How about MoveOn.org? Could he get away with taking them down? How about; could he get away with supressing their free purchase, at market rates, of ad-time during the Superbowl?
Going back to Nixon's bad call, and now the Ares fiasco - this technology delivers a critical jobs-preservation effort to the industry that grew around first, Apollo, then the Shuttle (which very much contributes to the high cost of Shuttle missions). At least in part - it's about retooling our nation's Launch Vehicle Manufacturing Infrastructure. Neither Lockheed, nor Boeing, can sustain EELV (Atlas and Delta) manufacturing at a rate that could fill in for the demand that would be necessary to replace the shuttle. Ares (reusability) is about maintaining the Shuttle hardware manufacturing infrastructure, so we can produce hardware at a rate that can sustain our space program. I don't know that SpaceX is going to have the capability to manufacture in volume - though reusability will somewhat take care of that (Musk has actually been downplaying Falcon's reusability, and says that they can be profitable even without reusability.)
In any case, I don't see Falcon "taking over" anything. But becoming a significant player? Sure. (incidentally, this is also a big problem for the X-33 "what if" - even had X-33 fully succeeded, there would still have been a ton of political, and production-type issues, as the Shuttle phased-out - OR, some real significant infrastructure funding would have been needed (for manufacturing, reprocessing, launch facilities, etc. ) - - I'm not certain, but I believe that Katrina may have even played a role in the political finagling around Ares - in the drive to adapt Shuttle hardware - to preserve the huge economic boon to the New Orleans area that the Shuttle Main Tank manufacturing facility represents. (this facility, and its staff, of course, could be re-tooled to build some kind of main-stage booster. Fairly easily. But it would have been more than NASA wanted to spend on Ares - in a Bush regime).
My solution to this problem is to maintain a bank balance that is lower than what someone would incur trying to steal account numbers off a discarded hard disk drive. Much less effort involved.
Still - there were a lot of politics involved in the cancellation of X-33. It's been 10 years. I think this approach merits another try. The Shuttle has some advantages in certain mission profiles, and the X-33 approach could yield a launch vehicle, or family of launch vehicles that has a potential to realize some of the benefits that the Shuttle was intended to deliver, but never did.
There are some pretty serious technical challenges to conquer to make the X-33 approach work. I would rather have seen those challenges conquered, rather than the whole approach dumped because of a few failed tests. Looking back at the early space program work - there were many, many failures, and they pushed forward anyway.
I think the Falcon approach is good too: but I think that Musk, and the SpaceX organization is currently re-learning some expensive and hard lessons about spacelaunch, after going into the business with a high degree of arrogance. Musk's statements after the last test flight's failure show that the arrogance is still there. And SpaceX is going to likely burn through a lot more money before they learn some humility. I hope they survive that phase of corporate growth. I really do.
I dunno. I tend to think that one is not truly a geek unless one keeps an oxy-aceteline torch in one's workshop. I mean, really. They're handy for all sorts of jobs. Cheap chinese ones can be had for around $70 or so, and are more than adequate for occasional light duty use.
And 700 F is pretty much child's play.
I used to watch CSI, and I wonder why the writers never wrote about a murderer that simply melted down the murder weapon (knife, gun, etc.).
Ironically, I know at least 3 different "white" people who very proudly proclaim their 1/16th, or 1/64th Native American heritage. If you travel anywhere in the American Southwest, you see all the art stores, culture, etc. is directed at Native American heritage; the cities are decorated with their ideograms, their colors, their design motifs, etc.
For a despised and oppressed people, they sure do figure prominently with regard to cultural respect. I'm not denying that there's racism and oppression. I'm just saying there's a strong cognitive dissonance going on in Western culture. Though; I'd say that power politics, and multiculturalism are two very different things. . .
The problem with that is that EVERYONE is subsidized up the wazoo. Even in America. (who paid for the roads? who paid for the basic education of the work force? who paid for securing the Saudi oil fields (twice)?)
This "Free Market" talk is all just a bunch of Jerking Off.
I think he spent too much time explaining how NOT to comment.
I wouldn't say the goal of commenting is to "write smart comments". The goal should be "think about your audience" (which should be the goal of ANY writer; including a coder).
