Well, I'm a math major (as an undergrad -- currently working on my MS in CS) who does business programming too, and I'd argue there's a hell of a lot of math involved. SQL, in particular, is set theory at the root; if you've used set theory in any of the traditional math applications (real analysis, linear algebra) then it's a hell of lot easier to write efficient queries.
Cue up all the "i d0n7 N0 4nY m47H & i 4m 7eH 1337!" comments from people who write shitty, bloated, inefficient code because they didn't have the brains or dedication to pay attention in their math classes.
As an EMT, I pulled a great many conscious people out of cars. Now, sometimes I wished they had been knocked out... "Yes, damn it, we're going to get you out of the car, and you're going to be okay, now would you please hold still and shut up!"
The thing is, "___ has a monopoly" is only meaningful based on the market in which the alleged monopoly exists. Sure, Apple has a monopoly on Apple hardware... and Ford has a monopoly on Ford cars... and Sears has a monopoly on Sears appliances... etc. But none of these is a monopoly in any meaningful sense of the word, because they're competing in a much larger market where there are plenty of other products to choose from, many of which have a larger market share than they do. In short, every company has a monopoly on its own products; the question is, is there meaningful competition in the same market space?
No, the Justice Department blew it by giving up after they'd won thanks to a change in administration. Had they kept going on the course they were on before Bush & Ashcroft took over, we'd have two or three "Baby Bills" today, and the world would be a better place.
Yeah, I'm replying to my own post. My previous one was trollish, and I thought I should clarify.
I'm really sick of the "When Apple does it,/.ers think it's cool, but when Microsoft does it, they complain" meme. The facts are that a) Microsoft is a convicted monopoly, and Apple isn't, and b) more importantly, Apple does it better than Microsoft. Microsoft embeds lousy software in a lousy OS, releases lousy service packs, and talks about "innovation" when all they create is bloat. Apple embeds good software in a good OS, releases upgrades that really do improve the software and OS even further, and continues to be the driving force in innovation for the whole PC industry.
I'm not saying this is a permanent state of affairs. Companies can and do change. If you'd asked me twenty years ago, I'd have said that IBM would never be anything other than "Big Blue", a giant corporation sucking the life out of the industry by trading on name recognition to crush smaller companies that were doing all the real innovation. These days, IBM are the good guys. It may be that Microsoft will go through a similar change, and in twenty years they'll be an ally to small developers and desktop users, while Apple (or, more likely, some company we've barely even heard of in 2004) will be the giant evil force that's holding back the whole industry.
But right now: Microsoft is a bad corporation with bad products, Apple is a great corporation with great products, and there are a lot of people on/. who are smart enough to recognize that. People don't hate Microsoft because it's Microsoft. They hate it because its products and business practices suck.
No, because they're upgrades, not just patches. Really. If Microsoft were capable of making real, substantial improvements to the OS at the same speed as Apple, they'd be releasing (and charging for) full-scale updates just as often.
Actually, I think an OS called "Russian Blue" would sound pretty cool. OTOH, "Tabby", "Calico", and "American Shorthair" are not exactly going to make Bill Gates tremble in awe.
I think they should branch out to other wild predators. "Yeah, well, my Mac OS 11.7 'Hyena' is going to encircle your Windows 'Longhorn' and bring it down slowly and horribly, laughing the whole time... sucker..."
Mac OS point releases seem to have an even-odd curse just like Star Trek movies, only the other way around: the odd-numbered ones are much better. 10.0: unusable. 10.1: a huge improvement. 10.2: eh. 10.3: very nice. So maybe I'll wait for 10.5.
This trend goes back to at least the System 7 days, in my experience.
Bush limited fetal stem cell lines eligible for US federally funded research to those available at the time the decision was made. Since then, most of those lines have been found to be so contaminated as to be useless. US researchers were and are crippled by this decision. If you claim that someone has found a way to create clean, pluripotent stem cell lines that do everything new fetal stem cells can do, please provide a citation -- I follow this issue closely and haven't heard about it.
