college today simply looking for any degree. This results in over-enrollment in so called easy majors, and less funding for science and engineering. You don’t see nearly as many foreign students in those programs because, for them, the job market back home requires real knowledge, not just a piece of paper.

From Slashdot | Richard Feynman, the Challenger, and Engineering

As a software quality professional… (Score:5, Interesting)

by gosand (234100) on Wednesday February 20, @01:43PM (#22491510)
Homepage

I’ve been in software quality and testing for 14 years. I’ve worked at very large corporations as well as startups. There is a WIDE gap in software development process in our industry. Many people like to call themselves software engineers when they are developers. There is a huge difference. Engineering is a discipline that follows well-defined rules, and it usually takes time. But I think the very important thing to point out is that some software requires engineering - other software does not. If I go into a startup company that is trying to develop a blog/wiki site and try to implement a NASA-like software development methodology, they will fail. Likewise, software to control a heart monitor should be engineered and closely controlled. Sometimes quality and perfection is the goal, other times it might be time-to-market that is critical. You have to fit the process to your business. A bridge is a bridge, and they should all be engineered pretty much in the same way. You can’t say the same thing about software.

I think that this is a very key point to software development. I have seen companies who spent entirely too much time and money trying to eliminate all defects from their software when it wasn’t the critical part of their business. Yes, we should always strive to eliminate defects, but you can’t get them all. You have to know when to pick your battles, and when to accept the risks. If we’re talking about life-or-death software, or security, or other very critical things - you need to focus on those.

There’s a grid I have seen used that is a great tool when doing projects.
Schedule, Cost, Quality, Scope.
1 can be optimized, 1 is a constraint, and the other 2 you have to accept. Period. It is a more useful version of the “fast, good, cheap - pick two”

From Slashdot | ICANN Finds No Wrong Doing in Domain Front Running

Re:Not even “fair” here. (Score:5, Informative)

by a_nonamiss (743253) on Saturday February 16, @12:12AM (#22443124)

I don’t think you’re stupid, the issue is somewhat complex. The $0.20 charge is not for the consumer, it’s for the registrant. The scripts would be written by folks like you and I, (or a million other nerds that read Slashdot) and they would be designed to generate lots and lots of noise so that the companies could stop using their positions of power to take advantage of the regular folks on the Internet.

Here is an experiment that I encourage you to try on your own: I just now, right now, made up the domain flipperjikk.com. Make up your own and follow along. Use long random strings of letters to make sure it’s not an accident. I went to GoDaddy and did a search and the domain is available. Great! I then went to Network Solutions and searched for the same domain name, just to be sure. Yep, it’s still available. Immediately, I went back to GoDaddy, and lo and behold, in the 15 seconds since I checked the first time, somebody else must have come up with the exact same domain name as I did, because flipperjikk.com appears to have now been registered, and is no longer available. And it cost Network Solutions nothing to register this, because they can just get a refund in 5 days if I decide not to register it. The insidious part is, odds are that domain may NEVER become available again, because once the 5-day period expires, some squatter will see it’s expiring, someone’s interested in it, and register it for themselves, using the same technique. Domains can sit in limbo for months going back and forth between different shell companies using this trial period. Nobody pays a dime (or two) for all this activity.

The script I mentioned could search the availability for random domains all day. djiuqeruoweit.com, agrhlreijilaer.com, wejhafkljherk,com, etc. The registrants would be overwhelmed with searches, and they would no longer be able to tell which domains people were actually interested in, and which ones were garbage. If they register all the searches using an automated script (which they clearly did with flipperjikk.com) it would cost them millions per day.

This $0.20 tax would in no way hurt you and I. It would just discourage the registrants from registering every domain that they think people might be slightly interested in, because now it costs them money.

From Slashdot | White House Must Answer For Missing Emails

Re:Expected answer (Score:5, Insightful)

by Protonk (599901) on Thursday February 14, @10:15PM (#22430176)

That’s because that wasn’t part of an attempt to undermine our system of government. I don’t care WHO you are, there hasn’t been a president like GWB in office for at least 100 years. They have literally wrecked the place. I’m not talking about NCLB, Iraq, or whatever. That’s all normal stuff. That’s the kind of stuff that most of the presidents we remember would have done. Kennedy/Johnson got us into Vietnam. Roosevelt packed the supreme court. Hoover precipitated the great depression. Wilson effectively re-segregated the federal government. Etc. That kind of stuff is easy to recover from.