Your audience, is you, 6 months to a year from now, at 2 in the morning, trying to fix a bug, and get it built to make your demo work so your team doesn't get canned because your boss over-promised.
I would say - for some of the "stupid" comments he writes about - sure, avoid those, but that's not important. The REAL important thing to comment is; ANY weird behavior, any strange environmental tweak you had to make to get a piece of code to work, any odd limits that you didn't forsee, but you hit in testing, any observed issues that maybe weren't reproducible that you suspect had something to do with that block. You'll come back 6 months to a year (or more) down the road, and you'll thank yourself - because it's these little obscure bits you won't remember. There's nothing more frustrating than plowing through a problem, and at arriving at the solution, realizing, that you had gone through all that before, a few months earlier, and - maybe the fix didn't get checked in or merged, or maybe you didn't complete it, but you got pulled in another direction by someone else's "emergency" or something.
THIS is what comments are for.
I tell you - I'd rather sort through 1000 lines of inane comments and code, than 200 lines of code written by someone who thought he was clever (and maybe he was) - and decided that since I wasn't as clever, I didn't "deserve" to understand what he had written.
In summary: The intended audience of code is: the compiler. The intended audience of commentary is: other developers on your team; and your future self.
For the vast majority of us; the question is - HOW?
Is there a cheap, easy to set up piece of hardware that doesn't take up a lot of space, and doesn't burn 100+ watts? Is there a "Linux home network proxies for Dummies" book out there?
Re:The Relief and Visceral Joy of a Hard Drive Cra
on
Is Email 'Bankrupt'?
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Having just switched employers, and my old employer used Outlook - new employer uses Thunderbird; yeah. . . 10 years of archived personal folders. ker-FLUSH!
I still have them on a DVD.
I just don't know when, or if I'll ever look at them again. Chances are; I could try to look at them at some point in the future, and completely fail to find the right software capable of opening the files.
Among "Average Users" - from people I know, and opinions I read on the internet, what I'm hearing is that, while people may be overall, deciding to "stick" with windows, it's mostly because they feel "stuck" with it. Either by fiat of their employer's IT policy, or through special software requirements.
I wouldn't say that the average user is still happy with Windows. The dissatisfaction declined somewhat with XP; it's much more stable and useful than ME was, and that was far, far better than 98 or 95 (given that "average users" were priced out of being able to use 2000 pro). But the general buzz out there is that windows users are, almost unanimously, unhappy with Vista. The plan for most people is to just put up with it, with a smaller portion "sticking to XP" - and the next smaller portion (including my brother, of all people!) switching to Mac. I reckon that anyone who was going to switch to Linux, was already there before Vista came out.
Now; that's "Average User". For developers and integrators - I'm seeing a STAMPEDE away from Vista. We're fleeing in terror. Either to Apple, or Linux. That's what I'm seeing. At least in my niche of the IT industry.
As to who decides, the majority decides. If the minority of wealthy don't like it, tough. They would not be wealthy without society. If they don't like it, they can leave and go live by themselves on a deserted island some place.
Well, that's the salient difference between a Democracy and a Republic (Constitutional Democratic Republic, if you want to get pedantic about it).
The Majority does not rule. We can argue all day whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. Historically, I don't think you'll find a period where Majority *did* rule, at least not for long. Society is always ruled by an elite minority. It's always been the degree to which the ruling elite were subject to input from the masses. Torches and pitchforks, or guillotines, for the stubborn ones.
The Constitution is there to protect the minorities from being victimized by majorities. Equal rights, equal protection under the law.
It is unfortunate that equality doesn't extend to economics. But, I think economics THRIVES on inequalities. Otherwise, why would anybody trade something of value for something else?
Which is more of a choice than most of them propose to give most of us, that choice amounting to: make money for us as "consumers" or die in a gutter.
I disagree with the Conservative argument that says that the poor masses would starve if it weren't for the brilliant and philanthropic genius enterprenuers and their generosity and vision. That if we (the masses, the majority) were to oppress the rich with high taxes, that they'd leave and all economic activity would halt. I think, that in a lot of cases, if a "rich" player left the economy altogether because we tax them too high (for example, all the businesses that are supposedly fleeing California's oppressive regime of taxes and regulation - yeah, right) that it would merely open an opportunity for another willing player to step in. This happens all the time, in nature. If an environment gets too harsh for one life form, another one steps in and occupies that niche. The only reason it may not happen in markets, is if there's no available capital (example: the Great Depression - or any time monetary policy is too tight). Which, I suppose, is the ecological equivalent of an environment with insufficient energy for life to thrive.
