It was the biggest one we'd seen in something like 65 years... so nobody who owned/maintained any of the buildings had even the slightest clue about what to expect, or what state things were in. It was largely "everybody out of the pool"... downtown suddenly shut down as everybody streamed out of buildings and were told they can't come back in. Of course, I was in a meeting with my VP, and he didn't even miss a beat while it happened. I remember looking at the windows in the room we were in and the office tower across the street and wondering when I'd see glass go flying -- you could *see* the deflection and shaking in it. I wasn't sure if they'd start shattering.
I think we had part of a church collapse, a section of highway get completely wrecked, and a couple of other things. For us, it was a big deal... the last time I'd heard about one in Ottawa it was at 2am and much smaller, so most people never even noticed. This was smack in the afternoon when everybody was at work.
If you don't get these things, you don't know how to deal with them... though, as you say, the north east US should have some experience with hurricanes.
Me, if I never experience another 5.0 earthquake, I think I'll be happy with that.:-P
Besides, China is supposed to be Communist... They still have The Party
China seems to be fascists for most things, and then unregulated capitalists for their economy.
So, the worst of both possible systems seems to be what they've evolved into. I don't think they can be truly called Communists in any meaningful sense of the word.
And, in fairness, China has chosen between industry with little or no controls, and pollution/the environment.
For the same reason that a lot of Chinese children fell ill when their milk powder was laced with melamine... because there are either no controls, or it's really easy to bypass them. Ultimately, they exported this to us as pet food.
Hell, even if Apple (or whoever) had stipulated that they do it all according to the book because they wanted to be ethical, there's no guarantee it would have happened. China is more or less completely unregulated capitalism run amok. I must say, I am completely unsurprised by any of this.
And, really, pretty much anywhere in the world, industry will consistently do things like this if nobody is doing an effective job of policing them... greed and short cuts for profit know no cultural boundaries.
Corporations in America would burn kittens, babies, and the flag for fuel if it was cost effective and nobody stopped them. Especially if you could bribe the people who were supposed to keep you honest.
When the earthquake hit the east coast and everyone got hysterical, wife and I had to laugh. Having lived right on the fault in California, we'd wake up, go "that felt like a 5.3, maybe a 5.5" and go back to sleep.
Well, it all depends on how many earthquakes you've ever experienced before.
Last summer, there was a 5.0 near Ottawa -- I happened to be sitting on the 14th floor of an office building at the time. It took several seconds to realize that it wasn't just someone with a noisy mail cartcart, and then an increasing feeling of "WTF" until you finally clue in to what's happening... and then probably another good 30+ seconds of feeling the building wobble and rattle.
For people who are used to living on ground what doesn't move much, your first earthquake can be exceedingly unnerving, because you have no idea of what is happening at first. It also managed to pretty much clear out most of the buildings downtown, and many of them stayed closed until everybody could do an assessment.
I don't think I'd ever want to get too comfortable with even 5.0 magnitude earthquakes if I could avoid it.
Though, by all accounts, I do gather this storm was much more hyped than it needed to be... but, after thinking "oh, gee, nothing will happen" and seeing what happened with Katrina... I don't think I'm overly surprised that the level of fear around these things has been ratcheted up.
Welcome to the life of perpetual fear that has been happening since 9/11. I don't see that changing any time soon.
Is there a real need to be such an asshole, or do you do it because you can't stop?
While there are some improvements to HTML since then, I run into a lot of applications that are web based which still fall back to the "click hyperlink, reload entire page, click another hyperlink" model which sucks. It's slow, doesn't do half of the things you can do with a native interface.
I see more bad examples of shitty web interfaces than I do good ones. And, short of something like Flash, I've yet to really see anything which makes web pages operate like native GUI toolkits do.
You confuse design with technology. stop it.
No, I just continue to be underwhelmed with the technology which is supposed to make a web page every bit as good as a native application.
WHY are there apps for this crap? Why can't you access The Economist through a specially formatted web page? Why can't you access it through a generic eBook format? Why can't you access Netflix through HTML5?
Do you really want to know why? It's because HTML sucks for a user interface. It always has.
No, really. Back in the day, we had fat clients that did specific things; they did them fast, and the did them well. Then came the web as user interface... and quite frankly, it has sucked donkey balls for most of it.
Oh, sure, it's gotten better. But, really, the difference between a native app and a web application has always been miles. A native app is faster, cleaner, and generally does things you can't really do in a web page.
