The problem is, any start IT person knows their days are numbered since 95% of their day to day duties are completely automated in a could data center. Cloud deployments are quickly making the entire idea of a private physical data center laughable for most uses.
If I have a new app to deploy that's going to need 5 servers I could ask IT to find me U10 of rack space, call the usual suppliers to give us some bloated quote for server hardware, have the IT guys rack it all up, plug it in, try and fail to get all the required software installed and configured properly, etc.
Or...I could click "deploy" and watch all that and much, much more happen in about a minute.
As a release manager for a software development team, I'm strongly looking forward to never having to deal with painfully slow, fat fingered, over compensated IT departments ever again. It can't come soon enough. The question isn't to cloud or not to cloud, the question is which cloud.
Who cares about Google's Apps, beyond a functional example of an application deployed to their cloud?
We're not talking about using Google's Apps, rather we're talking about deploying our OWN custom applications. We're talking about transforming the idea of a physical data center to a virtual one.
If I need 5 servers to run my application I could find U10 of rack space in a data center somewhere, buy a bunch of hardware, rack it in, cable it up, install the OS, prereqs, etc.
Or...I could click "deploy" and have all of that happen in 60 seconds. Including live, hot failover DR for both data and systems, CDN, etc. And doing it for literally pennies compared to traditional datacenter deployment. What's not to love? (unless you're a sys admin or other IT support drone).
Cloud deployments are a complete no-brainer for nearly every application. The only exception at this point (and it won't be for long) are applications in PCI scope.
We're looking very seriously at the cloud for all new deployments and likely catching a few existing systems.
Not generic things like email or whatever, but for our own company applications. Cost is a major consideration sure, but honestly the biggest win I'm looking for is being able to specify a deployment in code (XML, whatever) and actually see it executed correctly and timely. The ability to deploy an entire infrastructure with the same ease we currently have of typing "make all" to compile.
Server allocations, network ACL settings, storage needs, all of it. All the stuff that currently takes 3-5 teams (DB operations, Sysadmins, Network Operations, etc, etc) a few weeks or months to do, screw up, screw up again, redo thrice, etc. None of this is particularly fancy or new, it's the same basic requests every time. Yet IT can never, ever deploy anything quickly, accurately, or efficiently.
And it's not just this company's IT. It's most every company's IT department. I know, I know, there's a bazillion reasons why this or that can't happen in whatever way, etc. I don't give a flying fuck about the excuses, by bosses sure as hell don't, at the end of the day NOT ONE is ever valid.
The cloud promises to replace all that repetitive deployment headache with the ability to simply specify what we need in a tidy little XML file and press Go. We're talking about taking a part of our SDLC that previously took weeks or months and doing it in seconds. Accurately. Reliably. Repetitively. Without complaints. Without obstacles. Without lost email. Without fat fingers.
That is why your IT department should be incredibly scared of the cloud. Because you've been doing a shit job for decades and now someone has finally figured out how to literally replace yall with 5 lines of script code.
This isn't a question of outsourcing ("internal" clouds are just fine), this is a question of obsolescence. Most of the human hands in a typical IT department are going to have all the modern relevance of a horse and buggy repairman.
We're to the point that we've had 2 disasters with major nuclear material contamination. One was a reactor that wouldn't have been certified in the rest of the world and lacked a containment dome, the other was basically one of the oldest operational plants in the world, hit by a huge natural disaster that killed far more people than what the nuclear relases are going to.
The point is two fold:
1 - They both failed because of bad management decisions, not technology.
2 - Even a single meltdown in the entire history of the human race is 1 too many. We've had four to date.
It doesn't matter in hindsight if one should have had a containment dome, others should have had larger tsunami walls, redundant flood proof power, etc, etc. Everyone involved with these plants KNEW all that before they laid the first brick. Yet they still fucked them up.
Humans are simply not capable of managing technology with such massive costs of failure. We fail at everything, it's in our nature, it's how we learn and advance. Yet nuclear is something we simply can not fail at, even once, even a little bit, the consequences are simply far too massive.
Yet because humans are managing it...we know it's going to fail. It doesn't matter the design, it doesn't matter the precautions, it doesn't matter the oversight. At the end of the day we're still humans and what we do, 100% of the time, is fail. Sooner or later, we fail at absolutely everything. Failing (and, eventually, learning from it) is how we advance, it is at the very core of what it is to be human.
Nuclear simply is not compatible with the human race.
Fukushima was a very old design that shouldn't have even still been running
Like I said, the problem is the management not the technology.
and it had a more or less worst-case disaster where the damage was no where comparable to "effectively wiping a large cities right off the map"
Will humans be able to safely live within 50 miles of Fukushimaj ever again, effectively? No, they won't.
