Companies that both manufacture hardware and hand-roll their operating systems tend to collapse over time.
There are too many decisions which must be made centrally, and these involve too many conflicting "business objectives." In other words, the two branches (hardware and OS) can't figure out how to work together to nudge consumers toward spending more money, time and effort on the product.
Apple ducked this one by purchasing the core of its operating system from two sources, and allowing maintenance to be mostly driven by updates at least one of those OSes (BSD).
Blackberry has been frozen in motion (like Yahoo), unable to develop new software or hardware at the pace of the market. The result is that the world has moved on and, by parallax motion, RIM has moved backward.
I don't agree with that one either. These are all learned skills. Being a liberal arts major at a competitive college is as much of a learning process as becoming a programmer, just in a different specialization.
But what do they all have in common? The ability to reason, to remember, and to organize.
This isn't to say that anyone should be a programmer (or artist). Some are better than others. But if you just want someone to be able to write code, it's not any more difficult than any other major.
Politics in a democracy involve two sides cheering for their own while doing anything they can to damage the other side.
Whenever a disaster happens, whichever side that named its underlying cause as an issue makes a huge deal of the event. To gain maximum publicity for their (righteous) cause, they overstates the event and style it as a new coming apocalypse.
Then months later when the consequence isn't as big as they thought, the event and the issue it represents pass out of public consciousness.
There's a nasty see-saw effect as a result. We're either full on an issue, or have forgotten it, and our legislators write law accordingly. It's like a society without an attention span.
We wanted to make the figures look good, so we dumbed down elementary school, junior high and high school so that everybody could get a degree.
As a result, kids coming to college knew next to nothing, so we dumbed down college as well, and justified it by expanding the industry at a record pace.
Education that's accessible to everyone is not education. It's memorizing stuff for a test, dumping it on the test, and then forgetting it instantly. It does not test ability; it tests duration of study and the assimilation of unrelated details.
Computer science programs were churning out bad candidates back in the 1990s too. These people did not code in their spare time, were not all that interested in the technology, but even worse, were entirely dependent on the type of template-based learning that they had excelled at.
When you dumb down education to make sure that everyone can play, you have then created a situation where degrees are worthless and in fact oftentimes mean that a candidate with a "good resume" is a cynical manipulator who will be a parasite on your company.
Since the ancestors of our modern operating systems came out in the 80s, computing power has increased but so has the data load that the average consumer carries.
It only makes sense to start having smart management systems. Why not integrate heating, A/C, security, messaging and even purchasing of common supplies? We're all going to have home servers anyway for our video and music content, so it's not a stretch to use that machine as a control point for all of these.
Removing DRM engenders consumer goodwill because people are no longer forced to use cumbersome restraints with their ebooks. These restraints mainly penalize legal consumers, because those with intent to steal will circumvent them as a matter of course.
However, it's worth noting that not all consumers are the same. Legal consumers tend to like books which require a brain to read. If you released the Twilight series without DRM, it will be pirated more than a brainier book.
It's another thing altogether to outright aim for weaponizing a disease to begin with and then publish the blueprints for doing so for the world to read. How does this possibly benefit society by any stretch of the imagination?
If I find a way to immunize the population against cancer, but the only delivery system is through a modified bird flu virus, it's very helpful to have this information out in public.
Others may have more experience or more general experience, but mine has been that language trends come and go but there will always be some constants. To me it seems like Perl is one of them; if you're doing anything short of application development, it's probably the fastest way to get it to work. Anything else would do well in the C++ or Java realm. I have never seen a need to move to Python. It's a fine language but doesn't offer any tangible improvements over Perl.
I think the trend is just beginning. I'll grant you that this is currently speculative and is based more on trends I've seen in a highly responsive section of the economy as far as technology is concerned.
As much as I am not a big fan of PHP, I'm going to stand up for it. No one with a computer science background seems to like it, but it's a good general purpose tool. If you're going to put up a web application and it just needs to work and do so quickly, PHP is how most people will do that, especially the self-taught.
