I've just made an extensive post on the subject, but your anecdote does not make a case for abandoning a doctor's judgment. At best it makes an argument for banning the advertisement of pharmaceuticals.
(long rant elided)
but your anecdote does not make a case for abandoning a doctor's judgment
How does my post suggest abandoning a doctor's judgement? I said I want my doctor to have better information from science, not pharmaceutical marketers. The fact you believe it's abandoning a doctor's judgment shows your own bias on this issue, and more importantly, how ideology has prevented you from seeing what is actually being talked about. More examples follow.
You were prescribed a medication based on the best medical knowledge and practices of the day.
I was not, as my psychiatrist explained. The best medical knowledge and practice of the day suggested cheaper Prozac or the much-maligned Wellbutrin should have been the first ones she reached for. Instead she reached for the most recently approved one.
So you believe that your doctor is giving you the best medical knowledge and practice of the day? He/she is probably not, which is the point of the original article. It's time to get find out that information and spread it to our doctors. For our health, more than our wallets.
If your story were to repeat itself under a system such as the one you are espousing, the most likely scenario would be that any doctor would be forced to prescribe you Paxil or face fines for not doing so. If you could demonstrate a need for an alternative medication, then you would almost certainly pay through the nose for the privilege. That might sound scary and unrealistic, but I assure you it's not terribly far from today's current practices.
Here your ideology leaks through. The system I'm supporting has doctors learning from peer-reviewed science what actually works and improves health vs. just being expensive placebos. You have a dangerous belief that your doctor knows the best knowledge around and that this program is about government intervention. You are not, IMHO, a rational person--a person who can effectively use reason to understand the world around them. You are a slave of ideology and that is colouring your world view, and frankly, I think you are at high risk of dying due to medical malpractice.
RTFA and look at your world in a new light.
That the distributors of that information presented a biased study is not the fault of the individual doctor. Subsequent scientific studies showed that the drug was flawed. That's the way the medical field advances, that's how science works. Asking the government to keep track of the rapidly advancing field of medical science can only be doomed to failure.
This shows you never understood the issue in the first place. The bill is paying for scientific studies to show if drugs work or are flawed. If a medical treatment improved health or makes it worse. It has very little to do with the government and everything to do with your health.
So, when your doctor told you that you must ween off of an anti-depressant, did you just ignore that part of the conversation?
What about when your pharmacist said the same thing?
How about the label on the bottle that says the same thing?
Hmm. How long have you had reading comprehension problems? Why do I ask? Because I said it happened the day I started it. What does weening have to do with it? Also, the bottle did not say that at the time. It was not on the medication fact sheet that came with my prescription for Paxil.
As for weening, most doctors don't even know about weening from anti-depressants. Pharmacists didn't know about it until recently. The anti-depressant I'm on has severe weening issues (users call it "brain shivers" which is accurate) and apparently it took a class-action lawsuit to even get the manufacturer to admit they saw this problem during their trials but declined to disclose it to the FDA.
It must be nice to take advantage of all the experience of us who came before you and made sure you have the information we should have had.
(Yeah, I'm a little [ticked] off by this snotty answer)
I had an unfortunate incident of that. I came in with depression/anxiety, and my doctor put me on Paxil. Not because it was the best choice, but because it was the NEWEST one, and the lovely dinner the pharamceutical company paid for had these nice salesmen who told all the doctors how safe and effective with it.
After one night on it, I stopped it and made another appointment with the doctor. To say I had a bad reaction would be an understatement. I'd describe it as extreme anxiety with hot sweats and other wonderful symptoms. Cut to a few years later, I start reading in the news about "unreported" side-effects of Paxil and the drug maker being forced to issue updated clinical notes. Now the warnings list all these things.
The appallingly bad knowledge, especially about new drugs, family doctors have is downright frightening.