Fact: EVERY SINGLE nuclear disaster the world has had so far, has wiped a large city off the map.
Any new nuclear plant built would be built to modern safety standards which prevent such disasters from being possible
No they won't. They could, sure. But they won't.
How do I know this to be unquestionable fact? Simple: We've known the dangers of nuclear and yet still cut corners, get lazy, and get stupid. Every, Single, Time.
Humans, as a species, are fundamentally incapable of properly handling dangers this great. We will always cut corners, get lazy, get stupid, and otherwise mismanage technology. We do this with everything we touch. The only difference is with nuclear when something goes wrong it isn't a few oil covered birds washing up on a beach, it's entire cities rendered uninhabitable forever and radioactive contamination spreading across every last inch of the planet. -That last statement refers to the fact Chernobyl particles have been found spread out across every last inch of the planet and Fukushima isn't far behind.
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Sooner or later humans botch everything they touch. That's really just fine when botching something has a reasonably localized effect. That's a large part of how we learn and improve.
But when botching something has insanely large and widespread effects the cost of botching it even a single time is just not reasonable. Especially since, as humans, we have to botch it many times before we make any progress. It's the case with nuclear. It's the case with major banks. It's the case with GMO foods.
These are technologies that the human race simply is not responsible enough to handle under any conditions whatsoever. Doing so is no different then handing a loaded gun to a baby and trusting it to handle it safely.
If you think cloud deployments have anything to do with spreadsheets and email, you really haven't the slightest clue what you're talking about.
Especially if you're doing engineering work, leveraging cloud resources makes drastically more sense then trying to stuff a laptop with more computing power. If you're doing anything much beyond trivial, you'll quickly outgrow the most powerful laptops. It's a dead end. In stark contrast you'll never outgrow the cloud. And that's all before we even start talking about ease of deployment, procurement costs, or operational costs.
1) The near complete majority of applications that would run in a data center don't need specialized hardware, etc.
2) Even if it does, it can live in a datacenter. There is nothing about cloud deployments that precludes placing custom hardware on site.
3) If John Doe doing spreadsheets is your idea of cloud deployments, you seriously haven't the slightest clue what the cloud is.
Yes, a machine at your desk is needed, but it increasingly makes less and less sense to try and make it a massively powerful machine with the idea that you'll run your work locally. Not when you can so easily tap into such massively more powerful computing power for a single digit fraction of the cost. Especially for engineering. It isn't simply about the cost, it really does give you access to power that you simply can't get at your desk at any price. And it's a hell of a lot easier to tap into the cloud then it ever was, is, or will be to deploy your own physical servers.
More then anything else, it's this all-too-common story that's driving me to strongly advocate cloud computing. Massive cost savings is just as nice side effect and an easy way to sell it to the suits.
Hardware needs, network ACLs, software dependencies, licenses, all get defined in a pretty little xml file that just magically happens.
No meetings upon meetings, endless reviews and approvals, no dumbed down versions for finance to wrap their tiny little brains around, no fat fingered sysadmins who can't ever manage to correctly open a single TCP port much less anything else.
Just one little deployment descriptor and magically the robots build it for me. Instantly. Perfectly. Exactly the way I asked for. With no back talk.
Honestly, nuke batteries just have bad idea written all over them.
Here's the problem with nuclear in a nutshell:
In theory it can be perfectly safe and extremely efficient.
In practice it is nothing but a ticking time bomb easily capable of effectively wiping a large cities right off the map with additional affects world wide. And it's the poster child for inefficient.
A battery of nukes? Again, in theory it could be even safer and more efficient...in practice however, it's just massively compounding the dangers. Remember, Fukushima was a battery of 6 reactors. A problem in one reactor will hamper or completely prevent attending to issues with other reactors, either physically, available man power, or just attention.
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Humans have proven, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that we as a species simply are not capable of safely handling nuclear. It's not the science we lack. It's not the tech. It's the management.
While I will admit there might be some bad plants that needed to be shut down and that some changes needed to happen, was it necessary to shut all of them down at the same time?
Yes, without question.
Those in charge of managing the safety of those plants have been proven beyond any shadow of a doubt, completely incompetent, willfully negligent, and incredibly deceitful.
There is simply no legitimate reason to trust anything anyone claims in the affirmative about the fitness and safety of any plant in Japan (or much of the world, honestly). So yes, the only prudent...no, the only sane decision is to shut them all down until such time that a trustworthy source can testify to their safety and fitness. Of course when we're talking about so much money and power corrupting everyone anywhere near nuclear energy, such a time will probably never exist.
