"What sort of social impact can we expect when/if life expectancies are measured in centuries?"
Here's my guess. It all goes pretty peachy for the first couple of hundred years, until we run out room for agricultural production and food. Then we will have to begin eating each other.
This is where controlling our own evolution becomes key. The high priest microbiologists become 10 feet tall with hardened steel exoskeletons. And of course, huge penises so they will get all the good-lookin' chicks.
The rest of us will be evolved to fatten up nicely on the minimum amount of soylent green and will be especially succulent with the right marinade.
I manage the Info Systems Department for a local government. I ended up here purely by chance. I wanted to leave a very large, Plano, TX based outsourcing firm (didn't want to move to Plano) and my current employer was hiring.
Here are the lousy parts of government:
1. If you are fairly bright and motivated, you will likely be working with a lot of folks who aren't.
2. Government is about accountability, not profitability. Things happen very slowly in government primarily because you have to document exactly how every penny is spent and why it is spent that way. Government will gladly spend thousands to select a product that costs $10 less than the competitor, just so any citizen or the press won't fry your ass if you made the wrong decision.
3. Remember your spending taxpayers money! Forget about bonuses, nice office furniture, big training budgets, or any other perk found in the private sector.
4. Because of 3 above, you will find that there is little reward for doing a job well. You'll likely get the same raise as the guy who hasn't put a line of code in production in years! Your average citizen would rather have you doing nothing than make more money than he does!
5. Forget about getting rid of poor performing employees. The documentation required isn't worth a managers time. Want to be guaranteed a job for life? Blow the whistle on anything you even think might have been done incorrectly and call the local newspaper!
6. Budgets are pretty much fixed yearly. If your priorities change during the year, you're screwed til next year. Just keep doing nothing.
I intended to jump back into the private sector last year, but the employment market sucks.
If you really don't want to work and don't mind hanging out in a drab government facility 8 hours a day, it may just be the right career move for you.
If someone wants to license their IP to you, instead of just giving it to you, that's their business. Repeat after me: "I am not required to spend my money on someone's Intellectual Property". If you don't like shinkwrapped licenses, don't by the product. I haven't purchased a Microsoft product in 10 years. What's the big friggin' deal?
The real world isn't always perfect
on
Do You Like Your Job?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
As a software development manager and programmer, I'll throw in some ideas:
1. Your real "job" is to feed, clothe, and shelter yourself and your family the best way you can. This is most often done by working for a company.
2. Your real "job" at the company is to do whatever it takes to maintain the short and long term growth and profitability of the organization. Sometimes this means hacking together some crap to close a deal which will make enough money to keep you and your coworkers employed a bit longer.
3. Your real "job" as a programmer is to put together the absolute best product you can given the constraints of time and money. Don't assume you understand all of the constraints, or the implications of the constraints.
Finally, while you are doing the best job you can, it is in your and the company's best interests to always try and make your manager aware of the downsides of his decisions in a polite and intelligent way.
Actually, your brilliant if your 25 and realize you don't know anything. I'm 39 and just starting to figure that out!
Globalization
on
Globalization
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The increase in religious fundamentalism is, in my opinion, the result of the spread of Western liberal culture through the Internet, television etc... The liberation of women from their historic roles, secularism and commercialism are anathema to many religious groups; including not least Christian fundamentalists in the United States.
Globalization is primarily a commercial function, and I don't believe it has a thing to do with the radicalization of opinions in the third world. Most people are happy to work for next to nothing for a rapacious Western conglomerate because their only other choice IS nothing.
Anti-American feelings in the Islamic world is primarily a response to U.S. support for Israel. Finland has some global corporations and you don't here people screaming "Death to Israel, death to Finland!".
Finding a way to reconcile Israel with her Arab neighbors would be a good start in reducing radicalism in the Islamic world. Religious fundamentalism is something we should not worry about, hell, maybe they're right.
Economic globalization is a fundamental choice that each nation is free to make, and again is none of our business.
We used to use Postresql 6.3 on our site and switched to Oracle to please our PHB. With Postgresql we had:
1) Rock Solid stability
2) Instantaneous response to moderately complex queries
3) simple administration
4) zero cost (with the exception of a really bright dba)
With Oracle we have
1) Rock solid stability
2) Instantaneous response to moderately complex queries
3) complex administration
4) $55,000 up front plus $20,000/yr for support plus a really bright dba.
The support, by the way, is via repeated incorrect responses from their web site.
Other comments:
1) Postgresql is a better comparison to Oracle than is MySQL. MySQL is a great product for what it does but is not (yet) a full-featured RDBMS.
2) Access is a datafile on a PC. You can rw it with a library built into an application.
3) MS SQL server is a great mid-upper tier database if you want a MicroSoft solution.
4) Oracle has incredible scalability. Very few organizations will ever need that scalability. Look at your organization and decide where you can best get a ROI on your money.
Why not just share the Access.mdb file on an NT server? Sure, once you have your 20th user on the system it will come to a grinding halt. But you did warn your boss. Maybe he'll listen to his dba the next time.
