the NT series turned out to be fairly insecure, fragile, bloated monstrosities
What was the last member of the NT series you used?
From where I'm sat (typing at a machine running XP Pro), the NT series is none of those things. XP crashes for me about as often as Linux, which is to say almost never, and despite using P2P, downloading shareware software, etc, my machine has never been compromised. Bloated? Required hardware specs are comparable to those for any modern Linux distro, and in any case, it certainly doesn't feel in the least bit bloated on my machine (2.4GHz, 512 meg of RAM - barely mid-level these days)
True, I loathe NT 3.5 and 4 with a passion, but 2k and especially XP are fine operating systems, on a technical basis at least.
In the end the US worker has to offer something that his/her indian counterpart can't. Language, proximity to the project, and superiour skill and/or inovation are just some advantages that people might leverage.
Keep thinking. What you describe is a situation where the majority of the skilled technical jobs have been moved off-shore.
So, what's to stop those businesses in those countries from setting up software shops of their own, and hiring away all the now skilled and experienced programmers? For that matter, what's to stop the people at the top of the American companies from reaching the same conclusion as you, and shifting the rest of the teams out there?
As for "superior skill and/or innovation", ask yourself this - how do you acquire skill in something? By working at it. If we've all lost our jobs to outsourcing, our skills are in danger of stagnating while their's are steadily increasing. Scratch one possible advantage.
As for innovation, well, I don't believe that we have any kind of a monopoly on that either. Oh sure, you can point at all the innovations in software that have come out of the US and Western Europe. But that's where almost all the software has been produced so far. I'm betting that given the chance, our foreign colleagues will prove themselves to be every bit as capable of innovation.
A friend thinks his 6-year-old child is a computer genius because she can use the mouse to play children's games.
Dude, the kid is six years old. How computer literate were you at six?
(okay, so at eight, I was fooling around with BASIC on my ZX Spectrum, but I digress, and besides I'm a programmer now...)
My daughter is four years old. She can sit down at her mum's PC, switch it on, click on her name on the welcome screen (XP Home), then use the Start Menu to launch the game she wants to play. Hell, I've seen her launch a game because she knows that from the splash screen, she can get to the Barbie website, which is where she actually wants to go.
I think the biggest problem most non-techy adults have with using computers is age. As you get older, it gets harder to learn new things, and for most people, PCs are as unlike anything else they use as they can be.
What IDE do I use in Windows?... MS wants you to use VisualStudio (after giving them much money,) but how many 10-year-olds can afford it.
Well, that may be true of their C/C++ compilers, but if you don't mind going down the.net route (and as you mention Java, I guess you don't), the Framework SDK comes with all the command line tools you need - compilers, debugger, etc. There's also at least one Free.NET IDE, #develop (at http://www.icsharpcode.net), and MS themselves have released a free asp.net IDE. I forget the name, but it's something like "asp matrix", or "asp web matrix". Of course, to use that you need IIS, which only comes with the Pro version of XP, but then that's true for asp.net development in general.
Java is easy to install, after waiting for the download, but compiling requires the command line.
There are several fully-featured free IDEs for Java. I suggest taking a look at Eclipse or netbeans, although AnyJ is free for non-commercial use on Linux. JBuilder also has a cut-down version that's free for personal use (and personally, I prefer JBuilder).
Well, I'm running XP Pro as I type this, and I can't say that I've encountered any restrictions on what I can and can't do with it, or the other software I have installed.
I've had no problems with activation (I had to reactivate once - I did it over the net with a couple of clicks; no problem), or with DRM. My hardware works just fine, and I can write my own software.
No, I can't modify the OS itself much, but then I never really could with Linux, either. My C is too rusty and I simply don't have the time required to go mucking about with that sort of thing, so practically, it doesn't much matter to me whether the guys who do are working for a company or just doing it for kicks.
This situation may change, and maybe one day MS will do something that does seriously inconvenience me, but so far they haven't.
Has Red Hat been studying Microsoft for years? One need only look at kernel support for NTFS
RedHat does not ship with support for NTFS, not even read-only. True, you can down-load rpms that other people have packaged for RedHat, and you may even be able to compile it yourself from the stock RedHat kernel sources, but they do not ship a pre-compiled module for it.
