you're swinging both ways. acer ought to be happy the microsoft is going it alone if acer thinks it'll flop. but more importantly, it doesn't matter why. acer couldn't sell windows tablets. microsoft couldn't get acer to sell windows tablets. the microsoft is going to sell its own tablets. what's the problem? who's upset? how can acer be upset about it?
the only way that acer can be upset is if it wants microsoft to not sell the surface. and the only reason acer can want that is if acer thinks microsoft will be successful with the surface. and if microsoft is successful with the surface, then I really don't care about acer's lack of opportunity to repackage someone else's product yet again.
if you saw the features of the surface, then you know there are about a dozen things that it has that no other device has. list any for the w500 or w200. that's not innovation. that's repackaging someone else's product. that adds zero value for me.
Look, I'm in no hurry for a tablet. the form factor doesn't suit my business, and the features don't suit my lifestyle. same goes for a laptop. but the surface at least gives me enough value for the money that it's worth my having one on occasion. and even with the low frequency with which I'll be able to use it, it'll survive and be useful and not get in my way. that's nice. and it's something that doesn't exist on other portable/mobile computers at all.
I'd have had acer build their w510 last year, market the hell out of it, offer microsoft the chance to weigh in on its hardware, have already orchestrated their own app store, and have promoted it as an ipad killer. and I'd have had them do it allied with half of their industry -- asus, gigabyte, etc..
the w510 itself, like the transformer, isn't anything new. and of course the ipad isn't useful for any real work. but that's the problem; since it's the only thing in the space, idiots flock to it. and there are a lot of people who are idiots when it comes to working with machines of all kinds. so if you're going to profit in the tablet market, you get to make the best device for the space, not the best device for the user.
I said it's acer's fault because they didn't join microsoft in the fight. now microsoft's been forced to go it alone. that wasn't true two years ago.
As for the surface pro, it's my dream tablet for sure. I've never been able to use a tablet, since the software limitations make it useless to me. but the surface pro will actually let me do 15% of my work from anywhere, and 40% of my recreation from anywhere (vs 1% and 10% with current tablets). The price point doesn't bother me. it's still less than half of what I need to spend on any computer I buy -- which has been the same $2'000 it's always been for the last three decades, and for the same reasons. And since a laptop isn't any good to me, the pro gives me what little portability my business can manage. As for others, either enterprise sees it as a way to furnish employees with a device for the road, or they don't. And while employees in non-technical arenas won't want to carry a laptop, they may be willing to carry a tablet. That, in my opinion, is what will swing things one way or the other.
that looks like any ordinary small pc, with a touch screen. like I said, no innovation. and also like I said, zero marketing.
acer wouldn't complain if they didn't think that microsoft might succeed. acer's only complaining because microsoft's made a few leaps where acer did nothing.
you seem to think that acer couldn't do anything without microsoft for the last three years. that they couldn't do anything without win8. well not only did they not even try, but they also didn't step up to microsoft and offer to help with the hardware. so where apple did all of the work by itself years ago, and microsoft is doing all of the work by itself now, acer's done no such thing.
you're seeing a situation now where microsoft went it all alone, because acer didn't choose to help.
and I'll bet that microsoft spent a few months and went from partner to partner, including to acer, asking someone to put real money into innovating a tablet. acer didn't. acer said: we're not going to take any such risk. we're going to combine a dozen other companies' technologies and put our sticker onto it. it'll be an intel chip, a microsoft operating system, and we'll just get it all off the shelf.
that makes acer yet another company that not only doesn't innovate, but just takes then-existing products and repackages them. that's not innovation. repackaging and distribution only means something when the market can't order direct. and apparently, that's just ended for windows tablets.
no, it's not a good thing. I still think it'll change. I think that even if microsoft is wildly successful with the surface, they'll let companies like acer buy back in. they'll licence the entire surface product, os and hardware and software, for sale by acer. and acer can then fabricate absolutely nothing but their own logo sticker.
Acer could have used win7, or asked for win8, or planned a hardware device for this year with win8. instead, acer did none of that, and complained. they still don't have a tablet for win8, with or without surface in existence.
