Here is the secret for staying in demand
on
Too Old To Code?
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· Score: 1
I'm soon 37 and a senior SW engineer in Silicon Valley. I make good money and is in high demand. I think the secret for getting here is to constantly jump for new technologies when they arrive. I was a C++ expert, but when Java arrived I decided it was the future, so I studied on my free time to become a Certified Java Programmer. I'll dump Java whenever I see something that is even cooler, but right now I don't see it coming anytime soon.
I would love to see Microsoft being split into several Baby Bills, since that would kill the company. Try to imagine yourself in a company with N * 10 millions lines of code (N is 3 or 6 depending on who you believe) and then suddenly 67% of all your co-workers quit to go to those other Baby Bills. How long do you think it would take them to get their act together? How long would it take to re-hire that many people to get the code under control again? Especially in Seattle... how many unemployed SW Engineers do you think are on the dole up there?
Wouldn't they insist on the.ue suffix, since the union's name in French must be Union Europeane (sp?) or something like that? Or have they finally come to their senses? No, that can't be true...
What if someone rewrites this virus so that instead of sending itself with the same name to everyone in the address book, it would make sure every email sent has a different title and different name of the attachment? The virus could perhaps open some Word documents on the infected hard drive and randomly select some sentences. This way it could even localize itself, so that it would use a swedish subject in Sweden, a thai subject in Thailand, and a portugese subject in Brazil.
The really bad thing with such a virus would be that prevention would be much harder. All you can say is: Don't open email attachments if they are sent to you from someone you know!
In a way I really hope someone writes such a virus, since it would make it so obvious what crap products Microsoft makes.
> Thirdly, yes, religion WILL have a bigger impact on the future. Science has no power in the moral and ethical realms. It may never have. It was never built to.
What on earth makes you believe that morals and ethics has any impact on the future? Laws are hardly created with them in mind. Money, politics and technology shapes it much more than ethics and morals.
The 10 commandments? Give us all modern people a break! It is so simple minded.
Experiment: A man with a knife aproaches you at night and asks in which direction that blond woman ran. What do you do? Follow one of the ten commandments and doom the woman by pointing in the direction she ran, or do you lie to the guy since that is the reasonable thing to do?
It is time to grow up and realize that the ten commandments were written for people that needed hard, cold and simple rules for how to behave.
All religinions collapses if they realize they are just one religion among others, which is why all others are dismissed as "cults" or "sects".
Banks mainstream books are also good
on
Inversions
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· Score: 1
I've read most of his works, and of the non-SF books I think "Wasp Factory" and "Canal Dreams" are the best ones. "Canal Dreams" is very much a rather straightforward action novel set in the near future.
Right now I'm reading "The Bridge", and it is very grandiose in its setting (the whole world is a never ending bridge), and it has a very good love story in it that sort of reminds me of the one in "The English Patient", but the parallell plots are quite confusing, and even though I haven't finished it yet, it feels like he wasted it by trying to be too clever.
Many of his books could easily be made into films, and it amazes me that it still has not happened.
> how do you explain the fact that projects like GCC, GDB, and the Linux kernel have not forked?
Could it be because noone *wanted* to fork them?
The situation for Java is *so* much different, since there is (A) someone that really really wants to fork Java (Microsoft), and (B) the company that wants to fork Java has the distribution channels to drown everything else.
Remember the battle between Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer? Microsoft wanted to split the browser market, if not totally own it. What they did was to create an incompatible product and then put it on all new machines on the planet? What happened? Now they own 65% of the market. An open source version of Netscape wouldn't have saved the situation, since what mattered was that someone else wanted an incompatible product and had the distribution channels to make it flood the world!
Re:the freedom to fork versus wrtie-once-run-anywh
on
RMS on Java and GPL
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· Score: 1
> WORA is a complete myth
Sheesh, how, then, is it that we have 200 000 lines of Java code at our company that runs just fine on Solaris, Windows and Linux? Not a single line of code needs to be changed between these environments?
What you are spreading is FUD. I dispise you for that!
Imagine yourself at a company with 27 millions of rather newly written lines of code, cranked out under rather tough deadlines. Suddenly 75% of all your co-workers quits (goes to any of the other three Baby Bills). How long do you think it would take to get your act together again? Where would you hire all the new people to maintain this code?
This would delay them for years and years, giving the Linux community lots of time to take over.
> Maybe java does not fit in with Microsoft's core technologies road map
The problem for Microsoft is that Java fits too well into their technology road map. This is because it is such a pine in the ass (!) to program in COM/DCOM/ActiveX/ATL or whatever their technology and tools are called now.