If you want to know how my story turned out, I got a referral to a psychiatrist who had many, many years of experience and helped me figure out my problem was a combination of biology, a sleeping disorder I'd recently been diagnosed with and really bad work environment. He helped me figure out which drug worked better for me (one that was new, but was relatively less marketed), talked me through how to make the appropriate changes in my thinking and lifestyle to survive bad times and then after the appropriate monitoring time, sent me on my way, and I've been overall pretty good.
The lesson here is our doctors need real medical knowledge to draw on--not just what the marketers and sales people tell them. Family doctors are usually over worked trying to pay the office rent, the receptionist, the malpractice insurance, etc. And they don't have the time or energy to keep learning anymore, and what they do have time for is usually not of high quality to begin with.
I for one am looking forward to this. It doesn't just benefit America--it could benefit everybody.
I know about extreme programming, and I've really enjoyed some team programming sessions, but when it comes down to it, I think one reason some people hold a much deeper level of knowledge than their peers is that they spend extreme amounts of time alone.
...
People who are fascinated with math and coding tend to have fewer peers who can understand what they are doing. Is this a bad thing?... I guess the challenge is to guide young people to seek out their peers (those who are fascinated with the same things), and to make friends without making everything into a competition.... There is a place for ambition, but that instinct can be a hinderance.
I think you've misunderstood was Bjarne was talking about. Most software projects have a dozen or more developers requiring close collaboration and the ability to cope with egos and positive/negative emotions. Also, just the ability to communicate your information to someone who needs it. Damn straight modern programming is a team sport! Are you working on tiny apps in a small closet hidden somewhere inside a small company? 'Cause for the rest of us, our day is filled with interacting with people. I'm very introverted, but I do need social skills to deal with the people I work with every day -- which causes me extra stress, but I digress. Software development in big companies and FOSS projects is a team effort, and for successful projects, the humans working on those teams need to work together smoothly.
Eventually, you start talking about what Bjarne was talking about at AT&T: social skills doesn't mean your hosting dinner parties and chatting up girls. It means being able to share and communicate your idea to another very smart person, and then being able to listen and learn from that other very smart person. I think you shifted into that point at the end of your post: the idea that introverted smart people need to find other smart people they can talk with.
Social skills in this context doesn't mean being the life of the party or tossing a football with non-geeks. Social skills means being able to tell the prima donna that his code has a bug in it. It means being able to explain to others why a design or architecture is bad. It's coping with hurt feelings: yours and theirs. The basic social skills of working in a modern business environment.
Programming has evolved waaaay beyond the lone programmer in his little corner office working his own hours. A programmer is expected to talk to end users and tease out their real requirements; it requires them to be able to stand up and argue for something in a room full of managers; it requires having the ability to tell another programmer his coding style is awful, but you want to help him to get better.
That's what Bjarne meant by social skills and team programming.
Isn't this argument a bit like claiming we cannot judge Communism because it was never implemented per Karl Marx vision?
No, because that is the very definition of Reganomics, and the very goals Republican administrations have claimed to aspire to. What Regan actually did is something else, which can be debated endlessly. And let's face it, Communism was never implemented Karl Marx style, but that's why we make the distinction of Soviet Communism (which bore a striking resemblance to fascism to me), Chinese Communism (which seemed to be an effectively modernized Chinese imperialism -- i.e., emperor based) and Cuban Communism, which seems more like Socialism as the days go on and they begin to play at the edges.
The point is that Reganomics is defined (simply) as Less Government = More Prosperity = More Equality. Since Regan was never able to implement the Less Government thing, how can he have proved Less Government = More Prosperity = More Equality? He did some minor things, but we still have the Farm Bill, the Sugar price controls and countless other ways the American government manages the marketplace.
Your other comment about not balancing the budget is square on the money, though. So many things that happened in the 80s could have been avoided: The Japanese trade deficit, high interest rates and inflation above 4%. This is why I think Americans should be presented the stark reality: if you are unwilling to cut spending, you need more taxes. Chose.
