I'm in the sub-tropics. From late May until early October, chances are that the daytime temperatures will exceed 92 and the nighttime temperature will not dip below 72.
Setting an office temperature to 68 as is too often the case around here means that for 4 months of the year you're running cooling 24 hours a day unless you throttle back at night and even then you can't turn it off or you wouldn't get back down to 68 until noon.
And to carry on the analogy, the more successful ones will swallow up or destroy the less successful ones until you have a small handful at most of really massive ones who are accountable to no one.
I don't know about 1960s, but up until about 1985 you could wrap yourself around a mainframe terminal if it got too cold. Been there, did that.
Modern PCs can pull some power, but the draw on an LCD monitor is hardly noticeable. And the printer might pull a kilowatt when it cranks up, but in hibernation, it's only 5W.
It's not the temperature, it's the humidity; at any temperature.
No question. Earlier this week, temps were in the low 80s and I was dying. Sun came out, temperature went up to 96 and it felt wonderful. Then clouds moved back in and I'm dying again.
Indoor thermostat is at 83 and with a little fan action that's fine, because the A/C is pulling water out of the air.
It's not that outdated. But it misses the part where it became conflated with lower-temperatures=more-productiviity until ice began forming on the walls.
The full stereotype is actually overweight men in 3-piece suits who spend a good deal of their day walking around (including leaving the office) and who reside in offices with outside windows where the sun heats them up. Because upper management controls the thermostat and the "glass ceiling" is alive and well. Although I'm not sure that having women in the same position would help if they're dressed the same and behaving the same.
And no, I don't think the old crack about "if you're cold, you can always put something more on" is amusing. We weren't allowed to wear hats and typing while wearing mittens isn't my idea of productivity. And I'm especially pissed when this is happening in a climate where daytime temperatures exceed 90 degrees for months at a time. You walk outside for lunch and the temperature shock gives an instant headache.
The worst bugs to fix are the bugs that are not bugs.
I learned a long time ago that the place where most time gets eaten in a project isn't the tricky fancy functions and algorithms, it's the niggling little things. Stuff like missing commas or mis-capitalized names. You can stare at them for hours or even days and miss them, and this is why it's important to get someone - anyone at all, regardless of how inexperienced to look at the offending code. Because you see what 'should" be there, and not what actually is there.
Worse even than that are the non-bugs. Where the code is doing exactly what it should, but you are making incorrect assumptions about the results and cannot find anything to fix because there is, in fact, nothing to fix.
Seriously. IBM has a program whose sole purpose in life is to do nothing. It went through 4 or 5 releases before they made it do nothing correctly. Then they had to do further maintenance on it when mainframes went 64-bit.
Hundreds of cartoon characters were created in the early and mid 1900s. Only a few became successful and one of them was Mickey. Why should Disney make that asset available free to the public because the luck, creative and technical skills in pulling off a creative masterpiece is a lot?
Indeed. And why shouldn't the heirs of the people who invented the tales of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, Jack and the Beanstalk, the legends of King Arthur and so forth not be getting paid royalties because someone else (for example, say, Disney) has made use of them?
At least that is my hope. The concept of car ownership is archaic. I look forward to the offloading all the associated penalty costs of car ownership in favour of a service model.
Back in the Good Old Days, the "service model" was called a chauffeur.
I have to ask why was such sensitive information able to be accessed from the internet? Doesn't the government have leased lines or some other really secure backbone?
And retribution towards China. I think a one trillion dollar fine would be in order. Freeze some of their cash, make some of their US Government Treasury bonds worthless....
And if they did, then how would all of the web-based services that use this data get to it?
Not every database exploit comes from some dimwit leaving port 1433 open to Internet access or a SQL Injection attack. You can do even worse damage if you pwn the webservers and start working your way back up the LAN.
The irony is that these days if you let your little darlings wander physical streets unsupervised, they'll come and arrest you and take away your children leaving them traumatized because the police hauled Mommy and Daddy off to jail and the Social Services people told the kiddies that their parents were horrible abusive creatures who deserved never to be allowed to see them again.
For doing what everyone thought was natural 20 years or so ago.
Logic is one thing. The real trick is to anticipate, plan for, and handle the unexpected things that turn an "All You Have To Do Is..." into something that takes months to complete.