Militarily, not a whole lot of difference -- although Russia has a lot of trouble projecting its military power the way the US does because there's no middle ground; they can nuke any country out of existence, but they have enough trouble to keep troops on the ground and fighting in Chechnya, for God's sake! That makes Russia, IMO, more dangerous than the old USSR, not less. Decaying empires which see military force as an all-or-nothing option tend to lash out in ugly ways. We can only hope that as the EU and Chinese economies grow, they'll boost Russia's along with them.
But it's really not military power I'm talking about. In the past, Russia has produced some pretty damn impressive science and engineering. These days, the next generation of great scientists and engineers is too busy trying to keep from starving to death to accomplish much of anything. All the money is flowing to crooked businessmen, corrupt politicians, and mobsters. It's like an exaggerated version of where the US is going; I just hope things here never get quite that bad.
Well, people tend to stick the word "reverse" in front of trends that go in a surprising direction -- e.g., "reverse discrimination" when it's white males who are being discriminated against. I agree that it's silly; brain drain is brain drain, discrimination is discrimination, etc.
The problem is spinoffs, or the lack thereof. If military tech is locked up by secrecy, then it makes the military stronger, but it can't be used by industry. Of course, the same is true of civilian research that's locked up by absurd patents... Unclassified, public domain research that's free for use by everyone gives the most bang for the buck in the long run. The twin trends of classification and draconian IP protection pretty much guarantee that the average American won't benefit from a lot of the research being done for a long, long time.
Anti-intellectualism is another serious problem, I agree; that's something fundamental in our culture that we really need to fix, but I confess I have no idea how.
Europe and Asia are ascendant, analysts say, even if their achievements go unnoticed in the United States. In March, for example, European scientists announced that one of their planetary probes had detected methane in the atmosphere of Mars -- a possible sign that alien microbes live beneath the planet's surface. The finding made headlines from Paris to Melbourne. But most Americans, bombarded with images from America's own rovers successfully exploring the red planet, missed the foreign news.
IOW, the real problem is Roman... er, Spanish... er, British... er, American, damn it!... cultural arrogance. We've been the most powerful country in the world in every way -- not just militarily, but scientifically, economically, culturally, and politically -- for somewhere between six decades and a century, depending on your specific measure. We're used to thinking of that state of affairs as though it will last forever, as though it were personally handed to us on a silver platter by God Himself. But it doesn't work that way.
Ideally, of course, it doesn't matter where the knowledge is -- knowledge is knowledge, and an American is not diminished if the latest miracle drug or neat gizmo he uses to make his life better comes originally from outside our borders. But it adds up over time. Part of the reason for America's dominance of most of the 20th c. was simply that we were a huge nation with lots of natural resources... but there were and are other nations fitting this description that didn't get so far. The reverse is also true; consider that (just barely) within living memory, a small island in the North Sea controlled the biggest empire the world has ever seen, and its language and culture are still the closest thing to universal in human history. A nation's position on the world stage is primarily determined by its culture.
We are not, hopefully, going to turn into Russia: a Third World nation with nukes. But if we don't pay attention, we are going to see the permanent decline in living standards for the average American, in not only relative but absolute terms. This trend has already begun. That's not the future I want for myself and my children.
I strongly encourage this practice as a form of Darwinian selective pressure. With luck, another generation or two, and there won't be any more frat boys.
... but it seems like putting a little more engineering into the thing to make a softer ground landing would have been easier, and safer, than relying on this bizarre mid-air catch. The article says it will probably survive the landing even if the pilot misses; how much extra material would have been required to soften the landing enough for them to be sure?
And who is this projects "customer"? If it's consulting or contract work, your product isn't the code you write, it's the hours you bill.
To be fair, I should I have mentioned that this is in-house database work, so it's not like nothing of value ever gets produced; in fact, the applications that I and others turn out get used throughout the company on a daily basis. Our users aren't willing to wait for endless cycles of design and review, and neither are we.
Notice I didn't trash documentation; that is one of the areas of software engineering doctrine I agree with. I try to document everything I do thoroughly, so that my co-workers (and eventually, successors) can see exactly what I did and why. It's the heavy emphasis on the prep work that I think is overrated. I'm not saying zero planning is a good idea, either; just that if you overplan, it's very easy to get caught up in an endless maze of "process" without actually ever getting anywhere.
