there just seems to be something about it that drives all the Oo fanboys up the wall
Yeah, I know what you mean. These kids can't wrap their tiny minds around the following concepts:
A table is not a class
A row is not an object
A column is not a property
Whenever I see a project gone horribly wrong, and the language is C++ or Java, the problem usually is the system architect didn't grok the above statements. They should be tattooed onto the forehead of every OO programmer, so when they're "pair programming" they can read it off each other.
solution to (hypothetical) "database bottlenecks" is to bury everything in a quarter of a million lines of EJB code
I get that too - then I show 'em the logs that show the database processor is mostly idle as it waits for their application to either request more data or finish working on what it's got!
Will my stock be worth less when those options are exercised, en masse, by employees fleeing a sinking ship?
Typically, when a company is in financial trouble, the employee's options will be "under water", with a lower price than the market value, hence they cannot be exercised anyway.
Figure out how much it has cost to develop/will cost to deliver, double that, there's your price. Pick a number based on the local market rate for embedded developers, and include every hour in your calculation, even time spent in the shower thinking about it. Even if you don't charge for them, you'll need the real number so you can estimate jobs in the future.
In fact, triple the number, then you can give your customer a big discount and they'll love you for it, and you'll still come out ahead.
The army's always recruiting, and if you join the Royal Signals (or whatever your local army calls 'em) you'll get plenty of training and experience in IT and Comms.
But system administration still can't be outsourced.
You think?
What if the data centre itself moves to India? What if all your desktop users run all their apps via Citrix, with the server farm in India? Sure someone has to physically set up a network in your office, but then all the routers and switches can be remotely administered.
Unless by "system administration" you mean changing toner cartridges and cleaning sticky mice. Yeah, that can't be outsourced.
It's got to be done right here at home by people whom we trust implicitly.
You trust your bank, right? Their call centre is probably in India by now. Very very few jobs can't be outsourced in one way or another.
Except for management, you might think. Well, you'd be wrong. Managers in the US have this dream where all their work will be done at low cost offshore, and they'll rake in the profits at home. What happens when the offshore companies realize, hey, we know everything we need to about the business now, we've done all the work - why do we need management over in the US to cream off the profits? Already there are Indian companies like Tata and Wipro doing an end-run around US-based consultancies and pitching direct to customers. Won't be long before there are actual Indian investment banks, telco equipment manufacturers, accountancy firms, competing directly with US-based firms who now have no staff of their own.
The US in particular and the West in general doesn't realize that it's simultaneously educating its competitors and losing the skills needed to compete. In 10 years, all those hollow management-only companies will totally implode.
They opted for a small fleet of SMALL aircraft carriers that are designed to rush in and handle local skirmishes and cost a helluvalot cheaper than their American leviathan counterparts
Actually, the Invincible-class carriers were designed to hunt Soviet submarines in the northern Atlantic between the UK and Iceland. They were barely sufficient for force projection (e.g. the Falklands War), for that, real carriers should have been used - only we didn't have any. So we made do. You know container ships were pressed into service as helicopter carriers for that war? That's how desperate the situation was.
A ship of the type you describe is the Hornet-class operated by the USMC.
there was something on some show on Discovery (i think?) about how there is interest in basically dropping large steel rods from really really really high up and use some minimal navigation..... the idea is that they would fly like a "smartbomb" and when going at their terminal velocity (or however fast they can get) they don't even need explosives to cause massive destruction apon impact.....
The RAF is already doing this with bomb-shaped blocks of concrete with smart-bomb guidance packages attached.
The bottom line is that the only times in the last forty years the US has fought a serious military adversary - Vietnam and Bosnia - much of the high tech that was promoted as being decisive failed.
Gulf Wars 1 and 2?
I don't think it's fair to call Serbian militia a serious military adversary yet not classify the Special Republican Guard the same way.
Assaulting the carrier battle group that the railgun equipped vessel would be a part of?