I'm not in denial of its many problems, including slowness and security issues. I don't want to code in it ever again. But it's a good general purpose web templating language.
The point of central authority is that we all pay in a certain amount of our wealth, and it concentrates that wealth and does great things with it. Whether that's Roman emperors building temples, or NASA, it's the same principle.
It doesn't need to be government. In fact, any tax-deductible cause will do. We need a big science lobby with a big science 501(c)(3) non-profit to collect money and administer it to these projects. Because it's tax-deductible, it's roughly the same thing as paying it in taxes, so no net loss to the citizen.
Back in the 1980s, Macs were very tempting virus targets. They had multitasking operating systems at a time when the rest of us were running DOS or CP/M (although Amiga users and users of DOS multitaskers like DESQview had a small market share). Luckily this was before the internet, so the only real risk was downloaded software.
While I agree the laws could be better-written, the goals of having equality and justice are part of who we are as a nation. It's a choice we have made and it enhances our quality of life to have this. Other nations are struggling to do the same, because in their view what we have done is a better way of life.
In the USA, many of the obligations to employers come from government-enforced responsible behavior. We want equal treatment of women, minorities and LGBT people; employee rights and regulation; health and safety standards; environmental pollution limitation; a complete tax system; counseling for employees who need it and so on.
Other countries don't (yet) have these, so their costs are most lower.
If the consumers start being willing to pay extra money for products designed and built according to our standards here in the USA, maybe we will see IBM and others stop this outflow of labor. However, if the consumers compete mostly on price, that won't be the case.
Apple's servers may or may not use an excess amount of power, but this seems to me like environmentalists attacking a detail when they should be attacking the bigger picture. How about laptops we throw out every three years? The ten billion trees that business kills each year in paperwork? All the land consumed by urban blight, that could be open forest? Compared to that, some data center is not really a big deal.
It's all about the individual and doing things your own way, not about society functioning as a whole for a greater good. This is where China really differs, where the government has long term goals instead of the next election or tomorrow's headlines.
Dictatorships are always more effective for getting specific things done in a long-term sense. Democracies are better at producing wealth, because people prefer to live in them. I don't know where this leaves us, but you're right that their more powerful central command structure helps the Chinese be fierce competitors and eventually, a fierce military threat.
AC, I've thought about this since yesterday. I think you're right about the immediate situation, but you're missing the bigger picture.
Using a computer is now an everyday skill like driving, programming a DVR, typing, and downloading ringtones for your smart phone. Instead of hiding how the computer works behind a layer of interface, we should teach the average person the simple skills of computing.
I imagine this is a controversial view. It was controversial as I debated it with myself at least. But in the end calculus, I don't think that fancy GUIs and ignorant users are going to do anything but perpetuate ignorance and with it, helplessness. The best antidote to computer phobia is to teach the basics to everyone.
It's not particularly difficult material to learn, no more complicated than programming DVRs and smartphones. Among other advantages, this would encourage people who are above-average to move on to learn some code and more about their operating systems.
You're right that Apple (and probably Microsoft and Intel) would be upset about this change. Linux won't have that problem.
Our modern world is very inward-focused. If it's not on the ego, it's on those social problems that never go away. These may be important, but I think space exploration is more important. Humanity does its best when it has a frontier, and some goal to shoot for. That fills us with a sense of hope and power. That in turn pushes us to be better than we were. When we stop exploring the stars and look inward, there's really nothing of interest left, just some intractable problems. The Romans couldn't fix them, the Greeks couldn't fix them, and we can't either. That kind of mentality could make people depressed and stubbornly selfish.
Slashdot Mirror
Third generation will be a (recycled) latex glove and lotion. We'll stop those terrorists from hiding their weapons in places we're afraid to look!
Humanity has grown so large that nature is now endangered.
My solution? Buy local-ish land in the country, and preserve it from development.
It's all for the lizards, birds, snakes, bats, bugs, turtles, rodents, deer and fish now.
We're one buffer overflow away from WWIII.
Companies that both manufacture hardware and hand-roll their operating systems tend to collapse over time.