Yes a time machine. Time moves forward all by itself. if acer had a tablet now, microsoft would gladly help them out against apple. acer has nothing because they figured they'd wait and see how win8 would do first. well, so sorry but now you've got microsoft to compete with as well. you were expecting nothing? bad guess.
no I don't think acer has a tablet ready for win8. I don't think they have anything like surface in any way. I think they have the same thing that they had last year, now running ivy bridge. I think they haven't innovated at all. as for turning over, I mean the entire win8 tablet market. the only reason microsoft is now into it is because no one else took the lead.
win8 has been available to acer in various betas for over a year. acer could have marketted the greatest tablet ever built all this time -- and just not sell it until win8 comes out. or they could have sold it with win7, and a tutorial on installing win8 previews. but instead you've seen absolutely nothing from acer.
you've got microsoft surface announced for the very first time within four months of win8 release. that's very tight. microsoft gave acer plenty of time to announce an acer solution -- and none was.
I say nothing android. I say acer could have had a half-way decent win7 tablet, and a transitional win8 tablet, and an annouced and fully marketed win8 tablet already promoted at the start of this year.
Instead you've seen absolutely nothing from acer, because acer's plan was simply to take their old hardware, put in new intel chips and new microsoft os and innovate nothing at all.
sorry they decided to take no risks. as a result they've specifically created a new competitor.
think about it this way. acer, asus, gigabyte, and a dozen others could have announced win8 tablets in january 2012, with interesting specs and peripherals and everything. they could have sparked the entire market, and be ready for win8 launch. and yes, win8 preview existed in january so full marketing ads and promotional materials would have been 99% perfect.
Microsoft gave Acer the last three years to come up with a consumer tablet. And Acer didn't. Sure they made one or two, but those weren't anything ipad-competitive, and Acer didn't market them at all.
So after this many years of the iPad being basically the only marketed tablet, I can respect Microsoft's choice to step up. ..since no one else seems willing to do so.
And yes, in order to do so itself, microsoft needs to make the entire solution, and market the entire solution, and take all of the risk, and force the start screen, and everything else that may be required to compete with the iPad.
And if those tablets are relatively successful, Microsoft will turn it back to Acer-like partners. And if those tablets are very successful, Microsoft will rightfully keep things for itself. And if they fail entirely, then Acer will be right.
It's that simple.
So next time, Acer, try to actually innovate products yourself, instead of yelling at those who try. And stop complaining when someone steps forward to do something that you specifically avoided doing yourself.
Maybe, just maybe, it's high time that these scientists find another source of funding, outside of the public government. Last I checked, government was about governing, not about researching.
So sorry there isn't a surplus of money in our giant country of few people. You may just need to earn some of your own.
I'd think this obvious. Anyone walking into an environment that they don't like shouldn't expect that environment to change. It can be a female into a team of males, a male into a team of females, a man into a team of monkeys. If she's not happy with what men do, then she shouldn't apply for a job amongst a team of men. There are plenty of female-based workplaces, and any woman has my support to start her own.
There's nothing wrong with a team of men choosing to act with the comradery expected of such a team.
But, I'll tell you what. If I can apply for a job with a team of women, and force them to stop crying, and wearing lipstick, because I find those offensive; then I'll support the whole "no puns in the workplace" carp.
Seriously, it's an easy line to draw. Sticks and stones. Words are fine. Not pleasant, but fine.
If you don't like men, stop spending time around them. It's that simple.
Congratulations. The system put in to replace the old system isn't infinitely the best system possible. Dude, it's still better than the old system. I think most forget that this replaced a normal key and lock.
The normal key and lock can be picked with far cheaper components and far less experience than this one. Lockpicks aren't expensive. They never were.
So quite complaining, and quit leaving your passport in your hotel room.
My platform's about 1 meg of perl code. But each project gets its own copy -- for stability purposes. As a result, my bug tracking umbrella's multiple projects. While bug fixes are routinely pushed back to the main repository, other projects rarely get the updated code until absolutely necessary.
we don't need to write down anything, nor store anything. this is yet another dumb problem with a very easy non-technological solution, that needn't any gadgetry.
we have plenty of information from tens of thousands of years ago. you'd think that archeologists would be familiar with them. They're called rocks.
Bury the nuclear wasted wherever you like, and put a big ugly rock on top of it. and not a round one. I promise, it'll stay there for as long as the waste does.
In a million years, assuming everyone forgot, someone will ask why these weird rocks are everywhere. and then they'll dig beneath one, and find out pretty damn fast.
