All of this happened while linux was nothing but a bare little kernel, with admittedly pretty small goals. I can't see how any influence would've been even noticed until at least 1998. Loads of other OSes had things like memory protection, pre-emptive multitasking, configuration changes without reboots well before linux.
And I'll just add that that early work was OS/2 collaboration with IBM that had a falling out, and Gates was in a pissing match with IBM to out OS/2 IBM with NT.
There wasn't a reason for Linux to have even been on a radar screen in Redmond in 1991.
Interesting point, though. Cheers. Backwards compatibility, in particular, is a sticking point. But I do believe that we should be moving forward to a generalised system, while (for now) retaining the knowledge of older systems, if only to (as in your example) maintain systems where such a system has not been deployed.
I said in another post that either text or xml isn't the point, it is a dialogue controls app that interfaces to all the config files, at a minimum functionality similar to the Windows System Editor but ideally much better in terms of selecting options that would edit the configuration text files as needed, in the current text format.
I saw several references here to GConf but also that it could be better, I have no idea how close it is.
The best of both worlds is that the configuration controls app would also write the configurations and changes to an XML equivalent of a central registry with history, version states, etc., so that changes could be backed out, configurations set to a known state, etc.
More advanced apps could possibly access the central repository for such analysis by an admin.
That's what we need today. Longer term, the desktop is going to become largely irrelevant anyhow due to web-based technologies. This is what most pundits fail to realize when discussing the future of Linux and MS. Standards-based rich-web intranets are the holy grail of business IT.
That kind of thinking is going to make Linux desktop lose. Business wise, Microsoft has 300 programmers writing their businesss software Project Green in.NET.
Oracle has 800 programmers writing their business software Project Fusion in Java, and whatever they do, the desktop will matter.
IBM has thousands of developers in Java, and with Eclipse the desktop matters.
For consumers, everything they run is Windows level GUI. The desktop matters.
I know thats your not actually saying, but I have to shake my head when I see people saying that Apple should port to Intel, or give away the os source for free. Yah I know its a big rant, and a hyperbole at that.
They should get someone to install it for them, like they do on Windows.
It isn't the Linux distro, it's the app distribution, whether FOSS or proprietary, that needs to be there and install and work across the board for people to use Linux.
Of course, I've seen a lot of posts in the last couple of pages from people that prefer that normal people, whom I'll refer to as users, can't and therefore won't use Linux. I guess that exclusivity makes them feel special.
Another asked what is success? Success is numbers, numbers of apps that an OS is there to host, and numbers of people that use them.
Just getting Linux out there for the people who created it is success. The world using it as their portal to the world of computers is global success.
I defer to Star Trek analogies for universal success.
Also, in reading the last few pages of posts, I have always thought of Windows, Mac, and Linux as the desktop systems, even though I knew OS/X was based on a Unix (BSD I think I read).
One person said it very well, please let me know when a Linux distro looks as good and works as well as OS/X.
Can the major Linux distros coalesce around a strategy similar to what Apple did with BSD and make Linux an experience that Mac users enjoy?
A lot of people need to get over the fact that text-editing files is probably not the best way to configure a system. Besides, looking at many more-modern systems, they already use XML for configuration.
Actually, neither editing text or XML gets the point. The point is that the editing needs to be in the form of a dialogue with settings and entries that edit the text to say what it needs to say.
At the barest minimum would be something like Windows System Editor or whatever its called that has the Windows config files and then guides and controls somewhat what to change and whether it is acceptable, etc.
This is what distro people should be making sure that happens as an interface to dealing with the OS, it should be open source, and good solutions should be shared for a standard Linux experience.
That by no means prevents the normal way of editing text in config files, just as I continued to edit config.sys with Notepad. But in just responding to this text versus XML thing going back and forth, the answer is neither, at least as far as a dialogue to the user.
I suppose some would say the XML would be able to render to the dialogue via XSLT or something, yada, yada, but there's no real reason to break everything or make it complicated, just put a control dialogue interface over the text.