They just smashed the joint up. They fired or forced to resign what amounts to hundreds to thousands of person-years of experience in government. They politicized every office they could get their hands on. they enriched cronies in brazen fashion. They used a national fucking tragedy to secure political control of congress. They pushed a TRIPLE FUCKING AMPUTEE who was a Vietnam veteran out of office because he had the temerity to stand up to their bullshit. They completed the circle of lobbyist control in congress started by Tom Delay. they made supine the court system and the legislature, and now they stand to do it again.

Getting dome in the white house doesn’t begin to compare. We will go decades and not be able to access the wreckage honestly.

Re:Expected answer (Score:5, Insightful)

by Protonk (599901) on Thursday February 14, @11:30PM (#22430596)

No, it doesn’t. I’ve never seen anything so patently absurd in my whole life, and I’ve seen a lot of absurd things. To accuse the democratic congress of organizing a witch hunt is preposterous. Show me the witch hunt. Show me the weeks of dogged congressional action. Show me the impeachment proceedings. Show me the honest, hard-working Americans forced into jail because of the partisan hackery of the democrats, I defy you.

There isn’t a witch hunt. The fact that the democrats are willing to exercise a modicum of oversight should come as a slight relief, not rejected. Think about it:

This is what Clinton did:

Lied about getting dome in the white house while under oath. Suggested that his mistress lie under oath in order to protect him.

This is what bush did:

Used political operatives in the white house and the justice department to prosecute democrats during election seasons. Fired uncooperative prosecutors.

Used 9/11 to illegally wiretap large volumes of conversations over telephone and email. Didn’t even use a secret court designed for such surveillance SIMPLY TO DECLARE THAT THE WHITE HOUSE WAS BEYOND THE REACH OF THAT COURT. Lied about it even after it was discovered by the New York times 4 years later.

Deliberately moved a detention facility outside of US court jurisdiction in order to prevent detainees from getting basic human rights afforded to them. Violated the Geneva conventions. authorized and lied about torture.

Replaced government professionals with political operatives and like minded conservatives. Used appointed officials to stifle press releases AND to eliminate oversight, resulting in (likely) the mine collapse disasters and the mismanagement of Katrina.

The list could go on. Those aren’t partisan accusations. They aren’t crazy conspiracies. They aren’t unsubstantiated attacks. they are fucking facts, confirmed by former White House officials, members of congress, informants, or statements of the presidents advisors while still in office. I didn’t even include most of John Woo and David Addington’s rape of our constitution or the iraq war. How has the partisan, liberal, democratic congress responded to these blatant examples of misconduct? About as meekly as a church mouse.

From Slashdot | EU Commissioner Proposes 95 year Copyright

I agree! (Score:5, Funny)

by Jaysyn (203771) <`jaysyn+slashdot’ `at’ `gmail.com’> on Thursday February 14, @11:59AM (#22421774)
Homepage Journal

I think that the government & various communications companies that I’ve done work for over the years should pay me for my designs & plans for 95 years after their creation. Why yes, they are works of art!

Re:I agree! (Score:5, Insightful)

by NeutronCowboy (896098) on Thursday February 14, @12:40PM (#22422528)

Someone give this guy props and mod him insightful. I won’t comment too much, since there are plenty of comments already that point out the absurdity of this.

I’ll just reiterate: there’s nothing special about what an artist creates. An artist either fills a supply niche with material for which there is demand, or they’re just doing intellectual masturbation. And yes, I’m dead serious with that statement.

This means that if an artist can’t find a buyer, they don’t deserve an income. Now, there’s indeed the wrinkle of near-free unlimited distribution of digital copies of their work. Sell your song or painting to one person, and everyone in the world has access to the digital copy. Here are the options to deal with this: make sure that the first sale of the song compensates you for the work you put into it, or get enough people to pay for it to provide enough aggregate compensation. The simplest solution for this is still the tried and true live performance. You can’t copy it, because then it wouldn’t be live. You can easily calculate how much you need to charge to make a living.

That said, I can live with a certain amount of copyright law. This will make it easier for artists to create income and won’t make the creation of art into a rat race of who can copy whose popular work the best. Personally, I’d like to see it be as long as a patent: 20 years. If 20 years is enough time to recoup investment in creating new technology, it is enough time to recoup investment in creating new art. Also, I don’t think that copyright should end with the death of the artist. I’m sure there are enough people out there who aren’t above killing someone to be able to freely copy and perform a piece of art. Not having the death provision in there will remove an incentive for killing. It’s true that it’s already illegal to kill someone, but it also doesn’t mean we have to give killers a reason to kill.