Software design has been likened to creating a contract with the Devil. For the same reason. Anything you don't allow for will send you to Hell quickly.
But most people aren't fool enough to show up in court without a lawyer.
You want to really screw a good thing up, set up a set of rigid metrics.
Once everything gets in the hands of the bean counters, anything that cannot be quantified as a bean gets summarily discarded, whether it's good, bad or indifferent.
And it's truly appalling how many systems get set up to measure the quantity and quality of the bathwater and ignore the fact that there's a baby in it.
It's a vicious cycle though, because on the other end you have users that don't really care about security or taking the time to educate themselves to use technology responsibly. Management could push having a robust and secure product, but by the time its built, someone else will have grabbed most of the market or the market will have changed enough that your product has no where near as much potential.
A popular myth that justifies being hasty and sloppy.
Which product defined the PDA? Apple's Newton or the later-arriving and more realistically-designed (for the limitations of the day) Palm Pilot?
How about tablets? Microsoft was doing a tablet years before Apple.
Anyone remember those big-name forums that predated Facebook? I don't.
If you are lucky, being first-to-market will gain you some income, but somebody better can come along and sink you like a stone. You'll get some nice cash for a short period, they'll get a massive revenue stream for many years.
That doesn't mean that every pilot product has to be perfect, but it should mean that your plans for long-term success should incorporate the development of a professional product capable of carrying the load.
And if you're a continent-spanning bank or other long-established "respectable" business, it means that you have absolutely no business at all going for the fast-and-cheap.
I'm afraid that the appearance of working is all that people really care about.
You can sell "pretty" over functional any day, and "quick" over both, with "cheap" trumping all.
Developers cannot fix this. Not unless they get far more organized than they are now. As long as developers do what management tells them and management's values are as previously described, insecurity and unreliability are going to be the hallmarks of software.
And unreliable software is almost guaranteed to be insecure, so kiss all your private data goodbye.
Instead of "bug fixes and new features", why isn't software ever delivered with the simple truth? "Lots of new bugs."
Because it's not simply "lots of new bugs". It's a rearrangement of bugs.
All joking aside, metrics over the years have indicated that once a software product reaches maturity, the total number of bugs on file for further releases will be relatively constant.
Yes, but are there any wiccan spells that can do the trick?
This is worse than useless. Computers, copiers, traffic lights, all electrical, electronic, and mechanical devices all operate because they are possessed by evil spirits bent on the frustration and injury of human beings.
Whether you employ wiccans, African witch doctors, Catholic priests or Indian medicine men, exorcising the evil that lives inside these devices will make them non-functional.
Then you'll have to call in a repairman to install a new evil spirit.
And the first thing the users will tell you is "That's great! But can you make it do this one simple thing?"
Do you even work in the IT field? This is what we call a "revenue opportunity". If they really want it, they will pay you for it.
I can tell that you don't, if you think that people want to pay for anything in IT. After all, there's millions of people in Southeast Asia who'd be glad to do the job. For wages that would starve anyone in the First World.
Oh yes, and it has to be delivered in 3 days. Because All Yo Have To Do Is...
we are talking about full integrated application suites here, not textbook examples. If you look in your industry you will probably find 10 providers that have canned applications that they are selling to your competitors. Do you have a grocery warehouse? A hospital? Do you rent cars? What about an apartment complex? I could go on and on... If you need software for one of these applications, you have no business rolling your own. You go out and get a full-on software suite that takes care of it all. You can either buy it outright or you can pay for it as a service, your choice.
And the first thing the users will tell you is "That's great! But can you make it do this one simple thing?"
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I'm in the sub-tropics. From late May until early October, chances are that the daytime temperatures will exceed 92 and the nighttime temperature will not dip below 72.
Setting an office temperature to 68 as is too often the case around here means that for 4 months of the year you're running cooling 24 hours a day unless you throttle back at night and even then you can't turn it off or you wouldn't get back down to 68 until noon.
Hardly energy efficient.
And to carry on the analogy, the more successful ones will swallow up or destroy the less successful ones until you have a small handful at most of really massive ones who are accountable to no one.
I don't know about 1960s, but up until about 1985 you could wrap yourself around a mainframe terminal if it got too cold. Been there, did that.