I know that because I stupidly assumed that Fedora would be able to access my XP partition. Nope; without that support, I couldn't access the internet from Linux. Well, until I wiped it and replaced it with Mandrake, that is. Teach me to try to fix what wasn't broken in the first place...
That Microsoft will someday be able to release a stable operating system?
You mean like Windows 2000? Did that 3 years ago. XP crashes on me as often as Linux (Mandrake) does - which is to say, almost never.
Nothing inspires excellence like a little competition...
Indeed, and given sufficient time and money, any competition can be beaten. MS clearly has the money, and with Longhorn not due to ship until 2006, it looks like they're trying to give themselves the time, too.
I for one hope they release something that completely craps all over Linux and OSX. Why? Two reasons: firstly, I play a lot of (PC) games, so I need Windows, so the better it is, the better for me (not to mention everyone else who uses it). Secondly, because that will force both Apple and the OSS community to improve their software even more - also better for me (as I also use Linux) and everyone. As you say, competition is good.
That's one of the reasons why the EU recently (last few months) introduced legislation requiring all such things to be opt-out, and to default to that. If an EU company pulls that sort of shit on me, they're in trouble.
Of course, the problems are
a) I only get spam to an address that was harvested off the web, and occasionally "webmaster" or "sales" at my domain; and
b) none of the spam I get comes from the EU or EU-based companies. It's all sent by or on behalf of US companies.
Thankfully, I don't get spam to any address I care about, and as soon as I get round to hosting my domain myself, I'll bounce everything to that one address. I only get a couple of dozen per week, though.
The only way we're ever going to fully kill spam is to abandon SMTP and get a better way to verify that e-mail really came from the claimed sender and leaves a valid return address...
But we have verifiable contact details now! All spam is advertising a product, right? So we have a website, or a phone number or address - if you want to complain to/about the company, you already can!
Maybe I'm being slow (I've not had my morning coffee yet;-) ), but I'm not sure what difference requiring another means of contacting them would make.
A few years ago, I started a PhD in plasma phsyics - my thesis was on something intimately tied in to fusion reactions (basically, it was on high speed electron transport effects in short pulse, high intensity laser-plasma interactions - as occur when hitting a hydrogen/deuterium/tritium pellet with a laser to try to initiate fusion). Now, I got bored half-way through and quit to become a programmer, but I still retain an interest, and would have enjoyed contributing to a debate.
But no; instead, I see almost all the score 5 comments "discussing" the unsubstantiated claim that the US vetoed it being sited in France.
Who fucking cares? What the hell does that have to do with the reactor? There are plenty of sites out there dealing with that aspect of the discussion; why can't we discuss the technical aspects instead?
As others have said, it's important, and worth discussing - but not here.
Java's threads aren't particularly lightweight, nor is its huge library
Java has two threading models - internal or "green", and native. Internal threads are "pseudo-threads" created within the JVM, and have nothing to do with the host operating system. This was originally the default (only, iirc) model, but a couple of years ago native thread support was added. The default now is to use a native thread for each Java thread; therefore, Java threads are as light- or heavyweight as your OS's threads.
As for the "huge library", that's one of Java's strengths! The fact that the core distribution provides so much functionality makes writing and deploying code much easier. No need to choose between writing your own support libraries, or using someone else's and hoping that the target machines have it installed (and have the right version, etc). With Java, I can just write my app, create a jar file (which are now executable, at least on Windows), and tell people "JDK 1.3 or better" and that's that. If they're running Java apps, they already have everything they need, or know where to get it.
Also, you do realise that with the probable exception of classes in the java.lang package, all classes are loaded on demand? Just because there are thousands of classes in the core API, doesn't mean that you have them all loaded everytime you run a Java app. Similarly, an app I write in C isn't going to start loading up libraries that are written in C that it doesn't explicitly use...
and we obviously don't give our cars copyright protection, even if the blueprints for a car does
That's because a car, by its very nature, is extremely difficult to reproduce. I can't just shove it in another machine, hit "copy" and sit back and wait. Trust me, if/when it becomes that easy, you'll see every manufacturer in the world screaming for the same protections.
