The difference between NASA and PARC is that NASA just followed the narrow goal of space exportation and PARC (being XEROX) tried to get the computer into the office. The use of computers for space exploration is does not bare many fruits for normal people. On the other hand almost everybody needs text processing and table calculations, including people that do not work in offices.
What you are referring to is not aspect ration, but screen orientation. But yes, you are correct, for many applications portrait is the favorable orientation.
For starters you remove all the accentual gun deaths. The total number of homicides also drops, because killing someone without a gun is significantly harder. The best option that fits in mode of operation of a gun is a knife. But to use a knife you need to get close and personal, that is psychologically and physically more difficult. The reason why martial arts have knife defense is, because it works (to a certain degree), but there is no gun defense (except at gunpoint) because it is useless. The other options such as poisoning would probably not have been done with a gun to start. GP's assertion hold true if you just start to think about it for less than 5 min. Nobody claims that reducing gun ownership will eliminate all homicides, but claiming that the total number will not go down nonsense.
And that is why I have a weapon bag that contains two sticks, a bokken (wooden sword) and a hanbo (90cm stick). The feature that makes it comply with German law, is that it is tied with a knot and it takes "a while" to open it. I can carry a broom handle openly, but because my special two pieces of wood are "martial arts" weapons, they need to be transported in a closed bag or container. (The reason I don't own a katana, is because I will only do so I am proficient enough to not mutilate myself or others by accident.)
Men take chances, many jobs require strength and endurance that women don't have.
Right and you are though an burly man?
I practice traditional martial arts and I can tell you, although this is true on statistical level, it definitely is not true on an individual level. In addition, women that are stronger and/or more aggressive than average men are not a freak occurrence, but something along the 30%-40%. I would very much like to see the notion dropped that men are strong/endurant and women are weak/feeble. This is more wrong that it is true. Come by and have your ass handed to you by a woman, if you have the guts.
You are right and wrong at the same time. On a statistical scale you will find differences between men and women; actually you will also find that between different races or nations. What creates these I can't really tell you, it may be genetic, it may be socialized, but that is basically besides the point. The important issue to realize is that this does not apply to individuals.
The problem start when you discriminate people because of not what they do. but who they are AND IN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT WE ARE SEEING THIS QUITE OFTEN! How come I know more female electrical engineers, than software engineers? Anecdotal evidence would suggest that shops that develop hardware are less chauvinistic places to work for than pure software shops.
If you see women picking up other natural sciences, except computer science, you have a straw-man argument. Physics and electrical engineering the quote is along 30%, but computer science is 10%, care to explain the difference?
What about people that want to work in a field because they like the subject, but not the culture attached to it? In addition to that, each time someone tries to fix the culture associated to it in their company or organisation, veterans scream bloody murder.
Same here, only reverse. My daughter is totally into sciences. Her favorite color is red and liked to play with toy cars and similar. In kindergarten her best friends where boys and she was the only accepted girl in the clique. But things changed, pink was now "in color" and barbie, because girls. Although she is still into a math crack and into many things technical, but kindergarten and grade school has had a profound shaping of her interests. The amount of streamlining society has on you is terrifying, if you are lucky it works in your favor, if you are not you are basically unhappy for the rest of your life...
Gender equality swings both ways. I don't want to be looked at stupidly when I leave work "early" to pick up my daughter form school. I worked a full day, since I came in early because of the same reason (school stating early). I should not be told to man up because I have a reasonable and fair deal with my wife when it comes to splinting up parenting work. I should not be looked at weird because I am the only guy at the teacher / parent conference. Just because you are not seeing the problems of the imbalance does not mean there are none.
Yes, but think about all the peripherals you can sell? How about girl power gaming gear? I think by marketing to "boys" they are missing a demographic entirely. It is not like the clothing and cosmetics companies conspired with the computer manufacturers and split up the market. The cosmetics industry on the other hand are starting to understand the issues, such as marketing anti aging lotions to men...
Except that you get a flat rate for "all software from Microsoft, except flight simulation" for development and testing purposes. This means that you can setup bunch of computers or virtual machines with different OS revisions and variants for testing purposes or try out if Visual Fox Pro is something you want to use. They throw in a number of support incidents, that are quite expensive and access to development versions. Visual Studio with MSDN is not really overpriced for what you get, but the question is if you actually need it.
If you really think you need VS and don't want to break the bank you can still use VS express. There is really little of value missing. The key point about VS is that is basically contains the de facto standard compiler for MS. It is not a bad IDE, but why some people get religious about it, I will never understand.