(Example: Unions are good for workers, My Counter-Example: The number of Unions up until the 60s that prohibited blacks from working at a union shop)
That's a counterexample for "Unions are perfect", not for "Unions are good". I don't have any strong opinions on unions, one way or another, but I just hate to see a bogus argument go unchallenged.
Touche! Excellent point, and good call on my straw man argument.:-)
How many more politicians and faux-news talking heads will continue to push the pseudo-scientific religion that is reaganomics?
Humans are capable of believing untrue things for a very long time, even after reality begins to seriously challenge those beliefs. The Left has long-cherished beliefs (Example: Unions are good for workers, My Counter-Example: The number of Unions up until the 60s that prohibited blacks from working at a union shop). The Right has its long-cherished beliefs.
There are a lot of possible explanations why people are like that, but the more important thing is to engage those people by asking questions about the basis of their belief and learning yourself. If someone says something, and you don't know if it's true or not, take some effort to find out if it is. Most of the time, you can Google the issue and find a lot of people have done the hard work for you. You just have to verify if their logic is sound and inferences are valid.
Krugman, via his blog and columns, does try his best to do this. In fact, he often posts links to early versions of his papers and mathematics on his NY Times blog and lets his readers pick it apart. He and Tyler Cowan (a libertarian leaning economist) have very civil debates via their blogs.
Most *-wing sites simply tune out contrary voices with more chanting and weak arguments that bolster that community's feelings on right and wrong. In short: people judge arguments by its truthiness, not its validity.
And for the record, we cannot judge if Reagnomics worked because Reagonomics is:
reduce the growth of government spending,
reduce marginal tax rates on income from labor and capital,
reduce government regulation of the economy,
control the money supply to reduce inflation.
To be honest, I don't believe he achieved those four goals during his presidency, so I'm not sure one can say Reagonomics worked or not:
Exchange? Active Directory? Group policy? Try to find an open source replacement for those products? I have and I can't.... These are world class enterprise systems... SQL SErver 2008? Windows? A whole eco-system? Without Windows how many of you people would have ever gotten to try open source software? Would PC's have become so dominant? I doubt it.
Um yeah. You listed three of the things that makes my Enterprise level development and technical architecting a never-ending source of pain (or at least discomfort).
Exchange = Any SMTP server w/ IMAP service.
Active Directory = You... want this?
Group Policy = Proof of one-size does not fit all.
The closest thing I've seen to a good Enterprise product from Microsoft was SharePoint 2007 (esp. the Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007). And while quite good, it also has all the configuration and maintenance headache of APACHE + MySQL + Postgress with less of the features and support.
To be fair though, simply asking for OSS equivalents of MS isn't the best way of arguing for MS. I would point out that Exchange and Active Directory were preceded by at least a decade by Novel and other offerings. And there were a lot of good 3rd party Group Policy products before MS nuked them all by providing it for free.
For the over-worked IT grunt, I'm sure Group Policy seems like a godsend. For a developer who has to call for admin over-ride every time I install software, group policy doesn't seem like such a clever idea.
As someone who used to "read" 2ch.net, lemme tell you...
It's over rated. Imagine slashdot with WAAAY more -1 and 0 rated posts. Lots of trolling. No, that's an understatement. 90% of threads are taken over by trolls and name callers (including racial insults), even the originally interesting threads.
The majority of responses are 1-liners of little value. Most threads are actually cross-threaded to hell and gone so even if you find a new thread, the first message is a summary (with links) too all the threads that lead up to this new one so you're usually lost trying to follow any conversation.
I wish I could find a handy transcription to quote the conversation between Chandra and HAL, but in 2010, Clarke showed he did know how to write. I'll never forget the chill up my spine when Dave Bowman shows up to warn the crew that they have to leave, and on leaving, the dark spot appears on Jupiter... *shudder* (When 2010 shows up on the boob tube, I tune in just for the ending).
