Just how keen do you think these guys are going to be to fund something that threatens the way people like them become millionaires?
On the other hand, these people are "old money". Their families (and their family's lawyers and portfolio managers) didn't get that way thinking short term.
I would have been happy to do that, since Salon did have some good content. But, I didn't, because I don't think they'll be around for another year. They've already laid off a bunch of people. By actually finding a way to make money they may have actually shortened their life, unless they're getting much more CPM for those huge ads they have now.
On the other hand, do we really want corporations in charge of space research?
You cite a bunch of example with no analogies to any other form of transport. We have privately owned and operated airlines, shipping companies, road haulage companies, railroads, etc. Why would space be any different? The initial capex is high, but then that was the case for railroads and airlines too.
Saying that giving more kids Meccano would solve this is totally unfounded. Whilst I respect Harry Kroto (he discovered Buckminster Fullerenes), and think that kids should be exposed to more engineering toys, I think that he's way off the mark with his comment.
I'll tell you why the quality of British engineering has declined: because Engineers are treated terribly in the UK. For a start, "Engineer" isn't a protected title, as it is in the US and even in Europe, where it has similar standing to the title of a medical doctor. In the UK, the electrician who installs your cable TV probably calls himself an "Electrical Engineer". If someone asks you what you do for a living and you say "Mechanical Engineer", in the UK they will think you are a car mechanic. (These are of course necessary and worthy jobs, but you don't need a 4-year degree and 4 years of professional experience to do them, as you do to become an Engineer). Also, an Engineer in the UK is unlikely to be well paid, compared to a similarly qualified lawyer or finance professional.
I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering from UCL, one of the top 3 universities in the UK, and like many of my graduating class, I didn't even apply to engineering firms. We went straight into consulting, banking, software and similar jobs - where our talents would be respected and rewarded.
I believe that these factors are more important than Lego -vs- Meccano. Remember, we all started off *wanting* to be Engineers - it was only when we realised what it was really like that we changed our minds.
To bad, I could have told them that there isn't any money in NT unless your microsoft.
Umm, SGI jumped on the Linux bandwagon too, for example their work on a journalling file system. That hasn't paid off for them either. It remains to be seen if IBM will make any money there either.
I know this sounds stupid, untechincal and irrational in chosing a langauge but politics in the bussiness world is very important
Why is it stupid? The majority of the total-cost-of-ownership of any system is in maintenance and support. It's nothing to do with "politics". Do you whine and complain about having to comment your code too? To write documentation? To submit to code reviews? Those nasty political managers, making you do your job like a professional!
Using a new language for its own sake, with no thought to its suitability is foolish. Its rare to find a specification which doesn't stipulate that a system should be developed with ease of maintenance and extension as key success criteria.
I for one hate office politics but they are a fact of life and explains why MS is so popular.
Like most slashbots, you can't let a post go by without a dig at MS, can you? Not that it's even slightly relevant here, of course.
Solar cell sales have grown at a CAGR over 15% for the last 15 years. PV production has been running at capacity for over 10 years, despite construction of new PV manufacturing facilities. PV sales are on allocation and have multi-year backlogs.
Yes, but a real solar power station won't be based on PV cells. It'll be a concave field, many miles across, filled with mirrors mounted such that they can turn and follow the sun. You can power this bit just by spare heat from sunlight. The mirrors are curved to focus the sunlight on a huge black obelisk in the middle of the field. This obelisk is filled with a network of pipes.
The sun comes out, the mirrors reflect the sunlight to focus on the obelisk and it gets real hot, real quick. Cold water gets pumped in, gets superheated into steam, then drives turbines which generate electricity. The steam then gets routed to run CHP in a hearby town, then cooled and either pumped back in, or vented harmlessly into a river.
That's how to use solar power on an industrial scale, but I don't know if there's anything like this in production yet.
First of all, the Kioto Treaty demands MORE from European countries than it does from USA! And we are willing to comply! You are not, even when it would be easier for you to follow the guidelines set by the treaty.