Well, the Soviet Empire believed that the only feasible way to take on a US Navy carrier battlegroup was with tactical nukes. Even then it would be tough to actually get the package to the vicinity of the target. But, people take risks in war, and there are certainly enemies of the US these days that don't particularly care about their own lives.
you absolutely love developing in ANSI C99, using lots of pointers, using the Intel compiler
I'm going to guess here that you're probably very inexperienced, in fact have never worked as a developer. Real developers don't give a monkey's about things like that. Languages and compilers to us are tools that are used to solve problems. A mechanic doesn't develop an emotional attachement to his hammer and then try to use it to bang in screws!
put on a VisualC.NET platform, where you have to use C++,
No-one "puts" you anywhere. Last I heard programmers weren't conscripted! You get a job, you work it, you get paid, if you don't like the work or the pay you can either leave, or get yourself promoted to a position where you're making the decisions. That's called the "real world".
Just put 12 developers together, make a list of their IDEAL development environment, OS, language, tools, algorithm
Development teams standardize for a reason - so everyone can work on everyone elses code, and it all integrates nicely. And real developers, as I say, don't even care about those things. What matters is elegant solutions to tricky problems.
I just hate Java
You hate it, but can't explain why? A real developer, who hates any language, will be able to say why, and why that is a problem, for example he might say "I hate java because it has no MI, and MI is useful for...". But it's unlikely that hate would come into it, languages and compilers are just tools after all.
You'll learn all this for yourself, just as soon as you actually start developing something non-trivial.
it all came down to space - what was the point of storing two or four numbers if you only needed one?
It wasn't so much space as it was fixed record widths. A record could only be so many bytes, so when someone said "hey, we need another column in this table!" they had nowhere to put it. So they took 2 bytes off the front of the date, the "19" since that was all the same in every row. I guess they figured they'd upgrade later to a database server that actually let you add columns to existing rows (something we take for granted now) but those ol' mainframes kept on tickin' so the old database (which was compiled into the app in many cases) was never replaced.
You want to impress me with this show, kill the captain in the third episode, have a struggle for possession of the ship itself (which costs namable characters' lives), and follow plot from there. Three episodes later, blow up the ship forever, strand them on a planet where they're dirt poor and unable to run from their pasts and chase their futures. Plus, they have to get a new ship.
You've pretty much described the plot of the old BBC sci-fi series Blake's 7. Blake gets whacked, Avon takes over, their ship the Liberator is lost, they get a new ship (don't recall its name offhand) etc etc etc.
But Firefly concentrates on the basics. The relationships. The flawed characters. The goal of living life the best you can.
Absolutely - there's no technobabble. The closest they've come in fact was the Out of Gas episode, and even then, it wasn't anything more complex than needing a new compressor (IIRC) for the engine. And I don't miss it at all - who really cares how the engine works? Does anyone actually care how the engine on the USS Enterprise works? NO! So why do they waste half of each episode talking meaningless crap about obscure technical details?*
* Actually that's a rhetorical question, I know the answer: because the writers don't have the wit to write intelligent dialogue.
The father of DNS and a scientist working at a DNS management company believes that everything will be controlled by a DNS-like system, absolutely unbelievable!
Well, quite, given that LDAP pretty much obsoletes DNS for any non-trivial directory implementation. DNS should be phased out, not extended. It simply doesn't extend beyond hostname/IP mappings, it can't handle the metadata that a read directory system needs.
Didn't you read the summary? It's apparently a "pjojector". Or Slashdot's editors missed a typo, but what're the chances of that?
Re:Don't elevate the status of 'Think Tanks'
on
When Think Tanks Attack
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The status of a 'Think Tank' report is no different to comments on Slashdot although they might be better researched and spell-checked
Let's be clear about what a "Think Tank" is - an organization like Rand, that employs legions of incredibly smart people and produces tomes of actual original thought.
These so-called "think tanks" are nothing more than second-tier market researchers with ideas above their station. Like Gartner and Forrester.
I guess its Lembeck's job to say nice things about NASA and those who control its purse-strings, but its a bit too optimistic to expect private industry to do a Mars launch anytime in the forseeable future. Heck, its hard to see NASA doing it, or any good reason to do it as a moon base would be safer, cheaper, and practical!
I suggest you read Dr Robert Zubrin's research on the matter. Key points are: Establishing a Mars base is actually easier than establishing a Lunar base, as Mars has far richer and more diverse minerals. Up on the moon you've got lots of silicon oxide and that's it. It's a very stable compound so it's very difficult to extract anything useful from it. On Mars in contrast, you can process the atmosphere, thin tho' it is, to generate rocket fuel, using a centuries-old process that Zubrin has tested on a simulated Martian atmosphere in his lab. You can easily refine metals, make cement and glass, etc. For a moon base, you'd have to ship everything in from Earth, one bit at a time.