And the final dialog between Chandra and HAL actually talking with him and being honest. And HAL chosing the right thing. The redemption of HAL is one of my all-time favorite moments in SF.
"The clear message of the session was that a command of facts is never going to be good enough to convince most segments of the public, whether they're parents or Congress. How the information is conveyed can matter more than its content, and different forms of communication may be necessary for different audiences."
Translation: Sophistry trumps logic in public debate.
The Edmonds case is fascinating, but the latest stuff she's been saying sounds a tad ludicrous. But considering the FBI has gone to an __awful__ lot of trouble to silence her, it may just be as bad as she says.
Re:"How will you use XML in years to come?"
on
The Future of XML
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
JSON is inflicting Javascript on everyone.
No, it really doesn't, but if "JavaScript" in the name bothers you, you might feel better with YAML.
No, it wouldn't because JSON is bare bones data. It's simply nested hash tables, arrays and strings. XML does much more than that. XML can represent a lot of information in a simple, easy-to-understand format. JSON strips it out for speed & efficiency. Which sort of gets into the point I did want to make but was too impatient to explain: JSON is good where JSON is best, and XML is good where XML is best. I dislike the one-uber-alles arguments because it's ignoring other situations and their needs.
There are other programming languages out there.
And there are JSON and/or YAML libraries for quite a lot of them. So what?
Would you like to live in a world of S-expressions? The LISP people would point out there are libraries to read/write S-expressions, so why use JSON? The answer of course is that we want more than simply nesting lists of strings. We want our markup languages to fit our requirements, not the other way around. And saying "JSON for Everything", which the original poster did was... silly.
My problems with JSON are:
No schema: XML Schema not only makes it easier to unit test, but it can be fed into tools that can do useful things like automatic creation of Java classes and code to read/write. Does JSON have anything like that? Of course not, because it would defeat JSON's purpose: easy Javascript data transmission.
Expressability: With XML, I can create a model that fits my logical model of the data where I use attributes to augment the data in the child elements. Doing that in JSON is a kludge with a hash-table to represent an element which can't be easily converted into a graph for easy understanding.
Diversity: I use GML in my day job. A lot. I can easily set up an object conversion rule with Jakarta Digester that I can painlessly drop into future projects without modification. That's the power of namespaces. I can build an XML document using tags from a dozen different schema, and then feed it to another application that only looks for the tags it cares about.
XPath. 'Nuff said. Ok, one thing: this should have replaced SAX/DOM years ago.
JSON is great for AJAX where XML is clunky and a little bit slower (my own speed tests hasn't shown there's a huge hit, but it is significant). XML is great for document-type data like formatted documents or electronic data interchange between heavy-weight processes. My point was that the original poster's JSON is everything was narrow-minded, and that XML answers a very specific need. There are tonnes of mark-up languages out there, and I think XML is a great machine-based language. I hate it when humans have to write XML to configure something though. That really ticks me off. But that's the point: there should not be one mark-up language to rule them all. A mark-up language for every purpose.
Re:"How will you use XML in years to come?"
on
The Future of XML
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Sparingly. JSON is just plain better, and doesn't inflict an enterprisey mindset on anyone that tries to use it.
JSON is inflicting Javascript on everyone. There are other programming languages out there. Also, XML can painlessly create meta-documents made up of other people's XML documents.
Way to conveniently drop important contextual information. Axioms like these, derived from 40 years of experience, carry a lot of weight for me.
While a good point, it's still irrelevant to Google and Map-Reduce because Google's search engine is NOT a RDBMS. It's almost pure indexing, and what they are doing is comparing, say , Oracle to a specific B+-Tree implementation. They are seeing the Map-Reduce algorithm purely from a RDBMS perspective--not a "let's solve this specific problem" perspective.
I'm reminded of a co-worker who accused me of being a database-bigot: you want to solve everything with a [RDBMS]. He was right.:-)
So we "early adopters" who forked over vast amounts of cash for early-gen HDTVs are now discovering that we've been screwed over royally by the HD content providers! Life sucks.
