How do you think historians apply all that knowledge? Do you think they keep all their books locked up in a library and just gab about it at cocktail parties?
Perhaps they output it the same way as all academics and engineers... point I was trying to make was that I just don't see history degree as being significantly more communications oriented than, say, engineering or CS degrees.
However, I definitely do agree with you regarding Carly, however: I wouldn't really blast her education (or lack thereof) as the cause for her failures.
That is blatantly idiotic.
She was a total disaster as a CEO, and deserves to go. There are no gender or racial quotas for CEOs; but if there were, they would have absolutely no trouble finding a better replacement, with or without breasts.
In fact, stupid cunts like Carly probably make it harder for good qualified female executives to get into similar positions. And as such she has been bad from equality perspective.
Or maybe there just will never be another Microsoft; as in no company will duplicate the (early) life-span of Microsoft. That's entirely possible -- perhaps time for mega-corporations based on standard expensive shrink-wrapped applications is over?
This is not to say there couldn't be other mega-corps in software, just that they would probably become such using different kinds of products, strategies and so on.
What I don't understand, however, is the last part ("play to win, or give it up now"): are you implying there is no other way to succeed than the Microsoft way? I'd think that's bit short-sighted.
Besides, Microsoft didn't exactly get started on great unstoppable visions, but with rather simple ideas of building basic interpreters (etc) to sell for hobbyists. The vision part only came when they grew big, and made founder(s) think
they need to have visions; bit like how George Lucas keeps on reinventing the history of Star Wars.
Doh. What a lousy troll... I eat tougher ones with my breakfast cereal. Not much enjoyment from such a canned lukewarm run of the mill bland rant -- so why did you waste a perfectly valid comment id with it?
Go back to your mama, little one, grow a bit, and come back when you have something more interesting to say.
Could be. Perhaps I completely misunderstood your point(s)... maybe I read too much into your commment, grouping it with "but public-funded education is EVIL" group, and assuming that was the context of the comment.
Parents are responsible for their child's education, not the government, not their church, not anyone else in the world, them. We've been screwing things up for years by letting the government run education, and at some point, it's going to have to stop.
Ever wondered why this "big bad govt is screwing up our kids" feeling is pretty much unique to US culture? I don't recall ever hearing that in Scandinavia (as a significant component of public opinion).
Could it be that the public school system in itself is not really the major problem?
I definitely agree in that in the end it's in the best interest of the parents (when kids are young) and students themselves (when they become aware of
the reality... somewhere between 8 and 30 years) to follow up on quality of education, but claiming that the actual act of education should be handled by the parents is impractical, and in the end, ridiculous. Most adults actually have lives outside of just overseeing their kids life... and those who don't, should.
The difference is that terrorism is hardly a significant threat.
I would argue, though, that the "communism" 50s paranoid politicians thought they were fighting against was similarly non-existing bogeyman: the supposedly powerful american communist organization(s), bent on getting revolution in the US, and forming an imminent internal threat.
That is; although Soviet Union was a (real) powerful adversary, it was NOT the enemy, supposedly, but these pesky "american traitors". And that was the strawman.
I agree in that terrorists are in the same sense strawmen; created by the hyper-active imagination of people who are lacking enough real-world threats (would a good old famine caused by cricket swarms fix this?). Just like it's suspected that human immunosystem manages to create itself new problems (allergies, other auto-immune diseases) if it gets bored with the lack of external threats, politicians seem prone to similar mental diseases. It feels unnatural NOT to be scared shitless by "someone somewhere"; and there's alway s the need to paint the face of your enemy, real or imaginary.
In the end, "communist" and "terrorist" threats (from US perspective) are very similar: in the first case it's the problem that the military machine lots its enemies after WWII (Germany and Japan), in the second case it was once again the military machine losing good ol' Soviet Union.
Your description is so accurate describing my current employer, too, that it's spooky. 8-)
And yes, I fear that many (or most) biggish corporations are like that: and comments from bigwigs from all big players are as clueless as this one; mostly since they live in their own specially insulated la-la land, without any grounding to actual reality. And while at the lowest levels (up to maybe second level of managers) people quite often know what they are doing, that information won't get up through the chain.
My analysis of the EPL helped me to see what is so good about the GPL and the LGPL. They do exactly what they appear to do on the surface, no surprises.
.... except when you consider LGPL with languages like Java and C# (search for discussion on why Apache people don't think they can use any LGPL'ed code with their own code). I wish there were no surprises, but the gaping hole in LGPL is the vague (or misguided) definition of dynamic and and static linking. It's ok for C and C++, but has trouble with (some) newer languages.
