It's difficult to decide what's a bad career choice without taking into account the personality of the person making the decision. And of course, everybody's different. I'm currently in IT research and about to jump into a startup company for several reasons:
I like challenges and am willing to take risks
I'm going to work no harder in trying to make a successful and lucrative business then I was working in research. This is an unsubtle but very important point
I do feel passionately about the technology and the work
The greater risk would be wondering what-if? for the rest of my life. My point is that these things can't really be planned and much of life is about risk, opportunism and luck;-)
I'd prefer bridge to whist. I believe that it builds more social capital. I'm working on a rigorous scientific methodology to prove this and I'll have the results in about 2025. Seriously though, if you can look beyond the term social capital as some people find it too grandiose I genuinely believe that always-on mobile communications technologies CAN BE excellent at building rapport across organisations and communities. Co-op based WiFi schemes are also a fascinating development where people essentially reclaim a portion (however small) of their communications networks. Our study involves determining the good and bad features of these technologies and making recommendations to ensure it's a boost rather than a hindrance at work, play or rest... A worthy aim and one we'll be pursuing for the next few months anyway.
Yes that's exactly what I meant. Read the post again. I'm perfectly aware of the difference between the two words and also the need for considered interpretation before I respond to something.
The 'dumbness' of the idea will be determined after we've collected our data, studies and analysed it.
I don't know whether you have a source code respository but we manage all our documentation using a combination of our perforce which runs on our linux and windows boxes and having accepted pracices for the use of collaboration tools such as groove and webloggers. All useful information is stored in a respository and may be accessed from our intranet website. We're investigating using XML to categorise our knowledge base. We do some work on knowledge management so technically the group I work for should be good at this and our current processes seem to work well. Don't underestimate the need to have formal documents emphasising that knowledge is your most important resource and outlining how everyone should achieve it's management.
Too true. I'm a European so I'm sure the guy who wrote that 'oh so eloquent' reply doesn't give a shit about any opinion I may have. Ultimately Clinton appeared to do a really good job. I don't care who he did or didn't have sex with, he seemed to be a good and wise leader.
Bush doesn't seem to be either of those things, quite the opposite in fact. It really is worrying that so much power is entrusted to someone with such a narrow view of the world. Or is he just a puppet for the republican hordes? Of course I could be complete wrong and he may be a genius but us Europeans ( speaking in the 'general improbable') think he's immature and irrational and almost everyone I know (some of them not liberals by any stretch of the imagination) can't quite believe he got elected. Enough politics.
I agree that Dubya is trying to have it both ways. I also have an intense dislike for the man but that's beside the point. I also care a great deal about some of the issues mentioned previously so permit me this little:-) rant.
I don't care if the pope cries 'crocodile tears' as you describe them for anything. I was raised a member of the Roman Catholic faith but there are many concepts that I find ludicrous. Papal infallibility is definitely one of them an historically it's a highly pretentious notion which ignores the fact that the pope is ultimately a man who takes his personal opinion, experiences etc. into the job. However the pope and the church are paradoxically 'of their time' despite the constant criticism that the church has always endured, often totally valid.
I don't support abortion unless the life of the mother is threatened and not by her own hand. That seems cold but ultimately we all live our lives to ideals and need to fully understand that they might be totally inappropriate.
However, being practical, I reckon that our ability to think makes us human. (In deference to Aquinas's "I think therefore I am". Therefore as soon as an 'unborn child' has developed a 'brain' I fully believe that they are a person and killing them is murder. This might sound trite, silly and even pathetic but, personally, it makes sense. That doesn't for one minute make me believe that every woman who's ever had an abortion should be sent to prison for committing murder. Ultimately it was a legitimate choice and they have to live with it. If their happy with it, well and good. If their not they have to deal with it. Life goes on.
How do we know when an embryo can think? I'm not sure. I know that this is very contentious as many people would not be willing to acknowledge this kind of information. It plays on their consciences. Deal with it. If you don't think you can deal with the consequences of something then don't do it.