No kidding. Why would I bother buying a HD player if I'm not allowed to view HD output because I don't have HDMI?
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is how most people predict or evaluate Oracle's actions: "How would this f--- Bill Gates?"
"Um, Mr. Ellison? Bill Gates isn't running Microsoft anymore--"
"SHUT UP! I know he's still out there..." (stares out his window menacingly towards Redmond)
I've just made an extensive post on the subject, but your anecdote does not make a case for abandoning a doctor's judgment. At best it makes an argument for banning the advertisement of pharmaceuticals.
(long rant elided)
but your anecdote does not make a case for abandoning a doctor's judgment
How does my post suggest abandoning a doctor's judgement? I said I want my doctor to have better information from science, not pharmaceutical marketers. The fact you believe it's abandoning a doctor's judgment shows your own bias on this issue, and more importantly, how ideology has prevented you from seeing what is actually being talked about. More examples follow.
You were prescribed a medication based on the best medical knowledge and practices of the day.
I was not, as my psychiatrist explained. The best medical knowledge and practice of the day suggested cheaper Prozac or the much-maligned Wellbutrin should have been the first ones she reached for. Instead she reached for the most recently approved one.
So you believe that your doctor is giving you the best medical knowledge and practice of the day? He/she is probably not, which is the point of the original article. It's time to get find out that information and spread it to our doctors. For our health, more than our wallets.
If your story were to repeat itself under a system such as the one you are espousing, the most likely scenario would be that any doctor would be forced to prescribe you Paxil or face fines for not doing so. If you could demonstrate a need for an alternative medication, then you would almost certainly pay through the nose for the privilege. That might sound scary and unrealistic, but I assure you it's not terribly far from today's current practices.
Here your ideology leaks through. The system I'm supporting has doctors learning from peer-reviewed science what actually works and improves health vs. just being expensive placebos. You have a dangerous belief that your doctor knows the best knowledge around and that this program is about government intervention. You are not, IMHO, a rational person--a person who can effectively use reason to understand the world around them. You are a slave of ideology and that is colouring your world view, and frankly, I think you are at high risk of dying due to medical malpractice.
RTFA and look at your world in a new light.
That the distributors of that information presented a biased study is not the fault of the individual doctor. Subsequent scientific studies showed that the drug was flawed. That's the way the medical field advances, that's how science works. Asking the government to keep track of the rapidly advancing field of medical science can only be doomed to failure.
This shows you never understood the issue in the first place. The bill is paying for scientific studies to show if drugs work or are flawed. If a medical treatment improved health or makes it worse. It has very little to do with the government and everything to do with your health.
So, when your doctor told you that you must ween off of an anti-depressant, did you just ignore that part of the conversation?
What about when your pharmacist said the same thing?
How about the label on the bottle that says the same thing?
Hmm. How long have you had reading comprehension problems? Why do I ask? Because I said it happened the day I started it. What does weening have to do with it? Also, the bottle did not say that at the time. It was not on the medication fact sheet that came with my prescription for Paxil.
As for weening, most doctors don't even know about weening from anti-depressants. Pharmacists didn't know about it until recently. The anti-depressant I'm on has severe weening issues (users call it "brain shivers" which is accurate) and apparently it took a class-action lawsuit to even get the manufacturer to admit they saw this problem during their trials but declined to disclose it to the FDA.
It must be nice to take advantage of all the experience of us who came before you and made sure you have the information we should have had.
(Yeah, I'm a little [ticked] off by this snotty answer)
I had an unfortunate incident of that. I came in with depression/anxiety, and my doctor put me on Paxil. Not because it was the best choice, but because it was the NEWEST one, and the lovely dinner the pharamceutical company paid for had these nice salesmen who told all the doctors how safe and effective with it.