Is customization and differentiation a really good thing?
I've got a few pages of comments to read, and maybe it's been said and said better already, but in my very unexperienced in Unix viewpoint, although Unix including Linux is the topic here, the only thing that counts is Linux standardization.
Unix had 35 years to tweak directory heirarchies and GUI standards, and what's left doesn't have anybody worrying about how they'll get software distributed to Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and the BSDs.
No, we have a new branch, Linux, which is dangerously fragmented to the degree that the chicken and egg dilemma seriously slows acceptance of desktop Linux by consumers.
Linux is the only place that lack of standards really matter for consumer acceptance, and quite frankly 35 years of lessons from Unix tweaking ought to be enough time for tweaking.
Now's the time to make a system that is consistent enough to be accepted by users.
I have Mandrake, which I chose because of based on advertising superior distribution while retaining Red Hat compatability. On the other hand, I paid for several distributions, back when I had a programming job and had the money to do that.
So there's room for different levels of distribution completeness and support and resulting cost or lack of it, but better get them all to take an install when you stick a CD in and click a button, speaking of which, that button better work in KDE, Gnome, or X and not care which, that is, if Linux wants to compete.
This is late for this thread, but for the record, I read this excerpt today in InformationWeek. What is interesting here is that both Oracle and Microsoft are doing rewrites of multiple acquired ERP's:
Oracle combining Oracle apps, Peoplesoft, and JD Edwards in Project Fusion,
and Microsoft combining Great Plains, Solomon, Navision, and Axapta in Project Green along with their own CRM and a (they hope to be) Quickbooks killer called Magellan.
Microsoft is doing it in.NET, but Longhorn's slip has screwed everything up and their own business app rewrite in.NET has seriously slipped as swell, and we're talking over 300 developers on it.
On the other hand, it's Microsoft, and on top of that, a rewrite of four ERP's in.NET, and anyone who believed their dates to start with were brainwashed anyway.
The interesting thing is that Oracle is rewriting four huge ERP's, not the small time stuff Microsoft is doing, but rewriting four huge ERP's in Java.
We will see if rewrites in Java will go any better than.NET. The only thing that Oracle has going for it is that Microsoft started earlier and has already missed their Project Green timeframe of late 2004.
Oracle promised similar length, 2006, on a much bigger job, and has 800 developers on it.
This is real Java versus.NET where it hits the road.
rd
Another important phase of Project Green is integrating Axapta and Navision into SharePoint Portal Server so that VARs can use common Webparts across the whole ERP spectrum, Utzschneider said.
This is a much more evolutionary model than most Microsoft watchers construed the old Project Green to be. It was unclear to some solution providers how this effort, which starts at the user and works back into the innards of the system, will lead to the promised unified code base.
"It's ironic that Microsoft appears to be backpedaling at a time when Oracle appears to be getting it all together with its Project Fusion [a melding of the best of Oracle and PeopleSoft apps]," said one longtime partner.
Another partner disagreed. "There is an ability to create portal and.Net apps across functions so that core modules can be replaced over time and you get to pretty much what they promised," said John Hendrickson, CEO of Interdyn MicroVar, a solution provider in St. Paul, Minn.
Although C# was modeled after Java, hence not innovative in the programming world, it is a great leap forward for VB developers and MFC developers.
Although Java versus C# is stated throughout the thread, as far as I recall C# was done by Delphi's former developers when Microsoft ripped off the bulk of the Delphi development staff, an act that ranks right up there with what they did to Netscape, Foxpro and others, that is, destroyed superior competition such as Delphi with whatever it took.
That C# was done by the Delphi guy with the.NET runtime ala Java is as far as I could see a replacement for the Delphi threat, while J# was a replacement for the Java threat. I never looked at them, but that's what seemed to be going on to me.
