It would be child's play to maintain artificial scarcity. If you're a member of the ruling class who's power, wealth and prestige depends on that scarcity it's in your best interests to maintain it.
That's where the Cyberpunk comes in. Tribes and groups building alternate societies and cultures utilitzing technology salvaged from the mainstream or built as an alternative to established ways of dealing wiht things. This always happens. Only the revolution in tech is rarely violent in a classic class-warfare sense. It's simply people building alternatives to systems that don't work. As technology get's cheaper that becomes easyer for more and more people. One trait of the age of cyberpunk is that cultural and economic spaces aren't spacially divided but stacked on to each other and basically spread out globall - which is a side-effect of current developments. As further advanced technology gets, the easyer it is to actually implement marxism, because it becomes easyer and easyer to take what I need without taking away from others. See FOSS for a prime example.
Likewise, maintaining artificial scarcity is pointless when what I need can be provided faster and easyer by robots than the people I would want to control. There is no incentive anymore to control people beyond a certain point in such a society. It would be more trouble than it is worth and is much better done by netflix and facebook than with all-out opression.
What I'm doing right now I can do in just about any part of the world thjat has an internet connection. A sign of things to come. Yes, sure, Google or some other megacorp will own everthing but it will be so dirt cheap to use it and so costly to deny it to people that we can very well have an Utopia.
I think what many people don't get is that the post-scarcity economy is coming, one way or the other.
Point in case: I do web development in an agency, and while my work isn't always all-out pointless like that of some of my peers who produce power-point presentations (no joke - they produce presentations for a living - we make quite an amount of money of this), I also see clearly that most of my work comes from LAMP and WordPress being so shitty that building something that resembles a useful model often requires hours of custom programming per project. I work part-time, 5 hours/day, so I don't go insane and even that remaining work is mostly a classic "bullshit-job".
We are moving into an all out cyberpunk post-scarcity economy - that's a plain and simple fact. Meanwhile the luxury problems I have come from cellphone manufacturers artificially inflating phone-storage prices or not offering the exact type of phone I'm looking for, the girls I meet often being to tied up in social media to be useful for quality time and me being to lazy to book my surfing vacation for late summer.
Money in it's current for is either becoming worhless (negative interest) or being removed alltogether (sharing economy, access culture).
The problems that await us will stem from people and societies who can't deal with a post-scarcity economy and turn fanatic - religiously, politically or otherwise. That is the problem Jack Ma is probably talking about.
Other than that I personally see no problem with the rise of robots. If we play our cards right, we can have an utopia in a century. But probably the nutbags are going to screw this up again, using religion and/or totalitarianism, as usual.
FP basically forces you to do multiple steps in one and trains your brain to think faster. Getting rid of state wherever possible is a neat thing too and enables more complex programms and routines that are less error-prone and more vertasile.
As long as you can wrap your head around what your doing FP is great. I've made a habit of using it whenever I can.... Although sometimes I'm just to lazy or tired and start wittling about with variables again.
They run Chrome OS. Basically an extension of Google into your lap. Like android phones are a extension of Google into your hands and pockets.
Complaining that Google is observing it's users is like complaining that water is wet. Observing users is Googles freakin business model, that's what they earn money with. That's why you get all the neat stuff including cloud storage basically for free. This is also the reason Google is not another MS or Apple. They are a different league. They don't care what your device costs and which software it runs, as long as you use Google. Plain and simple.
And because of this, Google could offer services for minors no other company could. Like, for instance, warning parents when the child is communicating with a person that is obviously an unknown middle-aged man posing as a teenager.
I guess the EFF get's the Captain Obvious Award for stating that Google observes it's users.... Allthough I do like them basically doing public education on the matter - probably needed in the US I presume.
... and I'm usually judged 7-12 years younger than I actually am (47). I even feel that way too. Given, I also dance a lot. But I combine my biking with PT, so that evens it out.
I offen get angry seeing avalanches of SUVs and full sized cars with only one Person in them. Germanys cities are clogged to the Brink with Cars and it's a freakin' Pita for everybody. We even start seeing the push for larger Bike Infrastructure at federal Level... two decades or so too late imho.
