Most of the resources we have consumed in the past 100 years took about 100 million years of sunlight to produce (oil, coal, natural gas). Technology needs to get about 1000000 times better than it is if we have any hope of economic growth becoming a reality rather than a fiction underwritten by draining prehistoric resources.
This assumes that the market rebounds, i.e. it keeps growing forever. You make a good case that the market is really a Ponzi scheme, but that it is so large it cannot be imagined to fail, so everyone consents to pretend it will grow forever. At base, there are limited natural resources, and limited human resources, and when the market starts to run out of ways to efficiently exploit them, or the resources themselves start running out (peak oil, peak rainforest, peak population), it's hard to imagine how there will ever be a rebound. On the upside, some of the base resources are generated by sunlight and other forms of nuclear energy, which won't run out for a long time, but most resources are all too finite.
I would mod this up if I could. Anyone who hasn't heard of batch processing is working on apps of no real importance. Batches are a lot faster than they used to be is all.
We used to do this crap in Windows in the early 90s - notebooks with rules lines and faux punched holes, folders with flaps that opened, old fashioned analogue clocks - and we stopped because it was stupid.
For me the question is why would you want someone to spend $1000 per year of your money maintaining something that might be evidence against someone who might be guilty of something that might have harmed people? There are probably a large number of people who might be guilty of something and might have more than 2GB of data that might prove it, but do we want to pay to keep it all?
This is not really true. If the first world we waste about a quarter of our food and in the developing world a similar proportion is lost to pests and diseases, but population is growing exponentially, so even if we stopped the waste, it wouldn't help us for long. We have previously increased food production to keep pace with population growth by a) irrigation b) fertilisers c) plant breeding d) destroying rainforest. a) is a problem because large parts of the world are running out of water, and consuming non-replaceable aquifers to irrigate crops. This is only going to get worse. b) is almost entirely based on consumption of fossil fuels, so gets more expensive and damaging all the time. c) has been successsful since the 1950s but although we continue to breed potentially 'better' more productive crops, the farm-gate productivity has been stalled for about a decade, so we may be reaching some other limit like what the soil can support. d) is self-limiting and only makes the water crisis worse. We really do have some deep seated and intractable food security problems, and it is not just about distribution. A global switch to vegetarianism would help stave off the problems for a couple more decades.
It's not just the large growths that kill you either, often it is the proliferation throughout the circulatory system. I don't know if anyone has ever seen this in plants - tumeruos tissues spreading by circulation.
This. We were doing this stuff in software development in the 90s as well (large consultancy firms). Agile is just some marketing name for one way of doing things.
I thought the point the poster was trying to make was that there should be two rovers ON EARTH - one that they try stuff out on (the dev rover), and one that they only do stuff to that actually gets done to the one on Mars (the test rover). That way they can hopefully control for the effects of doing and undoing changes, and they will always have one system here that is in the same state as the one on Mars, except for while the one on Mars is being updated. Engineers often like to set things up that way for supporting important systems.
Most of the best content comes from passionate people making it because it is the thing they want to do most in life. This is true in the arts, music, science, sport, and most other areas of cultural production. Recessions tend to produce a cultural flowering, because people have more time on their hands, so more time to devote to their passions. We used to need huge business enterprises to do DISTRIBUTION, but we have that sorted now thank you. Having less big budget movies being made does not make me think our societies will become a cultural desert, although, as a movie fan and someone who works in the industry I can see how you would be worried. And by the way the pirates are entirely winning, and no, it isn't meaning no new movies. This is flawed thinking.
This. Someone I know buys quite a lot of ebooks, hardly any physical books, and certainly doesn't spend a lot of time reading. As for the motivation, I guess people buy a book sometimes because they like the idea of reading it. At the time of purchase you haven't read the book, so the main instant gratification is in allowing yourself the possibility that you might have the kind of life that would allow you to read the things you are interested in. The fact that you never seem to find the time doesn't detract from the instant buzz of the buy.
I don't get this. So the American public paid for this research, and now they have to pay again if they ever want to use the knowledge? The original paper says this: "This research is supported by NSF grants CNS- 0831244, CNS-0845874, CNS-0923313, CNS-0964641, SRC task 1836.074, Gigascale Systems Research Center, and a Sloan Research Fellowship.", so how does a private corporation get to own a patent on this idea?
Point taken about small businesses. I guess when it comes to the small businesses that make up a large part of the economy, the powers that be tend to treat them in the same way as they treat individuals, and corporations only get the royal treatment when they are big enough to afford the lobbying funds.
When something is 'new' the publishers spend a lot of money advertising it, so more people want it, so they charge more. Once they stop advertising, noone wants it so it gets a lot cheaper. This is the way these weird content markets work (music, film, games, books). Due to the advertising, and people's 'shiny shiny' mentality, some people are willing to pay more for something when it is new. I don't understand it myself, and only buy old things, recycled things, and 'used' content. The content industries try to argue that if I wasn't allowed to buy used things I would buy more new ones, but this is just not true.
Citation needed. I say the opposite - the losses that have been socialised in the past few yeas (trillions) likely dwarf the losses that have been privatised over the last 100 years. Which of us is right?
I think the point is that data stored on the internet are all public. There is no real security. There are no private online data. If we want ISPs to store everything we do online then we are effectively saying we want it all to be public.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the resources we have consumed in the past 100 years took about 100 million years of sunlight to produce (oil, coal, natural gas). Technology needs to get about 1000000 times better than it is if we have any hope of economic growth becoming a reality rather than a fiction underwritten by draining prehistoric resources.