To reproduce software, on the other hand, doesn't require the blueprints, tons of raw materials and a suitably equipped factory, or even the source code. It just takes the install media and a PC.
a program is essentially a chunk of opaque binary data, which is completely incomprehensible without the source code
Tell that to all the people who release cracks and modifications to binary-only code. (Go take a look at gamecopyworld if you don't believe me, or just consider Kazaa++ vs Kazaa)
Not having the source makes it harder, but it doesn't make modification impossible. That's why so many EULAs have clauses forbidding decompilation and reverse-engineering.
Someone else has discussed ust plain making the UI look less ugly, but I can think of another possible use. Say you're typing something based on a diagram - maybe some documentation, or some code, an email, whatever. It's a large diagram and takes up most/all of the screen, and a large part of it is obscured by the window yo're typing into, but you need to refer to it as you type.
Currently, you'd have to keep switching between the two, either by raising/lowering the windows, or switching desktops. With translucent windows, you could set the window you're typing into to be semi-opaque, and so see the diagram through it.
Not a huge deal, perhaps, but I can certainly think of situations where I'd have found it useful.
I'm a programmer. At my company, we use CVS for our source control system.
Over the years, we've tried to get other parts of the company (eg design, UI development) to use CVS. In the past, we've had problems with this, people have been pretty resistant - it's difficult to understand, they don't see why they should have to learn a new tool, etc.
A couple of times, when we finally managed to convince some incarnation of a department or other that source control was a good thing, but they still hated CVS, one of the arguments used against it is that there's no support.
So here we have an adequate tool (it's not without it's little - and not so little - irritations, but it works), widely used, that's been around for years and is practically a de facto standard, and they're bitching about support.
That's the way a lot of people think - if it's a pay-for product, that means the company is making money, and can employ full-time employees. Full-time employees and paying customers means support. Freely downloadable means its someone's hobby, which means that there won't be any support, unless you're lucky enough to be able to get them to reply to an email, but don't count on it.
Obviously some elements of proprietary software development still hold true in OSS.
You mean shipping later, rather than sooner?
I suggest you go take a look at soureforge; it's littered with projects that start, get a little way in, and are then dropped, never to be touched again (or in some cases, never even get off the ground). Seems to me that with the exception of a few notable and very large successes (Linux, apache, etc), OSS's record on delivering projects is nothing to be proud of.
But in most shops employing RDBMS, you have one team that maintains the OS, one team that maintains the database, one team that maintains the network, and finally a team that writes and maintains the actual applications. What the poster is probably worried about is being a DBA when some application programmer uses Java badly and then his boss leans on him, as the DBA, to make the process work faster.
I work in such a company, as an application programmer. Where I work, it's not up to the DBA to make things run faster - if an application is too slow, it's our problem. True, we can call on the various other people to help us in tracking down the cause of the problem, working out what needs to be done to improve the situation, etc, but ultimately it's our responsibility. It may be that the solution is to increase the spec of the machine(s), or upgrade the network, but we'd still be very much involved in coming to that decision.
So, as a counter example - from my position as a programmer, I'd be rather upset if my otherwise well-performing code is crippled by an underspecced machine or poorly-configured database. I trust the people responsible to do their jobs properly, though.
Pornography is not as much of a problem in Europe because it is accepted. I guess the same is true of racism.
Yes, pornography is generally more accepted in Europe; I guess we just have less of a problem with seeing people having sex. Note that the same cannot be said of the whole of Europe - here in the UK, after all, we're rather more Victorian about the whole thing.
Racism, on the other hand, is most certainly not tolerated. Yes, there are fringe groups, like the British National Party here in the UK, or the hard-line Combat 18 (note that the story is 4 years old), they are not representative of Europeans as a whole, any more than the KKK is representative of Americans as a whole.
France has in recent years has had massive anti-semitic rallies.
Proof please, as I don't remember hearing about them. Also, I've been on a few rallies and marches in my time, the largest being an anti-racism one organised by the Anti Nazi League. About 150,000 people marched through London on that one; I think that qualifies as a "massive" rally.
I find it incredible that you've been modded up insightful for this. Sure, Europe has its problems, but from what I see reported in the news, for the most part they're no worse than similar ones in the US.
God, my sister can make a program with.NET in a few hours...
