All of that said, Shatner's milked the Star Trek thing long enough.
Actually, if you ever see him interviewed, he wishes people would stop talking about Star Trek.
There's nothing unique about a 1-role actor.
That's the thing - he feels totally trapped by the Kirk role. He wishes that a) he could do something else and b) people would want to talk about anything else he's done. It's not fair to him to suggest he's "milking" his role as Kirk, I think he almost wishes he'd never taken it.
Oh please. Foppish, decadent Athenians, cowering behind their city walls, versus mighty Spartans, trained from early childhood as warriors? The Peloponnesian war was over before it began.
Look I don't have a patent number I have heard many story's from variable source
So you've never actually read one, but you're sure they exist because you have heard "story's". I see. And conspiracy nuts wonder why no-one takes them seriously...
the oil company's end up buying the company / patent and tucking new technology's / products away and out of public reach.
If the patents exist, they will be in the online patent database, which contains every patent - there's no such thing as a secret patent. Now I'm curious: have you read any of the patents for these miracle technologies? Can you post the patent numbers here so the rest of us can read them too?
What the BBC (a taxpayer-funded entity accountable to no-one in particular) doesn't seem to understand is that GOOGLE IS NOT A PUBLIC SERVICE.
"Is it ethical to put ads on absolutely everything they do, almost like a supermarket floor?"
If you don't like it, don't use Gmail. End of story. If you don't like the BBC but still watch TV, they'll tax you anyway. If you don't use Gmail, it costs you not a penny.
But any alteration will change the way people see the web, so should they be undertaken lightly?
Again, the BBC doesn't understand that Google is a private enterprise in competition with other private enterprises. The BBC doesn't compete because it receives a GBP 2.5 Bn subsidy every year.
What about links that showed, for instance, video of American Nick Berg being beheaded?
What about them? The BBC is very selective about what it does and doesn't report, and the spin it puts on it. Google just reflects the web.
And business is business, so what if the company wanted to introduce "favoured status" within its results?
What of it? Google is a business, if it doesn't make money it won't survive, if it alienates its end-users it won't survive. The BBC has no understanding of commercial viability.
Do they feel lucky? Sitting on billions of dollars, what is the best way to share their luck?
Unlike the BBC, Google earned its money. Why should anyone else feel automatically entitled to it?
In fact, it would offer active discouragement to companies to seek patents on their research, as licensing would have to made available on equal terms.
And how, then, do you propose that expensive research gets funded? Higher taxes I suppose?
it uses Windows' SSL whereas Mozilla has its own SSL
Actually, this is exactly contrary to SSL philosophy. When asked "why doesn't SSL/SSH do such-and-such", developers reply that they want to concentrate on the crypto layer and other applications can use that layer to provide their own services (for example, sftp is layered on top of ssh, VNC uses ssh to provide its crypto, etc). So, there's one crypto system to maintain and patch, not two or even n.
It's Unix philosphy too, building useful things from small tools that do one thing well. The Mozilla people lost sight of that pure vision LONG ago, and reimplemented everything from scratch. Kinda missing the point of libraries altogether.
They WON'T support the one system which you DON'T have a license for.
So you pay X dollars and get Y Red Hat licenses. If you weren't planning to rip them off anyway, that is absolutely no different to paying X dollars and getting Y Windows licenses.
Just the small fact that Linux is FREE and what you really pay for wheny buying a Linux distro such as RedHat or SuSe is support.
True, but how much difference does that actually make? If you buy 25 licenses for Red Hat's enterprise distribution, they won't support you if they find out that you installed it on a 26th system.
Now, obviously, if you simply download Fedora (4 CDs worth of it, I wonder how big Longhorn will be) you can run it on as many systems as you like, but you're on your own if you want support (no, Usenet doesn't count as an advantage here as there are also Windows newsgroups, mailing lists, whatever). That's free. But in practice, for a corporation, buying Red Hat isn't so different from buying NT.
'When I think of Linux, I don't think about it as our competitor. I think about Linux as a technology that is used by our competitors to build competitive offerings.'
Well, that's true enough. Linux does NOT compete with Microsoft, and in fact never did. A Linux distribution company such as Red Hat competes with Microsoft and a Linux distribution competes with a Microsoft product such as NT.