And, yes, I'm sure HTML 5 is wonderful and likely even makes toast for me. But, it's largely a moving target: and a well designed, native application will pretty much always give you a better piece of software to interact with simply because the GUI works differently. It also has the added benefit of being something I can run when I am disconnected from the network.
An app isn't a marketing gimmick... back in the day, we used to call it 'software'. The world as a web page? Now there's something which has made for more crappy (and slow) software than you can think of.
That tablet PC fever is already starting to cool down because, let's face it, the tablet PC is actually a pretty dumb idea. How can we improve the friendliness of computers? I know! Let's take away the keyboard! What next? Take away the screen? That would look cool!
So, have you ever actually used a tablet? Or have you just used that superior (and quite smug) mensa IQ to deduce that a tablet is useless? You have mentally explored all of the utility of the device and found it lacking?
I don't use my tablet for extensive typing... sure, in an airport, I'll send a couple of emails. But generally, it's games, videos, music, surfing the web.
I mean, seriously, once you have impressed all of your friends with your new trendy gadget, you have to go back to writing emails, articles, software, books, and good luck with that if you don't even have a keyboard.
This is the part you don't get. I've got a desktop (OK, a couple), I've got a laptop (OK, maybe a couple of those too)... but I don't do the kind of tasks you describe with a tablet. It's a totally different kind of use. Usually I'm in a much more comfortable chair than I could ever be with a computer, and it's leisure that I typically use it for.
Admittedly, it's a bit of a luxury item in that it isn't a device I use for doing "work" with. It's entertainment, and it's consuming content. When I bought it, I wasn't even thinking of business travel... but on my last several business trips, I haven't used my laptop at all, because everything else I could do from either my tablet or the office.
I did, however, watch a movie on the plane, played some games, and finished up a book.
The only reason people are buying tablet PCs today is either
And then the mensa babe sets up a false dichotomy of an absurd either or statement.
After damned near 30 years around computers, a tablet for me actually provides a device which allows me to use a computer in ways (and in places), that it's simply not convenient to have a computer with a keyboard and wires and the need to be sitting at a desk.
Are you so stuck on your own interpretation of this that you refuse to believe that there are objective reasons why someone might like a tablet?
while a whopping 78% of tablet users said they used their tablets while lying in bed. And in a data point sure to further damage techies' reputation for social skills, Staples Advantage also reported that 30% of tablet users said they used their tablets while at restaurants.
I use my iPad every night before I got to bed for some of the time-sink games I play. And, in fairness, on business travel while I'm having dinner alone, I have definitely used it in a restaurant. And in the hotel bar.
Best place was on the bar in an airport at midnight as I replied to an email from my wife while having a drink and waiting for a connecting flight to get me home after a business trip.
Never used it in the bathroom, though. At least, not yet.:-P
Heh. I just bought the wife a new HP laptop, and I've been two days getting rid of all the shovelware. Running Windows 7, it was using 1.4 Gig of RAM at idle immediately after a reboot. The number of bullshit services running was just mind-boggling.
I'm still not sure I got all of the crap off the wife's HP laptop... it's a dual core (or quad core, I can't remember), which had 4GB of RAM and a decently big hard drive.
It was so full of crap that it couldn't even rip a CD without vast amounts of skipping and digital noise. I'm sorry, but on spec that's a fast machine... in reality, it's the most pathetically slow piece of junk I've seen in a while.
That, and the completely strange keyboard I've never seen elsewhere that is almost unusable. If that's what HP is making, good riddance.
This is worse than patents that boil down to "a system for doing some thing well known but with a computer".
This is a system for taking a well defined connection and cutting it in half, with a magnet to keep it in place, and putting a rubber thingy on it to make it look pretty. Worse, it's more like "a system to make a cylinder narrower by cutting it in half longitudinally while still retaining all of the connection properties of the original device".
How the hell is this patentable? There is no "invention" here.
And, of course, no longer being a cylinder, it's going to lose rigidity and there will be constant problems with these things bending and/or shearing off.
Whooosh. I'll ruin the joke, but I guess it has to be explained. When you masturbate, you're likely to pull your pubic hair out (no matter your gender).
It's a good attempt, but I think you're way off...
