The gmcs compiler is a demonstration of generics support that you can use right now, at least in a prototyping capacity. The mono team is watching the ball.
The mono team has released an incredible amount of code in a relatively short timespan. The mono codebase goes beyond a compiler and runtime - graphical bindings, documentation, and a full IDE are all being rolled out as one more strong alternative in the linux development world. Added to which there are already "for real" apps out there you can use today that are not just toys - for example the Muine music player.
Too many people will get hung up over the Microsoft angle and notions that mono is out to wipe out all other development toolkits. This is nonsense. What the mono team has done is upended a Microsoft strategy - that Windows is differentiated because of the.Net platform. Now we have a level playing field on top of all of the other inherent advantages of open source.
First of all, SQL databases can be installed and played with on your PC. Its close enough to the "big" databases to get your foot in the door. No one expects a new grad to have mastered the latest vedrsion of Oracle.
As for Cisco equipment...well, first of all you mention SQL and Cisco in the same sentence...what is it you really want to do? Databases or networking? If you want ot do networking, numerous training firms will cert you on high end networking equipment...you will have to pay to play but you will make it back on wages, assuming you get trained on the right equipment from the right vendor.
We do not equate private possession of water woth private possession of cesium chloride, which can also be used for beneficial and pernicious purposes. Society finds a balance, and in this case I can say that the potential threat of fires, damage, etc far outweighs someone's need to have a hobby.
By time SBC actually gets round to rolling this out they will have subverted this project in favor of some wireless scheme. NOTE - SBC already ditched on this once - the project was called "Pony" or something like that - this was maybe three years ago.
Incredibly expensive sitting ducks. Sinkable for 1% of their cost. Oh, they have Vulcan guns that can shoot down a missile? Okay, can they shoot down ten missiles simultaneously? No matter what argument you provide, the attacker still has the cost advantage, its just a matter of numbers.
Once again, to anyone who makes idiotic claims about the invulnerability of these vessels and the strategies to employ them, I give you the USS Cole. Ooops, no one thought of that.
Terrorism is the future of warfare, not star wars. American military thinkers still have not wrapped their heads around this although to his credit, the otherwise snakelike Donald Rumsfeld has tried to pound this in to them, although with little success.
International airports, seaways, telephone lines and cross border highways are the next attack vectors.
The British military also funded horse cavalry even as tank combat was evolving in WW1. Sometimes it just takes a very loud BOOM to get people to change their thinking. That has still not happened even after 9/11, but the inevitable use of bioweapons or atomic weapons inside a US city will probably do the trick, and at this rate of anti-US sentiment, this is virtually inevitable in the next three decades.
You have a good point. In Vietnam the winning side took 10x the losses but was determined to win. The problem for the US was that their adversary had decided it would fight to the last man. There are two routes you can go in this scenario - a costly 'total' war (as with Japan, that also basically fought to the very end) or abandonment (Vietnam). Its not clear yet what route the US will take in the Middle East.
Your videogame fantasies nothwithstanding, everyone has known that if war actually sparked between the Koreas, Seoul would be levelled and there is little the US could do to stop it...unless you think the navy can destroy the five thousand pieces of mobile artillery the North has pointed at it.
The US has been withdrawing from this conflict partly because the South Koreans are no longer interested in proceeding as a US aggressor proxy when in fact it seeks to reunify with the North, not destroy it.
The bottom line is that the only times in the last forty years the US has fought a serious military adversary - Vietnam and Bosnia - much of the high tech that was promoted as being decisive failed. A conflict between he Koreas would probably show this again.
I think the purpose here is fighting a war without risking your own solders' lives.
Most NATO nations have had the capability to do this for decades. The US has had this capacity since it put very big guns on battleships in WW2. The original posters question stands - what kind of conflict will this be used in? Nothing we are currently facing.
Saudi Arabia has the world's largest secret police force yet it can't find people videotaping murders of foreigners in its own cities. The US has a hundred thousand men in Baghdad who likewise can't seem to locate the same types right under their noses.
Killer satellites. Rail guns. Anti-missile tech. A trillion dollars or so spent that has absolutely nothing to do with defending US citizens from the most perniciious threat they face today - an attack in their own cities using easily obtainable materials.