I don't think internet has cause a brain drain, but I believe it has created a money drain. My father has this great patent with which you can build infinitely large motors. But finding investors has been very hard, mainly because (my guess here) it isn't related to internet. Everyone and his grandmother believes that the fast bucks are best made in internet-related companies, so why bother spending money on hydraulics? http://www.henricson.se/hercules
I think he is wrong, to some extent, since he doesn't see the differences between Java and Linux.
Linux has a dictator in Linus. He is a good dictator, since he has proven over and over again to make good decisions that are good for us all.
Java has a dictator as well, Sun. If Sun made Java open source, the risk of fragmentation is high, because Microsoft wants nothing else than fragmentation of the Java movement, AND they have the channels to do it. They could just twist the Java source the way they want it to be (tied to Windows) and then ship it with every Windows box, which would make it turn up on perhaps 80% of all PC:s on this planet.
No one else wants that, but that is what would happen if they just made Java open source.
Linux doesn't have that risk hovering over its head, because MS is very unlikely to ever ship an incompatible Linux version to anyone.
What Sun should do is to give the current Java 2 spec to ISO for standardization. That would be fast and pretty painless. Microsoft cannot fiddle with ISO. They tried 2 years ago and failed. After that there would be a standard base which all Java environments had to adhere to, and from there on Sun could let people innovate, by making the rest of Java open source.
No, we've had this game in Sweden for some time, and it turns out that the person that seems most likely to win is often voted out first, because he/she is the worst competitor.
I suppose being a nice guy is a plus, because you don't really want to spend week after week with a bunch of people you don't like. Unless, of course, the price to the winner is so big that it is worth the time...
If you think the price difference of $500 is much, then you're either a Linux whiz, or value you own time very low, since it's a major mess installing Linux on a laptop.
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I'm soon 37 and a senior SW engineer in Silicon Valley. I make good money and is in high demand. I think the secret for getting here is to constantly jump for new technologies when they arrive. I was a C++ expert, but when Java arrived I decided it was the future, so I studied on my free time to become a Certified Java Programmer. I'll dump Java whenever I see something that is even cooler, but right now I don't see it coming anytime soon.
I would love to see Microsoft being split into several Baby Bills, since that would kill the company. Try to imagine yourself in a company with N * 10 millions lines of code (N is 3 or 6 depending on who you believe) and then suddenly 67% of all your co-workers quit to go to those other Baby Bills. How long do you think it would take them to get their act together? How long would it take to re-hire that many people to get the code under control again? Especially in Seattle... how many unemployed SW Engineers do you think are on the dole up there?
Wouldn't they insist on the .ue suffix, since the union's name in French must be Union Europeane (sp?) or something like that? Or have they finally come to their senses? No, that can't be true...
What if someone rewrites this virus so that instead of sending itself with the same name to everyone in the address book, it would make sure every email sent has a different title and different name of the attachment? The virus could perhaps open some Word documents on the infected hard drive and randomly select some sentences. This way it could even localize itself, so that it would use a swedish subject in Sweden, a thai subject in Thailand, and a portugese subject in Brazil.
The really bad thing with such a virus would be that prevention would be much harder. All you can say is: Don't open email attachments if they are sent to you from someone you know!
In a way I really hope someone writes such a virus, since it would make it so obvious what crap products Microsoft makes.
Mats
> Thirdly, yes, religion WILL have a bigger impact on the future. Science has no power in the moral and ethical realms. It may never have. It was never built to.
What on earth makes you believe that morals and ethics has any impact on the future? Laws are hardly created with them in mind. Money, politics and technology shapes it much more than ethics and morals.
The 10 commandments? Give us all modern people a break! It is so simple minded.
Experiment: A man with a knife aproaches you at night and asks in which direction that blond woman ran. What do you do? Follow one of the ten commandments and doom the woman by pointing in the direction she ran, or do you lie to the guy since that is the reasonable thing to do?
It is time to grow up and realize that the ten commandments were written for people that needed hard, cold and simple rules for how to behave.
All religinions collapses if they realize they are just one religion among others, which is why all others are dismissed as "cults" or "sects".
I've read most of his works, and of the non-SF books I think "Wasp Factory" and "Canal Dreams" are the best ones. "Canal Dreams" is very much a rather straightforward action novel set in the near future.
Right now I'm reading "The Bridge", and it is very grandiose in its setting (the whole world is a never ending bridge), and it has a very good love story in it that sort of reminds me of the one in "The English Patient", but the parallell plots are quite confusing, and even though I haven't finished it yet, it feels like he wasted it by trying to be too clever.