Certain groups who view masturbation as sinful (*cough* Catholics *cough*), in an attempt to dissuade kids from doing it, would suggest that it would cause you to have hairy palms, or go blind. The implication being that engaging in that very sinful act would have long term consequences that would be visible to the outside world. Basically, shame and fear -- the usual.
I have never heard any body attempt to say that it's from your pubic hair falling out into your palm. I think you get a Whoosh for attempting to explain an idiom you don't know the origins of.
If you can't handle short release cycles you're not agile. And competing companies which have an infrastructure for automatically verification in place will leap ahead.
Complete and utter horseshit. There's a lot of industries which simply can't be agile... both because they're heavily regulated, and because their investment cycle is measures in millions of dollars and multiple years. In the case of my current employer, it is simply impossible to have a player leap ahead because they roll out a web browser quickly. We're talking about companies with market capitalization measured in the billions. You really think getting a web browser out within a week gives you anything here?
I guess your working at IBM or some other dinosaur company with heavy weight processes. You will be marginalized by disruptive technology.
I'd hardly say dinosaur, but there is a heavy weight process, and for a damned good reason. That's because an IT outage can cause a loss of tens of millions of dollars in a very short period of time -- every hour of down time can cost huge money. There's simply no room for "disruptive technology". There is safe, tested, well planned, and well executed.
Occasionally people who think IT is the be all and end all of what companies do need a good solid smack... because this belief that IT is running the show basically means you're clueless (and usually a liability). Many companies use IT like infrastructure... it's function is to keep the people who make the real money and make the real product going. Not to dictate terms to the business.
You try explaining that multi-million dollar machines which generate millions of revenue in a week are idling because a web browser update screwed up a critical system. If you really think that companies like that have any ability to be "agile", you are only demonstrating that you've never worked for anybody sufficiently large as to understand the issues.
Go tell an airline or a ship manufacturer they should be "agile"... and when they're done laughing at you, maybe you'll realize you don't actually have the experience to make the assertion that such companies need to do this or get swept aside by some competitor. It simply doesn't work that way.
Rolling out a web browser six months early isn't going to make a damned bit of difference in the competitiveness of a multi-billion dollar corporation. Doing it wrong, however, will make one hell of a difference if it causes outages and costs you millions of dollars.
Maybe the whole point is that in late 2011, a freaking web browser should not be making evolutionary or revolutionary changes. It should just accept html written to a standard, and display it to that standard.
And, what specific standard do you think exist today that defines the precise behavior of a web page in all situations, on all platforms, and in all browsers? HTML as it stands now is interpreted differently by several different groups, and mostly is consistent. HTML 5 is a moving target with a bunch of stuff that may or may not have been implemented by anybody in particular. Oh, and of course it isn't likely to be a "standard" for quite some time. That, and browsers do a lot more than just viewing web pages nowadays.
Your idea would sound good if the things a web browser were expected to do were carved in stone and unlikely to change. But that's not even remotely true.
There simply is no standard which can be looked to which would achieve what you describe, least of all HTML 5. And, having worked in IT shops where they need to manage the desktops of literally thousands of PCs... if there is no version number that has any meaning to it, and if the software depends on continuously updating, that software is going to get dropped so damned fast it's not funny.
All of the reasons why I said I see problems with this... I really don't see that you've addressed. If you want to run it, go ahead. But, I can say pretty definitively that we're planning on desktop roll-outs that will happen in six months from now... we'd never be able to use this. For a large, risk averse organization, having an external party continuously changing the software, and being expected to do the same presents a level of risk which is completely unacceptable.
Sometimes people who write software (and even some people in IT) seem to think the world is running in order to serve them and that everyone revolves around them. Software in many organizations serves the needs of the business... that the actual business of many organizations doesn't want to be disrupted by some piece of software which thinks the world should change to suit it.
It's precisely things like this why corporations want software controlled by corporate entities who understand this. This might work for home users, but for a lot of corporations, Firefox has just made itself unusable.
From an IT perspective, it's helpful to know what versions people are running. And, from a practical perspective, who the heck updates every single day?
This is like agile development and continuously running the steaming build from last night... it seems to completely violate any notion of a tested, supportable version of software, and turns it into a thing that is completely difficult to nail down. It's just a constantly evolving piece of software. So if something was broken for a day or so, you'll never really know WTF it was.