Oh I so very much agree. The negative organization effects come in so many ways. Mainly, real bug tracking systems are designed for projects where keeping bugs around is the norm, but tracking those bugs is also necessary. That's just weird for most projects; it's a weight that kills most projects.
Trouble is that it requires more than an internet connection. It requires an application. Nice part about the text file is that I can keep it next to the code -- main.pl can have main.bugs. I can edit it in my favourite code editor, with all of the same features that I've been using all day to manage code.
But yeah, I use tabs to create pseudo-columns by which I can sort.
I've got a few hundreds megs of perl code. I've got five text files of bugs / planned features / quirks. Not sure what features of a bug tracking system you seek. I need the file name, the function name, and a description. Text files are great, and far more portable and accessible than a spreadsheet.
But I've never been one to like "proper" bug tracking systems. Of course, I'm not working with dozens of other developers.
The temperature at which asphalt re-liquifies (for lack of a better conversational term) is based purely on the balance of the ingredients. It can easily be adjusted for a warmer climate. Similarly, a different material with the same property over a wider range is just as easily fabricated.
On the other side, wider airplane tires would also weigh into the equasion, pardon the pun.
So don't let this article do what so many FUD-oriented pieces do. Don't let it take a rare occurance, use it to highlight an unusual event, and then use an inconsequential failure as proof of a future eventual catastrophic one.
I promiss that in twenty years, planes will still be able to have runways.
I think people, especially industry experts, have blinders on. It's not the PC that makes the PC important. It's the room that makes the PC important.
Doing real work, in any technical industry -- be it architecture, painting, engineering, mathermatics, accounting, etc. -- requires a human being sitting down with no distractions in a room dedicated to the task. With a proper chair, and a proper set of tools.
So with the park bench and the beach chair tossed aside, you've got a professional in a room. At that point, he's not holding a tablet. Not because he couldn't be, just because as a business it's worth spending ten time the cost to have three times the power/productivity. And when the space can fit a giant PC, that's going to be more productive than any single handheld tablet.
If you want to kill the PC, you need to kill the room first. If you figure out how to kill the room, I'd love to hear it.
That doesn't sound like what I said at all. I described my observations of others. My move from hard to soft wasn't about that. I was in artificial intelligence. After four years of compsci and maths just to get to AI, I discovered something quite simple -- AI, at the time at least, was all about short-cut algorithms. I don't believe that my brain does any calculus when walking around a room, and I had zero interest in spending my years in an iterative process of slightly improving algorithms to appear more intelligent and constantly being limited by computing power.
Instead, I moved over to cognitive modelling, which is AI in the psychology department. The rule is to ignore computing power, since it'll be faster tomorrow, and focus on algorithms that function in a natural manner. That's where I ran into neural networks, which are both lighting fast, and reall fun.
Although, you are correct in one manner. Neural networks don't get debugged the way compsci calculus algorithms are. It's a far more natural execution, and so it's wildly parallel in a way where each parallel path is dynamic and different from the others. So you wind up building black boxes into your code. So debugging is more like diagnosing the code, and treating it with small nudges. You can't tear it apart and unit test anything because such units don't function at all, by definition.
As someone who's been on both of those academic sides (I started in hard, and moved into soft four years later), I never thought it was a lack of comprehension when fellow students have trouble with hard sciences. Instead, it's an appreciation for numerical conclusions.
Hard sciences basically tend to conclude three steps earlier than soft sciences -- because the math ends there. Hard sciences tend to describe a scenario, detail it numerically, hypothesize a numerical result, experiment numerically, solve for x, and x=n is the answer. The issue for soft science students is really that nobody ever cared about x. Hard sciences very quickly forget where x came from, because the entire scenario was translated into numbers. This affords hard sciences a certain level of abstraction, making problems faster to solve, easier to solve, and more widely relevant to re-apply.
Soft sciences tend to be industries where some aspect of the scenario can't be translated into numbers. It's usually a black-box scenario, and psychology is a good example. Such experiments don't attempt to describe certain behavioural anomalies numerically. Instead, 40% - 80% of a scenario is translated into numbers, leaving the remaining 20% - 60% as mysterious elements. Imagine a hard science equasion where six linear constants simply cannot be merged into a single constant -- for no seemingly good reason. As a direct result, after solving for x, the numerical abstraction must then be de-abstracted back into whatever the real-world scenario actually is. This procedure is not only an effort to grasp, but it's also a a major point of interpretation at the end of an experiment -- usually because x isn't the number of grams diluted; instead x is the likelihood that a person might turn left.
