NG has the contract for fixing the lines in the region and is the main energy broker, unfortunately.
This is the ultimate problem: having the power lines and the energy broker/provider be the same entity. The power lines are an obvious natural monopoly. The supply of energy across those power lines is not a natural monopoly. The lines should be owned by one company and the power selling/brokerage should be by a different company.
Yeah. These electrons belong to Duke Power, those electrons belong to Con Edison, the ones over there belong to...
The idea that the Free Market makes any sense in the simultaneous transmission of commodity objects (or forces) over a common medium is one of the most insane artifices that anyone ever invented. All you are really selling is the right to bill something that you probably didn't produce going over lines you probably don't own. Capitalism at it's finest!
I've been using the Google handwriting recognition installable "keyboard" for 2-3 days now.
Unlike the Newton, which was famous for its inability to accurately recognize what you input, the Google handwriting actually works pretty well. Although it's occasionally slow. I think it's doing a lot of its magic by talking back to a Google server.
Unfortunately, I've gotten into the habit of writing Grafitti-style, so using "real" letters and writing them across the input area instead of within a limited box doesn't come naturally to me any more. I could do Grafitti faster than I can type.
Also, the "forward-space gesture" just enters a dash. There's an actual "space bar" at the bottom of the input area that you have to tap.
That smells too much of the zero-tolerance, total-fear climate that typifies the USA these days.
If you have enough unstable employees that you need to be that worried, you were doing something major wrong long before "firing" time.
In any event, laid-off people aren't known for running amok in the parking lots. They come back later, heavily-armed and lay waste to the remaining employees (and customers).
You don't need a massive conspiracy. You don't even really need a conspiracy.
All that's needed is for people - politicians and the populace - to accept just a little more incursion every time the investigation and enforcement people claim that their job is being made "too hard".
Inch by inch, until one day, it's no longer "We're free to do travel about and do things", but "Your papers, please!"
Or because as long as people are OK with that bit of intrusiveness every time they travel, they'll be more accepting of other restrictions on their freedom as well.
Because, among other things, compilers (such as C) can automatically generate pipeline-friendly machine language. All that extra bookkeeping is trivial for an automated process.
And a compiler can re-optimize the entire module every time they compile.
Hand-optimized assembly lost it when IBM introduced Pascal/VS. I COULD optimize code as good or better than it did, but considering that it was doing large-scale register reassignments, the equivalent amount of hand optimization for just one minor source change/recompile would have taken me a full day or more.
Unlike the old dinosaur mainframes, modern microprocessors run internal pipe lines and what instructions follow what other instructions can make a big different.
Aside from that, one reason that raw assembly is no longer the cult favorite it used to be is that the average C statement is probably going to produce 5-10 machine-language instructions. More instructions means more work to create or replace them, more places for potential bugs, and less flexibility to make high-level architectural changes.
Trust us. It's real, but we can't show you. Yeah, just like the harem of gorgeous women that wait on me hand and foot. I'd love to show you, but you know how shy they can be, so you'll just have to take my word for it...
You have the same issues with Docker containers you know. You still have to set up DB connections, install data, etc, etc. Config files and static data can be put anywhere in both situations, so Docker really doesn't solve much more in the case you supplied. All you're doing is sticking it into a docker image rather than a directory structure.
Not entirely. In many apps, there are internal objects and external objects. When the app is installed as a native OS app, the difference is not apparent, so you have a fairly untidy collection of stuff all over the place.
When I package for docker, I leave most of the app's characteristics internal, and the docker run specs clearly document the external characteristics. At most that's usually config, data, and log volumes and one or 2 ports.
The difference between a container and just trying to grab everything in a tarball is that A) invariably something important doesn't make it into the tarball and B) the target system may have conflicts with what's in the tarball. For internal resources, all that's tidily collected within the Docker image and hidden by container virtualization. For external resources, I can, if necessary simply remap locations, since I'm not in the habit of making containers use shared external resources. Plus, thanks to container linking, I can often inject certain characteristics from container to container and not even have to worry about their external aspects.
It's true. No such thing as a Silver Bullet. And any sufficiently-advanced technology can be turned into a screaming nightmare when placed in the hands of incompetents. Done judiciously, however, I find Docker makes for a tidier system, and one that's a lot easier to assure business continuity on.
Why does it not work? Even the Irish and Chinese railroad workers were made citizens. We brought in temp workers, and kept them. Africa first, others later. All were made citizens (and yes, slaves were citizens, just not free ones). We've always had a love-hate relationship with workers, but, until recently, were happy to make them citizens.
