If we say each idiot ways 80 kgs on average, they'd explode with a force of a 1700 megaton bomb per idiot via E=mc^2. Somehow I doubt there's be many smart people left either, hell some of the million cities will explode with the force of a million gigaton bombs. I think might actually apply as inventing anti-terraforming while you're at it.
If I get a wild hair and decide to try the netbook form factor again I may get stuck buying a Macbook Air unless somebody else has built in a full-sized keyboard to their netbooks.
Haven't looked at the Mac Air but my netbook is 26 cm wide. Just from left Ctrl to right Ctrl I measure around 29 cm on a full size keyboard, and that is if you don't want arrow keys or insert / delete / home / end / page up / page down. So unless you have a fold-out keyboard it's just not possible to do a full size keyboard in that form factor.
Poorly configured DHCP server that doesn't relay DNS servers?
Ping is your friend, usually the following three step process will tell you: 1. Can I ping the internal network by IP? If not, there's something wrong with hardware/cable. 2. Can I ping an Internet server by IP? If not, there's something wrong with the router setup. 3. Can I ping an Internet server by name? If not, there is a DNS problem.
Never had a problem with this myself. By the way, regarding wireless you may want to try installing a newer kernel version. I had the same issue with my netbook, it was too new for wireless suppport in my distro.
Well, I can only answer this for myself. I have a desktop at home, which for all sorts of reasons (CPU, GPU, memory, dual monitors, full size keyboard+++) is where I like to do anything serious. When I want to go mobile, I want something small, light and cheap I can bring almost everywhere. I'm not a road warrior, so I don't need a powerful laptop. I'm not hauling it from site to site so I don't need a desktop replacement - I did have one of those as a consultant though. I just need a real computer to go and the 10" screen, cramped keyboard and anemic performance are acceptable tradeoffs.
It might get 2.6.38, decision to be made around Christmas. I would think this might influence them enough to include it.
Doubtful. Kernel releases are on a ~3 month schedule and 2.6.36 came out in October, that puts 37 in January and 38 in April which is way too late. They've been very regular with one month of merges, two months of weekly RCs for the last 3-4 years so the chances of an early release is slim..
If you don't care about having it in a release, then the kernel team already has a PPA with all the releases + rcs + daily builds. I would think the next *buntu release (11.04) will have 2.6.37, so you probably won't see this in an official release until october next year...
Any settlers to Mars would need certain things provided to them, regularly, for the foreseeable future (at least a year or two):
* air * food * water
With various recycling methods it's likely we'd only need to send filters, though I suspect we'd have to send them for far longer than a year or two. A probably equally big problem that's not on your list is power. At the pole you can find the biggest extremes of up to +27C but also down to -143C. If you do the "subtropics" as a permanent base would then it'll vary between -20C to -90C. That is not impossible - we have had arctic/antarctic bases that survive that cold but they burn a *lot* of power, more if you need plants to grow both for air and food. Somehow I doubt radioactive isotopes is a good way to heat people, so it'd have to be solar panels. Check out the rover specs, they run less than 100W a day. How much would you need to heat a human colony from -90C to +20C? Even if it's burrowed into the ground and isolated as hell? That's a pretty huge solar panel array. That'll need replacement every so often because the panels lose efficiency. It's a long way until we have anything like a manufacture of those. I'd say we'd be lucky to have a colony that is self-sufficient for the basics within 50 years.
You know, if China was a new US that was upsurping the old US, I'd agree with your sentiment. And as long as China keeps the focus internal and sticks to China's borders the rest of the world will be ok. What is scary is that China is by no means a democracy. It's a country where the government says jump and you ask "How high?" And that country is taking over most of the world's heavy production industry.
If the relation to China goes sour, it won't be like the Cold War. Then it was US industry versus Soviet industry. It'll be Chinese industry versus no industry. IP agreements depend on enforced contracts, the day China says here are the letters F and U they'll still have all the means to produce, while the US will have nothing.
