It didn't survive because people through the ages simply didn't give a fuck about it. It's not some innate right of art to be preserved in perpetuity, you know.
There are library editions of books that are better bound, printed on heavier or better paper, etc. Nobody forces libraries to buy them, though. At least in the U.S., libraries don't have to pay extra for books just because they are to lend them. Heck, if anything, library systems try to maintain volume discounts with publishers, consolidate orders to get better pricing, and generally push their weight around just lika any bigger customer out there would. Where on Earth do you have to pay more for books if you're to lend them? There are such pricing differences for lending licenses for audiovisual works. As for books, that's news to me.
If "those people" would rather pay for someone to steal dog sperm rather than compensate your dog owner, you may wish to reconsider what kind of market you're getting yourself into. I'd stay away from such "market" no matter how lucrative it may be.
Putting it shortly: certain sales are not worth it. People who don't pretend to know sales and marketing but do in fact understand those disciplines understand that. I'm sure there would have been market for my then-girlfriend's, um, services, in the sunny state of Nevada, for example. Yet I choose not to be a pimp.
Same as identifying legit contractors and legit anything else that's common in everyday life. And I don't mean being able to tell a fake diamond from a real one.
Somehow people think that they don't need to know the "pesky details", it's not their job, whatever. Life doesn't work that way, though. You need to know at least a bit of the pesky technical details of common everyday objects and procedures. Stuff like CPR, basic functions of what's in a car, a computer and in your home, a bit of how at least local government actually works (pay them a visit or a dozen),... It wouldn't be a problem if schools would teach that. Once you're an adult you won't feel like devoting a year or two of your life to learning all that -- by that point it may well be too late.
What you propose turns out to be, in practice, a pipe dream. If you don't know anything about cars, you're getting ripped off by car mechanics and dealerships every time you visit them. And I do mean ripped off; I'd think an average car-driving american can easily waste $20k over their life that way. If you know nothing about basics of home construction, you'll be lucky if you end up on Holmes on Homes and get a $100k gift to fix the mess you got yourself in -- if $100k is enough, that is. I've seen myself houses on the market listed for $100-$150k where it'd be cheaper to rebuild than to fix. If you don't ask questions, have no company at the hospital and know nothing about medicine, you're at elevated risk of various medical mistakes (sorry, I don't have a link handy, but that's my personal experience). If you don't know anything about science and can't visualize meaning of numbers, you'll be easily fooled by politicians, marketers and bankers alike. Knowing your orders of magnitude and being able to do mental math to visualize things is way more important than knowing about Shakespeare, unless you've got a wealthy uncle sponsoring you, that is. Not that I have anything against learning of Shakespeare's work, mind that.
There is a minimum amount of general education that one needs to succeed in today's society -- and no, that doesn't mean knowing literature or whatever else classically passes for general education. You need to know basics of various "technical" disciplines that directly affect you in your life. To me, that's what contemporary civics should mean. It should be the role of grade schools (up to grade 12) to teach kids the basics of what makes the world tick, so to speak. Unfortunately, that's not what's done, and the adults in charge are none the wiser...
Most of what passes for civics these days is entirely useless trivia: stuff that you can't base any decisions on. It's as useful as entertainment is: good for you if that's what you like to know/do, but not helpful otherwise. I'd even go as far as claiming that, say, learning the names of all U.S. presidents or the roots of the U.S. government is an abominable waste of time -- again, if you're forced to do it at school. It's knowledge with absolutely no application to everyday life. Some people may find such trivia entertaining or interesting, but then it's their choice how to apportion their free time, and I sure as heck can't tell them not to learn it. But if they choose memorizing the presidents over knowing what malware is and how to protect oneself: it's them who lose, not myself. Let's face it: computers and automobiles are everyday tools that livelihoods depend on, especially in the U.S.
Apple products may not be inherently stylish, but they certainly have, at least in the recent few years, strived for a certain minimalistic, clean look. After working on an aluminum iMac, I just couldn't stand looking at the almost distracting in their flourish designs of other all-in-one PCs. Same goes for notebooks and music players -- for me, at least. It's a matter of personal preference -- I simply dislike design elements for sake of themselves. Apple seems to be deleting everything that's not functional from the user perspective. They are pretty consistent at it, too, perhaps even overreaching, say in their most recent Macbooks where they simply glued the battery cells to the chassis.