After one night on it, I stopped it and made another appointment with the doctor. To say I had a bad reaction would be an understatement. I'd describe it as extreme anxiety with hot sweats and other wonderful symptoms. Cut to a few years later, I start reading in the news about "unreported" side-effects of Paxil and the drug maker being forced to issue updated clinical notes. Now the warnings list all these things.
The appallingly bad knowledge, especially about new drugs, family doctors have is downright frightening.
If you want to know how my story turned out, I got a referral to a psychiatrist who had many, many years of experience and helped me figure out my problem was a combination of biology, a sleeping disorder I'd recently been diagnosed with and really bad work environment. He helped me figure out which drug worked better for me (one that was new, but was relatively less marketed), talked me through how to make the appropriate changes in my thinking and lifestyle to survive bad times and then after the appropriate monitoring time, sent me on my way, and I've been overall pretty good.
The lesson here is our doctors need real medical knowledge to draw on--not just what the marketers and sales people tell them. Family doctors are usually over worked trying to pay the office rent, the receptionist, the malpractice insurance, etc. And they don't have the time or energy to keep learning anymore, and what they do have time for is usually not of high quality to begin with.
I for one am looking forward to this. It doesn't just benefit America--it could benefit everybody.
I know about extreme programming, and I've really enjoyed some team programming sessions, but when it comes down to it, I think one reason some people hold a much deeper level of knowledge than their peers is that they spend extreme amounts of time alone.
...
People who are fascinated with math and coding tend to have fewer peers who can understand what they are doing. Is this a bad thing? ... I guess the challenge is to guide young people to seek out their peers (those who are fascinated with the same things), and to make friends without making everything into a competition. ... There is a place for ambition, but that instinct can be a hinderance.
I think you've misunderstood was Bjarne was talking about. Most software projects have a dozen or more developers requiring close collaboration and the ability to cope with egos and positive/negative emotions. Also, just the ability to communicate your information to someone who needs it. Damn straight modern programming is a team sport! Are you working on tiny apps in a small closet hidden somewhere inside a small company? 'Cause for the rest of us, our day is filled with interacting with people. I'm very introverted, but I do need social skills to deal with the people I work with every day -- which causes me extra stress, but I digress. Software development in big companies and FOSS projects is a team effort, and for successful projects, the humans working on those teams need to work together smoothly.
Eventually, you start talking about what Bjarne was talking about at AT&T: social skills doesn't mean your hosting dinner parties and chatting up girls. It means being able to share and communicate your idea to another very smart person, and then being able to listen and learn from that other very smart person. I think you shifted into that point at the end of your post: the idea that introverted smart people need to find other smart people they can talk with.
Social skills in this context doesn't mean being the life of the party or tossing a football with non-geeks. Social skills means being able to tell the prima donna that his code has a bug in it. It means being able to explain to others why a design or architecture is bad. It's coping with hurt feelings: yours and theirs. The basic social skills of working in a modern business environment.
Programming has evolved waaaay beyond the lone programmer in his little corner office working his own hours. A programmer is expected to talk to end users and tease out their real requirements; it requires them to be able to stand up and argue for something in a room full of managers; it requires having the ability to tell another programmer his coding style is awful, but you want to help him to get better.
That's what Bjarne meant by social skills and team programming.
Twelve Ceasars made me realize that political muck-raking has existed for as long as humans could say "Oog pals around with Neanderthals!"
Claudius got a mild thumbs down from Suetonius, which lead to Robert Graves to "correct the record".
Also Emperor Tiberius was the original Michael Jackson.
Isn't this argument a bit like claiming we cannot judge Communism because it was never implemented per Karl Marx vision?
No, because that is the very definition of Reganomics, and the very goals Republican administrations have claimed to aspire to. What Regan actually did is something else, which can be debated endlessly. And let's face it, Communism was never implemented Karl Marx style, but that's why we make the distinction of Soviet Communism (which bore a striking resemblance to fascism to me), Chinese Communism (which seemed to be an effectively modernized Chinese imperialism -- i.e., emperor based) and Cuban Communism, which seems more like Socialism as the days go on and they begin to play at the edges.
