Lies, Damn Lies and Metrics. Metrics are what you use so that you can be blind to things that can't be/aren't measured.
Lines of Code is a classic. If I rip down an algorithm and replace it with one that's faster, more reliable, and 1/3 the size, I have negative LOC. And if LOC is all of the above that got metrics, I'm a loser.
I have a great respect for being able to measure things (where it's possible and meaningful), but unlike the legendary Statistical Bikini, it's what isn't covered that's as important as what is. Metrics should be a guide, but when you have people spending all their time fiddling with metrics, and other people spending time fiddly ways to look good under the metrics you're losing a lot of your productivity to metrics. And unless you are in the business of producing metrics, that's not good.
Why does being at home guarentee productivity? From the comments, a lot of people appear to believe being in the office is less productive than being at home, but at least with a VPN, it can be measured how much data is being sent to and recieved from the telecomuters. I doubt a former Google exec would make a decision like this lightly.
Data transfer volume is of practically ZERO utility in measuring productivity. As a developer, doing as much of my work as possible on my local drive is more productive than having it dragged down by network latency. Ditto, I'd say for anyone doing artistic or word-processing work.
All Data transfer volume metrics tell is how much activity I have on the net. It's no more useful than measuring the amount of time a cubicle is inhabited by a person as opposed to an inflatable Bozo doll.
I don't buy into the proposition that people can only trade ideas when they're physically proximate. I spent too many years hiding from other people in offices.
The only REAL metric of value is what the employee produces. If the employee is going to be productive, then location is relatively unimportant. If not, there are plenty of ways to appear productive in an office without doing anything useful at all. Some of them can consume massive amounts of network bandwidth, for that matter.
If the employee is not productive, either the employee is at fault or the employee's manager is at fault. In fact, ultimately, it's the manager's responsibility to either ensure that the employee is productive or to replace him/her with someone who is productive. No amount of geographical relocation, micro-monitoring, spyware, or other "silver bullets" can take the place of good management.
I thought the US was a terrible place to work where everyone is chained to the desks and makes minimum wage? Why would foreign nationals want our jobs anyway?
Something is wrong with all the rhetoric I'm reading.
US chains are 6 inches longer than foreign chains. 'Cause we gots FREEDOMS!
Agreed. Best Buy is circling the drain. I imagine the reason they are asking folks to come in to the corporate headquarters is because they have to see them in person to lay them off.
I thought the "in" thing these days was to lay people off by email or SMS. Right before Christmas.
Getting near the top of the SEO list isn't going to hurt, but the answer that actually resolves the problem is often not the first, second, or even third link I visit. Usually the cue that I'm doomed is when the links start going into foreign languages and I still haven't got an answer.
I had a major gripe with MS documentation several years ago because it kept forcing Windows Mobile API reference pages on me back when they were pushing for mobile development. However, Microsoft generally does pretty decent documentation. So do others, like WebLogic (although Oracle's search engine is useless). For a long time one of my main go-to sites was TLDP.
Vendor documentation, however, is mostly reference documentation, and specific examples for practical use are in short supply. Stack Exchange, on the other hand, is very much practical solution-oriented and will quickly slap you down if you stray.
Still another approach can be seen at the JavaRanch. It isn't authoritative documentation like vendors provide, nor is it "git 'er dun!" immediate solutions, for the most part. It's a place where you can ask stupid how-and-why questions and - with any luck - gain some insight above and beyond the immediate problem.
There are probably other classes of documentation resources beyond these three types, but those are the ones that came immediately to mind.
Anyone who works for a company is an indentured servant. Do you really think companies pay you what you're worth? No. They pay you what they think they can get away with.
An "Indentured servant" is midway between an employee and a slave. Technically, the Indenture is a debt that must be paid off, and employers can buy and sell indentures, thus effectively buying and selling the person attached to the indenture.
In that sense, H1-B is metaphorically accurate, since an H1-B without an employer loses their right to be in the USA. It's not technically accurate unless the H1-B worker is actually working off a debt (say, because he signed up with some body shop back home and had to pay to get the Visa and posting).
Nobody ever gets paid what they're worth. Not garbagemen, not teachers, not software developers, not CEOs. They get paid what they can get away with. Some get away with murder, others get murdered. That doesn't make them indentured. All of them can quit. Some of them can find other positions elsewhere, others may only be able to afford to quit in the sense that they can afford to starve. When you are indentured, you can't quit.