From Slashdot | Tolkien Trust Sues New Line, May Kill “Hobbit”

Re:Soo … (Score:5, Insightful)

by PopeRatzo (965947) * on Tuesday February 12, @09:35AM (#22391802)
Homepage Journal

Copyright is supposed to encourage authors/composers/etc. to create new works to enrich society. Tolkien isn’t even enriching the ground he’s buried in anymore, so there’s *zero* need for a copyright to continue to exist on his works.

Thank you, NormalVisual. I was wondering when someone would state the obvious.

Since I’m someone who makes a living off his “intellectual property”, I’ve thought about this a lot. I just can’t see any benefit (as far as the original purpose of copyright is concerned) for any rights to a work of art to be transferable in any manner. I might go so far as to say an artist should be able to “license” his idea to someone else who wants to extend the work somehow, but there’s no reason his grandchildren should be able to reap direct benefits from it.

If I get rich off my work (probability: imperceptible), I’ll leave the dough to my wife and daughter (who both happen to be younger and healthier than me, and thus likely to survive me). I feel the same way about patent. If an inventor wants to monetize his invention, he should either develop it himself or license it to a company to develop. When he dies, it should become public domain.

And don’t tell me this will “hinder innovation”. Innovators innovate. It’s what they do.

Re:Soo … (Score:4, Insightful)

by ivan256 (17499) on Tuesday February 12, @10:19AM (#22392314)

Life + (X number of years) is a good way to keep people from getting killed for access to their highly profitable creation though… 70 years is probably too long, but I think 15 years is reasonable.

Of course I personally favor the “infinite copyright period with frequent renewals and exponentially increasing fees” model. I doubt we’ll ever see that though.

From Slashdot | Young IT Workers Disillusioned, Hard to Retain

Yes! Yes! To Obi-Wan you listen! (Score:5, Interesting)

by dtmos (447842) on Saturday January 12, @05:32AM (#22012706)

This is not the first time entry-level people have thought times were tougher on them than the preceeding generation.

In the mid-1960s my father worked for a contractor on the Apollo space program. Realizing that once the moon rocket design was substantially complete, engineers would be superfluous (a Briton would say redundant), in 1968 he transfered, within his company, out of the space program to a group in another state designing time-shared mainframes for business applications. It was the best decision of his career, but one that was very controversial at the time (”you’re leaving the space program?!?“).

I will carry the memory of the period that followed to my grave. Some time after the transfer, the NASA cuts began, and we started getting phone calls (at home!) from my father’s former coworkers, looking for work — any work, any where, in any field. More than 20,000 engineers, scientists, and technicians in the state of Florida alone — and probably 100,000 or more around the country — were laid of as fast as the mimeograph machines could reproduce the pink slips. Engineers were driving taxis and bagging groceries in the towns around the Kennedy Space Center.

The ultimate was when my father returned to the dinner table from another call to announce that the caller had been his former boss’s boss’s boss, looking for any work — even a drafting position (six levels down the corporate ladder, and one that did not require a college degree). Like all the other callers, he had a wife, x young children, and a mortgage to support. (Homes were essentially unsellable in the areas around the major contractors’ plants; the mortgages were greater than their market value, so foreclosures were the norm.) I hope I have sufficiently expressed the desperate nature of the situation.

And yet…

No university dropped its engineering program; freshout engineering graduates appeared, just as they always had, at the end of every semester. And all of them needed jobs. Entry-level jobs. All of these people entered school at the height of the space program, only to find when they graduated that the job market was considerably more difficult than they had expected. Having a difficult entry-level job market is not a new thing.

One of the pleasures of age is that one sees the world as dynamic, rather than static. A young person sees a constant world, for it’s the only one he’s ever known. With age, however, one sees things change, and can evaluate, say, the first derivative of the world function. With greater age, one can see the rate of change change, and appreciate the second derivative; at that point, one can begin modeling the dynamics of social structures.

The shortage of engineers in the 1960s led to the glut of engineers in the 1970s. However, because of the 4- to 6-year delay between entering and completing engineering school, the system is not necessarily stable; the glut of the 1970s led to such an engineering shortage by the early 1980s that separate, higher, salary ladders were established at major corporations for entry-level engineers (creating salary compression that demotivated experienced engineers, but that’s a different thread). The system continues to oscillate today; the point is, it’s oscillating through values we’ve seen before.