It is almost universal, in almost all cases where a project failed, it was because people did not communicate sufficiently and effectively. That is why all agile methodologies have some form of forced communication, such as for example the "sand up meeting". The ani-social nature of many developers is not a hallmark of programming, but it's failure. Solitary work, works only with small projects that actually can be done by one person. But the moment the project gets larger, communication is a must.
You know what? Basically ALLOT work is "anti-scocial" by that definition. Plumbing, Accounting, Carpentry, Welding, Writing are examples where the core of the job is solitary. The does not make the entire job "anit-social". But like a carpenter cannot build a house on her own, so can a programmer not build a large program on her own.
You get good at accounting by staring at a screen and figuring things out. For thousands, and thousands, and thousands of hours. There is no getting around that fact.
The more complicated it gets, the more "anti social" it is. What does that mean anyway? Do we all need to sit around and do accounting by committee?
The last mile is really a logistical problem. The current US system is quite problematic. In many cases whoever owns the last mile provides the service and you basically have no choice.
In contrast, I like the German system. Whoever owns the last mile, is forced by law to lease it at a reasonable price. The result is that you have real competition with dozen of telephone, internet, cable, gas and electricity providers. This is an almost perfect win-win system. The people owning the last mile infrastructure have an incentive to keep it running and upgrading it or else they will lose their income (penalties, incensed fees for better service, government subsidies) and the service providers can reach a large volume of people. This only mildly fails for rural areas, but here subsides are used to alleviate the problem. The other mild problem that established players (e.g. Deutsche Telekom) can rest on their laurels of existing infrastructure and provide crappy and overpriced service, but fixes itself in the long run.
Yes absolutely, in a country where you can own a battle ready katana, because tradition.
Then again, any place you lean traditional Japanese martial arts will concentrate on the mind and the body. You can not win an unarmed fight in blind rage...
I can totally relate to that sentiment. I am mentioned as "inventor" on two patents; things that are actually rehashes of existing things, just in a new context. The things where so novel to my colleagues that my boss though I should file an invention. And after a session with the company's patent lawyer and some waiting I got a nice letter form the patent office. I did it primarily for career advancement and I honestly think they will fail miserably if challenged.
Slashdot Mirror
True that, but in the 60s and 70s you would rather find a general purpose computer at an university or research facility than a business.
The difference between NASA and PARC is that NASA just followed the narrow goal of space exportation and PARC (being XEROX) tried to get the computer into the office. The use of computers for space exploration is does not bare many fruits for normal people. On the other hand almost everybody needs text processing and table calculations, including people that do not work in offices.
What you are referring to is not aspect ration, but screen orientation. But yes, you are correct, for many applications portrait is the favorable orientation.
You could call this "adding context"?
For starters you remove all the accentual gun deaths. The total number of homicides also drops, because killing someone without a gun is significantly harder. The best option that fits in mode of operation of a gun is a knife. But to use a knife you need to get close and personal, that is psychologically and physically more difficult. The reason why martial arts have knife defense is, because it works (to a certain degree), but there is no gun defense (except at gunpoint) because it is useless. The other options such as poisoning would probably not have been done with a gun to start. GP's assertion hold true if you just start to think about it for less than 5 min. Nobody claims that reducing gun ownership will eliminate all homicides, but claiming that the total number will not go down nonsense.
And that is why I have a weapon bag that contains two sticks, a bokken (wooden sword) and a hanbo (90cm stick). The feature that makes it comply with German law, is that it is tied with a knot and it takes "a while" to open it. I can carry a broom handle openly, but because my special two pieces of wood are "martial arts" weapons, they need to be transported in a closed bag or container. (The reason I don't own a katana, is because I will only do so I am proficient enough to not mutilate myself or others by accident.)
Men take chances, many jobs require strength and endurance that women don't have.
Right and you are though an burly man?
I practice traditional martial arts and I can tell you, although this is true on statistical level, it definitely is not true on an individual level. In addition, women that are stronger and/or more aggressive than average men are not a freak occurrence, but something along the 30%-40%. I would very much like to see the notion dropped that men are strong/endurant and women are weak/feeble. This is more wrong that it is true. Come by and have your ass handed to you by a woman, if you have the guts.
You are right and wrong at the same time. On a statistical scale you will find differences between men and women; actually you will also find that between different races or nations. What creates these I can't really tell you, it may be genetic, it may be socialized, but that is basically besides the point. The important issue to realize is that this does not apply to individuals.
The problem start when you discriminate people because of not what they do. but who they are AND IN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT WE ARE SEEING THIS QUITE OFTEN! How come I know more female electrical engineers, than software engineers? Anecdotal evidence would suggest that shops that develop hardware are less chauvinistic places to work for than pure software shops.
