At the risk of being modded down to oblivion, how is the First Post considered "Redundant"?!?!? (First post -- Redundant -- where's the logic in that?...I digress..)
Actually, if I had any mod points, I'd mark him "Insightful".
I think Linux saving one company a quarter of a BILLION dollars and most of 8 MILLION square feet is hardly newsworthy. The electrical power saved (enough to run small towns, I'd guess) would hardly be worthy of attention, either.
Mainframe Linux and IBM (and virtualization) are hardly newsworthy.
Let's keep articles like these off of Slashdot and adopt Digg style "community gossip as fact," instead. Now THAT's newsworthy....
I've read that approximately 5% of the U.S. is developed -- even much of that is wasted.
Travel all over the West, sometime, through the mountains, or through the forests. Get away from cities or the coasts, for that matter. You'll see what I mean.
Not to mention that, but there's a lot of wasted space on building rooftops.
Solar, small-scale wind, or algae would all be viable on a large percentage of building rooftops, if people start thinking small-scale and cheap.
There is *no* magic silver bullet. However, if large numbers of people chip away small pieces at a time (local production and reduction in consumption), we could end any energy crisis and at least produce a large percentage of what we consume.
The reason I am game is an end to terrorist funding and a start to energy independence.
If you're talking about cell towers, the maximum radiated wattage is a mere 16 Watts. For most "normal" WiFi, the max is about 100mW, or 0.1W. In reality, it may be a mere 28mW or 0.028W (Linksys, for example).
So, on one hand, 16W (cell) vs 0.028W (WiFi) is quite the difference.
However, the distance falls off in a square inverse fashion. If you're 1M away, you get 100 times the power as if you're 10M away, so as for how much power you get, it's all relative to distance.
If you are 1M from your Linksys and 10Km from a cell tower, I'd bet the cell tower "loses" (lay of land, atmosphere, and walls in home may change things, of course). If you're on the other side of concrete from your Linksys, in that scenario, the cell tower may "win".
If your Linksys or cell tower were VHF, instead of the high-frequency UHF that they both are, skin "absorption" might be quite different.
As somebody that has used OpenVZ, VMware (several flavors, since the early beta days), QEMU, Bochs, Linux-VServer, and others, I like OpenVZ (and VMware Server but for totally different reasons). I looked at Xen and decided that I would grow old setting it up, so I abandoned that effort, for now.
OpenVZ is easy to setup (once you get the kernel and packages setup, which is a breeze in Debian 3.1 and 4.0). It runs ridiculously fast, it consumes little memory, and takes little disk space (which can be further enhanced using hard links). Besides that, everything is fully scriptable. I also only have to maintain a single kernel (on the host).
By reducing isolation (jails/containers vs. virtualization), the host machine can directly copy files into and out of guests, but the guests can't directly see each other (you can through ssh, for instance).
I also like the fact that on the host machine, using ps -ef (or ps aux) gives you information on ALL processes, whether host or guest. The tty column shows you which machine owns a process.
Since it's a shared kernel and uses shared memory, resource utilization is superior. If a guest isn't doing anything, it really isn't doing anything at all, unlike the virtualizers (except the up-and-coming KVM). The virtualized machines, for instance, keep running the "do nothing loop" when the OS is idle. (I believe that VMware Tools is supposed to help a bit in this regard). And, if processes aren't running or disk space isn't being used, then, unlike VMware, resources aren't being consumed.
This is basically a way to run multiple guest Linuxes under a host, not a full virtualization environment, so there are trade-offs. I think that for running multiple Linux servers (as opposed to desktop apps), OpenVZ/Virtuozzo is an ideal solution.
Since I'm running a smallish server at home, I've found that OpenVZ is the best way to run so many Linux guests at once.
I will have to say that I have not tried UML because of performance. I can't try KVM since I don't have the correct AMD processors.
I was also initially impressed by Linux-VServer but got stuck, somewhere, but I cannot remember where. I found that OpenVZ seemed to be easier and more powerful than Linux-VServer, its virtualization cousin.
Since I live here in Kansas (Kansas City metro), I'll tell you that while it's certainly cheaper than New York, the difference isn't that great.
It might be closer to $100K (NY) vs. $40K-60K, unless you live in the cities or burbs (KC, Topeka, Wichita), where it might be closer to $100K (NY) vs. $50K-75K....
