Reminds me of the (possibly apocryphal) story about one of the initial meetings between Apple and IBM engineers back when they started work on the PowerPC. The IBM folks were aware that Apple had a very laid back atmosphere and so they made sure to ditch the 3 piece suits in favor of polo shirts and chinos. Of course, the Apple guys had the same realization about corporate culture and showed up in 3 piece suits.
This. Most of us in the IT leadership at the college where I work have Ph.Ds. Nobody blinks an eye, and we have a deal where we teach a class a year as well- helps us remember the actual goal of the college is. The networking guy has a masters in EE and does a lot of work with the astronomy department on the side.
It can even be a bonus in other ways- one of our newer guys in datasystems teaches CS at a local community college on the side, and ended up recruiting one of his best students directly into an open position- he already knew what he was capable of.
PHB: We need to add features X, Y and Z to our legacy inventory system
IT guy: The code is a giant pile of garbage, it would be cheaper and faster to rewrite the whole thing.
PHB: Ok, give it a try
(Six months pass)
PHB: How's the new inventory control system?
IT Guy: Going great- we just need some more time to get it functional
(Six months pass)
PHB: How's the new inventory control system? We really could use it
IT Guy: Almost done. We just need to make sure it supports the latest standards
(Six months pass)
PHB: Need that inventory control system guys...
IT Guy: Well, the standards have been in a bit of flux and when you're trying to put out really modern code you need to deal with that. By the way, we need a lot beefier server to handle the load, ok? It's a bit slow right now
(Six months pass)
PHB: Um, hello?
IT Guy: Really, it's almost done. It's going to be amazing! We're in the process of rearchtecting the main DB module to support Foobar 2.6 right now since Foobar 2.5 wasn't quite ready for prime time.
(Six months pass)
PHB: Look guys, we have to have this *now*. The legacy code can't run much longer without maintenance.
IT Guy: Well, here's my notice- I found a great new job programming cool Ruby code with a startup. I've put some comments in the code that should let you figure out what it does. It should build fine provided you only use the exact environment I specify and the front end works on a beta version of Chrome I downloaded. Go ahead and ship!
I got one and commented (favorably) in the other tablet thread, for which I was told that the iPad mini will blow away the Nexus 7 and that I sounded like a douche.
Nothing is more douchebaggish than "I won't buy XYZ any more because of blah blah emotional decision" posts on the Internet.
Why? Not buying from a company that engages in business practices you dislike is one of the very few powers ordinary consumers have. Don't like Apple's sue-happy policy? Don't buy, and let them know why.
As I mentioned in the other tablet thread, Apple better worry about the Nexus. It's flat out a better device than the iPad- yes, it's smaller, but going back to iOS on my iPad feels like stepping back in time. Really, it's not close anymore- Apple's sat on their laurels and has decided to sue rather than innovate, and iOS 6 has a ways to go to catch up.
As far as the profits argument, that's very true, just like it was back in the early days of the PC vs. the Mac. Apple has always had better margins than the commodity makers, but that doesn't matter since there will always be another member of the horde to take the place of anyone squeezed out. I own some Apple stock and I'm beginning to worry about it- the parallels to what happened to the Mac are beginning to look awfully obvious.
Then again, I bought the stock back in 1998 at something like $2.50/share adjusted for splits, so I probably shouldn't complain too loudly...
I spent the last week with a Nexus 7- it simply blows the Fire and Nook away. It's not even close.
For that matter, it blows away the iPad as well. After using it for a week, going back to iOS feels like going back in time. The Nexus is easier to use, more flexible, more responsive and it just plain feels slicker. I suspect an honest comparison between an iPad mini and the Nexus won't come up too well for the iPad. I'm sure it will still be bought in droves by the faithful, but Apple's been passed by Google.
Against a Dark Background and Use of Weapons are close seconds. Just unrelentingly bleak- truly awful things happen to anyone likable, the good guys frequently turn out to be evil as hell and virtually nobody survives. I find it rather ironic that CP and UoW occur in the Culture, which is his ultimate techo-utopia. AaDB occurs in a star system that's been ejected from it's galaxy- there are no other stars within thousands of light years. The local civilization has occupied every space within the system over and over again, only to destroy itself in pointless wars. All three are truly awesome books though- he throws out more interesting ideas in a page than lesser authors do in entire series.
