The good news is that, eventually, this will probably get sorted out. Producers and installers with brands and reputations (not to mention business contracts) to defend will eventually get fed up with dealing with shitty suppliers, who will either clean up their act, go out of business, or retreat to the purgatory of "known to be poor quality", where there's still plenty of business to be had (see again the desktop PC market), but not much money to be made.
Yah. That's the downside of "The Market Will Work It Out". You have to wait until the market works it out. Which means waiting for enough people with enough influence to go elsewhere. Which can be a very, very long time in some cases. Sometimes never.
I've never heard of the guy and was looking a bit into his stuff on Amazon. How "humorous" are his writings?
Don't look for belly-laughs. He's not Terry Pratchett. He went more for the sly, subtle approach, often with characters playing elaborate practical jokes on each other. This is a signature feature in the Dying Earth series, where the players all know that the sun could wink out at any instant, had already pretty much been there/done that/recycled the T shirt for polishing rags and so really had nothing to lose. Also, his "clever protagonists" often are not nearly as clever as they think they are, Especially Cugel the Clever and Rhialto the Marvellous. Joke's on them.
As an aside to the scientific nit-pickers, yes, I know that the projected fate of the Earth is to be swallowed up as the Sun goes nova. However, there are hints that, as in Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time, that the people of the Earth have plundered the entire rest of the Universe to sustain their ancestral planet and that only at the end are they left with the dregs. And possibly everyone not inclined to take e.e. cumming's advice about the Universe next door after wearing out the current one. And in the end, what does it matter? Good stories!
I was recently starting to read "Songs of the Dying Earth" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_of_the_Dying_Earth, ISBN ISBN 1-59606-213-4), a tribute from other authors to the Master of the art of world building.
Well, I will remember him drinking a tankard of Tatterblass or maybe some vintage from Almery in his honour.
And I shall dine, in remembrance of him, on a dish of braised leeks.
Vance was meticulous in his portrayal of colors, clothing, artifacts and odd cultural nuances. One world, one culture was rarely enough to contain him for the duration of an entire story. And he took Clarke's Law on technology and magic and wrapped it around his little finger.
One of my top 10 favorite authors of all time, and just the other day I was lamenting that he was no longer active.
If the terms of your employment are that you BYOD and comply with company security policies then you do that or you don't have a job.
Those terms of employment may violate labor law. Forcing employees to buy their own workplace equipment is generally not permitted.
I wouldn't take that as a blanket statement. There is a place on the US Form individual Income Tax return specifically to allow people to deduct unreimbursed business expenses, including equipment and supplies.
What an an employer can or cannot demand is subject in large part to local restrictions, so it's best to consult a lawyer if there is reason to make an issue of it.
This effort will help the Navajo nation preserve its cultural heritage in its language
And Star Wars relates to the Navajo cultural heritage how exactly?
If they're going to need to make up words to cover words like computer and droid, it sounds like they're doing the opposite.
I expect that by now they've already come up with a word for Computer. As I understand it, they came up with distinct Navajo names for each of the myriad parts of the automotive internal combustion engine. My kind of people.
As for "droid", it wasn't even an English word before Star Wars. Sure it's merely an abbreviated form of "android", but the actual word "droid" wasn't part of the common language. If we can add words, so can they.
PETA is an organization that pretends to love animals.
What PETA really is is an organization that hates people. Their fundamental position is that basically, no animal would ever voluntarily want to even be on the same planet as the evil horrible creatures known as "humans", that simple proximity to humans is intensely stressful to them, and that all humans are good for is to exploit, torment, and kill animals.
Their ignorance of what the animals themselves actually want and need is outright appalling. When they go full-on "rescue", the poor animals might as well be in an abattoir. They turn the phrase "killing with Kindness" quite literal. In fact, abattoirs have are often more humane. At least abattoirs are set up for relatively quick and painless death as opposed to panicked animals being smeared all over the highways and general mayhem.
I strongly believe in respect for animals. But to truly show respect, you need to gain understanding, not arrogantly assume you know best.
"55 MPH" seems fine to me. I don't have a problem with adding KPH readings to the signs, but if they want to claim that they are truly "bilingual" with measurements, then having both MPH and KPH would make the most sense...
They did that in Florida. People kept stealing the signs.