Modern PCs can pull some power, but the draw on an LCD monitor is hardly noticeable. And the printer might pull a kilowatt when it cranks up, but in hibernation, it's only 5W.
It's not the temperature, it's the humidity; at any temperature.
No question. Earlier this week, temps were in the low 80s and I was dying. Sun came out, temperature went up to 96 and it felt wonderful. Then clouds moved back in and I'm dying again.
Indoor thermostat is at 83 and with a little fan action that's fine, because the A/C is pulling water out of the air.
It's not that outdated. But it misses the part where it became conflated with lower-temperatures=more-productiviity until ice began forming on the walls.
The full stereotype is actually overweight men in 3-piece suits who spend a good deal of their day walking around (including leaving the office) and who reside in offices with outside windows where the sun heats them up. Because upper management controls the thermostat and the "glass ceiling" is alive and well. Although I'm not sure that having women in the same position would help if they're dressed the same and behaving the same.
And no, I don't think the old crack about "if you're cold, you can always put something more on" is amusing. We weren't allowed to wear hats and typing while wearing mittens isn't my idea of productivity. And I'm especially pissed when this is happening in a climate where daytime temperatures exceed 90 degrees for months at a time. You walk outside for lunch and the temperature shock gives an instant headache.
The worst bugs to fix are the bugs that are not bugs.
I learned a long time ago that the place where most time gets eaten in a project isn't the tricky fancy functions and algorithms, it's the niggling little things. Stuff like missing commas or mis-capitalized names. You can stare at them for hours or even days and miss them, and this is why it's important to get someone - anyone at all, regardless of how inexperienced to look at the offending code. Because you see what 'should" be there, and not what actually is there.
Worse even than that are the non-bugs. Where the code is doing exactly what it should, but you are making incorrect assumptions about the results and cannot find anything to fix because there is, in fact, nothing to fix.
Must be a bug.
Seriously. IBM has a program whose sole purpose in life is to do nothing. It went through 4 or 5 releases before they made it do nothing correctly. Then they had to do further maintenance on it when mainframes went 64-bit.
You know you've found a Tolerant Caring Liberal by how much they hate anyone not like themselves.
Wrong. A Conservative will eat your baby. Liberals eat their own babies.
It shows how totally diametrically opposite they are and why it's essential that you must be one or the other, since there can be nothing in between.
Hundreds of cartoon characters were created in the early and mid 1900s. Only a few became successful and one of them was Mickey. Why should Disney make that asset available free to the public because the luck, creative and technical skills in pulling off a creative masterpiece is a lot?
Indeed. And why shouldn't the heirs of the people who invented the tales of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, Jack and the Beanstalk, the legends of King Arthur and so forth not be getting paid royalties because someone else (for example, say, Disney) has made use of them?
I thought they ran out last year, until I saw the report of them running out last month.
I thought they ran out last month, until I saw the report of them running out last week.
I though they ran out last week, now I see they'll run out tomorrow.
Perhaps someone should start reporting facts rather than what ever you call all these reports.
Xeno's IPv4 Paradox.
I invented breathing, you insensitive clod!
Yes, but I have the patent on breathing.
Over the Internet!
At least that is my hope. The concept of car ownership is archaic. I look forward to the offloading all the associated penalty costs of car ownership in favour of a service model.
Back in the Good Old Days, the "service model" was called a chauffeur.
The surprising twist: when you're at sea, you can't just order from Amazon, you have to make it right then and there.
But what about Amazon's drone delivery service?
Careful. How are the no-bid contractors going to charge big $$$ for mil-spec parts if you can just 3D print them?
Sounds like a commie plot to me.
Just needs more thrust & control surfaces.
Yep, just make it bigger so it has more power and... why is our drone now too large to launch from the ship? The history of miniaturization :)
Well, I guess you'll have to 3D print a bigger ship, then!
I have to ask why was such sensitive information able to be accessed from the internet? Doesn't the government have leased lines or some other really secure backbone?
And retribution towards China. I think a one trillion dollar fine would be in order. Freeze some of their cash, make some of their US Government Treasury bonds worthless ....
And if they did, then how would all of the web-based services that use this data get to it?