Also not generally recognized when.NET is said to be their equivalennt of the Java model is that IBM has a multi language (RPG, Cobol, C++, Java) interoperable environment on the AS/400 called Integrated Language Environment which.NET also emulates..NET is really a hybrid of ILE and Java, taking on both IBM and Sun, not just Sun. And with C# they took on Borland. This is not a simple.NET versus Java thing as is widely portrayed here, but a hybrid of technologies from all their major competitors.
Informative exchange, what I get from Ian's experience is that you have to reach out to build a community, and from Ian's experience they didn't reach out and respond to the people that you would want to add to that community.
I would guess that to be because it was a technical question that needed answered to get him started, and limited the number of people that could respond and it didn't get responded to.
But I can't imagine some duplication of code to get a working prototype presented to be just rejected out of hand as duplicative. I mean it's an iterative process and getting something in front of them is a start. Asa's blog said they had contributions from a thousand developers.
On the other hand you would need a reviewer for it, and I think the point of this thread was that not only Ian's offer was ignored but his patch prototype may have been too.:)
That's perfectly consistent. Missing features are bitchable as bugs if they're features you want. Actual features are bitchable as bloat if they're features you see no need for.
I see the gist of this point made often here, although this really states it well, but I think the assumption that bloat = features is not shared by those making the comments.
I think that most seem to be astute users of said bloatness and already took totality of available features into consideration and still think it's bloated.
Something like it's lean and mean and just takes that much CPU and memory to do what it does is valid, but I never see that response.:)
Maybe that was taken into consideration and assumed in the responses as well, although the recent/. thread on focusing on removing bloat from an open source product had interesting comments on potentially inherent bloat in the communal process, although I have seen increasingly common comments about bloat in many products commercial and open source through the years.
What good is people submitting patches if no one is there to review the code prior to commit? Indeed, I submitted a very trivial usability enhancement to Firefox, and it was quickly swept under the rug. Perhaps it should simply be made into a plug-in, I don't know. Just thought I would share it as first-hand experience.
- shadowmatter
they diisabled links to Bugzilla from/. with a message that says so...:)
The Programming Language Popularity TCP Index was done very well, and I see it's a pretty stable list from last year.
As for RPG, I've been an AS/400 RPG programmer since 1989 but out of work for the last year and a half. Many large corporations are still running their business with RPG but scaled development way back and outsourcing to India.
So there may be some RPG work for me sometime but things would have to pick up quite a bit as there are plenty of qualified Americans for every US job opening recruiters know about, and no openings I've heard of without recruiters or Dice.
So I am just doing my own projects in Java and also will do more PHP web stuff for my site until either there's a need for RPG again or I get enough projects on the web that I can generate some work.
I did just finish rewriting my 8086 Double Deck Pinochle in Java, and have more to do before hosting it. It may sound like spaghetti, but I did it without even a tagged break so there was the same structure in the asm code, I just formalized it with while and if statements.
Look at the electricity, phone, the PC, the radio, and so on.... (no big companies).
Didn't IBM invent the PC? Don't know what the poster could be thinking of as a small inventer of the PC.
But as to the larger point, the useful invention patents mentioned were done a century ago when MegaEvilCo Inc.'s were more interested in monopolizing real assets such as oil and railroads than ideas.
Those monopolies were broken up because they stifled business. It took a law to do that. It will take another law to put some sense back into the patent process, implementing the many good ideas posted in previous/. threads on patents for example.
I don't care so much about patents granted, though public reviews of pending patent approvals to provide potential prior art was one of the ideas that needs to happen, but making a review and upholding of a patent a practical matter is where the law needs to be changed if we ever want to see another Edison or Bell in the US again.
Wansu finished with: The rabid fixation with short term profits is a problem cut from the same cloth as outsourcing.