In the business world, you are going to have to come up with a budget for your software projects. A project whose scope or length is not defined does not lend itself well to budget forecasting. And those project managers that cannot accurately forecast the time or cost of their projects are quickly without a job. And, oddly enough, many end up teaching at University.
Funny, I've had the opposite experience: my CS professors always wanted carefully planned projects with specified scope and length, but my boss has me working on an open-ended project that will probably go on basically forever. The more real-world development experience I have, the less impressed I am with any of the "software engineering" doctrine about planning and specifications, and the more value I place on just writing the damn code.
Dunno about the Windows version, but I can honestly say I would pay a hundred bucks for an OS X version of the last version of WordPerfect for Mac (3.5e) without any new features -- just OS X integration, with all the great features (and interface, please, not the pseudo-MS Office thing they seem to be pushing on the Windows and Linux version) from the OS 9 version. It's that good.
Fascinating stuff, but some of what's in the article really makes me grit my teeth. I love this bit:
Even now, they have yet to develop a comprehensive theory to explain its appearance in materials as diverse as metal and ceramics.
Such scientific conundrums are of only passing interest at Superpower, a four-year-old subsidiary of Intermagnetics General, and at other companies like it. After years of false starts and setbacks, these companies say they are closing in on the goal of producing relatively inexpensive superconducting wire for power generators, transformers and transmission lines.
Success requires making yard after yard of wire, and eventually mile after mile. The focus at the companies, at national laboratories and at many universities is on questions that call for a genius more like Edison than Einstein.
Uh, bullshit. If they don't understand how it works, they're never going to move this stuff beyond the applications possible at liquid nitrogen temps. I'm not selling that short -- it's neat, and has a number of industrial applications -- but we're not going to be making power lines, or even wiring our houses, with that kind of cooling.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'm a math major (as an undergrad -- currently working on my MS in CS) who does business programming too, and I'd argue there's a hell of a lot of math involved. SQL, in particular, is set theory at the root; if you've used set theory in any of the traditional math applications (real analysis, linear algebra) then it's a hell of lot easier to write efficient queries.
Cue up all the "i d0n7 N0 4nY m47H & i 4m 7eH 1337!" comments from people who write shitty, bloated, inefficient code because they didn't have the brains or dedication to pay attention in their math classes.
As an EMT, I pulled a great many conscious people out of cars. Now, sometimes I wished they had been knocked out ... "Yes, damn it, we're going to get you out of the car, and you're going to be okay, now would you please hold still and shut up!"
The thing is, "___ has a monopoly" is only meaningful based on the market in which the alleged monopoly exists. Sure, Apple has a monopoly on Apple hardware ... and Ford has a monopoly on Ford cars ... and Sears has a monopoly on Sears appliances ... etc. But none of these is a monopoly in any meaningful sense of the word, because they're competing in a much larger market where there are plenty of other products to choose from, many of which have a larger market share than they do. In short, every company has a monopoly on its own products; the question is, is there meaningful competition in the same market space?
Do dolphins think water is wet? I kind of doubt it.
No, the Justice Department blew it by giving up after they'd won thanks to a change in administration. Had they kept going on the course they were on before Bush & Ashcroft took over, we'd have two or three "Baby Bills" today, and the world would be a better place.
Yeah, I'm replying to my own post. My previous one was trollish, and I thought I should clarify.
/.ers think it's cool, but when Microsoft does it, they complain" meme. The facts are that a) Microsoft is a convicted monopoly, and Apple isn't, and b) more importantly, Apple does it better than Microsoft. Microsoft embeds lousy software in a lousy OS, releases lousy service packs, and talks about "innovation" when all they create is bloat. Apple embeds good software in a good OS, releases upgrades that really do improve the software and OS even further, and continues to be the driving force in innovation for the whole PC industry.
/. who are smart enough to recognize that. People don't hate Microsoft because it's Microsoft. They hate it because its products and business practices suck.
