Honestly, once a business starts adopting processes for accomplishing tasks as opposed to having smart trustworthy productive people who justGetItDone, its time to bail. Its not so much the processes themselves that will grind you into depression, it is the people who advocate them. There's the in house "process expert" who oddly enough is almost run down in the parking lot every night and eats lunch alone...although everyone pretends to like him when he gives a "mandatory company-wide" indoctrination session.
There's the idiotic management software that is nothing but an anchor on a speedboat to anyone with a brain.
There's the loss of perspective - everyone gets so tied up in meeting the paper goals, no one bothers remembering about the product being awesome or people getting to shine during its creation.
Just look around at the poeple who send in their two-weeks when these processes are put in place...if you think these are the best producers in the office, time to start writing yours too.
I have found that over the years, very few problems require complex algorithms that have not already been coded. Knowing a library (STL, etc) very well and the language that implements it has almost always trumped knowing how to implement mergesort. If you think differently, go code up quicksort and then look at the std implementation....whoops, you are not as smart as you thought...the std library uses all sorts of language tweaks to blow the doors off of yours.
This only shows how poorly you have read...
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Exultant
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· Score: 1
Having read practically every manor scifi book/series and every significant fiction work available during my lifetime, I can tell you that by far the more meaningful fiction has been outside of scifi. Some scifi does have messaging beyond the geekspehere (Heinlein), but mostly we're talking about stuff you should have left behind when you were fifteen.
Why are the fictions reviews scifi only????
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Exultant
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Come on, we're all grown ups (well, some of us are)...doesn't anyone read anything outside of the scifi and fantasy realm???
You would not want RHEL on a server but you would install FreeBSD, which has had serious issues throughout its latest release cycle. I think you spend more time reading about these products than using them.
The problem is that people perceive Sparc to be dead...thats all it takes. Look at Alpha - fastest platform in its day but it had the stink of death even though a well-heeled company (more than one through acquisitions) was being it.
In any case I don't see how Sun can resurrect Sparc at this point, even if they were to bring a breakthrough performance product to market (doubtful if they haven't announced anything firm by 2005).
What is a "high end" chip anyway? You have fast chips and you have slow chips.
Many of these Valley firms are hiring developers from the east coast, IIT (India) and universities in Russia and China. The proximity to Stanford and Cal is not relevant anymore. In fact I might say it is even irrelevant. These universities have moved on to biotech and to a lesser extent nanotech anyway as "big idea" fields.
When many of the pioneers of "the Valley" first set up shop, they were building on cheap farmland far away from the sky-high rents of San Francisco, and even Palo Alto. Look at a map of a place like Cupertino in the 60s...you will be blown away...nothing but farms. Some tech companies looked for cheap digs...and look at things now.
If that's your argument, HIV is not a virus either, since you need to make a choice to have sex to get it.
But the act in which you willfully engaged was intercourse - the HIV contraction was a side-effect, an unintended consequence. In the case of adopting the GPL, there is no side-effect, it is the direct consequence. So your analogy...well, it isn't an analogy at all.
N attempts to turn TV into a general purpose information appliance, N failures. This will be no different - no, I do not want to shop for eBay auctions on my television.
NetMail will enable a great webmail app (one day)...but who will run the server?
There is a great extension for syncing my Firefox bookmarks with an FTP server...but who will run this server?
iFolder allows easy syncing to a Novell BlahBlah server...who is running one?
Barring running these servers on my home box or a domain I lease myself (yuck), these seem like impotent solutions. Someone needs to open servers for these clients or whats the point.
While I appreciate what the mono folks are doing, I have to admit a cringe when I see ".exe" and ".dll" files on my system. Of course its just an extension i could symlink to anything I want...and whats in a name? Enough apparently to make a difference.
I think the key issue for mono is that most open source programmers are not overly concerned with Windows interoperability. Its not that they don't see the value of migrating Windows users to new open code...its that they just don't seem to care.
In any case mono is just one more Gtk binding as far as I am concerned...and there will never be an "official" Gnome language beyond C since there are too many powerful advocates in the various camps. Python would likely make the most sense (even though I am not a Python coder), but you have people still rooting for "open" Java (that which is supported by gcj) and C# via mono.
...that last year's "big story" (Dan Rather falsification of Bush military records controversy), was broken by bloggers.
Big Media (NYTimes, etc) long term are in no better shape than record or film companies. They claim to be the arbiters of intellectual property but in reality we see that once you eliminate manufacturing and distribution costs, they are no better or no different than a guy in his basement. These firms were not in fact media firms but manufacturers and distributors.
You're reaching. Its not that there isn't oil out there - its the cost of extracting it. There is plenty of oil right under good ol US soil...just too hard to get out at current prices. The tar sands in Canada (yeah we all read the Wired puff piece) is going to be very expensive to get out and the Canadians aren't going to let the US pollute and pillage their country like the Saudis do.
Sorry, the Arabs still control the price, even in your scenario.
The President, all of Congress, the Senate, the Federal Reserve, all foreign central banks, all major economists at lending institutions, all CEOs of major corporations, all state and municipal leaders...
Saudi Arabia in particular and the Middle East in general control the liquidity of the world's oil market through OPEC control and access to most of the world's easily obtainable crude supply. The United States has done nothing but support this hegemony with puppet regimes, payouts, turning-a-blind-eye, etc.
Seriously, the breakdown of imports and been brought up a thousand times and shot down a thousand times. Until Arabs lose control of the liquidity of the market, they control oil prices.
I am probably wrong, perhaps someone can fill me in as to how a these types of services meet a need that can't be built on top of HTTP (or are they in fact sitting on top of HTTP?) ??
