Yeah, "for life" is a bit of a stereotype, and like many stereotypes, more apparently true than universally true. But until the mid-1980s you didn't have to start looking for your next employer the minute you settled into your new job. Especially for non-menial positions. Most reasonably-competent people were more likely to change jobs voluntarily and not live in fear that they'd be "right-sized" into unemployment.
You don't have to present your papers - yet - when driving, but you can't even fly between cities in the same state anymore without doing so. And it's not guaranteed even when you ride the bus or take the train - there was a movement not long ago in Congress to remove that freedom as well. And I challenge you to drive from Atlanta to Honolulu.
No, the end-game of a market economy is a single conglomerate corporation that owns everything and is controlled by a small closed politically dominant class of extremely wealthy people. Like Wal-Mart, once it decides that retail is tapped out and expands into energy, transportation, chemicals and so forth using its substantial existing cash assets to buy the dominant players in each sector in bulk.
Yes, but that was back when most people stayed with one employer for life and you had to go to East Germany to find a place where you had to present papers to travel from city to city or to get a job,
I'll be glad to if you can tell me where it is. The only thing on my system that has an EULA is a game I bought about 15 years ago. (Oh, and flash, but I've currently go that disabled.)
Where THEY are. Even if you're running an open-source OS like Linux there are EULAs. All over the place. The GPL is a EULA. Virtually every application you installed came with a EULA. Usually the EULA is one of the installed files. Sometimes it's embedded in the code. Sometimes it's on the site that you downloaded from or on the box it came in. Assuming you can find a software product in a physical box anymore. EULA frequently come with your hardware and your ebooks.
We've seen so many EULAs and they've become so long and pointless that we've become blind to them, but they're still there.
Sounds more like describing the typical executive.
Rather, you're under the delusion that the law is whatever you wish it to be at the moment. This is not surprising, for two reasons. First, given that people with social deficiencies such as you have displayed tend also be be ignorant, to lack knowledge of the world around them. Second, the same ultra-selfcenteredness which allows you to think as though your desire for the law to be a certain way actually does make it so; this also makes it extremely difficult for such a person to converse in a civilized and respectful manner.
What about when you die? How can anyone inherit a digital library which may have cost the original owner thousands of dollars?
If I due with a $50,000 credit card debit, does that evaporate along with my library or do my heir get stuck with one and lose the other? It's not like it's a tangible object, after all.
A lot of times, there aren't many people who make unusually high demands on a system, but the few who do, do so with a vengeance. Caps are a way to keep them in line, or at least help pay for the excessive resource usage.
Unfortunately, caps are also something that are easily tightened at the whim of a bean-counter.
If white knights are what you're after, lots of luck. But at least you can vote out the government if you can get enough people to side with you. I doubt you or your 5000 closest friends own enough shares in Comcast or AT&T to change their policies via ballot.
It does not require "blind faith" to believe that the tomorrow will be more-or-less like today.
Yes, because we're all galloping around in carriages cracking our buggy whips. And going to bed early to spare candles.
Economic investment statements always come with the warning that Past Performance does not guarantee Future Results. Sometimes even the longest ride comes to a permanent end.
That's the problem with not only VB, but similar quick-and-dirty platforms such as PHP and almost anything scripting-based. Because today's business values "git 'er Dun!" over getting it done right: producing a secure and reliable product. Because that would take time and cost money.
If you're still running COBOL code you're probably part of the 50% of the economy that will be replaced by robots in the next 20 years. Change or die.
Don't be a fool.
I'm one of those people who sneer at the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality that causes PHBs, CEOs and other clueless/wishful people to treat their IT assets as fixed one-time-costs, but there are some computer applications that simply don't need to be based on the fad-of-the-moment technology.
Accounting systems have been pretty much the same since at least the time of Scrooge and Marley, if not all the way back to ancient Sumeria. Payroll, pretty much the same. The old "Data Processing" stuff doesn't need a total re-architecting and companies have better things to spend their money on. Such as overpriced consultants peddling overpriced technological "solutions".