It's like back in the day, Intel sent a sales rep to my (then) employer asking how Intel could help us. We explained the score to him: we don't buy Intel. What we buy is Compaq (i.e. complete systems) and if they happen to have Intel in fair enough, but really, that's Compaq's decision, we don't care.
Thus it is with Linux. The average person DOES NOT CARE whether the kernel on their system is Linux or the NT kernel or Mach or anything else. They just want to run their applications to get the stuff they want to do done.
Anyone care to shed some light (or links) onto what RDF and OWL actually do
The purpose of these projects is to generate funding for researchers who missed out on the dotcom boom.
Seriously, tho'. TBL himself took his HTTP and HTML to a serious hypertext conference once (don't recall which one offhand) and they basically laughed at him. His technique was laughably primitive, they thought. So, he went back to CERN, sat down at his NeXT workstation, and just implemented the damn thing and let it loose on the world and there was a revolution.
Now, he is one of those serious hypertext conference types. The web worked because the barrier to entry was incredibly low; anyone could have a homepage, almost anyone could build something useful and/or interesting. The "semantic web" will raise the barrier to entry so that serious computer scientists can take control back from grubby commercial interests.
Semantic web is doomed to failure precisely because it is being pushed by a group with a reputation for talking rather than doing. If Sun releases iPlanet OWL Server and Microsoft releases ActiveRDF, then maybe it'll be worth paying attention to.
If a person visited "LLBean.com" and had advertising pop up, it would bge reasonable for them to conclude that LL Bean caused the advertising to pop up, since the site is llbean.com (trademarked) and LLBean is on the website.
Quite. The analogy is that Nordstrom employees disguised as LL Bean employees are being sent into branches of LL Bean to mislead customers.
It just seems so mean-spirited to wish for a show's cancellation-- over a hundred people lose their jobs as a result, and I'm not talking about high-paid actors, I'm talking about camera men, editors, janitors-- normal people.
Look, if a show is cancelled, they don't just switch off the transmitter for an hour in its timeslot. They put a different show on. If Enterprise is cancelled, then that frees up resources - time, people, equipment, money - for something else. Now that something else might be even worse, but it might be way better. Either way, we'll never get to see it because the Star Trek franchise is being milked to death. So, yes, I do want to see Enterprise cancelled, and I don't expect anyone to lose their jobs apart from the dismal writers and producers.
And I have a feeling that, if the population has a say, they'll embrace the EU eventually.
Given the choice, the UK population would be part of neither the US nor the EU and strengthen its ties with the Commonwealth countries, such as Australia, Canada, India, etc etc.
1. Linux is cheaper (how do you get cheaper than free?).
What you say: Linux is free!
What your manager thinks: Hmm, he doesn't know that most of the cost of software isn't actually in the upfront cost. He doesn't know anything about business. I can ignore his advice.
Seriously, if you want to play the cost card, talk about TCO (total cost of ownership), not the fact that it is "free".
Having access to the source code is a good start, so the community can examine the methods used.
What is this "community" of which you speak? History is littered with smart people who thought they'd invented the ultimate cryptosystem, only to have to torn to shreds by a professional cryptographer. Said cryptographers spend all their time reading academic journals, not source code to consumer utilities. Being qualified to write an efficient compression algorithm or a highly usable UI doesn't qualify you to audit a cryptosystem.
In summary, even if the source was open, it wouldn't make a difference, because there is no-one who has both the inclination and qualification to do it for free.
And nobody leaves their BT clients open longer than it takes to download a file - I'm sorry, but relying on people's altruistic behavior is plain stupid.
My policy is to leave the client open for as long as it took me to get the file after the download completes. So if it took 1 hour, I would be distributing the bits of it for 2 hours. I think that satisfies karma while not overly using up my resources.
Classical (ie, sane) software engineering requires systems analysts and programmers as separate roles by separate people. Thus systems analysts bridge business analysts who need to know no tech with programmers who need to stand no stupidity.
At the time those theories were developed, the technology required that people work that way. There were no RAD tools, for example. Nowadays, coding is relatively easier and understanding the problem to be solved is relatively harder, so it makes sense to divert smart people (i.e. programmers) to work with the business analysts and systems analysts.