In parts of Johnson County, Kansas, a mere $60K income could be disasterous for a typical family of four, unless they are rather thrifty. Now, if you live in NYC, you most likely won't be buying as nice of a house, and you may rent -- granted.
Otherwise, the differences really aren't 4 times or even close -- maybe 1.5 to 2 times, and yes, the cost of living vs. pay is nice, here....
Obligatory: There's no place like home.... click, click, click
The original post asks if Assembly is still relevant today. I'll ask some rhetorical questions (the only kind in a blog) and see how they apply:
* Would you want an astronaut to understand physics and math? * Would you want a doctor to understand chemistry and biology? * Should somebody studying to be a Literature teacher take their full set of liberal arts courses, including history? * Should somebody earning a business degree take music appreciation?
Most of us probably said, "Yes" to most or all of those above. Even if the study seems irrelevant or too "low-level" or too "high-level" at the time, there are areas of coursework that help us understand things better.
I see a lot of dead wood in the IT industry. There are enormous numbers of people who either have no passion or who do not have a deep-enough or broad-enough knowledge of computer science to do their daily data processing job well. They are dependent on others around them for everything, even though they may be very skilled in one area.
By having both a broader and a deeper knowledge, people are necessarily better at troubleshooting and at understanding the areas outside their particular specialty. It makes them be better at all of IT and helps them do their specific role.
You should learn IT two ways -- deeply and broadly. You should deeply learn specific skills (Java/C#/Linux/Windows/scripting in Ruby/whatever) and you should learn broad skills (computing theory/relational databases/networking/troubleshooting/programming/a nalysis/architecture/whatever). The difference is training vs. education.
There is an enormous difference between training and education. Training is learning specific skills for specific tasks (narrow/specific), while education is broader and teaches you how to think, understand, and apply (broad/general).
While taking Assembly may not seem relevant at the time and you may never directly use it again, for every programming task, having a strong background in all of computing theory (including how the CPU handles its low-level instructions) educates you and gives you a deeper understanding. (Don't just be trained, be educated!)
My recommendation is the book My Job Went to India (And All I Got was this Lousy Book). If you can't afford it, read the sample chapters, especially the "Being a Generalist" and "Being a specialist" chapters at http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/mjwti/in dex.html.
Personally, unless you need the specific class/training, I'd say that FORTRAN or COBOL ought to be abolished as required material in all colleges and shouldn't be in the degree program. Those should be electives only. Assembly, on the other hand, should remain required, for a deeper and broader education. (Don't settle for a dumbed-down program).
The difference, again, is training (specific/skill-oriented/task-oriented) vs. education (general/broad/understanding-oriented). Education and being a generalist will reap large rewards, long term. So stick with it and take that class. Assembly is a very important foundation class that educates you, long-term....
Another rhetorical question I have is this: "Are you passionate for IT or is it just a high-paying (presumably) job?" If it isn't a passion of yours, find you passion and do it well. If it is, take Assembly and like it -- it'll help you appreciate IT, your computer, your high-level language, and give you a more educated view of the "soul" of your computer.
(They don't make you take Assembly at many/most schools for their health. It would be a crying shame to remove it from the required courses).
I've seen a large number of ideas for something like this and a list of advantages/disadvantages for each, but here's my two cents....
First, use rooftops, where possible. This should include new construction as well as old. There could be three options - owner stores extra power in batteries, owner sells back to the grid, or have a power-company-subsidized grid program. For the third option, the power company can make it up by not having to buy as much power over the grid, by selling excess solar electric power, by not having to construct as many new power plants, by not having to upgrade the grid as often, by having less in the way of power losses, and by not having to buy as much fuel to generate power in the first place. (Power-company-subsidized solar power could also get government incentives, I'm sure)....
Second, someone pointed out that rooftop solar would shadow the roof and reduce AC costs. Yes it would, but I'd add something. The waste heat from the sun could be used for passive solar, as well.... You could run a hot water heater or augment your heat/heat pump in the winter time. Otherwise, in the summer, there would be big savings and in the winter, there might be an actual loss, once you strip away roof heat. By cooling solar panels, the efficiency is actually raised, anyway, IIRC.