Surely, that's a good thing? After all, the whole point of Free software is returning "power" to the hands of the users. By providing them with the source, they are no longer beholden to the technical elite (us professional programmers), but can make modifications and fix bugs and security issues themselves.
Well, that's a noble goal, but all for nothing if none of the users can code. Surely, making it easier for them to do so is in everyone's interests, and in the true spirit of Free software, isn't it?
I was burning them here in the UK 10-11 years ago. Assuming they're the same thing, they're not actually cannabis, just cannabis-scented. (Yeah, right...)
So enough of the "robot rights" and "robot soldier" comments, these are just embarassing.
I guess that mine is one of the comments you find embarassing. If you read it carefully, you'll see that I do not refer to robot rights anywhere. I refer to rights for sentient creatures.
If you can prove to me that a machine is intelligent and self-aware, capable of independent, creative thought, and all the other things that we consider to define "(human) intelligence", then it deserves to have the same rights that we would wish to have ourselves.
This has nothing to do with cuteness, or being anthropomorphic - I don't care if it's humanoid, insectoid, gaseous, or a cube sat in the corner plugged into the mains. If it is sentient, and intelligent, it deserves rights.
Other than that, I agree with you, mostly. Bipedal robots are a hard problem - much, much easier to give it wheels, or tracks, or at least enough legs that balancing and standing upright become easier.
As for this thing, yes it's a toy, but toys matter too, even if they're not pushing the boundaries of modern robotics; try telling my daughter otherwise:-)
As has been commented, a majority of real humans do not have basic human rights, and probably never will.
That's an example of what I'm talking about - sentient, intelligent creatures denied what we consider to be essential, basic rights. The fact that they happen to be human is irrelevant to me, to be honest. Show me an AI that fits the bill, and I'll fight for its rights too.
Slashdot Mirror
They have a legal statement at the beginning that says they can make use of your answers however they want.
Yup. That's been in the small print of every survey I've ever taken, and on the "comment on our product/service/whatever" form I've seen.
What's your point?
Because that's a feature of all large businesses - there's nothing special about MS in that.
the NT series turned out to be fairly insecure, fragile, bloated monstrosities
What was the last member of the NT series you used?
From where I'm sat (typing at a machine running XP Pro), the NT series is none of those things. XP crashes for me about as often as Linux, which is to say almost never, and despite using P2P, downloading shareware software, etc, my machine has never been compromised. Bloated? Required hardware specs are comparable to those for any modern Linux distro, and in any case, it certainly doesn't feel in the least bit bloated on my machine (2.4GHz, 512 meg of RAM - barely mid-level these days)
True, I loathe NT 3.5 and 4 with a passion, but 2k and especially XP are fine operating systems, on a technical basis at least.
In the end the US worker has to offer something that his/her indian counterpart can't. Language, proximity to the project, and superiour skill and/or inovation are just some advantages that people might leverage.
Keep thinking. What you describe is a situation where the majority of the skilled technical jobs have been moved off-shore.
So, what's to stop those businesses in those countries from setting up software shops of their own, and hiring away all the now skilled and experienced programmers? For that matter, what's to stop the people at the top of the American companies from reaching the same conclusion as you, and shifting the rest of the teams out there?
As for "superior skill and/or innovation", ask yourself this - how do you acquire skill in something? By working at it. If we've all lost our jobs to outsourcing, our skills are in danger of stagnating while their's are steadily increasing. Scratch one possible advantage.
As for innovation, well, I don't believe that we have any kind of a monopoly on that either. Oh sure, you can point at all the innovations in software that have come out of the US and Western Europe. But that's where almost all the software has been produced so far. I'm betting that given the chance, our foreign colleagues will prove themselves to be every bit as capable of innovation.
A friend thinks his 6-year-old child is a computer genius because she can use the mouse to play children's games.
... MS wants you to use VisualStudio (after giving them much money,) but how many 10-year-olds can afford it.
.net route (and as you mention Java, I guess you don't), the Framework SDK comes with all the command line tools you need - compilers, debugger, etc. There's also at least one Free .NET IDE, #develop (at http://www.icsharpcode.net), and MS themselves have released a free asp.net IDE. I forget the name, but it's something like "asp matrix", or "asp web matrix". Of course, to use that you need IIS, which only comes with the Pro version of XP, but then that's true for asp.net development in general.