And, Zubrin also points out that the scheme preferred by NASA, which is to assemble a giant spacecraft in orbit, which would require a giant orbiting shipyard, then fly all the way there and back is hopelessly impractical. His own scheme is to first send unmanned missions, including his fuel generator and food, water, etc, to the surface of Mars. When they're there safely, send a human crew with enough fuel and food for a one-way trip. Once there, they can refuel and resupply for the return journey. Lots of small packages rather than one big one (i.e. nothing larger than can be launched right now on the biggest Russian boosters). For a $20B prize - slightly larger than one year's NASA budget - he could do it, too.
Have one or the other, or even both, but don't give public money to private enterprise.
Right now, NASA is giving money - billions and billions of dollars every year - to contractors like Boeing and Lockmart. And they're getting precisely NOWHERE. But you have no problem with that?
For a fraction of that amount put into a prize foundation, private industry will do the rest. Here's a hint: you don't fly on a government airline, do you?
I think you need to see past your socialist "public good, private bad" ideology and have a think about what you actually want to see as the result: lots of fat, happy bureaucrats, or being able to buy a daytrip into space at your travel agent?
And to take your skepticism further, the smartest people I've encountered to date have been university professors (at least in physics).
There's book smarts and there's applied intelligence. Take business schools for example. All the professors there preach about risk-taking and venture capital and so forth - but for themselves, they all chose the ultimate low-risk job, academia and tenure.
It's amazing what a small private company can do with just 20 million dollars.
Amazing isn't the word. The dotcom I worked for back in the day blew more than that on furniture and parties. It really is stunning to know that there are still people in the world who actually know what they're doing and can actually get stuff done. Imagine what could've been accomplished with a few less dotcoms and a few more clues -a $100M prize for the first private orbiter, perhaps?
Slashdot Mirror
Here's one that'll make you howl: "sorting is a presentation-tier concern"
I've met people who think that joins are best done in the middle tier, on tables with hundreds of thousands of rows!
Yeah, I know what you mean. These kids can't wrap their tiny minds around the following concepts:
Whenever I see a project gone horribly wrong, and the language is C++ or Java, the problem usually is the system architect didn't grok the above statements. They should be tattooed onto the forehead of every OO programmer, so when they're "pair programming" they can read it off each other.
solution to (hypothetical) "database bottlenecks" is to bury everything in a quarter of a million lines of EJB code
I get that too - then I show 'em the logs that show the database processor is mostly idle as it waits for their application to either request more data or finish working on what it's got!
Will my stock be worth less when those options are exercised, en masse, by employees fleeing a sinking ship?
Typically, when a company is in financial trouble, the employee's options will be "under water", with a lower price than the market value, hence they cannot be exercised anyway.
Figure out how much it has cost to develop/will cost to deliver, double that, there's your price. Pick a number based on the local market rate for embedded developers, and include every hour in your calculation, even time spent in the shower thinking about it. Even if you don't charge for them, you'll need the real number so you can estimate jobs in the future.
In fact, triple the number, then you can give your customer a big discount and they'll love you for it, and you'll still come out ahead.
The army's always recruiting, and if you join the Royal Signals (or whatever your local army calls 'em) you'll get plenty of training and experience in IT and Comms.
But system administration still can't be outsourced.
You think?
What if the data centre itself moves to India? What if all your desktop users run all their apps via Citrix, with the server farm in India? Sure someone has to physically set up a network in your office, but then all the routers and switches can be remotely administered.
Unless by "system administration" you mean changing toner cartridges and cleaning sticky mice. Yeah, that can't be outsourced.
It's got to be done right here at home by people whom we trust implicitly.
You trust your bank, right? Their call centre is probably in India by now. Very very few jobs can't be outsourced in one way or another.
Except for management, you might think. Well, you'd be wrong. Managers in the US have this dream where all their work will be done at low cost offshore, and they'll rake in the profits at home. What happens when the offshore companies realize, hey, we know everything we need to about the business now, we've done all the work - why do we need management over in the US to cream off the profits? Already there are Indian companies like Tata and Wipro doing an end-run around US-based consultancies and pitching direct to customers. Won't be long before there are actual Indian investment banks, telco equipment manufacturers, accountancy firms, competing directly with US-based firms who now have no staff of their own.