The same is just as true for new thorium reactors. Sure, the spin is that they are 100% filled with rainbows and fairies and strawberry shortcake, but what possible reason would any sane person have to believe a word of it, coming as it does from the same mouths that brought us the current world wide nuclear mess...promised with the same exact nonsense? It really doesn't matter if the actual reality of thorium lives up to the hype. The industry has burned the people of the world far too much with a century of complete bullshit. Standing on top of that mound of fertilizer and shouting, "But this time we're actually telling the truth, trust us!", just isn't going to cut it.
This probably explains why so few people working in software engineering have a computer science degree and those that do typically aren't very good software engineers. Most real world software engineering really has very little to do with math or science. It's much more akin to digital carpentry.
Though it would make developing on proprietary systems significantly more painful than Free/Open systems like Linux, so that would make some people around here very happy...
I don't know about that... You're assuming Linux would exist after something like this.
Consider the fact Linux along with more or less every project ever written under the GNU flag would ALL be in similar violation. It is at the very core of what most all FOSS projects are all about: Free reimplementations of preparatory APIs.
Sure, there is lots of innovation in the FOSS world, but the other 99.9% is reinventing other people's wheels be it reimplementation of compilers, library APIs, tool APIs, UIs, etc. Take that away and there is effectively no FOSS left on the planet. The entire FOSS movement would need to start over from byte 0.
When women are just as smart, knowledgeable, and skilled as any man...AND can additionally leverage their sex appeal, the combination in many fields can surpass what a typical man can offer. They can be far more effective (then men) by bringing both intellect and superficial advantages.
When it comes to engineering however, especially software engineering, they can't leverage their sex appeal for much of anything. Communication is mostly over email and IM, they don't even get much chance to use their voice much less leverage their looks. Compared to most any other field it ties one arm behind their back.
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Men, even very attractive men, aren't accustom to being able to leverage sex appeal to their advantage. This especially is true for the introverts commonly attracted to engineering. So it doesn't feel like they're losing anything, much the opposite as it feels like the playing field is more even as the advantage of sex appeal is taken away from everyone else.
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The feminist movement likes to go on about how they are fighting for women to be compared to men by intellect alone, but the truth of the matter is that wish comes true when it comes to software engineering. The results don't show either sex as intellectually superior...but they do show that women aren't really interested in a fair comparison. They want to leverage both their intellect and their feminine wiles, because they know it gives them an advantage over men who largely must rely only on their intellect.
Women aren't found in engineering because men keep them out. The vast majority of male engineers are dieing to get more eye candy around the office. No, women aren't found in engineering because women don't want to go into engineering. They know as women they are much, much more powerful in virtually any other field.
"One of two things. You could change the gear to neutral. There's a chance it will destroy your gearbox but it's better than crashing."
I'll assume you mean destroy the engine, not the gearbox.
Automatic transmissions don't even mesh/unmesh gears, there's nothing to strip. Manual transmissions do, however even modern under power you're going to have a very difficult time shifting to neutral w/o the clutch... But if you do manage it, there's still practically no chance of any real gear box damage.
The engine free revving away into the red however...
Sure they can. But on the whole humans are going to act like humans. Male humans are going to act like male humans. Female humans are going to act like female humans. And male humans are going to interact with female humans like male humans tend to interact with female humans.
On the whole of course. There are always exceptions. But generally speaking a male human is rather more likely to act like a male human then a female squid. Biology, formed by evolution, really is responsible the fast majority of our behavior, including everything people like to believe is their own individual cognitive thinking.
Perhaps ironically, the more someone believes they are actually in real, cognitive control of their own thinking (you know, the "independent thinkers") the more their raw, subconscious instincts control them. This is because their willful, arrogant ignorance of their own mental processes means they will never question their own thinking. They will never question where a thought comes from.
These are also the people who are most easily influenced (by media, by memes, by their peer groups, by everything) since they automatically credit themselves with any ideas implanted into their brain by other sources. Now they have ownership of the idea...they have a personal, emotional connection with the idea that they like to drink Coke, or whatever. They like Coke because they like Coke, none of the marking Coke does has ever had the slightest bit of influence on their thinking.
"Its a throwback to the times when every program used to include its own graphics, sound, and printer drivers. We moved away from those times for a very good reason."
There's a reason why VLC can play basically anything, on any system, far better and more reliably then anything else on the planet. And it sure as hell isn't because they're leveraging whatever maze of codec hell happens to be lying around a user's system.
System codecs were a nice idea in theory that never delivered in practice. Too many bad codecs included with every random software application that all register themselves to try and be the first priority codec for every format for the entire system... Did I mention there's no sane way for users to adjust codec priority order? The best of tools are 3rd party and at best can be described as incredibly cryptic. And they each are trying to reinvent that wheel because the ones actually shipped with the base OS are themselves, bad.
