And you seem very overly pessimistic about the New Space Race. Bezos and Musk seem quite determined to reduce launch costs, especially for manned missions, so much that it's a change in kind. They have a good track record so far. IIRC, SpaceX had more successful launches last year (21) than all the other US launchers and Russia combined. And Bezos has personal wealth that exceed the budget of the Apollo program, if he really wants to make this happen.
We saw almost no progress for 20-30 years in rocketry because of the Shuttle, but it's a new century now. The primary factor in launch cost is rocket re-usability, and both SpaceX and Blue Origin has already demonstrated game-changing numbers. SpaceX's "Starship", if it delivers, will be another 10x reduction in launch costs, to the point where all sorts of things start making financial sense to do in space.
I'm sure the Pentagon can find an underused broom closet to hang the Space Force sign on.
You do understand the the Air Force has a large group of people who launch and use spy satellites, right? (And other secret payloads we could speculate about). This isn't some futuristic Space Marines thing - this is an existing set of specialties with the Air Force, that has little in common with the other stuff the Air Force does.
The Russian Space Force also operates their early warning radar stations and some similar Cold War stuff. That overlaps enough with core Air Force specialties that I'm not sure it makes sense to split that off, but all the satellite stuff is clear.
As launch costs come down (and they've plummeted in the past decade), I rather expect the military will be doing a lot more with satellites.
Can we please stop having these content-free "Orange Man Bad" posts on Slashdot? Address the idea on it's merit. This isn't even an argument laced with ad hominum attacks, it's just an anti-Trump rant. It's about as useful as a GNAA post.
I agree it's a direction to take, but the name.. Space Force. I feel like I'm starting to live in a Mel Brooks film.
Why? Air Force; Space Force. It's what the Russians called their agency (well, in Russian).
When military airplanes became a mature part of warfare, it was time to split off the Army Air Core and make a new uniformed service. These days, the Air Force has a mature group within it that launches and uses spy satellites (and other secret missions). It's enough of a disjoint specialty that a new uniformed service makes sense.
This is kind of a different problem than most etch anyway. With most new tech, the goal is to rush to market to dominate mindshare before your compeitiors copy what you did. Then, even if they do it better, everyone thinks of them as knock-offs and imitations.
Self-driving cars are a different world. The pace of adapotion is a regulatory problem, not a market problem. No one is going to dominate the market by being slightly earlier than the competition, because everyone is going to be waiting on regulatory change. Bring first just means you get to be the first to advocate for the legal changes needed to allow the product, and the first to interact with the auditors for whatever the new regs end up being.
take this string, now reverse it, now convert it to pig latin, now reverse that.. How many internal threads are used to perform writes in a ConcurrentHashMap, now bark like a seal..
It's all about the specific questions. Asking someone to design a ConcurrentHashMap from scratch is a great question, at least for someone senior. Lots of interesting design choices, and still relevant to some parts of the industry.
It used to be popular to ask someone to write a function to find a string inside another string. This topic is so deep that I've read an actual book of nothing but different algorithms. That one has faded from relevancy these days, and doesn't seem appropriate any more.
It seems difficult because people are unfamiliar with it. When everyone is graduating from a Java school, bitwise operations are high magic.
I find bit bashing to be the most fun thing to do in code, but I'm at a loss for a real world problem to apply it to. Man, if I ever found a reason to count the "1" bits in a word, I could do that so fast...
The CS grads were having trouble with the basic idiom of read a byte, while not EOF, do something with the byte.
But you are aware that time has changed? I mean... obviously they have trouble to some bullshit like that when they never got taught how to do it.
If you can't solve a problem that's new to you, what good are you? Very simple problems like that are good especially because they'd be new to someone fresh out of school (where recursive descent problems are useless for new grads). Now, obviously you don't want to play "library trivial pursuit" and want to explain any bytewise I/O library calls they'd need, but given the primitives it's a fine question.
