I particularly like the implicit assumption in the article that only Americans have the ability to produce good/usable code. It even seems to assume that Linus is american.
Of course if congress passed a law tomorrow forbidding any americans to contribute to open source it wouldn't make a cent of difference in anything beyond the very short term.
As someone who's been coding commercially since the mid-80s I'd say you're looking at this from the wrong point of view. Business processes hasn't changed that much over the last 20 years, but nevertheless there now seems to be more opportunities to write code to solve business problems then there was back then.
I think software is more like an ecology than some sort of process tick list. As the business software environment gets more complex more niches are created to fill with new programs, which in turn create a more complex ecology and so on. Extending the metaphore the ecology also progressively spreads into previously inhospitable terrain and so gains breadth as well as depth.
While I wouldn't disagree with you that for many people yesterday's hardware is adequate for what they want, I would contend that we will all get to Longhorn standard hardware eventually, although probably slower than MS would like. After all, the pull will be games, which will upgrade many a family PC, and the push will be natural wastage. PCs don't last forever and when Joe Doe's box dies and they come to replace their box they won't be buying another PII with win98.
FYI it's an American thing. Americans use the plural for single entities composed of multiple people, whereas we use the singular. Gramatically both are correct, it just depends where your are. Deal with it and move on.
Absolutly. Even if you love system development and that's what you want to do then recognise that your customers don't really give toss about your code and probably don't understand much in the way of computer issues either.
I usually say I make my living by being a tame geek. Many managers of SMEs don't understand much in the way of IT but know they depend on it absolutly. If you can talk 'business' and give managers a nice warm friendly feeling that you understand them, but at the same time they know that you can take care of the hardcore issues for them then you become worth you weight in gold from their viewpoint.
If you are the best computer expert in the world but can't talk 'business' then you are worthless from a management point of view (and vica versa)
Oh, the flood, or floods, were almost certainly real and are distant folk memories of traumatic events. Which events and which floods are difficult to say though. There's possibly some very old submerged city ruins off the indian and japanese coasts in areas which havnt been above water for 10,000 years or so (easily predating sumeria). Anatomically modern humans were around when the North Sea flooded, and the Persian Gulf (vast area of arable farmland that one) and even the Mediterranian itself.
Much of this sort of thing ends up being speculated about under the pseudo-science heading, but the loss of vast areas of what would have been productive land for hunting and farming at the end of the last ice-age and thereafter is geographical fact. Beyond that is pure speculation, but given the proven longevity of folk memory it would be suprising if we didn't have some distant echo of it.
I checked out the last of these, and really it's jaw hit desk level in it's stupidity. These are just stories for children.
For example we have under "How could Noah's family take care of all those animals?" the line "Perhaps these abilities were supernaturally intensified during this period." refering to all animals going into hibernation (!). This is followed by in the next paragraph "It is evident, when all the facts are examined that there is no scientific evidence that the biblical account of Noah's ark is a myth or fable. The facts support the view that Noah's ark was large enough to carry the number of animals required to repopulate the earth after the flood and that Noah and his family were capable of caring for the animals during their time on the Ark.".
I mean, Jesus Fucking Christ, so this is "scientific creationism"? Be rational where you can but pull the supernatural out the hat whenever the facts don't fit? Science is by definition falsifiable. This gobblegook isn't, so whatever else it may be science it most certainly isn't.
But I'm curious. Lets see you jump through the hoops. So by the same site the flood was global and covered the whole earth including the mountain peaks. So how the fuck did Noah get the marsupials out of and back into Australia? Australia doesn't have very high mountains - a mear 2200 metres or so - hence by definition the whole of the australia must have been underwater and it's unique fauna aboard the ark.
Now, Australia has always been seperated from the rest of euroasia by very deep sea channels, so none of the marsupials could have walked to the place the ark was built or back to australia from mount Ararat. However Noah couldn't have dropped them off separatly because the highest point in Australia is below the lowest point which could qualify as on Mount Ararat - if he'd waited until australia was above the waters again before dropping the marsupials off then he couldn't have sailed back uphill to armenia.
Of course you'll have an explanation - because it's all made up gobblegook - just fascinated to know how you'll explain it away:-)
All of what you say is true, but don't 'dis bacteria. They are increadibly useful organisms that have a much wider range of biochemical tricks available to them than eukaryotes. From a bio-engineering perspective bacteria are probably more useful than eukaryotic cells.