Everybody I know who uses the bike as a main means of transport is a healthier happier person for it, including myself. We have too many cars. We need less better cars and caresharing at national level. And a private car limitation for cities. Everything would improve.... Probably even peoples sexlives.
I see two ends of the spectrum: Want an own DB? Use FOSS. MariaDB, MySQL, Postgres, Mongo, Couch,... tons of really cool stuff, all of it industry-grade software. I see virtually no usecase at all for non-FOSS DB technology in a fresh project these days.
Want to do the cloud DB thing? Use Google Spanner. That's what Oracle should be afraid of... and probably is.
"X11 has network transparency." If I got a dime everytime I heard this, I'd be a billionaire by now.
Screw X11 Network transparency. The network transparency X11 offers (draw this pixel there, take this input here) can be redone in 2 days and bolted on top of a well designed system as soon as anybody needs it. If X11s hand-made cast-iron NW transparency is the only thing it has going for it, that is sad.
As for efficiency, I get your point. Computers are so insanely fast these days, no one really cares if you need 1 or 3 cycles to draw a desktop. Especially if a better design takes a little longer. Gamers have their own thing for displaying anyway.
The problem with X11 is that it is ancient (in itself not a problem) and because of that was built around problems and requirements that nobody has today and in turn offers zilch to address todays demands. Modline configuration are relics of the steam age of microcomputers and 16-bit color CRTs and turn any X11 config session into an arcane ritual from yesteryear with no way of knowing if it will work out.
If X11 would fix that and make it easy to set up systems with todays technical traits, be it only with feasible tooling, I'm sure it would still have a chance of sticking around for another few decades. Until that happens, people are always going to try and replace it. And for good reasons too.
I always have been of the opinion that Facebook is only so successful, because all other Services and protocols are so bad. Usenet and E-Mail ancient don't fit in todays Messaging needs. I would argue that even fidonet was a better solution for that.
conclusion: We, the FOSS and Internet community finally need to come up with a distributed Service and protocol that does what Facebook does and get rid of this proprietary data-hog abomination. And we need to build reference Implementations for all Major Plattforms that work and are usable für normal people.
That aside, we all know that what Facebook does should be a regular Internet protocol and service and not some commercial website. The only reason FB took off and still is going strong is because E-Mail and Usenet and to some extent IRC are so very shitty and we, the Inet and FOSS community haven't built a viable modern communication service yet.
And no, Diaspora is an implementation of a non-service and not really a replacement. Yet.
Once a protocol and service that does what FB does is finished, FB eventually willbe replaced.
"The best rulers are those the people barely know, after that those they love after that those they despise and fear." - Konfuzius (paraphrased)
In an ideal society the leaders are barely known. But we don't have that yet - that would be Star Trek or something.... So in broken or non-optimal societies people lean towards the popular.
As far as humble leaders go, I think Uruguay, Buthan and Germany are good examples.
Link or not, I do think videogames are still too one-dimensional in dealing out death. Also I really don't get why male teenie fantasies have to evolve around the closest approximation to real war we can produce. Battlefield 1 was the pinnacle: Celebrating the massakre that WW1 war as something enjoyable left an awkward taste behind. Yes, the GFX were aweseome and I'm sure the leveldesign and the gameplay were top notch.... But why again do we have to simulate and fetishize real war as close as possible?
I read an article about a scandinavian dad who had exact same discussion with his teenage boys. He made an agreement with them: They would travel to israel and talk with israeli and hamas veterans and visit the places where they hang out and tell their stories. After that, the boys could play whatever they chose to.... Smart dad. I don't know how that turned out though.
I do get Unreal Tournament CTF, Tribes CTF, Xonotic CTF and Quake 3 Arena CTF. Bouncing around through space with teleporters, strange gaming levels and respawning instantly once your fragged and shooting bizar weapons that don't exist in the real world is all-out fun. And the direkt link to violence I don't see in both cases.... I do get stress and anxiety issues when playing these games for an extended period of time though.