The US in particular and the West in general doesn't realize that it's simultaneously educating its competitors and losing the skills needed to compete. In 10 years, all those hollow management-only companies will totally implode.
They opted for a small fleet of SMALL aircraft carriers that are designed to rush in and handle local skirmishes and cost a helluvalot cheaper than their American leviathan counterparts
Actually, the Invincible-class carriers were designed to hunt Soviet submarines in the northern Atlantic between the UK and Iceland. They were barely sufficient for force projection (e.g. the Falklands War), for that, real carriers should have been used - only we didn't have any. So we made do. You know container ships were pressed into service as helicopter carriers for that war? That's how desperate the situation was.
A ship of the type you describe is the Hornet-class operated by the USMC.
there was something on some show on Discovery (i think?) about how there is interest in basically dropping large steel rods from really really really high up and use some minimal navigation..... the idea is that they would fly like a "smartbomb" and when going at their terminal velocity (or however fast they can get) they don't even need explosives to cause massive destruction apon impact.....
The RAF is already doing this with bomb-shaped blocks of concrete with smart-bomb guidance packages attached.
The bottom line is that the only times in the last forty years the US has fought a serious military adversary - Vietnam and Bosnia - much of the high tech that was promoted as being decisive failed.
Gulf Wars 1 and 2?
I don't think it's fair to call Serbian militia a serious military adversary yet not classify the Special Republican Guard the same way.
Assaulting the carrier battle group that the railgun equipped vessel would be a part of?
Well, the Soviet Empire believed that the only feasible way to take on a US Navy carrier battlegroup was with tactical nukes. Even then it would be tough to actually get the package to the vicinity of the target. But, people take risks in war, and there are certainly enemies of the US these days that don't particularly care about their own lives.
you absolutely love developing in ANSI C99, using lots of pointers, using the Intel compiler
I'm going to guess here that you're probably very inexperienced, in fact have never worked as a developer. Real developers don't give a monkey's about things like that. Languages and compilers to us are tools that are used to solve problems. A mechanic doesn't develop an emotional attachement to his hammer and then try to use it to bang in screws!
put on a VisualC.NET platform, where you have to use C++,
No-one "puts" you anywhere. Last I heard programmers weren't conscripted! You get a job, you work it, you get paid, if you don't like the work or the pay you can either leave, or get yourself promoted to a position where you're making the decisions. That's called the "real world".
Just put 12 developers together, make a list of their IDEAL development environment, OS, language, tools, algorithm
Development teams standardize for a reason - so everyone can work on everyone elses code, and it all integrates nicely. And real developers, as I say, don't even care about those things. What matters is elegant solutions to tricky problems.
I just hate Java
You hate it, but can't explain why? A real developer, who hates any language, will be able to say why, and why that is a problem, for example he might say "I hate java because it has no MI, and MI is useful for...". But it's unlikely that hate would come into it, languages and compilers are just tools after all.
You'll learn all this for yourself, just as soon as you actually start developing something non-trivial.
it all came down to space - what was the point of storing two or four numbers if you only needed one?
It wasn't so much space as it was fixed record widths. A record could only be so many bytes, so when someone said "hey, we need another column in this table!" they had nowhere to put it. So they took 2 bytes off the front of the date, the "19" since that was all the same in every row. I guess they figured they'd upgrade later to a database server that actually let you add columns to existing rows (something we take for granted now) but those ol' mainframes kept on tickin' so the old database (which was compiled into the app in many cases) was never replaced.
You want to impress me with this show, kill the captain in the third episode, have a struggle for possession of the ship itself (which costs namable characters' lives), and follow plot from there. Three episodes later, blow up the ship forever, strand them on a planet where they're dirt poor and unable to run from their pasts and chase their futures. Plus, they have to get a new ship.
You've pretty much described the plot of the old BBC sci-fi series Blake's 7. Blake gets whacked, Avon takes over, their ship the Liberator is lost, they get a new ship (don't recall its name offhand) etc etc etc.
Too... much... hair!!
But Firefly concentrates on the basics. The relationships. The flawed characters. The goal of living life the best you can.