I doubt China will try matching the US or Russia on nukes, they have some but that's not so essential. But what if they develop a proper rocket shield? Suddenly you're back to way more conventional warfare, with a billion soldiers and heavy industry now making ammunition and tanks. I'm not always that happy with how the US is the lone dominating military superpower, but as dominating military superpowers go I'd dread to see China in its place.
Unfortunately, here in reality, the economics profession is a complete fucking failure of a joke. Banks are run by dipshit morons propped up by criminal politicians. Corporate accounting is a total fraud. Ridiculous models conflate assets and technology and labor along with fiat currencies that have no real measurable value. The entire bullshit field is based on a fantasyland premise of perpetual growth in "utility" along with magical non-zero-sum mathematics at odds with even basic physics.
Oh, the anger. What exactly is your problem with today's money? It's not gold backed but you can very well buy gold for dollars. Or real estate or whatever else "lasting" value you seem to think it lacks. As for the subprime fiasco it takes two to make a subprime loan, but blame it all on the lenders.
"Utility" is a personal measure of something's worth, generally it's used in pricing theory. If utility > price you buy, otherwise you don't. It's not easily measured nor aggregated, so do tell where you've ever heard that in the context of "perpetual growth".
As for non-zero-sum mathematics, specialization is a non-zero-sum game. If that was wrong, pretty much every civilization has been wrong. It's even true when one person is another's superior in every way.
Even if person 1 can do both things faster, he's so much faster at making object B it's profitable for him to make Bs and trade them for As from person 2. This is just proving that specialization still holds.
I'm glad I don't work in your office, or have to pay the software bill every couple years MS decides to release a new version merely to read all the proprietary formats. Seriously--working in that kind of environment would be so miserable.
So what's it like working for the FSF? Seriously, of all the things that make a work environment good or bad you pick on THAT? The only company money I really care about is what'll be in my paycheck, if they piss it away on something I figure that comes out of the CEOs paycheck. We already have a deal and I'm already getting my pay, even if they saved a few hundred bucks it's unlikely much of that would show up in my paycheck. It's not even how it functions, they don't give me money just because they save it. My pay is generally ruled by the labor market, not their internal costs.
Considering one of the things they did was pull in the go-oo patches that include better docx support, I doubt that is the big fear. It's mostly only RMS that think closed source lock-out is a way to promote freedom.
If you were building a supercomputer operating system from the start you'd make very different design decisions than Linus did.
Heh, one of those "start clean and it'll be so much better". There's been a kazillion patches to Linux to make it scale better, if there was anything essential holding it back they'd fork and run their own supercomputer-linux. Yes, you would use very different design decisions, but those Linux made in the early 90s aren't longer in effect either.
Yes, but you do read about the developers who end up coding "like" one language in another language, often leading to poor code and many wtfs. Since hiring people is a bit of a lemon problem it might be safer to hire someone who is already a C#/Java/whatever developer, rather than bet that he's a good one that can jump between languages with ease. And if it looks like you've jumped on every language fad in the last decade, they'll probably think you're going to take them for a ride too. It's not always about what you can do, but rather what you can show that you can do. What you know you're capable of doesn't matter much if you're not given the chance and your skill isn't being recognized by others. The last one is particularly true in front of other employers, what makes you stand out from the crowd?
That's like a soldier claiming to have learned how to perform in combat by watching lots of war movies and playing Call of Duty "for months". (...) You learn them by doing and by having your code blow up because of those intricacies
Well, soldiers don't learn how to deal with mine fields by doing exactly. There's things you can learn by doing, and there's things that'll drive you insane. You will not learn multi-threaded programming by having your code randomly blowing up by a race condition, it'll only make it seem like the computer is crashing at random. Honestly some of the things with templates is just so odd you need to know how it's supposed to work to make sense of it. That said, having 100% knowledge of the oddities of the language doesn't make you a great coder, it's more like being a great football referee than a football player. That's a foul, page 172, chapter 8, paragraph 5 of the C++ standard.
Personally, my opinion of templates is that they're best left to basic libraries like STL or Qt that can implement things like QList and QMap so the rest of us don't have to. I've never felt the need to write any template code myself though I did try it just to work out how it was done. The closest thing I've had to do is implement the operator== and operator functions so comparison and sorting will work, and not much of that either since most things can be done via classes that already have everything implemented...