I fully believe that we are capable of determining when enough brain tissue is present for a thought to happen. If this is 2 neurons then so be it. Then we have to determine whether that thought constitutes humanity. It often occurs to me that science asks "can I do this?" much more than "should I do this?"
I believe that it is perfectly alright to use
'failed embryos' produced as a result of fertility treatments.
I guess that I believe that the fundamental difference in people's motivations makes the difference between producing an embryo for harvesting and making use of a failed embryo is enough to justify it. It all goes back to those ideals that I mentioned earlier.
It would be lovely to think that this kind of research could make a difference to the quality of people's lives.
BTW I, like everyone else I've ever known, am a hypocrite. I'm comfortable with it. I just try to do the best that I can, fully appreciating that I'll fail more times than I succeed and that I'll be more wrong than right. If this mail offends anybody then I'm sorry. The tone of many of these mails seems to suggest irritation with certain political and religious groups rather than any real convictions about the rights or wrongs of embryo harvesting.
I agree with the spirit of your argument but there has to be some kind of punishment associated with breaking the law. Any 13 year old kid who's smart enough to hack into their school's computer system can hardly claim that they didn't know what they were doing and as such, they should be punishable. Equally I don't believe that it makes sense to threaten a child who's with something like prison no matter how smart they are. No matter how technically brilliant you are, some insights, take years to develop. Especially those relating to human nature. I'm sure there are many facets to this particular story and it probably shouldn't be on slashdot. What is certain is that most computer hackers that I've known ( and I've know a few ) would have been woefully unsuited to a life behind bars. The authorities fully realise that and prison is a standard threat for a computer hacker who gets caught, regardless of the severity of the crime. There are similiarites between the civil authorities and and the Spanish Inquisition when it comes to computer related crimes.
Perhaps a little more compassion ( and a lot more common sense ) is required...
I agree with you up to a point.
I think that you've summed up the advantages of SOAP. These are the things that developers are getting excited about. Above all the key to SOAP is it's genuine simplicity. RPC is for the most part a procedural approach to development of distributed systems. Many subsequent initiatives leveraged RPC technology with late 80s and early to mid 90s thinking of OO Programming practices. These suggest that Object Oriented Interfaces are king, binary on-the-wire protocols are necessary, infrastructure is provided by complicated runtimes and services with the emphasis on static interfaces, requests etc. Dyanmism and Interoperability were aided by programmatically difficult concepts like DII/DSI IN CORBA and Automation in COM. The flexibility was there but it came at a price. SOAP acts as a kind of Swiss Army Knife / Leatherman toolkit where the developer needs the minimum of infrastructure to get up and running and where interoperability is enhanced by the self describing nature of SOAP.
SOAP would never have been developed in the past as most people would have balked at the idea of the inefficiency of a text based protocol , despite the over-engineered bloat of protocols like OMG's IIOP.
The main problem that I see with SOAP and all XML/http based protocols is that they are being touted by many as firewall friendlyMany admins are worried about requests being sneaked in on PORT 80 leaving it up to server applications to validate them. To them firewall friendly means insecure, unchecked and potentially evil.
The really interesting thing about.NET is that it's managing to irritate almost all current windows developers in one way or another. The VB developers are understandably unhappy about some of the changes that are being made. Garbage collection for example has a major impact on when finalization / destruction code is called. Developers didn't code with that in mind. C++ developers are pissed off that having become experts in eeking out the last bit of performance from their code the Common Runtime promises that all code should perform pretty much the same regardless of language. MS are dumping Java and going with C# which is syntactically very similiar. .NET might be wonderful but the bottom line is that there are very few experts anymore and there's more going on under the hood than ever, placing even more pressure on MS to get everything 'acceptably' correct.
The key is that everyone will be able to code in a bastardised version of the language of their choice. Whether this is a big enough selling point I don't know but it doesn't matter..NET makes many things much easier and it's going to arrive no matter what anyone says. As a COM/DCOM programmer I find it ironic that all those hours working with obscure macros, dodgy structures and strange compilation switches aren't going to be very useful at all within a couple of months.