Then they raised the speed limit and dropped the metric numbers.
Ever notice that when you deliver something, they've managed to change the requirements?
Ever delivered something which met the formal requirements and had them say "well, that's not what we wanted"?
There is often an unbelievable disconnect between what users tell you they want versus what they actually really really wanted but had no idea until it was too late.
End users will often help you design unusable software which is exactly what they asked for.
Don't be too hard on them. Often, it's working with what they asked for that shows what they should have really asked for had they been able to see in advance what was actually possible.
One of the advantages of being Agile. Don't invest too much in the "final" solution. Because it probably won't be. Unfortunately, that particular nuance tends to get lost in the Cult of Agile.
If it were a case of causing physical, emotional or economic harm, possibly.. but if it just makes aunt sally think she's a programmer, where is the harm in that?
Too many people think they are programmers already. They learned how to do something in BASIC that prints "Hello" and think that that means that they know as much about software development as people who do it as a full-time job. Then they make demands based on that "knowledge".
The idea is to down-regulate the production of protein(s) that induce cellular senescence in chronic wounds, for example. The short interfering RNA molecules are fragile. The article is touting a potentially more effective delivery system (gun), rather than a particular fragment (bullet).
An even better system would also deal with the fallout from flesh-eating bacteria!
Forget, for a minute that drones have started off with a bad reputation, thanks to things like anonymous delivery of lethal capabilities and peering at people's backyard pot farms.
There are a LOT of intriguing applications for small quadcopters in a disaster situation. Since they are smaller, lighter, and slower that the bomb-type drones they can go places faster and easier than land-based alternatives and they can travel closer to the surface without the limitations of actually having to navigate the surface. Look at Oklahoma. In less than an hour a normal community became an unrecognizable obstacle course of twisted metal and debris with people intermingled with the rubble. Streets became impassible, and the extent of the damage and the urgency of the situation mandates that you cannot just bull your way in, you need to know what to address first in order to get a maximally-effective response.
A fleet of slow, low-flying quadrotors can map out this sort of debris field much more effectively than faster, high-flying craft, to say nothing of ground reconnaissance. It can help spot many of the victims, and not only direct aid to them, but deliver lightweight payloads such as cellphones and comfort supplies. It can make it easier to single out possible sites where victims might be trapped - even communicate directly with them.
Drones are a two-edged sword. But so are printing presses, and printing presses have almost certainly killed more people than drones. Don't throw out the good with the bad.
On top of that why does your employer owe you health insurance in the first place? That also used to be something that was a fringe benefit that people then started to expect and demand like it was owed to them.
I don't remember details, but the original reason for employer-provided health insurance was, I believe, a tax dodge cooked up when other types of incentives were eliminated by the government. All well and good, actually, when employment was more or less for life, but absolutely horrible when employment has become almost exclusively short-term and there can be gaps of 1-2 years or more between jobs. For that, an employer-independent insurance program becomes necessary.
As long as employment was more or less constant, with few gaps, ordinary insurance would have filled the bill, had not the insurance industry taken advantage of the norm being large-company group insurance to put the squeeze on smaller groups and individuals. However, many these days are in a feast-or-famine cycle where they can barely afford insurance sometimes and not at all other times. Few have the discipline to keep paying for "luxuries" such as insurance premiums while long-term unemployed, which is why an agency that is relatively immune to such things - and to business cycles - is more or less essential to keep things on an even keel. Because while watching people drop dead in the streets might appeal to the pseudo-Darwinists among us, the reality is that we end up paying for uninsured emergency care and therefore it is in our own best interests to ensure the availability of preventative health maintenance, if for no other reason than simple economics.
And, while you can scream "Socialism!" as loud as you like, there are only so many agencies capable of handling that sort of job, of which governments tend to be near the top of the list. Especially since the Catholic Church isn't the all-encompassing body it used to be.
Your employer owes you nothing. And it will give you nothing unless you metaphorically put a gun to its head.... The only reason they give you *anything* -- vacation, health care, a window, weekends, "free" soda, is because it is economically advantageous to them to do so.
That is a bit cynical. Not every employer is Ebenezer Scrooge, although there are more of them than there ought to be. A good employer will give out perks, not merely for financial gain but because it's frankly, an ego trip, and even because "it's the right thing to do".