These days "DP" systems have a lot of interaction with "IT", as we do things like run Big Data analysis on the Accounts Receivable. But the virtue of the old mainframe systems is that it's a lot easier to ETL data off the AR masterfiles and into your MongoDB database than to keep redesigning the accounting system every time some new externality is needed.
Exactly. People like to define other people as "useless" just because they don't conform to their standards of "useful". It reminds me of an old Lynyrd Skynyrd song about an unemployed alcoholic bum. Who just happened to have an uncommon skill.
Or, as Frank Burns once said in M.A.S.H, "If Albert Schweitzer is such a great doctor, why isn't he in Beverly Hills, tending to the Rich?"
Bad examples. One of the nice things about wiring and pipes is that they have definite geometries and you can design equipment to take advantage of that, including doing things like fixing plumbing from the inside out, which is more than most plumbers can do when dealing with a 1-inch pipe at the end of a 30-foot run.
A harder thing is automating agricultural stoop labor. There's a reason why we still employ armies of migrant workers at sub-minimum wages (wage laws don't apply to them). Creating machines that can recognize whether a fruit or vegetable is precisely ripe, harvesting it without damaging either the product or the (irregularly-shaped) plant, returning to do it again over several days - those are hard problems and designing the machines that can do that has been very challenging. Not like combine harvesters when you can just go in and mow it into a hopper all at once.
Another person who thinks that "software is forever". It doesn't "wear out", so you only have to pay for it once, not as a maintenance item.
Apparently this thread is a haven for the delusional.
in 4 years, it hardly matters that the hardware has changed - and it should be noted that the hardware doesn't change that much, or you wouldn't be able to plug vintage cameras into the Pi Zero. None of the stuff I wrote using WiFi dongles changed when I moved it from the original Pi B to the Pi 3. In 4 years, a lot more than hardware changes. But more on that in a moment.
I'm also skeptical of the assertion that these things are still being subsidized. As popular as the Pi is, I think whatever subsidies there were got paid off long ago. Indeed, you can go out and buy a pretty decent tablet for not much more than the Pi 3 runs these days. I know, got one for a Xmas present. Peppy little thing, too. Just not as good a screen as the more expensive ones.
But the biggest joke of all in this pile of questionable assertion has has to do with maintaining the system.
I got a call from a customer who I'd done a specialized monitoring system for about 2 years back because he was having problems getting it running on the Pi 3. Turns out that the #1 issue was simply that the Debian OS itself had been updated multiple times and the original code build was invoking obsolete system libraries.
And that's the exact same problem that would have occurred on a full-blown desktop or server machine. Because the Pi is a computer, not a microwave oven. And contrary to what the bean counters and PHB's believe, computers are not something that can be left un-maintained and only paid for once.
Dream on. People pay me to build Pi-based systems. This "toy" is at least as powerful as your desktop computer, circa Y2k, and a whole lot smaller and cheaper. It's being used for network monitor and control systems, process controllers, multimedia kiosks, home automation systems and a whole lot more. The Pi is a fully functional computer that's cheap enough to hand out in quantity as party favors.
If you weren't an anonymous coward, I'd recommend you be modded up, not down. Just so everyone could see how laughable you are.
The whole proton-folding scheme (I loved that one, BTW, finally found a use for all those hidden dimensions in String Theory), involves a stage where for part of the process, the unfolded proton is large enough to block out the sun(s).
At that very moment, they no longer needed to invade the Earth. Or, indeed, go anywhere. They had the technology to focus and direct the energy of their own suns, blocking them when they were too strong, aiming additional sunlight when they were too weak. I'm presuming that something as light as a single proton could be redirected far faster than the suns could move, and that furthermore, while a long-term solution to the 3-body problem might be impossible, it's almost certain that on a solar scale, it can be projected far enough to direct the solar shields safely.
So they could live quite happily right where they were until such time as their technology advanced to the level of being able to stabilize the suns themselves.