Besides there's a long tradition in working 'up' the scale starting with bacteria. Generally it runs something like e.coli, yeast, fruitflys, mice, primates. Got to start somewhere:-)
Re:Asteroids, Volcanoes.... Climate Change?
on
A New Ice Age?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
There was an interesting article in New Scientist about 6 months back that looked at the total contribution of the North Atlantic Drift to European climate. In fact when the authors tried to trace back the assertion that 'the gulf stream keeps europe warm' to verifiable evidence it turned out that there wasn't any.
Their subsequent calculations indicated that the NAD only contributed about 5% of the additional heat energy that Europe recieves. The majority - 60% - comes from atmospheric circulation effects most of which are contributed by the rockies. A further 35% was from general oceanic warming and other stuff that wouldn't be affected by the NAD shutting off.
Not ironic really. Best place to put wind turbines, and only place to put tidal generators, is out at sea. Aberdeen has more offshore expertese available than any other place in the UK - with the possible exception of Shetland - so is naturally the best place to get these things off the ground. Also don't forget the mass of spare heavy engineering capacity and skilled labour for building offshore plant just down the coast at the Dornoch firth.
While I've every hope that we do go exploring space in a meaningful and major way in the near future, this reason that keeps being given that "the sun will die" really bugs me. OK it will, but even the worst estimates give us a billion years before the earth is no longer habitable. This comfortably longer than the length of time from the cambrian to now and about 15 times longer than the length of time from us back to the dinosaurs.
Sure intelligent life will leave the earth sometime, but it could quite comfortably leave independently on several hundred different occassions over the timescale we have.
The wobblies (IWW - http://www.iww.org/) used to have a very nice article on doing this sort of thing on their site. It's an old tradition - workers not cooperating with management by 'playing dumb' has been going on ever since the capatilist worker-boss relationship arose a couple of hundred years ago
You're of course absolutly correct in doubting the assertion about crime was a fraction of what it is now. The seminal work on this is "The Victorian Underworld" by Donald Thomas, which is a thoroughly entertaining and readable book as well as being highly informative.
The fact is that the Victorian world was soaked in crime from top to bottom, particularly in the poorer neighbourhoods. Types of crimes may have differed, but the level of casual violence was much higher than it is now, and indeed things like child prostitution, which is abhored today as a near ultimate evil, were often regarded as little more than minor infringements of the law.
Anyone who thinks that the Victorian era were 'good times' socially is either a mis-informed or ignorant numbskull, or decidedly of suspect character themselves.
This is *so* true. I'm just about finished writing a 50,000 line application for a client who thinks along exactly these lines, and what's worse also believes everything should work first time without any need for significant testing.
There's oodles of police boxes around the city of Edinburgh, Scotland. Slightly different design to the London one and many now used for other things (one on Rose Street that's been converted to a coffee bar).
Jeez. First time I looked at MySQL a couple of years ago for a project I started putting a basic database scheme together an went to construct a view, only for my Jaw to hit the desk when I found out they were not available. Views are such a basic component of RDBMS databases that it simply hadn't occurred to me (an Oracle, DB2, SQLServer and others veteran) that software could be release that called itself a relational database that didn't have them.
Anyway, just went and used Postgres instead. It's still beyond me why people even bother giving MySQL the time of day when the incomparably superior Postgres is available under GPL.
May be moded as funny, but that's *actually* a really perceptive comment.
On a similar tack as a self-employed programmer/analyst/developer I do lots of work for small to medium sized businesses and I don't see any sign of that drying up to India any time soon - the people I do business with just are not suitable clients for remote development.
That's interesting. On a parallel note I believe that there's some evidence that blood group distribution in europe after the black death was quite markedly different from that before.
Well, that isn't quite so far out as you might think.
Here in the UK we have quite a lot of canals left over from the early industrial revolution, and as many of these predate railways they tend to be small in size, but with a much more extensive network than in countries where canal building started later. They're not used for freight now really, but in recent years there's been quite a boon in the leisure industry and many have been restored.
Obviouly though the state company that owns them - British Waterways - has ended up with lots of narrow strips of land connecting large centres of population. So there's now quite a lot of telecoms traffic carried by canal - or more precisely cables buried under canal towpaths: http://www.britishwaterways.co.uk/site/Developingo urBusiness_2238.asp
I've also heard of at least one company that was laying cables along sewers.
Slashdot Mirror
I particularly like the implicit assumption in the article that only Americans have the ability to produce good/usable code. It even seems to assume that Linus is american.
Of course if congress passed a law tomorrow forbidding any americans to contribute to open source it wouldn't make a cent of difference in anything beyond the very short term.