There are too many decisions which must be made centrally, and these involve too many conflicting "business objectives." In other words, the two branches (hardware and OS) can't figure out how to work together to nudge consumers toward spending more money, time and effort on the product.
Apple ducked this one by purchasing the core of its operating system from two sources, and allowing maintenance to be mostly driven by updates at least one of those OSes (BSD).
Blackberry has been frozen in motion (like Yahoo), unable to develop new software or hardware at the pace of the market. The result is that the world has moved on and, by parallax motion, RIM has moved backward.
I don't agree with that one either. These are all learned skills. Being a liberal arts major at a competitive college is as much of a learning process as becoming a programmer, just in a different specialization.
But what do they all have in common? The ability to reason, to remember, and to organize.
This isn't to say that anyone should be a programmer (or artist). Some are better than others. But if you just want someone to be able to write code, it's not any more difficult than any other major.
Politics in a democracy involve two sides cheering for their own while doing anything they can to damage the other side.
Whenever a disaster happens, whichever side that named its underlying cause as an issue makes a huge deal of the event. To gain maximum publicity for their (righteous) cause, they overstates the event and style it as a new coming apocalypse.
Then months later when the consequence isn't as big as they thought, the event and the issue it represents pass out of public consciousness.
There's a nasty see-saw effect as a result. We're either full on an issue, or have forgotten it, and our legislators write law accordingly. It's like a society without an attention span.
We wanted to make the figures look good, so we dumbed down elementary school, junior high and high school so that everybody could get a degree.
As a result, kids coming to college knew next to nothing, so we dumbed down college as well, and justified it by expanding the industry at a record pace.
Education that's accessible to everyone is not education. It's memorizing stuff for a test, dumping it on the test, and then forgetting it instantly. It does not test ability; it tests duration of study and the assimilation of unrelated details.
Computer science programs were churning out bad candidates back in the 1990s too. These people did not code in their spare time, were not all that interested in the technology, but even worse, were entirely dependent on the type of template-based learning that they had excelled at.
When you dumb down education to make sure that everyone can play, you have then created a situation where degrees are worthless and in fact oftentimes mean that a candidate with a "good resume" is a cynical manipulator who will be a parasite on your company.
When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Anything can become a religion, as a result. We're less critical of our data when that happens, and we "nudge" it into place.
The problem is not "science" per se but our social approach to it.
Portable nuclear reactors are cost efficient and you never have to argue with your power company again!
Since the ancestors of our modern operating systems came out in the 80s, computing power has increased but so has the data load that the average consumer carries.
It only makes sense to start having smart management systems. Why not integrate heating, A/C, security, messaging and even purchasing of common supplies? We're all going to have home servers anyway for our video and music content, so it's not a stretch to use that machine as a control point for all of these.
Removing DRM engenders consumer goodwill because people are no longer forced to use cumbersome restraints with their ebooks. These restraints mainly penalize legal consumers, because those with intent to steal will circumvent them as a matter of course.
However, it's worth noting that not all consumers are the same. Legal consumers tend to like books which require a brain to read. If you released the Twilight series without DRM, it will be pirated more than a brainier book.
If I find a way to immunize the population against cancer, but the only delivery system is through a modified bird flu virus, it's very helpful to have this information out in public.
With each new advance come new powers; with new powers, the ability to commit evils.
When humankind invented the axe, murder got a lot easier.
With the computer, hacking.
With home DNA synthesis, biological warfare.
When we get nuclear reactors for the home, all sorts of bad stuff can be done.
Do we retreat from technology just because there are going to be evils?
Or accept that we're going to take some casualties and move forward?
Others may have more experience or more general experience, but mine has been that language trends come and go but there will always be some constants. To me it seems like Perl is one of them; if you're doing anything short of application development, it's probably the fastest way to get it to work. Anything else would do well in the C++ or Java realm. I have never seen a need to move to Python. It's a fine language but doesn't offer any tangible improvements over Perl.