Developers rarely intentionally write web pages so that they follow the standard, they just aim for that it works on web browsers.
I must be an exception, then. I'm not very good at the artistic aspect of web page design. My speciality is the back-end. Since I'm not dealing with the in-and-out quirks of browsers and web pages every day, I don't have them memorized and I do my work by referencing the standards documents. Then and only then do I start tweaking for browsers.
I figure that eventually I'll get a full-sized tablet. No matter how good the video, reading business-sized documents on a 7-inch screen is a bit much, and a lot of websites don't work that well on the smaller screen size.
Overall however I like the 7-inch size, since the table is light enough to toss around casually without too much risk of damage and definitely light enough to use one-handed. In a lot of ways, it's more convenient than my phone, even though the phone is even smaller.
There are things that "take up space" and things that don't. To me, a full-size tablet is one and the 7-inch tablet is the other. Taking up space is no crime when you have something serious to do, but the non-space-takers have the advantage of being more suited to doing stuff "just because".
It sounds like you have an above-average set of resources designed to allow you to save items of interest. The key would be in using them properly.
First, it's a good idea to map out your typical workday. When are you most able to get things done uninterrupted, when are you most/least mentally acute and so forth.
Then take the distracting tasks and parcel them out to when they are most convenient. Turn off the "You've got Mail" alerts and stuff like that in favor of set times of day to check for important stuff and push the less important stuff to a "later" folder. When the proper times come around, do your detailed mail activities. Ditto for the web stuff. Ditto for correspondence. And so forth. Don't switch back and forth - the multi-tasking overhead will make everything take longer, be poorer quality, and very likely you'll forget important insights and ideas that come to you when you see everything related to one activity in front of you.
And, of course, take the "give 110%" advice and tell them where to stuff it. Just because email reading and web surfing isn't productive in the obvious sense doesn't mean it's valueless - at least as long as you're sensible enough to only work on work-related topics. Allow enough slack in your schedule so that if one day you get an email overload you can deal with it without blowing the whole agenda to shreds.
it was a great idea to start building homes on swamp land?
Who keeps tossing this stereotype around? The swamp land was what 1920s real estate developers sold to Yankees. These days we try to keep them as "protected wetlands". Despite the developers screaming about the goddam gubmint interfering with their rights.
Most of Florida, actually, is built on dirty beach sand with occasional layers of clay.
But underneath the layers of sand and clay - and the swamps - is a limestone substrate. Unlike, say granite, limestone can be eaten up relatively quickly (in geological terms) by acidic water. When the water level rises and falls, this agitates the process. And, since most of the people in Florida get their water by sucking it out of this same substrate, and since dry years have been more common lately, you end up with big hollow spaces underground with no water to help prop them up, So they collapse. Often, so does what's on top of them, which is the visible sinkhole. And with a still-growing population, the odds that the collapse will happen under a house - or even an occupied vehicle - go up.
Florida is dotted with lots of depressions, ponds, and small lakes. Many of them started out as sinkholes.
I've told this story on/. before when OS/2 stories come about. OS/2 had the unfortunate luck of coming out at a time when IBM was running/trying to run all of its divisions as separate companies. Case in point: I had some true blue IBM PCs (PS/ValuePoints IIRC) with true blue IBM 5250 (minicomputer terminal) emulator cards, trying to connect them to true blue IBM System/38s and AS/400s (The predecessors to the iSeries). I could not get the emulator cards to work with the OS/2 installed on the PCs, and the IBM support people told me point blank that they did not support OS/2 with their cards and to get it to work I would need to install Windows 3.1. So my nascent OS/2 rollout at the company I worked for was stopped dead in its tracks because even IBM wouldn't support OS/2. It's a shame because OS/2 was superior in almost every way to the Windows of the same era.
Actually, there was a cynical joke about IBM being 12 different companies on 5 different continents, none of whom were on speaking terms with each other that dates all the way back to at least the early 1980's.
IBM support still sucks. You spend more time proving to them that you're entitled to support than you spend getting support. Customer number? Site code? How about I give you the number of dollars we've sent you, and then we can talk about how you can't find those other numbers in your system.
I went through this yet again earlier this week. At one point I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying, "Four months ago, my company wrote you an eight-figure check for worldwide licensing and support. If that's not in your database, maybe you should switch to Oracle."