As someone who's been coding commercially since the mid-80s I'd say you're looking at this from the wrong point of view. Business processes hasn't changed that much over the last 20 years, but nevertheless there now seems to be more opportunities to write code to solve business problems then there was back then.
I think software is more like an ecology than some sort of process tick list. As the business software environment gets more complex more niches are created to fill with new programs, which in turn create a more complex ecology and so on. Extending the metaphore the ecology also progressively spreads into previously inhospitable terrain and so gains breadth as well as depth.
While I wouldn't disagree with you that for many people yesterday's hardware is adequate for what they want, I would contend that we will all get to Longhorn standard hardware eventually, although probably slower than MS would like. After all, the pull will be games, which will upgrade many a family PC, and the push will be natural wastage. PCs don't last forever and when Joe Doe's box dies and they come to replace their box they won't be buying another PII with win98.
FYI it's an American thing. Americans use the plural for single entities composed of multiple people, whereas we use the singular. Gramatically both are correct, it just depends where your are. Deal with it and move on.
Absolutly. Even if you love system development and that's what you want to do then recognise that your customers don't really give toss about your code and probably don't understand much in the way of computer issues either.
I usually say I make my living by being a tame geek. Many managers of SMEs don't understand much in the way of IT but know they depend on it absolutly. If you can talk 'business' and give managers a nice warm friendly feeling that you understand them, but at the same time they know that you can take care of the hardcore issues for them then you become worth you weight in gold from their viewpoint.
If you are the best computer expert in the world but can't talk 'business' then you are worthless from a management point of view (and vica versa)
Oh, the flood, or floods, were almost certainly real and are distant folk memories of traumatic events. Which events and which floods are difficult to say though. There's possibly some very old submerged city ruins off the indian and japanese coasts in areas which havnt been above water for 10,000 years or so (easily predating sumeria). Anatomically modern humans were around when the North Sea flooded, and the Persian Gulf (vast area of arable farmland that one) and even the Mediterranian itself.
Much of this sort of thing ends up being speculated about under the pseudo-science heading, but the loss of vast areas of what would have been productive land for hunting and farming at the end of the last ice-age and thereafter is geographical fact. Beyond that is pure speculation, but given the proven longevity of folk memory it would be suprising if we didn't have some distant echo of it.
For example we have under "How could Noah's family take care of all those animals?" the line "Perhaps these abilities were supernaturally intensified during this period." refering to all animals going into hibernation (!). This is followed by in the next paragraph "It is evident, when all the facts are examined that there is no scientific evidence that the biblical account of Noah's ark is a myth or fable. The facts support the view that Noah's ark was large enough to carry the number of animals required to repopulate the earth after the flood and that Noah and his family were capable of caring for the animals during their time on the Ark.".
I mean, Jesus Fucking Christ, so this is "scientific creationism"? Be rational where you can but pull the supernatural out the hat whenever the facts don't fit? Science is by definition falsifiable. This gobblegook isn't, so whatever else it may be science it most certainly isn't.
But I'm curious. Lets see you jump through the hoops. So by the same site the flood was global and covered the whole earth including the mountain peaks. So how the fuck did Noah get the marsupials out of and back into Australia? Australia doesn't have very high mountains - a mear 2200 metres or so - hence by definition the whole of the australia must have been underwater and it's unique fauna aboard the ark.
Now, Australia has always been seperated from the rest of euroasia by very deep sea channels, so none of the marsupials could have walked to the place the ark was built or back to australia from mount Ararat. However Noah couldn't have dropped them off separatly because the highest point in Australia is below the lowest point which could qualify as on Mount Ararat - if he'd waited until australia was above the waters again before dropping the marsupials off then he couldn't have sailed back uphill to armenia.
Of course you'll have an explanation - because it's all made up gobblegook - just fascinated to know how you'll explain it away :-)
All of what you say is true, but don't 'dis bacteria. They are increadibly useful organisms that have a much wider range of biochemical tricks available to them than eukaryotes. From a bio-engineering perspective bacteria are probably more useful than eukaryotic cells.
:-)
Besides there's a long tradition in working 'up' the scale starting with bacteria. Generally it runs something like e.coli, yeast, fruitflys, mice, primates. Got to start somewhere
There was an interesting article in New Scientist about 6 months back that looked at the total contribution of the North Atlantic Drift to European climate. In fact when the authors tried to trace back the assertion that 'the gulf stream keeps europe warm' to verifiable evidence it turned out that there wasn't any.