I don't know about the market for developers with/without SQL but there's definitively room for people on the reporting/BI/data warehousing side that know pretty much only SQL and the procedural variants like T-SQL, PL/SQL and so on. If you have a proper OLAP server then MDX is a must but it'll translate from SQL quickly. Throw in integration services or business objects too and you got plenty in that area, just look out so you don't become the one fixing up the layout on the TPS report.
For packages provided by the distro, it makes sense to have them all use their complex dependency tree. For installing some other version side by side, this sounds like a great tool. The problem with dependencies is that often a pebble turns into an avalanche by the time you're done. If you want the new version of *one* KDE app, it can drag pretty much the whole of KDE and every library they in turn depend on with it in an upgrade. I've had that happen and ended at 450MB to download and install, and that would pull almost all packages out of LTS support.
From the user's point of view it's completely illogical to upgrade the whole system just because you want a new feature in amaroK 2.4 while your distro only packages 2.3, you expect one application to install or upgrade independently of any other application. That does not happen with Linux. It is not just about new library versions, via dependencies you pull in unwanted version upgrades. As for security I'd rather have one potentially insecure package on my system than to pull most packages out of support, it probably open ups more vulnerabilities than it prevents.
I wouldn't want to run a dozen applications like that. But if it's one or two? I got no problem taking the extra overhead of a bit more memory use. And honestly, a lot of software I use isn't in contact with the "outside world" as such. Even if there is an exploit in a library, I'd never open any file crafted to exploit it. Obviously it is good in general to patch stuff, but it's not always that critical...
[Objective-]C[++], Pascal, Fortran, or whatever is just as portable as Java, if not more so.
Show me a GUI "Hello, world!" that'll run on every platform Java does - even if Java windows look like shit. Java isn't just a cross-platform language, it's also a cross-platform toolkit that hides all the OS specifics, far more than any of the languages you mention.
I fail to see why folks couldn't find a way to fork Java. Are there patents in place that would completely moot any such effort?
More or less. Some parts of Java are patented, but OpenJDK has been given some kind of grant. With the right amount of FUD from Oracle it'll be such a dark cloud over it that no one with deep pockets will dare pick it up. It'll linger, be used by hobbyists and small companies but eventually die.
Thus I must reiterate: You CAN just recompile the code if cross platform support was planned from the beginning.
Well, doh if you've specifically gone in for using cross platform tools and writing cross platform code it's just a recompile. Otherwise you've pretty much failed at that, haven't you?
It is hard when you start off writing the game using a system designed around vendor lock in... why wouldn't it be?
It is hard when you pick the best tool for your primary platform, giving you the lowest development cost, shortest time to market and lowest risk. You neglect that and pretend it's two perfectly equal tool chains and one will give you cross platform and the other not. If they're not equal then the Windows game can be out the door making money while the cross platform game is still in development going over budget, having performance, quality or stability issues, possibly even flopping or being canceled. Perhaps it's easy as a technical decision but it's far from easy to justify as a business decision. Unless the cross platform tools are superior even for Windows, but most game developers seem to strongly disagree with that.
Well EA and 2D Boy are both extremes on opposite side of the scale. I don't mean to be like EA that's releasing the same rehash over and over, but the first game in a series is rarely perfect. You probably had some budget/feature constraints, you didn't know what people would and wouldn't like and you hadn't had that much feedback. I think they're being silly in not releasing a World of Goo 2, unless they're really that out of ideas. Some game concepts are good as they are, "archetypes" of games and delivering a highly refined experience of them is perfectly fine. I loved the original Civilization, now I've played Civilization 5 and I'm still not tired of it. The essence of taking a civilization from the dawn of society through the ages is still exciting, even though many game mechanics have changed over the years.
My HR staff outsources their job responsibilities to online chat message boards. has anyone else had experience in replacing such a staff? [Warning: This post may cause recursion]
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If we say each idiot ways 80 kgs on average, they'd explode with a force of a 1700 megaton bomb per idiot via E=mc^2. Somehow I doubt there's be many smart people left either, hell some of the million cities will explode with the force of a million gigaton bombs. I think might actually apply as inventing anti-terraforming while you're at it.