... I'm ready to enroll in part-time college and am torn hither and fro wether I should go to the local University (classic CS, bland curriculum, ugly wasted 80ies architecture campus, further away from where I work, PhD option, higher rank, Math 1 through 5 (scares the shit out of me)) or the local University of Applied Sciences (Media CS, neat Master Programs, easy curriculum, brand new posh campus with all the bells and whistles, more chicks on the faculty (so I hope:-) ), PhD option on the ropes (might change within the next few years), 'lesser' rank, Math 1 through 3 (scary too, but manageable)).
Mind you, aside from semester fees of ~280 Euros these options I'm toying with are free (as in beer) and those fees actually are a bargain because as an enrolled student you get public transport for free in the entire state (there actually is a little problem with students enrolling just for the benefits alone).
C++ done right is do vastly different from C that debating which language is better is beyond silly. This goes threefold if you look at C++14 programmed with the GSL - the right way to do C++ these days.
In a nutshell C is assembler 2.0 and C++ is assembler 3.0. C++ has massive inner api advantages over C that C tries to compensate for with libs such as boost.
Yet build with C++ without knowing what you are doing and of course you'll produce bad software. With C you simply won't get anywhere.
Wether you use one or the other these days is often a matter of personal preference more than anything else. C++ has massive ready-made power with the responsibilty that comes with it. Any programmer looking at these PLs will see the difference and adapt his style of coding accordingly.
I second that. Just yesterday I nearly got run over on my bike by some SUV driver who was texting/dialing while driving. Smartphones and texting while driving kill people. The problem is so obvious, that carriers had renowned filmmaker Werner Herzog do a freely available documentary on the problem a few years back to keep people from doing this ---> https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Watch it and tell your friends to do that too. It's a must.
The best dev environment for me is the one I have under my control. Pluspoints if I can instance live on my local without a hitch due to neat scripts, vagrant or whatnot.
We have to face the plain and simple truth: There is public and there is private.
Point in case: I recently (again) met a woman who is into Gangbang and porn ( you'd be surprised how many women are). She's smart, independant, witty, well-mannered, can talk for hours about "God and the World" as we say in Germany. She's my age and looks gorgeous. And she fucks like a pornstar (no surprise here) and also loves to have a few guys on her all at once and no problem with indulging in that. This is the type of woman I have the deepest respect and admiration for. I even asked her if she has a friend from her camp, because I'm currently single and would like to have a sweetheart of her format (she's married... bummer...).
Yet there is no doubt that people like her (and me) have to be careful about being to outspoken and unphased when talking about our sexlives. Were I am comfortable and have crossed a few inner borders on my perspective on sex, I have to be aware that most people around me haven't and are still squarely in the "average frustrated" camp - men and women alike. I told her that I have the deepest respect and admiration for women "who know how to spread their legs, enjoy herself and f*ck the living daylights out of a good man... or a few as the case may be" and got a very positive reaction from her. But mentioning this in public we both agreed, would be bound to get the exact opposite reaction. She'd be slutshamed (the most careful woman with condoms ever) and I would be called a misogynist, despite being the exact opposite... I usually give women a surplus of respect and sometimes more than they deserve.
Bottom line: I can totally understand if a project lead wants to keep his project clean of these errrm " unconventional" things. We all live in a culture and have to have some groundrules we follow. Keeping an unusual sexlife to yourself or only with people whom it concerns is a huge part of that.
Slashdot Mirror
... and in no specific order:
The 4-Hour Workweek
The 100$ Start-Up
The Lean Startup
The one on my list that I haven't read yet:
The hard thing about hard things
In Trump's America your pension has been cancelled.
... but I find this effing creepy.
It would be child's play to maintain artificial scarcity. If you're a member of the ruling class who's power, wealth and prestige depends on that scarcity it's in your best interests to maintain it.