Maybe they aspire to make their centre international, rather than a local US center.
This assumes that the market rebounds, i.e. it keeps growing forever. You make a good case that the market is really a Ponzi scheme, but that it is so large it cannot be imagined to fail, so everyone consents to pretend it will grow forever. At base, there are limited natural resources, and limited human resources, and when the market starts to run out of ways to efficiently exploit them, or the resources themselves start running out (peak oil, peak rainforest, peak population), it's hard to imagine how there will ever be a rebound. On the upside, some of the base resources are generated by sunlight and other forms of nuclear energy, which won't run out for a long time, but most resources are all too finite.
I would mod this up if I could. Anyone who hasn't heard of batch processing is working on apps of no real importance. Batches are a lot faster than they used to be is all.
We used to do this crap in Windows in the early 90s - notebooks with rules lines and faux punched holes, folders with flaps that opened, old fashioned analogue clocks - and we stopped because it was stupid.
For me the question is why would you want someone to spend $1000 per year of your money maintaining something that might be evidence against someone who might be guilty of something that might have harmed people? There are probably a large number of people who might be guilty of something and might have more than 2GB of data that might prove it, but do we want to pay to keep it all?
This is not really true. If the first world we waste about a quarter of our food and in the developing world a similar proportion is lost to pests and diseases, but population is growing exponentially, so even if we stopped the waste, it wouldn't help us for long. We have previously increased food production to keep pace with population growth by a) irrigation b) fertilisers c) plant breeding d) destroying rainforest. a) is a problem because large parts of the world are running out of water, and consuming non-replaceable aquifers to irrigate crops. This is only going to get worse. b) is almost entirely based on consumption of fossil fuels, so gets more expensive and damaging all the time. c) has been successsful since the 1950s but although we continue to breed potentially 'better' more productive crops, the farm-gate productivity has been stalled for about a decade, so we may be reaching some other limit like what the soil can support. d) is self-limiting and only makes the water crisis worse. We really do have some deep seated and intractable food security problems, and it is not just about distribution. A global switch to vegetarianism would help stave off the problems for a couple more decades.
You mean aluminium foil shurely?
So when you are talking about hobbled web browsers and highly constrained apps 'back in the day' you mean like iOS today?
AFAIR these were the first smart phones http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_8110
It's not just the large growths that kill you either, often it is the proliferation throughout the circulatory system. I don't know if anyone has ever seen this in plants - tumeruos tissues spreading by circulation.
This. We were doing this stuff in software development in the 90s as well (large consultancy firms). Agile is just some marketing name for one way of doing things.
I thought the point the poster was trying to make was that there should be two rovers ON EARTH - one that they try stuff out on (the dev rover), and one that they only do stuff to that actually gets done to the one on Mars (the test rover). That way they can hopefully control for the effects of doing and undoing changes, and they will always have one system here that is in the same state as the one on Mars, except for while the one on Mars is being updated. Engineers often like to set things up that way for supporting important systems.
It could be the Israelis, they created Trusteer Rapport, so they have previous here.
Most decent developers use so much maths they don't even realise they are doing it due to familiarity with the language.
Most of the best content comes from passionate people making it because it is the thing they want to do most in life. This is true in the arts, music, science, sport, and most other areas of cultural production. Recessions tend to produce a cultural flowering, because people have more time on their hands, so more time to devote to their passions. We used to need huge business enterprises to do DISTRIBUTION, but we have that sorted now thank you. Having less big budget movies being made does not make me think our societies will become a cultural desert, although, as a movie fan and someone who works in the industry I can see how you would be worried. And by the way the pirates are entirely winning, and no, it isn't meaning no new movies. This is flawed thinking.
it's rounded rectangles!
This. Someone I know buys quite a lot of ebooks, hardly any physical books, and certainly doesn't spend a lot of time reading. As for the motivation, I guess people buy a book sometimes because they like the idea of reading it. At the time of purchase you haven't read the book, so the main instant gratification is in allowing yourself the possibility that you might have the kind of life that would allow you to read the things you are interested in. The fact that you never seem to find the time doesn't detract from the instant buzz of the buy.
I don't get this. So the American public paid for this research, and now they have to pay again if they ever want to use the knowledge? The original paper says this: "This research is supported by NSF grants CNS- 0831244, CNS-0845874, CNS-0923313, CNS-0964641, SRC task 1836.074, Gigascale Systems Research Center, and a Sloan Research Fellowship.", so how does a private corporation get to own a patent on this idea?
Point taken about small businesses. I guess when it comes to the small businesses that make up a large part of the economy, the powers that be tend to treat them in the same way as they treat individuals, and corporations only get the royal treatment when they are big enough to afford the lobbying funds.
When something is 'new' the publishers spend a lot of money advertising it, so more people want it, so they charge more. Once they stop advertising, noone wants it so it gets a lot cheaper. This is the way these weird content markets work (music, film, games, books). Due to the advertising, and people's 'shiny shiny' mentality, some people are willing to pay more for something when it is new. I don't understand it myself, and only buy old things, recycled things, and 'used' content. The content industries try to argue that if I wasn't allowed to buy used things I would buy more new ones, but this is just not true.
Citation needed. I say the opposite - the losses that have been socialised in the past few yeas (trillions) likely dwarf the losses that have been privatised over the last 100 years. Which of us is right?
What's even worse is they went to Ryan Seacrest
Politics is not a science except in Asimov stories.
I think the point is that data stored on the internet are all public. There is no real security. There are no private online data. If we want ISPs to store everything we do online then we are effectively saying we want it all to be public.