I know one old programmer who wrote an email system for a large corporation in assembly language. Back then, off-the-shelf databases were unheard of, everyone wrote everything by hand in ASM, COBOL or FORTRAN. Nowadays, if you want a data-entry application, any kid can code one up in VB or PHP and connect it to a database. The question now is, what data do we want, how do we store it to make the end report more efficient to run, how do we make it easy for the user, etc. A database designer who doesn't understand the business can't do it, a developer who refuses to talk to users can't do it.
the disparity of the buying power of money across the global economy, because this outsourcing ISN'T a sign of the health of the global economy it's a symptom a massive distortion in the market.
There's an easy solution, and that's for Western governments to require that any offshore facility meets the same standards for health & safety (etc) as an onshore facility, and simultaneously coerce the offshored-to country's government to raise its own standards. I'm all for a level playing field, but as you say, what we have here is an artificially distorted market. Offshoring is in many cases simple arbitrage of working conditions, and that isn't sustainable at either end - tho' it's actually much better for the offshore end.
These are MBA-type CEOs that love to ruin people's lives because they can't lie enough to keep customers happy but screwed.
No, he's right. People skills really do matter - in fact, I would say that for a good programmer, 25% is coding skills, 75% is a mixture of domain knowledge and people skills. A developer who can't work in a team, who can't build a rapport with testers and salespeople, who shuts himself away in an office - his code may be technically good, but is it what the end-user is willing to pay for? Because if it isn't, that developer - even if his coding skills are excellent - is not an asset but a liability.
Good developers establish relationships with testers so bug fixing becomes collaborative, not antagonistic. Good developers can speak to salespeople in their own language, so customers are not promised what cannot be delivered. Good developers write documentation, so they can get on with coding instead of having to answer the same question over and over again. Good developers speak to other developers, so they know who to ask when they have a problem.
Those things aren't directly related to development, of course, so many developers ignore them. And they wonder why their careers plateau! The point of a company is not to write code but to solve problems. You can't do that if you don't understand what the problems are (domain knowledge) and who has them.
Slashdot Mirror
All of that said, Shatner's milked the Star Trek thing long enough.
Actually, if you ever see him interviewed, he wishes people would stop talking about Star Trek.
There's nothing unique about a 1-role actor.
That's the thing - he feels totally trapped by the Kirk role. He wishes that a) he could do something else and b) people would want to talk about anything else he's done. It's not fair to him to suggest he's "milking" his role as Kirk, I think he almost wishes he'd never taken it.
Foppish, decadent Americans, cowering behind their oceans, versus mighty Germans, trained from early childhood as warriors?
You've been watching too much Hollywood - WW2 was won by the Brits, another warrior race.
Athens had every chance in the Peloponnesian war.
Oh please. Foppish, decadent Athenians, cowering behind their city walls, versus mighty Spartans, trained from early childhood as warriors? The Peloponnesian war was over before it began.
Look I don't have a patent number I have heard many story's from variable source
So you've never actually read one, but you're sure they exist because you have heard "story's". I see. And conspiracy nuts wonder why no-one takes them seriously...
the oil company's end up buying the company / patent and tucking new technology's / products away and out of public reach.
If the patents exist, they will be in the online patent database, which contains every patent - there's no such thing as a secret patent. Now I'm curious: have you read any of the patents for these miracle technologies? Can you post the patent numbers here so the rest of us can read them too?
If you don't like it, don't use Gmail. End of story. If you don't like the BBC but still watch TV, they'll tax you anyway. If you don't use Gmail, it costs you not a penny.
Again, the BBC doesn't understand that Google is a private enterprise in competition with other private enterprises. The BBC doesn't compete because it receives a GBP 2.5 Bn subsidy every year.
What about them? The BBC is very selective about what it does and doesn't report, and the spin it puts on it. Google just reflects the web.
What of it? Google is a business, if it doesn't make money it won't survive, if it alienates its end-users it won't survive. The BBC has no understanding of commercial viability.
Unlike the BBC, Google earned its money. Why should anyone else feel automatically entitled to it?
In fact, it would offer active discouragement to companies to seek patents on their research, as licensing would have to made available on equal terms.