Of course, maybe the reason they continued on was that they were ruled by a party that considered "flip-flopping" to be the ultimate evil and couldn't discard a questionable strategy in favor of one notably more effective, but there we're leaving the realm of science fiction and descending into fantasy. Such pointless and irrational behavior would never happen in an intelligent species.
Fortunately, no one hates me enough to inflict PowerPoint presentations on me.
Word documents are not a problem for me. Most people use Word like it's a glorified typewriter, jamming in lots of manual page breaks and hard carriage returns, and that breaks even when you move to another Windows computer with a different set of fonts installed, so I make allowances. Word isn't a page layout program, after all. If I demand precision formatting, I expect something designed for it, like a PDF.
I don't know how "hard" your "hard sci-fi" definition runs, if 3-Body isn't hard sci-fi, then I'd probably have to strike off Robert L. Forward's "Dragon's Egg" and Clarke's "2001 A Space Odessy" for starters.
Brown is primarily action/adventure, but the prime motivator is more based on real-world science than the Andromeda Strain.
Water Knife has certain parallels with A Canticle for Leibowitz, although more immediate.
Try 3-body Problem. It may be a slow start, though and I don't think it was a nominee. For that matter, I'm not sure it's a current-year book, but it was a good read.
I think The Water Knife was on the list, though.
In a sense, Dan Brown's Inferno is sci-fi, although like all his books, it's as much about arcana and action as about what-if. And mass-market writing, of course. Just heard it's coming out as a movie.
I don't understand the desire to run Office, period. Maybe I don't do enough obscure spreadsheet stuff, and I'll admit I'm not big into PowerPoint, but I can do everything I need and more in LibreOffice.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, "for life" is a bit of a stereotype, and like many stereotypes, more apparently true than universally true. But until the mid-1980s you didn't have to start looking for your next employer the minute you settled into your new job. Especially for non-menial positions. Most reasonably-competent people were more likely to change jobs voluntarily and not live in fear that they'd be "right-sized" into unemployment.
You don't have to present your papers - yet - when driving, but you can't even fly between cities in the same state anymore without doing so. And it's not guaranteed even when you ride the bus or take the train - there was a movement not long ago in Congress to remove that freedom as well. And I challenge you to drive from Atlanta to Honolulu.
No, the end-game of a market economy is a single conglomerate corporation that owns everything and is controlled by a small closed politically dominant class of extremely wealthy people. Like Wal-Mart, once it decides that retail is tapped out and expands into energy, transportation, chemicals and so forth using its substantial existing cash assets to buy the dominant players in each sector in bulk.
Yes, but that was back when most people stayed with one employer for life and you had to go to East Germany to find a place where you had to present papers to travel from city to city or to get a job,
That USA is dead and gone.
Ha! I'm waiting for the Bangalore version. $95.
Read the goddam EULA
I'll be glad to if you can tell me where it is. The only thing on my system that has an EULA is a game I bought about 15 years ago. (Oh, and flash, but I've currently go that disabled.)
Where THEY are. Even if you're running an open-source OS like Linux there are EULAs. All over the place. The GPL is a EULA. Virtually every application you installed came with a EULA. Usually the EULA is one of the installed files. Sometimes it's embedded in the code. Sometimes it's on the site that you downloaded from or on the box it came in. Assuming you can find a software product in a physical box anymore. EULA frequently come with your hardware and your ebooks.
We've seen so many EULAs and they've become so long and pointless that we've become blind to them, but they're still there.
Sounds more like describing the typical executive.
Rather, you're under the delusion that the law is whatever you wish it to be at the moment. This is not surprising, for two reasons. First, given that people with social deficiencies such as you have displayed tend also be be ignorant, to lack knowledge of the world around them. Second, the same ultra-selfcenteredness which allows you to think as though your desire for the law to be a certain way actually does make it so; this also makes it extremely difficult for such a person to converse in a civilized and respectful manner.
Steve Jobs' ears must be burning.
What about when you die? How can anyone inherit a digital library which may have cost the original owner thousands of dollars?