Yes, the EU's propaganda machine would like you to believe that. Now go back and ask your friendly neighbourhood commissioner how many EU countries even have plans in place to ratify Kyoto. I'll save you the trouble: 0.
The GE-Honeywell merger block merely shows that the EU hasn't outgrown protectionism. You're going to get your clocks cleaned by the open economies of the world. I can only hope that the UK isn't stupid enough to join.
It must be rather obvious to everyone that Japan has invented, created and developed many things. Just think of all the Multinational companies from Japan.
No, what Japanese corporations excel at is execution and operations. Historically, they haven't been great innovators. Take the example of motorcycles, televisions (and consumer electronics in general) and even heavy industry. The Japanese are great at manufacturing, they tend to buy innovation, either directly or by sending students overseas to study (I don't have the figures to hand, but Japan sends dozens of college students to the US for every one the US sends to Japan).
Couple this with a regulatory environment that is paranoid about defending Japanese home markets, and strict competition laws that amount to a government sponsored oligarchy, and you have a model for Japanese industrial success.
Japanese markets are hideously inefficient compared to ours (US/UK), for example the retail sector is dominated by a few huge manufacturers, but many thousands of tiny, single-premesis retailers. Very difficult to get economies of scale in retail like that, and even more difficult to get good marketing data (no, not banner ads, I mean data that informs product development). Their wholesale financial services sector is positively primitive compared to Wall Street, the Square Mile or Singapore.
It's these factors that mean that what the Japanese do well - bulk manufacturing of sophisticated products with gradual refinement - they do very well indeed, but they are very poorly positioned to compete in a world where the value is locked into innovative intellectual property which changes rapidly and where execution is commoditized. Their system can cope with long term capital investment in tangible assets such as factories, but it cannot cope with what we could call high-risk venture capital.
It will be fascinating to watch their attempts at reform, but I think that the only thing that will end the 10-year recession is full-scale deregulation, and opening up to inward investment.
Yes, imagine such a world. "Slashdot" would be called "C-colon-backslash-right-angle-bracket" for a start, and it would be full of kids raving about this marvellous thing called an "Explorer" and how it was way better than primitive command line interfaces, and how refreshing it was to reboot your system from time to time, and some crazy dude named ESR would write these amazing rants about how shipping pre-compiled binaries was like building a cathedral...;0)
Training (in my view) is geared to the lazy and incompetent. They wish to be spoon fed the info
Often times, I'll read a book (or a PDF, or a web site or whatever) but there are times you just can't do without training.
A hungry mind should be able to feed itself from the documentation and the system at hand rather then being read PPT slides
If "you don't know what you don't know", you might just end up wasting your time re-inventing the wheel, especially if a product has a huge documentation set and you just need to do a few specific things. Or if the product is very new and the documentation is patchy. Anyway, sitting down with a book is no substitute for hearing lessons learned in practice, or hearing the developers explain their design decisions. If you say that it is, I can only assume you've only worked with simple systems.
So long as you've some familiarity with the subject before the classes, and can ask specific, relevant and intelligent questions, training is very valuable indeed.
advancing yourself proffesionally (don't forget it is YOUR carrer)
To paraphrase Neal Stephenson, "Microsoft are 10 times smarter and about 100 times more aggressive than any government." (This is somewhere in Cryptonomicon).
And to paraphrase Warren Buffett, "In the short term the markets are gambling machines, in the long term they are weighing machines".
And the Good Book says, "he who has ears let him hear."
American Airlines has announced it will cease operation of it's fleet, and, instead, spend it's time and money working on an online set of websites
Interesting you should mention this, even as a joke. At one point, AA really were making more profit off SABRE than they were off flying planes around.
Smart Tags are a way for an outside agency to modify my pages on the fly, in ways I do not approve of
It could equally well be said that if you use Netscape on Linux to view a page that the designer laid out in Internet Explorer on a Mac, you're not viewing the page as the author intended.
Or, for example, if you use one of the many utilities that strips out banner ads.
Get over it! You know why HTML has header tags to describe headings, why we have title, and body, and ordered lists and all that other stuff? It's because you say what it is, and it's up to the client to decide how it looks. This is how it was back in 1994! And And Netscape had their "What's Related" (I don't remember the exact name) facility that could take you to other pages that might be relevant to what you're doing.