Last, there is no silver bullet. We need to commit to getting off of imported fuels and fossil fuels, in general. We should combine wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, hydroelectric, biomass, etc. We should never put our eggs in one basket. Plug-in hybrids that use flex fuels give us at least three ways to power a vehicle for daily commutes and reduce our dependence on one resource. Depending on one resource, including solar energy, can be disasterous. Augmenting the current system with the proposed reduces our dependence, in fact.
If we use a single chunk of land, we don't reduce our dependence on one source for power.... Having large arrays is nice, so long as they're spread out all over the country/world. Rooftop solar should be part of energy independence, as well. It has the added advantage of making power local.
I also wonder why wind farms don't do solar on the ground, in between windmills....
I don't know how many times at Slashdot that a story wasn't checked out and people jump on these replies that hold people's feet to the fire with a "Mod up" all the time.
Just because you don't like what somebody typed does not make it flamebait.
I can't imagine how you'd train on it or customer support it.
Sure, it would start out all uniform, but then, if things evolve and personalize, then only you really know your OS, not your neighbor and not your tech support person.
How do you interface that with others?
Training? Support? Interfacing?
We already have enough of this with Johnny Six Pack.... Now, we have to work with Johnny Five Pack, as well!
I've been following this thread, Stormin' and have to say that you've done a great job defending your case with logic and passion. I agree with you, too.
I'd say a large number of people just read and do not comment, either way.
I believe that most rational people agree with you and are able to see through the thin veneer of multiple forms of idealism, including passivism/pacifism.
I have seen countless people attacked on this site over the years, for not following the status quo and it's hypocrisy. It's amazing, for example, for people to share a believe in "tolerance", only to have the same sort of people slander someone who disagrees.
This thread wasn't quite as bad as others, and many of the previous threads surprisingly had a large number of people agree with you. (I'm a bit surpised at the agreement, today)....
As I understand it, TOS used different SciFi writers all the time, for different episodes, and usually created a three-act play. They got the best SciFi writers for their day.
Why not use Joss Whedon as chief writer and use the gang of two to fill in "Star Trek" details and to organize it into three-acts?
My goodness, Firely/Serenity were so good!
Don't skimp on space, ethics, and phaser fire, though....
Bullet points and indentation are screwy. These are two things used by common people, not some set of rarely-used features.
Bullet points can get really messed up when importing from Word -- even documents that don't have macros.
Indentation is also set at too large an interval. Why not default to 1/4 inch (US Letter), like most everyone else's word processor?
Just like Word, at times the auto formatting gets in the way. This is especially true of bullets and indentation.
Other than that, I have few disagreements with OpenOffice Writer. The two items, above, though are used by me on almost every document I produce. So, if I have Word and Writer on the same machine, I may actually use Word, to avoid this....
I think you've sorta hit the nail on the head, adding to some other commentary:
1.) Civil service
2.) Management
3.) Other, outside-IT careers
4.) Maintenance of "outdated" tech
5.) Field is too new to make a determination
I agree with you, that it is an unknown. The field is too new to make a determination. The field simply isn't old enough to have programmers retiring in droves. Yes, where I work, there are 60+ year olds doing COBOL/mainframe stuff, but it's pretty rare in this field.
When I entered the work force as a programmer just out of college, it was 1993. 1993 was interesting because it was during a downturn in the US economy and already had one of the largest gluts of programmers/IT people on the market, simultaneously. It was a hard time for programmers, everywhere.
So, I'll add one theory -- it depends on the job cycle. Compare the dot-com/Y2K/Euro-conversion days with the recessions before and after those days, for instance.... During "dot-com" era, jobs were plentiful and workers were very scarce, so the 40+ crowd was in huge demand, but not so before and afterward....
Agreed, and I, for one welcome the new competition.
And no, OpenSolaris will never de-throne Linux -- at least not without a lot of money and time....
Linux has several things on its side:
More users in general
More fanatical users, that do things "for the love of the code"
More software (OK, most things are ported/portable, but much more software is "first tier" on Linux)
More momentum
More installations
More documentation
More press (Is OpenSolaris a household word? Has grandma ever heard about OpenSolaris?)