That's where the Cyberpunk comes in. Tribes and groups building alternate societies and cultures utilitzing technology salvaged from the mainstream or built as an alternative to established ways of dealing wiht things. This always happens. Only the revolution in tech is rarely violent in a classic class-warfare sense. It's simply people building alternatives to systems that don't work. As technology get's cheaper that becomes easyer for more and more people. One trait of the age of cyberpunk is that cultural and economic spaces aren't spacially divided but stacked on to each other and basically spread out globall - which is a side-effect of current developments. As further advanced technology gets, the easyer it is to actually implement marxism, because it becomes easyer and easyer to take what I need without taking away from others. See FOSS for a prime example.
Likewise, maintaining artificial scarcity is pointless when what I need can be provided faster and easyer by robots than the people I would want to control. There is no incentive anymore to control people beyond a certain point in such a society. It would be more trouble than it is worth and is much better done by netflix and facebook than with all-out opression.
What I'm doing right now I can do in just about any part of the world thjat has an internet connection. A sign of things to come. Yes, sure, Google or some other megacorp will own everthing but it will be so dirt cheap to use it and so costly to deny it to people that we can very well have an Utopia.
I think what many people don't get is that the post-scarcity economy is coming, one way or the other.
Point in case: I do web development in an agency, and while my work isn't always all-out pointless like that of some of my peers who produce power-point presentations (no joke - they produce presentations for a living - we make quite an amount of money of this), I also see clearly that most of my work comes from LAMP and WordPress being so shitty that building something that resembles a useful model often requires hours of custom programming per project. I work part-time, 5 hours/day, so I don't go insane and even that remaining work is mostly a classic "bullshit-job".
We are moving into an all out cyberpunk post-scarcity economy - that's a plain and simple fact. Meanwhile the luxury problems I have come from cellphone manufacturers artificially inflating phone-storage prices or not offering the exact type of phone I'm looking for, the girls I meet often being to tied up in social media to be useful for quality time and me being to lazy to book my surfing vacation for late summer.
Money in it's current for is either becoming worhless (negative interest) or being removed alltogether (sharing economy, access culture).
The problems that await us will stem from people and societies who can't deal with a post-scarcity economy and turn fanatic - religiously, politically or otherwise. That is the problem Jack Ma is probably talking about.
Other than that I personally see no problem with the rise of robots.
If we play our cards right, we can have an utopia in a century. But probably the nutbags are going to screw this up again, using religion and/or totalitarianism, as usual.
My 2 eurocents.
So is knowing and understanding it.
FP basically forces you to do multiple steps in one and trains your brain to think faster. Getting rid of state wherever possible is a neat thing too and enables more complex programms and routines that are less error-prone and more vertasile.
As long as you can wrap your head around what your doing FP is great. I've made a habit of using it whenever I can. ... Although sometimes I'm just to lazy or tired and start wittling about with variables again.
Computer kid of the 80ies here. ZX81, ZX Spectrum, C64, Sharp PC 1402 ... all had Basic. :-)
Later I even did some QBasic on DOS.
They run Chrome OS. Basically an extension of Google into your lap. Like android phones are a extension of Google into your hands and pockets.
Complaining that Google is observing it's users is like complaining that water is wet. Observing users is Googles freakin business model, that's what they earn money with. That's why you get all the neat stuff including cloud storage basically for free. This is also the reason Google is not another MS or Apple. They are a different league. They don't care what your device costs and which software it runs, as long as you use Google. Plain and simple.
And because of this, Google could offer services for minors no other company could. Like, for instance, warning parents when the child is communicating with a person that is obviously an unknown middle-aged man posing as a teenager.
I guess the EFF get's the Captain Obvious Award for stating that Google observes it's users. ... Allthough I do like them basically doing public education on the matter - probably needed in the US I presume.
... and I'm usually judged 7-12 years younger than I actually am (47). I even feel that way too. Given, I also dance a lot. But I combine my biking with PT, so that evens it out.
I offen get angry seeing avalanches of SUVs and full sized cars with only one Person in them. Germanys cities are clogged to the Brink with Cars and it's a freakin' Pita for everybody. We even start seeing the push for larger Bike Infrastructure at federal Level ... two decades or so too late imho.