I might be wrong, but back then, it was mostly that OS/2 support sucked. IBM did, after all, originally have a reputation for providing support so all-encompassing that PHBs everywhere rejoiced in not having to think for themselves - as long as they bought what IBM told them to buy, IBM did most of their work for them.
That was, of course, before IBM jettisoned major constituents of their local talent in favor of offshore staff. Frankly, unless you're one of those rare companies that still has use for mainframes, I'm not sure what they're good for any more. I can get Dogbert Consulting from anyone.
And compatibility is still an issue. You cannot directly unload a DB2 database from an iSeries machine and load it into a Linux or Windows DB2. Or vice versa. For that, you're better off with one of the free open-source DBMS's.
Why keep the www when that's basically redundant information as well?
It's a legacy. www wasnt' the first service on the Internet, and ultimately, all Internet service requests have to reference a host. Usually we don't use raw IP addresses, so a fully-qualified domain hostname would be needed. It was common to alias (or primarily) name the www server with hostname "www", giving a FQDN of www.foobar.com. As distinguised from its gopher server in a different box (gopher.foobar.com) or the mail servers (mail.foobar.com and smtp.foobar.com).
However, as www grew, the assumption that the www server's hostname was going to be "www" became a safe bet, so if a client couldn't find a "foobar.com", it would try "www.foobar.com". For that matter, if it couldn't find "foobar", it would often look for "foobar.com" then "www.foobar.com".
In addition to adding educated guesswork to clients, DNS also participated in the conspiracy. A lot of places did clustering on the www service, so the actual physical hostname was no longer relevant.
So, in short, the full www.foobar.com remains, but we don't usually have to go to that much trouble anymore.
This is a good reminder of why Microsoft should never be trusted. Ever. OS/2 was gaining significant ground and (in theory) could have been *Linux* today. OS/2 was very advanced at the time. Excepting, MS paid off IBM to kill it so it wouldn't interfere with their race to the desktop. No jail time, no DoJ investigation; nothing...
Let's see how well secure boot works.
Actually, OS/2 and Linux co-existed side-by-side in the 1990s and one of the most frustrating things was that it was easier to get free Linux support from open-source resources than it was to get paid OS/2 support from one of the largest companies in the world. And we had 2 multi-CPU IBM mainframes at the time, which should have counted for something. As it was, every time we finally found someone in IBM who could help us, they ended up leaving IBM shortly thereafter, and us without support.
OS/2 support sucked. The IBM program products all used different and incompatible preferences and logfile formats, typically only readable by a proprietary IBM program; compare to Linux where the preferences and logs were/are in text files (and thus processable by text utilities) and in well-defined, consistent locations.
Yes, OS/2 had some worthwhile features, but in the end, they weren't enough, especially with Microsoft patting them on the back with knife in hand. Windows contains some of the same horribleness that OS/2 did, but less of it, and that made a lot of difference.
No, in real life outside of liberal art college where everything is abstract, the truth is subjective, and we're all one happy global community of free thinkers (damn I have to go wash my mouth out now).
No matter how much people think we are capable of rising above war, selfishness, ambition, pride, arrogance, etc the fact is that we all have those elements. They are embedded in our DNA. I happen to believe it was because of the fall, but regardless of how it happened I think anyone who is honest with themselves knows that what I'm saying is true. If you think you've risen above it, it's only because you've turned a blind eye to your true nature. Knowing that, and that the Chinese people are every bit as bent on world domination as we are, I'm going to go ahead and side with the guys whose soil I happen to be standing on.
If you believe in The Fall, then you are likely Christian. Christianity does not subscribe to the "eye-for-an-eye" approach to problem resolution.
The USA is not - despite what some wish to think - a Christian nation, but the founding principles were based in large part on Christianity, which is why things like pre-emptive warfare, torture, and other extreme or retaliatory measures were always considered "un-American" up until 2001. We strove to be better than that and to provide a better example for others. To rise above our baser natures.
Christianity notwithstanding, there is a pretty clear case to be made that endless retaliation Old Testament-style may feel good, but it simply propagates the damage down through generations forever. We have some pretty clear-cut examples in recent history on what happens in countries where they say "Enough is Enough" and stop trying to "balance the scales" versus countries that continue on the same old cycles expecting that one day things will be better.