On the other hand, a majority that is parasitic to a minority can't thrive either.
I don't mind being a consumer. I mind having my choices artificially constrained. And I mind having my individual rights (like privacy, or freedom of speech) trampled by a terrorized majority (keep in mind, that Bush was re-elected (and his policies approved), by a majority of voting Americans; vote fraud notwithstanding; even if that represents maybe 10-20% of the votes - it's still a scary-large chunk of the US population). I don't give a crap if 99% of Americans are afraid of Osama bin Laden. It still gives them no damn right to listen to my phone calls without a warrant or judicial oversight.
Integrators and developers decide what that consists of, and deliver it to their customer (the user).
If the Integrator picks correctly, he succeeds, and is more likely to get repeat business.
If the Integrator chooses poorly, he fails. This failure can come in the form of a steep bill due to bundled licensing, or due to unreliability and other hidden costs due to architectural constraints (license servers, vendor lock in, copy-protection, and other issues not related to engineering a product that focuses on doing the user's job). Or, a commercial, closed-source solution could bring nice things to the table like UI-cohesiveness, or canned-integration that just works, etc.
Sure, there are advantages to closed-source in some cases; sometimes money attracts talented developers, and you get a good product that offers features that outweigh the consequences or negative aspects.
But those of us who have worked in this business for years or decades have all seen situations where you get painted into a corner by artificial restrictions and trade-offs related to product licensing, or compatibility issues that ultimately resulted from a vendor resisting interoperability for the sole purpose of attempting to control a market through vendor lock in. We've all run into those situations. They suck. Open source can alleviate those problems, but it can bring other problems with it. Right now, I think the dynamic is leaning heavily in favor of open source solutions - but each situation, each system is different.
Honestly, I think the most successful integrators are those who can look honestly at both alternatives, weigh the options, and make the best choice, without religiously choosing one side or the other.
Though, it's compelling to religiously stick to open source, because one can easily imagine a world where that choice has been abridged, through the power-politics of money-financed legislation (ie. things like mandated DRM, "Trusted Computing" - flawed policies like the DMCA, etc.)
Closed-source is a religion too. And the compulsion there is an ideology that folks who come up with an innovation should have the right to OWN the profits from that innovation. This is a compelling ideology too (especially to an innovator - and especially to a middleman who is positioned to profit from others innovations). But it is a flawed ideology. And bundled with that ideology is an engineering philosophy that systems should be closed, and users access curtailed, in order to preserve this legal ownership, and protect it from infringement by others. This runs counter to the entire purpose of computers in the first place. As a tool for humans to automate the management of their information. Open engineering allows this. Closed engineering prevents it.
This conflict is summed-up nicely in a line from Disney's 1982 movie, TRON. In a discussion between the computer scientist, and his corporate boss: Dillinger: I can't worry about every user request that comes in here. Gibbs: User requests are what computers are for! Dillinger: Doing our business is what computers are for!
Oh - they've got all kinds of "blame Liberals" excuses for not doing so. But bottom line is; when there is a Monopoly, you profit by constraining supply artificially, not by trying to increase supply to undercut a competitor.
(I recently completed a project, well, about 99%, and the customer pulled the plug for reasons unrelated to the performance of my team - they ran out of money)
#1: If you're uncomfortable with lying - DON'T.
#2: If you were in charge; don't DENY that it was your fault. Take responsibility for what is your responsibility. Show that if mistakes were made, you have learned and moved on. It's better to show that you were in charge of a project, than to pretend you were a junior member. Taking responsibility for failures shows maturity.
#3: Don't take responsibility for things that were not your responsibility. Lots of people get put "in charge" of things; when, in reality, someone higher up in the chain can sandbag you.
#4: No project fails completely. Accentuate the positives. Highlight what you DID accomplish. Show that; despite project constraints, you came up with innovative approaches to solving issues. Be positive, and try not to make yourself look like a victim. Everyone in this industry for more than a year or two knows that projects fail from time to time. But a project is more than just "Failed" or "Succeeded". Whether you get paid may hinge on that dichotomy. But whether you did good work certainly does not.