If I due with a $50,000 credit card debit, does that evaporate along with my library or do my heir get stuck with one and lose the other? It's not like it's a tangible object, after all.
A lot of times, there aren't many people who make unusually high demands on a system, but the few who do, do so with a vengeance. Caps are a way to keep them in line, or at least help pay for the excessive resource usage.
Unfortunately, caps are also something that are easily tightened at the whim of a bean-counter.
The free market is not some white knight either.
If white knights are what you're after, lots of luck. But at least you can vote out the government if you can get enough people to side with you. I doubt you or your 5000 closest friends own enough shares in Comcast or AT&T to change their policies via ballot.
It does not require "blind faith" to believe that the tomorrow will be more-or-less like today.
Yes, because we're all galloping around in carriages cracking our buggy whips. And going to bed early to spare candles.
Economic investment statements always come with the warning that Past Performance does not guarantee Future Results. Sometimes even the longest ride comes to a permanent end.
Quicky, easily, and sloppily
That's the problem with not only VB, but similar quick-and-dirty platforms such as PHP and almost anything scripting-based. Because today's business values "git 'er Dun!" over getting it done right: producing a secure and reliable product. Because that would take time and cost money.
If you're still running COBOL code you're probably part of the 50% of the economy that will be replaced by robots in the next 20 years. Change or die.
Don't be a fool.
I'm one of those people who sneer at the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality that causes PHBs, CEOs and other clueless/wishful people to treat their IT assets as fixed one-time-costs, but there are some computer applications that simply don't need to be based on the fad-of-the-moment technology.
Accounting systems have been pretty much the same since at least the time of Scrooge and Marley, if not all the way back to ancient Sumeria. Payroll, pretty much the same. The old "Data Processing" stuff doesn't need a total re-architecting and companies have better things to spend their money on. Such as overpriced consultants peddling overpriced technological "solutions".
These days "DP" systems have a lot of interaction with "IT", as we do things like run Big Data analysis on the Accounts Receivable. But the virtue of the old mainframe systems is that it's a lot easier to ETL data off the AR masterfiles and into your MongoDB database than to keep redesigning the accounting system every time some new externality is needed.
But what about WHEN THE SUN GOES DOWN??? What then? Hmmm?
Exactly. People like to define other people as "useless" just because they don't conform to their standards of "useful". It reminds me of an old Lynyrd Skynyrd song about an unemployed alcoholic bum. Who just happened to have an uncommon skill.
Or, as Frank Burns once said in M.A.S.H, "If Albert Schweitzer is such a great doctor, why isn't he in Beverly Hills, tending to the Rich?"
Bad examples. One of the nice things about wiring and pipes is that they have definite geometries and you can design equipment to take advantage of that, including doing things like fixing plumbing from the inside out, which is more than most plumbers can do when dealing with a 1-inch pipe at the end of a 30-foot run.
A harder thing is automating agricultural stoop labor. There's a reason why we still employ armies of migrant workers at sub-minimum wages (wage laws don't apply to them). Creating machines that can recognize whether a fruit or vegetable is precisely ripe, harvesting it without damaging either the product or the (irregularly-shaped) plant, returning to do it again over several days - those are hard problems and designing the machines that can do that has been very challenging. Not like combine harvesters when you can just go in and mow it into a hopper all at once.
This is more like ED-209 Robocop was a Cyborg meaning a human brain supported by mechanics and electronics...
Or a Terminator.
Or a Cyberman.
Or a Dalek.
Oh joy.
Well, the choices are definitely awe-inspiring. Kind of like a tsunami headed our way is awe-inspiring.
And they were being exploited even before the Windows ATMs were.
Another person who thinks that "software is forever". It doesn't "wear out", so you only have to pay for it once, not as a maintenance item.