Having said that, however, there's no virtue in being a doormat, either. If the Chinese attack us, we should take defensive - and if necessary - offensive steps. I only desire that whatever is open and above-board where the world can see and judge. Don't pretend to false virtues, because once established as a liar, it's hard to be believed when you say anything later, even when it's true. Don't do things that you know you'll regret being discovered.
then when the east river in NYC freezes during winter and the temps are so bitter cold that the hipster idiots will go crazy and blame it on global warming
and then the intelligent people can point out that this is completely normal. it used to happen in the 1800's all the time before global warming screwed things up with a warmer winter
And those of us in the South thank you up there for pulling the Jet Stream further North, thereby allowing us to grow tropical vegetables in January.
There are some parts of the old ship that most definitely should NOT be replicated on the new one. Like the lifeboats. And the engines. And the bridge (and its navigation equipment and iceburg detection systems) And the kitchens
And the iceberg itself. I don't think I'll be comfortable in a recreation of a scenario that ends in people freezing to death.
And don't forget the best one of all - a double-hull construction using brittle steel where water, once entered into one of the compartments can then pour over the top into the other compartments!
Having an iceberg in the water doesn't make people freeze to death, though. Being in water cold enough that the icebergs are common, however...
I cannot help but wonder if UEFI is now Microsoft's backup plan to force casual PC users into Windows 8. There seems to be some resistance (the degree of which is debatable) to Windows 8 adoption. Perhaps users will, in the end, still be forced into Windows 8 if they lack the know-how to use alternate OSes?
How is that be any different to the way things are now?
More telling is the fact that to the casual observer (e.g. drooling idiot user), Windows 8 already is an "alternate OS". Which sort of leaves them between a rock and a hard place.
Slashdot Mirror
Lies, Damn Lies and Metrics. Metrics are what you use so that you can be blind to things that can't be/aren't measured.
Lines of Code is a classic. If I rip down an algorithm and replace it with one that's faster, more reliable, and 1/3 the size, I have negative LOC. And if LOC is all of the above that got metrics, I'm a loser.
I have a great respect for being able to measure things (where it's possible and meaningful), but unlike the legendary Statistical Bikini, it's what isn't covered that's as important as what is. Metrics should be a guide, but when you have people spending all their time fiddling with metrics, and other people spending time fiddly ways to look good under the metrics you're losing a lot of your productivity to metrics. And unless you are in the business of producing metrics, that's not good.
Why does being at home guarentee productivity? From the comments, a lot of people appear to believe being in the office is less productive than being at home, but at least with a VPN, it can be measured how much data is being sent to and recieved from the telecomuters. I doubt a former Google exec would make a decision like this lightly.
Data transfer volume is of practically ZERO utility in measuring productivity. As a developer, doing as much of my work as possible on my local drive is more productive than having it dragged down by network latency. Ditto, I'd say for anyone doing artistic or word-processing work.
All Data transfer volume metrics tell is how much activity I have on the net. It's no more useful than measuring the amount of time a cubicle is inhabited by a person as opposed to an inflatable Bozo doll.
I don't buy into the proposition that people can only trade ideas when they're physically proximate. I spent too many years hiding from other people in offices.
The only REAL metric of value is what the employee produces. If the employee is going to be productive, then location is relatively unimportant. If not, there are plenty of ways to appear productive in an office without doing anything useful at all. Some of them can consume massive amounts of network bandwidth, for that matter.
If the employee is not productive, either the employee is at fault or the employee's manager is at fault. In fact, ultimately, it's the manager's responsibility to either ensure that the employee is productive or to replace him/her with someone who is productive. No amount of geographical relocation, micro-monitoring, spyware, or other "silver bullets" can take the place of good management.
You think most domestic violence is done by people who can afford a brand new console and peripherals?
If it ever was possible, people would just leave the room to do that sort of thing.
Well, there have been several recent incidents involving violence by people who weren't allowed to play video games when they wanted to.
Reminds me a little bit of Fredrick Brown's story "The Little Black Bag"...
I thought the US was a terrible place to work where everyone is chained to the desks and makes minimum wage? Why would foreign nationals want our jobs anyway?
Something is wrong with all the rhetoric I'm reading.
US chains are 6 inches longer than foreign chains. 'Cause we gots FREEDOMS!
"I thought that the office was the place where the disgruntled ex-employee showed up and began firing at everyone in sight."
No, that's not the office. That's the Post Office.
Or GMAC (Florida). Or Xerox (Hawaii). Etc.
Post Office is just the stereotype.