Mozilla using system codes would increase crash reports 100 fold overnight, as well as security breaches, 99.9% of which would have nothing to do with Mozilla but damned if the users know or care about the distinction, and there wouldn't be a damned thing Mozilla could do to fix it if they wanted to.
In the 1940s it ran at 25 baud. Telex has been around since the 1920s, but I can't say off hand how fast it ran back then.
In the early 90s I used to connect to Bank of America with my Apple ][e and use their "online banking" service, which was really just an old telex system. 110 baud, UPPERCASE ONLY, 40 CHARACTERS PER LINE, NO CURSOR POSITIONING. They marketed it for computer users to dial in like it was a BBS, but really it was built for hard terminals (telex).
"Imagine waiting a half second for each character of the (text) file you requested to appear on your screen. Those were the days of the 2400 baud modems, which were in fact that slow."
What utter crap.
2,400 baud is 2,400 bits per second...even with overhead that's 240 characters per second, a far cry from 0.5 characters per second you claim. Not even the 300/1200 Apple modem I started with was that slow. Hell, telex of the 1940s was still five times faster then your claim of half a second.
"He [Obama] did the absolute best he could do to diminish the effect of the law..."
Obama didn't object to the indefinite detention clauses at all, given how the reason it was in the bill in the first place was because the White House asked for it to be included. The only objections Obama had were about limiting the discretion of the White House in choosing when and how to detain someone indefinitely. The revised language, passed and signed into law, EXPANDS the president's power by giving him that discretion...it does NOTHING to "diminish" the clause at all.
When it comes to matters of spying on and arresting US citizens without oversight, trial, or recourse, the Obama Administration has started from where Bush left off and hit the ground running hard.
The reality is Obama is a hard-right neo-con who's done a fantastic job of fooling the dirty hippie masses that he's a liberal. He's done a 180 on everything he promised (except his promise to greatly expand the war in Afghanistan...that promise, sadly, he has kept).
It's the medium - Re:It's the distribution channel
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You Will Never Kill Piracy
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I'd much more blame the "indestructible" CD then piracy. A LOT of the industry's revenue, especially the boom that came with CDs, was people re-buying music they already owned on yet-another-format.
Vinyl wasn't useful in cars (boom of 8 track), 8 track wasn't that useful walking around and self-destructed over time (boom of cassette tape and Sony's Walkman), all of them wore out over time and/or broke easily from being dropped.
Enter the CD... Never wares out, much more durable, as portable as most anyone would ever need, and for 99% of people sounds better then anything that came before. BOOM, there's a HUGE spike in CD sales as everyone is re-buying everything they ever wanted to keep on CD (along with new music sales, of course).
Enter digital...
It's everything the CD was and then some. But there's a problem... Unlike every other format change in the history of recorded music, no one is going to re-buy music they already have on CD as digital. They're just going to rip their own CDs. As a result the industry is left with only new music sales...
It isn't about piracy - It's about the Music Industry losing the ability to re-sell you the same music over, and over, and over. It's about the Music Industry's ever expanding back catalog no longer translating to automatic ever-expanding re-sales. The Music Industry spent a hell of a lot of money to make copyright effectively never-ending, explicitly to protect that re-selling revenue stream...and now the carpet has been yanked out from under them.
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That huge drop in sales? That's called market saturation. Most everyone that wanted a Beatles or Stones recording already owns it...on a format they will effectively never replace again.
It's about the Music Industry thinking, wrongly, that they were in the business of selling toothpaste. Then waking up one day to realize they really are selling cast iron frying pans. You'll always need to buy more toothpaste...but you'll never need to buy another cast iron frying pan.
Never mind the fact that the reason your employer offers such benefits is largely because they must compete against companies that offer similar or better benefits...which only offer them because a union in that other shop demanded them.
The existence of unions has drastically improved the benefits, security, and quality of life of all workers in all fields, reguardless if they are unionized or not. The workers rights and benefits unions fight for extend far, far beyond just the workers and shops that are unionized.
Sure, if we ignore the substantial cut for the middle man (GameStop, etc) selling the used game.
A used game for $20 didn't put $20 in some other gamer's pocket, more like $5, maybe $10. Just one more cycle and it's $1.25 - $5. That's not a whole lot to filter back up to a real game company and we've only cycled twice.
Your argument is like saying buying a $20 concert ticket from a scalper for $100 puts money into the artist's pocket, because the scalper will use the windfall to buy more tickets. In both cases some of the money cycles back around...but only after a significant amount has been siphoned out of the system entirely.