I like to ask new grads to design an arbitrary precision integer class that supports addition. In the old days everyone had done that, but it's a new problem for recent grads (and has lots of corner cases and opportunities to simplify, like real code). Of course, we may reach a time when grads don't know the pen-and-paper algorithm for adding numbers, and I'll have to stop using it. Hopefully I'll be retired first.
Whiteboards are fine. You just don't measure people on things that every IDE provides these days, you measure them on problem solving and code fluency (not library trivial pursuits, but if the candidate chooses the language he should know the common tools very well).
Any modern professional interview will start with the presentation of the problem, followed by "talk me through your design ideas before you start writing code". After all, the process of reasoning through the design is half the signal your trying to get.
Any decent question will be somewhat interactive - you want to get a sense of what it would be like to work with the person, not just watch them write code.
Nazi storm troopers wore black. The Imperial storm troopers wore white. I always though that was one of the best design choices in SW - otherwise the symbology was a bit too "on the nose" and shallow.
The thing is, there are more "real" games like that than anyone could play. Proper single-player games. They just don't come out of big studios.. And that's fine; bug studios are where creativity goes to die.
I don't look forward to games anymore either - I discover them after the fact to my delight.
It's a problem with corporate governance. Growth is usually favored over sustained dividends. The problem was created by the favorable tax treatment of capital gains over dividends - investors of course want their profits in a lower-tax way. But it has created a disease that has killed business after business, as corporate leadership seems unable to say "we've won: we've saturated the market and this business can't double again because we already have more than half the possible customers; here's a fat dividend which we can sustain indefinitely".
Transitioning from growth to dividends is the freaking point, it's how profits are supposed to flow to shareholders. But the culture of corporate governance is broken now, and cultural fixes are hard.
It's much better than "ignores it's community". This is especially true for bugs, rather than design choices. It's really good to see developers taking bugs seriously, and engaging with players on how to send the info they need to fix the bug.
EA and Blizzard are publishing mostly shitty games.
This. They're both trying to blame Fortnite for their problems, but they simply don't make great games any more. Perhaps giant corporate conglomerates never can.
AAA games focus on presentation, not gameplay, as that's the easiest way to get first-week sales. But when gameplay is bad game after game, not to mention code quality and server quality, people start to notice. I sure as heck won't buy e.g. the next Diablo without seeing reviews (by post-launch reviewers - everyone who gets pre-launch copies is captive these days).
Meanwhile Indy games with crappy graphics keep me entertained for endless hours. Much as I'd like to see those games look better, I don't want a better-looking game that's not fun to play!
Government provides services. Those services have to be funded. Yes, theoretically we could probably run a government on just a Value Added Tax, if we weren't trying to be the policeman for the entire world.
Meh, our defense budget is only $676 B out of a total budget of $4 T. It's not the cold war any more.
Actual government services, such as roads and courts, are even less, down around 10% IIRC. Those probably could be funded with some other form of tax, but the form of the tax isn't some much the point. Mostly our government is a pension system these days, and for some reason free Americans are hostile to the idea of alternatives to systems like Social Security and Medicare, which give the government the power to eliminate undesirables by simply not mailing them a check.
If they and their competition pay the same tax rate, they will all raise prices to match. But that's clearly not the case here. It's costs that affect all sellers that get passed on to buyers, including corporate tax rates, were those at all evenly applied.
Yeah, I was surprised how much the problem with the Hobbit were direct studio interference. But then, it's only one sign of a great many that Hollywood has lost touch with viewers.
Taxes are expense items. Companies generally keep income >= expense or eventually they go under. Lots of that going around for what it's worth.
That's true within reason. But still, something is clearly off with our tax code if under existing law Amazon owes nothing.
I don't blame Amazon at all for doing everything legal to pay no taxes - they have a duty to do so. The fault lies with the congresscritters who continue to enable the loopholes.
I'm not sure corporate income tax even makes sense in the first place, for the reasons you explain, but while we have one it certainly shouldn't penalize small companies at the expense of the biggest multinationals.