I won't miss them however...
Slashdot Mirror
The greater risk would be wondering what-if? for the rest of my life. My point is that these things can't really be planned and much of life is about risk, opportunism and luck
I'd prefer bridge to whist. I believe that it builds more social capital. I'm working on a rigorous scientific methodology to prove this and I'll have the results in about 2025. Seriously though, if you can look beyond the term social capital as some people find it too grandiose I genuinely believe that always-on mobile communications technologies CAN BE excellent at building rapport across organisations and communities. Co-op based WiFi schemes are also a fascinating development where people essentially reclaim a portion (however small) of their communications networks. Our study involves determining the good and bad features of these technologies and making recommendations to ensure it's a boost rather than a hindrance at work, play or rest...
A worthy aim and one we'll be pursuing for the next few months anyway.
Yes that's exactly what I meant. Read the post again. I'm perfectly aware of the difference between the two words and also the need for considered interpretation before I respond to something.
The 'dumbness' of the idea will be determined after we've collected our data, studies and analysed it.
I don't know whether you have a source code respository but we manage all our documentation using a combination of our perforce which runs on our linux and windows boxes and having accepted pracices for the use of collaboration tools such as groove and webloggers.
All useful information is stored in a respository and may be accessed from our intranet website. We're investigating using XML to categorise our knowledge base. We do some work on knowledge management so technically the group I work for should be good at this and our current processes seem to work well. Don't underestimate the need to have formal documents emphasising that knowledge is your most important resource and outlining how everyone should achieve it's management.
Too true. I'm a European so I'm sure the guy who wrote that 'oh so eloquent' reply doesn't give a shit about any opinion I may have. Ultimately Clinton appeared to do a really good job. I don't care who he did or didn't have sex with, he seemed to be a good and wise leader.
Bush doesn't seem to be either of those things, quite the opposite in fact. It really is worrying that so much power is entrusted to someone with such a narrow view of the world. Or is he just a puppet for the republican hordes? Of course I could be complete wrong and he may be a genius but us Europeans ( speaking in the 'general improbable') think he's immature and irrational and almost everyone I know (some of them not liberals by any stretch of the imagination) can't quite believe he got elected. Enough politics.
I agree that Dubya is trying to have it both ways. I also have an intense dislike for the man but that's beside the point. I also care a great deal about some of the issues mentioned previously so permit me this little :-) rant.
I don't care if the pope cries 'crocodile tears' as you describe them for anything. I was raised a member of the Roman Catholic faith but there are many concepts that I find ludicrous. Papal infallibility is definitely one of them an historically it's a highly pretentious notion which ignores the fact that the pope is ultimately a man who takes his personal opinion, experiences etc. into the job. However the pope and the church are paradoxically 'of their time' despite the constant criticism that the church has always endured, often totally valid. I don't support abortion unless the life of the mother is threatened and not by her own hand. That seems cold but ultimately we all live our lives to ideals and need to fully understand that they might be totally inappropriate.
However, being practical, I reckon that our ability to think makes us human. (In deference to Aquinas's "I think therefore I am". Therefore as soon as an 'unborn child' has developed a 'brain' I fully believe that they are a person and killing them is murder. This might sound trite, silly and even pathetic but, personally, it makes sense. That doesn't for one minute make me believe that every woman who's ever had an abortion should be sent to prison for committing murder. Ultimately it was a legitimate choice and they have to live with it. If their happy with it, well and good. If their not they have to deal with it. Life goes on.
How do we know when an embryo can think? I'm not sure. I know that this is very contentious as many people would not be willing to acknowledge this kind of information. It plays on their consciences. Deal with it. If you don't think you can deal with the consequences of something then don't do it.
I fully believe that we are capable of determining when enough brain tissue is present for a thought to happen. If this is 2 neurons then so be it. Then we have to determine whether that thought constitutes humanity. It often occurs to me that science asks "can I do this?" much more than "should I do this?"