That's the point, though. All the asians I know of who are citizens didn't become citizens via H1-B, they did it on our own.
Yes, my state - and probably yours - is full of towns whose names and history reflect the fact that someone brought over people en-masse from some other town, village or country primarily to serve as cheap - and frequently semi-captive labor. That's not even touching the importation of slaves from Africa.
And those people often brought financial hurt to established citizens because they were easier to control and to keep under low wages.
But they were nevertheless brought in as permanent residents with citizenship rights - even the slaves, allowing for differences in who got what "citizenship rights".
The H1-B program was specifically designed to bring in temporary immigrants, not people who'd eventually grow to become a permanent part of the tax-paying populace and even to demand competitive wages instead of exploitative ones.
Jesus. 750k? I live in NYC and very few programmers make that kind of cash.
200k is more typical.
Well, that's just about the relative difference between what H1-Bs make at home versus what they can get paid to work at lower wages than displaced US workers, thanks to the much lower cost of living in a country where consumer protection is virtually non-existent, environmental protection is a joke, electricity can be hit-and-miss and a lot of the local recipes are based on the idea that you won't be putting anything in a refrigerator.
And to tell the truth, it would take about $750 to get me to work in New York, too. I won't put it down, but it's not my kind of town. Or, for that matter, my kind of weather. If you want my skills available in NYC, and don't want to shell out major $$$, then it's going to be a telecommute position.
Ain't got time for that. I'm working with a lot of different systems. The amount of time I can afford to spend tweaking - and re-tweaking, since I'm doing a lot image-zapping - for personal idiosyncracies is limited.
Anyway, MY inconsistent tab habits are only a small part of the problem. It's when you get a lot of other people involved that it gets really messy.
Microsoft copies someone else. In Microsoft language,
copying==innovation
To be fair, every company copies to some extent. It's just that nobody spins it as much as Microsoft.
Before we got all hung up on patents and copyrights, computer software technologies were freely copied/stolen right and left. Often gaining interesting and useful new capabilities in the process.
Back then, it was common to repeat Newton's quote that he saw further because he stood on the "shoulders of giants". And to sourly observe that programmers more often stood on each other's feet.
These days, you often have to, lest lawyers descend upon you and pick your bones.
It's one reason open-source software is now so popular. For whatever illusory protection against indemnification closed-source products might project, the open-source ones at least won't sure you. Unless you violate the basic terms of sharing, anyway.
Whether your app is one big monolithic ugly or a sordid collection of shared resources, if you want to toss it around between machines, you still need to "install" it on each machine. Installation means not only the code, but whatever data files need to be set up, config files, database connections and possibly even nastier things. In the Internet era, few apps live in total isolation.
So it's not so simple.
What Docker offers is a way of essentially taking a master image of the application's installation - and ONLY the applications's installation - and bouncing it between servers. Docker also supports keeping libraries of these ready-to-go images so that as many instances as you want can be spun up on demand.
If you'd like a good analogy, think of a traditional OS disk system as a box that you dump multiple applications into. In the traditional way, all the applications might be unrelated and self-contained, but they all went into the box as one big jumble. In Docker, each of those apps might be contained in a completely self-contained bag. You put the bag in the box. If the box gets overloaded, you pull the bag out of the box and put it in another box.
The only time I set either my text editor OR my word processor to show non-printing characters is when I need to diagnose why spacing is off. Those little markers they use as visible tabs, paragraph markers, etc. are a distraction, otherwise.
When used properly, indentation can be very nice. Tabs, however, are too much at the mercy of whoever set the tabstops. And even if you can get away with an iron-bound shop-wide tab standard, that wouldn't help when integrating with external sources or with the inevitable sloppyness when people hit the space bar and mix spaces and tabs willy-nilly.
And considering the number of word-processed documents I've encountered over the years where people used brute-force spacing and newline characters in place of proper tabs and paragraph styling, I don't delude myself how well that would work.
Slashdot Mirror
At least it's honest, and actually provides some deterrent^Wentertainment value. Good old-fashioned barbarism has its advantages.
The reason that we don't still do public executions is that they don't provide deterrent value.
Why not just drown them like kittens?
... And if no one ever determines that the innocent person is innocent, then their life is completely wasted in prison, in my opinion.
Quite a few great works of literature were penned in prison.
Prison - by definition - limits what you can do, but whether you waste your life or not is up to you.
NG has the contract for fixing the lines in the region and is the main energy broker, unfortunately.