I was going to post a (virtual) +5 Insightful mod for G.S.'s "Carly's Way" article but here's a real +5 Insightful post to add it to.:) Good points, G.S. and Wansu.
jets42 finished with: NOW comes the HARD part... making all of this stuff actually HAPPEN -- in my OWN life, and job!!! (you might notice that *I* am writing this little note at 3:am) so I need to cut/paste/print or get a tattoo of this on my inner forearm for reference.
I guess I'm off to bed, and setting the alarm 20 minutes early. There's a job to tame, and a boss to train tomorrow.
One of the most insightful and right on advice posts on working (especially programming) I have ever seen, jets42. After 25 years programming, I've been unemployed for the last year and a half, but if I ever get hired again, this is the way to do it.
I've been spending the last year and a half doing what I should have been doing after 5PM every evening, working on my own projects and new technologies.
Good point, and misleading in more ways than one. The Discover "Anything Into Oil" article quoted Changing World Technologies as saying that "we'll make oil at $15 a barrel".
Ok, their estimate was wrong, the Fortune Small Business "A Turkey In Your Tank" article says that as a result of having to pay for turkey offal with no tax breaks, "CWT's production costs have doubled, to nearly $80 a barrel".
But this implies that if the input stock were free, production costs would be closer to $40 a barrel instead of their estimated $15 a barrel or the cited $80 a barrel.
So why aren't they using nearly free input, for example as suggested by/. posters, manure storage that are huge environmental problems on the east coast? What about the mountains of landfills to be mined?
The problem is a $30 million plant was built next to a turkey plant that could sell the turkey offal, and will, because we still allow animal remains to be made into animal feed. Hopefully without Americans developing something akin to Mad Cow Disease the offal will come cheaper to the plant when it is no longer allowed to be used in feed and becomes less valuable.
But in the meantime, it seems the $80 a barrel is misleading and should be $40 a barrel plus cost of stock, or more importantly, minus cost of being paid to recycle.
Why America is not putting these TMD plants close to gigantic landfills and manure pits immediately is hard to understand. Just eliminating the waste would be sufficient reason, but offsetting the need to import oil would also be sufficient in itself.
Together, this should be #2 heating oil, distilled water, and carbon powder and minerals at less than $40 a barrel. Instead, the company is forced to seek to go overseas to survive.
Maybe if it is stated as $40 a barrel less cost saved from waste instead of $80 a barrel it would no longer be misleading and the comparisons to $50 a barrel would become positive instead of negative.
Because this technology should be a positive story for America today, not something that someday will become cost effective at $80 a barrel.
Necessity is the mother of invention. I think you'll agree we came up with some algorithms that were especially elegant and not the brute force algorithm that would first come to mind because we had to.
And I'll add that it's really 8086 under DOS (which I did) where you had snappy performance such as WordPerfect, Lotus, and other apps in 8086 like PC Paintbrush because we had to. That is, if memory was managed very carefully, otherwise disk access killed you.
Going under Windows and run time environments ate up the extra CPU but gave a GUI interface and cross platform abstraction, and so it continues.
Any one process may not seem that much faster, but IIRC several processes run concurrently light years faster now than those days of DOS and early Windows.
From my cursory examination of open source databases a few weeks ago, an enterprise level database with record level access is needed, both with record at a time keyed access and the IBM SQL extensions of cursor positioning on a result set.
From what I could tell Oracle's proprietary and SAP's open source database have record level capability but both are expensive licenses. An open source database from Sun that can compete with them and DB2 would be most welcome from my viewpoint as a former DB2/400 developer looking for comparable capability.
Slashdot Mirror
If the man wants people to use his programs all he has to do is distribute the source.
What if a man wants to make a living?
rd
All of this happened while linux was nothing but a bare little kernel, with admittedly pretty small goals. I can't see how any influence would've been even noticed until at least 1998. Loads of other OSes had things like memory protection, pre-emptive multitasking, configuration changes without reboots well before linux.
And I'll just add that that early work was OS/2 collaboration with IBM that had a falling out, and Gates was in a pissing match with IBM to out OS/2 IBM with NT.