Not every database exploit comes from some dimwit leaving port 1433 open to Internet access or a SQL Injection attack. You can do even worse damage if you pwn the webservers and start working your way back up the LAN.
The irony is that these days if you let your little darlings wander physical streets unsupervised, they'll come and arrest you and take away your children leaving them traumatized because the police hauled Mommy and Daddy off to jail and the Social Services people told the kiddies that their parents were horrible abusive creatures who deserved never to be allowed to see them again.
For doing what everyone thought was natural 20 years or so ago.
Logic is one thing. The real trick is to anticipate, plan for, and handle the unexpected things that turn an "All You Have To Do Is..." into something that takes months to complete.
Software design has been likened to creating a contract with the Devil. For the same reason. Anything you don't allow for will send you to Hell quickly.
But most people aren't fool enough to show up in court without a lawyer.
You want to really screw a good thing up, set up a set of rigid metrics.
Once everything gets in the hands of the bean counters, anything that cannot be quantified as a bean gets summarily discarded, whether it's good, bad or indifferent.
And it's truly appalling how many systems get set up to measure the quantity and quality of the bathwater and ignore the fact that there's a baby in it.
It's a vicious cycle though, because on the other end you have users that don't really care about security or taking the time to educate themselves to use technology responsibly. Management could push having a robust and secure product, but by the time its built, someone else will have grabbed most of the market or the market will have changed enough that your product has no where near as much potential.
A popular myth that justifies being hasty and sloppy.
Which product defined the PDA? Apple's Newton or the later-arriving and more realistically-designed (for the limitations of the day) Palm Pilot?
How about tablets? Microsoft was doing a tablet years before Apple.
Anyone remember those big-name forums that predated Facebook? I don't.
If you are lucky, being first-to-market will gain you some income, but somebody better can come along and sink you like a stone. You'll get some nice cash for a short period, they'll get a massive revenue stream for many years.
That doesn't mean that every pilot product has to be perfect, but it should mean that your plans for long-term success should incorporate the development of a professional product capable of carrying the load.
And if you're a continent-spanning bank or other long-established "respectable" business, it means that you have absolutely no business at all going for the fast-and-cheap.
I'm afraid that the appearance of working is all that people really care about.
You can sell "pretty" over functional any day, and "quick" over both, with "cheap" trumping all.
Developers cannot fix this. Not unless they get far more organized than they are now. As long as developers do what management tells them and management's values are as previously described, insecurity and unreliability are going to be the hallmarks of software.
And unreliable software is almost guaranteed to be insecure, so kiss all your private data goodbye.
Instead of "bug fixes and new features", why isn't software ever delivered with the simple truth? "Lots of new bugs."
Because it's not simply "lots of new bugs". It's a rearrangement of bugs.
All joking aside, metrics over the years have indicated that once a software product reaches maturity, the total number of bugs on file for further releases will be relatively constant.
There is no cure for absolute fucking stupidity.
Yes, but are there any wiccan spells that can do the trick?
This is worse than useless. Computers, copiers, traffic lights, all electrical, electronic, and mechanical devices all operate because they are possessed by evil spirits bent on the frustration and injury of human beings.
Whether you employ wiccans, African witch doctors, Catholic priests or Indian medicine men, exorcising the evil that lives inside these devices will make them non-functional.
Then you'll have to call in a repairman to install a new evil spirit.
And the first thing the users will tell you is "That's great! But can you make it do this one simple thing?"
Do you even work in the IT field? This is what we call a "revenue opportunity". If they really want it, they will pay you for it.
I can tell that you don't, if you think that people want to pay for anything in IT. After all, there's millions of people in Southeast Asia who'd be glad to do the job. For wages that would starve anyone in the First World.
Oh yes, and it has to be delivered in 3 days. Because All Yo Have To Do Is...
we are talking about full integrated application suites here, not textbook examples. If you look in your industry you will probably find 10 providers that have canned applications that they are selling to your competitors. Do you have a grocery warehouse? A hospital? Do you rent cars? What about an apartment complex? I could go on and on... If you need software for one of these applications, you have no business rolling your own. You go out and get a full-on software suite that takes care of it all. You can either buy it outright or you can pay for it as a service, your choice.
And the first thing the users will tell you is "That's great! But can you make it do this one simple thing?"