Hell, having done QA and the like... the version of the browser you're running is part of the stuff you need to know so you know what you support. You can't even begin to say your software supports Firefox if you can't say anything more than "well, whatever Firefox looked like in January, we know it works on that".
I've dealt with a vendor who pretty much does constant releases of their software (several times/week), and their idiot support people mostly won't listen to you until you're running the latest version. It takes me several weeks to promote a version through my environments to do testing and get approvals, and you think my production instance is running the steaming turd you released on Friday?? How do you expect I've managed to do that? By having no control whatsoever as to what is deployed?
I'm pretty sure that for some organizations, this is going to make it really difficult to use Firefox. I'm pretty sure that in at least one or two places I've worked, this would be a complete non-starter.
According to the article, the thorium takes 30 seconds of heating before it can be used. Where does the power to run the 250 MW laser come from during this time? Or even after?
You jump-start it with another 250MW thorium laser.
Youll note that the price is for "pristine" graphene, and parents point was that if $5 investment could really turn into $15bil, everyone would be doing it. That is, in fact, capitalism at its best.
Well, if that was the case, then before any one person could make $15bil.... loads of other people would glut the market and essentially make graphene worthless.
Despite what Wall Street likes to tell us... capitalism doesn't really allow for an infinite amount of people to make an infinite amount of money. In fact, loads of people would end up with graphene nobody was interested in.
Capitalism is still bounded by reality, even though a lot of people wish it wasn't so.
Which means, most of us will end up on the street if we want to stay developers or system engineers.
I'm nearly 35, and I'm started to feel it. Like you, I have years of development under my belt and a nice amount of system engineering. I have a nice job, but management has changed and I see the first signs of decline. I've been looking around and... basically, everywhere where I show up, I'm told I'm too expensive.
I had this decision made for me several years ago by a previous employer. I'd been a coder for around 14 years, and had been focused on staying that way... no interest in management like everybody else. After I, er, graduated, I found work at a consulting company.
Now I'm not a developer any more, but all of the experience I have from being in the software industry, plus all of those soft skills you may not realize you have come in handy... the ability to sit in a meeting with people and try to meet quorum, the ability to see broader architectural and "big picture issues", plus all of the troubleshooting and critical reasoning skills, as well as whatever domain expertise you've picked up along the way.
I was lucky enough to encounter a manager who understood that I'd picked up a lot of those skills but didn't quite know how to articulate them or feel confident in them. He immediately knew that with a little bit of guidance and some polish, I could very easily become an asset.
Fast forward a couple of years... and I'm happier than I had been at my old job, and I consistently find that the breadth of experience I picked up while I was a developer come in handy in terms of being able to function in a business environment, work with an understand PMs in terms of what they're trying to accomplish and the like, as well as actually do a lot of working with clients to manage expectations and make sure that we're all on the same page.
You're getting older, you may not always be a coder... but unless you're the most recalcitrant of back-room coders who never learned to interact with non-technical people and act like an adult in a meeting... you've likely picked up a lot of useful business skills, and a really broad technical background along the way that prove to be exceedingly valuable and useful in your day to day life.
There is life after code, and you can still do a lot of things that can keep the income going. Once you get over this "us vs them" mentality that coders start out with, and man up and work on some of the tasks you've likely already done extensively anyway (planning, making sure you meet your deadlines, testing, documenting, playing well with other children, thinking about the project and not just your part)... you'll find you do a lot of this stuff anyway.
It's actually not that difficult to change into a role that is still technical, but just not coding. In fact, depending on how you adjust to it, it can be quite rewarding.
If you think you need to root for the devs instead of the users... well, then you may not ever be able to transition out of the back room as you will be mired in that "keep the mere mortals away" mindset. But, as a former developer, I can say you need to get past that anyway -- the software exists to serve the business, not the other way around.
This one contained a more real-time estimate based on ACTUAL transit times to similar geographic locations. This was not common in 2007. Back then you got a best guess.
Yeah, but you're describing an incremental improvement to a process that's been in place for most of the last decade.
Is that really the intent of a patent? I'm inclined to think not.
However, the trend seems to be to patent something people have been doing for years but with one more component. That doesn't make for a novel invention, that makes for a minor refinement.
All true... which is why I think patents are generally counter-productive in this day and age.
I'm pretty sure I've seen patents on things I learned in school as part of classes, and which had been fairly obvious at the time as an expected evolution.