The British military funded horse cavalry right through to WW1. Only after the tank made it obvious did they try to actually meet the present threat instead of living in the past. The US military cannot escape its relationship with military contractors who love big expensive science projects.
You don't always get what you pay for. You will often find that the decline in quality of the German vehicles is consistent with their recent manufacture outside of Germany. Not sure why the Germans cannot export their methods like the Japanese can - Toyota etc have very high quality rankings for their North American plants.
Specifically you are correct, what I was referring to was the ability to punch the glass out like a window, or shatter it like a jar, which I think we both understand you do not want to be able to do.
My understanding is that safety glass is engineered to shatter in a way that the pane deforms but does not come out of the frame, at least for low speed impacts. This is why you see glass that actually looks "bent" by the shape of an impact - the glass has shattered but the shards stay adhered together along cleavage lines.
Your concerns were outweighed by the need to keep glass from nicely shattering and shredding passengers decades ago. Go look at accident photos prior to the age of safety glass. Not pretty.
The chance of my car being submerged in water is maybe ten million times less likely than the chance a collision will press my face against the windsheild or door glass at a high rate of speed, in which case I definitely do not want to be able to shatter that glass on impact - if I do, if forms a guillotene that take off a body part when I retract.
I'm amazed to hear that the major autos makers can figure out how to use nanotech to build car parts yet the 30% increase in efficiency demanded by new California emmissions guidelines is apparently beyond the scope of all known science and apparently will bankrupt them, according to a suit they filed to render said guidelines illegal.
You're right - if you work off of random tarballs off of the net, you will end up with a hosed install. Stick with the major distribution automation tools - apt, yum etc. Packages in the repositories are typically kept "sane".
The problems on Earth are 100% political, and no matter how long we wait the problems of poverty, fanatics, etc... will be with us.
But when we go to Mars all of these issues will go away, right? Resources will be even harder to obtain than they would be on Earth...I would expect conflict to break out within the first decade of colonization.
They in fact prepared a study specifically stating that wars over natural resources could start as soon as the next two years as ecologically issues plague global communities.
and yet we can all still get a glass of water if need be. That seens sustainable to me.
Ignorance is bliss. Count the forest fires each summer - they are rising as sprawl consumes the Southwest in the midst of a long term drought. Measure the levels of The Colorado River. Oh, you also seem to forget water rationing in California not even a decade back...
Its good they talked to scifi writers about this because that is all it is - scifi. We can't even terraform the Western US in a sustainable fashion (we are technically in a worse drought than the dust bowl right now), so why would we think we could do it on Mars?
You want to make sure they have a feel for the tech but frankly they are not hiring an engineer, they are hiring an exec. Are you really concerned that the VP know as much or more about the tech than you? Isn't that your job?
Tech will be -part- of this person's job, but only part, since they will be managing the business side of things.
Probably more important is the question "can us engineers work with this person?"
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The gmcs compiler is a demonstration of generics support that you can use right now, at least in a prototyping capacity. The mono team is watching the ball.
Too many people will get hung up over the Microsoft angle and notions that mono is out to wipe out all other development toolkits. This is nonsense. What the mono team has done is upended a Microsoft strategy - that Windows is differentiated because of the .Net platform. Now we have a level playing field on top of all of the other inherent advantages of open source.
Bravo and thanks mono team.
I am hopeful for the future of Gstreamer, but right now it is very buggy, and probably not reliable enough for a full corporate distro to endorse.
As for Cisco equipment...well, first of all you mention SQL and Cisco in the same sentence...what is it you really want to do? Databases or networking? If you want ot do networking, numerous training firms will cert you on high end networking equipment...you will have to pay to play but you will make it back on wages, assuming you get trained on the right equipment from the right vendor.
We do not equate private possession of water woth private possession of cesium chloride, which can also be used for beneficial and pernicious purposes. Society finds a balance, and in this case I can say that the potential threat of fires, damage, etc far outweighs someone's need to have a hobby.