CS teaches you how to build something that works correctly. CS doesn't have much to say when things don't work as expected.
If you can't debug, really, really well, then you can't be an engineer. That your own programs won't work right (and you can't fix them) is only part of it; Debugging causes you to learn what does or does not work in the real world, ivory tower CS solution be dammed. With that knowledge and understanding, you'll better engineer your next program taking that into account.
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The problem is, any start IT person knows their days are numbered since 95% of their day to day duties are completely automated in a could data center. Cloud deployments are quickly making the entire idea of a private physical data center laughable for most uses.
If I have a new app to deploy that's going to need 5 servers I could ask IT to find me U10 of rack space, call the usual suppliers to give us some bloated quote for server hardware, have the IT guys rack it all up, plug it in, try and fail to get all the required software installed and configured properly, etc.
Or...I could click "deploy" and watch all that and much, much more happen in about a minute.
As a release manager for a software development team, I'm strongly looking forward to never having to deal with painfully slow, fat fingered, over compensated IT departments ever again. It can't come soon enough. The question isn't to cloud or not to cloud, the question is which cloud.
Who cares about Google's Apps, beyond a functional example of an application deployed to their cloud?
We're not talking about using Google's Apps, rather we're talking about deploying our OWN custom applications. We're talking about transforming the idea of a physical data center to a virtual one.
If I need 5 servers to run my application I could find U10 of rack space in a data center somewhere, buy a bunch of hardware, rack it in, cable it up, install the OS, prereqs, etc.
Or...I could click "deploy" and have all of that happen in 60 seconds. Including live, hot failover DR for both data and systems, CDN, etc. And doing it for literally pennies compared to traditional datacenter deployment. What's not to love? (unless you're a sys admin or other IT support drone).
Cloud deployments are a complete no-brainer for nearly every application. The only exception at this point (and it won't be for long) are applications in PCI scope.
We're looking very seriously at the cloud for all new deployments and likely catching a few existing systems.
Not generic things like email or whatever, but for our own company applications. Cost is a major consideration sure, but honestly the biggest win I'm looking for is being able to specify a deployment in code (XML, whatever) and actually see it executed correctly and timely. The ability to deploy an entire infrastructure with the same ease we currently have of typing "make all" to compile.
Server allocations, network ACL settings, storage needs, all of it. All the stuff that currently takes 3-5 teams (DB operations, Sysadmins, Network Operations, etc, etc) a few weeks or months to do, screw up, screw up again, redo thrice, etc. None of this is particularly fancy or new, it's the same basic requests every time. Yet IT can never, ever deploy anything quickly, accurately, or efficiently.
And it's not just this company's IT. It's most every company's IT department. I know, I know, there's a bazillion reasons why this or that can't happen in whatever way, etc. I don't give a flying fuck about the excuses, by bosses sure as hell don't, at the end of the day NOT ONE is ever valid.
The cloud promises to replace all that repetitive deployment headache with the ability to simply specify what we need in a tidy little XML file and press Go. We're talking about taking a part of our SDLC that previously took weeks or months and doing it in seconds. Accurately. Reliably. Repetitively. Without complaints. Without obstacles. Without lost email. Without fat fingers.
That is why your IT department should be incredibly scared of the cloud. Because you've been doing a shit job for decades and now someone has finally figured out how to literally replace yall with 5 lines of script code.
This isn't a question of outsourcing ("internal" clouds are just fine), this is a question of obsolescence. Most of the human hands in a typical IT department are going to have all the modern relevance of a horse and buggy repairman.
The same could be said for Megaupload's entire site...
The point is two fold:
1 - They both failed because of bad management decisions, not technology.
2 - Even a single meltdown in the entire history of the human race is 1 too many. We've had four to date.
It doesn't matter in hindsight if one should have had a containment dome, others should have had larger tsunami walls, redundant flood proof power, etc, etc. Everyone involved with these plants KNEW all that before they laid the first brick. Yet they still fucked them up.
Humans are simply not capable of managing technology with such massive costs of failure. We fail at everything, it's in our nature, it's how we learn and advance. Yet nuclear is something we simply can not fail at, even once, even a little bit, the consequences are simply far too massive.
Yet because humans are managing it...we know it's going to fail. It doesn't matter the design, it doesn't matter the precautions, it doesn't matter the oversight. At the end of the day we're still humans and what we do, 100% of the time, is fail. Sooner or later, we fail at absolutely everything. Failing (and, eventually, learning from it) is how we advance, it is at the very core of what it is to be human.
Nuclear simply is not compatible with the human race.
Like I said, the problem is the management not the technology.
Will humans be able to safely live within 50 miles of Fukushimaj ever again, effectively? No, they won't.