The point is that Reganomics is defined (simply) as Less Government = More Prosperity = More Equality. Since Regan was never able to implement the Less Government thing, how can he have proved Less Government = More Prosperity = More Equality? He did some minor things, but we still have the Farm Bill, the Sugar price controls and countless other ways the American government manages the marketplace.
Your other comment about not balancing the budget is square on the money, though. So many things that happened in the 80s could have been avoided: The Japanese trade deficit, high interest rates and inflation above 4%. This is why I think Americans should be presented the stark reality: if you are unwilling to cut spending, you need more taxes. Chose.
(Example: Unions are good for workers, My Counter-Example: The number of Unions up until the 60s that prohibited blacks from working at a union shop)
That's a counterexample for "Unions are perfect", not for "Unions are good". I don't have any strong opinions on unions, one way or another, but I just hate to see a bogus argument go unchallenged.
Touche! Excellent point, and good call on my straw man argument. :-)
How many more politicians and faux-news talking heads will continue to push the pseudo-scientific religion that is reaganomics?
Humans are capable of believing untrue things for a very long time, even after reality begins to seriously challenge those beliefs. The Left has long-cherished beliefs (Example: Unions are good for workers, My Counter-Example: The number of Unions up until the 60s that prohibited blacks from working at a union shop). The Right has its long-cherished beliefs.
There are a lot of possible explanations why people are like that, but the more important thing is to engage those people by asking questions about the basis of their belief and learning yourself. If someone says something, and you don't know if it's true or not, take some effort to find out if it is. Most of the time, you can Google the issue and find a lot of people have done the hard work for you. You just have to verify if their logic is sound and inferences are valid.
Krugman, via his blog and columns, does try his best to do this. In fact, he often posts links to early versions of his papers and mathematics on his NY Times blog and lets his readers pick it apart. He and Tyler Cowan (a libertarian leaning economist) have very civil debates via their blogs.
Most *-wing sites simply tune out contrary voices with more chanting and weak arguments that bolster that community's feelings on right and wrong. In short: people judge arguments by its truthiness, not its validity.
And for the record, we cannot judge if Reagnomics worked because Reagonomics is:
To be honest, I don't believe he achieved those four goals during his presidency, so I'm not sure one can say Reagonomics worked or not:
... How often do we see an article on SGI here that doesn't either forecast their demise or have updates on their latest bankruptcy filing?
I was tempted to post: "Holy crap, this is big news!! SGI is still in business!!!"
A nice safe delay of, oh...a hour to make sure that nothing gets shown that's not supposed to be shown.
"Get that stage hand out of the shot!!"
Exchange? Active Directory? Group policy? Try to find an open source replacement for those products? I have and I can't.... These are world class enterprise systems... SQL SErver 2008? Windows? A whole eco-system?
Without Windows how many of you people would have ever gotten to try open source software? Would PC's have become so dominant? I doubt it.
Um yeah. You listed three of the things that makes my Enterprise level development and technical architecting a never-ending source of pain (or at least discomfort).
Exchange = Any SMTP server w/ IMAP service.
Active Directory = You... want this?
Group Policy = Proof of one-size does not fit all.
The closest thing I've seen to a good Enterprise product from Microsoft was SharePoint 2007 (esp. the Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007). And while quite good, it also has all the configuration and maintenance headache of APACHE + MySQL + Postgress with less of the features and support.
To be fair though, simply asking for OSS equivalents of MS isn't the best way of arguing for MS. I would point out that Exchange and Active Directory were preceded by at least a decade by Novel and other offerings. And there were a lot of good 3rd party Group Policy products before MS nuked them all by providing it for free.
For the over-worked IT grunt, I'm sure Group Policy seems like a godsend. For a developer who has to call for admin over-ride every time I install software, group policy doesn't seem like such a clever idea.