I think the trend is just beginning. I'll grant you that this is currently speculative and is based more on trends I've seen in a highly responsive section of the economy as far as technology is concerned.
As much as I am not a big fan of PHP, I'm going to stand up for it. No one with a computer science background seems to like it, but it's a good general purpose tool. If you're going to put up a web application and it just needs to work and do so quickly, PHP is how most people will do that, especially the self-taught.
I'm not in denial of its many problems, including slowness and security issues. I don't want to code in it ever again. But it's a good general purpose web templating language.
The trend after the web became big in the mid-90s was to find specialized languages and try to code in those.
The trend has swung backward. People are now looking for general purpose languages. They want Swiss army knives, not specialized tools.
The point of central authority is that we all pay in a certain amount of our wealth, and it concentrates that wealth and does great things with it. Whether that's Roman emperors building temples, or NASA, it's the same principle.
It doesn't need to be government. In fact, any tax-deductible cause will do. We need a big science lobby with a big science 501(c)(3) non-profit to collect money and administer it to these projects. Because it's tax-deductible, it's roughly the same thing as paying it in taxes, so no net loss to the citizen.
Back in the 1980s, Macs were very tempting virus targets. They had multitasking operating systems at a time when the rest of us were running DOS or CP/M (although Amiga users and users of DOS multitaskers like DESQview had a small market share). Luckily this was before the internet, so the only real risk was downloaded software.
While I agree the laws could be better-written, the goals of having equality and justice are part of who we are as a nation. It's a choice we have made and it enhances our quality of life to have this. Other nations are struggling to do the same, because in their view what we have done is a better way of life.
In the USA, many of the obligations to employers come from government-enforced responsible behavior. We want equal treatment of women, minorities and LGBT people; employee rights and regulation; health and safety standards; environmental pollution limitation; a complete tax system; counseling for employees who need it and so on.
Other countries don't (yet) have these, so their costs are most lower.
If the consumers start being willing to pay extra money for products designed and built according to our standards here in the USA, maybe we will see IBM and others stop this outflow of labor. However, if the consumers compete mostly on price, that won't be the case.
Apple's servers may or may not use an excess amount of power, but this seems to me like environmentalists attacking a detail when they should be attacking the bigger picture. How about laptops we throw out every three years? The ten billion trees that business kills each year in paperwork? All the land consumed by urban blight, that could be open forest? Compared to that, some data center is not really a big deal.
Dictatorships are always more effective for getting specific things done in a long-term sense. Democracies are better at producing wealth, because people prefer to live in them. I don't know where this leaves us, but you're right that their more powerful central command structure helps the Chinese be fierce competitors and eventually, a fierce military threat.
AC, I've thought about this since yesterday. I think you're right about the immediate situation, but you're missing the bigger picture.
Using a computer is now an everyday skill like driving, programming a DVR, typing, and downloading ringtones for your smart phone. Instead of hiding how the computer works behind a layer of interface, we should teach the average person the simple skills of computing.
I imagine this is a controversial view. It was controversial as I debated it with myself at least. But in the end calculus, I don't think that fancy GUIs and ignorant users are going to do anything but perpetuate ignorance and with it, helplessness. The best antidote to computer phobia is to teach the basics to everyone.
It's not particularly difficult material to learn, no more complicated than programming DVRs and smartphones. Among other advantages, this would encourage people who are above-average to move on to learn some code and more about their operating systems.
You're right that Apple (and probably Microsoft and Intel) would be upset about this change. Linux won't have that problem.
Our modern world is very inward-focused. If it's not on the ego, it's on those social problems that never go away. These may be important, but I think space exploration is more important. Humanity does its best when it has a frontier, and some goal to shoot for. That fills us with a sense of hope and power. That in turn pushes us to be better than we were. When we stop exploring the stars and look inward, there's really nothing of interest left, just some intractable problems. The Romans couldn't fix them, the Greeks couldn't fix them, and we can't either. That kind of mentality could make people depressed and stubbornly selfish.
You put the LSD in the water, and then you start playing techno. Absence of female companionship problem: solved.