Fact: EVERY SINGLE nuclear disaster the world has had so far, has wiped a large city off the map.
No they won't. They could, sure. But they won't.
How do I know this to be unquestionable fact? Simple: We've known the dangers of nuclear and yet still cut corners, get lazy, and get stupid. Every, Single, Time.
Humans, as a species, are fundamentally incapable of properly handling dangers this great. We will always cut corners, get lazy, get stupid, and otherwise mismanage technology. We do this with everything we touch. The only difference is with nuclear when something goes wrong it isn't a few oil covered birds washing up on a beach, it's entire cities rendered uninhabitable forever and radioactive contamination spreading across every last inch of the planet. -That last statement refers to the fact Chernobyl particles have been found spread out across every last inch of the planet and Fukushima isn't far behind.
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Sooner or later humans botch everything they touch. That's really just fine when botching something has a reasonably localized effect. That's a large part of how we learn and improve.
But when botching something has insanely large and widespread effects the cost of botching it even a single time is just not reasonable. Especially since, as humans, we have to botch it many times before we make any progress. It's the case with nuclear. It's the case with major banks. It's the case with GMO foods.
These are technologies that the human race simply is not responsible enough to handle under any conditions whatsoever. Doing so is no different then handing a loaded gun to a baby and trusting it to handle it safely.
It's the (mis)management, stupid.
If you think cloud deployments have anything to do with spreadsheets and email, you really haven't the slightest clue what you're talking about.
Especially if you're doing engineering work, leveraging cloud resources makes drastically more sense then trying to stuff a laptop with more computing power. If you're doing anything much beyond trivial, you'll quickly outgrow the most powerful laptops. It's a dead end. In stark contrast you'll never outgrow the cloud. And that's all before we even start talking about ease of deployment, procurement costs, or operational costs.
1) The near complete majority of applications that would run in a data center don't need specialized hardware, etc.
2) Even if it does, it can live in a datacenter. There is nothing about cloud deployments that precludes placing custom hardware on site.
3) If John Doe doing spreadsheets is your idea of cloud deployments, you seriously haven't the slightest clue what the cloud is.
Yes, a machine at your desk is needed, but it increasingly makes less and less sense to try and make it a massively powerful machine with the idea that you'll run your work locally. Not when you can so easily tap into such massively more powerful computing power for a single digit fraction of the cost. Especially for engineering. It isn't simply about the cost, it really does give you access to power that you simply can't get at your desk at any price. And it's a hell of a lot easier to tap into the cloud then it ever was, is, or will be to deploy your own physical servers.
More then anything else, it's this all-too-common story that's driving me to strongly advocate cloud computing. Massive cost savings is just as nice side effect and an easy way to sell it to the suits.
Hardware needs, network ACLs, software dependencies, licenses, all get defined in a pretty little xml file that just magically happens.
No meetings upon meetings, endless reviews and approvals, no dumbed down versions for finance to wrap their tiny little brains around, no fat fingered sysadmins who can't ever manage to correctly open a single TCP port much less anything else.
Just one little deployment descriptor and magically the robots build it for me. Instantly. Perfectly. Exactly the way I asked for. With no back talk.
Honestly, nuke batteries just have bad idea written all over them.
Here's the problem with nuclear in a nutshell:
A battery of nukes? Again, in theory it could be even safer and more efficient...in practice however, it's just massively compounding the dangers. Remember, Fukushima was a battery of 6 reactors. A problem in one reactor will hamper or completely prevent attending to issues with other reactors, either physically, available man power, or just attention.
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Humans have proven, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that we as a species simply are not capable of safely handling nuclear. It's not the science we lack. It's not the tech. It's the management.
Yes, without question.
Those in charge of managing the safety of those plants have been proven beyond any shadow of a doubt, completely incompetent, willfully negligent, and incredibly deceitful.
There is simply no legitimate reason to trust anything anyone claims in the affirmative about the fitness and safety of any plant in Japan (or much of the world, honestly). So yes, the only prudent...no, the only sane decision is to shut them all down until such time that a trustworthy source can testify to their safety and fitness. Of course when we're talking about so much money and power corrupting everyone anywhere near nuclear energy, such a time will probably never exist.
The same is just as true for new thorium reactors. Sure, the spin is that they are 100% filled with rainbows and fairies and strawberry shortcake, but what possible reason would any sane person have to believe a word of it, coming as it does from the same mouths that brought us the current world wide nuclear mess...promised with the same exact nonsense? It really doesn't matter if the actual reality of thorium lives up to the hype. The industry has burned the people of the world far too much with a century of complete bullshit. Standing on top of that mound of fertilizer and shouting, "But this time we're actually telling the truth, trust us!", just isn't going to cut it.