Everybody I know who uses the bike as a main means of transport is a healthier happier person for it, including myself. We have too many cars. We need less better cars and caresharing at national level. And a private car limitation for cities. ... Probably even peoples sexlives.
Everything would improve.
My 2 eurocents.
I see two ends of the spectrum: ... tons of really cool stuff, all of it industry-grade software.
Want an own DB?
Use FOSS.
MariaDB, MySQL, Postgres, Mongo, Couch,
I see virtually no usecase at all for non-FOSS DB technology in a fresh project these days.
Want to do the cloud DB thing? ... and probably is.
Use Google Spanner.
That's what Oracle should be afraid of
"X11 has network transparency." If I got a dime everytime I heard this, I'd be a billionaire by now.
Screw X11 Network transparency. The network transparency X11 offers (draw this pixel there, take this input here) can be redone in 2 days and bolted on top of a well designed system as soon as anybody needs it. If X11s hand-made cast-iron NW transparency is the only thing it has going for it, that is sad.
As for efficiency, I get your point. Computers are so insanely fast these days, no one really cares if you need 1 or 3 cycles to draw a desktop. Especially if a better design takes a little longer. Gamers have their own thing for displaying anyway.
The problem with X11 is that it is ancient (in itself not a problem) and because of that was built around problems and requirements that nobody has today and in turn offers zilch to address todays demands. Modline configuration are relics of the steam age of microcomputers and 16-bit color CRTs and turn any X11 config session into an arcane ritual from yesteryear with no way of knowing if it will work out.
If X11 would fix that and make it easy to set up systems with todays technical traits, be it only with feasible tooling, I'm sure it would still have a chance of sticking around for another few decades. Until that happens, people are always going to try and replace it. And for good reasons too.
I always have been of the opinion that Facebook is only so successful, because all other Services and protocols are so bad. Usenet and E-Mail ancient don't fit in todays Messaging needs. I would argue that even fidonet was a better solution for that.
conclusion: We, the FOSS and Internet community finally need to come up with a distributed Service and protocol that does what Facebook does and get rid of this proprietary data-hog abomination. And we need to build reference Implementations for all Major Plattforms that work and are usable für normal people.
my 2 cents (sorry, German Spelling due to Swipe)
*TADUM* *CRASH* *THUD*
Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week.
Tip your waiter and try the fish.
Learned programming on that one. Basic. It even had a querty keyboard.
... it's a global mental illness.
That aside, we all know that what Facebook does should be a regular Internet protocol and service and not some commercial website. The only reason FB took off and still is going strong is because E-Mail and Usenet and to some extent IRC are so very shitty and we, the Inet and FOSS community haven't built a viable modern communication service yet.
And no, Diaspora is an implementation of a non-service and not really a replacement. Yet.
Once a protocol and service that does what FB does is finished, FB eventually willbe replaced.
My 2 eurocents.
Just a wild guess here ...
"The best rulers are those the people barely know, after that those they love after that those they despise and fear."
- Konfuzius (paraphrased)
In an ideal society the leaders are barely known. But we don't have that yet - that would be Star Trek or something. ... So in broken or non-optimal societies people lean towards the popular.
As far as humble leaders go, I think Uruguay, Buthan and Germany are good examples.
Then read it again.
Then read it again taking notes.
The you'll know what to do.
Good luck!
Link or not, I do think videogames are still too one-dimensional in dealing out death. Also I really don't get why male teenie fantasies have to evolve around the closest approximation to real war we can produce. Battlefield 1 was the pinnacle: Celebrating the massakre that WW1 war as something enjoyable left an awkward taste behind. Yes, the GFX were aweseome and I'm sure the leveldesign and the gameplay were top notch. ... But why again do we have to simulate and fetishize real war as close as possible?
I read an article about a scandinavian dad who had exact same discussion with his teenage boys. He made an agreement with them: They would travel to israel and talk with israeli and hamas veterans and visit the places where they hang out and tell their stories. After that, the boys could play whatever they chose to. ... Smart dad. I don't know how that turned out though.