As long as the system is geared so that lawyers are running the show, it's going to be a train wreck for the rest of us. Especially where a patent can be approved 10 years later, suddenly making a bunch of stuff that's been pretty common become something which infringes.
This is about as close as I've seen to a "System for accomplishing a well known task with a computer".
This patent sounds like complete rubbish. I'm pretty sure that FedEx and several other companies have been giving me an estimate as to when my parcel will arrive for some number of years.
I'm just as concerned with the tendency of websites with 'mobile apps' to intentionally break their own website experience when browsing on a mobile device in order to push their native app instead.
I see this a lot... visit a web site on my iPad, get popup telling me they have a native app, and wouldn't I rather be running that.
No, go away... show me the damned web page, and leave me alone. Sometimes the redirect they use makes it almost impossible to use the back button to get out of the damned site.
Or, as you say, they redirect you to some mobile home page which doesn't have the content you followed the link to, and which you can't subsequently find. Which basically makes the visit to their page useless.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, hell yeah.
It was the biggest one we'd seen in something like 65 years ... so nobody who owned/maintained any of the buildings had even the slightest clue about what to expect, or what state things were in. It was largely "everybody out of the pool" ... downtown suddenly shut down as everybody streamed out of buildings and were told they can't come back in. Of course, I was in a meeting with my VP, and he didn't even miss a beat while it happened. I remember looking at the windows in the room we were in and the office tower across the street and wondering when I'd see glass go flying -- you could *see* the deflection and shaking in it. I wasn't sure if they'd start shattering.
I think we had part of a church collapse, a section of highway get completely wrecked, and a couple of other things. For us, it was a big deal ... the last time I'd heard about one in Ottawa it was at 2am and much smaller, so most people never even noticed. This was smack in the afternoon when everybody was at work.
If you don't get these things, you don't know how to deal with them ... though, as you say, the north east US should have some experience with hurricanes.
Me, if I never experience another 5.0 earthquake, I think I'll be happy with that. :-P
China seems to be fascists for most things, and then unregulated capitalists for their economy.
So, the worst of both possible systems seems to be what they've evolved into. I don't think they can be truly called Communists in any meaningful sense of the word.
And, in fairness, China has chosen between industry with little or no controls, and pollution/the environment.
For the same reason that a lot of Chinese children fell ill when their milk powder was laced with melamine ... because there are either no controls, or it's really easy to bypass them. Ultimately, they exported this to us as pet food.
Hell, even if Apple (or whoever) had stipulated that they do it all according to the book because they wanted to be ethical, there's no guarantee it would have happened. China is more or less completely unregulated capitalism run amok. I must say, I am completely unsurprised by any of this.
And, really, pretty much anywhere in the world, industry will consistently do things like this if nobody is doing an effective job of policing them ... greed and short cuts for profit know no cultural boundaries.
Corporations in America would burn kittens, babies, and the flag for fuel if it was cost effective and nobody stopped them. Especially if you could bribe the people who were supposed to keep you honest.
Well, it all depends on how many earthquakes you've ever experienced before.
Last summer, there was a 5.0 near Ottawa -- I happened to be sitting on the 14th floor of an office building at the time. It took several seconds to realize that it wasn't just someone with a noisy mail cartcart, and then an increasing feeling of "WTF" until you finally clue in to what's happening ... and then probably another good 30+ seconds of feeling the building wobble and rattle.
For people who are used to living on ground what doesn't move much, your first earthquake can be exceedingly unnerving, because you have no idea of what is happening at first. It also managed to pretty much clear out most of the buildings downtown, and many of them stayed closed until everybody could do an assessment.
I don't think I'd ever want to get too comfortable with even 5.0 magnitude earthquakes if I could avoid it.
Though, by all accounts, I do gather this storm was much more hyped than it needed to be ... but, after thinking "oh, gee, nothing will happen" and seeing what happened with Katrina ... I don't think I'm overly surprised that the level of fear around these things has been ratcheted up.
Welcome to the life of perpetual fear that has been happening since 9/11. I don't see that changing any time soon.
Is there a real need to be such an asshole, or do you do it because you can't stop?
While there are some improvements to HTML since then, I run into a lot of applications that are web based which still fall back to the "click hyperlink, reload entire page, click another hyperlink" model which sucks. It's slow, doesn't do half of the things you can do with a native interface.
I see more bad examples of shitty web interfaces than I do good ones. And, short of something like Flash, I've yet to really see anything which makes web pages operate like native GUI toolkits do.