#5: Unless you're just out of college, you've got other successes in your work history that you can talk about instead. Your last job is the most relevant. But it's not the ONLY relevant item.
Hope that helps.
I wasn't really made the scapegoat in my case. But it still sucks that I can't say that my project was a complete success, and got used, and worst of all, I have no use-case metrics to prove that my approach improved anything. But when I explained it in interviews, it was apparent that I was on the right track, and was just unlucky.
Does OPEC reduce oil production by 25% in the summer?
No they don't, but any market-driven producer would anticipate demand cycles, and increase production to meet peak demand.
OPEC (and the non-OPEC seven-sisters cartel) do not increase production in the summer to meet peak demand, because they don't HAVE to. They simply jack up the prices in unison, and compliant government regulators throw up their hands and say "market effects".
Given the grotesque profits these companies have made in recent years, they have more than ample capital on hand to invest in increasing production. They decline to do so. Because they know damn well that no competitor will undercut them on price.
THAT is the impact of a monopoly.
The fact that this is energy; which is the seminal source of economic productivity for the entire industrialized (and post-industrial) world, means that this hurts EVERYONE, except the oil execs who hold obnoxious compensation packages. No wonder the US president and vice president are former oil execs.
But as far as tools go; sometimes you just need a crowbar, not a screwdriver, or a scalpel.
If you're writing an office suite, or 3d simulation, of course you don't want to even consider something like VB Script.
But if you're blasting changes to 100 Active Directory users, or changing permissions on a web site's directory structure, it's a damn useful little crowbar. (that's not because of the language - it's because of the embedded facilities in windows that talk to this language).
I don't know a single construction worker or mechanic that doesn't like to have more tools in his (or her) toolbox. They may not ever use all of them. Some may be favorites. But every tool is the right tool for some job.
Learning/Teaching programming?
I don't think that a particular programming language is ideal for that.
I think that a car with no transmission (ie. an engine capable of producing useful torque across the entire RPM range required at the drive wheel) would be a wonderful thing. But I also think that the modern, automatic transmission is an abomination. From the energy-wasting viscous coupling, to the way it shields the driver from the cognitive effort of managing engine RPM.
Shifting gears is NOT a mindless mechanical decision. It can be made into one. But that's not optimal - for performance, efficiency, and safety reasons. You want drivers to know how fast their engine is running, what their acceleration options are, and the ability to judge speed roughly. This is why things like triptronic shifting is popular on higher-end "drivers" cars. Not just for machismo.
Another good benefit: the independent motors could probably be mounted on pivots attached to the frame, so that each axle only has a single cv-joint, instead of the dual-joint axles we have on most cars now. There's weight-savings, and longevity in that design.
I like the idea of inboard brakes as well - I think I saw a custom porsche 550 replica that was built that way.
The system is broken, and stronger penalties won't fix it.
Which part of the system are you talking about?
The part that's there to make authoritarians happy? Authoritarians who believe in the principle that "if your horse won't gallup, that just means you aren't beating it hard enough." - That there's a "right" and a "wrong" - and if simply stating what is right and wrong doesn't work to preserve a worldview, then steeper punishment is necessary to enforce it, and if wrong still happens, that just means you're not punishing hard enough.
Keeping these folks happy is hard work. But necessary for re-election. Just like spending billions on "airline security" makes people feel safer, so they'll risk flying, even if they're not really any safer. Just like spending hundreds of billions on a war, and torture, to make people feel empowered against "those dirty terrorists" - even when they're NOT more empowered.
Of course all this is hard work. For the taxpayers who have to pay for it all.
Slashdot Mirror
How about MoveOn.org? Could he get away with taking them down? How about; could he get away with supressing their free purchase, at market rates, of ad-time during the Superbowl?
I love my RAZR. It's physically fragile, but that's the price you pay for small.
What I hate about it is the crappy software UI. Which is entirely Verizon's fault. Fuckers.
I'm not so sure about the BFR taking over.