If you see women picking up other natural sciences, except computer science, you have a straw-man argument. Physics and electrical engineering the quote is along 30%, but computer science is 10%, care to explain the difference?
What about people that want to work in a field because they like the subject, but not the culture attached to it? In addition to that, each time someone tries to fix the culture associated to it in their company or organisation, veterans scream bloody murder.
Same here, only reverse. My daughter is totally into sciences. Her favorite color is red and liked to play with toy cars and similar. In kindergarten her best friends where boys and she was the only accepted girl in the clique. But things changed, pink was now "in color" and barbie, because girls. Although she is still into a math crack and into many things technical, but kindergarten and grade school has had a profound shaping of her interests. The amount of streamlining society has on you is terrifying, if you are lucky it works in your favor, if you are not you are basically unhappy for the rest of your life...
Gender equality swings both ways. I don't want to be looked at stupidly when I leave work "early" to pick up my daughter form school. I worked a full day, since I came in early because of the same reason (school stating early). I should not be told to man up because I have a reasonable and fair deal with my wife when it comes to splinting up parenting work. I should not be looked at weird because I am the only guy at the teacher / parent conference. Just because you are not seeing the problems of the imbalance does not mean there are none.
Yes, but think about all the peripherals you can sell? How about girl power gaming gear? I think by marketing to "boys" they are missing a demographic entirely. It is not like the clothing and cosmetics companies conspired with the computer manufacturers and split up the market. The cosmetics industry on the other hand are starting to understand the issues, such as marketing anti aging lotions to men...
And white... which was quite far from the truth, the majority of cow boys where black, latin or native american.
Except that you get a flat rate for "all software from Microsoft, except flight simulation" for development and testing purposes. This means that you can setup bunch of computers or virtual machines with different OS revisions and variants for testing purposes or try out if Visual Fox Pro is something you want to use. They throw in a number of support incidents, that are quite expensive and access to development versions. Visual Studio with MSDN is not really overpriced for what you get, but the question is if you actually need it.
If you really think you need VS and don't want to break the bank you can still use VS express. There is really little of value missing. The key point about VS is that is basically contains the de facto standard compiler for MS. It is not a bad IDE, but why some people get religious about it, I will never understand.
It is almost universal, in almost all cases where a project failed, it was because people did not communicate sufficiently and effectively. That is why all agile methodologies have some form of forced communication, such as for example the "sand up meeting". The ani-social nature of many developers is not a hallmark of programming, but it's failure. Solitary work, works only with small projects that actually can be done by one person. But the moment the project gets larger, communication is a must.
You know what? Basically ALLOT work is "anti-scocial" by that definition. Plumbing, Accounting, Carpentry, Welding, Writing are examples where the core of the job is solitary. The does not make the entire job "anit-social". But like a carpenter cannot build a house on her own, so can a programmer not build a large program on her own.
Accounting IS anti social!
You get good at accounting by staring at a screen and figuring things out. For thousands, and thousands, and thousands of hours. There is no getting around that fact.
The more complicated it gets, the more "anti social" it is. What does that mean anyway? Do we all need to sit around and do accounting by committee?
Flying toasters... THAT was totally not the 80s anymore... If memory serves me well, flying toasters was from the early 90s...
The last mile is really a logistical problem. The current US system is quite problematic. In many cases whoever owns the last mile provides the service and you basically have no choice.
In contrast, I like the German system. Whoever owns the last mile, is forced by law to lease it at a reasonable price. The result is that you have real competition with dozen of telephone, internet, cable, gas and electricity providers. This is an almost perfect win-win system. The people owning the last mile infrastructure have an incentive to keep it running and upgrading it or else they will lose their income (penalties, incensed fees for better service, government subsidies) and the service providers can reach a large volume of people. This only mildly fails for rural areas, but here subsides are used to alleviate the problem. The other mild problem that established players (e.g. Deutsche Telekom) can rest on their laurels of existing infrastructure and provide crappy and overpriced service, but fixes itself in the long run.
#14 ...
+1 Funny
Yes absolutely, in a country where you can own a battle ready katana, because tradition.
Then again, any place you lean traditional Japanese martial arts will concentrate on the mind and the body. You can not win an unarmed fight in blind rage...
Yes yes, but what about the latency?
Unfortunately, even if they have your data, they won't hand it out to you, since it is classified.
I can totally relate to that sentiment. I am mentioned as "inventor" on two patents; things that are actually rehashes of existing things, just in a new context. The things where so novel to my colleagues that my boss though I should file an invention. And after a session with the company's patent lawyer and some waiting I got a nice letter form the patent office. I did it primarily for career advancement and I honestly think they will fail miserably if challenged.