When I was a kid, I had some scrap plexiglass and my dad's machine shop available for use in the room adjacent to mine. I put the guts of my ZX Spectrum into a two-piece machined blue plexiglass housing. I wish I had pics, it's still somewhere in a closed a few thousand miles away... It was pretty much a block with flat sides at right angles, openings for the connectors and the keys, and a fitting cover over the bottom. Somewhat like unibody MBP in overall scheme. I used carbide PC board drills and an alcohol bath to drill the "grille" on top and bottom for ventilation. Indexing those 1mm holes was a major pain, IIRC it took me the better part of a week to do that, in spite of having made an indexing attachment to the mill's table. I coupled a stepper from an 8 inch disk drive, with barely modified driver/interface boards, driven from a Morrow CP/M system that was coaxed to ignore the index mark and move a dozen or so tracks, always forward. I had to degrease and oil the X screw on the mill table because with the old grease on it the stepper would occasionally miss steps. Brings back fond memories, although I would get a good headache after sitting in the fumes for a couple hours every day after school...
Interesting. I'm in the Mountain Lake Hotel right now (they filmed Dirty Dancing there, and on another location in N.C.), and the hotel and surrounding area is all running on generators.
There's this thing called direct burial cable. I've seen plenty of utility power strung with only a concrete "stop now" piece about a foot above the cable. Yes, there was a concrete upside-down trough running a foot above the cable, so that when digging you'd hit it first and perhaps think about the trouble you'll be in if you continue.
Isn't the damage done by the falling trees and flying debris rather than wind load on the wires? Wires are thin and present very little wind resistance. Same goes for utility poles.
My neighbors have a tall and extensive but dead tree: not a single leaf on it. In spite of natural decay, no branches have ever snapped from it, even in the aftermath of various hurricanes. All that while the trees right next to it have lost probably 40% of their mass. I don't buy it that wind breaks power lines. Every downed power line I've seen in the urban area where I live was due to stuff falling on the wires. Usually trees, only once did I see a very old advertisement on a tall post toppling and taking down the power line.
Are you serious that anyone sign-extends pointers, where there is no concept of a sign?! Why would you do that?? It makes no sense at all. Zero-extending: sure. Sign extending: that's major brain damage symptom right there.
Would a firewall/router, even one with a couple 10Gb NICs, really need that much memory? On a firewall/router, if it's not in the L2 cache (or its performance-wise equivalent), it better not be needed very often. I have an 8 port 100 Mbit switch with some firewall and routing functionality that has a whooping 256 kbytes of memory shared between code and data, and it performs very smoothly.
There's plenty of better and arguably faster software development platforms than PHP, that let you accomplish stuff more efficiently if you actually know the tools in question. If all you know is PHP and you insist that it's the only thing you can ever spare any of your precious time to learn, then there's no way you'll ever realize there are better tools out there. It's the classic chicken-and-egg problem: you won't learn because you have no time to learn because you're so busy with busywork.
You're completely occupied billing for your busywork on a clusterfuck of a platform, getting "things done". A popular platform, admittedly, but a clusterfuck nevertheless. Your idea of "getting things done" must be vastly different from how people who really get shit done get shit done. Busywork surely gets you towards getting shit done, but just imagine that there might be a way where there's comparatively no busywork and you're just doing the "shit done" part without the "getting" part. As much as I'm no MS fanboy, even most rudimentary ASP.NET or contemporary is miles ahead in productivity compared to what PHP offers out-of-the-box (with no other frameworks on top of it). Heck, even JSP offers a much cleaner, faster and consistent environment from PHP.
Couldn't agree more. I'd actually argue that the "just get it done" mentality is only applicable to cute sample code. When you get even a 20kloc "production" code developed that way, it's usually a copypasta mess where 5% is probably publication-quality thedailywtf.com-grade material. When it gets to 200kloc, you've got a product that can't even be installed without hiring a consultant.
Then it grows to order of 1Mloc, and you get Lotus notes where just a test deployment will take you a week if you're lucky and have never dealt with it previously. All completely gratuitous complications that are a clear indicator of how broken a code base it must be -- there's no fundamental reason why you can't have a working test system after installing the fine RPMs and not mucking much beyond that, thank you. Zimbra is about as far as I'm willing to endure with an "enterprisey" deployment. Anything more than that means that someone somewhere likes things complicated just to keep themselves (or their contractor buddies) occupied at all costs.
You've basically decided that you'll be stuck with software engineering as it was in the 70s and to hell with progress, because that's what you're used to. If you truly believe that you can be a good professional without continuously learning, I've got news for you: in no other engineering discipline I know of would that be true. Doctors and even nurses won't be renewed their licenses without proof of continuing education. Civil, mechanical and electrical engineers need to keep up with new technologies both in the design and the end product sides of the process. Even educators often need to do continuing education or their licenses will be taken away. This "academic functionality" you speak of has been, for the most part, engineered as a solution to oft faced problems. Problems you're apparently unaware of. Problems that make you less productive, make your code harder to maintain, and lose money for your employer.