The nice part about de-abstracting at the end is that you wind up with a real-world answer, not a mystery number.
So my point is, that for a social science student used to walking in with a scenario, and walking out with a conclusion, you need to teach them how to appreciate the hard-science "datum result" without having a one-question-one-answer conclusion.
You can see this same effect in the business world. Big business corporate C.E.O.'s often make decisions from numbers in, to predict numbers out, without ever knowing where the numbers came from, nor how they'll be used on the way out. But if you've seen anyone go through "board of director" training, you know that the skills wind up applying to any business anywhere because they are all done at the hard-science executive level.
Constrast that to the entrepreneur of a small business, who needs to make all of the same decisions, but simply doesn't have the sample-size of data coming in to ever be able to make decisions numerically like the corporate guy -- which is one of the primary reasons that he has an advisory board instead of a board of directors. The decision-making process is very different, even though they are the same questions and the same answers. And each has a very difficult time in the other's business world.
Here's hoping someone else's response details a good way to actually teach that appreciation.
There's a mobile/portable version of ultraedit, and while it can be nothing more than a simple notepad replacement, it can also be configured as a rather formidable IDE. www.ultraedit.com
Start your own business. You're in an industry where the clients know nothing about the fabrication -- like many but not most industries. What's impressive about the programming industry is that the clients actually know that they don't know anything about programming.
So it's easy to get started. You'll obviously be limitted in the beginning, mostly due to lack of infrastructure. But that's ok, since you'll still be making a nice $20K in year one. Within three years you'll have found yourself with enough infrastructure to react in professional business ways, and you'll be at the $50K level. Beyond that, the projects you select, the clients you foster, the talent that you develop, and a little bit of luck will take you as high as you want.
That's what I did, and I wound up dropping out of university after 18 months. Should have done it earlier.
After five years, I was making the equivalent of $80K (as a business owner, you pay way less tax). Now, at 33 years old, I've got a nice new large house, a sportscar, the equivalent of $120K - $200K depending on the year and the number of vacations I take. Life is incredibly smooth, I can't get fired, it's unlikely that I'd lose all of my clients in the same month. I've been through multiple economic down-turns with little effect (things are smoothed out over multiple clients).
What I don't have is paint on the walls, and it's killing me. But I just don't want to spend time painting when I can go out and have fun. And I don't believe it paying someone else to do something that I can do that easily. It's a major problem in my life. It's almost as big as last week's major life problem when I had two fun things to do in one night, and it took five days for me to find a neighbour able to take my show tickets.
Major life problems take on a whole new meaning when you set your hours -- and I don't just mean work hours; I mean sleep hours too.
I'm almost positive it's exactly the same. Except the plague episode was from a jar from a ship that had a cat, and the cat episode was a neighbour's pet that had previously died. Or something like that.
Would you leave work to go to your bank during your work day? Stop bringing your personal life to your employer's place of business. What they hell is wrong with you? Do you accept personal courier packages at work too? Would you be upset if the building's security guard -- or mail desk -- checked what was inside if you did?
Just because it takes you fewer than 5 minutes, and you can do it "on a break" doesn't make it something that you should be doing at someone else's premises. Do you have dinner at a friend's house, and between courses just casually pay your bills from their computer? Do you format their hard drive afterwards just to make sure they weren't logging anything?
Just because your employer allows you to do some personal errands using his premises doesn't mean that he isn't controlling his own network however the hell he wants to. It doesn't matter why. It's his network, not yours.
You want your privacy, get your own private network. The word private is right in the name.
So sorry that other people's stuff isn't your private stuff. Buy your own.
I've always hated the whole "saving the planet" "green" concepts. Polluting less and all that is a great way to preserve the current human-likable climate, but that's about it. The planet can handle our measily polluting quite easily.
But here's the exact opposite. Last I checked, tsunamis are perfectly natural events. "invasive species" gaining access to new lands is a perfectly typical historical circumstance. Stopping those species from landing on distant shores amounts to limiting their movements.
Stopping crabs from travelling the world is as bad, if not worse, than killing baby seals.
So, where are the save-the-whales people now? What if the invading species were whales instead of crabs?
