The government outsources everything now. They (or one of the companies they hire) could collect up all of your email and web surfing logs and send it to credit agencies, insurance companies, even your employer.
What if you emailed your friend that you had a crummy day at work, and the next day, your employer waves a copy of it in your face and says "you're fired".
What if you surfed around looking for alternatives to your current insurance, and your carrier decides to drop you because you're not a loyal customer?
They could do it all in the name of 'maximizing shareholder value'.
I'd like to see someone make a computer that can navigate a spaceship to the moon and back without mathematics.
One of the 'hot' new topics in computers is heat dissipation. How to get anywhere in this without thermodynamics and its underlying mathematics? If this is not computer science, what is?
Maybe you can get logo turtles to make pretty pictures on the screen without understanding the math involved, but real computers exist in the real world. We use math to understand our world, so we need to use math to figure out how the computers interact with it.
My chemistry teacher in high school taught us to think this way, you got no credit for your math unless you carried the units around.
- There doesn't have to be a big performance degradation, most of the work can be done at compile time. . - Like templates, you are free to ignore all of this if you want to, keep coding the way you have been, and maybe dabble with it where it's convenient.
- It's okay to accept some overhead in the name of helping to ensure program correctness. If you disagree with this statement, then you'd better be prepared to show me the blisters on your fingers from entering code via the front-panel switches.
- If there's a real concern for performance, there can be a run-time switch to turn off the checking, which you can enable after you've run the code through all your testing.
They could keep the service going if they charged a small monthly fee. I mean really small, on the order of couple of dollars a month, at the most, hopefully less. At that rate, it's not worth the effort for anyone to "misuse" (redistribute) it.
It looks like someone's borrowed a theme from politics: the straw man. Take something that doesn't exist (this hypothetical band of developers and their even more hypothetical 'license pressure') and spin and pound your fist, and maybe noone will notice that you've created what appears to be a good argument out of pure nothingness.
My old roommate at MIT used to make free phone calls to Israel by tricking the old Dormline phone system. I don't remember how he did it. Ah, good old Dormline. "I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is imaginary. Please rotate your telephone 90 degrees and try again."
Companies that charge for music make more money than companies that give it away.
In other news, gravity is still in effect, and time is still going forward.
In the mean time, the music distributors, with even less musical talent than Karl Rove, are still making millions, and all of my musician friends are still broke.
Way back whem, my buddy Mike and I heard about this Speakeasy place that was going to start up an Internet cafe in Belltown. They had not yet opened up for business, so we went around back to the alley and knocked on the door. Nearby we could hear Mark Arm from Mudhoney practicing on guitar somewhere. The door opened and we met the owners, the Apgars. They were totally cool and really knew what they were doing. When the cafe opened, we used to go there all the time. They had a bunch of machines for public use. They had coffee, beer, food, live music, and it was a perfect place to hang. They realized that they weren't utilizing all of the T1 that they were paying gobs of money for, so they decided to sell some dialup accounts. This is the beginning of the Speakeasy that the rest of you know. Soon after, the cafe burned down in a terrible accident that also consumed a favorite pool hall, the 2-11 Club. By then, the dialup business had really taken off, and they never bothered to reopen the cafe. The Apgars sold out at some point to the current management.
Best Buy. Sheesh. I hardly ever go in there, when I do, I realize that the Target next door has much better prices and much friendlier folks, and I shake my head and walk out. Speakeasy has died, and now its zombie corpse will haunt us. It just goes to show you that everything good will eventually turn to crap.
Two stroke engines are stinking messes. They smell bad, they leave an oil film all over everything nearby. Most civilized people have outlawed them. The oil vapor will sicken any people or animals that are nearby, especially for extended periods. Heaven help the poor slob who has to hike next to one.
We live in a denial-based society where everything is somebody else's fault. Instead of modifying our behavior or actions to accomodate reality, we come up with some reason to blame our failures on others. Here the railroad fails to provide a safe workplace, so they try to blame it on the genetics of their employees. Do anything except own up to the problem and admit that something might need to change on their part. Next they will want detailed interviews with family members so they can screen out anyone whose parents didn't nuture them "correctly". It won't stop until we live in a Brave New World. The whole process gets institutionalized, and they call it 'idealogy', where facts and reality are inconvenient impediments. Anyone who studies circuits knows that a system needs to apply negative feedback to improve the quality of the output. We have disconnected the feedback and replaced it with essentially noise. This is why our culture is doomed.
What open-source project in their right mind would accept a patch or any kind of contribution from these folks? Personally, I wouldn't allow a SCO employee to tell me what time it is, because they might turn around and claim that all my intellectual property belongs to them. All their enhancements are just empty vapor because they will never be of use to anyone else.
It just goes to show you how twisted and obscure Windows is. Even Microsoft's own people don't know how their operating system works. How can they expect to keep it reliable and virus free if they don't even understand what processes need to be running?