It's designed to let the lowest common denominator programmer make something that will work
Nope. It's not designed for that. There's an utter lack of coherent design. The lower common denominator programmer must not be given all sorts of ways of safely shoot him/herself in the foot. In C/C++ when you shoot yourself in the foot, there's blood and it's usually obvious sooner rather than later (yeah I know not all security holes are that trivial, but a zero dereference usually is quite obvious). In PHP, the bullets are made of a potent anesthetic. By the time you realize you're full of holes, your neighbor has used one to fuck your wife without you noticing.
PHP lets the lowest common denominator programmer make something that is always full of security holes, silent data corruption and is usually no more than a proof of concept that should be treated no better than that. It lets the programmer fool him/herself and the client, too.
My "only" problem with PHP is something that would not make it any harder to use. It's the freaking inconsistency in design of the API: function naming, order of parameters, availability of complementary functions, functions that actually work and not pretend to (escaping ha ha). Fixing it would make it even easier to use and faster to learn. Why the fuck would a high level language expose C string API for example -- the very one that's misunderstood and unsafely applied by apparently most anyone who ever wrote any C code at some point in their life.
I figure there may be ways for it to clear CO2 as well. It involves, apparently, a single-use liquid that's pumped in then dumped out. You may as well add some chemicals that bind CO2 and keep it in the liquid. No clue what those might be, though. And it might need a mighty lot of pH buffer too. Overall I think it would be great if there was a synthetic emergency blood substitute that worked, and this might be the first step in right direction. Sure blood does more than gas exhange, but for short periods of time doing what amounts to a major immune shutdown might be OK I hope.
I think that as long as the non-blood provides gas exchange (not merely oxygen, but also CO2 removal), pH balance and some sugars to keep the cells happy, it shouldn't be much of a big deal short-term, right? I'm sure over longer times the wacky haemodynamics will tend, for example, to kill liver, but for a couple of hours I don't see why it wouldn't work.
Slashdot Mirror
Never mind the fact that you couldn't go to a convenience store to get paper and pencils.
It didn't survive because people through the ages simply didn't give a fuck about it. It's not some innate right of art to be preserved in perpetuity, you know.
There are library editions of books that are better bound, printed on heavier or better paper, etc. Nobody forces libraries to buy them, though. At least in the U.S., libraries don't have to pay extra for books just because they are to lend them. Heck, if anything, library systems try to maintain volume discounts with publishers, consolidate orders to get better pricing, and generally push their weight around just lika any bigger customer out there would. Where on Earth do you have to pay more for books if you're to lend them? There are such pricing differences for lending licenses for audiovisual works. As for books, that's news to me.
If "those people" would rather pay for someone to steal dog sperm rather than compensate your dog owner, you may wish to reconsider what kind of market you're getting yourself into. I'd stay away from such "market" no matter how lucrative it may be.
Putting it shortly: certain sales are not worth it. People who don't pretend to know sales and marketing but do in fact understand those disciplines understand that. I'm sure there would have been market for my then-girlfriend's, um, services, in the sunny state of Nevada, for example. Yet I choose not to be a pimp.
+1 Funny
Same as identifying legit contractors and legit anything else that's common in everyday life. And I don't mean being able to tell a fake diamond from a real one.
Somehow people think that they don't need to know the "pesky details", it's not their job, whatever. Life doesn't work that way, though. You need to know at least a bit of the pesky technical details of common everyday objects and procedures. Stuff like CPR, basic functions of what's in a car, a computer and in your home, a bit of how at least local government actually works (pay them a visit or a dozen), ... It wouldn't be a problem if schools would teach that. Once you're an adult you won't feel like devoting a year or two of your life to learning all that -- by that point it may well be too late.
What you propose turns out to be, in practice, a pipe dream. If you don't know anything about cars, you're getting ripped off by car mechanics and dealerships every time you visit them. And I do mean ripped off; I'd think an average car-driving american can easily waste $20k over their life that way. If you know nothing about basics of home construction, you'll be lucky if you end up on Holmes on Homes and get a $100k gift to fix the mess you got yourself in -- if $100k is enough, that is. I've seen myself houses on the market listed for $100-$150k where it'd be cheaper to rebuild than to fix. If you don't ask questions, have no company at the hospital and know nothing about medicine, you're at elevated risk of various medical mistakes (sorry, I don't have a link handy, but that's my personal experience). If you don't know anything about science and can't visualize meaning of numbers, you'll be easily fooled by politicians, marketers and bankers alike. Knowing your orders of magnitude and being able to do mental math to visualize things is way more important than knowing about Shakespeare, unless you've got a wealthy uncle sponsoring you, that is. Not that I have anything against learning of Shakespeare's work, mind that.