If I get a wild hair and decide to try the netbook form factor again I may get stuck buying a Macbook Air unless somebody else has built in a full-sized keyboard to their netbooks.
Haven't looked at the Mac Air but my netbook is 26 cm wide. Just from left Ctrl to right Ctrl I measure around 29 cm on a full size keyboard, and that is if you don't want arrow keys or insert / delete / home / end / page up / page down. So unless you have a fold-out keyboard it's just not possible to do a full size keyboard in that form factor.
Poorly configured DHCP server that doesn't relay DNS servers?
Ping is your friend, usually the following three step process will tell you:
1. Can I ping the internal network by IP? If not, there's something wrong with hardware/cable.
2. Can I ping an Internet server by IP? If not, there's something wrong with the router setup.
3. Can I ping an Internet server by name? If not, there is a DNS problem.
Never had a problem with this myself. By the way, regarding wireless you may want to try installing a newer kernel version. I had the same issue with my netbook, it was too new for wireless suppport in my distro.
That is not the netbook segment. It's the ultraportable segment, which has existed for a long, long time but at prices that made you cringe.
Well, I can only answer this for myself. I have a desktop at home, which for all sorts of reasons (CPU, GPU, memory, dual monitors, full size keyboard+++) is where I like to do anything serious. When I want to go mobile, I want something small, light and cheap I can bring almost everywhere. I'm not a road warrior, so I don't need a powerful laptop. I'm not hauling it from site to site so I don't need a desktop replacement - I did have one of those as a consultant though. I just need a real computer to go and the 10" screen, cramped keyboard and anemic performance are acceptable tradeoffs.
It might get 2.6.38, decision to be made around Christmas. I would think this might influence them enough to include it.
Doubtful. Kernel releases are on a ~3 month schedule and 2.6.36 came out in October, that puts 37 in January and 38 in April which is way too late. They've been very regular with one month of merges, two months of weekly RCs for the last 3-4 years so the chances of an early release is slim..
No, you only thought you did.
Signed, your adult kids 20 years from now
If you don't care about having it in a release, then the kernel team already has a PPA with all the releases + rcs + daily builds. I would think the next *buntu release (11.04) will have 2.6.37, so you probably won't see this in an official release until october next year...
We use the European version of "discover", it's new when it's new to us :)
Any settlers to Mars would need certain things provided to them, regularly, for the foreseeable future (at least a year or two):
* air
* food
* water
With various recycling methods it's likely we'd only need to send filters, though I suspect we'd have to send them for far longer than a year or two. A probably equally big problem that's not on your list is power. At the pole you can find the biggest extremes of up to +27C but also down to -143C. If you do the "subtropics" as a permanent base would then it'll vary between -20C to -90C. That is not impossible - we have had arctic/antarctic bases that survive that cold but they burn a *lot* of power, more if you need plants to grow both for air and food. Somehow I doubt radioactive isotopes is a good way to heat people, so it'd have to be solar panels. Check out the rover specs, they run less than 100W a day. How much would you need to heat a human colony from -90C to +20C? Even if it's burrowed into the ground and isolated as hell? That's a pretty huge solar panel array. That'll need replacement every so often because the panels lose efficiency. It's a long way until we have anything like a manufacture of those. I'd say we'd be lucky to have a colony that is self-sufficient for the basics within 50 years.
You know, if China was a new US that was upsurping the old US, I'd agree with your sentiment. And as long as China keeps the focus internal and sticks to China's borders the rest of the world will be ok. What is scary is that China is by no means a democracy. It's a country where the government says jump and you ask "How high?" And that country is taking over most of the world's heavy production industry.
If the relation to China goes sour, it won't be like the Cold War. Then it was US industry versus Soviet industry. It'll be Chinese industry versus no industry. IP agreements depend on enforced contracts, the day China says here are the letters F and U they'll still have all the means to produce, while the US will have nothing.
