Until it's your name/job/reputation on the line. In the absence of a business model, most government folks of any strip play a conservative hand, unless there is good press involved for doing something intelligent. It's a fear driven, inefficient culture. David Gergen said this about it, recently:
But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The civil service-the substructure that is so vital to day-to-day operations-is rapidly crumbling: 53 percent of the federal workforce will qualify for retirement by 2004; 71 percent of the government's senior managers can retire by then.
And there's precious little new blood to replace them. A survey of the nation's most academically gifted college students-the Phi Beta Kappa graduates-found that only 1 in 10 rated the government as the employer of choice. Among the nation's public-policy schools, interest in government has also declined. According to Light, some 76 percent of those graduates sought public-sector jobs in 1973; two decades later, the number dropped to 49 percent; today it has dwindled to about 30 percent. And these are people supposedly being trained for public service!
There is a temptation to blame recent moral turpitude in elected officials for the intellectual vacuum of the civil service corps, but calling it a leadership issue is oversimplifying.
Closer to the mark, we get what we pay for. I just turned down a GS position, because the pay was 2/3 a private sector offer.
Go figure why we are shocked by this decision to spare unclassified hard drives.
Q: The new software also allows a user to
install it only twice. You have recently cracked down on corporate piracy and large-scale pirating operations. Are home users next?
A: Intellectual property should be protected.... Our goal is to try to educate people on what it means to protect intellectual property and pay for it properly. We are trying to help customers understand when they are crossing the line by putting some bumps in the road so they can't do the wrong thing.
Ballmer, I don't know who you are trying to impress with this train of thought. As a purchaser of every version of your OS from 3.0 to 98, and Office suite from 4.3 on, I am truly offended.
Your products are simply maintenance intensive. Non-trivial use of them requires occasional rebuilds from bare metal, as the poorly documented file structure and applications overwhelm even the power user. Some of the Gnomes of Redmond might survive within the two installation limit, but I'm uncertain I could.
Wasn't Frank Zappa prescient in the Joe's Garage libretto:
'Pursue the Good long enough, and the Bad makes you yawn.' This is not a Christian belief, because it excludes the leap of faith Kierkegaard mentioned. The leap of faith means that we believe no matter how much we pursue the Good, we'll never get there. Our minds are finite, and Good is infinite.
Faith, repentance, baptism, and the gift of the Holy Spirit. Anything else is not Christian.
Applauding capitalism is like applauding a pig for finding a truffle. Pigs find truffles by nature. Applauding a pig for speaking proper English, now that would be something worth applauding.
True, true. Yet,/. is not a theological forum. Here, it is more useful to demonstrate that Christ == freedom, and that understanding the death/burial/resurrection does not preclude critical thinking. My faith is no lobotomy.
Regrets, if my use of irony was misconstrued as liberalism.
How many of the suits in the Fortune X stand to lose a pile of money if they embrace open source products?
Prediction: there will be a gradual erosion of M$ market share, but there will never be a point of inflection. Too much inertia in the economic system.
I just put RH7.1 on my Linux drive. M0st k3wl. Installed well, learning curve still steep.
The point is, while I'm no elite hacker, folks who are seriously trying out new stuff are a fringe, and will always be.
M$ panders to the unwashed masses, and provides a servicable product to the Lowest Common Denominator. Can we admit that this is OK?
M$ might be the software equivalent of Socialist Security; something that truly draws vacuum, but is too entrenched to destroy, therefore making it best ignored.
Where does the majority of american tax payers money go?
Socialist Security. In the past, the answer to your rhetorical question would have been 'The Department of Defense', but no longer.
Re:Read some LaVey, man.
on
Apocalypse 2
·
· Score: 2
Christian.
Intelligent.
Open minded.
Sorry, I just can't make the connection. If you truely were so open-minded and intelligent, you wouldn't be a christian.
I am those three, and Open Eyed, as well.
Pursue the Good long enough, and the Bad makes you yawn. Let us applaud LaVey's capitalism; he made a living out of packaging 'evil'. To what real end? Did it amount to much when he met the author of Reality, an operating system that still hasn't crashed?
But you are spot-on when you allude to close-minded Christians. Alas, there is no escaping humanity in this life...:-|
we have a wireless direct neural intererface with a heads up display and thought recognition.
...strikes me as ghoulish. What are you going to do when they write a virus and use your flesh for crime? Or force you to vote for a moron? (Or did our electoral process already effect that?)
Sorry, the epidermis forms a logical boundary for this system of 'dust and ashes' (Maximus).