There is a minimum amount of general education that one needs to succeed in today's society -- and no, that doesn't mean knowing literature or whatever else classically passes for general education. You need to know basics of various "technical" disciplines that directly affect you in your life. To me, that's what contemporary civics should mean. It should be the role of grade schools (up to grade 12) to teach kids the basics of what makes the world tick, so to speak. Unfortunately, that's not what's done, and the adults in charge are none the wiser...
Most of what passes for civics these days is entirely useless trivia: stuff that you can't base any decisions on. It's as useful as entertainment is: good for you if that's what you like to know/do, but not helpful otherwise. I'd even go as far as claiming that, say, learning the names of all U.S. presidents or the roots of the U.S. government is an abominable waste of time -- again, if you're forced to do it at school. It's knowledge with absolutely no application to everyday life. Some people may find such trivia entertaining or interesting, but then it's their choice how to apportion their free time, and I sure as heck can't tell them not to learn it. But if they choose memorizing the presidents over knowing what malware is and how to protect oneself: it's them who lose, not myself. Let's face it: computers and automobiles are everyday tools that livelihoods depend on, especially in the U.S.
Apple products may not be inherently stylish, but they certainly have, at least in the recent few years, strived for a certain minimalistic, clean look. After working on an aluminum iMac, I just couldn't stand looking at the almost distracting in their flourish designs of other all-in-one PCs. Same goes for notebooks and music players -- for me, at least. It's a matter of personal preference -- I simply dislike design elements for sake of themselves. Apple seems to be deleting everything that's not functional from the user perspective. They are pretty consistent at it, too, perhaps even overreaching, say in their most recent Macbooks where they simply glued the battery cells to the chassis.
When I was a kid, I had some scrap plexiglass and my dad's machine shop available for use in the room adjacent to mine. I put the guts of my ZX Spectrum into a two-piece machined blue plexiglass housing. I wish I had pics, it's still somewhere in a closed a few thousand miles away... It was pretty much a block with flat sides at right angles, openings for the connectors and the keys, and a fitting cover over the bottom. Somewhat like unibody MBP in overall scheme. I used carbide PC board drills and an alcohol bath to drill the "grille" on top and bottom for ventilation. Indexing those 1mm holes was a major pain, IIRC it took me the better part of a week to do that, in spite of having made an indexing attachment to the mill's table. I coupled a stepper from an 8 inch disk drive, with barely modified driver/interface boards, driven from a Morrow CP/M system that was coaxed to ignore the index mark and move a dozen or so tracks, always forward. I had to degrease and oil the X screw on the mill table because with the old grease on it the stepper would occasionally miss steps. Brings back fond memories, although I would get a good headache after sitting in the fumes for a couple hours every day after school...
I think the problem is with people who won't stomach being called an idiot to their face. As the Polish saying goes: truth stings one's eyes.
Interesting. I'm in the Mountain Lake Hotel right now (they filmed Dirty Dancing there, and on another location in N.C.), and the hotel and surrounding area is all running on generators.
There's this thing called direct burial cable. I've seen plenty of utility power strung with only a concrete "stop now" piece about a foot above the cable. Yes, there was a concrete upside-down trough running a foot above the cable, so that when digging you'd hit it first and perhaps think about the trouble you'll be in if you continue.
Isn't the damage done by the falling trees and flying debris rather than wind load on the wires? Wires are thin and present very little wind resistance. Same goes for utility poles.
My neighbors have a tall and extensive but dead tree: not a single leaf on it. In spite of natural decay, no branches have ever snapped from it, even in the aftermath of various hurricanes. All that while the trees right next to it have lost probably 40% of their mass. I don't buy it that wind breaks power lines. Every downed power line I've seen in the urban area where I live was due to stuff falling on the wires. Usually trees, only once did I see a very old advertisement on a tall post toppling and taking down the power line.
Are you serious that anyone sign-extends pointers, where there is no concept of a sign?! Why would you do that?? It makes no sense at all. Zero-extending: sure. Sign extending: that's major brain damage symptom right there.
Who the fuck would sign-extend a pointer?!
Would a firewall/router, even one with a couple 10Gb NICs, really need that much memory? On a firewall/router, if it's not in the L2 cache (or its performance-wise equivalent), it better not be needed very often. I have an 8 port 100 Mbit switch with some firewall and routing functionality that has a whooping 256 kbytes of memory shared between code and data, and it performs very smoothly.