By time SBC actually gets round to rolling this out they will have subverted this project in favor of some wireless scheme. NOTE - SBC already ditched on this once - the project was called "Pony" or something like that - this was maybe three years ago.
Once again, to anyone who makes idiotic claims about the invulnerability of these vessels and the strategies to employ them, I give you the USS Cole. Ooops, no one thought of that.
International airports, seaways, telephone lines and cross border highways are the next attack vectors.
The British military also funded horse cavalry even as tank combat was evolving in WW1. Sometimes it just takes a very loud BOOM to get people to change their thinking. That has still not happened even after 9/11, but the inevitable use of bioweapons or atomic weapons inside a US city will probably do the trick, and at this rate of anti-US sentiment, this is virtually inevitable in the next three decades.
You have a good point. In Vietnam the winning side took 10x the losses but was determined to win. The problem for the US was that their adversary had decided it would fight to the last man. There are two routes you can go in this scenario - a costly 'total' war (as with Japan, that also basically fought to the very end) or abandonment (Vietnam). Its not clear yet what route the US will take in the Middle East.
The US has been withdrawing from this conflict partly because the South Koreans are no longer interested in proceeding as a US aggressor proxy when in fact it seeks to reunify with the North, not destroy it.
The bottom line is that the only times in the last forty years the US has fought a serious military adversary - Vietnam and Bosnia - much of the high tech that was promoted as being decisive failed. A conflict between he Koreas would probably show this again.
Most NATO nations have had the capability to do this for decades. The US has had this capacity since it put very big guns on battleships in WW2. The original posters question stands - what kind of conflict will this be used in? Nothing we are currently facing.
Saudi Arabia has the world's largest secret police force yet it can't find people videotaping murders of foreigners in its own cities. The US has a hundred thousand men in Baghdad who likewise can't seem to locate the same types right under their noses.
The British military funded horse cavalry right through to WW1. Only after the tank made it obvious did they try to actually meet the present threat instead of living in the past. The US military cannot escape its relationship with military contractors who love big expensive science projects.
You don't always get what you pay for. You will often find that the decline in quality of the German vehicles is consistent with their recent manufacture outside of Germany. Not sure why the Germans cannot export their methods like the Japanese can - Toyota etc have very high quality rankings for their North American plants.
My understanding is that safety glass is engineered to shatter in a way that the pane deforms but does not come out of the frame, at least for low speed impacts. This is why you see glass that actually looks "bent" by the shape of an impact - the glass has shattered but the shards stay adhered together along cleavage lines.
So if Boston has such great mass transit, why are they undertaking the most expensive highway project ever?
The chance of my car being submerged in water is maybe ten million times less likely than the chance a collision will press my face against the windsheild or door glass at a high rate of speed, in which case I definitely do not want to be able to shatter that glass on impact - if I do, if forms a guillotene that take off a body part when I retract.
I'm amazed to hear that the major autos makers can figure out how to use nanotech to build car parts yet the 30% increase in efficiency demanded by new California emmissions guidelines is apparently beyond the scope of all known science and apparently will bankrupt them, according to a suit they filed to render said guidelines illegal.
You're right - if you work off of random tarballs off of the net, you will end up with a hosed install. Stick with the major distribution automation tools - apt, yum etc. Packages in the repositories are typically kept "sane".
But when we go to Mars all of these issues will go away, right? Resources will be even harder to obtain than they would be on Earth...I would expect conflict to break out within the first decade of colonization.
They in fact prepared a study specifically stating that wars over natural resources could start as soon as the next two years as ecologically issues plague global communities.
Ignorance is bliss. Count the forest fires each summer - they are rising as sprawl consumes the Southwest in the midst of a long term drought. Measure the levels of The Colorado River. Oh, you also seem to forget water rationing in California not even a decade back...
Its good they talked to scifi writers about this because that is all it is - scifi. We can't even terraform the Western US in a sustainable fashion (we are technically in a worse drought than the dust bowl right now), so why would we think we could do it on Mars?
Mozilla is not bloated code - everything in there does something. Bloat refers to useless code.
Tech will be -part- of this person's job, but only part, since they will be managing the business side of things.
Probably more important is the question "can us engineers work with this person?"