Of course a bad employer will do the 20 hours and sell you the breadcrust for 20x the general rate and more. Which is why various governments, unions, and occasionally other agencies make it "economically advantageous" to do better. As in shut down or cripple egregious offenders. Because if you're an ordinary person making an ordinary salary and trying to match strength against an organized group of people with large sums of money and political connections... well, lots of luck. You'll need it.
As for who "owes" whom, that's an indication of the illness of the times that neither party no longer feels that they "owe" the other anything. We all owe each other some respect and decency. Or at least that what the US Declaration of Independence asserts. A fair day's work for a fair day's pay, for example.
I think that's sort of the appeal of combining COBOL and Java in one server product. Now, PHBs can use Java for record-oriented applications and COBOL for everything else. Prior to that, they'd have to pick one or the other.
How does COBOL stack up against classic VB for record handling? Or older BASICs for that matter? The BASIC family is generally held to be pretty good in that department.
Having fought mainframe-style records in DB/2 in Java, what I wonder is how they are managing the fundamental data format issues.
COBOL didn't support variable-length strings for ages. The optimal record in COBOL consisted of fixed-length fields.
Java, on the other hand, can only support fixed-length character strings (semi-)properly when they are done as character arrays, and they didn't spend excessive amounts of time making character-array manipulation as easy as fixed-length string handling is in COBOL.
DB/2 just makes it worse, since the stock JDBC driver (and perhaps DB/2 itself) have a bad habit of returning space-padded fixed-length fields as space-trimmed character string objects when used with popular ORM systems, causing all sorts of hair-tearing issues when two "identical" items are compared and one of them is padded but the other isn't. Cache lookups, table joins, and all sorts of other critical operations fail for no obvious reason.
True. Those things are almost exact opposites. You will never waste money by cutting costs, if you are accounting correctly.
Nobody ever accounts correctly. Practically everything has ripples that extend far beyond what goes into the bean-counter calculations, whether it's producing sweatsuits, generating power, running a datacenter, outsourcing key resources or just storing fertilizer in an old barn instead of a facility designed to hold volatile substances. And sometimes those ripples don't kick in for years, which means that in today's near-term focused business world, accounting allows you to dump major costs "over the neighbors fence" because when the real bill comes due, you'll have taken the money and run.
If "green fatigue" has really set in, however, I'm not displeased. It means that someone has been working hard enough on the problems to come up with solutions. If they need a break, that's fine. Having done that much work means that probably the issue will come up for review - and additional efforts - somewhere in the future.
I save my contempt for the one's who simply throw up their hands and wail "we're helpless! We can't afford it!" Often their only "solution" is to dump the problem over the neighbor's fence.
Wake me up when they've got something a little more all-terrain. This thing couldn't negotiate it's way over a power cord, if it can even negotiate the pile in my carpeting (which looks doubtful)
Rumor has it that the AT-AT version is due out early next year.
I immediately (certainly didn't RTFA) thought of the retirees already staking out the pressure cookers at Wal-Mart. Now they'll have a # to call, this should save the 911 operators a lot of grief.
We're talking North Florida, here. Not as many retirees, more rednecks. Most of whom actually probably only would buy a pressure cooker for bomb-making purposes.
As people become more productive, that increase in production leads to better and better products. Those products require more labor to afford.
Whoa! Increased productivity means LESS labor to afford the products! Unless the producers artificially jack up the spread between cost-to-produce and cost-to-buy, the product prices go down, not up. Consider the difference between a high-end stereo system circa 1960 and now. The modern-day equivalents are much smaller, vastly more power-efficient, and produce much better audio quality for the dollar. About the only major downshift has been from furniture-quality cabinets to plastic boxes, but even the plastic boxes have a much better fit and finish than a 1960's plastic box. And you were a very unusual person indeed back then if you had a computer in your house (although I knew someone with an IBM S/360 in his basement in the mid 1970's. He ran a business with it, though).
The one case where it takes MORE labor to afford all these goodies is when the labor itself becomes devalued. Which does seem to be the way we've been headed for the last 20 years or so.
Flowcharts were popular in the 80s and fell out of favour as a way of describing tasks. As a task gets complex, the flowchart becomes unwieldy very quickly. Far easier to use a high-level language like Python.)