Huh? The entire reason Python exists at all is because a lot of people care a great deal about syntax.
This probably explains why so few people working in software engineering have a computer science degree and those that do typically aren't very good software engineers. Most real world software engineering really has very little to do with math or science. It's much more akin to digital carpentry.
I don't know about that... You're assuming Linux would exist after something like this.
Consider the fact Linux along with more or less every project ever written under the GNU flag would ALL be in similar violation. It is at the very core of what most all FOSS projects are all about: Free reimplementations of preparatory APIs.
Sure, there is lots of innovation in the FOSS world, but the other 99.9% is reinventing other people's wheels be it reimplementation of compilers, library APIs, tool APIs, UIs, etc. Take that away and there is effectively no FOSS left on the planet. The entire FOSS movement would need to start over from byte 0.
When women are just as smart, knowledgeable, and skilled as any man...AND can additionally leverage their sex appeal, the combination in many fields can surpass what a typical man can offer. They can be far more effective (then men) by bringing both intellect and superficial advantages.
When it comes to engineering however, especially software engineering, they can't leverage their sex appeal for much of anything. Communication is mostly over email and IM, they don't even get much chance to use their voice much less leverage their looks. Compared to most any other field it ties one arm behind their back.
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Men, even very attractive men, aren't accustom to being able to leverage sex appeal to their advantage. This especially is true for the introverts commonly attracted to engineering. So it doesn't feel like they're losing anything, much the opposite as it feels like the playing field is more even as the advantage of sex appeal is taken away from everyone else.
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The feminist movement likes to go on about how they are fighting for women to be compared to men by intellect alone, but the truth of the matter is that wish comes true when it comes to software engineering. The results don't show either sex as intellectually superior...but they do show that women aren't really interested in a fair comparison. They want to leverage both their intellect and their feminine wiles, because they know it gives them an advantage over men who largely must rely only on their intellect.
Women aren't found in engineering because men keep them out. The vast majority of male engineers are dieing to get more eye candy around the office. No, women aren't found in engineering because women don't want to go into engineering. They know as women they are much, much more powerful in virtually any other field.
"One of two things. You could change the gear to neutral. There's a chance it will destroy your gearbox but it's better than crashing."
I'll assume you mean destroy the engine, not the gearbox.
Automatic transmissions don't even mesh/unmesh gears, there's nothing to strip. Manual transmissions do, however even modern under power you're going to have a very difficult time shifting to neutral w/o the clutch... But if you do manage it, there's still practically no chance of any real gear box damage.
The engine free revving away into the red however...
Sure they can. But on the whole humans are going to act like humans. Male humans are going to act like male humans. Female humans are going to act like female humans. And male humans are going to interact with female humans like male humans tend to interact with female humans.
On the whole of course. There are always exceptions. But generally speaking a male human is rather more likely to act like a male human then a female squid. Biology, formed by evolution, really is responsible the fast majority of our behavior, including everything people like to believe is their own individual cognitive thinking.
Perhaps ironically, the more someone believes they are actually in real, cognitive control of their own thinking (you know, the "independent thinkers") the more their raw, subconscious instincts control them. This is because their willful, arrogant ignorance of their own mental processes means they will never question their own thinking. They will never question where a thought comes from.
These are also the people who are most easily influenced (by media, by memes, by their peer groups, by everything) since they automatically credit themselves with any ideas implanted into their brain by other sources. Now they have ownership of the idea...they have a personal, emotional connection with the idea that they like to drink Coke, or whatever. They like Coke because they like Coke, none of the marking Coke does has ever had the slightest bit of influence on their thinking.
"Its a throwback to the times when every program used to include its own graphics, sound, and printer drivers. We moved away from those times for a very good reason."
There's a reason why VLC can play basically anything, on any system, far better and more reliably then anything else on the planet. And it sure as hell isn't because they're leveraging whatever maze of codec hell happens to be lying around a user's system.
System codecs were a nice idea in theory that never delivered in practice. Too many bad codecs included with every random software application that all register themselves to try and be the first priority codec for every format for the entire system... Did I mention there's no sane way for users to adjust codec priority order? The best of tools are 3rd party and at best can be described as incredibly cryptic. And they each are trying to reinvent that wheel because the ones actually shipped with the base OS are themselves, bad.
Mozilla using system codes would increase crash reports 100 fold overnight, as well as security breaches, 99.9% of which would have nothing to do with Mozilla but damned if the users know or care about the distinction, and there wouldn't be a damned thing Mozilla could do to fix it if they wanted to.
In the 70s-90s (yes, 90s...) it ran at 110 baud.