Apparently this thread is a haven for the delusional.
in 4 years, it hardly matters that the hardware has changed - and it should be noted that the hardware doesn't change that much, or you wouldn't be able to plug vintage cameras into the Pi Zero. None of the stuff I wrote using WiFi dongles changed when I moved it from the original Pi B to the Pi 3. In 4 years, a lot more than hardware changes. But more on that in a moment.
I'm also skeptical of the assertion that these things are still being subsidized. As popular as the Pi is, I think whatever subsidies there were got paid off long ago. Indeed, you can go out and buy a pretty decent tablet for not much more than the Pi 3 runs these days. I know, got one for a Xmas present. Peppy little thing, too. Just not as good a screen as the more expensive ones.
But the biggest joke of all in this pile of questionable assertion has has to do with maintaining the system.
I got a call from a customer who I'd done a specialized monitoring system for about 2 years back because he was having problems getting it running on the Pi 3. Turns out that the #1 issue was simply that the Debian OS itself had been updated multiple times and the original code build was invoking obsolete system libraries.
And that's the exact same problem that would have occurred on a full-blown desktop or server machine. Because the Pi is a computer, not a microwave oven. And contrary to what the bean counters and PHB's believe, computers are not something that can be left un-maintained and only paid for once.
Dream on. People pay me to build Pi-based systems. This "toy" is at least as powerful as your desktop computer, circa Y2k, and a whole lot smaller and cheaper. It's being used for network monitor and control systems, process controllers, multimedia kiosks, home automation systems and a whole lot more. The Pi is a fully functional computer that's cheap enough to hand out in quantity as party favors.
If you weren't an anonymous coward, I'd recommend you be modded up, not down. Just so everyone could see how laughable you are.
Actually, there's a much more fatal flaw.
The whole proton-folding scheme (I loved that one, BTW, finally found a use for all those hidden dimensions in String Theory), involves a stage where for part of the process, the unfolded proton is large enough to block out the sun(s).
At that very moment, they no longer needed to invade the Earth. Or, indeed, go anywhere. They had the technology to focus and direct the energy of their own suns, blocking them when they were too strong, aiming additional sunlight when they were too weak. I'm presuming that something as light as a single proton could be redirected far faster than the suns could move, and that furthermore, while a long-term solution to the 3-body problem might be impossible, it's almost certain that on a solar scale, it can be projected far enough to direct the solar shields safely.
So they could live quite happily right where they were until such time as their technology advanced to the level of being able to stabilize the suns themselves.
Of course, maybe the reason they continued on was that they were ruled by a party that considered "flip-flopping" to be the ultimate evil and couldn't discard a questionable strategy in favor of one notably more effective, but there we're leaving the realm of science fiction and descending into fantasy. Such pointless and irrational behavior would never happen in an intelligent species.
Fortunately, no one hates me enough to inflict PowerPoint presentations on me.
Word documents are not a problem for me. Most people use Word like it's a glorified typewriter, jamming in lots of manual page breaks and hard carriage returns, and that breaks even when you move to another Windows computer with a different set of fonts installed, so I make allowances. Word isn't a page layout program, after all. If I demand precision formatting, I expect something designed for it, like a PDF.
I don't know how "hard" your "hard sci-fi" definition runs, if 3-Body isn't hard sci-fi, then I'd probably have to strike off Robert L. Forward's "Dragon's Egg" and Clarke's "2001 A Space Odessy" for starters.
Brown is primarily action/adventure, but the prime motivator is more based on real-world science than the Andromeda Strain.
Water Knife has certain parallels with A Canticle for Leibowitz, although more immediate.
Try 3-body Problem. It may be a slow start, though and I don't think it was a nominee. For that matter, I'm not sure it's a current-year book, but it was a good read.
I think The Water Knife was on the list, though.
In a sense, Dan Brown's Inferno is sci-fi, although like all his books, it's as much about arcana and action as about what-if. And mass-market writing, of course. Just heard it's coming out as a movie.
I don't understand the desire to run Office, period. Maybe I don't do enough obscure spreadsheet stuff, and I'll admit I'm not big into PowerPoint, but I can do everything I need and more in LibreOffice.