Actually, the peak decade for flowcharts was probably the 1960s. By the mid-1980s, Object-Oriented programming had pretty much rendered them obsolete, although they had been waning in popularity ever since Structured Programming became the norm in the 1970s, as flowcharts actually are most essential when you have spaghetti code. When code is more modular and/or more organized, other tools, such as Nassi-Scheiderman diagrams are more useful for covering all the potential decision paths.
The 1970s was the decade of the 4GL. The "Fourth Generation Languages" were supposed to be higher-level, more abstract frameworks (as opposed to 3GLs, such as FORTRAN and COBOL). Problem was, they did what they were supposed to do very well, but made doing the actual above-and-beyond things that people always demand very difficult indeed. Modern-day 4GL equivalents include such things as RoR and Spring Roo, which suffer from the same problems.
Python isn't really a higher-level language than Java. What it is is an example of the currently-popular idea that because it produces visible results more rapidly that it is "more productive". However, this speed in delivery comes from discarding much of the coding-time debugging that languages like Java demand. What is actually occurring is that you move the time-consuming parts of the job to some other part of the overall application lifecycle, just as OO programming languages moved more of the error checking to earlier parts of the lifecycle. For "one-off' hacking jobs, then, Python is a good choice, since you don't care about getting all the bugs out. For an ongoing production system, it becomes just another option.
In short, despite decades of trying, the net amount of work to develop an industrial grade system remains about the same. You can shift what phases the work is done in, but the total amount of work required is just about the same, regardless. And is likely to stay that way until we come up with a completely different way to get computers to do what we want.
Slashdot Mirror
The good news is that, eventually, this will probably get sorted out. Producers and installers with brands and reputations (not to mention business contracts) to defend will eventually get fed up with dealing with shitty suppliers, who will either clean up their act, go out of business, or retreat to the purgatory of "known to be poor quality", where there's still plenty of business to be had (see again the desktop PC market), but not much money to be made.
Yah. That's the downside of "The Market Will Work It Out". You have to wait until the market works it out. Which means waiting for enough people with enough influence to go elsewhere. Which can be a very, very long time in some cases. Sometimes never.
Almost a century of life, and plenty accomplished in that time.
Jack Vance, Andre Norton. Sometimes the good don't die young.
We still miss them, though.
I've never heard of the guy and was looking a bit into his stuff on Amazon. How "humorous" are his writings?
Don't look for belly-laughs. He's not Terry Pratchett. He went more for the sly, subtle approach, often with characters playing elaborate practical jokes on each other. This is a signature feature in the Dying Earth series, where the players all know that the sun could wink out at any instant, had already pretty much been there/done that/recycled the T shirt for polishing rags and so really had nothing to lose. Also, his "clever protagonists" often are not nearly as clever as they think they are, Especially Cugel the Clever and Rhialto the Marvellous. Joke's on them.
As an aside to the scientific nit-pickers, yes, I know that the projected fate of the Earth is to be swallowed up as the Sun goes nova. However, there are hints that, as in Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time, that the people of the Earth have plundered the entire rest of the Universe to sustain their ancestral planet and that only at the end are they left with the dregs. And possibly everyone not inclined to take e.e. cumming's advice about the Universe next door after wearing out the current one. And in the end, what does it matter? Good stories!
Truly one of the best.
Sad loss for us fans.
I was recently starting to read "Songs of the Dying Earth" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_of_the_Dying_Earth, ISBN ISBN 1-59606-213-4), a tribute from other authors to the Master of the art of world building.
Well, I will remember him drinking a tankard of Tatterblass or maybe some vintage from Almery in his honour.
And I shall dine, in remembrance of him, on a dish of braised leeks.
Vance was meticulous in his portrayal of colors, clothing, artifacts and odd cultural nuances. One world, one culture was rarely enough to contain him for the duration of an entire story. And he took Clarke's Law on technology and magic and wrapped it around his little finger.
One of my top 10 favorite authors of all time, and just the other day I was lamenting that he was no longer active.
>> an intricate electronic folder structure comprised of approximately 6,712 folders and subfolders, approximately 707,307 files
Sounds like a regular disk drive structure to me. Nothing particularly "intricate" about it.