Going back to Nixon's bad call, and now the Ares fiasco - this technology delivers a critical jobs-preservation effort to the industry that grew around first, Apollo, then the Shuttle (which very much contributes to the high cost of Shuttle missions). At least in part - it's about retooling our nation's Launch Vehicle Manufacturing Infrastructure. Neither Lockheed, nor Boeing, can sustain EELV (Atlas and Delta) manufacturing at a rate that could fill in for the demand that would be necessary to replace the shuttle. Ares (reusability) is about maintaining the Shuttle hardware manufacturing infrastructure, so we can produce hardware at a rate that can sustain our space program. I don't know that SpaceX is going to have the capability to manufacture in volume - though reusability will somewhat take care of that (Musk has actually been downplaying Falcon's reusability, and says that they can be profitable even without reusability.)
In any case, I don't see Falcon "taking over" anything. But becoming a significant player? Sure. (incidentally, this is also a big problem for the X-33 "what if" - even had X-33 fully succeeded, there would still have been a ton of political, and production-type issues, as the Shuttle phased-out - OR, some real significant infrastructure funding would have been needed (for manufacturing, reprocessing, launch facilities, etc. ) - - I'm not certain, but I believe that Katrina may have even played a role in the political finagling around Ares - in the drive to adapt Shuttle hardware - to preserve the huge economic boon to the New Orleans area that the Shuttle Main Tank manufacturing facility represents. (this facility, and its staff, of course, could be re-tooled to build some kind of main-stage booster. Fairly easily. But it would have been more than NASA wanted to spend on Ares - in a Bush regime).
This really IS the modern-day equivalent of "if your eye offends thee, pluck it out."
My solution to this problem is to maintain a bank balance that is lower than what someone would incur trying to steal account numbers off a discarded hard disk drive. Much less effort involved.
Still - there were a lot of politics involved in the cancellation of X-33. It's been 10 years. I think this approach merits another try. The Shuttle has some advantages in certain mission profiles, and the X-33 approach could yield a launch vehicle, or family of launch vehicles that has a potential to realize some of the benefits that the Shuttle was intended to deliver, but never did.
There are some pretty serious technical challenges to conquer to make the X-33 approach work. I would rather have seen those challenges conquered, rather than the whole approach dumped because of a few failed tests. Looking back at the early space program work - there were many, many failures, and they pushed forward anyway.
I think the Falcon approach is good too: but I think that Musk, and the SpaceX organization is currently re-learning some expensive and hard lessons about spacelaunch, after going into the business with a high degree of arrogance. Musk's statements after the last test flight's failure show that the arrogance is still there. And SpaceX is going to likely burn through a lot more money before they learn some humility. I hope they survive that phase of corporate growth. I really do.
I dunno. I tend to think that one is not truly a geek unless one keeps an oxy-aceteline torch in one's workshop. I mean, really. They're handy for all sorts of jobs. Cheap chinese ones can be had for around $70 or so, and are more than adequate for occasional light duty use.
And 700 F is pretty much child's play.
I used to watch CSI, and I wonder why the writers never wrote about a murderer that simply melted down the murder weapon (knife, gun, etc.).
Ironically, I know at least 3 different "white" people who very proudly proclaim their 1/16th, or 1/64th Native American heritage. If you travel anywhere in the American Southwest, you see all the art stores, culture, etc. is directed at Native American heritage; the cities are decorated with their ideograms, their colors, their design motifs, etc.
For a despised and oppressed people, they sure do figure prominently with regard to cultural respect. I'm not denying that there's racism and oppression. I'm just saying there's a strong cognitive dissonance going on in Western culture. Though; I'd say that power politics, and multiculturalism are two very different things. . .
The problem with that is that EVERYONE is subsidized up the wazoo. Even in America. (who paid for the roads? who paid for the basic education of the work force? who paid for securing the Saudi oil fields (twice)?)
This "Free Market" talk is all just a bunch of Jerking Off.
I think he spent too much time explaining how NOT to comment.
I wouldn't say the goal of commenting is to "write smart comments".
The goal should be "think about your audience" (which should be the goal of ANY writer; including a coder).
Your audience, is you, 6 months to a year from now, at 2 in the morning, trying to fix a bug, and get it built to make your demo work so your team doesn't get canned because your boss over-promised.