There wasn't a reason for Linux to have even been on a radar screen in Redmond in 1991.
rd
Interesting point, though. Cheers. Backwards compatibility, in particular, is a sticking point. But I do believe that we should be moving forward to a generalised system, while (for now) retaining the knowledge of older systems, if only to (as in your example) maintain systems where such a system has not been deployed.
I said in another post that either text or xml isn't the point, it is a dialogue controls app that interfaces to all the config files, at a minimum functionality similar to the Windows System Editor but ideally much better in terms of selecting options that would edit the configuration text files as needed, in the current text format.
I saw several references here to GConf but also that it could be better, I have no idea how close it is.
The best of both worlds is that the configuration controls app would also write the configurations and changes to an XML equivalent of a central registry with history, version states, etc., so that changes could be backed out, configurations set to a known state, etc.
More advanced apps could possibly access the central repository for such analysis by an admin.
rd
That's what we need today. Longer term, the desktop is going to become largely irrelevant anyhow due to web-based technologies. This is what most pundits fail to realize when discussing the future of Linux and MS. Standards-based rich-web intranets are the holy grail of business IT.
.NET.
That kind of thinking is going to make Linux desktop lose. Business wise, Microsoft has 300 programmers writing their businesss software Project Green in
Oracle has 800 programmers writing their business software Project Fusion in Java, and whatever they do, the desktop will matter.
IBM has thousands of developers in Java, and with Eclipse the desktop matters.
For consumers, everything they run is Windows level GUI. The desktop matters.
So get GUI right in Linux. The desktop matters.
rd
I know thats your not actually saying, but I have to shake my head when I see people saying that Apple should port to Intel, or give away the os source for free.
:)
Yah I know its a big rant, and a hyperbole at that.
But a good one, and every word true.
rd
They should get someone to install it for them, like they do on Windows.
It isn't the Linux distro, it's the app distribution, whether FOSS or proprietary, that needs to be there and install and work across the board for people to use Linux.
Of course, I've seen a lot of posts in the last couple of pages from people that prefer that normal people, whom I'll refer to as users, can't and therefore won't use Linux. I guess that exclusivity makes them feel special.
Another asked what is success? Success is numbers, numbers of apps that an OS is there to host, and numbers of people that use them.
Just getting Linux out there for the people who created it is success. The world using it as their portal to the world of computers is global success.
I defer to Star Trek analogies for universal success.
Also, in reading the last few pages of posts, I have always thought of Windows, Mac, and Linux as the desktop systems, even though I knew OS/X was based on a Unix (BSD I think I read).
One person said it very well, please let me know when a Linux distro looks as good and works as well as OS/X.
Can the major Linux distros coalesce around a strategy similar to what Apple did with BSD and make Linux an experience that Mac users enjoy?
rd
A lot of people need to get over the fact that text-editing files is probably not the best way to configure a system. Besides, looking at many more-modern systems, they already use XML for configuration.
Actually, neither editing text or XML gets the point. The point is that the editing needs to be in the form of a dialogue with settings and entries that edit the text to say what it needs to say.
At the barest minimum would be something like Windows System Editor or whatever its called that has the Windows config files and then guides and controls somewhat what to change and whether it is acceptable, etc.
This is what distro people should be making sure that happens as an interface to dealing with the OS, it should be open source, and good solutions should be shared for a standard Linux experience.
That by no means prevents the normal way of editing text in config files, just as I continued to edit config.sys with Notepad. But in just responding to this text versus XML thing going back and forth, the answer is neither, at least as far as a dialogue to the user.
I suppose some would say the XML would be able to render to the dialogue via XSLT or something, yada, yada, but there's no real reason to break everything or make it complicated, just put a control dialogue interface over the text.
rd
MoralHazard ended with:
:)
The real question isn't "standardize or not". It's "userbase size versus technicals."
and after posting your question, I agree with your reasoning and conclusion as well.
rd
Is customization and differentiation a really good thing?