This is the ultimate problem: having the power lines and the energy broker/provider be the same entity. The power lines are an obvious natural monopoly. The supply of energy across those power lines is not a natural monopoly. The lines should be owned by one company and the power selling/brokerage should be by a different company.
Yeah. These electrons belong to Duke Power, those electrons belong to Con Edison, the ones over there belong to...
The idea that the Free Market makes any sense in the simultaneous transmission of commodity objects (or forces) over a common medium is one of the most insane artifices that anyone ever invented. All you are really selling is the right to bill something that you probably didn't produce going over lines you probably don't own. Capitalism at it's finest!
And now we have the tablet market.
I've been using the Google handwriting recognition installable "keyboard" for 2-3 days now.
Unlike the Newton, which was famous for its inability to accurately recognize what you input, the Google handwriting actually works pretty well. Although it's occasionally slow. I think it's doing a lot of its magic by talking back to a Google server.
Unfortunately, I've gotten into the habit of writing Grafitti-style, so using "real" letters and writing them across the input area instead of within a limited box doesn't come naturally to me any more. I could do Grafitti faster than I can type.
Also, the "forward-space gesture" just enters a dash. There's an actual "space bar" at the bottom of the input area that you have to tap.
That smells too much of the zero-tolerance, total-fear climate that typifies the USA these days.
If you have enough unstable employees that you need to be that worried, you were doing something major wrong long before "firing" time.
In any event, laid-off people aren't known for running amok in the parking lots. They come back later, heavily-armed and lay waste to the remaining employees (and customers).
Well, that's what makes America such a great country!
You don't need a massive conspiracy. You don't even really need a conspiracy.
All that's needed is for people - politicians and the populace - to accept just a little more incursion every time the investigation and enforcement people claim that their job is being made "too hard".
Inch by inch, until one day, it's no longer "We're free to do travel about and do things", but "Your papers, please!"
Hey I can't wait for the giant "McAfee certified" stickers on the sides of planes. Watch out for the "My Clean 747" ones though...
Well, it wouldn't be the first time McAfee crashed something.
Oh, absolutely. By the way, citizen...
Or because as long as people are OK with that bit of intrusiveness every time they travel, they'll be more accepting of other restrictions on their freedom as well.
Paycheck?
Doesn't Wal-Mart or McDonalds pay better, though?
Because, among other things, compilers (such as C) can automatically generate pipeline-friendly machine language. All that extra bookkeeping is trivial for an automated process.
And a compiler can re-optimize the entire module every time they compile.
Hand-optimized assembly lost it when IBM introduced Pascal/VS. I COULD optimize code as good or better than it did, but considering that it was doing large-scale register reassignments, the equivalent amount of hand optimization for just one minor source change/recompile would have taken me a full day or more.
And my boss wouldn't have tolerated that.
Yeah, yeah, All You Have To Do, yada yada.
Unlike the old dinosaur mainframes, modern microprocessors run internal pipe lines and what instructions follow what other instructions can make a big different.
Aside from that, one reason that raw assembly is no longer the cult favorite it used to be is that the average C statement is probably going to produce 5-10 machine-language instructions. More instructions means more work to create or replace them, more places for potential bugs, and less flexibility to make high-level architectural changes.
Chorus:
"Well, It's Simple! All You Have To Do Is..."
Use the tablets to build walls with. Win-win!
Trust us. It's real, but we can't show you.
Yeah, just like the harem of gorgeous women that wait on me hand and foot. I'd love to show you, but you know how shy they can be, so you'll just have to take my word for it...
You have 72 virgins???
You have the same issues with Docker containers you know. You still have to set up DB connections, install data, etc, etc. Config files and static data can be put anywhere in both situations, so Docker really doesn't solve much more in the case you supplied. All you're doing is sticking it into a docker image rather than a directory structure.
Not entirely. In many apps, there are internal objects and external objects. When the app is installed as a native OS app, the difference is not apparent, so you have a fairly untidy collection of stuff all over the place.
When I package for docker, I leave most of the app's characteristics internal, and the docker run specs clearly document the external characteristics. At most that's usually config, data, and log volumes and one or 2 ports.
The difference between a container and just trying to grab everything in a tarball is that A) invariably something important doesn't make it into the tarball and B) the target system may have conflicts with what's in the tarball. For internal resources, all that's tidily collected within the Docker image and hidden by container virtualization. For external resources, I can, if necessary simply remap locations, since I'm not in the habit of making containers use shared external resources. Plus, thanks to container linking, I can often inject certain characteristics from container to container and not even have to worry about their external aspects.