Many of his books could easily be made into films, and it amazes me that it still has not happened.
The best SF writer in Europe, I think.
It has crashed on this page since M11.
I run NT on a single processor PIII.
Try http://www.dn.se
Mozilla, from M11 and on, always blows up on
this daily swedish newspapers site.
> apt-get install
>
> Debian rocks.
I agree, but remember you need to "su" first.
M11, M12 and M13 all bombs on this major Swedish
daily papers home page: http://www.dn.se
I don't think I'll switch from Netdscape 4.7 to
Mozilla before it can handle it, unfortunately.
Anyone that knows why it bombs?
http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=distro2&aid=- 1
Sure, this is not science, but I think it tells us something.
> how do you explain the fact that projects like GCC, GDB, and the Linux kernel have not forked?
Could it be because noone *wanted* to fork them?
The situation for Java is *so* much different, since there is (A) someone that really really wants to fork Java (Microsoft), and (B) the company that wants to fork Java has the distribution channels to drown everything else.
Remember the battle between Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer? Microsoft wanted to split the browser market, if not totally own it. What they did was to create an incompatible product and then put it on all new machines on the planet? What happened? Now they own 65% of the market. An open source version of Netscape wouldn't have saved the situation, since what mattered was that someone else wanted an incompatible product and had the distribution channels to make it flood the world!
> WORA is a complete myth
Sheesh, how, then, is it that we have 200 000 lines of Java code at our company that runs just fine on Solaris, Windows and Linux? Not a single line of code needs to be changed between these environments?
What you are spreading is FUD. I dispise you for that!
Imagine yourself at a company with 27 millions of rather newly written lines of code, cranked out under rather tough deadlines. Suddenly 75% of all your co-workers quits (goes to any of the other three Baby Bills). How long do you think it would take to get your act together again? Where would you hire all the new people to maintain this code?
This would delay them for years and years, giving the Linux community lots of time to take over.
> Maybe java does not fit in with Microsoft's core technologies road map
The problem for Microsoft is that Java fits too well into their technology road map. This is because it is such a pine in the ass (!) to program in COM/DCOM/ActiveX/ATL or whatever their technology and tools are called now.
Sorry, it does not show up in Netscape 4.7 (NT).
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,32263, 00.html
They have removed it, yes?
I don't think internet has cause a brain drain, but I believe it has created a money drain. My father has this great patent with which you can build infinitely large motors. But finding investors has been very hard, mainly because (my guess here) it isn't related to internet. Everyone and his grandmother believes that the fast bucks are best made in internet-related companies, so why bother spending money on hydraulics?
http://www.henricson.se/hercules
I think he is wrong, to some extent, since he doesn't see the differences between Java and Linux.
Linux has a dictator in Linus. He is a good dictator, since he has proven over and over again to make good decisions that are good for us all.
Java has a dictator as well, Sun. If Sun made Java open source, the risk of fragmentation is high, because Microsoft wants nothing else than fragmentation of the Java movement, AND they have the channels to do it. They could just twist the Java source the way they want it to be (tied to Windows) and then ship it with every Windows box, which would make it turn up on perhaps 80% of all
PC:s on this planet.
No one else wants that, but that is what would happen if they just made Java open source.
Linux doesn't have that risk hovering over its head, because MS is very unlikely to ever ship an incompatible Linux version to anyone.
What Sun should do is to give the current Java 2 spec to ISO for standardization. That would be fast and pretty painless. Microsoft cannot fiddle with ISO. They tried 2 years ago and failed. After that there would be a standard base which all Java environments had to adhere to, and from there on Sun could let people innovate, by making the rest of Java open source.
No, we've had this game in Sweden for some time,
and it turns out that the person that seems most
likely to win is often voted out first, because
he/she is the worst competitor.
I suppose being a nice guy is a plus, because
you don't really want to spend week after week
with a bunch of people you don't like. Unless,
of course, the price to the winner is so big
that it is worth the time...
Don't bookmark this plain URL:
http://www.google.com/
Use this one instead:
http://www.google.com/search?q=
It directly gives you the possibility to
choose the number of hits (10, 30 or 100).
My dad has a patent for how you can build the ;-)
2 0clockwise.gif
largest motor in the world. Any size possible.
Want to rotate the Pentagon? Sure, it is now
possible!
http://www.henricson.se/hercules/
Animated GIF:
http://www.henricson.se/hercules/pic/animation%
If you think the price difference of $500 is much,
then you're either a Linux whiz, or value you own
time very low, since it's a major mess installing
Linux on a laptop.