One of the nicer features of ant, one that doesn't seem to be mentioned, is its JUnit integration. There is a very JUnit reporting mechanism built into ant. It wasn't exactly what I wanted, but with a fairly small modification (superclassing, no actual code mods) I was able to get it to work just as I wanted it to.
Hey, make fiends, try this: add new functionality to make, extending its syntax. PITA, you say. It's very simple with ant.
I want to hear about the techniques used by "the major database vendors" to deal with the thread blocking issue. Maybe programs like MySQL can take advantage of these enhancements, too.
This doesn't appear flattering for Apple, but it's apparent that they have been scrambling to get the user experience right in OSX, at the expense of sub-optimal kernel development. Hopefully they will be able to refocus on the kernel and the compiler and get the performance up to what Linux people expect. Thread blocking will become much more of an issue as multi-core CPUs become mainstream.
Linux is a good example of what can happen here. They got crummy benchmarks, the kernel guys identified the bottlenecks, experiments were written to overcome the bottlenecks, and eventually the fixes made it into the kernel and everyone benefits. Notice how Microsoft doesn't brag about performance any more?
Check out Intersystems Cache. http://www.intersys.com/ It successfully merges SQL and objects in the same database. Very nice. (Disclaimer: I work there).
It's basically using the grass and the soil as solar panels. The problem with this is that growing all this grass requires using soil that could otherwise grow food. If you grow on polluted ground then anything absorbed by the grass will also end up in the air. You also have to supply water and nutrients to the soil to grow the grass, and these are not recovered. All that solar energy will also do a marvellous job of converting irrigation water into water vapor, wasting all the energy you spent to get it there. In the end you are probably not doing any better than solar cells or anything else.
There are no closed systems for generating energy. Harnessing nuclear energy requires technological and logistical skills that we clearly do not possess. The only long term answer is to cut back consumption to the point where we are not messing with Mother Nature.
Grass growing in the ground IS the ground. When the grass dies the carbon stays in the ground. It took a whole lot of solar energy for that grass to pull the carbon out of the air.
The problem with that is that you need to put the potential energy back into the carbon in order to get it out of the air and back into the ground. Where does that energy come from?
The laws of thermodynamics won't let you win or even break even here. It all sucks. The only answer is to not use the energy in the first place.
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The government outsources everything now. They (or one of the companies they hire) could collect up all of your email and web surfing logs and send it to credit agencies, insurance companies, even your employer.
What if you emailed your friend that you had a crummy day at work, and the next day, your employer waves a copy of it in your face and says "you're fired".
What if you surfed around looking for alternatives to your current insurance, and your carrier decides to drop you because you're not a loyal customer?
They could do it all in the name of 'maximizing shareholder value'.
With all the VMware instances and the old clunkers in the basement, I can't even figure out how many Linux systems I have.
I'd like to see someone make a computer that can navigate a spaceship to the moon and back without mathematics.
One of the 'hot' new topics in computers is heat dissipation. How to get anywhere in this without thermodynamics and its underlying mathematics? If this is not computer science, what is?
Maybe you can get logo turtles to make pretty pictures on the screen without understanding the math involved, but real computers exist in the real world. We use math to understand our world, so we need to use math to figure out how the computers interact with it.
It's a natural extension of templates.
My chemistry teacher in high school taught us to think this way, you got no credit for your math unless you carried the units around.
- There doesn't have to be a big performance degradation, most of the work can be done at compile time.
.
- Like templates, you are free to ignore all of this if you want to, keep coding the way you have been, and maybe dabble with it where it's convenient.
- It's okay to accept some overhead in the name of helping to ensure program correctness. If you disagree with this statement, then you'd better be prepared to show me the blisters on your fingers from entering code via the front-panel switches.
- If there's a real concern for performance, there can be a run-time switch to turn off the checking, which you can enable after you've run the code through all your testing.
"Pirate" is the new inflammatory word used by tech writers these days to invoke passion and get page clicks.
Just like "terrorist", it has a fuzzy meaning and can be abused to no end.
I tried several times in private email to get the author of this piece to define the word "pirate", but she would not or could not.
They could keep the service going if they charged a small monthly fee. I mean really small, on the order of couple of dollars a month, at the most, hopefully less. At that rate, it's not worth the effort for anyone to "misuse" (redistribute) it.
It looks like someone's borrowed a theme from politics: the straw man. Take something that doesn't exist (this hypothetical band of developers and their even more hypothetical 'license pressure') and spin and pound your fist, and maybe noone will notice that you've created what appears to be a good argument out of pure nothingness.
This guy needs a better lawyer.
My old roommate at MIT used to make free phone calls to Israel by tricking the old Dormline phone system. I don't remember how he did it. Ah, good old Dormline. "I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is imaginary. Please rotate your telephone 90 degrees and try again."
Ha ha.
This is not Guitar Hero.
Companies that charge for music make more money than companies that give it away.
In other news, gravity is still in effect, and time is still going forward.