I believe that it is perfectly alright to use 'failed embryos' produced as a result of fertility treatments.
I guess that I believe that the fundamental difference in people's motivations makes the difference between producing an embryo for harvesting and making use of a failed embryo is enough to justify it. It all goes back to those ideals that I mentioned earlier.
It would be lovely to think that this kind of research could make a difference to the quality of people's lives.
BTW I, like everyone else I've ever known, am a hypocrite. I'm comfortable with it. I just try to do the best that I can, fully appreciating that I'll fail more times than I succeed and that I'll be more wrong than right. If this mail offends anybody then I'm sorry. The tone of many of these mails seems to suggest irritation with certain political and religious groups rather than any real convictions about the rights or wrongs of embryo harvesting.
I agree with the spirit of your argument but there has to be some kind of punishment associated with breaking the law. Any 13 year old kid who's smart enough to hack into their school's computer system can hardly claim that they didn't know what they were doing and as such, they should be punishable. Equally I don't believe that it makes sense to threaten a child who's with something like prison no matter how smart they are. No matter how technically brilliant you are, some insights, take years to develop. Especially those relating to human nature. I'm sure there are many facets to this particular story and it probably shouldn't be on slashdot. What is certain is that most computer hackers that I've known ( and I've know a few ) would have been woefully unsuited to a life behind bars. The authorities fully realise that and prison is a standard threat for a computer hacker who gets caught, regardless of the severity of the crime. There are similiarites between the civil authorities and and the Spanish Inquisition when it comes to computer related crimes. Perhaps a little more compassion ( and a lot more common sense ) is required ...
I agree with you up to a point. I think that you've summed up the advantages of SOAP. These are the things that developers are getting excited about. Above all the key to SOAP is it's genuine simplicity. RPC is for the most part a procedural approach to development of distributed systems.
Many subsequent initiatives leveraged RPC technology with late 80s and early to mid 90s thinking of OO Programming practices. These suggest that Object Oriented Interfaces are king, binary on-the-wire protocols are necessary, infrastructure is provided by complicated runtimes and services with the emphasis on static interfaces, requests etc. Dyanmism and Interoperability were aided by programmatically difficult concepts like DII/DSI IN CORBA and Automation in COM. The flexibility was there but it came at a price.
SOAP acts as a kind of Swiss Army Knife / Leatherman toolkit where the developer needs the minimum of infrastructure to get up and running and where interoperability is enhanced by the self describing nature of SOAP.
SOAP would never have been developed in the past as most people would have balked at the idea of the inefficiency of a text based protocol , despite the over-engineered bloat of protocols like OMG's IIOP.
The main problem that I see with SOAP and all XML/http based protocols is that they are being touted by many as firewall friendlyMany admins are worried about requests being sneaked in on PORT 80 leaving it up to server applications to validate them. To them firewall friendly means insecure, unchecked and potentially evil.
The really interesting thing about .NET is that it's managing to irritate almost all current windows developers in one way or another.
.NET might be wonderful but the bottom line is that there are very few experts anymore and there's more going on under the hood than ever, placing even more pressure on MS to get everything 'acceptably' correct.
The key is that everyone will be able to code in a bastardised version of the language of their choice. Whether this is a big enough selling point I don't know but it doesn't matter. .NET makes many things much easier and it's going to arrive no matter what anyone says. As a COM/DCOM programmer I find it ironic that all those hours working with obscure macros, dodgy structures and strange compilation switches aren't going to be very useful at all within a couple of months.
The VB developers are understandably unhappy about some of the changes that are being made. Garbage collection for example has a major impact on when finalization / destruction code is called. Developers didn't code with that in mind. C++ developers are pissed off that having become experts in eeking out the last bit of performance from their code the Common Runtime promises that all code should perform pretty much the same regardless of language. MS are dumping Java and going with C# which is syntactically very similiar.
I won't miss them however...