I've got a few pages of comments to read, and maybe it's been said and said better already, but in my very unexperienced in Unix viewpoint, although Unix including Linux is the topic here, the only thing that counts is Linux standardization.
Unix had 35 years to tweak directory heirarchies and GUI standards, and what's left doesn't have anybody worrying about how they'll get software distributed to Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and the BSDs.
No, we have a new branch, Linux, which is dangerously fragmented to the degree that the chicken and egg dilemma seriously slows acceptance of desktop Linux by consumers.
Linux is the only place that lack of standards really matter for consumer acceptance, and quite frankly 35 years of lessons from Unix tweaking ought to be enough time for tweaking.
Now's the time to make a system that is consistent enough to be accepted by users.
I have Mandrake, which I chose because of based on advertising superior distribution while retaining Red Hat compatability. On the other hand, I paid for several distributions, back when I had a programming job and had the money to do that.
So there's room for different levels of distribution completeness and support and resulting cost or lack of it, but better get them all to take an install when you stick a CD in and click a button, speaking of which, that button better work in KDE, Gnome, or X and not care which, that is, if Linux wants to compete.
rd
This is late for this thread, but for the record, I read this excerpt today in InformationWeek. What is interesting here is that both Oracle and Microsoft are doing rewrites of multiple acquired ERP's:
.NET, but Longhorn's slip has screwed everything up and their own business app rewrite in .NET has seriously slipped as swell, and we're talking over 300 developers on it.
.NET, and anyone who believed their dates to start with were brainwashed anyway.
.NET. The only thing that Oracle has going for it is that Microsoft started earlier and has already missed their Project Green timeframe of late 2004.
.NET where it hits the road.
.Net apps across functions so that core modules can be replaced over time and you get to pretty much what they promised," said John Hendrickson, CEO of Interdyn MicroVar, a solution provider in St. Paul, Minn.
Oracle combining Oracle apps, Peoplesoft, and JD Edwards in Project Fusion,
and Microsoft combining Great Plains, Solomon, Navision, and Axapta in Project Green along with their own CRM and a (they hope to be) Quickbooks killer called Magellan.
Microsoft is doing it in
On the other hand, it's Microsoft, and on top of that, a rewrite of four ERP's in
The interesting thing is that Oracle is rewriting four huge ERP's, not the small time stuff Microsoft is doing, but rewriting four huge ERP's in Java.
We will see if rewrites in Java will go any better than
Oracle promised similar length, 2006, on a much bigger job, and has 800 developers on it.
This is real Java versus
rd
Another important phase of Project Green is integrating Axapta and Navision into SharePoint Portal Server so that VARs can use common Webparts across the whole ERP spectrum, Utzschneider said.
This is a much more evolutionary model than most Microsoft watchers construed the old Project Green to be. It was unclear to some solution providers how this effort, which starts at the user and works back into the innards of the system, will lead to the promised unified code base.
"It's ironic that Microsoft appears to be backpedaling at a time when Oracle appears to be getting it all together with its Project Fusion [a melding of the best of Oracle and PeopleSoft apps]," said one longtime partner.
Another partner disagreed. "There is an ability to create portal and
Although C# was modeled after Java, hence not innovative in the programming world, it is a great leap forward for VB developers and MFC developers.
.NET runtime ala Java is as far as I could see a replacement for the Delphi threat, while J# was a replacement for the Java threat. I never looked at them, but that's what seemed to be going on to me.
.NET is said to be their equivalennt of the Java model is that IBM has a multi language (RPG, Cobol, C++, Java) interoperable environment on the AS/400 called Integrated Language Environment which .NET also emulates. .NET is really a hybrid of ILE and Java, taking on both IBM and Sun, not just Sun. And with C# they took on Borland. This is not a simple .NET versus Java thing as is widely portrayed here, but a hybrid of technologies from all their major competitors.