If there's a way to switch your "smart tags" provider to someone other than MSFT, then there's whole new business opportunity right there.
Honestly, Microsoft are damned if they do, damned if they don't. Ask yourself, honestly, if this were a funky new feature in KDE, would you be as bitter?
You must clearly have had no contact whatsoever with Oracle, or you must be working for them.
Oracle are a big company, and vary hugely in the support they give you. I've had situations where I've been given the runaround, like you. Getting passed from extension to extension, explaining my problem over and over again, "oh, umm, we don't do that stuff here, call this number..." and finding out that Bob's on holiday and his secretary has no idea who else I could speak to...
I've also had situations where Oracle have said our engineers aren't sleeping until this gets fixed, and a few hours later there's a motorcycle courier at my door with a gold disc containing a brand new build of Oracle with the bug fixed. I've had Oracle techs ssh into my servers, I've had the come to the data centre with mysterious CDs containing Oracle software that they don't let outsiders have, and that they erase from your machine once they're done.
Helps to have (or at least have access to) a high-end support contract, tho'. If you're some kid downloaded 9i onto his Red Hat box, forget it.
Re:If they're so sophisticated...
on
MilSpec Biotech
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· Score: 2
Wouldn't it be easier to just pour a much smaller fraction of their budget into discovering ways to, oh,-I-don't-know, maybe find ways to reduce the need for armed conflict in the first place??!?
That's exactly what they are doing. Technology like this will enable problems to be dealt with quickly and efficiency, with minimal loss of life and collateral damage. And it will act as a deterrent. If you want peace, you must prepare for war.
So the BBC seems to be thinking 'cluster'='large server' perhaps. Of course we know that isn't quite right, but nontechnical people might not understand the difference.
There are few people in the world less technical than the BBC web team:0)
(That was a joke. The BBC serve up a non-trivial volume of traffic every day themselves).
I understand it means a lot to have a comparable strength with an enterprise database...but talk about comparing old and obsoleted products....
Well, the brief was, find out what commercial products this could be used in place of. Oracle 7 is still a very capable product, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if many of the apps now being coded against Oracle 8.1.6 could be made to run on it with trivial changes (again, so long as you aren't using the exotic data types, yadda yadda).
Is this the most advanced open-source database available now?
I believe so, yes. I conducted an exhaustive study of this product as a consultant, and found it was equivalent to Oracle 7.3.2. If you're working with straight, transactional SQL in a relational schema (i.e. no OR features, none of the Oracle extensions for Time Series, Spatial Data et al) it's a fine choice, and decades ahead of MySQL.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, these people are "old money". Their families (and their family's lawyers and portfolio managers) didn't get that way thinking short term.
Not true. Lars Ulrich of Metallica referred to his music as "art" and resented it being traded as a "commodity".
James Hetfield commented, "dam right we sold out- every seat in the stadium, baby!". (Something like that, anyway).
I would have been happy to do that, since Salon did have some good content. But, I didn't, because I don't think they'll be around for another year. They've already laid off a bunch of people. By actually finding a way to make money they may have actually shortened their life, unless they're getting much more CPM for those huge ads they have now.
Heh, maybe the Democrats could bail 'em out... ;0)
You cite a bunch of example with no analogies to any other form of transport. We have privately owned and operated airlines, shipping companies, road haulage companies, railroads, etc. Why would space be any different? The initial capex is high, but then that was the case for railroads and airlines too.
I'll tell you why the quality of British engineering has declined: because Engineers are treated terribly in the UK. For a start, "Engineer" isn't a protected title, as it is in the US and even in Europe, where it has similar standing to the title of a medical doctor. In the UK, the electrician who installs your cable TV probably calls himself an "Electrical Engineer". If someone asks you what you do for a living and you say "Mechanical Engineer", in the UK they will think you are a car mechanic. (These are of course necessary and worthy jobs, but you don't need a 4-year degree and 4 years of professional experience to do them, as you do to become an Engineer). Also, an Engineer in the UK is unlikely to be well paid, compared to a similarly qualified lawyer or finance professional.