More freedom
More flexibility
More user-friendliness
More drivers and hardware support, in general
More platforms
More open sourcecode
With a wave of a wand, you can't expect OpenSolaris to take off overnight, this year, next year, nor the following year. In fact, it's been open for months now, and what do we have? A very small amount of momentum and three new distros, much of which is a cobbling together of OpenSolaris and pieces of Linux distributions....
OpenSolaris is late to the party, but I probably will try it out, especially to re-sharpen my Solaris skills. But I probably won't host anything, unless it is a specific customer requirement.
What is scary is that many PHB's don't understand opensource. Many think OpenSolaris is not somehow bad, since Solaris went opensource. Go figure....
Slashdot Mirror
At the risk of being modded down to oblivion, how is the First Post considered "Redundant"?!?!? (First post -- Redundant -- where's the logic in that? ...I digress..)
/. about junk science until people get it? *Most* of the "science" articles you read are sensationalized junk and are all about maximizing grant money.g +%22junk+science%22+grant%7Cmoney&ie=utf-8&oe=utf- 8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firef ox-a
Actually, if I had any mod points, I'd mark him "Insightful".
How many "redundant" articles do there need to be on
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aslashdot.or
Do people believe everything they read or do they still have an analytical brain? (Obviously, somebody with mod points doesn't).
I agree with the "Redundant" FP:
This article was written on the basis of a suggestion? Please get back to me when you have facts.
Junk that is a mere "suggestion" is obviously not fact-based. As a matter of "fact," I shall not read this article on principle.
Amen, brother. Peace out.
I think Linux saving one company a quarter of a BILLION dollars and most of 8 MILLION square feet is hardly newsworthy. The electrical power saved (enough to run small towns, I'd guess) would hardly be worthy of attention, either.
Mainframe Linux and IBM (and virtualization) are hardly newsworthy.
Let's keep articles like these off of Slashdot and adopt Digg style "community gossip as fact," instead. Now THAT's newsworthy....
I've read that approximately 5% of the U.S. is developed -- even much of that is wasted.
Travel all over the West, sometime, through the mountains, or through the forests. Get away from cities or the coasts, for that matter. You'll see what I mean.
Not to mention that, but there's a lot of wasted space on building rooftops.
Solar, small-scale wind, or algae would all be viable on a large percentage of building rooftops, if people start thinking small-scale and cheap.
There is *no* magic silver bullet. However, if large numbers of people chip away small pieces at a time (local production and reduction in consumption), we could end any energy crisis and at least produce a large percentage of what we consume.
The reason I am game is an end to terrorist funding and a start to energy independence.
ZIRCONIA ZTOLEN! http://www.snpp.com/episodes/1F09.html
Not only that, but when I read the articles, they refer to a competitor doing this in California (not Baja California).
That's *exactly* what I was thinking when I read the patent!
If you're talking about cell towers, the maximum radiated wattage is a mere 16 Watts. For most "normal" WiFi, the max is about 100mW, or 0.1W. In reality, it may be a mere 28mW or 0.028W (Linksys, for example).
So, on one hand, 16W (cell) vs 0.028W (WiFi) is quite the difference.
However, the distance falls off in a square inverse fashion. If you're 1M away, you get 100 times the power as if you're 10M away, so as for how much power you get, it's all relative to distance.
If you are 1M from your Linksys and 10Km from a cell tower, I'd bet the cell tower "loses" (lay of land, atmosphere, and walls in home may change things, of course). If you're on the other side of concrete from your Linksys, in that scenario, the cell tower may "win".
If your Linksys or cell tower were VHF, instead of the high-frequency UHF that they both are, skin "absorption" might be quite different.
As somebody that has used OpenVZ, VMware (several flavors, since the early beta days), QEMU, Bochs, Linux-VServer, and others, I like OpenVZ (and VMware Server but for totally different reasons). I looked at Xen and decided that I would grow old setting it up, so I abandoned that effort, for now.
r y/l-linuxvirt/?ca=dgr-lnxw01Virtual-Linux
OpenVZ is easy to setup (once you get the kernel and packages setup, which is a breeze in Debian 3.1 and 4.0). It runs ridiculously fast, it consumes little memory, and takes little disk space (which can be further enhanced using hard links). Besides that, everything is fully scriptable. I also only have to maintain a single kernel (on the host).