So, basically a clean Windows install.
If the terms of your employment are that you BYOD and comply with company security policies then you do that or you don't have a job.
Those terms of employment may violate labor law. Forcing employees to buy their own workplace equipment is generally not permitted.
I wouldn't take that as a blanket statement. There is a place on the US Form individual Income Tax return specifically to allow people to deduct unreimbursed business expenses, including equipment and supplies.
What an an employer can or cannot demand is subject in large part to local restrictions, so it's best to consult a lawyer if there is reason to make an issue of it.
And Star Wars relates to the Navajo cultural heritage how exactly?
If they're going to need to make up words to cover words like computer and droid, it sounds like they're doing the opposite.
I expect that by now they've already come up with a word for Computer. As I understand it, they came up with distinct Navajo names for each of the myriad parts of the automotive internal combustion engine. My kind of people.
As for "droid", it wasn't even an English word before Star Wars. Sure it's merely an abbreviated form of "android", but the actual word "droid" wasn't part of the common language. If we can add words, so can they.
PETA is and always has been such a joke.
PETA is an organization that pretends to love animals.
What PETA really is is an organization that hates people. Their fundamental position is that basically, no animal would ever voluntarily want to even be on the same planet as the evil horrible creatures known as "humans", that simple proximity to humans is intensely stressful to them, and that all humans are good for is to exploit, torment, and kill animals.
Their ignorance of what the animals themselves actually want and need is outright appalling. When they go full-on "rescue", the poor animals might as well be in an abattoir. They turn the phrase "killing with Kindness" quite literal. In fact, abattoirs have are often more humane. At least abattoirs are set up for relatively quick and painless death as opposed to panicked animals being smeared all over the highways and general mayhem.
I strongly believe in respect for animals. But to truly show respect, you need to gain understanding, not arrogantly assume you know best.
"55 MPH" seems fine to me. I don't have a problem with adding KPH readings to the signs, but if they want to claim that they are truly "bilingual" with measurements, then having both MPH and KPH would make the most sense...
They did that in Florida. People kept stealing the signs.
Then they raised the speed limit and dropped the metric numbers.
Ever delivered something which met the formal requirements and had them say "well, that's not what we wanted"?
There is often an unbelievable disconnect between what users tell you they want versus what they actually really really wanted but had no idea until it was too late.
End users will often help you design unusable software which is exactly what they asked for.
Don't be too hard on them. Often, it's working with what they asked for that shows what they should have really asked for had they been able to see in advance what was actually possible.
One of the advantages of being Agile. Don't invest too much in the "final" solution. Because it probably won't be. Unfortunately, that particular nuance tends to get lost in the Cult of Agile.
If it were a case of causing physical, emotional or economic harm, possibly.. but if it just makes aunt sally think she's a programmer, where is the harm in that?
Too many people think they are programmers already. They learned how to do something in BASIC that prints "Hello" and think that that means that they know as much about software development as people who do it as a full-time job. Then they make demands based on that "knowledge".
Quality is defined as the degree to which a deliverable meets requirements.
Ever notice that when you deliver something, they've managed to change the requirements?
The idea is to down-regulate the production of protein(s) that induce cellular senescence in chronic wounds, for example. The short interfering RNA molecules are fragile. The article is touting a potentially more effective delivery system (gun), rather than a particular fragment (bullet).
An even better system would also deal with the fallout from flesh-eating bacteria!
And the inability to appropriately use the space bar?
What? YOU don't operate the spacebar with your right foot?
Just because you're one of those morally-questionable left-footed people doesn't give you the right to be an insensitive clod!
But what if someone later decides to NOT do the after step, even though the before step has already happened and its answer is in the sealed envelope?
That's when you let the cat out of the box!
Forget, for a minute that drones have started off with a bad reputation, thanks to things like anonymous delivery of lethal capabilities and peering at people's backyard pot farms.
There are a LOT of intriguing applications for small quadcopters in a disaster situation. Since they are smaller, lighter, and slower that the bomb-type drones they can go places faster and easier than land-based alternatives and they can travel closer to the surface without the limitations of actually having to navigate the surface. Look at Oklahoma. In less than an hour a normal community became an unrecognizable obstacle course of twisted metal and debris with people intermingled with the rubble. Streets became impassible, and the extent of the damage and the urgency of the situation mandates that you cannot just bull your way in, you need to know what to address first in order to get a maximally-effective response.