We often get vague requirements that we can solve however we see fit, often in a really tight timeline. The folks who seem to do best on junkyard wars aren't the certified mechanics or PhD's, they're the "car hackers", the guys who are toying with blowtorches and wrenches for fun.
Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. On the other hand, two indirectly linked phrases I've heard a lot in the government arena are:
'The Best' is the enemy of 'Good Enough'.
We never have time to do it right, but we always have time to do it over.
We all know instinctively that, besides goofing off and having fun, good design pays for itself repeatedly as much as bad habit punish repeatedly.
There seem to be two somewhat orthogonal continuums:
1) How competent someone is.
2) How curious someone is.
What about age? Competence is often proportional to age and, with it, experience. Curiosity is even more often inversely proportional to age. Goofing off is often about preserving spiritual youth, even if we are, as in Galdiator "Dust and Ashes."
I agree. In addition to being a goof-off, it pays to be a student of IT. The nice thing about reading DDJ or CUJ is that, unlike television, you don't feel stupider for the time investment.
A machine with no moving parts should never break, and in five years that'll be the case with computers. System administrators were indispensible fifteen years ago, but they're barely useful now -- and in a short time they'll be completely superfluous.
I'm no sysadmin, so I have no turf to protect here. But the sheer entropy of modern configuration control argues heavily against your viewpoint.
I got a soda says you'll have as many, or more, sysadmins in five years just to deal with the botched HTML/XML/SGML/VRML/??ML... nonsense.
The simple fact is that any idiot can fix a printer.
I was submitting an entry for a one-act play contest. There was a sudden requirement for three copies. The English professor looked at my submission, realized I'd duplex printed it, and said "I'll show you where the copier is, but you'll have to take it from there, because I don't do two-sided."
I held my peace, and managed to take third place. Not bad for an engineering major.
I wonder if that teacher is competent with table implements...
I have no business speaking above my skill level, but here I go, anyway:
The number of differing Application Binary Interfaces with a significant user base can't be terribly high. Why not a template parameter for the compiler to target the different platforms? I suppose some linker interface trickery would degrade performance.
Reading Mr. Stroustrup's February response on/., he seems disinclined to endorse anyone's ABI. Can the discussion be obviated?
We must keep in mind that politicians are the product of the societal system, in addition to feeding back input to society.
Society drives politicians at the ballot box and the poll. Politicians can thrown on Helmet, Aftertaste, and crank up "Just Exactly What You Wanted" with confidence.
While I fit into the category...the myriad of clueless Slashdot posts from people who have never actually done anything more than a "hello world"..., the opinion I'm forming based on all of the "Mine Is More Gooder" posts is that, as with playing music, the quality of the final product has more to do with the musician than the instrument in question.
Guess when I move to the web front-end of my project I'll rummage around the Linux distribution and see which of these groovy tools irritates the least. Or gaff them all off and do my own high speed, low drag unit in C++.
...I think we can wait another four years for a President who is not in the pocket of the energy companies before we let that genie out of the bottle again...
Boss, if you think any politician, with the possible exception of Nader, is not in the pocket of the energy companies, I have an infinite series of cliches for you.
How about doing a reasonable benchmark? Come up with brief requirements, a little database, a little numerical frippery, and let the language proponents speak for themselves.
Compare the languages on the same hardware with a controlled loading environment.
Do some problems in a timed environment, tapping that whole 'ease of programming' thing.
Give some to FNGs like me, to test the learning curve.
Who disagrees that there are a few fellows at IBM that recall the OS/2 bait-and-switch conducted by the Rakes of Redmond over a decade ago?
If you were IBM, wouldn't you like to take Linux and show Microsoft that, among other things, it's a great suppository? Neglecting ASPs in a scripting roundup is just another brick in that wall.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a temptation to blame recent moral turpitude in elected officials for the intellectual vacuum of the civil service corps, but calling it a leadership issue is oversimplifying.
Closer to the mark, we get what we pay for. I just turned down a GS position, because the pay was 2/3 a private sector offer.
Go figure why we are shocked by this decision to spare unclassified hard drives.
Ballmer, I don't know who you are trying to impress with this train of thought. As a purchaser of every version of your OS from 3.0 to 98, and Office suite from 4.3 on, I am truly offended.
Your products are simply maintenance intensive. Non-trivial use of them requires occasional rebuilds from bare metal, as the poorly documented file structure and applications overwhelm even the power user. Some of the Gnomes of Redmond might survive within the two installation limit, but I'm uncertain I could.
Wasn't Frank Zappa prescient in the Joe's Garage libretto:
Suggestion: blow MS right off. Just say NO!