I doubt China will try matching the US or Russia on nukes, they have some but that's not so essential. But what if they develop a proper rocket shield? Suddenly you're back to way more conventional warfare, with a billion soldiers and heavy industry now making ammunition and tanks. I'm not always that happy with how the US is the lone dominating military superpower, but as dominating military superpowers go I'd dread to see China in its place.
Unfortunately, here in reality, the economics profession is a complete fucking failure of a joke. Banks are run by dipshit morons propped up by criminal politicians. Corporate accounting is a total fraud. Ridiculous models conflate assets and technology and labor along with fiat currencies that have no real measurable value. The entire bullshit field is based on a fantasyland premise of perpetual growth in "utility" along with magical non-zero-sum mathematics at odds with even basic physics.
Oh, the anger. What exactly is your problem with today's money? It's not gold backed but you can very well buy gold for dollars. Or real estate or whatever else "lasting" value you seem to think it lacks. As for the subprime fiasco it takes two to make a subprime loan, but blame it all on the lenders.
"Utility" is a personal measure of something's worth, generally it's used in pricing theory. If utility > price you buy, otherwise you don't. It's not easily measured nor aggregated, so do tell where you've ever heard that in the context of "perpetual growth".
As for non-zero-sum mathematics, specialization is a non-zero-sum game. If that was wrong, pretty much every civilization has been wrong. It's even true when one person is another's superior in every way.
Even if person 1 can do both things faster, he's so much faster at making object B it's profitable for him to make Bs and trade them for As from person 2. This is just proving that specialization still holds.
I'm glad I don't work in your office, or have to pay the software bill every couple years MS decides to release a new version merely to read all the proprietary formats. Seriously--working in that kind of environment would be so miserable.
So what's it like working for the FSF? Seriously, of all the things that make a work environment good or bad you pick on THAT? The only company money I really care about is what'll be in my paycheck, if they piss it away on something I figure that comes out of the CEOs paycheck. We already have a deal and I'm already getting my pay, even if they saved a few hundred bucks it's unlikely much of that would show up in my paycheck. It's not even how it functions, they don't give me money just because they save it. My pay is generally ruled by the labor market, not their internal costs.
Considering one of the things they did was pull in the go-oo patches that include better docx support, I doubt that is the big fear. It's mostly only RMS that think closed source lock-out is a way to promote freedom.
If you were building a supercomputer operating system from the start you'd make very different design decisions than Linus did.
Heh, one of those "start clean and it'll be so much better". There's been a kazillion patches to Linux to make it scale better, if there was anything essential holding it back they'd fork and run their own supercomputer-linux. Yes, you would use very different design decisions, but those Linux made in the early 90s aren't longer in effect either.
thus limiting the potential speed increase to 6.88 zettaflops.
If it could become a million times faster by installing Windows, there's something very very wrong with the world.
Yes, but you do read about the developers who end up coding "like" one language in another language, often leading to poor code and many wtfs. Since hiring people is a bit of a lemon problem it might be safer to hire someone who is already a C#/Java/whatever developer, rather than bet that he's a good one that can jump between languages with ease. And if it looks like you've jumped on every language fad in the last decade, they'll probably think you're going to take them for a ride too. It's not always about what you can do, but rather what you can show that you can do. What you know you're capable of doesn't matter much if you're not given the chance and your skill isn't being recognized by others. The last one is particularly true in front of other employers, what makes you stand out from the crowd?
That's like a soldier claiming to have learned how to perform in combat by watching lots of war movies and playing Call of Duty "for months". (...) You learn them by doing and by having your code blow up because of those intricacies
Well, soldiers don't learn how to deal with mine fields by doing exactly. There's things you can learn by doing, and there's things that'll drive you insane. You will not learn multi-threaded programming by having your code randomly blowing up by a race condition, it'll only make it seem like the computer is crashing at random. Honestly some of the things with templates is just so odd you need to know how it's supposed to work to make sense of it. That said, having 100% knowledge of the oddities of the language doesn't make you a great coder, it's more like being a great football referee than a football player. That's a foul, page 172, chapter 8, paragraph 5 of the C++ standard.