On the other hand, I do still use both licenses, but in some cases there's need for dual-open-source-licensing, which is silly.:-/
Perhaps, but what I was questioning was the assumption that "Solaris was once open, then it was closed"... not whether current change with Solaris 10 is a true "opening".
Now, a minor nitpicking with regards to poisoning -- with patents that doesn't matter at all. Independent of whether you saw an implementation, you will still be violating the patent, if you implement the 'invention' patented. It's only with copyrights where 'poisoning' may (or might not) apply (thus clean room implementations of software).
Sun has shown a propensity to sue companies and individuals.
Hmmh? Sun sued Microsoft, yes. But other than that I can't really think of a long list that would back up that statement?
About Solaris: it has NEVER been really open: it has been gratis (or almost); and maybe one could license to see the code (for research etc. purpose), but in the sense it's now being opened, it has never really been open.
And as to SCO... well, really, what Sun actually did pay for isn't that clear; from what I have heard they were just protecting their back (some money to shut SCO up).
I don't really get your point in any way or form: I assume the video is brutal and gruesome, but... So? I wouldn't want to watch such crap, and I assume most other people wouldn't either. And as a result major TV channels wouldn't broadcast it. But if enough people did want to, and there wasn't anything illegal (and I don't mean just immoral, but actually illegal) about the video, why should the government prevent it from being broadcast?
And if people still did want to ban such material, it should be done by making it criminal to create and broadcast (ultra-)violent stuff; not by allowing some government organization use its powers to ban whatever its leaders pet peeve (tits) happens to be.
Finally, you do realize that you do not have to fucking watch everything that gets broadcast, right?
Ok, I see; I guess I will have to agree with you then.:-)
Service providers can choose their terms, and I don't have much problem with that, as long as there's enough competition to keep providers to somewhat reasonable terms.
OK, so he banned a few "bad" words and a little nudity.
And what else is censorship but banning few things here and others there, one at a time?
It just perplexes me how it's not considered to be against 1st amendment to do this kind of direct censorship.:-/
Also, although I'm sceptic as the next guy WRT Bush' nominations, I guess it's better to change the bad guy as often as possible (I mean, if one can not get decent ones): longer ones stays in a given position, more damage he can do. Power generally grows over time; they know more people: J. Edgar Hoover was powerful thanks to his very long reign. Just changing him to another similar drag queen would actually have helped things a lot; even if that person was an "asshole of same caliber".
It's never about costs. Mistakes ALWAYS cost more than thorough testing.
Well, that's kind of nitpicking. Although "time is money" is just a slogan, it does point to the fact that both timeline and money are constraints that affect test coverage that can be done. And cost/benefit analysis should be done for testing as well as for implementation: proper amount of testing to do is a compromise based on many things (type of system, expertise of implementers, aggressiveness of implementation/release schedule etc. etc.). So I would argue that it's ALWAYS about cost, in broad sense (delaying a release costs money -- that's the main reason to avoid delays).
And finally, there are cases where defects just are cheaper to have, than doing rigorours testing. Like everything in software engineering, impact of defects is relative; there are no absolute guidelines.
And since MMORPG EULAs are about as legally viable as they get (straightforward terms of use for a service, tons of legal precedent), I don't think they'll have much of a problem pushing it.
Really? There have been cases where MMORPG EULAs have been tested and proven to be enforceable, forming tons of legal precedent?
I guess they can probably easily terminate the contract, but anything beyond that seems highly questionable.
One good place to start might be Lucene's home page:
http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/docs/index.html
Although Lucene started as a Java search (or indexing) engine there are ports to other languages; and design seems quite clean. As the engine it's pretty amazing (as well as free+open).
It does not include spidering component, but there are projects that add those on top of Lucene engine. Plus, when using DBs one often does not need a spider: you can directly index content that is primarily stored in DB and just refer to that from the search index.
I implemented a simple (but powerful enough) search functionality for an enterprise-wide CMS using Lucene; doing that integration was probably the simplest part of the whole project. And users seem quite happy with the results (especially compared to the old system that was replaced).
Full text indexing, for one, which is utilized by many Forum web app.
.... which is pretty unfortunate, since I feel strongly that relational DBs are the wrong place to put full text indexing functionality in. There are very good text indexing packages (like Lucene) that do very good job of indexing any and all textual data (and with tweaking many semi-textual ones); I prefer to have modular approach instead of creating a dependency to a specific RDBMS.
Although I do understand that it may be convenient to just use whatever DB provides, there is still some value for using the right tool for the job.
And doing so reduces dependencies to your specific DB engine.