His last few SF books have been a lot more upbeat (at least for him) for some reason- Excession is laugh out loud funny in quite a few places, as is Surface Detail. Matter and Look To Windward at least end on happy notes.
You can use their notebooks, which aren't that expensive IMHO, or you can print your own paper. You need a color laser printer and it's pretty slow to print but they give you a PDF of a couple of various types.
They apparently have built up real political support for the program by not turning people into funeral pyres
Umm, yeah, about that. They've killed a whole pile more people than either the US or Russian programs, but most folks in China don't know about it since the Chinese government suppresses the news.
You're using the Skunkworks as an example? Seriously?
Hint: The Skunkworks built airplanes for the US government, under US government contracts. Here's the list of planes they built- see anything civilian on that list? A number of your other examples are dubious at best- a huge amount of GE's R&D is government funded through the military. Bell Labs existed only because Bell had a monopoly on phone service- it's no accident that as soon as that monopoly was gone and they had to compete in a free market Bell Labs was gone as well.
As for your thesis that government research crowds out civilian, I'd counter that long term R&D simply isn't something most companies these days can budget for. That's not because the government is competing with them, it's because the stock market demands that they produce higher quarterly profits every single period. Pure R&D is expensive and almost always results in nothing more than a bunch of research papers without any revenue. It's the first thing to go when the CEO needs to trim costs.
I dunno, teachers are paid pretty well for the months they actually work. Often near $25-30+ an hour. It's only when one factors in the months they aren't teaching as lost wages does the rate seem to be lower. I don't think there is anything preventing them from working in the off season. Just another form of seasonal worker like lifegaurd or Mr Plow.
I know- $25/hour for a job that requires a bachelors, a ton of certifications and increasingly a masters degree. I mean, who are these folks to demand middle class wages? I mean, they're only responsible for educating our kids. We need to cut their pay to something reasonable like $10/hour. We'll save a ton of tax money that way, and I'm sure the kids will never notice. (At least those unfortunate enough to have to go to public school, that is. The deserving wealthy can use their tax cuts to pay for private school tuitions.)
You think that, but you're not correct. An awful lot of advertising has nothing to do with selling X to you right now. It's to let you know that X is available, and from company Y. In a year or two you might find a case where you need X, and your subconscious will remember that you can get it from Y. Most people only consider 2-3 options when buying something, so getting on that list is critical.
Yes, both Home Depot and Lowes do events like this. They also sell kits that work along the same lines. My kid's grandfather likes to give them to us and the kids have a good time putting them together. They're nothing very complex- you can usually assemble them with a hammer and a screwdriver in 30 minutes, but it's good practice. The kids were actually thrilled this year when the birdhouses they built over the winter ended up inhabited with baby birds.
Code all your websites in Flash! You get a stable, cross-platform rich browsing experience without all the issues of figuring out what version of HTML you need. With some work, we can turn the browser into a stable, speedy Flash-delivering platform and let HTML die like the dinosaur that it is.
You don't work anywhere where there are more than a dozen computers, do you?
One of the biggest challenges we have is trying to deal with the slew of constant updates to dozens of applications, all of which seem to break in subtle ways. Testing a large application for browser compatibility is a royal PITA, and every time one goes through you end up having to come up with a new set of workarounds for small bugs and explaining why the old set of workarounds isn't needed anymore.
Or you can just do what we do, which is freeze all your applications for a specific build every semester or year, then carefully turn off every farking updater to stop the blizzard of login messages you otherwise get socked with. But then you get people wondering why you still have machines running Firefox 3.6
Worse, Earth's moon is slowly moving away from the center of the Earth due to tidal effects. At some future point the barycenter of the E-M system will be outside the surface of the Earth, and which point Earth becomes a binary planet as well.
One amusing bit-they had a competition between the British and Aussie Top Gear presenters. When they first did it with the German cast, they had a race where they welded two cars on top of each other- the top could steer, the bottom had the gas and brakes. For the Aussie show, the British presenters helpfully set up the same challenge, with the second Aussie car welded on upside down so they'd feel at home. This worked as well as you might expect.
The Aussie Stig also arrived in a shipping crate, upside down.
The first and last real MS innovation was the Microsoft BASIC interpreter which became ubiquitous in 1980s home computers. Everything else they ever did was shamelessly stolen and/or bought and/or badly copied from others.