Personally, my opinion of templates is that they're best left to basic libraries like STL or Qt that can implement things like QList and QMap so the rest of us don't have to. I've never felt the need to write any template code myself though I did try it just to work out how it was done. The closest thing I've had to do is implement the operator== and operator functions so comparison and sorting will work, and not much of that either since most things can be done via classes that already have everything implemented...
I don't know about the market for developers with/without SQL but there's definitively room for people on the reporting/BI/data warehousing side that know pretty much only SQL and the procedural variants like T-SQL, PL/SQL and so on. If you have a proper OLAP server then MDX is a must but it'll translate from SQL quickly. Throw in integration services or business objects too and you got plenty in that area, just look out so you don't become the one fixing up the layout on the TPS report.
For packages provided by the distro, it makes sense to have them all use their complex dependency tree. For installing some other version side by side, this sounds like a great tool. The problem with dependencies is that often a pebble turns into an avalanche by the time you're done. If you want the new version of *one* KDE app, it can drag pretty much the whole of KDE and every library they in turn depend on with it in an upgrade. I've had that happen and ended at 450MB to download and install, and that would pull almost all packages out of LTS support.
From the user's point of view it's completely illogical to upgrade the whole system just because you want a new feature in amaroK 2.4 while your distro only packages 2.3, you expect one application to install or upgrade independently of any other application. That does not happen with Linux. It is not just about new library versions, via dependencies you pull in unwanted version upgrades. As for security I'd rather have one potentially insecure package on my system than to pull most packages out of support, it probably open ups more vulnerabilities than it prevents.
I wouldn't want to run a dozen applications like that. But if it's one or two? I got no problem taking the extra overhead of a bit more memory use. And honestly, a lot of software I use isn't in contact with the "outside world" as such. Even if there is an exploit in a library, I'd never open any file crafted to exploit it. Obviously it is good in general to patch stuff, but it's not always that critical...
[Objective-]C[++], Pascal, Fortran, or whatever is just as portable as Java, if not more so.
Show me a GUI "Hello, world!" that'll run on every platform Java does - even if Java windows look like shit. Java isn't just a cross-platform language, it's also a cross-platform toolkit that hides all the OS specifics, far more than any of the languages you mention.
I fail to see why folks couldn't find a way to fork Java. Are there patents in place that would completely moot any such effort?
More or less. Some parts of Java are patented, but OpenJDK has been given some kind of grant. With the right amount of FUD from Oracle it'll be such a dark cloud over it that no one with deep pockets will dare pick it up. It'll linger, be used by hobbyists and small companies but eventually die.
Thus I must reiterate: You CAN just recompile the code if cross platform support was planned from the beginning.
Well, doh if you've specifically gone in for using cross platform tools and writing cross platform code it's just a recompile. Otherwise you've pretty much failed at that, haven't you?
It is hard when you start off writing the game using a system designed around vendor lock in... why wouldn't it be?
It is hard when you pick the best tool for your primary platform, giving you the lowest development cost, shortest time to market and lowest risk. You neglect that and pretend it's two perfectly equal tool chains and one will give you cross platform and the other not. If they're not equal then the Windows game can be out the door making money while the cross platform game is still in development going over budget, having performance, quality or stability issues, possibly even flopping or being canceled. Perhaps it's easy as a technical decision but it's far from easy to justify as a business decision. Unless the cross platform tools are superior even for Windows, but most game developers seem to strongly disagree with that.
Well EA and 2D Boy are both extremes on opposite side of the scale. I don't mean to be like EA that's releasing the same rehash over and over, but the first game in a series is rarely perfect. You probably had some budget/feature constraints, you didn't know what people would and wouldn't like and you hadn't had that much feedback. I think they're being silly in not releasing a World of Goo 2, unless they're really that out of ideas. Some game concepts are good as they are, "archetypes" of games and delivering a highly refined experience of them is perfectly fine. I loved the original Civilization, now I've played Civilization 5 and I'm still not tired of it. The essence of taking a civilization from the dawn of society through the ages is still exciting, even though many game mechanics have changed over the years.
My HR staff outsources their job responsibilities to online chat message boards. has anyone else had experience in replacing such a staff? [Warning: This post may cause recursion]