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you're swinging both ways. acer ought to be happy the microsoft is going it alone if acer thinks it'll flop. but more importantly, it doesn't matter why. acer couldn't sell windows tablets. microsoft couldn't get acer to sell windows tablets. the microsoft is going to sell its own tablets. what's the problem? who's upset? how can acer be upset about it?
the only way that acer can be upset is if it wants microsoft to not sell the surface. and the only reason acer can want that is if acer thinks microsoft will be successful with the surface. and if microsoft is successful with the surface, then I really don't care about acer's lack of opportunity to repackage someone else's product yet again.
if you saw the features of the surface, then you know there are about a dozen things that it has that no other device has. list any for the w500 or w200. that's not innovation. that's repackaging someone else's product. that adds zero value for me.
Look, I'm in no hurry for a tablet. the form factor doesn't suit my business, and the features don't suit my lifestyle. same goes for a laptop. but the surface at least gives me enough value for the money that it's worth my having one on occasion. and even with the low frequency with which I'll be able to use it, it'll survive and be useful and not get in my way. that's nice. and it's something that doesn't exist on other portable/mobile computers at all.
I'd have had acer build their w510 last year, market the hell out of it, offer microsoft the chance to weigh in on its hardware, have already orchestrated their own app store, and have promoted it as an ipad killer. and I'd have had them do it allied with half of their industry -- asus, gigabyte, etc..
the w510 itself, like the transformer, isn't anything new. and of course the ipad isn't useful for any real work. but that's the problem; since it's the only thing in the space, idiots flock to it. and there are a lot of people who are idiots when it comes to working with machines of all kinds. so if you're going to profit in the tablet market, you get to make the best device for the space, not the best device for the user.
I said it's acer's fault because they didn't join microsoft in the fight. now microsoft's been forced to go it alone. that wasn't true two years ago.
As for the surface pro, it's my dream tablet for sure. I've never been able to use a tablet, since the software limitations make it useless to me. but the surface pro will actually let me do 15% of my work from anywhere, and 40% of my recreation from anywhere (vs 1% and 10% with current tablets). The price point doesn't bother me. it's still less than half of what I need to spend on any computer I buy -- which has been the same $2'000 it's always been for the last three decades, and for the same reasons. And since a laptop isn't any good to me, the pro gives me what little portability my business can manage. As for others, either enterprise sees it as a way to furnish employees with a device for the road, or they don't. And while employees in non-technical arenas won't want to carry a laptop, they may be willing to carry a tablet. That, in my opinion, is what will swing things one way or the other.
that looks like any ordinary small pc, with a touch screen. like I said, no innovation. and also like I said, zero marketing.
acer wouldn't complain if they didn't think that microsoft might succeed. acer's only complaining because microsoft's made a few leaps where acer did nothing.
you seem to think that acer couldn't do anything without microsoft for the last three years. that they couldn't do anything without win8. well not only did they not even try, but they also didn't step up to microsoft and offer to help with the hardware. so where apple did all of the work by itself years ago, and microsoft is doing all of the work by itself now, acer's done no such thing.
you're seeing a situation now where microsoft went it all alone, because acer didn't choose to help.
and I'll bet that microsoft spent a few months and went from partner to partner, including to acer, asking someone to put real money into innovating a tablet. acer didn't. acer said: we're not going to take any such risk. we're going to combine a dozen other companies' technologies and put our sticker onto it. it'll be an intel chip, a microsoft operating system, and we'll just get it all off the shelf.
that makes acer yet another company that not only doesn't innovate, but just takes then-existing products and repackages them. that's not innovation. repackaging and distribution only means something when the market can't order direct. and apparently, that's just ended for windows tablets.
no, it's not a good thing. I still think it'll change. I think that even if microsoft is wildly successful with the surface, they'll let companies like acer buy back in. they'll licence the entire surface product, os and hardware and software, for sale by acer. and acer can then fabricate absolutely nothing but their own logo sticker.
Acer could have used win7, or asked for win8, or planned a hardware device for this year with win8. instead, acer did none of that, and complained. they still don't have a tablet for win8, with or without surface in existence.