Woz must have been abusing that time machine of his, to have copied microsoft's 1980 "innovation" in 1978 with his AppleSoft BASIC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applesoft_BASIC
Insofar as he was cloning Gates' 1975 introduction of Altair Basic, yes. Of course, neither was remotely original: BASIC had been around since the mid 60's, if just hadn't been ported to small machines.
It was a wonderous language. It was (for the time) very easy to use, powerful and understandable. Millions of lines of code were written in it because it *worked*.
Fortran's pretty similar- nobody here is going to hold it up as a language marvel, but it was- it fit the niche of "powerful number processor" very well. Perl is noted for being a complete mess, but if you need a quick script to massage some text nothing is better. BASIC fit into its niche as well, and frankly so does PHP
None of them were "elegant" in the sense of LISP, Smalltalk or Haskell. How are those doing by the way?
Slashdot Mirror
A good landing is one you walk away from. A great landing is one where you can use the airplane again.
Reminds me of the (possibly apocryphal) story about one of the initial meetings between Apple and IBM engineers back when they started work on the PowerPC. The IBM folks were aware that Apple had a very laid back atmosphere and so they made sure to ditch the 3 piece suits in favor of polo shirts and chinos. Of course, the Apple guys had the same realization about corporate culture and showed up in 3 piece suits.
Except that you need the infrastructure and logistics capability to launch a thousand missiles. That's *not* cheap or easy
It can even be a bonus in other ways- one of our newer guys in datasystems teaches CS at a local community college on the side, and ended up recruiting one of his best students directly into an open position- he already knew what he was capable of.
PHB: We need to add features X, Y and Z to our legacy inventory system
IT guy: The code is a giant pile of garbage, it would be cheaper and faster to rewrite the whole thing.
PHB: Ok, give it a try
(Six months pass)
PHB: How's the new inventory control system?
IT Guy: Going great- we just need some more time to get it functional
(Six months pass)
PHB: How's the new inventory control system? We really could use it
IT Guy: Almost done. We just need to make sure it supports the latest standards
(Six months pass)
PHB: Need that inventory control system guys...
IT Guy: Well, the standards have been in a bit of flux and when you're trying to put out really modern code you need to deal with that. By the way, we need a lot beefier server to handle the load, ok? It's a bit slow right now
(Six months pass)
PHB: Um, hello?
IT Guy: Really, it's almost done. It's going to be amazing! We're in the process of rearchtecting the main DB module to support Foobar 2.6 right now since Foobar 2.5 wasn't quite ready for prime time.
(Six months pass)
PHB: Look guys, we have to have this *now*. The legacy code can't run much longer without maintenance.
IT Guy: Well, here's my notice- I found a great new job programming cool Ruby code with a startup. I've put some comments in the code that should let you figure out what it does. It should build fine provided you only use the exact environment I specify and the front end works on a beta version of Chrome I downloaded. Go ahead and ship!
It's a lousy place to stop. Cite nothing but Wikipedia and you're going to get a crappy grade.
(Cut+paste from Wikipedia and I haul you in front of the honor commission, along with nice color coded pages showing exactly what was lifted.)
Same reason they call porn actors/actresses "talent"
Clearly you should avoid the Nexus 7
Nothing is more douchebaggish than "I won't buy XYZ any more because of blah blah emotional decision" posts on the Internet.
Why? Not buying from a company that engages in business practices you dislike is one of the very few powers ordinary consumers have. Don't like Apple's sue-happy policy? Don't buy, and let them know why.
As far as the profits argument, that's very true, just like it was back in the early days of the PC vs. the Mac. Apple has always had better margins than the commodity makers, but that doesn't matter since there will always be another member of the horde to take the place of anyone squeezed out. I own some Apple stock and I'm beginning to worry about it- the parallels to what happened to the Mac are beginning to look awfully obvious.
Then again, I bought the stock back in 1998 at something like $2.50/share adjusted for splits, so I probably shouldn't complain too loudly...
For that matter, it blows away the iPad as well. After using it for a week, going back to iOS feels like going back in time. The Nexus is easier to use, more flexible, more responsive and it just plain feels slicker. I suspect an honest comparison between an iPad mini and the Nexus won't come up too well for the iPad. I'm sure it will still be bought in droves by the faithful, but Apple's been passed by Google.
His last few SF books have been a lot more upbeat (at least for him) for some reason- Excession is laugh out loud funny in quite a few places, as is Surface Detail. Matter and Look To Windward at least end on happy notes.