I would say - for some of the "stupid" comments he writes about - sure, avoid those, but that's not important. The REAL important thing to comment is; ANY weird behavior, any strange environmental tweak you had to make to get a piece of code to work, any odd limits that you didn't forsee, but you hit in testing, any observed issues that maybe weren't reproducible that you suspect had something to do with that block. You'll come back 6 months to a year (or more) down the road, and you'll thank yourself - because it's these little obscure bits you won't remember. There's nothing more frustrating than plowing through a problem, and at arriving at the solution, realizing, that you had gone through all that before, a few months earlier, and - maybe the fix didn't get checked in or merged, or maybe you didn't complete it, but you got pulled in another direction by someone else's "emergency" or something.
THIS is what comments are for.
I tell you - I'd rather sort through 1000 lines of inane comments and code, than 200 lines of code written by someone who thought he was clever (and maybe he was) - and decided that since I wasn't as clever, I didn't "deserve" to understand what he had written.
In summary:
The intended audience of code is: the compiler.
The intended audience of commentary is: other developers on your team; and your future self.
Okay. Sounds like a good idea.
For the vast majority of us; the question is - HOW?
Is there a cheap, easy to set up piece of hardware that doesn't take up a lot of space, and doesn't burn 100+ watts? Is there a "Linux home network proxies for Dummies" book out there?
Having just switched employers, and my old employer used Outlook - new employer uses Thunderbird; yeah. . . 10 years of archived personal folders. ker-FLUSH!
I still have them on a DVD.
I just don't know when, or if I'll ever look at them again. Chances are; I could try to look at them at some point in the future, and completely fail to find the right software capable of opening the files.
Temp today in Baghdad is 109 F.
This is May 24.
Not August.
120 F is routine for these guys.
There are areas of deployment in Afghanistan that are routinely -20 F. A -20 to 120 degree temp. tolerance is a very reasonable requirement.
We've already been through this exercise with a different brand of body armor that didn't stand up to high temperatures very well.
Among "Average Users" - from people I know, and opinions I read on the internet, what I'm hearing is that, while people may be overall, deciding to "stick" with windows, it's mostly because they feel "stuck" with it. Either by fiat of their employer's IT policy, or through special software requirements.
I wouldn't say that the average user is still happy with Windows. The dissatisfaction declined somewhat with XP; it's much more stable and useful than ME was, and that was far, far better than 98 or 95 (given that "average users" were priced out of being able to use 2000 pro). But the general buzz out there is that windows users are, almost unanimously, unhappy with Vista. The plan for most people is to just put up with it, with a smaller portion "sticking to XP" - and the next smaller portion (including my brother, of all people!) switching to Mac. I reckon that anyone who was going to switch to Linux, was already there before Vista came out.
Now; that's "Average User".
For developers and integrators - I'm seeing a STAMPEDE away from Vista. We're fleeing in terror. Either to Apple, or Linux. That's what I'm seeing. At least in my niche of the IT industry.
As to who decides, the majority decides. If the minority of wealthy don't like it, tough. They would not be wealthy without society. If they don't like it, they can leave and go live by themselves on a deserted island some place.
Well, that's the salient difference between a Democracy and a Republic (Constitutional Democratic Republic, if you want to get pedantic about it).
The Majority does not rule. We can argue all day whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. Historically, I don't think you'll find a period where Majority *did* rule, at least not for long. Society is always ruled by an elite minority. It's always been the degree to which the ruling elite were subject to input from the masses. Torches and pitchforks, or guillotines, for the stubborn ones.
The Constitution is there to protect the minorities from being victimized by majorities. Equal rights, equal protection under the law.
It is unfortunate that equality doesn't extend to economics. But, I think economics THRIVES on inequalities. Otherwise, why would anybody trade something of value for something else?
Which is more of a choice than most of them propose to give most of us, that choice amounting to: make money for us as "consumers" or die in a gutter.