No, I just continue to be underwhelmed with the technology which is supposed to make a web page every bit as good as a native application.
Do you really want to know why? It's because HTML sucks for a user interface. It always has.
No, really. Back in the day, we had fat clients that did specific things; they did them fast, and the did them well. Then came the web as user interface ... and quite frankly, it has sucked donkey balls for most of it.
Oh, sure, it's gotten better. But, really, the difference between a native app and a web application has always been miles. A native app is faster, cleaner, and generally does things you can't really do in a web page.
And, yes, I'm sure HTML 5 is wonderful and likely even makes toast for me. But, it's largely a moving target: and a well designed, native application will pretty much always give you a better piece of software to interact with simply because the GUI works differently. It also has the added benefit of being something I can run when I am disconnected from the network.
An app isn't a marketing gimmick ... back in the day, we used to call it 'software'. The world as a web page? Now there's something which has made for more crappy (and slow) software than you can think of.
So, have you ever actually used a tablet? Or have you just used that superior (and quite smug) mensa IQ to deduce that a tablet is useless? You have mentally explored all of the utility of the device and found it lacking?
I don't use my tablet for extensive typing ... sure, in an airport, I'll send a couple of emails. But generally, it's games, videos, music, surfing the web.
This is the part you don't get. I've got a desktop (OK, a couple), I've got a laptop (OK, maybe a couple of those too) ... but I don't do the kind of tasks you describe with a tablet. It's a totally different kind of use. Usually I'm in a much more comfortable chair than I could ever be with a computer, and it's leisure that I typically use it for.
Admittedly, it's a bit of a luxury item in that it isn't a device I use for doing "work" with. It's entertainment, and it's consuming content. When I bought it, I wasn't even thinking of business travel ... but on my last several business trips, I haven't used my laptop at all, because everything else I could do from either my tablet or the office.
I did, however, watch a movie on the plane, played some games, and finished up a book.
And then the mensa babe sets up a false dichotomy of an absurd either or statement.
After damned near 30 years around computers, a tablet for me actually provides a device which allows me to use a computer in ways (and in places), that it's simply not convenient to have a computer with a keyboard and wires and the need to be sitting at a desk.
Are you so stuck on your own interpretation of this that you refuse to believe that there are objective reasons why someone might like a tablet?
I use my iPad every night before I got to bed for some of the time-sink games I play. And, in fairness, on business travel while I'm having dinner alone, I have definitely used it in a restaurant. And in the hotel bar.
Best place was on the bar in an airport at midnight as I replied to an email from my wife while having a drink and waiting for a connecting flight to get me home after a business trip.
Never used it in the bathroom, though. At least, not yet. :-P
I'm still not sure I got all of the crap off the wife's HP laptop ... it's a dual core (or quad core, I can't remember), which had 4GB of RAM and a decently big hard drive.
It was so full of crap that it couldn't even rip a CD without vast amounts of skipping and digital noise. I'm sorry, but on spec that's a fast machine ... in reality, it's the most pathetically slow piece of junk I've seen in a while.
That, and the completely strange keyboard I've never seen elsewhere that is almost unusable. If that's what HP is making, good riddance.
Seriously, what?
This is worse than patents that boil down to "a system for doing some thing well known but with a computer".
This is a system for taking a well defined connection and cutting it in half, with a magnet to keep it in place, and putting a rubber thingy on it to make it look pretty. Worse, it's more like "a system to make a cylinder narrower by cutting it in half longitudinally while still retaining all of the connection properties of the original device".
How the hell is this patentable? There is no "invention" here.
And, of course, no longer being a cylinder, it's going to lose rigidity and there will be constant problems with these things bending and/or shearing off.
It's a good attempt, but I think you're way off ...
Certain groups who view masturbation as sinful (*cough* Catholics *cough*), in an attempt to dissuade kids from doing it, would suggest that it would cause you to have hairy palms, or go blind. The implication being that engaging in that very sinful act would have long term consequences that would be visible to the outside world. Basically, shame and fear -- the usual.
I have never heard any body attempt to say that it's from your pubic hair falling out into your palm. I think you get a Whoosh for attempting to explain an idiom you don't know the origins of.
Or an aircraft carrier.
Hmmm ...
Dilute the Word?
Delude the World?
Dilute the World?
Denude the World?