Their subsequent calculations indicated that the NAD only contributed about 5% of the additional heat energy that Europe recieves. The majority - 60% - comes from atmospheric circulation effects most of which are contributed by the rockies. A further 35% was from general oceanic warming and other stuff that wouldn't be affected by the NAD shutting off.
Not ironic really. Best place to put wind turbines, and only place to put tidal generators, is out at sea. Aberdeen has more offshore expertese available than any other place in the UK - with the possible exception of Shetland - so is naturally the best place to get these things off the ground. Also don't forget the mass of spare heavy engineering capacity and skilled labour for building offshore plant just down the coast at the Dornoch firth.
While I've every hope that we do go exploring space in a meaningful and major way in the near future, this reason that keeps being given that "the sun will die" really bugs me. OK it will, but even the worst estimates give us a billion years before the earth is no longer habitable. This comfortably longer than the length of time from the cambrian to now and about 15 times longer than the length of time from us back to the dinosaurs.
Sure intelligent life will leave the earth sometime, but it could quite comfortably leave independently on several hundred different occassions over the timescale we have.
The wobblies (IWW - http://www.iww.org/) used to have a very nice article on doing this sort of thing on their site. It's an old tradition - workers not cooperating with management by 'playing dumb' has been going on ever since the capatilist worker-boss relationship arose a couple of hundred years ago
You're of course absolutly correct in doubting the assertion about crime was a fraction of what it is now. The seminal work on this is "The Victorian Underworld" by Donald Thomas, which is a thoroughly entertaining and readable book as well as being highly informative.
The fact is that the Victorian world was soaked in crime from top to bottom, particularly in the poorer neighbourhoods. Types of crimes may have differed, but the level of casual violence was much higher than it is now, and indeed things like child prostitution, which is abhored today as a near ultimate evil, were often regarded as little more than minor infringements of the law.
Anyone who thinks that the Victorian era were 'good times' socially is either a mis-informed or ignorant numbskull, or decidedly of suspect character themselves.
Ooh look. Another Brave American Anonymous Coward. Oh, actually a whole thread of them.
Damm. No mod points when I really need them.
This is *so* true. I'm just about finished writing a 50,000 line application for a client who thinks along exactly these lines, and what's worse also believes everything should work first time without any need for significant testing.
Of course, the catch is that you have to modify your car so that it has a 39,34,250 gallon fuel tank before you start.
There's oodles of police boxes around the city of Edinburgh, Scotland. Slightly different design to the London one and many now used for other things (one on Rose Street that's been converted to a coffee bar).
www.zetnet.co.uk
Been using them to host my main site since mid 90's
Wow, views will finally be in version 5.1.
Jeez. First time I looked at MySQL a couple of years ago for a project I started putting a basic database scheme together an went to construct a view, only for my Jaw to hit the desk when I found out they were not available. Views are such a basic component of RDBMS databases that it simply hadn't occurred to me (an Oracle, DB2, SQLServer and others veteran) that software could be release that called itself a relational database that didn't have them.
Anyway, just went and used Postgres instead. It's still beyond me why people even bother giving MySQL the time of day when the incomparably superior Postgres is available under GPL.
May be moded as funny, but that's *actually* a really perceptive comment.
On a similar tack as a self-employed programmer/analyst/developer I do lots of work for small to medium sized businesses and I don't see any sign of that drying up to India any time soon - the people I do business with just are not suitable clients for remote development.
It was to move all the scenes into chronological order - discussion arose because the dead Aragorn scene would have been the last in the film
That's interesting. On a parallel note I believe that there's some evidence that blood group distribution in europe after the black death was quite markedly different from that before.
No, I'm absolutly certain that we over here in the UK don't need YOUR tourist dollars.
Well, that isn't quite so far out as you might think.
o urBusiness_2238.asp
Here in the UK we have quite a lot of canals left over from the early industrial revolution, and as many of these predate railways they tend to be small in size, but with a much more extensive network than in countries where canal building started later. They're not used for freight now really, but in recent years there's been quite a boon in the leisure industry and many have been restored.
Obviouly though the state company that owns them - British Waterways - has ended up with lots of narrow strips of land connecting large centres of population. So there's now quite a lot of telecoms traffic carried by canal - or more precisely cables buried under canal towpaths: http://www.britishwaterways.co.uk/site/Developing
I've also heard of at least one company that was laying cables along sewers.
As Rutherford said:
"We haven't got the money, so we've got to think!
"