Absolutely - there's no technobabble. The closest they've come in fact was the Out of Gas episode, and even then, it wasn't anything more complex than needing a new compressor (IIRC) for the engine. And I don't miss it at all - who really cares how the engine works? Does anyone actually care how the engine on the USS Enterprise works? NO! So why do they waste half of each episode talking meaningless crap about obscure technical details?*
* Actually that's a rhetorical question, I know the answer: because the writers don't have the wit to write intelligent dialogue.
The father of DNS and a scientist working at a DNS management company believes that everything will be controlled by a DNS-like system, absolutely unbelievable!
Well, quite, given that LDAP pretty much obsoletes DNS for any non-trivial directory implementation. DNS should be phased out, not extended. It simply doesn't extend beyond hostname/IP mappings, it can't handle the metadata that a read directory system needs.
This isn't a new projector.
Didn't you read the summary? It's apparently a "pjojector". Or Slashdot's editors missed a typo, but what're the chances of that?
The status of a 'Think Tank' report is no different to comments on Slashdot although they might be better researched and spell-checked
Let's be clear about what a "Think Tank" is - an organization like Rand, that employs legions of incredibly smart people and produces tomes of actual original thought.
These so-called "think tanks" are nothing more than second-tier market researchers with ideas above their station. Like Gartner and Forrester.
I guess its Lembeck's job to say nice things about NASA and those who control its purse-strings, but its a bit too optimistic to expect private industry to do a Mars launch anytime in the forseeable future. Heck, its hard to see NASA doing it, or any good reason to do it as a moon base would be safer, cheaper, and practical!
I suggest you read Dr Robert Zubrin's research on the matter. Key points are: Establishing a Mars base is actually easier than establishing a Lunar base, as Mars has far richer and more diverse minerals. Up on the moon you've got lots of silicon oxide and that's it. It's a very stable compound so it's very difficult to extract anything useful from it. On Mars in contrast, you can process the atmosphere, thin tho' it is, to generate rocket fuel, using a centuries-old process that Zubrin has tested on a simulated Martian atmosphere in his lab. You can easily refine metals, make cement and glass, etc. For a moon base, you'd have to ship everything in from Earth, one bit at a time.
And, Zubrin also points out that the scheme preferred by NASA, which is to assemble a giant spacecraft in orbit, which would require a giant orbiting shipyard, then fly all the way there and back is hopelessly impractical. His own scheme is to first send unmanned missions, including his fuel generator and food, water, etc, to the surface of Mars. When they're there safely, send a human crew with enough fuel and food for a one-way trip. Once there, they can refuel and resupply for the return journey. Lots of small packages rather than one big one (i.e. nothing larger than can be launched right now on the biggest Russian boosters). For a $20B prize - slightly larger than one year's NASA budget - he could do it, too.
Have one or the other, or even both, but don't give public money to private enterprise.
Right now, NASA is giving money - billions and billions of dollars every year - to contractors like Boeing and Lockmart. And they're getting precisely NOWHERE. But you have no problem with that?
For a fraction of that amount put into a prize foundation, private industry will do the rest. Here's a hint: you don't fly on a government airline, do you?
I think you need to see past your socialist "public good, private bad" ideology and have a think about what you actually want to see as the result: lots of fat, happy bureaucrats, or being able to buy a daytrip into space at your travel agent?
Would it be too much trouble for Slashcode to automatically make links out of text starting with http://? Just a thought.
Would it be too much effort for posters to make hyperlinks?
And to take your skepticism further, the smartest people I've encountered to date have been university professors (at least in physics).
There's book smarts and there's applied intelligence. Take business schools for example. All the professors there preach about risk-taking and venture capital and so forth - but for themselves, they all chose the ultimate low-risk job, academia and tenure.
Those as can do, those as can't teach.
An imperial pint is 20 fluid ounces (a little over half a litre). A US pint is 16 fluid ounces
This also accounts for the worldwide belief that Americans are lightweights who can't hold their beer.
It's amazing what a small private company can do with just 20 million dollars.
Amazing isn't the word. The dotcom I worked for back in the day blew more than that on furniture and parties. It really is stunning to know that there are still people in the world who actually know what they're doing and can actually get stuff done. Imagine what could've been accomplished with a few less dotcoms and a few more clues -a $100M prize for the first private orbiter, perhaps?