I do get Unreal Tournament CTF, Tribes CTF, Xonotic CTF and Quake 3 Arena CTF. Bouncing around through space with teleporters, strange gaming levels and respawning instantly once your fragged and shooting bizar weapons that don't exist in the real world is all-out fun. And the direkt link to violence I don't see in both cases. ... I do get stress and anxiety issues when playing these games for an extended period of time though.
... I'm ready to enroll in part-time college and am torn hither and fro wether I should go to the local University (classic CS, bland curriculum, ugly wasted 80ies architecture campus, further away from where I work, PhD option, higher rank, Math 1 through 5 (scares the shit out of me)) or the local University of Applied Sciences (Media CS, neat Master Programs, easy curriculum, brand new posh campus with all the bells and whistles, more chicks on the faculty (so I hope :-) ), PhD option on the ropes (might change within the next few years), 'lesser' rank, Math 1 through 3 (scary too, but manageable)).
Mind you, aside from semester fees of ~280 Euros these options I'm toying with are free (as in beer) and those fees actually are a bargain because as an enrolled student you get public transport for free in the entire state (there actually is a little problem with students enrolling just for the benefits alone).
Bottom line:
It sucks to be a student in the US.
C++ done right is do vastly different from C that debating which language is better is beyond silly. This goes threefold if you look at C++14 programmed with the GSL - the right way to do C++ these days.
In a nutshell C is assembler 2.0 and C++ is assembler 3.0. C++ has massive inner api advantages over C that C tries to compensate for with libs such as boost.
Yet build with C++ without knowing what you are doing and of course you'll produce bad software. With C you simply won't get anywhere.
Wether you use one or the other these days is often a matter of personal preference more than anything else. C++ has massive ready-made power with the responsibilty that comes with it. Any programmer looking at these PLs will see the difference and adapt his style of coding accordingly.
The housing bubble has moved to an education bubble.
He said 8 years before that the dotcom bubble had moved to a real-estate bubble. ...
To his credit, he's actually paying people to leave college and start companies.
I second that.
Just yesterday I nearly got run over on my bike by some SUV driver who was texting/dialing while driving.
Smartphones and texting while driving kill people. The problem is so obvious, that carriers had renowned filmmaker Werner Herzog do a freely available documentary on the problem a few years back to keep people from doing this ---> https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Watch it and tell your friends to do that too. It's a must.
Captain Obvious strikes again.
The best dev environment for me is the one I have under my control.
Pluspoints if I can instance live on my local without a hitch due to neat scripts, vagrant or whatnot.
You're welcome.
We have to face the plain and simple truth: There is public and there is private.
Point in case: I recently (again) met a woman who is into Gangbang and porn ( you'd be surprised how many women are). She's smart, independant, witty, well-mannered, can talk for hours about "God and the World" as we say in Germany. She's my age and looks gorgeous. And she fucks like a pornstar (no surprise here) and also loves to have a few guys on her all at once and no problem with indulging in that. This is the type of woman I have the deepest respect and admiration for. I even asked her if she has a friend from her camp, because I'm currently single and would like to have a sweetheart of her format (she's married ... bummer ...).
Yet there is no doubt that people like her (and me) have to be careful about being to outspoken and unphased when talking about our sexlives. Were I am comfortable and have crossed a few inner borders on my perspective on sex, I have to be aware that most people around me haven't and are still squarely in the "average frustrated" camp - men and women alike. I told her that I have the deepest respect and admiration for women "who know how to spread their legs, enjoy herself and f*ck the living daylights out of a good man ... or a few as the case may be" and got a very positive reaction from her. But mentioning this in public we both agreed, would be bound to get the exact opposite reaction. She'd be slutshamed (the most careful woman with condoms ever) and I would be called a misogynist, despite being the exact opposite ... I usually give women a surplus of respect and sometimes more than they deserve.
Bottom line:
I can totally understand if a project lead wants to keep his project clean of these errrm " unconventional" things. We all live in a culture and have to have some groundrules we follow. Keeping an unusual sexlife to yourself or only with people whom it concerns is a huge part of that.
My 2 eurocents.