It's true. No such thing as a Silver Bullet. And any sufficiently-advanced technology can be turned into a screaming nightmare when placed in the hands of incompetents. Done judiciously, however, I find Docker makes for a tidier system, and one that's a lot easier to assure business continuity on.
Why does it not work? Even the Irish and Chinese railroad workers were made citizens. We brought in temp workers, and kept them. Africa first, others later. All were made citizens (and yes, slaves were citizens, just not free ones). We've always had a love-hate relationship with workers, but, until recently, were happy to make them citizens.
That's the point, though. All the asians I know of who are citizens didn't become citizens via H1-B, they did it on our own.
Yes, my state - and probably yours - is full of towns whose names and history reflect the fact that someone brought over people en-masse from some other town, village or country primarily to serve as cheap - and frequently semi-captive labor. That's not even touching the importation of slaves from Africa.
And those people often brought financial hurt to established citizens because they were easier to control and to keep under low wages.
But they were nevertheless brought in as permanent residents with citizenship rights - even the slaves, allowing for differences in who got what "citizenship rights".
The H1-B program was specifically designed to bring in temporary immigrants, not people who'd eventually grow to become a permanent part of the tax-paying populace and even to demand competitive wages instead of exploitative ones.
Jesus. 750k? I live in NYC and very few programmers make that kind of cash.
200k is more typical.
Well, that's just about the relative difference between what H1-Bs make at home versus what they can get paid to work at lower wages than displaced US workers, thanks to the much lower cost of living in a country where consumer protection is virtually non-existent, environmental protection is a joke, electricity can be hit-and-miss and a lot of the local recipes are based on the idea that you won't be putting anything in a refrigerator.
And to tell the truth, it would take about $750 to get me to work in New York, too. I won't put it down, but it's not my kind of town. Or, for that matter, my kind of weather. If you want my skills available in NYC, and don't want to shell out major $$$, then it's going to be a telecommute position.
Ain't got time for that. I'm working with a lot of different systems. The amount of time I can afford to spend tweaking - and re-tweaking, since I'm doing a lot image-zapping - for personal idiosyncracies is limited.
Anyway, MY inconsistent tab habits are only a small part of the problem. It's when you get a lot of other people involved that it gets really messy.
I too, liked Solaris zones, but Docker does have some essential differences.
In any event, Docker has the advantage of running under Linux. Solaris isn't as popular as it used to be.
Microsoft copies someone else. In Microsoft language,
copying==innovation
To be fair, every company copies to some extent. It's just that nobody spins it as much as Microsoft.
Before we got all hung up on patents and copyrights, computer software technologies were freely copied/stolen right and left. Often gaining interesting and useful new capabilities in the process.
Back then, it was common to repeat Newton's quote that he saw further because he stood on the "shoulders of giants". And to sourly observe that programmers more often stood on each other's feet.
These days, you often have to, lest lawyers descend upon you and pick your bones.
It's one reason open-source software is now so popular. For whatever illusory protection against indemnification closed-source products might project, the open-source ones at least won't sure you. Unless you violate the basic terms of sharing, anyway.
"It's Simple. All You Have To Do Is..." FacePalm.
Whether your app is one big monolithic ugly or a sordid collection of shared resources, if you want to toss it around between machines, you still need to "install" it on each machine. Installation means not only the code, but whatever data files need to be set up, config files, database connections and possibly even nastier things. In the Internet era, few apps live in total isolation.
So it's not so simple.
What Docker offers is a way of essentially taking a master image of the application's installation - and ONLY the applications's installation - and bouncing it between servers. Docker also supports keeping libraries of these ready-to-go images so that as many instances as you want can be spun up on demand.
If you'd like a good analogy, think of a traditional OS disk system as a box that you dump multiple applications into. In the traditional way, all the applications might be unrelated and self-contained, but they all went into the box as one big jumble. In Docker, each of those apps might be contained in a completely self-contained bag. You put the bag in the box. If the box gets overloaded, you pull the bag out of the box and put it in another box.
It's, er, "Simple".
The only time I set either my text editor OR my word processor to show non-printing characters is when I need to diagnose why spacing is off. Those little markers they use as visible tabs, paragraph markers, etc. are a distraction, otherwise.
When used properly, indentation can be very nice. Tabs, however, are too much at the mercy of whoever set the tabstops. And even if you can get away with an iron-bound shop-wide tab standard, that wouldn't help when integrating with external sources or with the inevitable sloppyness when people hit the space bar and mix spaces and tabs willy-nilly.
And considering the number of word-processed documents I've encountered over the years where people used brute-force spacing and newline characters in place of proper tabs and paragraph styling, I don't delude myself how well that would work.