And how, then, do you propose that expensive research gets funded? Higher taxes I suppose?
it uses Windows' SSL whereas Mozilla has its own SSL
Actually, this is exactly contrary to SSL philosophy. When asked "why doesn't SSL/SSH do such-and-such", developers reply that they want to concentrate on the crypto layer and other applications can use that layer to provide their own services (for example, sftp is layered on top of ssh, VNC uses ssh to provide its crypto, etc). So, there's one crypto system to maintain and patch, not two or even n.
It's Unix philosphy too, building useful things from small tools that do one thing well. The Mozilla people lost sight of that pure vision LONG ago, and reimplemented everything from scratch. Kinda missing the point of libraries altogether.
They WON'T support the one system which you DON'T have a license for.
So you pay X dollars and get Y Red Hat licenses. If you weren't planning to rip them off anyway, that is absolutely no different to paying X dollars and getting Y Windows licenses.
Just the small fact that Linux is FREE and what you really pay for wheny buying a Linux distro such as RedHat or SuSe is support.
True, but how much difference does that actually make? If you buy 25 licenses for Red Hat's enterprise distribution, they won't support you if they find out that you installed it on a 26th system.
Now, obviously, if you simply download Fedora (4 CDs worth of it, I wonder how big Longhorn will be) you can run it on as many systems as you like, but you're on your own if you want support (no, Usenet doesn't count as an advantage here as there are also Windows newsgroups, mailing lists, whatever). That's free. But in practice, for a corporation, buying Red Hat isn't so different from buying NT.
'When I think of Linux, I don't think about it as our competitor. I think about Linux as a technology that is used by our competitors to build competitive offerings.'
Well, that's true enough. Linux does NOT compete with Microsoft, and in fact never did. A Linux distribution company such as Red Hat competes with Microsoft and a Linux distribution competes with a Microsoft product such as NT.
It's like back in the day, Intel sent a sales rep to my (then) employer asking how Intel could help us. We explained the score to him: we don't buy Intel. What we buy is Compaq (i.e. complete systems) and if they happen to have Intel in fair enough, but really, that's Compaq's decision, we don't care.
Thus it is with Linux. The average person DOES NOT CARE whether the kernel on their system is Linux or the NT kernel or Mach or anything else. They just want to run their applications to get the stuff they want to do done.
Anyone care to shed some light (or links) onto what RDF and OWL actually do
The purpose of these projects is to generate funding for researchers who missed out on the dotcom boom.
Seriously, tho'. TBL himself took his HTTP and HTML to a serious hypertext conference once (don't recall which one offhand) and they basically laughed at him. His technique was laughably primitive, they thought. So, he went back to CERN, sat down at his NeXT workstation, and just implemented the damn thing and let it loose on the world and there was a revolution.
Now, he is one of those serious hypertext conference types. The web worked because the barrier to entry was incredibly low; anyone could have a homepage, almost anyone could build something useful and/or interesting. The "semantic web" will raise the barrier to entry so that serious computer scientists can take control back from grubby commercial interests.
Semantic web is doomed to failure precisely because it is being pushed by a group with a reputation for talking rather than doing. If Sun releases iPlanet OWL Server and Microsoft releases ActiveRDF, then maybe it'll be worth paying attention to.
Apart from the syntactic sugar, how does that differ from C's assert.h macro?
If a person visited "LLBean.com" and had advertising pop up, it would bge reasonable for them to conclude that LL Bean caused the advertising to pop up, since the site is llbean.com (trademarked) and LLBean is on the website.
Quite. The analogy is that Nordstrom employees disguised as LL Bean employees are being sent into branches of LL Bean to mislead customers.
It just seems so mean-spirited to wish for a show's cancellation-- over a hundred people lose their jobs as a result, and I'm not talking about high-paid actors, I'm talking about camera men, editors, janitors-- normal people.
Look, if a show is cancelled, they don't just switch off the transmitter for an hour in its timeslot. They put a different show on. If Enterprise is cancelled, then that frees up resources - time, people, equipment, money - for something else. Now that something else might be even worse, but it might be way better. Either way, we'll never get to see it because the Star Trek franchise is being milked to death. So, yes, I do want to see Enterprise cancelled, and I don't expect anyone to lose their jobs apart from the dismal writers and producers.
And I have a feeling that, if the population has a say, they'll embrace the EU eventually.
Given the choice, the UK population would be part of neither the US nor the EU and strengthen its ties with the Commonwealth countries, such as Australia, Canada, India, etc etc.