There's plenty of better and arguably faster software development platforms than PHP, that let you accomplish stuff more efficiently if you actually know the tools in question. If all you know is PHP and you insist that it's the only thing you can ever spare any of your precious time to learn, then there's no way you'll ever realize there are better tools out there. It's the classic chicken-and-egg problem: you won't learn because you have no time to learn because you're so busy with busywork.
You're completely occupied billing for your busywork on a clusterfuck of a platform, getting "things done". A popular platform, admittedly, but a clusterfuck nevertheless. Your idea of "getting things done" must be vastly different from how people who really get shit done get shit done. Busywork surely gets you towards getting shit done, but just imagine that there might be a way where there's comparatively no busywork and you're just doing the "shit done" part without the "getting" part. As much as I'm no MS fanboy, even most rudimentary ASP.NET or contemporary is miles ahead in productivity compared to what PHP offers out-of-the-box (with no other frameworks on top of it). Heck, even JSP offers a much cleaner, faster and consistent environment from PHP.
Couldn't agree more. I'd actually argue that the "just get it done" mentality is only applicable to cute sample code. When you get even a 20kloc "production" code developed that way, it's usually a copypasta mess where 5% is probably publication-quality thedailywtf.com-grade material. When it gets to 200kloc, you've got a product that can't even be installed without hiring a consultant.
Then it grows to order of 1Mloc, and you get Lotus notes where just a test deployment will take you a week if you're lucky and have never dealt with it previously. All completely gratuitous complications that are a clear indicator of how broken a code base it must be -- there's no fundamental reason why you can't have a working test system after installing the fine RPMs and not mucking much beyond that, thank you. Zimbra is about as far as I'm willing to endure with an "enterprisey" deployment. Anything more than that means that someone somewhere likes things complicated just to keep themselves (or their contractor buddies) occupied at all costs.
You've basically decided that you'll be stuck with software engineering as it was in the 70s and to hell with progress, because that's what you're used to. If you truly believe that you can be a good professional without continuously learning, I've got news for you: in no other engineering discipline I know of would that be true. Doctors and even nurses won't be renewed their licenses without proof of continuing education. Civil, mechanical and electrical engineers need to keep up with new technologies both in the design and the end product sides of the process. Even educators often need to do continuing education or their licenses will be taken away. This "academic functionality" you speak of has been, for the most part, engineered as a solution to oft faced problems. Problems you're apparently unaware of. Problems that make you less productive, make your code harder to maintain, and lose money for your employer.
It's designed to let the lowest common denominator programmer make something that will work
Nope. It's not designed for that. There's an utter lack of coherent design. The lower common denominator programmer must not be given all sorts of ways of safely shoot him/herself in the foot. In C/C++ when you shoot yourself in the foot, there's blood and it's usually obvious sooner rather than later (yeah I know not all security holes are that trivial, but a zero dereference usually is quite obvious). In PHP, the bullets are made of a potent anesthetic. By the time you realize you're full of holes, your neighbor has used one to fuck your wife without you noticing.
PHP lets the lowest common denominator programmer make something that is always full of security holes, silent data corruption and is usually no more than a proof of concept that should be treated no better than that. It lets the programmer fool him/herself and the client, too.
I meant to say: my problem is something that, were it fixed, would not make it any harder to use.
My "only" problem with PHP is something that would not make it any harder to use. It's the freaking inconsistency in design of the API: function naming, order of parameters, availability of complementary functions, functions that actually work and not pretend to (escaping ha ha). Fixing it would make it even easier to use and faster to learn. Why the fuck would a high level language expose C string API for example -- the very one that's misunderstood and unsafely applied by apparently most anyone who ever wrote any C code at some point in their life.
I figure there may be ways for it to clear CO2 as well. It involves, apparently, a single-use liquid that's pumped in then dumped out. You may as well add some chemicals that bind CO2 and keep it in the liquid. No clue what those might be, though. And it might need a mighty lot of pH buffer too. Overall I think it would be great if there was a synthetic emergency blood substitute that worked, and this might be the first step in right direction. Sure blood does more than gas exhange, but for short periods of time doing what amounts to a major immune shutdown might be OK I hope.
Let me get this straight: you've been inhaling an oxygen-saturated liquid? For how long?
The only real problem I see is lack of clotting: that liquid will leak like crazy from any broken vessel...
I think that as long as the non-blood provides gas exchange (not merely oxygen, but also CO2 removal), pH balance and some sugars to keep the cells happy, it shouldn't be much of a big deal short-term, right? I'm sure over longer times the wacky haemodynamics will tend, for example, to kill liver, but for a couple of hours I don't see why it wouldn't work.