A fleet of slow, low-flying quadrotors can map out this sort of debris field much more effectively than faster, high-flying craft, to say nothing of ground reconnaissance. It can help spot many of the victims, and not only direct aid to them, but deliver lightweight payloads such as cellphones and comfort supplies. It can make it easier to single out possible sites where victims might be trapped - even communicate directly with them.
Drones are a two-edged sword. But so are printing presses, and printing presses have almost certainly killed more people than drones. Don't throw out the good with the bad.
On top of that why does your employer owe you health insurance in the first place? That also used to be something that was a fringe benefit that people then started to expect and demand like it was owed to them.
I don't remember details, but the original reason for employer-provided health insurance was, I believe, a tax dodge cooked up when other types of incentives were eliminated by the government. All well and good, actually, when employment was more or less for life, but absolutely horrible when employment has become almost exclusively short-term and there can be gaps of 1-2 years or more between jobs. For that, an employer-independent insurance program becomes necessary.
As long as employment was more or less constant, with few gaps, ordinary insurance would have filled the bill, had not the insurance industry taken advantage of the norm being large-company group insurance to put the squeeze on smaller groups and individuals. However, many these days are in a feast-or-famine cycle where they can barely afford insurance sometimes and not at all other times. Few have the discipline to keep paying for "luxuries" such as insurance premiums while long-term unemployed, which is why an agency that is relatively immune to such things - and to business cycles - is more or less essential to keep things on an even keel. Because while watching people drop dead in the streets might appeal to the pseudo-Darwinists among us, the reality is that we end up paying for uninsured emergency care and therefore it is in our own best interests to ensure the availability of preventative health maintenance, if for no other reason than simple economics.
And, while you can scream "Socialism!" as loud as you like, there are only so many agencies capable of handling that sort of job, of which governments tend to be near the top of the list. Especially since the Catholic Church isn't the all-encompassing body it used to be.
Your employer owes you nothing. And it will give you nothing unless you metaphorically put a gun to its head. ... The only reason they give you *anything* -- vacation, health care, a window, weekends, "free" soda, is because it is economically advantageous to them to do so.
That is a bit cynical. Not every employer is Ebenezer Scrooge, although there are more of them than there ought to be. A good employer will give out perks, not merely for financial gain but because it's frankly, an ego trip, and even because "it's the right thing to do".
Of course a bad employer will do the 20 hours and sell you the breadcrust for 20x the general rate and more. Which is why various governments, unions, and occasionally other agencies make it "economically advantageous" to do better. As in shut down or cripple egregious offenders. Because if you're an ordinary person making an ordinary salary and trying to match strength against an organized group of people with large sums of money and political connections ... well, lots of luck. You'll need it.
As for who "owes" whom, that's an indication of the illness of the times that neither party no longer feels that they "owe" the other anything. We all owe each other some respect and decency. Or at least that what the US Declaration of Independence asserts. A fair day's work for a fair day's pay, for example.
I think that's sort of the appeal of combining COBOL and Java in one server product. Now, PHBs can use Java for record-oriented applications and COBOL for everything else. Prior to that, they'd have to pick one or the other.
How does COBOL stack up against classic VB for record handling? Or older BASICs for that matter? The BASIC family is generally held to be pretty good in that department.
Having fought mainframe-style records in DB/2 in Java, what I wonder is how they are managing the fundamental data format issues.
COBOL didn't support variable-length strings for ages. The optimal record in COBOL consisted of fixed-length fields.
Java, on the other hand, can only support fixed-length character strings (semi-)properly when they are done as character arrays, and they didn't spend excessive amounts of time making character-array manipulation as easy as fixed-length string handling is in COBOL.
DB/2 just makes it worse, since the stock JDBC driver (and perhaps DB/2 itself) have a bad habit of returning space-padded fixed-length fields as space-trimmed character string objects when used with popular ORM systems, causing all sorts of hair-tearing issues when two "identical" items are compared and one of them is padded but the other isn't. Cache lookups, table joins, and all sorts of other critical operations fail for no obvious reason.