Yes a time machine. Time moves forward all by itself. if acer had a tablet now, microsoft would gladly help them out against apple. acer has nothing because they figured they'd wait and see how win8 would do first. well, so sorry but now you've got microsoft to compete with as well. you were expecting nothing? bad guess.
no I don't think acer has a tablet ready for win8. I don't think they have anything like surface in any way. I think they have the same thing that they had last year, now running ivy bridge. I think they haven't innovated at all. as for turning over, I mean the entire win8 tablet market. the only reason microsoft is now into it is because no one else took the lead.
win8 has been available to acer in various betas for over a year. acer could have marketted the greatest tablet ever built all this time -- and just not sell it until win8 comes out. or they could have sold it with win7, and a tutorial on installing win8 previews. but instead you've seen absolutely nothing from acer.
you've got microsoft surface announced for the very first time within four months of win8 release. that's very tight. microsoft gave acer plenty of time to announce an acer solution -- and none was.
I say nothing android. I say acer could have had a half-way decent win7 tablet, and a transitional win8 tablet, and an annouced and fully marketed win8 tablet already promoted at the start of this year.
Instead you've seen absolutely nothing from acer, because acer's plan was simply to take their old hardware, put in new intel chips and new microsoft os and innovate nothing at all.
sorry they decided to take no risks. as a result they've specifically created a new competitor.
think about it this way. acer, asus, gigabyte, and a dozen others could have announced win8 tablets in january 2012, with interesting specs and peripherals and everything. they could have sparked the entire market, and be ready for win8 launch. and yes, win8 preview existed in january so full marketing ads and promotional materials would have been 99% perfect.
but they did nothing.
Microsoft gave Acer the last three years to come up with a consumer tablet. And Acer didn't. Sure they made one or two, but those weren't anything ipad-competitive, and Acer didn't market them at all.
So after this many years of the iPad being basically the only marketed tablet, I can respect Microsoft's choice to step up. . .since no one else seems willing to do so.
And yes, in order to do so itself, microsoft needs to make the entire solution, and market the entire solution, and take all of the risk, and force the start screen, and everything else that may be required to compete with the iPad.
And if those tablets are relatively successful, Microsoft will turn it back to Acer-like partners. And if those tablets are very successful, Microsoft will rightfully keep things for itself. And if they fail entirely, then Acer will be right.
It's that simple.
So next time, Acer, try to actually innovate products yourself, instead of yelling at those who try. And stop complaining when someone steps forward to do something that you specifically avoided doing yourself.
Maybe, just maybe, it's high time that these scientists find another source of funding, outside of the public government. Last I checked, government was about governing, not about researching.
So sorry there isn't a surplus of money in our giant country of few people. You may just need to earn some of your own.
Wasn't this last week's episode of Continuum verbatim?
I'd think this obvious. Anyone walking into an environment that they don't like shouldn't expect that environment to change. It can be a female into a team of males, a male into a team of females, a man into a team of monkeys. If she's not happy with what men do, then she shouldn't apply for a job amongst a team of men. There are plenty of female-based workplaces, and any woman has my support to start her own.
There's nothing wrong with a team of men choosing to act with the comradery expected of such a team.
But, I'll tell you what. If I can apply for a job with a team of women, and force them to stop crying, and wearing lipstick, because I find those offensive; then I'll support the whole "no puns in the workplace" carp.
Seriously, it's an easy line to draw. Sticks and stones. Words are fine. Not pleasant, but fine.
If you don't like men, stop spending time around them. It's that simple.
When computers move around, it's called robotics. Plenty of programming to be done.
Congratulations. The system put in to replace the old system isn't infinitely the best system possible. Dude, it's still better than the old system. I think most forget that this replaced a normal key and lock.
The normal key and lock can be picked with far cheaper components and far less experience than this one. Lockpicks aren't expensive. They never were.
So quite complaining, and quit leaving your passport in your hotel room.
Heh, no. Well, actually, kinda.
My platform's about 1 meg of perl code. But each project gets its own copy -- for stability purposes. As a result, my bug tracking umbrella's multiple projects. While bug fixes are routinely pushed back to the main repository, other projects rarely get the updated code until absolutely necessary.
we don't need to write down anything, nor store anything. this is yet another dumb problem with a very easy non-technological solution, that needn't any gadgetry.
we have plenty of information from tens of thousands of years ago. you'd think that archeologists would be familiar with them. They're called rocks.
Bury the nuclear wasted wherever you like, and put a big ugly rock on top of it. and not a round one. I promise, it'll stay there for as long as the waste does.
In a million years, assuming everyone forgot, someone will ask why these weird rocks are everywhere. and then they'll dig beneath one, and find out pretty damn fast.
it's a rock, not a hard place.