By reducing isolation (jails/containers vs. virtualization), the host machine can directly copy files into and out of guests, but the guests can't directly see each other (you can through ssh, for instance).
I also like the fact that on the host machine, using ps -ef (or ps aux) gives you information on ALL processes, whether host or guest. The tty column shows you which machine owns a process.
Since it's a shared kernel and uses shared memory, resource utilization is superior. If a guest isn't doing anything, it really isn't doing anything at all, unlike the virtualizers (except the up-and-coming KVM). The virtualized machines, for instance, keep running the "do nothing loop" when the OS is idle. (I believe that VMware Tools is supposed to help a bit in this regard). And, if processes aren't running or disk space isn't being used, then, unlike VMware, resources aren't being consumed.
This is basically a way to run multiple guest Linuxes under a host, not a full virtualization environment, so there are trade-offs. I think that for running multiple Linux servers (as opposed to desktop apps), OpenVZ/Virtuozzo is an ideal solution.
Since I'm running a smallish server at home, I've found that OpenVZ is the best way to run so many Linux guests at once.
I will have to say that I have not tried UML because of performance. I can't try KVM since I don't have the correct AMD processors.
I was also initially impressed by Linux-VServer but got stuck, somewhere, but I cannot remember where. I found that OpenVZ seemed to be easier and more powerful than Linux-VServer, its virtualization cousin.
Here's a decent comparison of the kinds of VM's available for Linux:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/libra
I really like OpenVZ and will be glad to put in a plug for it. Try howtoforge.com for some great help on setting up....
Since I live here in Kansas (Kansas City metro), I'll tell you that while it's certainly cheaper than New York, the difference isn't that great.
It might be closer to $100K (NY) vs. $40K-60K, unless you live in the cities or burbs (KC, Topeka, Wichita), where it might be closer to $100K (NY) vs. $50K-75K....
In parts of Johnson County, Kansas, a mere $60K income could be disasterous for a typical family of four, unless they are rather thrifty. Now, if you live in NYC, you most likely won't be buying as nice of a house, and you may rent -- granted.
Otherwise, the differences really aren't 4 times or even close -- maybe 1.5 to 2 times, and yes, the cost of living vs. pay is nice, here....
Obligatory: There's no place like home.... click, click, click
I noticed from http://colemak.com/ that there are two backspace keys....
t _2.png
Any reason, such as more mistakes, maybe?
http://colemak.com/wiki/images/8/80/Colemak_layou
Thanks. I felt some rare inspiration.
:-)
It came from that book I referred to in the previous post.
Some also came from reading about 1/3 of the online book here johntaylorgatto.com/.
I've been rethinking my thinking....
The original post asks if Assembly is still relevant today. I'll ask some rhetorical questions (the only kind in a blog) and see how they apply:
a nalysis/architecture/whatever). The difference is training vs. education.
n dex.html.
* Would you want an astronaut to understand physics and math?
* Would you want a doctor to understand chemistry and biology?
* Should somebody studying to be a Literature teacher take their full set of liberal arts courses, including history?
* Should somebody earning a business degree take music appreciation?
Most of us probably said, "Yes" to most or all of those above. Even if the study seems irrelevant or too "low-level" or too "high-level" at the time, there are areas of coursework that help us understand things better.
I see a lot of dead wood in the IT industry. There are enormous numbers of people who either have no passion or who do not have a deep-enough or broad-enough knowledge of computer science to do their daily data processing job well. They are dependent on others around them for everything, even though they may be very skilled in one area.
By having both a broader and a deeper knowledge, people are necessarily better at troubleshooting and at understanding the areas outside their particular specialty. It makes them be better at all of IT and helps them do their specific role.
You should learn IT two ways -- deeply and broadly. You should deeply learn specific skills (Java/C#/Linux/Windows/scripting in Ruby/whatever) and you should learn broad skills (computing theory/relational databases/networking/troubleshooting/programming/
There is an enormous difference between training and education. Training is learning specific skills for specific tasks (narrow/specific), while education is broader and teaches you how to think, understand, and apply (broad/general).
While taking Assembly may not seem relevant at the time and you may never directly use it again, for every programming task, having a strong background in all of computing theory (including how the CPU handles its low-level instructions) educates you and gives you a deeper understanding. (Don't just be trained, be educated!)