I disagree with the Conservative argument that says that the poor masses would starve if it weren't for the brilliant and philanthropic genius enterprenuers and their generosity and vision. That if we (the masses, the majority) were to oppress the rich with high taxes, that they'd leave and all economic activity would halt. I think, that in a lot of cases, if a "rich" player left the economy altogether because we tax them too high (for example, all the businesses that are supposedly fleeing California's oppressive regime of taxes and regulation - yeah, right) that it would merely open an opportunity for another willing player to step in. This happens all the time, in nature. If an environment gets too harsh for one life form, another one steps in and occupies that niche. The only reason it may not happen in markets, is if there's no available capital (example: the Great Depression - or any time monetary policy is too tight). Which, I suppose, is the ecological equivalent of an environment with insufficient energy for life to thrive.
On the other hand, a majority that is parasitic to a minority can't thrive either.
I don't mind being a consumer. I mind having my choices artificially constrained. And I mind having my individual rights (like privacy, or freedom of speech) trampled by a terrorized majority (keep in mind, that Bush was re-elected (and his policies approved), by a majority of voting Americans; vote fraud notwithstanding; even if that represents maybe 10-20% of the votes - it's still a scary-large chunk of the US population). I don't give a crap if 99% of Americans are afraid of Osama bin Laden. It still gives them no damn right to listen to my phone calls without a warrant or judicial oversight.
Users want to use what works, and is cheap.
Integrators and developers decide what that consists of, and deliver it to their customer (the user).
If the Integrator picks correctly, he succeeds, and is more likely to get repeat business.
If the Integrator chooses poorly, he fails. This failure can come in the form of a steep bill due to bundled licensing, or due to unreliability and other hidden costs due to architectural constraints (license servers, vendor lock in, copy-protection, and other issues not related to engineering a product that focuses on doing the user's job). Or, a commercial, closed-source solution could bring nice things to the table like UI-cohesiveness, or canned-integration that just works, etc.
Sure, there are advantages to closed-source in some cases; sometimes money attracts talented developers, and you get a good product that offers features that outweigh the consequences or negative aspects.
But those of us who have worked in this business for years or decades have all seen situations where you get painted into a corner by artificial restrictions and trade-offs related to product licensing, or compatibility issues that ultimately resulted from a vendor resisting interoperability for the sole purpose of attempting to control a market through vendor lock in. We've all run into those situations. They suck. Open source can alleviate those problems, but it can bring other problems with it. Right now, I think the dynamic is leaning heavily in favor of open source solutions - but each situation, each system is different.
Honestly, I think the most successful integrators are those who can look honestly at both alternatives, weigh the options, and make the best choice, without religiously choosing one side or the other.
Though, it's compelling to religiously stick to open source, because one can easily imagine a world where that choice has been abridged, through the power-politics of money-financed legislation (ie. things like mandated DRM, "Trusted Computing" - flawed policies like the DMCA, etc.)
Closed-source is a religion too. And the compulsion there is an ideology that folks who come up with an innovation should have the right to OWN the profits from that innovation. This is a compelling ideology too (especially to an innovator - and especially to a middleman who is positioned to profit from others innovations). But it is a flawed ideology. And bundled with that ideology is an engineering philosophy that systems should be closed, and users access curtailed, in order to preserve this legal ownership, and protect it from infringement by others. This runs counter to the entire purpose of computers in the first place. As a tool for humans to automate the management of their information. Open engineering allows this. Closed engineering prevents it.
This conflict is summed-up nicely in a line from Disney's 1982 movie, TRON.
In a discussion between the computer scientist, and his corporate boss:
Dillinger: I can't worry about every user request that comes in here.
Gibbs: User requests are what computers are for!
Dillinger: Doing our business is what computers are for!
End of Line.
Then they need more refining capacity. Duh.
Oh - they've got all kinds of "blame Liberals" excuses for not doing so. But bottom line is; when there is a Monopoly, you profit by constraining supply artificially, not by trying to increase supply to undercut a competitor.
(I recently completed a project, well, about 99%, and the customer pulled the plug for reasons unrelated to the performance of my team - they ran out of money)
#1: If you're uncomfortable with lying - DON'T.
#2: If you were in charge; don't DENY that it was your fault. Take responsibility for what is your responsibility. Show that if mistakes were made, you have learned and moved on. It's better to show that you were in charge of a project, than to pretend you were a junior member. Taking responsibility for failures shows maturity.
#3: Don't take responsibility for things that were not your responsibility. Lots of people get put "in charge" of things; when, in reality, someone higher up in the chain can sandbag you.