Why else would drumpf want a space force? Certainly not for NASA
People do realize that the Space Force is just that part of the Air Force that launches and operates military satellites and the like, right? Russia has a similar arrangement.
I don't get why people think that was odd. The Army Air Corp became the Air Force after WWII when it became clear it was it's own disjoint specialty. This is much the same.
They suck at understanding nerd culture to an extreme degree.
Anime is not made for nerds in the first place. It's just Japanese TV, made for a broad audience. Most is aimed at either teen girls or teen boys (thus the appeal to basement-dwelling manchildren).
Like TV anywhere, there are some real gems among the dross. Hollywood fails at adapting almost everything with a fan base, never bothering to understand what people liked in the first place. The exceptions are very rare indeed (and made quite a lot of money): the Marvel movies, especially the early ones; the LOTR movies, though they went downhill as Jackson added more of his own BS to each in turn. I'm struggling to think of a third example from the past 50 years - Fight Club maybe.
The Internet, as we know it today, will be a relic in 20 years.
That will obviously be true regardless. However, I think the early internet will resurface and some censorship-free platform, at least in countries that don't just ban all encrypted packets not to a whitelisted endpoint. Perhaps something like a v2 of Freenet, with its technical problems addressed. Something with no servers to take down. Hiding from large governments is hard - impossible if they just effectively ban encryption - but we could at least be free from corporate oversight, on a platform optimized for privacy over business.
For now people are happy with VPNs, but with the rise of corporate censorship and the ever-increasing political power of content distribution corporations, I don't think that's stable.
The whole HQ2 thing was a scam to begin with. Good to see NY rejecting the con. Opening 2 HQs next to Bezo's other 2 houses was so blatant, I'm amazed he thought it would fly.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not what the Space Force is.
And you seem very overly pessimistic about the New Space Race. Bezos and Musk seem quite determined to reduce launch costs, especially for manned missions, so much that it's a change in kind. They have a good track record so far. IIRC, SpaceX had more successful launches last year (21) than all the other US launchers and Russia combined. And Bezos has personal wealth that exceed the budget of the Apollo program, if he really wants to make this happen.
We saw almost no progress for 20-30 years in rocketry because of the Shuttle, but it's a new century now. The primary factor in launch cost is rocket re-usability, and both SpaceX and Blue Origin has already demonstrated game-changing numbers. SpaceX's "Starship", if it delivers, will be another 10x reduction in launch costs, to the point where all sorts of things start making financial sense to do in space.
I'm sure the Pentagon can find an underused broom closet to hang the Space Force sign on.
You do understand the the Air Force has a large group of people who launch and use spy satellites, right? (And other secret payloads we could speculate about). This isn't some futuristic Space Marines thing - this is an existing set of specialties with the Air Force, that has little in common with the other stuff the Air Force does.
The Russian Space Force also operates their early warning radar stations and some similar Cold War stuff. That overlaps enough with core Air Force specialties that I'm not sure it makes sense to split that off, but all the satellite stuff is clear.
As launch costs come down (and they've plummeted in the past decade), I rather expect the military will be doing a lot more with satellites.
Can we please stop having these content-free "Orange Man Bad" posts on Slashdot? Address the idea on it's merit. This isn't even an argument laced with ad hominum attacks, it's just an anti-Trump rant. It's about as useful as a GNAA post.
I agree it's a direction to take, but the name.. Space Force. I feel like I'm starting to live in a Mel Brooks film.
Why? Air Force; Space Force. It's what the Russians called their agency (well, in Russian).
When military airplanes became a mature part of warfare, it was time to split off the Army Air Core and make a new uniformed service. These days, the Air Force has a mature group within it that launches and uses spy satellites (and other secret missions). It's enough of a disjoint specialty that a new uniformed service makes sense.