I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering from UCL, one of the top 3 universities in the UK, and like many of my graduating class, I didn't even apply to engineering firms. We went straight into consulting, banking, software and similar jobs - where our talents would be respected and rewarded.
I believe that these factors are more important than Lego -vs- Meccano. Remember, we all started off *wanting* to be Engineers - it was only when we realised what it was really like that we changed our minds.
And who needs to burn CDs? Certainly not all those Apple customers who bought OSX! How about the Open Source camp beating Apple to it?
Umm, SGI jumped on the Linux bandwagon too, for example their work on a journalling file system. That hasn't paid off for them either. It remains to be seen if IBM will make any money there either.
Why is it stupid? The majority of the total-cost-of-ownership of any system is in maintenance and support. It's nothing to do with "politics". Do you whine and complain about having to comment your code too? To write documentation? To submit to code reviews? Those nasty political managers, making you do your job like a professional!
Using a new language for its own sake, with no thought to its suitability is foolish. Its rare to find a specification which doesn't stipulate that a system should be developed with ease of maintenance and extension as key success criteria.
I for one hate office politics but they are a fact of life and explains why MS is so popular.
Like most slashbots, you can't let a post go by without a dig at MS, can you? Not that it's even slightly relevant here, of course.
It's like "doppelganger". Why do Germans have a word for that? Does it happen a lot over there? Really, I'm curious.
Yes, but a real solar power station won't be based on PV cells. It'll be a concave field, many miles across, filled with mirrors mounted such that they can turn and follow the sun. You can power this bit just by spare heat from sunlight. The mirrors are curved to focus the sunlight on a huge black obelisk in the middle of the field. This obelisk is filled with a network of pipes.
The sun comes out, the mirrors reflect the sunlight to focus on the obelisk and it gets real hot, real quick. Cold water gets pumped in, gets superheated into steam, then drives turbines which generate electricity. The steam then gets routed to run CHP in a hearby town, then cooled and either pumped back in, or vented harmlessly into a river.
That's how to use solar power on an industrial scale, but I don't know if there's anything like this in production yet.
Yes, the EU's propaganda machine would like you to believe that. Now go back and ask your friendly neighbourhood commissioner how many EU countries even have plans in place to ratify Kyoto. I'll save you the trouble: 0.
The GE-Honeywell merger block merely shows that the EU hasn't outgrown protectionism. You're going to get your clocks cleaned by the open economies of the world. I can only hope that the UK isn't stupid enough to join.
No, what Japanese corporations excel at is execution and operations. Historically, they haven't been great innovators. Take the example of motorcycles, televisions (and consumer electronics in general) and even heavy industry. The Japanese are great at manufacturing, they tend to buy innovation, either directly or by sending students overseas to study (I don't have the figures to hand, but Japan sends dozens of college students to the US for every one the US sends to Japan).
Couple this with a regulatory environment that is paranoid about defending Japanese home markets, and strict competition laws that amount to a government sponsored oligarchy, and you have a model for Japanese industrial success.
Japanese markets are hideously inefficient compared to ours (US/UK), for example the retail sector is dominated by a few huge manufacturers, but many thousands of tiny, single-premesis retailers. Very difficult to get economies of scale in retail like that, and even more difficult to get good marketing data (no, not banner ads, I mean data that informs product development). Their wholesale financial services sector is positively primitive compared to Wall Street, the Square Mile or Singapore.
It's these factors that mean that what the Japanese do well - bulk manufacturing of sophisticated products with gradual refinement - they do very well indeed, but they are very poorly positioned to compete in a world where the value is locked into innovative intellectual property which changes rapidly and where execution is commoditized. Their system can cope with long term capital investment in tangible assets such as factories, but it cannot cope with what we could call high-risk venture capital.
It will be fascinating to watch their attempts at reform, but I think that the only thing that will end the 10-year recession is full-scale deregulation, and opening up to inward investment.