But the office is the primary work location.
I thought that the office was the place where the disgruntled ex-employee showed up and began firing at everyone in sight.
Agreed. Best Buy is circling the drain. I imagine the reason they are asking folks to come in to the corporate headquarters is because they have to see them in person to lay them off.
I thought the "in" thing these days was to lay people off by email or SMS. Right before Christmas.
Getting near the top of the SEO list isn't going to hurt, but the answer that actually resolves the problem is often not the first, second, or even third link I visit. Usually the cue that I'm doomed is when the links start going into foreign languages and I still haven't got an answer.
I had a major gripe with MS documentation several years ago because it kept forcing Windows Mobile API reference pages on me back when they were pushing for mobile development. However, Microsoft generally does pretty decent documentation. So do others, like WebLogic (although Oracle's search engine is useless). For a long time one of my main go-to sites was TLDP.
Vendor documentation, however, is mostly reference documentation, and specific examples for practical use are in short supply. Stack Exchange, on the other hand, is very much practical solution-oriented and will quickly slap you down if you stray.
Still another approach can be seen at the JavaRanch. It isn't authoritative documentation like vendors provide, nor is it "git 'er dun!" immediate solutions, for the most part. It's a place where you can ask stupid how-and-why questions and - with any luck - gain some insight above and beyond the immediate problem.
There are probably other classes of documentation resources beyond these three types, but those are the ones that came immediately to mind.
Anyone who works for a company is an indentured servant. Do you really think companies pay you what you're worth? No. They pay you what they think they can get away with.
An "Indentured servant" is midway between an employee and a slave. Technically, the Indenture is a debt that must be paid off, and employers can buy and sell indentures, thus effectively buying and selling the person attached to the indenture.
In that sense, H1-B is metaphorically accurate, since an H1-B without an employer loses their right to be in the USA. It's not technically accurate unless the H1-B worker is actually working off a debt (say, because he signed up with some body shop back home and had to pay to get the Visa and posting).
Nobody ever gets paid what they're worth. Not garbagemen, not teachers, not software developers, not CEOs. They get paid what they can get away with. Some get away with murder, others get murdered. That doesn't make them indentured. All of them can quit. Some of them can find other positions elsewhere, others may only be able to afford to quit in the sense that they can afford to starve. When you are indentured, you can't quit.
Developers rarely intentionally write web pages so that they follow the standard, they just aim for that it works on web browsers.
I must be an exception, then. I'm not very good at the artistic aspect of web page design. My speciality is the back-end. Since I'm not dealing with the in-and-out quirks of browsers and web pages every day, I don't have them memorized and I do my work by referencing the standards documents. Then and only then do I start tweaking for browsers.
I figure that eventually I'll get a full-sized tablet. No matter how good the video, reading business-sized documents on a 7-inch screen is a bit much, and a lot of websites don't work that well on the smaller screen size.
Overall however I like the 7-inch size, since the table is light enough to toss around casually without too much risk of damage and definitely light enough to use one-handed. In a lot of ways, it's more convenient than my phone, even though the phone is even smaller.
There are things that "take up space" and things that don't. To me, a full-size tablet is one and the 7-inch tablet is the other. Taking up space is no crime when you have something serious to do, but the non-space-takers have the advantage of being more suited to doing stuff "just because".
It sounds like you have an above-average set of resources designed to allow you to save items of interest. The key would be in using them properly.
First, it's a good idea to map out your typical workday. When are you most able to get things done uninterrupted, when are you most/least mentally acute and so forth.
Then take the distracting tasks and parcel them out to when they are most convenient. Turn off the "You've got Mail" alerts and stuff like that in favor of set times of day to check for important stuff and push the less important stuff to a "later" folder. When the proper times come around, do your detailed mail activities. Ditto for the web stuff. Ditto for correspondence. And so forth. Don't switch back and forth - the multi-tasking overhead will make everything take longer, be poorer quality, and very likely you'll forget important insights and ideas that come to you when you see everything related to one activity in front of you.
And, of course, take the "give 110%" advice and tell them where to stuff it. Just because email reading and web surfing isn't productive in the obvious sense doesn't mean it's valueless - at least as long as you're sensible enough to only work on work-related topics. Allow enough slack in your schedule so that if one day you get an email overload you can deal with it without blowing the whole agenda to shreds.
it was a great idea to start building homes on swamp land?