Although Java versus C# is stated throughout the thread, as far as I recall C# was done by Delphi's former developers when Microsoft ripped off the bulk of the Delphi development staff, an act that ranks right up there with what they did to Netscape, Foxpro and others, that is, destroyed superior competition such as Delphi with whatever it took.
That C# was done by the Delphi guy with the
Also not generally recognized when
rd
Just copy/paste the link location into a new tab/window when you are blocked entry to a site via referer. :)
Thanks for that tip, Josh.
rd
Informative exchange, what I get from Ian's experience is that you have to reach out to build a community, and from Ian's experience they didn't reach out and respond to the people that you would want to add to that community.
:)
I would guess that to be because it was a technical question that needed answered to get him started, and limited the number of people that could respond and it didn't get responded to.
But I can't imagine some duplication of code to get a working prototype presented to be just rejected out of hand as duplicative. I mean it's an iterative process and getting something in front of them is a start. Asa's blog said they had contributions from a thousand developers.
On the other hand you would need a reviewer for it, and I think the point of this thread was that not only Ian's offer was ignored but his patch prototype may have been too.
rd
That's perfectly consistent. Missing features are bitchable as bugs if they're features you want. Actual features are bitchable as bloat if they're features you see no need for.
:)
/. thread on focusing on removing bloat from an open source product had interesting comments on potentially inherent bloat in the communal process, although I have seen increasingly common comments about bloat in many products commercial and open source through the years.
I see the gist of this point made often here, although this really states it well, but I think the assumption that bloat = features is not shared by those making the comments.
I think that most seem to be astute users of said bloatness and already took totality of available features into consideration and still think it's bloated.
Something like it's lean and mean and just takes that much CPU and memory to do what it does is valid, but I never see that response.
Maybe that was taken into consideration and assumed in the responses as well, although the recent
rd
What good is people submitting patches if no one is there to review the code prior to commit? Indeed, I submitted a very trivial usability enhancement to Firefox, and it was quickly swept under the rug. Perhaps it should simply be made into a plug-in, I don't know. Just thought I would share it as first-hand experience.
/. with a message that says so... :)
- shadowmatter
they diisabled links to Bugzilla from
rd
The Programming Language Popularity TCP Index was done very well, and I see it's a pretty stable list from last year.
As for RPG, I've been an AS/400 RPG programmer since 1989 but out of work for the last year and a half. Many large corporations are still running their business with RPG but scaled development way back and outsourcing to India.
So there may be some RPG work for me sometime but things would have to pick up quite a bit as there are plenty of qualified Americans for every US job opening recruiters know about, and no openings I've heard of without recruiters or Dice.
So I am just doing my own projects in Java and also will do more PHP web stuff for my site until either there's a need for RPG again or I get enough projects on the web that I can generate some work.
I did just finish rewriting my 8086 Double Deck Pinochle in Java, and have more to do before hosting it. It may sound like spaghetti, but I did it without even a tagged break so there was the same structure in the asm code, I just formalized it with while and if statements.
It's not the language, it's the programmer.
rd
Look at the electricity, phone, the PC, the radio, and so on .... (no big companies).
"Didn't IBM invent the PC? Don't know what the poster could be thinking of as a small inventer of the PC."
My bad. I took PC too literally. The microcomputer pioneers are a good example of individual and small company innovation.
rd
Look at the electricity, phone, the PC, the radio, and so on .... (no big companies).
/. threads on patents for example.
Didn't IBM invent the PC? Don't know what the poster could be thinking of as a small inventer of the PC.
But as to the larger point, the useful invention patents mentioned were done a century ago when MegaEvilCo Inc.'s were more interested in monopolizing real assets such as oil and railroads than ideas.
Those monopolies were broken up because they stifled business. It took a law to do that. It will take another law to put some sense back into the patent process, implementing the many good ideas posted in previous
I don't care so much about patents granted, though public reviews of pending patent approvals to provide potential prior art was one of the ideas that needs to happen, but making a review and upholding of a patent a practical matter is where the law needs to be changed if we ever want to see another Edison or Bell in the US again.
rd
Wansu finished with:
:) Good points, G.S. and Wansu.