Dude, the kid is six years old. How computer literate were you at six?
(okay, so at eight, I was fooling around with BASIC on my ZX Spectrum, but I digress, and besides I'm a programmer now...)
My daughter is four years old. She can sit down at her mum's PC, switch it on, click on her name on the welcome screen (XP Home), then use the Start Menu to launch the game she wants to play. Hell, I've seen her launch a game because she knows that from the splash screen, she can get to the Barbie website, which is where she actually wants to go.
I think the biggest problem most non-techy adults have with using computers is age. As you get older, it gets harder to learn new things, and for most people, PCs are as unlike anything else they use as they can be.
What IDE do I use in Windows?
Well, that may be true of their C/C++ compilers, but if you don't mind going down the
Java is easy to install, after waiting for the download, but compiling requires the command line.
There are several fully-featured free IDEs for Java. I suggest taking a look at Eclipse or netbeans, although AnyJ is free for non-commercial use on Linux. JBuilder also has a cut-down version that's free for personal use (and personally, I prefer JBuilder).
Well, I'm running XP Pro as I type this, and I can't say that I've encountered any restrictions on what I can and can't do with it, or the other software I have installed.
I've had no problems with activation (I had to reactivate once - I did it over the net with a couple of clicks; no problem), or with DRM. My hardware works just fine, and I can write my own software.
No, I can't modify the OS itself much, but then I never really could with Linux, either. My C is too rusty and I simply don't have the time required to go mucking about with that sort of thing, so practically, it doesn't much matter to me whether the guys who do are working for a company or just doing it for kicks.
This situation may change, and maybe one day MS will do something that does seriously inconvenience me, but so far they haven't.
Has Red Hat been studying Microsoft for years? One need only look at kernel support for NTFS
RedHat does not ship with support for NTFS, not even read-only. True, you can down-load rpms that other people have packaged for RedHat, and you may even be able to compile it yourself from the stock RedHat kernel sources, but they do not ship a pre-compiled module for it.
I know that because I stupidly assumed that Fedora would be able to access my XP partition. Nope; without that support, I couldn't access the internet from Linux. Well, until I wiped it and replaced it with Mandrake, that is. Teach me to try to fix what wasn't broken in the first place...
That Microsoft will someday be able to release a stable operating system?
You mean like Windows 2000? Did that 3 years ago. XP crashes on me as often as Linux (Mandrake) does - which is to say, almost never.
Nothing inspires excellence like a little competition...
Indeed, and given sufficient time and money, any competition can be beaten. MS clearly has the money, and with Longhorn not due to ship until 2006, it looks like they're trying to give themselves the time, too.
I for one hope they release something that completely craps all over Linux and OSX. Why? Two reasons: firstly, I play a lot of (PC) games, so I need Windows, so the better it is, the better for me (not to mention everyone else who uses it). Secondly, because that will force both Apple and the OSS community to improve their software even more - also better for me (as I also use Linux) and everyone. As you say, competition is good.
Well, I don't think you can really hold Nextel responsible for your managers being dicks...
That's one of the reasons why the EU recently (last few months) introduced legislation requiring all such things to be opt-out, and to default to that. If an EU company pulls that sort of shit on me, they're in trouble.
;-) ), but I'm not sure what difference requiring another means of contacting them would make.
Of course, the problems are
a) I only get spam to an address that was harvested off the web, and occasionally "webmaster" or "sales" at my domain; and
b) none of the spam I get comes from the EU or EU-based companies. It's all sent by or on behalf of US companies.
Thankfully, I don't get spam to any address I care about, and as soon as I get round to hosting my domain myself, I'll bounce everything to that one address. I only get a couple of dozen per week, though.
The only way we're ever going to fully kill spam is to abandon SMTP and get a better way to verify that e-mail really came from the claimed sender and leaves a valid return address...
But we have verifiable contact details now! All spam is advertising a product, right? So we have a website, or a phone number or address - if you want to complain to/about the company, you already can!
Maybe I'm being slow (I've not had my morning coffee yet
I guess you missed the bit where it says that they're unmanned probes, right?
Sickening, isn't it?