Who keeps tossing this stereotype around? The swamp land was what 1920s real estate developers sold to Yankees. These days we try to keep them as "protected wetlands". Despite the developers screaming about the goddam gubmint interfering with their rights.
Most of Florida, actually, is built on dirty beach sand with occasional layers of clay.
But underneath the layers of sand and clay - and the swamps - is a limestone substrate. Unlike, say granite, limestone can be eaten up relatively quickly (in geological terms) by acidic water. When the water level rises and falls, this agitates the process. And, since most of the people in Florida get their water by sucking it out of this same substrate, and since dry years have been more common lately, you end up with big hollow spaces underground with no water to help prop them up, So they collapse. Often, so does what's on top of them, which is the visible sinkhole. And with a still-growing population, the odds that the collapse will happen under a house - or even an occupied vehicle - go up.
Florida is dotted with lots of depressions, ponds, and small lakes. Many of them started out as sinkholes.
I've told this story on /. before when OS/2 stories come about. OS/2 had the unfortunate luck of coming out at a time when IBM was running/trying to run all of its divisions as separate companies. Case in point: I had some true blue IBM PCs (PS/ValuePoints IIRC) with true blue IBM 5250 (minicomputer terminal) emulator cards, trying to connect them to true blue IBM System/38s and AS/400s (The predecessors to the iSeries). I could not get the emulator cards to work with the OS/2 installed on the PCs, and the IBM support people told me point blank that they did not support OS/2 with their cards and to get it to work I would need to install Windows 3.1. So my nascent OS/2 rollout at the company I worked for was stopped dead in its tracks because even IBM wouldn't support OS/2. It's a shame because OS/2 was superior in almost every way to the Windows of the same era.
Actually, there was a cynical joke about IBM being 12 different companies on 5 different continents, none of whom were on speaking terms with each other that dates all the way back to at least the early 1980's.
OS/2 just helped prove the point.
IBM support still sucks. You spend more time proving to them that you're entitled to support than you spend getting support. Customer number? Site code? How about I give you the number of dollars we've sent you, and then we can talk about how you can't find those other numbers in your system.
I went through this yet again earlier this week. At one point I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying, "Four months ago, my company wrote you an eight-figure check for worldwide licensing and support. If that's not in your database, maybe you should switch to Oracle."
I might be wrong, but back then, it was mostly that OS/2 support sucked. IBM did, after all, originally have a reputation for providing support so all-encompassing that PHBs everywhere rejoiced in not having to think for themselves - as long as they bought what IBM told them to buy, IBM did most of their work for them.
That was, of course, before IBM jettisoned major constituents of their local talent in favor of offshore staff. Frankly, unless you're one of those rare companies that still has use for mainframes, I'm not sure what they're good for any more. I can get Dogbert Consulting from anyone.
And compatibility is still an issue. You cannot directly unload a DB2 database from an iSeries machine and load it into a Linux or Windows DB2. Or vice versa. For that, you're better off with one of the free open-source DBMS's.
It's not?
We're trying!
Why keep the www when that's basically redundant information as well?
It's a legacy. www wasnt' the first service on the Internet, and ultimately, all Internet service requests have to reference a host. Usually we don't use raw IP addresses, so a fully-qualified domain hostname would be needed. It was common to alias (or primarily) name the www server with hostname "www", giving a FQDN of www.foobar.com. As distinguised from its gopher server in a different box (gopher.foobar.com) or the mail servers (mail.foobar.com and smtp.foobar.com).
However, as www grew, the assumption that the www server's hostname was going to be "www" became a safe bet, so if a client couldn't find a "foobar.com", it would try "www.foobar.com". For that matter, if it couldn't find "foobar", it would often look for "foobar.com" then "www.foobar.com".
In addition to adding educated guesswork to clients, DNS also participated in the conspiracy. A lot of places did clustering on the www service, so the actual physical hostname was no longer relevant.
So, in short, the full www.foobar.com remains, but we don't usually have to go to that much trouble anymore.
At one time, IE would change a URL of "freecell" to "freecell.com", then use that to bring up the solitaire game.
This is a good reminder of why Microsoft should never be trusted. Ever.
OS/2 was gaining significant ground and (in theory) could have been *Linux* today.
OS/2 was very advanced at the time.
Excepting, MS paid off IBM to kill it so it wouldn't interfere with their race to the desktop.
No jail time, no DoJ investigation; nothing...