I'd like to see a version of OpenOffice using native Aqua and Quartz.
Why? Should it really matter what technology is used under the hood, if it works well? I'd think that it wouldn't matter much whether it was written in Lisp, Ruby, assembler or Java, as long as end result is good?
XML, as originally designed, is deliciously straightforward
Hmmh... not really, XML 1.0 is surprisingly complicated (you know what I mean if you have ever tried to write a fully compliant parser... or even xml writer). It would be, if it wasn't for things like entities (and indeed most everything defined in DTD, like attribute typing and default values), and convoluted character validity rules (including automatic linefeed and white space normalization).
And CDATA should not have been included in the first place -- not so much because of potential for 'abuse' (after all, you could just encode same thing explicitly, CDATA adds no expressive power), but because it complicates many aspects of parsing (coalescing of adjacent text nodes, '<' not being encoded inside CDATA, which prevents ultra-fast seeking etc. etc. etc.).
XML as used in its simplest form, however, could be said to be nice, clean and simple. Too bad specs didn't limit to "sane" use cases. That's mostly SGML legacy, of course; compared to SGML even XML is delightfully simple.
I know you are joking, but 80k may well be a reasonable overall average (or median) for US software engineers. I know I'm already above that in my mid-career, and I work in a state where cost of living is well below that of NY or California.
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Perhaps they output it the same way as all academics and engineers... point I was trying to make was that I just don't see history degree as being significantly more communications oriented than, say, engineering or CS degrees.
However, I definitely do agree with you regarding Carly, however: I wouldn't really blast her education (or lack thereof) as the cause for her failures.
In fact, stupid cunts like Carly probably make it harder for good qualified female executives to get into similar positions. And as such she has been bad from equality perspective.
Wow! And all is time I thought history degrees about learning about things like, well, history, and stuff... not about learning communication.
Nope. Things started nose-diving around late 2000... but some companies lingered on for bit longer. -+ Tatu +-
This is not to say there couldn't be other mega-corps in software, just that they would probably become such using different kinds of products, strategies and so on.
What I don't understand, however, is the last part ("play to win, or give it up now"): are you implying there is no other way to succeed than the Microsoft way? I'd think that's bit short-sighted. Besides, Microsoft didn't exactly get started on great unstoppable visions, but with rather simple ideas of building basic interpreters (etc) to sell for hobbyists. The vision part only came when they grew big, and made founder(s) think they need to have visions; bit like how George Lucas keeps on reinventing the history of Star Wars.
Go back to your mama, little one, grow a bit, and come back when you have something more interesting to say.
Could be. Perhaps I completely misunderstood your point(s)... maybe I read too much into your commment, grouping it with "but public-funded education is EVIL" group, and assuming that was the context of the comment.
Ever wondered why this "big bad govt is screwing up our kids" feeling is pretty much unique to US culture? I don't recall ever hearing that in Scandinavia (as a significant component of public opinion). Could it be that the public school system in itself is not really the major problem?
I definitely agree in that in the end it's in the best interest of the parents (when kids are young) and students themselves (when they become aware of the reality... somewhere between 8 and 30 years) to follow up on quality of education, but claiming that the actual act of education should be handled by the parents is impractical, and in the end, ridiculous. Most adults actually have lives outside of just overseeing their kids life... and those who don't, should.
I would argue, though, that the "communism" 50s paranoid politicians thought they were fighting against was similarly non-existing bogeyman: the supposedly powerful american communist organization(s), bent on getting revolution in the US, and forming an imminent internal threat. That is; although Soviet Union was a (real) powerful adversary, it was NOT the enemy, supposedly, but these pesky "american traitors". And that was the strawman.
I agree in that terrorists are in the same sense strawmen; created by the hyper-active imagination of people who are lacking enough real-world threats (would a good old famine caused by cricket swarms fix this?). Just like it's suspected that human immunosystem manages to create itself new problems (allergies, other auto-immune diseases) if it gets bored with the lack of external threats, politicians seem prone to similar mental diseases. It feels unnatural NOT to be scared shitless by "someone somewhere"; and there's alway s the need to paint the face of your enemy, real or imaginary.
In the end, "communist" and "terrorist" threats (from US perspective) are very similar: in the first case it's the problem that the military machine lots its enemies after WWII (Germany and Japan), in the second case it was once again the military machine losing good ol' Soviet Union.
And yes, I fear that many (or most) biggish corporations are like that: and comments from bigwigs from all big players are as clueless as this one; mostly since they live in their own specially insulated la-la land, without any grounding to actual reality. And while at the lowest levels (up to maybe second level of managers) people quite often know what they are doing, that information won't get up through the chain.