Gartner gets something wrong? Say it ain't so!
</sarcasm>
Check your NoScript options. You can tell it to block Flash from even trusted sites.
As someone who used to "read" 2ch.net, lemme tell you...
It's over rated. Imagine slashdot with WAAAY more -1 and 0 rated posts. Lots of trolling. No, that's an understatement. 90% of threads are taken over by trolls and name callers (including racial insults), even the originally interesting threads.
The majority of responses are 1-liners of little value. Most threads are actually cross-threaded to hell and gone so even if you find a new thread, the first message is a summary (with links) too all the threads that lead up to this new one so you're usually lost trying to follow any conversation.
Great ASCII art from the trollers though.
So... you want them to get Steve Jobs?
I wish I could find a handy transcription to quote the conversation between Chandra and HAL, but in 2010, Clarke showed he did know how to write. I'll never forget the chill up my spine when Dave Bowman shows up to warn the crew that they have to leave, and on leaving, the dark spot appears on Jupiter... *shudder* (When 2010 shows up on the boob tube, I tune in just for the ending).
And the final dialog between Chandra and HAL actually talking with him and being honest. And HAL chosing the right thing. The redemption of HAL is one of my all-time favorite moments in SF.
That was awesome writing.
"The clear message of the session was that a command of facts is never going to be good enough to convince most segments of the public, whether they're parents or Congress. How the information is conveyed can matter more than its content, and different forms of communication may be necessary for different audiences."
Translation: Sophistry trumps logic in public debate.
The Edmonds case is fascinating, but the latest stuff she's been saying sounds a tad ludicrous. But considering the FBI has gone to an __awful__ lot of trouble to silence her, it may just be as bad as she says.
No, it wouldn't because JSON is bare bones data. It's simply nested hash tables, arrays and strings. XML does much more than that. XML can represent a lot of information in a simple, easy-to-understand format. JSON strips it out for speed & efficiency. Which sort of gets into the point I did want to make but was too impatient to explain: JSON is good where JSON is best, and XML is good where XML is best. I dislike the one-uber-alles arguments because it's ignoring other situations and their needs.
Would you like to live in a world of S-expressions? The LISP people would point out there are libraries to read/write S-expressions, so why use JSON? The answer of course is that we want more than simply nesting lists of strings. We want our markup languages to fit our requirements, not the other way around. And saying "JSON for Everything", which the original poster did was... silly.
My problems with JSON are:
JSON is great for AJAX where XML is clunky and a little bit slower (my own speed tests hasn't shown there's a huge hit, but it is significant). XML is great for document-type data like formatted documents or electronic data interchange between heavy-weight processes. My point was that the original poster's JSON is everything was narrow-minded, and that XML answers a very specific need. There are tonnes of mark-up languages out there, and I think XML is a great machine-based language. I hate it when humans have to write XML to configure something though. That really ticks me off. But that's the point: there should not be one mark-up language to rule them all. A mark-up language for every purpose.
JSON is inflicting Javascript on everyone. There are other programming languages out there. Also, XML can painlessly create meta-documents made up of other people's XML documents.
He'd make it from his old science projects and make it work better than the Enterprise's transporters! :-P
(Too bad one can't actually invoke CleverNickName to post)
While a good point, it's still irrelevant to Google and Map-Reduce because Google's search engine is NOT a RDBMS. It's almost pure indexing, and what they are doing is comparing, say , Oracle to a specific B+-Tree implementation. They are seeing the Map-Reduce algorithm purely from a RDBMS perspective--not a "let's solve this specific problem" perspective.
I'm reminded of a co-worker who accused me of being a database-bigot: you want to solve everything with a [RDBMS]. He was right. :-)
No kidding. Why would I bother buying a HD player if I'm not allowed to view HD output because I don't have HDMI?
"If not operated occasionally, a hard drive will freeze up in as little as two years."