Denude the Women?
Definitely can't be "delude the word" ... that doesn't parse.
Complete and utter horseshit. There's a lot of industries which simply can't be agile ... both because they're heavily regulated, and because their investment cycle is measures in millions of dollars and multiple years. In the case of my current employer, it is simply impossible to have a player leap ahead because they roll out a web browser quickly. We're talking about companies with market capitalization measured in the billions. You really think getting a web browser out within a week gives you anything here?
I'd hardly say dinosaur, but there is a heavy weight process, and for a damned good reason. That's because an IT outage can cause a loss of tens of millions of dollars in a very short period of time -- every hour of down time can cost huge money. There's simply no room for "disruptive technology". There is safe, tested, well planned, and well executed.
Occasionally people who think IT is the be all and end all of what companies do need a good solid smack ... because this belief that IT is running the show basically means you're clueless (and usually a liability). Many companies use IT like infrastructure ... it's function is to keep the people who make the real money and make the real product going. Not to dictate terms to the business.
You try explaining that multi-million dollar machines which generate millions of revenue in a week are idling because a web browser update screwed up a critical system. If you really think that companies like that have any ability to be "agile", you are only demonstrating that you've never worked for anybody sufficiently large as to understand the issues.
Go tell an airline or a ship manufacturer they should be "agile" ... and when they're done laughing at you, maybe you'll realize you don't actually have the experience to make the assertion that such companies need to do this or get swept aside by some competitor. It simply doesn't work that way.
Rolling out a web browser six months early isn't going to make a damned bit of difference in the competitiveness of a multi-billion dollar corporation. Doing it wrong, however, will make one hell of a difference if it causes outages and costs you millions of dollars.
And, what specific standard do you think exist today that defines the precise behavior of a web page in all situations, on all platforms, and in all browsers? HTML as it stands now is interpreted differently by several different groups, and mostly is consistent. HTML 5 is a moving target with a bunch of stuff that may or may not have been implemented by anybody in particular. Oh, and of course it isn't likely to be a "standard" for quite some time. That, and browsers do a lot more than just viewing web pages nowadays.
Your idea would sound good if the things a web browser were expected to do were carved in stone and unlikely to change. But that's not even remotely true.
There simply is no standard which can be looked to which would achieve what you describe, least of all HTML 5. And, having worked in IT shops where they need to manage the desktops of literally thousands of PCs ... if there is no version number that has any meaning to it, and if the software depends on continuously updating, that software is going to get dropped so damned fast it's not funny.
All of the reasons why I said I see problems with this ... I really don't see that you've addressed. If you want to run it, go ahead. But, I can say pretty definitively that we're planning on desktop roll-outs that will happen in six months from now ... we'd never be able to use this. For a large, risk averse organization, having an external party continuously changing the software, and being expected to do the same presents a level of risk which is completely unacceptable.
Sometimes people who write software (and even some people in IT) seem to think the world is running in order to serve them and that everyone revolves around them. Software in many organizations serves the needs of the business ... that the actual business of many organizations doesn't want to be disrupted by some piece of software which thinks the world should change to suit it.
It's precisely things like this why corporations want software controlled by corporate entities who understand this. This might work for home users, but for a lot of corporations, Firefox has just made itself unusable.
I'm not so sure I'm entirely keen on this.
From an IT perspective, it's helpful to know what versions people are running. And, from a practical perspective, who the heck updates every single day?
This is like agile development and continuously running the steaming build from last night ... it seems to completely violate any notion of a tested, supportable version of software, and turns it into a thing that is completely difficult to nail down. It's just a constantly evolving piece of software. So if something was broken for a day or so, you'll never really know WTF it was.
Hell, having done QA and the like ... the version of the browser you're running is part of the stuff you need to know so you know what you support. You can't even begin to say your software supports Firefox if you can't say anything more than "well, whatever Firefox looked like in January, we know it works on that".
I've dealt with a vendor who pretty much does constant releases of their software (several times/week), and their idiot support people mostly won't listen to you until you're running the latest version. It takes me several weeks to promote a version through my environments to do testing and get approvals, and you think my production instance is running the steaming turd you released on Friday?? How do you expect I've managed to do that? By having no control whatsoever as to what is deployed?
I'm pretty sure that for some organizations, this is going to make it really difficult to use Firefox. I'm pretty sure that in at least one or two places I've worked, this would be a complete non-starter.