A few years ago, I started a PhD in plasma phsyics - my thesis was on something intimately tied in to fusion reactions (basically, it was on high speed electron transport effects in short pulse, high intensity laser-plasma interactions - as occur when hitting a hydrogen/deuterium/tritium pellet with a laser to try to initiate fusion). Now, I got bored half-way through and quit to become a programmer, but I still retain an interest, and would have enjoyed contributing to a debate.
But no; instead, I see almost all the score 5 comments "discussing" the unsubstantiated claim that the US vetoed it being sited in France.
Who fucking cares? What the hell does that have to do with the reactor? There are plenty of sites out there dealing with that aspect of the discussion; why can't we discuss the technical aspects instead?
As others have said, it's important, and worth discussing - but not here.
Java's threads aren't particularly lightweight, nor is its huge library
Java has two threading models - internal or "green", and native. Internal threads are "pseudo-threads" created within the JVM, and have nothing to do with the host operating system. This was originally the default (only, iirc) model, but a couple of years ago native thread support was added. The default now is to use a native thread for each Java thread; therefore, Java threads are as light- or heavyweight as your OS's threads.
As for the "huge library", that's one of Java's strengths! The fact that the core distribution provides so much functionality makes writing and deploying code much easier. No need to choose between writing your own support libraries, or using someone else's and hoping that the target machines have it installed (and have the right version, etc). With Java, I can just write my app, create a jar file (which are now executable, at least on Windows), and tell people "JDK 1.3 or better" and that's that. If they're running Java apps, they already have everything they need, or know where to get it.
Also, you do realise that with the probable exception of classes in the java.lang package, all classes are loaded on demand? Just because there are thousands of classes in the core API, doesn't mean that you have them all loaded everytime you run a Java app. Similarly, an app I write in C isn't going to start loading up libraries that are written in C that it doesn't explicitly use...
Damn, missed a bit.
and we obviously don't give our cars copyright protection, even if the blueprints for a car does
That's because a car, by its very nature, is extremely difficult to reproduce. I can't just shove it in another machine, hit "copy" and sit back and wait. Trust me, if/when it becomes that easy, you'll see every manufacturer in the world screaming for the same protections.
To reproduce software, on the other hand, doesn't require the blueprints, tons of raw materials and a suitably equipped factory, or even the source code. It just takes the install media and a PC.
a program is essentially a chunk of opaque binary data, which is completely incomprehensible without the source code
Tell that to all the people who release cracks and modifications to binary-only code. (Go take a look at gamecopyworld if you don't believe me, or just consider Kazaa++ vs Kazaa)
Not having the source makes it harder, but it doesn't make modification impossible. That's why so many EULAs have clauses forbidding decompilation and reverse-engineering.
Someone else has discussed ust plain making the UI look less ugly, but I can think of another possible use. Say you're typing something based on a diagram - maybe some documentation, or some code, an email, whatever. It's a large diagram and takes up most/all of the screen, and a large part of it is obscured by the window yo're typing into, but you need to refer to it as you type.
Currently, you'd have to keep switching between the two, either by raising/lowering the windows, or switching desktops. With translucent windows, you could set the window you're typing into to be semi-opaque, and so see the diagram through it.
Not a huge deal, perhaps, but I can certainly think of situations where I'd have found it useful.
I'm a programmer. At my company, we use CVS for our source control system.
Over the years, we've tried to get other parts of the company (eg design, UI development) to use CVS. In the past, we've had problems with this, people have been pretty resistant - it's difficult to understand, they don't see why they should have to learn a new tool, etc.
A couple of times, when we finally managed to convince some incarnation of a department or other that source control was a good thing, but they still hated CVS, one of the arguments used against it is that there's no support.
So here we have an adequate tool (it's not without it's little - and not so little - irritations, but it works), widely used, that's been around for years and is practically a de facto standard, and they're bitching about support.
That's the way a lot of people think - if it's a pay-for product, that means the company is making money, and can employ full-time employees. Full-time employees and paying customers means support. Freely downloadable means its someone's hobby, which means that there won't be any support, unless you're lucky enough to be able to get them to reply to an email, but don't count on it.
Obviously some elements of proprietary software development still hold true in OSS.
You mean shipping later, rather than sooner?