Oh I so very much agree. The negative organization effects come in so many ways. Mainly, real bug tracking systems are designed for projects where keeping bugs around is the norm, but tracking those bugs is also necessary. That's just weird for most projects; it's a weight that kills most projects.
Trouble is that it requires more than an internet connection. It requires an application. Nice part about the text file is that I can keep it next to the code -- main.pl can have main.bugs. I can edit it in my favourite code editor, with all of the same features that I've been using all day to manage code.
But yeah, I use tabs to create pseudo-columns by which I can sort.
I sort the text file, and I have a different text file for all non-critical/non-current bugs.
I've got a few hundreds megs of perl code. I've got five text files of bugs / planned features / quirks.
Not sure what features of a bug tracking system you seek. I need the file name, the function name, and a description. Text files are great, and far more portable and accessible than a spreadsheet.
But I've never been one to like "proper" bug tracking systems. Of course, I'm not working with dozens of other developers.
The temperature at which asphalt re-liquifies (for lack of a better conversational term) is based purely on the balance of the ingredients. It can easily be adjusted for a warmer climate. Similarly, a different material with the same property over a wider range is just as easily fabricated.
On the other side, wider airplane tires would also weigh into the equasion, pardon the pun.
So don't let this article do what so many FUD-oriented pieces do. Don't let it take a rare occurance, use it to highlight an unusual event, and then use an inconsequential failure as proof of a future eventual catastrophic one.
I promiss that in twenty years, planes will still be able to have runways.
I think people, especially industry experts, have blinders on. It's not the PC that makes the PC important. It's the room that makes the PC important.
Doing real work, in any technical industry -- be it architecture, painting, engineering, mathermatics, accounting, etc. -- requires a human being sitting down with no distractions in a room dedicated to the task. With a proper chair, and a proper set of tools.
So with the park bench and the beach chair tossed aside, you've got a professional in a room. At that point, he's not holding a tablet. Not because he couldn't be, just because as a business it's worth spending ten time the cost to have three times the power/productivity. And when the space can fit a giant PC, that's going to be more productive than any single handheld tablet.
If you want to kill the PC, you need to kill the room first. If you figure out how to kill the room, I'd love to hear it.
That doesn't sound like what I said at all. I described my observations of others. My move from hard to soft wasn't about that. I was in artificial intelligence. After four years of compsci and maths just to get to AI, I discovered something quite simple -- AI, at the time at least, was all about short-cut algorithms. I don't believe that my brain does any calculus when walking around a room, and I had zero interest in spending my years in an iterative process of slightly improving algorithms to appear more intelligent and constantly being limited by computing power.
Instead, I moved over to cognitive modelling, which is AI in the psychology department. The rule is to ignore computing power, since it'll be faster tomorrow, and focus on algorithms that function in a natural manner. That's where I ran into neural networks, which are both lighting fast, and reall fun.
Although, you are correct in one manner. Neural networks don't get debugged the way compsci calculus algorithms are. It's a far more natural execution, and so it's wildly parallel in a way where each parallel path is dynamic and different from the others. So you wind up building black boxes into your code. So debugging is more like diagnosing the code, and treating it with small nudges. You can't tear it apart and unit test anything because such units don't function at all, by definition.
As someone who's been on both of those academic sides (I started in hard, and moved into soft four years later), I never thought it was a lack of comprehension when fellow students have trouble with hard sciences. Instead, it's an appreciation for numerical conclusions.
Hard sciences basically tend to conclude three steps earlier than soft sciences -- because the math ends there. Hard sciences tend to describe a scenario, detail it numerically, hypothesize a numerical result, experiment numerically, solve for x, and x=n is the answer. The issue for soft science students is really that nobody ever cared about x. Hard sciences very quickly forget where x came from, because the entire scenario was translated into numbers. This affords hard sciences a certain level of abstraction, making problems faster to solve, easier to solve, and more widely relevant to re-apply.
Soft sciences tend to be industries where some aspect of the scenario can't be translated into numbers. It's usually a black-box scenario, and psychology is a good example. Such experiments don't attempt to describe certain behavioural anomalies numerically. Instead, 40% - 80% of a scenario is translated into numbers, leaving the remaining 20% - 60% as mysterious elements. Imagine a hard science equasion where six linear constants simply cannot be merged into a single constant -- for no seemingly good reason. As a direct result, after solving for x, the numerical abstraction must then be de-abstracted back into whatever the real-world scenario actually is. This procedure is not only an effort to grasp, but it's also a a major point of interpretation at the end of an experiment -- usually because x isn't the number of grams diluted; instead x is the likelihood that a person might turn left.