True. Those things are almost exact opposites. You will never waste money by cutting costs, if you are accounting correctly.
Nobody ever accounts correctly. Practically everything has ripples that extend far beyond what goes into the bean-counter calculations, whether it's producing sweatsuits, generating power, running a datacenter, outsourcing key resources or just storing fertilizer in an old barn instead of a facility designed to hold volatile substances. And sometimes those ripples don't kick in for years, which means that in today's near-term focused business world, accounting allows you to dump major costs "over the neighbors fence" because when the real bill comes due, you'll have taken the money and run.
If "green fatigue" has really set in, however, I'm not displeased. It means that someone has been working hard enough on the problems to come up with solutions. If they need a break, that's fine. Having done that much work means that probably the issue will come up for review - and additional efforts - somewhere in the future.
I save my contempt for the one's who simply throw up their hands and wail "we're helpless! We can't afford it!" Often their only "solution" is to dump the problem over the neighbor's fence.
Wake me up when they've got something a little more all-terrain. This thing couldn't negotiate it's way over a power cord, if it can even negotiate the pile in my carpeting (which looks doubtful)
Rumor has it that the AT-AT version is due out early next year.
3% of all dinosaurs say that meteor-induced global climate change is a myth!
I immediately (certainly didn't RTFA) thought of the retirees already staking out the pressure cookers at Wal-Mart.
Now they'll have a # to call, this should save the 911 operators a lot of grief.
We're talking North Florida, here. Not as many retirees, more rednecks. Most of whom actually probably only would buy a pressure cooker for bomb-making purposes.
Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day.
Teach a man to fish, then charge him for use of your private lake for the rest of his life.
As people become more productive, that increase in production leads to better and better products. Those products require more labor to afford.
Whoa! Increased productivity means LESS labor to afford the products! Unless the producers artificially jack up the spread between cost-to-produce and cost-to-buy, the product prices go down, not up. Consider the difference between a high-end stereo system circa 1960 and now. The modern-day equivalents are much smaller, vastly more power-efficient, and produce much better audio quality for the dollar. About the only major downshift has been from furniture-quality cabinets to plastic boxes, but even the plastic boxes have a much better fit and finish than a 1960's plastic box. And you were a very unusual person indeed back then if you had a computer in your house (although I knew someone with an IBM S/360 in his basement in the mid 1970's. He ran a business with it, though).
The one case where it takes MORE labor to afford all these goodies is when the labor itself becomes devalued. Which does seem to be the way we've been headed for the last 20 years or so.
Flowcharts were popular in the 80s and fell out of favour as a way of describing tasks. As a task gets complex, the flowchart becomes unwieldy very quickly. Far easier to use a high-level language like Python.)
Actually, the peak decade for flowcharts was probably the 1960s. By the mid-1980s, Object-Oriented programming had pretty much rendered them obsolete, although they had been waning in popularity ever since Structured Programming became the norm in the 1970s, as flowcharts actually are most essential when you have spaghetti code. When code is more modular and/or more organized, other tools, such as Nassi-Scheiderman diagrams are more useful for covering all the potential decision paths.
The 1970s was the decade of the 4GL. The "Fourth Generation Languages" were supposed to be higher-level, more abstract frameworks (as opposed to 3GLs, such as FORTRAN and COBOL). Problem was, they did what they were supposed to do very well, but made doing the actual above-and-beyond things that people always demand very difficult indeed. Modern-day 4GL equivalents include such things as RoR and Spring Roo, which suffer from the same problems.
Python isn't really a higher-level language than Java. What it is is an example of the currently-popular idea that because it produces visible results more rapidly that it is "more productive". However, this speed in delivery comes from discarding much of the coding-time debugging that languages like Java demand. What is actually occurring is that you move the time-consuming parts of the job to some other part of the overall application lifecycle, just as OO programming languages moved more of the error checking to earlier parts of the lifecycle. For "one-off' hacking jobs, then, Python is a good choice, since you don't care about getting all the bugs out. For an ongoing production system, it becomes just another option.
In short, despite decades of trying, the net amount of work to develop an industrial grade system remains about the same. You can shift what phases the work is done in, but the total amount of work required is just about the same, regardless. And is likely to stay that way until we come up with a completely different way to get computers to do what we want.