In the 1940s it ran at 25 baud. Telex has been around since the 1920s, but I can't say off hand how fast it ran back then.
In the early 90s I used to connect to Bank of America with my Apple ][e and use their "online banking" service, which was really just an old telex system. 110 baud, UPPERCASE ONLY, 40 CHARACTERS PER LINE, NO CURSOR POSITIONING. They marketed it for computer users to dial in like it was a BBS, but really it was built for hard terminals (telex).
"Imagine waiting a half second for each character of the (text) file you requested to appear on your screen. Those were the days of the 2400 baud modems, which were in fact that slow."
What utter crap.
2,400 baud is 2,400 bits per second...even with overhead that's 240 characters per second, a far cry from 0.5 characters per second you claim. Not even the 300/1200 Apple modem I started with was that slow. Hell, telex of the 1940s was still five times faster then your claim of half a second.
"He [Obama] did the absolute best he could do to diminish the effect of the law..."
Obama didn't object to the indefinite detention clauses at all, given how the reason it was in the bill in the first place was because the White House asked for it to be included. The only objections Obama had were about limiting the discretion of the White House in choosing when and how to detain someone indefinitely. The revised language, passed and signed into law, EXPANDS the president's power by giving him that discretion...it does NOTHING to "diminish" the clause at all.
When it comes to matters of spying on and arresting US citizens without oversight, trial, or recourse, the Obama Administration has started from where Bush left off and hit the ground running hard.
The reality is Obama is a hard-right neo-con who's done a fantastic job of fooling the dirty hippie masses that he's a liberal. He's done a 180 on everything he promised (except his promise to greatly expand the war in Afghanistan...that promise, sadly, he has kept).
http://www.popmatters.com/images/news_art/t/the-day-recorded-music-revenue-per-capita-feb-2011.jpg
I'd much more blame the "indestructible" CD then piracy. A LOT of the industry's revenue, especially the boom that came with CDs, was people re-buying music they already owned on yet-another-format.
Vinyl wasn't useful in cars (boom of 8 track), 8 track wasn't that useful walking around and self-destructed over time (boom of cassette tape and Sony's Walkman), all of them wore out over time and/or broke easily from being dropped.
Enter the CD... Never wares out, much more durable, as portable as most anyone would ever need, and for 99% of people sounds better then anything that came before. BOOM, there's a HUGE spike in CD sales as everyone is re-buying everything they ever wanted to keep on CD (along with new music sales, of course).
Enter digital...
It's everything the CD was and then some. But there's a problem... Unlike every other format change in the history of recorded music, no one is going to re-buy music they already have on CD as digital. They're just going to rip their own CDs. As a result the industry is left with only new music sales...
It isn't about piracy - It's about the Music Industry losing the ability to re-sell you the same music over, and over, and over. It's about the Music Industry's ever expanding back catalog no longer translating to automatic ever-expanding re-sales. The Music Industry spent a hell of a lot of money to make copyright effectively never-ending, explicitly to protect that re-selling revenue stream...and now the carpet has been yanked out from under them.
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That huge drop in sales? That's called market saturation. Most everyone that wanted a Beatles or Stones recording already owns it...on a format they will effectively never replace again.
It's about the Music Industry thinking, wrongly, that they were in the business of selling toothpaste. Then waking up one day to realize they really are selling cast iron frying pans. You'll always need to buy more toothpaste...but you'll never need to buy another cast iron frying pan.
Never mind the fact that the reason your employer offers such benefits is largely because they must compete against companies that offer similar or better benefits...which only offer them because a union in that other shop demanded them.
The existence of unions has drastically improved the benefits, security, and quality of life of all workers in all fields, reguardless if they are unionized or not. The workers rights and benefits unions fight for extend far, far beyond just the workers and shops that are unionized.
Sure, if we ignore the substantial cut for the middle man (GameStop, etc) selling the used game.
A used game for $20 didn't put $20 in some other gamer's pocket, more like $5, maybe $10. Just one more cycle and it's $1.25 - $5. That's not a whole lot to filter back up to a real game company and we've only cycled twice.
Your argument is like saying buying a $20 concert ticket from a scalper for $100 puts money into the artist's pocket, because the scalper will use the windfall to buy more tickets. In both cases some of the money cycles back around...but only after a significant amount has been siphoned out of the system entirely.
CS teaches you how to build something that works correctly. CS doesn't have much to say when things don't work as expected.
If you can't debug, really, really well, then you can't be an engineer. That your own programs won't work right (and you can't fix them) is only part of it; Debugging causes you to learn what does or does not work in the real world, ivory tower CS solution be dammed. With that knowledge and understanding, you'll better engineer your next program taking that into account.