The nice part about de-abstracting at the end is that you wind up with a real-world answer, not a mystery number.
So my point is, that for a social science student used to walking in with a scenario, and walking out with a conclusion, you need to teach them how to appreciate the hard-science "datum result" without having a one-question-one-answer conclusion.
You can see this same effect in the business world. Big business corporate C.E.O.'s often make decisions from numbers in, to predict numbers out, without ever knowing where the numbers came from, nor how they'll be used on the way out. But if you've seen anyone go through "board of director" training, you know that the skills wind up applying to any business anywhere because they are all done at the hard-science executive level.
Constrast that to the entrepreneur of a small business, who needs to make all of the same decisions, but simply doesn't have the sample-size of data coming in to ever be able to make decisions numerically like the corporate guy -- which is one of the primary reasons that he has an advisory board instead of a board of directors. The decision-making process is very different, even though they are the same questions and the same answers. And each has a very difficult time in the other's business world.
Here's hoping someone else's response details a good way to actually teach that appreciation.
There's a mobile/portable version of ultraedit, and while it can be nothing more than a simple notepad replacement, it can also be configured as a rather formidable IDE. www.ultraedit.com
Start your own business. You're in an industry where the clients know nothing about the fabrication -- like many but not most industries. What's impressive about the programming industry is that the clients actually know that they don't know anything about programming.
So it's easy to get started. You'll obviously be limitted in the beginning, mostly due to lack of infrastructure. But that's ok, since you'll still be making a nice $20K in year one. Within three years you'll have found yourself with enough infrastructure to react in professional business ways, and you'll be at the $50K level. Beyond that, the projects you select, the clients you foster, the talent that you develop, and a little bit of luck will take you as high as you want.
That's what I did, and I wound up dropping out of university after 18 months. Should have done it earlier.
After five years, I was making the equivalent of $80K (as a business owner, you pay way less tax). Now, at 33 years old, I've got a nice new large house, a sportscar, the equivalent of $120K - $200K depending on the year and the number of vacations I take. Life is incredibly smooth, I can't get fired, it's unlikely that I'd lose all of my clients in the same month. I've been through multiple economic down-turns with little effect (things are smoothed out over multiple clients).
What I don't have is paint on the walls, and it's killing me. But I just don't want to spend time painting when I can go out and have fun. And I don't believe it paying someone else to do something that I can do that easily. It's a major problem in my life. It's almost as big as last week's major life problem when I had two fun things to do in one night, and it took five days for me to find a neighbour able to take my show tickets.
Major life problems take on a whole new meaning when you set your hours -- and I don't just mean work hours; I mean sleep hours too.
I'm almost positive it's exactly the same. Except the plague episode was from a jar from a ship that had a cat, and the cat episode was a neighbour's pet that had previously died. Or something like that.
Would you leave work to go to your bank during your work day? Stop bringing your personal life to your employer's place of business. What they hell is wrong with you? Do you accept personal courier packages at work too? Would you be upset if the building's security guard -- or mail desk -- checked what was inside if you did?
Just because it takes you fewer than 5 minutes, and you can do it "on a break" doesn't make it something that you should be doing at someone else's premises. Do you have dinner at a friend's house, and between courses just casually pay your bills from their computer? Do you format their hard drive afterwards just to make sure they weren't logging anything?
Just because your employer allows you to do some personal errands using his premises doesn't mean that he isn't controlling his own network however the hell he wants to. It doesn't matter why. It's his network, not yours.
You want your privacy, get your own private network. The word private is right in the name.
So sorry that other people's stuff isn't your private stuff. Buy your own.
I've always hated the whole "saving the planet" "green" concepts. Polluting less and all that is a great way to preserve the current human-likable climate, but that's about it. The planet can handle our measily polluting quite easily.
But here's the exact opposite. Last I checked, tsunamis are perfectly natural events. "invasive species" gaining access to new lands is a perfectly typical historical circumstance. Stopping those species from landing on distant shores amounts to limiting their movements.
Stopping crabs from travelling the world is as bad, if not worse, than killing baby seals.
So, where are the save-the-whales people now? What if the invading species were whales instead of crabs?
It's all a load af horse carp.