After reading the article, I decided to go ahead and shutdown Linux but accidentally rebooted instead. When LILO popped up I found an entry called "DOS". I booted it up and this really cool OS popped up. It has everything! Solitaire, Mines, a text editor, even a partially functional telnet app! But now my screen has turned blue and has a bunch of hex on it. Does anyone know how to kill this program?
Has anyone ever created a fuel cell engine that'll push an SUV at 80 mph? No. Electric cars currently suck. Is there more natural gas than gasoline in the ground? If we all switch to natural gas will it be cheap forever?
How much of our currently wild land would have to be plowed under to grow corn or rice for everyone to switch to methanol or ethanol?
Whether power comes from dead dinos, dead corn, or smashing atoms, it's all dirty and expensive. The right answer is to find ways to minimize it's use. But as long as you want to live 40 miles from work, pull your boat with your SUV, and live far enough from shopping that you have to drive to buy milk for the kids - stop your bitching! You made your own call!
What exactly does pulling up a Word document on a web browser do for you? Why not store the data in HTML in the first place? I guess if I had to store data like this, I would store them in the local filesystem with MySQL maintaining a table of URL's and document descriptions. It would take what, a couple of days to spit out a few web pages with perl that could upload, search and return those docs? Or is there something vastly more complex going on here?
Katz, you have a goofy argument. Singer publicly made his argument and is not in prison. The fact that others publicly disagree with him does not make this some kind of dictatorship.
What does make this a dictatorship of the 51% is that I risk prison for holing up for a weekend with a couple of hookers and a bag of weed.
In the shoot-out between Linux and WNT done by PC Week, WNT won on every front. As I understand it, the problem is a lack of threading in the network code in the Linux kernel. So what's the scoop on this?
I think there is a greater dichotomy between the commercial world and the Linux community than is mentioned in this article.
The entire premise of commercial software developers is to put together a proprietary system where they can control your software support dollars and continuously churn the market for revenues. This is completely opposite of the value derived by the GPL.
How can a PHB reconcile the two? I cannot imagine a valid economic justification for an ISV to invest millions in developing GPL'ed software. You can make some money off of it, but nowhere near what would be possible under a proprietary scheme.
On the other hand, if a piece of software is a good idea and has broad appeal, the hacker community will likely put together an OSS version within a couple of years anyway.
Software vendors will eventually have to support Linux, but they are going to be required to completely change their business strategy. Their won't be very many that find a financially successful one.
Slashdot Mirror
"What sort of social impact can we expect when/if life expectancies are measured in centuries?"
Here's my guess. It all goes pretty peachy for the first couple of hundred years, until we run out room for agricultural production and food. Then we will have to begin eating each other.
This is where controlling our own evolution becomes key. The high priest microbiologists become 10 feet tall with hardened steel exoskeletons. And of course, huge penises so they will get all the good-lookin' chicks.
The rest of us will be evolved to fatten up nicely on the minimum amount of soylent green and will be especially succulent with the right marinade.
After that, it just starts getting freaky.
I manage the Info Systems Department for a local government. I ended up here purely by chance. I wanted to leave a very large, Plano, TX based outsourcing firm (didn't want to move to Plano) and my current employer was hiring.
Here are the lousy parts of government:
1. If you are fairly bright and motivated, you will likely be working with a lot of folks who aren't.
2. Government is about accountability, not profitability. Things happen very slowly in government primarily because you have to document exactly how every penny is spent and why it is spent that way. Government will gladly spend thousands to select a product that costs $10 less than the competitor, just so any citizen or the press won't fry your ass if you made the wrong decision.
3. Remember your spending taxpayers money! Forget about bonuses, nice office furniture, big training budgets, or any other perk found in the private sector.
4. Because of 3 above, you will find that there is little reward for doing a job well. You'll likely get the same raise as the guy who hasn't put a line of code in production in years! Your average citizen would rather have you doing nothing than make more money than he does!
5. Forget about getting rid of poor performing employees. The documentation required isn't worth a managers time. Want to be guaranteed a job for life? Blow the whistle on anything you even think might have been done incorrectly and call the local newspaper!
6. Budgets are pretty much fixed yearly. If your priorities change during the year, you're screwed til next year. Just keep doing nothing.
I intended to jump back into the private sector last year, but the employment market sucks.
If you really don't want to work and don't mind hanging out in a drab government facility 8 hours a day, it may just be the right career move for you.
If someone wants to license their IP to you, instead of just giving it to you, that's their business. Repeat after me: "I am not required to spend my money on someone's Intellectual Property". If you don't like shinkwrapped licenses, don't by the product. I haven't purchased a Microsoft product in 10 years. What's the big friggin' deal?
As a software development manager and programmer, I'll throw in some ideas:
1. Your real "job" is to feed, clothe, and shelter yourself and your family the best way you can. This is most often done by working for a company.
2. Your real "job" at the company is to do whatever it takes to maintain the short and long term growth and profitability of the organization. Sometimes this means hacking together some crap to close a deal which will make enough money to keep you and your coworkers employed a bit longer.