I'm really sick of the "When Apple does it,
I'm not saying this is a permanent state of affairs. Companies can and do change. If you'd asked me twenty years ago, I'd have said that IBM would never be anything other than "Big Blue", a giant corporation sucking the life out of the industry by trading on name recognition to crush smaller companies that were doing all the real innovation. These days, IBM are the good guys. It may be that Microsoft will go through a similar change, and in twenty years they'll be an ally to small developers and desktop users, while Apple (or, more likely, some company we've barely even heard of in 2004) will be the giant evil force that's holding back the whole industry.
But right now: Microsoft is a bad corporation with bad products, Apple is a great corporation with great products, and there are a lot of people on
Because Microsoft releases lousy OSs every two or three years, and Apple releases a great OS once a year, you dumb shit.
No, because they're upgrades, not just patches. Really. If Microsoft were capable of making real, substantial improvements to the OS at the same speed as Apple, they'd be releasing (and charging for) full-scale updates just as often.
Actually, I think an OS called "Russian Blue" would sound pretty cool. OTOH, "Tabby", "Calico", and "American Shorthair" are not exactly going to make Bill Gates tremble in awe.
... sucker ..."
I think they should branch out to other wild predators. "Yeah, well, my Mac OS 11.7 'Hyena' is going to encircle your Windows 'Longhorn' and bring it down slowly and horribly, laughing the whole time
Mac OS point releases seem to have an even-odd curse just like Star Trek movies, only the other way around: the odd-numbered ones are much better. 10.0: unusable. 10.1: a huge improvement. 10.2: eh. 10.3: very nice. So maybe I'll wait for 10.5.
This trend goes back to at least the System 7 days, in my experience.
Bush limited fetal stem cell lines eligible for US federally funded research to those available at the time the decision was made. Since then, most of those lines have been found to be so contaminated as to be useless. US researchers were and are crippled by this decision. If you claim that someone has found a way to create clean, pluripotent stem cell lines that do everything new fetal stem cells can do, please provide a citation -- I follow this issue closely and haven't heard about it.
Militarily, not a whole lot of difference -- although Russia has a lot of trouble projecting its military power the way the US does because there's no middle ground; they can nuke any country out of existence, but they have enough trouble to keep troops on the ground and fighting in Chechnya, for God's sake! That makes Russia, IMO, more dangerous than the old USSR, not less. Decaying empires which see military force as an all-or-nothing option tend to lash out in ugly ways. We can only hope that as the EU and Chinese economies grow, they'll boost Russia's along with them.
But it's really not military power I'm talking about. In the past, Russia has produced some pretty damn impressive science and engineering. These days, the next generation of great scientists and engineers is too busy trying to keep from starving to death to accomplish much of anything. All the money is flowing to crooked businessmen, corrupt politicians, and mobsters. It's like an exaggerated version of where the US is going; I just hope things here never get quite that bad.
Well, people tend to stick the word "reverse" in front of trends that go in a surprising direction -- e.g., "reverse discrimination" when it's white males who are being discriminated against. I agree that it's silly; brain drain is brain drain, discrimination is discrimination, etc.
The problem is spinoffs, or the lack thereof. If military tech is locked up by secrecy, then it makes the military stronger, but it can't be used by industry. Of course, the same is true of civilian research that's locked up by absurd patents ... Unclassified, public domain research that's free for use by everyone gives the most bang for the buck in the long run. The twin trends of classification and draconian IP protection pretty much guarantee that the average American won't benefit from a lot of the research being done for a long, long time.
Anti-intellectualism is another serious problem, I agree; that's something fundamental in our culture that we really need to fix, but I confess I have no idea how.
Europe and Asia are ascendant, analysts say, even if their achievements go unnoticed in the United States. In March, for example, European scientists announced that one of their planetary probes had detected methane in the atmosphere of Mars -- a possible sign that alien microbes live beneath the planet's surface. The finding made headlines from Paris to Melbourne. But most Americans, bombarded with images from America's own rovers successfully exploring the red planet, missed the foreign news.