This is kind of a different problem than most etch anyway. With most new tech, the goal is to rush to market to dominate mindshare before your compeitiors copy what you did. Then, even if they do it better, everyone thinks of them as knock-offs and imitations.
Self-driving cars are a different world. The pace of adapotion is a regulatory problem, not a market problem. No one is going to dominate the market by being slightly earlier than the competition, because everyone is going to be waiting on regulatory change. Bring first just means you get to be the first to advocate for the legal changes needed to allow the product, and the first to interact with the auditors for whatever the new regs end up being.
take this string, now reverse it, now convert it to pig latin, now reverse that.. How many internal threads are used to perform writes in a ConcurrentHashMap, now bark like a seal..
It's all about the specific questions. Asking someone to design a ConcurrentHashMap from scratch is a great question, at least for someone senior. Lots of interesting design choices, and still relevant to some parts of the industry.
It used to be popular to ask someone to write a function to find a string inside another string. This topic is so deep that I've read an actual book of nothing but different algorithms. That one has faded from relevancy these days, and doesn't seem appropriate any more.
It seems difficult because people are unfamiliar with it. When everyone is graduating from a Java school, bitwise operations are high magic.
I find bit bashing to be the most fun thing to do in code, but I'm at a loss for a real world problem to apply it to. Man, if I ever found a reason to count the "1" bits in a word, I could do that so fast ...
Easy fix: remove the headphone jack. Users will stop complaining about audio quality; problem solved!
The CS grads were having trouble with the basic idiom of read a byte, while not EOF, do something with the byte.
But you are aware that time has changed? ... obviously they have trouble to some bullshit like that when they never got taught how to do it.
I mean
If you can't solve a problem that's new to you, what good are you? Very simple problems like that are good especially because they'd be new to someone fresh out of school (where recursive descent problems are useless for new grads). Now, obviously you don't want to play "library trivial pursuit" and want to explain any bytewise I/O library calls they'd need, but given the primitives it's a fine question.
I like to ask new grads to design an arbitrary precision integer class that supports addition. In the old days everyone had done that, but it's a new problem for recent grads (and has lots of corner cases and opportunities to simplify, like real code). Of course, we may reach a time when grads don't know the pen-and-paper algorithm for adding numbers, and I'll have to stop using it. Hopefully I'll be retired first.
Whiteboards are fine. You just don't measure people on things that every IDE provides these days, you measure them on problem solving and code fluency (not library trivial pursuits, but if the candidate chooses the language he should know the common tools very well).
Any modern professional interview will start with the presentation of the problem, followed by "talk me through your design ideas before you start writing code". After all, the process of reasoning through the design is half the signal your trying to get.
Any decent question will be somewhat interactive - you want to get a sense of what it would be like to work with the person, not just watch them write code.
Nazi storm troopers wore black. The Imperial storm troopers wore white. I always though that was one of the best design choices in SW - otherwise the symbology was a bit too "on the nose" and shallow.
Star Wars at least mixed it up a bit: the literal black hats and literal white hats were both bad guys.
The thing is, there are more "real" games like that than anyone could play. Proper single-player games. They just don't come out of big studios.. And that's fine; bug studios are where creativity goes to die.
I don't look forward to games anymore either - I discover them after the fact to my delight.
It's a problem with corporate governance. Growth is usually favored over sustained dividends. The problem was created by the favorable tax treatment of capital gains over dividends - investors of course want their profits in a lower-tax way. But it has created a disease that has killed business after business, as corporate leadership seems unable to say "we've won: we've saturated the market and this business can't double again because we already have more than half the possible customers; here's a fat dividend which we can sustain indefinitely".
Transitioning from growth to dividends is the freaking point, it's how profits are supposed to flow to shareholders. But the culture of corporate governance is broken now, and cultural fixes are hard.
It's much better than "ignores it's community". This is especially true for bugs, rather than design choices. It's really good to see developers taking bugs seriously, and engaging with players on how to send the info they need to fix the bug.