Part of it is that mars isnt self-sufficient. No food, hell, no air, and even h2o is proboby gonna be a long way away.
Read some Robert Zubrin, kid. Mars has everything you need, you just need to be smart about getting it.
And Iceland.
Indeed. Iceland has been a democracy for three times longer than the US has existed. Americans can't see past the tips of their own noses!
1. Linux is cheaper (how do you get cheaper than free?).
What you say: Linux is free!
What your manager thinks: Hmm, he doesn't know that most of the cost of software isn't actually in the upfront cost. He doesn't know anything about business. I can ignore his advice.
Seriously, if you want to play the cost card, talk about TCO (total cost of ownership), not the fact that it is "free".
B) That year of crypto I took while working on a math degree doesn't qualify me? That was a waste of time, then.
Kid, I know people with PhDs in the field who still prefix every crypto-related sentence with something like "as far as we know..."
Having access to the source code is a good start, so the community can examine the methods used.
What is this "community" of which you speak? History is littered with smart people who thought they'd invented the ultimate cryptosystem, only to have to torn to shreds by a professional cryptographer. Said cryptographers spend all their time reading academic journals, not source code to consumer utilities. Being qualified to write an efficient compression algorithm or a highly usable UI doesn't qualify you to audit a cryptosystem.
In summary, even if the source was open, it wouldn't make a difference, because there is no-one who has both the inclination and qualification to do it for free.
And nobody leaves their BT clients open longer than it takes to download a file - I'm sorry, but relying on people's altruistic behavior is plain stupid.
My policy is to leave the client open for as long as it took me to get the file after the download completes. So if it took 1 hour, I would be distributing the bits of it for 2 hours. I think that satisfies karma while not overly using up my resources.
Classical (ie, sane) software engineering requires systems analysts and programmers as separate roles by separate people. Thus systems analysts bridge business analysts who need to know no tech with programmers who need to stand no stupidity.
At the time those theories were developed, the technology required that people work that way. There were no RAD tools, for example. Nowadays, coding is relatively easier and understanding the problem to be solved is relatively harder, so it makes sense to divert smart people (i.e. programmers) to work with the business analysts and systems analysts.
I know one old programmer who wrote an email system for a large corporation in assembly language. Back then, off-the-shelf databases were unheard of, everyone wrote everything by hand in ASM, COBOL or FORTRAN. Nowadays, if you want a data-entry application, any kid can code one up in VB or PHP and connect it to a database. The question now is, what data do we want, how do we store it to make the end report more efficient to run, how do we make it easy for the user, etc. A database designer who doesn't understand the business can't do it, a developer who refuses to talk to users can't do it.
the disparity of the buying power of money across the global economy, because this outsourcing ISN'T a sign of the health of the global economy it's a symptom a massive distortion in the market.
There's an easy solution, and that's for Western governments to require that any offshore facility meets the same standards for health & safety (etc) as an onshore facility, and simultaneously coerce the offshored-to country's government to raise its own standards. I'm all for a level playing field, but as you say, what we have here is an artificially distorted market. Offshoring is in many cases simple arbitrage of working conditions, and that isn't sustainable at either end - tho' it's actually much better for the offshore end.
These are MBA-type CEOs that love to ruin people's lives because they can't lie enough to keep customers happy but screwed.
No, he's right. People skills really do matter - in fact, I would say that for a good programmer, 25% is coding skills, 75% is a mixture of domain knowledge and people skills. A developer who can't work in a team, who can't build a rapport with testers and salespeople, who shuts himself away in an office - his code may be technically good, but is it what the end-user is willing to pay for? Because if it isn't, that developer - even if his coding skills are excellent - is not an asset but a liability.
Good developers establish relationships with testers so bug fixing becomes collaborative, not antagonistic. Good developers can speak to salespeople in their own language, so customers are not promised what cannot be delivered. Good developers write documentation, so they can get on with coding instead of having to answer the same question over and over again. Good developers speak to other developers, so they know who to ask when they have a problem.
Those things aren't directly related to development, of course, so many developers ignore them. And they wonder why their careers plateau! The point of a company is not to write code but to solve problems. You can't do that if you don't understand what the problems are (domain knowledge) and who has them.