... er, Spanish ... er, British ... er, American, damn it! ... cultural arrogance. We've been the most powerful country in the world in every way -- not just militarily, but scientifically, economically, culturally, and politically -- for somewhere between six decades and a century, depending on your specific measure. We're used to thinking of that state of affairs as though it will last forever, as though it were personally handed to us on a silver platter by God Himself. But it doesn't work that way.
... but there were and are other nations fitting this description that didn't get so far. The reverse is also true; consider that (just barely) within living memory, a small island in the North Sea controlled the biggest empire the world has ever seen, and its language and culture are still the closest thing to universal in human history. A nation's position on the world stage is primarily determined by its culture.
IOW, the real problem is Roman
Ideally, of course, it doesn't matter where the knowledge is -- knowledge is knowledge, and an American is not diminished if the latest miracle drug or neat gizmo he uses to make his life better comes originally from outside our borders. But it adds up over time. Part of the reason for America's dominance of most of the 20th c. was simply that we were a huge nation with lots of natural resources
We are not, hopefully, going to turn into Russia: a Third World nation with nukes. But if we don't pay attention, we are going to see the permanent decline in living standards for the average American, in not only relative but absolute terms. This trend has already begun. That's not the future I want for myself and my children.
I strongly encourage this practice as a form of Darwinian selective pressure. With luck, another generation or two, and there won't be any more frat boys.
Gotta love people who hang out on a site subtitled "news for nerds" ripping on other people for how geeky they are.
Well, I'll be damned -- I had no idea. Thanks for the info.
... but it seems like putting a little more engineering into the thing to make a softer ground landing would have been easier, and safer, than relying on this bizarre mid-air catch. The article says it will probably survive the landing even if the pilot misses; how much extra material would have been required to soften the landing enough for them to be sure?
And who is this projects "customer"? If it's consulting or contract work, your product isn't the code you write, it's the hours you bill.
To be fair, I should I have mentioned that this is in-house database work, so it's not like nothing of value ever gets produced; in fact, the applications that I and others turn out get used throughout the company on a daily basis. Our users aren't willing to wait for endless cycles of design and review, and neither are we.
Notice I didn't trash documentation; that is one of the areas of software engineering doctrine I agree with. I try to document everything I do thoroughly, so that my co-workers (and eventually, successors) can see exactly what I did and why. It's the heavy emphasis on the prep work that I think is overrated. I'm not saying zero planning is a good idea, either; just that if you overplan, it's very easy to get caught up in an endless maze of "process" without actually ever getting anywhere.
In the business world, you are going to have to come up with a budget for your software projects. A project whose scope or length is not defined does not lend itself well to budget forecasting. And those project managers that cannot accurately forecast the time or cost of their projects are quickly without a job. And, oddly enough, many end up teaching at University.
Funny, I've had the opposite experience: my CS professors always wanted carefully planned projects with specified scope and length, but my boss has me working on an open-ended project that will probably go on basically forever. The more real-world development experience I have, the less impressed I am with any of the "software engineering" doctrine about planning and specifications, and the more value I place on just writing the damn code.
Dunno about the Windows version, but I can honestly say I would pay a hundred bucks for an OS X version of the last version of WordPerfect for Mac (3.5e) without any new features -- just OS X integration, with all the great features (and interface, please, not the pseudo-MS Office thing they seem to be pushing on the Windows and Linux version) from the OS 9 version. It's that good.
Fascinating stuff, but some of what's in the article really makes me grit my teeth. I love this bit:
Even now, they have yet to develop a comprehensive theory to explain its appearance in materials as diverse as metal and ceramics.
Such scientific conundrums are of only passing interest at Superpower, a four-year-old subsidiary of Intermagnetics General, and at other companies like it. After years of false starts and setbacks, these companies say they are closing in on the goal of producing relatively inexpensive superconducting wire for power generators, transformers and transmission lines.
Success requires making yard after yard of wire, and eventually mile after mile. The focus at the companies, at national laboratories and at many universities is on questions that call for a genius more like Edison than Einstein.
Uh, bullshit. If they don't understand how it works, they're never going to move this stuff beyond the applications possible at liquid nitrogen temps. I'm not selling that short -- it's neat, and has a number of industrial applications -- but we're not going to be making power lines, or even wiring our houses, with that kind of cooling.