Sounds like you missed Kerbal Space Program - don't overlook it if you like the games you listed.
EA and Blizzard are publishing mostly shitty games.
This. They're both trying to blame Fortnite for their problems, but they simply don't make great games any more. Perhaps giant corporate conglomerates never can.
AAA games focus on presentation, not gameplay, as that's the easiest way to get first-week sales. But when gameplay is bad game after game, not to mention code quality and server quality, people start to notice. I sure as heck won't buy e.g. the next Diablo without seeing reviews (by post-launch reviewers - everyone who gets pre-launch copies is captive these days).
Meanwhile Indy games with crappy graphics keep me entertained for endless hours. Much as I'd like to see those games look better, I don't want a better-looking game that's not fun to play!
Government provides services. Those services have to be funded. Yes, theoretically we could probably run a government on just a Value Added Tax, if we weren't trying to be the policeman for the entire world.
Meh, our defense budget is only $676 B out of a total budget of $4 T. It's not the cold war any more.
Actual government services, such as roads and courts, are even less, down around 10% IIRC. Those probably could be funded with some other form of tax, but the form of the tax isn't some much the point. Mostly our government is a pension system these days, and for some reason free Americans are hostile to the idea of alternatives to systems like Social Security and Medicare, which give the government the power to eliminate undesirables by simply not mailing them a check.
If they and their competition pay the same tax rate, they will all raise prices to match. But that's clearly not the case here. It's costs that affect all sellers that get passed on to buyers, including corporate tax rates, were those at all evenly applied.
Yeah, I was surprised how much the problem with the Hobbit were direct studio interference. But then, it's only one sign of a great many that Hollywood has lost touch with viewers.
Taxes are expense items. Companies generally keep income >= expense or eventually they go under. Lots of that going around for what it's worth.
That's true within reason. But still, something is clearly off with our tax code if under existing law Amazon owes nothing.
I don't blame Amazon at all for doing everything legal to pay no taxes - they have a duty to do so. The fault lies with the congresscritters who continue to enable the loopholes.
I'm not sure corporate income tax even makes sense in the first place, for the reasons you explain, but while we have one it certainly shouldn't penalize small companies at the expense of the biggest multinationals.
Why else would drumpf want a space force? Certainly not for NASA
People do realize that the Space Force is just that part of the Air Force that launches and operates military satellites and the like, right? Russia has a similar arrangement.
I don't get why people think that was odd. The Army Air Corp became the Air Force after WWII when it became clear it was it's own disjoint specialty. This is much the same.
They suck at understanding nerd culture to an extreme degree.
Anime is not made for nerds in the first place. It's just Japanese TV, made for a broad audience. Most is aimed at either teen girls or teen boys (thus the appeal to basement-dwelling manchildren).
Like TV anywhere, there are some real gems among the dross. Hollywood fails at adapting almost everything with a fan base, never bothering to understand what people liked in the first place. The exceptions are very rare indeed (and made quite a lot of money): the Marvel movies, especially the early ones; the LOTR movies, though they went downhill as Jackson added more of his own BS to each in turn. I'm struggling to think of a third example from the past 50 years - Fight Club maybe.
The Internet, as we know it today, will be a relic in 20 years.
That will obviously be true regardless. However, I think the early internet will resurface and some censorship-free platform, at least in countries that don't just ban all encrypted packets not to a whitelisted endpoint. Perhaps something like a v2 of Freenet, with its technical problems addressed. Something with no servers to take down. Hiding from large governments is hard - impossible if they just effectively ban encryption - but we could at least be free from corporate oversight, on a platform optimized for privacy over business.
For now people are happy with VPNs, but with the rise of corporate censorship and the ever-increasing political power of content distribution corporations, I don't think that's stable.
The whole HQ2 thing was a scam to begin with. Good to see NY rejecting the con. Opening 2 HQs next to Bezo's other 2 houses was so blatant, I'm amazed he thought it would fly.