I suggest you go take a look at soureforge; it's littered with projects that start, get a little way in, and are then dropped, never to be touched again (or in some cases, never even get off the ground). Seems to me that with the exception of a few notable and very large successes (Linux, apache, etc), OSS's record on delivering projects is nothing to be proud of.
But in most shops employing RDBMS, you have one team that maintains the OS, one team that maintains the database, one team that maintains the network, and finally a team that writes and maintains the actual applications. What the poster is probably worried about is being a DBA when some application programmer uses Java badly and then his boss leans on him, as the DBA, to make the process work faster.
I work in such a company, as an application programmer. Where I work, it's not up to the DBA to make things run faster - if an application is too slow, it's our problem. True, we can call on the various other people to help us in tracking down the cause of the problem, working out what needs to be done to improve the situation, etc, but ultimately it's our responsibility. It may be that the solution is to increase the spec of the machine(s), or upgrade the network, but we'd still be very much involved in coming to that decision.
So, as a counter example - from my position as a programmer, I'd be rather upset if my otherwise well-performing code is crippled by an underspecced machine or poorly-configured database. I trust the people responsible to do their jobs properly, though.
Who the hell modded this crap up?
Pornography is not as much of a problem in Europe because it is accepted. I guess the same is true of racism.
Yes, pornography is generally more accepted in Europe; I guess we just have less of a problem with seeing people having sex. Note that the same cannot be said of the whole of Europe - here in the UK, after all, we're rather more Victorian about the whole thing.
Racism, on the other hand, is most certainly not tolerated. Yes, there are fringe groups, like the British National Party here in the UK, or the hard-line Combat 18 (note that the story is 4 years old), they are not representative of Europeans as a whole, any more than the KKK is representative of Americans as a whole.
France has in recent years has had massive anti-semitic rallies.
Proof please, as I don't remember hearing about them. Also, I've been on a few rallies and marches in my time, the largest being an anti-racism one organised by the Anti Nazi League. About 150,000 people marched through London on that one; I think that qualifies as a "massive" rally.
I find it incredible that you've been modded up insightful for this. Sure, Europe has its problems, but from what I see reported in the news, for the most part they're no worse than similar ones in the US.
God, my sister can make a program with .NET in a few hours...
Surely, that's a good thing? After all, the whole point of Free software is returning "power" to the hands of the users. By providing them with the source, they are no longer beholden to the technical elite (us professional programmers), but can make modifications and fix bugs and security issues themselves.
Well, that's a noble goal, but all for nothing if none of the users can code. Surely, making it easier for them to do so is in everyone's interests, and in the true spirit of Free software, isn't it?
Well, to be fair, it was someone claiming that the letter u doesn't belong in "flavour" that started it...
Cannabis Incense Sticks...
I was burning them here in the UK 10-11 years ago. Assuming they're the same thing, they're not actually cannabis, just cannabis-scented. (Yeah, right...)
So enough of the "robot rights" and "robot soldier" comments, these are just embarassing.
:-)
I guess that mine is one of the comments you find embarassing. If you read it carefully, you'll see that I do not refer to robot rights anywhere. I refer to rights for sentient creatures.
If you can prove to me that a machine is intelligent and self-aware, capable of independent, creative thought, and all the other things that we consider to define "(human) intelligence", then it deserves to have the same rights that we would wish to have ourselves.
This has nothing to do with cuteness, or being anthropomorphic - I don't care if it's humanoid, insectoid, gaseous, or a cube sat in the corner plugged into the mains. If it is sentient, and intelligent, it deserves rights.
Other than that, I agree with you, mostly. Bipedal robots are a hard problem - much, much easier to give it wheels, or tracks, or at least enough legs that balancing and standing upright become easier.
As for this thing, yes it's a toy, but toys matter too, even if they're not pushing the boundaries of modern robotics; try telling my daughter otherwise
As has been commented, a majority of real humans do not have basic human rights, and probably never will.
That's an example of what I'm talking about - sentient, intelligent creatures denied what we consider to be essential, basic rights. The fact that they happen to be human is irrelevant to me, to be honest. Show me an AI that fits the bill, and I'll fight for its rights too.
Same reason every tiny (.z) point release of Linux is front page news here - because the Geek Collective has deemed it cool.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't - but it definitely isn't "stuff that matters".