Nobody is actually stopping you from wearing strange neon-colored rubber clothing, you know.
In fact, I'm sure a google search would turn up several purveyors of such things.
You jump-start it with another 250MW thorium laser.
It's thorium all the way down.
Well, if that was the case, then before any one person could make $15bil .... loads of other people would glut the market and essentially make graphene worthless.
Despite what Wall Street likes to tell us ... capitalism doesn't really allow for an infinite amount of people to make an infinite amount of money. In fact, loads of people would end up with graphene nobody was interested in.
Capitalism is still bounded by reality, even though a lot of people wish it wasn't so.
I had this decision made for me several years ago by a previous employer. I'd been a coder for around 14 years, and had been focused on staying that way ... no interest in management like everybody else. After I, er, graduated, I found work at a consulting company.
Now I'm not a developer any more, but all of the experience I have from being in the software industry, plus all of those soft skills you may not realize you have come in handy ... the ability to sit in a meeting with people and try to meet quorum, the ability to see broader architectural and "big picture issues", plus all of the troubleshooting and critical reasoning skills, as well as whatever domain expertise you've picked up along the way.
I was lucky enough to encounter a manager who understood that I'd picked up a lot of those skills but didn't quite know how to articulate them or feel confident in them. He immediately knew that with a little bit of guidance and some polish, I could very easily become an asset.
Fast forward a couple of years ... and I'm happier than I had been at my old job, and I consistently find that the breadth of experience I picked up while I was a developer come in handy in terms of being able to function in a business environment, work with an understand PMs in terms of what they're trying to accomplish and the like, as well as actually do a lot of working with clients to manage expectations and make sure that we're all on the same page.
You're getting older, you may not always be a coder ... but unless you're the most recalcitrant of back-room coders who never learned to interact with non-technical people and act like an adult in a meeting ... you've likely picked up a lot of useful business skills, and a really broad technical background along the way that prove to be exceedingly valuable and useful in your day to day life.
There is life after code, and you can still do a lot of things that can keep the income going. Once you get over this "us vs them" mentality that coders start out with, and man up and work on some of the tasks you've likely already done extensively anyway (planning, making sure you meet your deadlines, testing, documenting, playing well with other children, thinking about the project and not just your part) ... you'll find you do a lot of this stuff anyway.
It's actually not that difficult to change into a role that is still technical, but just not coding. In fact, depending on how you adjust to it, it can be quite rewarding.
If you think you need to root for the devs instead of the users ... well, then you may not ever be able to transition out of the back room as you will be mired in that "keep the mere mortals away" mindset. But, as a former developer, I can say you need to get past that anyway -- the software exists to serve the business, not the other way around.
Yeah, but you're describing an incremental improvement to a process that's been in place for most of the last decade.
Is that really the intent of a patent? I'm inclined to think not.
However, the trend seems to be to patent something people have been doing for years but with one more component. That doesn't make for a novel invention, that makes for a minor refinement.
All true ... which is why I think patents are generally counter-productive in this day and age.
I'm pretty sure I've seen patents on things I learned in school as part of classes, and which had been fairly obvious at the time as an expected evolution.
As long as the system is geared so that lawyers are running the show, it's going to be a train wreck for the rest of us. Especially where a patent can be approved 10 years later, suddenly making a bunch of stuff that's been pretty common become something which infringes.
This is about as close as I've seen to a "System for accomplishing a well known task with a computer".
This patent sounds like complete rubbish. I'm pretty sure that FedEx and several other companies have been giving me an estimate as to when my parcel will arrive for some number of years.
Oh, don't get me wrong ... if DARPA and their egg-heads say glider, it likely is. And, quite likely for the reasons you say and then some.
But in my little brain, this sounds very much unlike "gliding". Obviously if it can steer it's not just a purely ballistic trajectory.
To me, "13,000 mph" and "gliding" just can't be made to get together. :-P That just sounds more like it should be a rocket or something.
I see this a lot ... visit a web site on my iPad, get popup telling me they have a native app, and wouldn't I rather be running that.
No, go away ... show me the damned web page, and leave me alone. Sometimes the redirect they use makes it almost impossible to use the back button to get out of the damned site.
Or, as you say, they redirect you to some mobile home page which doesn't have the content you followed the link to, and which you can't subsequently find. Which basically makes the visit to their page useless.