The rabid fixation with short term profits is a problem cut from the same cloth as outsourcing.
I was going to post a (virtual) +5 Insightful mod for G.S.'s "Carly's Way" article but here's a real +5 Insightful post to add it to.
rd
jets42 finished with:
NOW comes the HARD part... making all of this stuff actually HAPPEN -- in my OWN life, and job!!!
(you might notice that *I* am writing this little note at 3:am) so I need to cut/paste/print or get a tattoo of this on my inner forearm for reference.
I guess I'm off to bed, and setting the alarm 20 minutes early. There's a job to tame, and a boss to train tomorrow.
One of the most insightful and right on advice posts on working (especially programming) I have ever seen, jets42. After 25 years programming, I've been unemployed for the last year and a half, but if I ever get hired again, this is the way to do it.
I've been spending the last year and a half doing what I should have been doing after 5PM every evening, working on my own projects and new technologies.
rd
Make that TDP plants.
rd
The $80 per barrel number is misleading.
/. posters, manure storage that are huge environmental problems on the east coast? What about the mountains of landfills to be mined?
Good point, and misleading in more ways than one. The Discover "Anything Into Oil" article quoted Changing World Technologies as saying that "we'll make oil at $15 a barrel".
Ok, their estimate was wrong, the Fortune Small Business "A Turkey In Your Tank" article says that as a result of having to pay for turkey offal with no tax breaks, "CWT's production costs have doubled, to nearly $80 a barrel".
But this implies that if the input stock were free, production costs would be closer to $40 a barrel instead of their estimated $15 a barrel or the cited $80 a barrel.
So why aren't they using nearly free input, for example as suggested by
The problem is a $30 million plant was built next to a turkey plant that could sell the turkey offal, and will, because we still allow animal remains to be made into animal feed. Hopefully without Americans developing something akin to Mad Cow Disease the offal will come cheaper to the plant when it is no longer allowed to be used in feed and becomes less valuable.
But in the meantime, it seems the $80 a barrel is misleading and should be $40 a barrel plus cost of stock, or more importantly, minus cost of being paid to recycle.
Why America is not putting these TMD plants close to gigantic landfills and manure pits immediately is hard to understand. Just eliminating the waste would be sufficient reason, but offsetting the need to import oil would also be sufficient in itself.
Together, this should be #2 heating oil, distilled water, and carbon powder and minerals at less than $40 a barrel. Instead, the company is forced to seek to go overseas to survive.
Maybe if it is stated as $40 a barrel less cost saved from waste instead of $80 a barrel it would no longer be misleading and the comparisons to $50 a barrel would become positive instead of negative.
Because this technology should be a positive story for America today, not something that someday will become cost effective at $80 a barrel.
rd
Necessity is the mother of invention. I think you'll agree we came up with some algorithms that were especially elegant and not the brute force algorithm that would first come to mind because we had to.
rd
And I'll add that it's really 8086 under DOS (which I did) where you had snappy performance such as WordPerfect, Lotus, and other apps in 8086 like PC Paintbrush because we had to. That is, if memory was managed very carefully, otherwise disk access killed you.
Going under Windows and run time environments ate up the extra CPU but gave a GUI interface and cross platform abstraction, and so it continues.
Any one process may not seem that much faster, but IIRC several processes run concurrently light years faster now than those days of DOS and early Windows.
rd
From my cursory examination of open source databases a few weeks ago, an enterprise level database with record level access is needed, both with record at a time keyed access and the IBM SQL extensions of cursor positioning on a result set.
From what I could tell Oracle's proprietary and SAP's open source database have record level capability but both are expensive licenses. An open source database from Sun that can compete with them and DB2 would be most welcome from my viewpoint as a former DB2/400 developer looking for comparable capability.
rd