My recommendation is the book My Job Went to India (And All I Got was this Lousy Book). If you can't afford it, read the sample chapters, especially the "Being a Generalist" and "Being a specialist" chapters at http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/mjwti/i
Personally, unless you need the specific class/training, I'd say that FORTRAN or COBOL ought to be abolished as required material in all colleges and shouldn't be in the degree program. Those should be electives only. Assembly, on the other hand, should remain required, for a deeper and broader education. (Don't settle for a dumbed-down program).
The difference, again, is training (specific/skill-oriented/task-oriented) vs. education (general/broad/understanding-oriented). Education and being a generalist will reap large rewards, long term. So stick with it and take that class. Assembly is a very important foundation class that educates you, long-term....
Another rhetorical question I have is this: "Are you passionate for IT or is it just a high-paying (presumably) job?" If it isn't a passion of yours, find you passion and do it well. If it is, take Assembly and like it -- it'll help you appreciate IT, your computer, your high-level language, and give you a more educated view of the "soul" of your computer.
(They don't make you take Assembly at many/most schools for their health. It would be a crying shame to remove it from the required courses).
I've seen a large number of ideas for something like this and a list of advantages/disadvantages for each, but here's my two cents....
First, use rooftops, where possible. This should include new construction as well as old. There could be three options - owner stores extra power in batteries, owner sells back to the grid, or have a power-company-subsidized grid program. For the third option, the power company can make it up by not having to buy as much power over the grid, by selling excess solar electric power, by not having to construct as many new power plants, by not having to upgrade the grid as often, by having less in the way of power losses, and by not having to buy as much fuel to generate power in the first place. (Power-company-subsidized solar power could also get government incentives, I'm sure)....
Second, someone pointed out that rooftop solar would shadow the roof and reduce AC costs. Yes it would, but I'd add something. The waste heat from the sun could be used for passive solar, as well.... You could run a hot water heater or augment your heat/heat pump in the winter time. Otherwise, in the summer, there would be big savings and in the winter, there might be an actual loss, once you strip away roof heat. By cooling solar panels, the efficiency is actually raised, anyway, IIRC.
Last, there is no silver bullet. We need to commit to getting off of imported fuels and fossil fuels, in general. We should combine wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, hydroelectric, biomass, etc. We should never put our eggs in one basket. Plug-in hybrids that use flex fuels give us at least three ways to power a vehicle for daily commutes and reduce our dependence on one resource. Depending on one resource, including solar energy, can be disasterous. Augmenting the current system with the proposed reduces our dependence, in fact.
If we use a single chunk of land, we don't reduce our dependence on one source for power.... Having large arrays is nice, so long as they're spread out all over the country/world. Rooftop solar should be part of energy independence, as well. It has the added advantage of making power local.
I also wonder why wind farms don't do solar on the ground, in between windmills....
Nothing different from this "Firefox protects you" official Google site: http://www.google.com/firefox
Fair enough. Nothing to see here, folks [bg]
Which sits next to this site: http://www.google.com/ie/
The parent was flamebait if this was.
I don't know how many times at Slashdot that a story wasn't checked out and people jump on these replies that hold people's feet to the fire with a "Mod up" all the time.
Just because you don't like what somebody typed does not make it flamebait.
Grow up, people...
Several readers have already commented on some things that made programming natural for us in the olden days of yore.
_ Users_Manual_(1977)(David_Lien)(pdf).zip
As for point 5 in the parent post, he's (she's?) right find documentation written for beginning programmers.
The Level I Users Manual by David Lien (1977) has been considered the gold standard in teaching beginners how to program. You have simply got to read it to appreciate it (putting it in the context of small machines).
http://www.trs-80.com/trs80-hw.htm
http://www.trs-80.com/cgi-bin/linkmehw.pl?Level_1
Several colleges made their comp sci students buy this book, to show them how to write manuals, years later....
I used this thing when I was 10 and very quickly learned computing and programming without any other outside help.
Computers were simpler back then. Kids' expectations for computers were, too.... So was documentation.
David Lien did an incredible job with this book and I don't believe his craft has ever been duplicated.
Agreed.
Until the Kuiper Express tells us more about Pluto, Charon, et. al, as well as others of these Kuiper Belt objects, we should reserve our judgement.