As much as I do like Bladerunner, I must agree -- the book is absolutely great, and even better than the movie.
On the other hand, I do still use both licenses, but in some cases there's need for dual-open-source-licensing, which is silly. :-/
Now, a minor nitpicking with regards to poisoning -- with patents that doesn't matter at all. Independent of whether you saw an implementation, you will still be violating the patent, if you implement the 'invention' patented. It's only with copyrights where 'poisoning' may (or might not) apply (thus clean room implementations of software).
That sure sounds insightful!
Hmmh? Sun sued Microsoft, yes. But other than that I can't really think of a long list that would back up that statement?
About Solaris: it has NEVER been really open: it has been gratis (or almost); and maybe one could license to see the code (for research etc. purpose), but in the sense it's now being opened, it has never really been open.
And as to SCO... well, really, what Sun actually did pay for isn't that clear; from what I have heard they were just protecting their back (some money to shut SCO up).
And if people still did want to ban such material, it should be done by making it criminal to create and broadcast (ultra-)violent stuff; not by allowing some government organization use its powers to ban whatever its leaders pet peeve (tits) happens to be.
Finally, you do realize that you do not have to fucking watch everything that gets broadcast, right?
Ok, I see; I guess I will have to agree with you then. :-)
Service providers can choose their terms, and I don't have much problem with that, as long as there's enough competition to keep providers to somewhat reasonable terms.
And what else is censorship but banning few things here and others there, one at a time?
It just perplexes me how it's not considered to be against 1st amendment to do this kind of direct censorship. :-/
Also, although I'm sceptic as the next guy WRT Bush' nominations, I guess it's better to change the bad guy as often as possible (I mean, if one can not get decent ones): longer ones stays in a given position, more damage he can do. Power generally grows over time; they know more people: J. Edgar Hoover was powerful thanks to his very long reign. Just changing him to another similar drag queen would actually have helped things a lot; even if that person was an "asshole of same caliber".
Well, that's kind of nitpicking. Although "time is money" is just a slogan, it does point to the fact that both timeline and money are constraints that affect test coverage that can be done. And cost/benefit analysis should be done for testing as well as for implementation: proper amount of testing to do is a compromise based on many things (type of system, expertise of implementers, aggressiveness of implementation/release schedule etc. etc.). So I would argue that it's ALWAYS about cost, in broad sense (delaying a release costs money -- that's the main reason to avoid delays).
And finally, there are cases where defects just are cheaper to have, than doing rigorours testing. Like everything in software engineering, impact of defects is relative; there are no absolute guidelines.
Really? There have been cases where MMORPG EULAs have been tested and proven to be enforceable, forming tons of legal precedent? I guess they can probably easily terminate the contract, but anything beyond that seems highly questionable.
http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/docs/index.html
Although Lucene started as a Java search (or indexing) engine there are ports to other languages; and design seems quite clean. As the engine it's pretty amazing (as well as free+open). It does not include spidering component, but there are projects that add those on top of Lucene engine. Plus, when using DBs one often does not need a spider: you can directly index content that is primarily stored in DB and just refer to that from the search index.
I implemented a simple (but powerful enough) search functionality for an enterprise-wide CMS using Lucene; doing that integration was probably the simplest part of the whole project. And users seem quite happy with the results (especially compared to the old system that was replaced).
Why? Should it really matter what technology is used under the hood, if it works well? I'd think that it wouldn't matter much whether it was written in Lisp, Ruby, assembler or Java, as long as end result is good?
Hmmh... not really, XML 1.0 is surprisingly complicated (you know what I mean if you have ever tried to write a fully compliant parser... or even xml writer). It would be, if it wasn't for things like entities (and indeed most everything defined in DTD, like attribute typing and default values), and convoluted character validity rules (including automatic linefeed and white space normalization). And CDATA should not have been included in the first place -- not so much because of potential for 'abuse' (after all, you could just encode same thing explicitly, CDATA adds no expressive power), but because it complicates many aspects of parsing (coalescing of adjacent text nodes, '<' not being encoded inside CDATA, which prevents ultra-fast seeking etc. etc. etc.).
XML as used in its simplest form, however, could be said to be nice, clean and simple. Too bad specs didn't limit to "sane" use cases. That's mostly SGML legacy, of course; compared to SGML even XML is delightfully simple.
I know you are joking, but 80k may well be a reasonable overall average (or median) for US software engineers. I know I'm already above that in my mid-career, and I work in a state where cost of living is well below that of NY or California.