True, true. Yet, /. is not a theological forum. Here, it is more useful to demonstrate that Christ == freedom, and that understanding the death/burial/resurrection does not preclude critical thinking. My faith is no lobotomy.
Regrets, if my use of irony was misconstrued as liberalism.
-Christopher
How many of the suits in the Fortune X stand to lose a pile of money if they embrace open source products?
Prediction: there will be a gradual erosion of M$ market share, but there will never be a point of inflection. Too much inertia in the economic system.
I just put RH7.1 on my Linux drive. M0st k3wl. Installed well, learning curve still steep.
The point is, while I'm no elite hacker, folks who are seriously trying out new stuff are a fringe, and will always be.
M$ panders to the unwashed masses, and provides a servicable product to the Lowest Common Denominator. Can we admit that this is OK?
M$ might be the software equivalent of Socialist Security; something that truly draws vacuum, but is too entrenched to destroy, therefore making it best ignored.
Socialist Security. In the past, the answer to your rhetorical question would have been 'The Department of Defense', but no longer.
Intelligent.
Open minded.
Sorry, I just can't make the connection. If you truely were so open-minded and intelligent, you wouldn't be a christian.
I am those three, and Open Eyed, as well.
Pursue the Good long enough, and the Bad makes you yawn. Let us applaud LaVey's capitalism; he made a living out of packaging 'evil'. To what real end? Did it amount to much when he met the author of Reality, an operating system that still hasn't crashed?
But you are spot-on when you allude to close-minded Christians. Alas, there is no escaping humanity in this life... :-|
we have a wireless direct neural intererface with a heads up display and thought recognition.
Sorry, the epidermis forms a logical boundary for this system of 'dust and ashes' (Maximus).
Convince an employer that experience garnered doing open source benefits a company in two ways:
1) smarter workforce (design skill)
2) broader techology base (technical skill)
Perhaps this sort of thinking is why I am not in business.
Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. On the other hand, two indirectly linked phrases I've heard a lot in the government arena are:
'The Best' is the enemy of 'Good Enough'.
We never have time to do it right, but we always have time to do it over.
We all know instinctively that, besides goofing off and having fun, good design pays for itself repeatedly as much as bad habit punish repeatedly.
1) How competent someone is.
2) How curious someone is.
What about age? Competence is often proportional to age and, with it, experience. Curiosity is even more often inversely proportional to age. Goofing off is often about preserving spiritual youth, even if we are, as in Galdiator "Dust and Ashes."
I'm no sysadmin, so I have no turf to protect here. But the sheer entropy of modern configuration control argues heavily against your viewpoint.
I got a soda says you'll have as many, or more, sysadmins in five years just to deal with the botched HTML/XML/SGML/VRML/??ML... nonsense.
I was submitting an entry for a one-act play contest. There was a sudden requirement for three copies. The English professor looked at my submission, realized I'd duplex printed it, and said "I'll show you where the copier is, but you'll have to take it from there, because I don't do two-sided."
I held my peace, and managed to take third place. Not bad for an engineering major.
I wonder if that teacher is competent with table implements...
The number of differing Application Binary Interfaces with a significant user base can't be terribly high. Why not a template parameter for the compiler to target the different platforms? I suppose some linker interface trickery would degrade performance.
Reading Mr. Stroustrup's February response on /., he seems disinclined to endorse anyone's ABI. Can the discussion be obviated?
Society drives politicians at the ballot box and the poll. Politicians can thrown on Helmet, Aftertaste, and crank up "Just Exactly What You Wanted" with confidence.
While I fit into the category ...the myriad of clueless Slashdot posts from people who have never actually done anything more than a "hello world"..., the opinion I'm forming based on all of the "Mine Is More Gooder" posts is that, as with playing music, the quality of the final product has more to do with the musician than the instrument in question.
Guess when I move to the web front-end of my project I'll rummage around the Linux distribution and see which of these groovy tools irritates the least. Or gaff them all off and do my own high speed, low drag unit in C++.
Don't question the /. orthodoxy without a little elaboration, boss.
Boss, if you think any politician, with the possible exception of Nader, is not in the pocket of the energy companies, I have an infinite series of cliches for you.
Aside: Deslock, as in Leader Deslock from Star Blazers? That show was the Best.
Compare the languages on the same hardware with a controlled loading environment.
Do some problems in a timed environment, tapping that whole 'ease of programming' thing.
Give some to FNGs like me, to test the learning curve.
Give a stuffed penguin to the winners.
Publish some results.
Call it 'Script Race '01'. (no TM)
If you were IBM, wouldn't you like to take Linux and show Microsoft that, among other things, it's a great suppository? Neglecting ASPs in a scripting roundup is just another brick in that wall.