You can use their notebooks, which aren't that expensive IMHO, or you can print your own paper. You need a color laser printer and it's pretty slow to print but they give you a PDF of a couple of various types.
They apparently have built up real political support for the program by not turning people into funeral pyres
Umm, yeah, about that. They've killed a whole pile more people than either the US or Russian programs, but most folks in China don't know about it since the Chinese government suppresses the news.
Hint: The Skunkworks built airplanes for the US government, under US government contracts. Here's the list of planes they built- see anything civilian on that list? A number of your other examples are dubious at best- a huge amount of GE's R&D is government funded through the military. Bell Labs existed only because Bell had a monopoly on phone service- it's no accident that as soon as that monopoly was gone and they had to compete in a free market Bell Labs was gone as well.
As for your thesis that government research crowds out civilian, I'd counter that long term R&D simply isn't something most companies these days can budget for. That's not because the government is competing with them, it's because the stock market demands that they produce higher quarterly profits every single period. Pure R&D is expensive and almost always results in nothing more than a bunch of research papers without any revenue. It's the first thing to go when the CEO needs to trim costs.
I dunno, teachers are paid pretty well for the months they actually work. Often near $25-30+ an hour. It's only when one factors in the months they aren't teaching as lost wages does the rate seem to be lower. I don't think there is anything preventing them from working in the off season. Just another form of seasonal worker like lifegaurd or Mr Plow.
I know- $25/hour for a job that requires a bachelors, a ton of certifications and increasingly a masters degree. I mean, who are these folks to demand middle class wages? I mean, they're only responsible for educating our kids. We need to cut their pay to something reasonable like $10/hour. We'll save a ton of tax money that way, and I'm sure the kids will never notice. (At least those unfortunate enough to have to go to public school, that is. The deserving wealthy can use their tax cuts to pay for private school tuitions.)
You think that, but you're not correct. An awful lot of advertising has nothing to do with selling X to you right now. It's to let you know that X is available, and from company Y. In a year or two you might find a case where you need X, and your subconscious will remember that you can get it from Y. Most people only consider 2-3 options when buying something, so getting on that list is critical.
Yes, both Home Depot and Lowes do events like this. They also sell kits that work along the same lines. My kid's grandfather likes to give them to us and the kids have a good time putting them together. They're nothing very complex- you can usually assemble them with a hammer and a screwdriver in 30 minutes, but it's good practice. The kids were actually thrilled this year when the birdhouses they built over the winter ended up inhabited with baby birds.
Code all your websites in Flash! You get a stable, cross-platform rich browsing experience without all the issues of figuring out what version of HTML you need. With some work, we can turn the browser into a stable, speedy Flash-delivering platform and let HTML die like the dinosaur that it is.
One of the biggest challenges we have is trying to deal with the slew of constant updates to dozens of applications, all of which seem to break in subtle ways. Testing a large application for browser compatibility is a royal PITA, and every time one goes through you end up having to come up with a new set of workarounds for small bugs and explaining why the old set of workarounds isn't needed anymore.
Or you can just do what we do, which is freeze all your applications for a specific build every semester or year, then carefully turn off every farking updater to stop the blizzard of login messages you otherwise get socked with. But then you get people wondering why you still have machines running Firefox 3.6
Worse, Earth's moon is slowly moving away from the center of the Earth due to tidal effects. At some future point the barycenter of the E-M system will be outside the surface of the Earth, and which point Earth becomes a binary planet as well.
The Aussie Stig also arrived in a shipping crate, upside down.
Or rather, don't. Seriously, don't.
Woz must have been abusing that time machine of his, to have copied microsoft's 1980 "innovation" in 1978 with his AppleSoft BASIC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applesoft_BASIC
Insofar as he was cloning Gates' 1975 introduction of Altair Basic, yes. Of course, neither was remotely original: BASIC had been around since the mid 60's, if just hadn't been ported to small machines.
Fortran's pretty similar- nobody here is going to hold it up as a language marvel, but it was- it fit the niche of "powerful number processor" very well. Perl is noted for being a complete mess, but if you need a quick script to massage some text nothing is better. BASIC fit into its niche as well, and frankly so does PHP
None of them were "elegant" in the sense of LISP, Smalltalk or Haskell. How are those doing by the way?