In the mean time, the music distributors, with even less musical talent than Karl Rove, are still making millions, and all of my musician friends are still broke.
Way back whem, my buddy Mike and I heard about this Speakeasy place that was going to start up an Internet cafe in Belltown. They had not yet opened up for business, so we went around back to the alley and knocked on the door. Nearby we could hear Mark Arm from Mudhoney practicing on guitar somewhere. The door opened and we met the owners, the Apgars. They were totally cool and really knew what they were doing. When the cafe opened, we used to go there all the time. They had a bunch of machines for public use. They had coffee, beer, food, live music, and it was a perfect place to hang. They realized that they weren't utilizing all of the T1 that they were paying gobs of money for, so they decided to sell some dialup accounts. This is the beginning of the Speakeasy that the rest of you know. Soon after, the cafe burned down in a terrible accident that also consumed a favorite pool hall, the 2-11 Club. By then, the dialup business had really taken off, and they never bothered to reopen the cafe. The Apgars sold out at some point to the current management.
Best Buy. Sheesh. I hardly ever go in there, when I do, I realize that the Target next door has much better prices and much friendlier folks, and I shake my head and walk out. Speakeasy has died, and now its zombie corpse will haunt us. It just goes to show you that everything good will eventually turn to crap.
Two stroke engines are stinking messes. They smell bad, they leave an oil film all over everything nearby. Most civilized people have outlawed them. The oil vapor will sicken any people or animals that are nearby, especially for extended periods. Heaven help the poor slob who has to hike next to one.
We live in a denial-based society where everything is somebody else's fault. Instead of modifying our behavior or actions to accomodate reality, we come up with some reason to blame our failures on others. Here the railroad fails to provide a safe workplace, so they try to blame it on the genetics of their employees. Do anything except own up to the problem and admit that something might need to change on their part. Next they will want detailed interviews with family members so they can screen out anyone whose parents didn't nuture them "correctly". It won't stop until we live in a Brave New World. The whole process gets institutionalized, and they call it 'idealogy', where facts and reality are inconvenient impediments. Anyone who studies circuits knows that a system needs to apply negative feedback to improve the quality of the output. We have disconnected the feedback and replaced it with essentially noise. This is why our culture is doomed.
Okay, put an RJ-45 jack and a 110-volt outlet at every table, and at each barstool. Wireless? What wireless?
What open-source project in their right mind would accept a patch or any kind of contribution from these folks? Personally, I wouldn't allow a SCO employee to tell me what time it is, because they might turn around and claim that all my intellectual property belongs to them. All their enhancements are just empty vapor because they will never be of use to anyone else.
It just goes to show you how twisted and obscure Windows is. Even Microsoft's own people don't know how their operating system works. How can they expect to keep it reliable and virus free if they don't even understand what processes need to be running?
Hey, make fiends, try this: add new functionality to make, extending its syntax. PITA, you say. It's very simple with ant.
It's even older than that. Check out Steve Strassman's MIT Master's Thesis from 1986.
I want to hear about the techniques used by "the major database vendors" to deal with the thread blocking issue. Maybe programs like MySQL can take advantage of these enhancements, too.
This doesn't appear flattering for Apple, but it's apparent that they have been scrambling to get the user experience right in OSX, at the expense of sub-optimal kernel development. Hopefully they will be able to refocus on the kernel and the compiler and get the performance up to what Linux people expect. Thread blocking will become much more of an issue as multi-core CPUs become mainstream.
Linux is a good example of what can happen here. They got crummy benchmarks, the kernel guys identified the bottlenecks, experiments were written to overcome the bottlenecks, and eventually the fixes made it into the kernel and everyone benefits. Notice how Microsoft doesn't brag about performance any more?
Sunshine is the best disinfectant. - Tip O'Neill
Check out Intersystems Cache. http://www.intersys.com/ It successfully merges SQL and objects in the same database. Very nice. (Disclaimer: I work there).
How is this different from Kerberos? Why not just use kerberos?
I thought about this some more:
It's basically using the grass and the soil as solar panels. The problem with this is that growing all this grass requires using soil that could otherwise grow food. If you grow on polluted ground then anything absorbed by the grass will also end up in the air. You also have to supply water and nutrients to the soil to grow the grass, and these are not recovered. All that solar energy will also do a marvellous job of converting irrigation water into water vapor, wasting all the energy you spent to get it there. In the end you are probably not doing any better than solar cells or anything else.
There are no closed systems for generating energy. Harnessing nuclear energy requires technological and logistical skills that we clearly do not possess. The only long term answer is to cut back consumption to the point where we are not messing with Mother Nature.
Grass growing in the ground IS the ground. When the grass dies the carbon stays in the ground. It took a whole lot of solar energy for that grass to pull the carbon out of the air.
The problem with that is that you need to put the potential energy back into the carbon in order to get it out of the air and back into the ground. Where does that energy come from?
The laws of thermodynamics won't let you win or even break even here. It all sucks. The only answer is to not use the energy in the first place.