3. Your real "job" as a programmer is to put together the absolute best product you can given the constraints of time and money. Don't assume you understand all of the constraints, or the implications of the constraints.
Finally, while you are doing the best job you can, it is in your and the company's best interests to always try and make your manager aware of the downsides of his decisions in a polite and intelligent way.
Actually, your brilliant if your 25 and realize you don't know anything. I'm 39 and just starting to figure that out!
The increase in religious fundamentalism is, in my opinion, the result of the spread of Western liberal culture through the Internet, television etc... The liberation of women from their historic roles, secularism and commercialism are anathema to many religious groups; including not least Christian fundamentalists in the United States.
Globalization is primarily a commercial function, and I don't believe it has a thing to do with the radicalization of opinions in the third world. Most people are happy to work for next to nothing for a rapacious Western conglomerate because their only other choice IS nothing.
Anti-American feelings in the Islamic world is primarily a response to U.S. support for Israel. Finland has some global corporations and you don't here people screaming "Death to Israel, death to Finland!".
Finding a way to reconcile Israel with her Arab neighbors would be a good start in reducing radicalism in the Islamic world. Religious fundamentalism is something we should not worry about, hell, maybe they're right.
Economic globalization is a fundamental choice that each nation is free to make, and again is none of our business.
That is the /opt approach and the correct one.
/usr/local/gnucash/lib/libcool.so /usr/local/lib
Improvements I would make:
1. If it is a truly shared library:
ln -s
2. If you don't make it backward compatible be told how much you suck by the community.
We used to use Postresql 6.3 on our site and switched to Oracle to please our PHB. With Postgresql we had:
1) Rock Solid stability
2) Instantaneous response to moderately complex queries
3) simple administration
4) zero cost (with the exception of a really bright dba)
With Oracle we have
1) Rock solid stability
2) Instantaneous response to moderately complex queries
3) complex administration
4) $55,000 up front plus $20,000/yr for support plus a really bright dba.
The support, by the way, is via repeated incorrect responses from their web site.
Other comments:
1) Postgresql is a better comparison to Oracle than is MySQL. MySQL is a great product for what it does but is not (yet) a full-featured RDBMS.
2) Access is a datafile on a PC. You can rw it with a library built into an application.
3) MS SQL server is a great mid-upper tier database if you want a MicroSoft solution.
4) Oracle has incredible scalability. Very few organizations will ever need that scalability. Look at your organization and decide where you can best get a ROI on your money.
Why not just share the Access .mdb file on an NT server? Sure, once you have your 20th user on the system it will come to a grinding halt. But you did warn your boss. Maybe he'll listen to his dba the next time.
After reading the article, I decided to go ahead and shutdown Linux but accidentally rebooted instead. When LILO popped up I found an entry called "DOS". I booted it up and this really cool OS popped up. It has everything! Solitaire, Mines, a text editor, even a partially functional telnet app! But now my screen has turned blue and has a bunch of hex on it. Does anyone know how to kill this program?
Has anyone ever created a fuel cell engine that'll push an SUV at 80 mph? No. Electric cars currently suck. Is there more natural gas than gasoline in the ground? If we all switch to natural gas will it be cheap forever?
How much of our currently wild land would have to be plowed under to grow corn or rice for everyone to switch to methanol or ethanol?
Whether power comes from dead dinos, dead corn, or smashing atoms, it's all dirty and expensive. The right answer is to find ways to minimize it's use. But as long as you want to live 40 miles from work, pull your boat with your SUV, and live far enough from shopping that you have to drive to buy milk for the kids - stop your bitching! You made your own call!
What exactly does pulling up a Word document on a web browser do for you? Why not store the data in HTML in the first place? I guess if I had to store data like this, I would store them in the local filesystem with MySQL maintaining a table of URL's and document descriptions. It would take what, a couple of days to spit out a few web pages with perl that could upload, search and return those docs? Or is there something vastly more complex going on here?
Katz, you have a goofy argument. Singer publicly made his argument and is not in prison. The fact that others publicly disagree with him does not make this some kind of dictatorship.
What does make this a dictatorship of the 51% is that I risk prison for holing up for a weekend with a couple of hookers and a bag of weed.
In the shoot-out between Linux and WNT done by PC Week, WNT won on every front. As I understand it, the problem is a lack of threading in the network code in the Linux kernel. So what's the scoop on this?
I think there is a greater dichotomy between the commercial world and the Linux community than is mentioned in this article.
The entire premise of commercial software developers is to put together a proprietary system where they can control your software support dollars and continuously churn the market for revenues. This is completely opposite of the value derived by the GPL.
How can a PHB reconcile the two? I cannot imagine a valid economic justification for an ISV to invest millions in developing GPL'ed software. You can make some money off of it, but nowhere near what would be possible under a proprietary scheme.
On the other hand, if a piece of software is a good idea and has broad appeal, the hacker community will likely put together an OSS version within a couple of years anyway.
Software vendors will eventually have to support Linux, but they are going to be required to completely change their business strategy. Their won't be very many that find a financially successful one.
Just some random, poorly formatted thoughts.