Let's see how well secure boot works.
Actually, OS/2 and Linux co-existed side-by-side in the 1990s and one of the most frustrating things was that it was easier to get free Linux support from open-source resources than it was to get paid OS/2 support from one of the largest companies in the world. And we had 2 multi-CPU IBM mainframes at the time, which should have counted for something. As it was, every time we finally found someone in IBM who could help us, they ended up leaving IBM shortly thereafter, and us without support.
OS/2 support sucked. The IBM program products all used different and incompatible preferences and logfile formats, typically only readable by a proprietary IBM program; compare to Linux where the preferences and logs were/are in text files (and thus processable by text utilities) and in well-defined, consistent locations.
Yes, OS/2 had some worthwhile features, but in the end, they weren't enough, especially with Microsoft patting them on the back with knife in hand. Windows contains some of the same horribleness that OS/2 did, but less of it, and that made a lot of difference.
No, in real life outside of liberal art college where everything is abstract, the truth is subjective, and we're all one happy global community of free thinkers (damn I have to go wash my mouth out now).
No matter how much people think we are capable of rising above war, selfishness, ambition, pride, arrogance, etc the fact is that we all have those elements. They are embedded in our DNA. I happen to believe it was because of the fall, but regardless of how it happened I think anyone who is honest with themselves knows that what I'm saying is true. If you think you've risen above it, it's only because you've turned a blind eye to your true nature. Knowing that, and that the Chinese people are every bit as bent on world domination as we are, I'm going to go ahead and side with the guys whose soil I happen to be standing on.
If you believe in The Fall, then you are likely Christian. Christianity does not subscribe to the "eye-for-an-eye" approach to problem resolution.
The USA is not - despite what some wish to think - a Christian nation, but the founding principles were based in large part on Christianity, which is why things like pre-emptive warfare, torture, and other extreme or retaliatory measures were always considered "un-American" up until 2001. We strove to be better than that and to provide a better example for others. To rise above our baser natures.
Christianity notwithstanding, there is a pretty clear case to be made that endless retaliation Old Testament-style may feel good, but it simply propagates the damage down through generations forever. We have some pretty clear-cut examples in recent history on what happens in countries where they say "Enough is Enough" and stop trying to "balance the scales" versus countries that continue on the same old cycles expecting that one day things will be better.
Having said that, however, there's no virtue in being a doormat, either. If the Chinese attack us, we should take defensive - and if necessary - offensive steps. I only desire that whatever is open and above-board where the world can see and judge. Don't pretend to false virtues, because once established as a liar, it's hard to be believed when you say anything later, even when it's true. Don't do things that you know you'll regret being discovered.
then when the east river in NYC freezes during winter and the temps are so bitter cold that the hipster idiots will go crazy and blame it on global warming
and then the intelligent people can point out that this is completely normal. it used to happen in the 1800's all the time before global warming screwed things up with a warmer winter
And those of us in the South thank you up there for pulling the Jet Stream further North, thereby allowing us to grow tropical vegetables in January.
That's why they call it "global".
Obviously once it gets cold enough that also impacts how much work can get done since now all energy must go into just not freezing to death.
Sounds like an office building I used to work in.
I'd actually pay for a trip on that, though perhaps not if it'll use hydrogen as its lifting gas like the original.
More recently it has been noted that the hydrogen gas was hardly the only major flammable thing about the Hindenberg.
There are some parts of the old ship that most definitely should NOT be replicated on the new one.
Like the lifeboats.
And the engines.
And the bridge (and its navigation equipment and iceburg detection systems)
And the kitchens
And the iceberg itself. I don't think I'll be comfortable in a recreation of a scenario that ends in people freezing to death.
And don't forget the best one of all - a double-hull construction using brittle steel where water, once entered into one of the compartments can then pour over the top into the other compartments!
Having an iceberg in the water doesn't make people freeze to death, though. Being in water cold enough that the icebergs are common, however...
I cannot help but wonder if UEFI is now Microsoft's backup plan to force casual PC users into Windows 8. There seems to be some resistance (the degree of which is debatable) to Windows 8 adoption. Perhaps users will, in the end, still be forced into Windows 8 if they lack the know-how to use alternate OSes?
How is that be any different to the way things are now?
More telling is the fact that to the casual observer (e.g. drooling idiot user), Windows 8 already is an "alternate OS". Which sort of leaves them between a rock and a hard place.