Yes, imagine such a world. "Slashdot" would be called "C-colon-backslash-right-angle-bracket" for a start, and it would be full of kids raving about this marvellous thing called an "Explorer" and how it was way better than primitive command line interfaces, and how refreshing it was to reboot your system from time to time, and some crazy dude named ESR would write these amazing rants about how shipping pre-compiled binaries was like building a cathedral... ;0)
Often times, I'll read a book (or a PDF, or a web site or whatever) but there are times you just can't do without training.
A hungry mind should be able to feed itself from the documentation and the system at hand rather then being read PPT slides
If "you don't know what you don't know", you might just end up wasting your time re-inventing the wheel, especially if a product has a huge documentation set and you just need to do a few specific things. Or if the product is very new and the documentation is patchy. Anyway, sitting down with a book is no substitute for hearing lessons learned in practice, or hearing the developers explain their design decisions. If you say that it is, I can only assume you've only worked with simple systems.
So long as you've some familiarity with the subject before the classes, and can ask specific, relevant and intelligent questions, training is very valuable indeed.
advancing yourself proffesionally (don't forget it is YOUR carrer)
Quite.
And to paraphrase Warren Buffett, "In the short term the markets are gambling machines, in the long term they are weighing machines".
And the Good Book says, "he who has ears let him hear."
Interesting you should mention this, even as a joke. At one point, AA really were making more profit off SABRE than they were off flying planes around.
It could equally well be said that if you use Netscape on Linux to view a page that the designer laid out in Internet Explorer on a Mac, you're not viewing the page as the author intended.
Or, for example, if you use one of the many utilities that strips out banner ads.
Get over it! You know why HTML has header tags to describe headings, why we have title, and body, and ordered lists and all that other stuff? It's because you say what it is, and it's up to the client to decide how it looks. This is how it was back in 1994! And And Netscape had their "What's Related" (I don't remember the exact name) facility that could take you to other pages that might be relevant to what you're doing.
If there's a way to switch your "smart tags" provider to someone other than MSFT, then there's whole new business opportunity right there.
Honestly, Microsoft are damned if they do, damned if they don't. Ask yourself, honestly, if this were a funky new feature in KDE, would you be as bitter?
Quite. No matter what Microsoft do, they will never get a fair hearing on /.
I'm not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing, it just is.
Oracle are a big company, and vary hugely in the support they give you. I've had situations where I've been given the runaround, like you. Getting passed from extension to extension, explaining my problem over and over again, "oh, umm, we don't do that stuff here, call this number..." and finding out that Bob's on holiday and his secretary has no idea who else I could speak to...
I've also had situations where Oracle have said our engineers aren't sleeping until this gets fixed, and a few hours later there's a motorcycle courier at my door with a gold disc containing a brand new build of Oracle with the bug fixed. I've had Oracle techs ssh into my servers, I've had the come to the data centre with mysterious CDs containing Oracle software that they don't let outsiders have, and that they erase from your machine once they're done.
Helps to have (or at least have access to) a high-end support contract, tho'. If you're some kid downloaded 9i onto his Red Hat box, forget it.
That's exactly what they are doing. Technology like this will enable problems to be dealt with quickly and efficiency, with minimal loss of life and collateral damage. And it will act as a deterrent. If you want peace, you must prepare for war.
There are few people in the world less technical than the BBC web team :0)
(That was a joke. The BBC serve up a non-trivial volume of traffic every day themselves).
Well, the brief was, find out what commercial products this could be used in place of. Oracle 7 is still a very capable product, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if many of the apps now being coded against Oracle 8.1.6 could be made to run on it with trivial changes (again, so long as you aren't using the exotic data types, yadda yadda).
I believe so, yes. I conducted an exhaustive study of this product as a consultant, and found it was equivalent to Oracle 7.3.2. If you're working with straight, transactional SQL in a relational schema (i.e. no OR features, none of the Oracle extensions for Time Series, Spatial Data et al) it's a fine choice, and decades ahead of MySQL.
I guess I just imagined using Rogue Wave products then. Or maybe I was smoking crack.
That was probably meant as a joke, but what do you think, say, MFC is? Plenty of people use that as a part of their applications.