#4: No project fails completely. Accentuate the positives. Highlight what you DID accomplish. Show that; despite project constraints, you came up with innovative approaches to solving issues. Be positive, and try not to make yourself look like a victim. Everyone in this industry for more than a year or two knows that projects fail from time to time. But a project is more than just "Failed" or "Succeeded". Whether you get paid may hinge on that dichotomy. But whether you did good work certainly does not.
#5: Unless you're just out of college, you've got other successes in your work history that you can talk about instead. Your last job is the most relevant. But it's not the ONLY relevant item.
Hope that helps.
I wasn't really made the scapegoat in my case. But it still sucks that I can't say that my project was a complete success, and got used, and worst of all, I have no use-case metrics to prove that my approach improved anything. But when I explained it in interviews, it was apparent that I was on the right track, and was just unlucky.
Does OPEC reduce oil production by 25% in the summer?
No they don't, but any market-driven producer would anticipate demand cycles, and increase production to meet peak demand.
OPEC (and the non-OPEC seven-sisters cartel) do not increase production in the summer to meet peak demand, because they don't HAVE to. They simply jack up the prices in unison, and compliant government regulators throw up their hands and say "market effects".
Given the grotesque profits these companies have made in recent years, they have more than ample capital on hand to invest in increasing production. They decline to do so. Because they know damn well that no competitor will undercut them on price.
THAT is the impact of a monopoly.
The fact that this is energy; which is the seminal source of economic productivity for the entire industrialized (and post-industrial) world, means that this hurts EVERYONE, except the oil execs who hold obnoxious compensation packages. No wonder the US president and vice president are former oil execs.
Yes, VB Script is a lousy excuse for a language.
But as far as tools go; sometimes you just need a crowbar, not a screwdriver, or a scalpel.
If you're writing an office suite, or 3d simulation, of course you don't want to even consider something like VB Script.
But if you're blasting changes to 100 Active Directory users, or changing permissions on a web site's directory structure, it's a damn useful little crowbar. (that's not because of the language - it's because of the embedded facilities in windows that talk to this language).
I don't know a single construction worker or mechanic that doesn't like to have more tools in his (or her) toolbox. They may not ever use all of them. Some may be favorites. But every tool is the right tool for some job.
Learning/Teaching programming?
I don't think that a particular programming language is ideal for that.
I think that a car with no transmission (ie. an engine capable of producing useful torque across the entire RPM range required at the drive wheel) would be a wonderful thing. But I also think that the modern, automatic transmission is an abomination. From the energy-wasting viscous coupling, to the way it shields the driver from the cognitive effort of managing engine RPM.
Shifting gears is NOT a mindless mechanical decision. It can be made into one. But that's not optimal - for performance, efficiency, and safety reasons. You want drivers to know how fast their engine is running, what their acceleration options are, and the ability to judge speed roughly. This is why things like triptronic shifting is popular on higher-end "drivers" cars. Not just for machismo.
Another good benefit: the independent motors could probably be mounted on pivots attached to the frame, so that each axle only has a single cv-joint, instead of the dual-joint axles we have on most cars now. There's weight-savings, and longevity in that design.
I like the idea of inboard brakes as well - I think I saw a custom porsche 550 replica that was built that way.
The system is broken, and stronger penalties won't fix it.
Which part of the system are you talking about?
The part that's there to make authoritarians happy? Authoritarians who believe in the principle that "if your horse won't gallup, that just means you aren't beating it hard enough." - That there's a "right" and a "wrong" - and if simply stating what is right and wrong doesn't work to preserve a worldview, then steeper punishment is necessary to enforce it, and if wrong still happens, that just means you're not punishing hard enough.
Keeping these folks happy is hard work. But necessary for re-election. Just like spending billions on "airline security" makes people feel safer, so they'll risk flying, even if they're not really any safer. Just like spending hundreds of billions on a war, and torture, to make people feel empowered against "those dirty terrorists" - even when they're NOT more empowered.
Of course all this is hard work. For the taxpayers who have to pay for it all.
I didn't know you could still get non-ULSD. I thought that the high-sulfur stuff was banned starting 1/2007. I know Exxon has ULSD.
Heh - how 'bout an A4 Quattro convertible - Diesel hybrid?