How would spending $280 billion on alternative fuel research cow the public into self-censuring criticism of the government, its policies, the military, etc??
The war on terror has been an incredibly useful device for the Republican party...they get to broaden their appeal to military types and flat-out bigots, they get free reign to pillage Alaska for a miniscule amount of oil, they get to paint criticism as "unpatriotic", and they get to defer serious debate because of course "we're at war!".
They wouldn't get any of this out of alternative fuels research, and to boot they would lose the oil and military graft dollars that got them there in the first place.
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There's the idiotic management software that is nothing but an anchor on a speedboat to anyone with a brain.
There's the loss of perspective - everyone gets so tied up in meeting the paper goals, no one bothers remembering about the product being awesome or people getting to shine during its creation.
Just look around at the poeple who send in their two-weeks when these processes are put in place...if you think these are the best producers in the office, time to start writing yours too.
I have found that over the years, very few problems require complex algorithms that have not already been coded. Knowing a library (STL, etc) very well and the language that implements it has almost always trumped knowing how to implement mergesort. If you think differently, go code up quicksort and then look at the std implementation....whoops, you are not as smart as you thought...the std library uses all sorts of language tweaks to blow the doors off of yours.
Having read practically every manor scifi book/series and every significant fiction work available during my lifetime, I can tell you that by far the more meaningful fiction has been outside of scifi. Some scifi does have messaging beyond the geekspehere (Heinlein), but mostly we're talking about stuff you should have left behind when you were fifteen.
Come on, we're all grown ups (well, some of us are)...doesn't anyone read anything outside of the scifi and fantasy realm???
Was it high performance? x86 outperforms all of your examples on a per-CPU basis.
Was it incredible graphics? These geezers don't have access to modern gpus.
Was it rugged hardware? x86 boxes are now equipped as good or better than any of your examples.
I'm not sure what it is you got out of using these systems that represents a legit advantage.
You would not want RHEL on a server but you would install FreeBSD, which has had serious issues throughout its latest release cycle. I think you spend more time reading about these products than using them.
In any case I don't see how Sun can resurrect Sparc at this point, even if they were to bring a breakthrough performance product to market (doubtful if they haven't announced anything firm by 2005).
What is a "high end" chip anyway? You have fast chips and you have slow chips.
Many of these Valley firms are hiring developers from the east coast, IIT (India) and universities in Russia and China. The proximity to Stanford and Cal is not relevant anymore. In fact I might say it is even irrelevant. These universities have moved on to biotech and to a lesser extent nanotech anyway as "big idea" fields.
When many of the pioneers of "the Valley" first set up shop, they were building on cheap farmland far away from the sky-high rents of San Francisco, and even Palo Alto. Look at a map of a place like Cupertino in the 60s...you will be blown away...nothing but farms. Some tech companies looked for cheap digs...and look at things now.
But the act in which you willfully engaged was intercourse - the HIV contraction was a side-effect, an unintended consequence. In the case of adopting the GPL, there is no side-effect, it is the direct consequence. So your analogy...well, it isn't an analogy at all.
N attempts to turn TV into a general purpose information appliance, N failures. This will be no different - no, I do not want to shop for eBay auctions on my television.
There is a great extension for syncing my Firefox bookmarks with an FTP server...but who will run this server?
iFolder allows easy syncing to a Novell BlahBlah server...who is running one?
Barring running these servers on my home box or a domain I lease myself (yuck), these seem like impotent solutions. Someone needs to open servers for these clients or whats the point.
and no, that is not a typo
You mean besides the full SDKs that exist for Perl, Python, Ruby etc including good Gtk (and Qt!) bindings??
These languages have critical mass and are free. I won't mention viable alternatives such as Ruby because I grant that the developer base is tiny.
Come on, when a dead guy nearly sweeps the awards (regardless of the fact that Ray was talented), truly this an industry running out of options.
Wx looks crappy on every platform. Is this what they had in mind when they designed it for interoperability?
I think the key issue for mono is that most open source programmers are not overly concerned with Windows interoperability. Its not that they don't see the value of migrating Windows users to new open code...its that they just don't seem to care.
In any case mono is just one more Gtk binding as far as I am concerned...and there will never be an "official" Gnome language beyond C since there are too many powerful advocates in the various camps. Python would likely make the most sense (even though I am not a Python coder), but you have people still rooting for "open" Java (that which is supported by gcj) and C# via mono.
Big Media (NYTimes, etc) long term are in no better shape than record or film companies. They claim to be the arbiters of intellectual property but in reality we see that once you eliminate manufacturing and distribution costs, they are no better or no different than a guy in his basement. These firms were not in fact media firms but manufacturers and distributors.
Sorry, the Arabs still control the price, even in your scenario.
The President, all of Congress, the Senate, the Federal Reserve, all foreign central banks, all major economists at lending institutions, all CEOs of major corporations, all state and municipal leaders...
shall I continue?
Maybe these services layer on an extra confirmation mechanism...but isn't this what TCP performs in any case?
Seriously, the breakdown of imports and been brought up a thousand times and shot down a thousand times. Until Arabs lose control of the liquidity of the market, they control oil prices.
I am probably wrong, perhaps someone can fill me in as to how a these types of services meet a need that can't be built on top of HTTP (or are they in fact sitting on top of HTTP?) ??
The war on terror has been an incredibly useful device for the Republican party...they get to broaden their appeal to military types and flat-out bigots, they get free reign to pillage Alaska for a miniscule amount of oil, they get to paint criticism as "unpatriotic", and they get to defer serious debate because of course "we're at war!".
They wouldn't get any of this out of alternative fuels research, and to boot they would lose the oil and military graft dollars that got them there in the first place.
Sorry, wouldn't work!