I can't imagine how you'd train on it or customer support it.
Sure, it would start out all uniform, but then, if things evolve and personalize, then only you really know your OS, not your neighbor and not your tech support person.
How do you interface that with others?
Training? Support? Interfacing?
We already have enough of this with Johnny Six Pack.... Now, we have to work with Johnny Five Pack, as well!
I've been following this thread, Stormin' and have to say that you've done a great job defending your case with logic and passion. I agree with you, too.
I'd say a large number of people just read and do not comment, either way.
I believe that most rational people agree with you and are able to see through the thin veneer of multiple forms of idealism, including passivism/pacifism.
I have seen countless people attacked on this site over the years, for not following the status quo and it's hypocrisy. It's amazing, for example, for people to share a believe in "tolerance", only to have the same sort of people slander someone who disagrees.
This thread wasn't quite as bad as others, and many of the previous threads surprisingly had a large number of people agree with you. (I'm a bit surpised at the agreement, today)....
I personally liked this article.
And, I think it's silly to have a "no military use" edition of the GPL. I'm sure Al-Qaida will have their legal department get right on it....
As I understand it, TOS used different SciFi writers all the time, for different episodes, and usually created a three-act play. They got the best SciFi writers for their day.
Why not use Joss Whedon as chief writer and use the gang of two to fill in "Star Trek" details and to organize it into three-acts?
My goodness, Firely/Serenity were so good!
Don't skimp on space, ethics, and phaser fire, though....
Bullet points and indentation are screwy. These are two things used by common people, not some set of rarely-used features.
Bullet points can get really messed up when importing from Word -- even documents that don't have macros.
Indentation is also set at too large an interval. Why not default to 1/4 inch (US Letter), like most everyone else's word processor?
Just like Word, at times the auto formatting gets in the way. This is especially true of bullets and indentation.
Other than that, I have few disagreements with OpenOffice Writer. The two items, above, though are used by me on almost every document I produce. So, if I have Word and Writer on the same machine, I may actually use Word, to avoid this....
sending duplicate chromosomes back to the center of the original cell, an event once thought impossible
Now, there's two of me.
I think you've sorta hit the nail on the head, adding to some other commentary:
1.) Civil service
2.) Management
3.) Other, outside-IT careers
4.) Maintenance of "outdated" tech
5.) Field is too new to make a determination
I agree with you, that it is an unknown. The field is too new to make a determination. The field simply isn't old enough to have programmers retiring in droves. Yes, where I work, there are 60+ year olds doing COBOL/mainframe stuff, but it's pretty rare in this field.
When I entered the work force as a programmer just out of college, it was 1993. 1993 was interesting because it was during a downturn in the US economy and already had one of the largest gluts of programmers/IT people on the market, simultaneously. It was a hard time for programmers, everywhere.
So, I'll add one theory -- it depends on the job cycle. Compare the dot-com/Y2K/Euro-conversion days with the recessions before and after those days, for instance.... During "dot-com" era, jobs were plentiful and workers were very scarce, so the 40+ crowd was in huge demand, but not so before and afterward....
So, I see 6 trends, so far, for the 40+ crowd.
I've got 4-5 years to find out.
Agreed, and I, for one welcome the new competition.
And no, OpenSolaris will never de-throne Linux -- at least not without a lot of money and time....
Linux has several things on its side:
More users in general
More fanatical users, that do things "for the love of the code"
More software (OK, most things are ported/portable, but much more software is "first tier" on Linux)
More momentum
More installations
More documentation
More press (Is OpenSolaris a household word? Has grandma ever heard about OpenSolaris?)
More freedom
More flexibility
More user-friendliness
More drivers and hardware support, in general
More platforms
More open sourcecode
With a wave of a wand, you can't expect OpenSolaris to take off overnight, this year, next year, nor the following year. In fact, it's been open for months now, and what do we have? A very small amount of momentum and three new distros, much of which is a cobbling together of OpenSolaris and pieces of Linux distributions....
OpenSolaris is late to the party, but I probably will try it out, especially to re-sharpen my Solaris skills. But I probably won't host anything, unless it is a specific customer requirement.
What is scary is that many PHB's don't understand opensource. Many think OpenSolaris is not somehow bad, since Solaris went opensource. Go figure....