The web app I am working now sells for $5000 per CPU, and runs in Fortune 100 network environments providing cloud network security services.
I have worked on it for 3 years and once it's running with the full feature set my job as lead UI coder could be outsourced to a team in Hungary who would then do the bug fixes. And I absolutely expect that is what will happen.
You are not in my industry, or else you are not in my league.
Oracle, Google, Apple, Yahoo, HP and all the rest have an army of lobbyists in Washington DC specifically to prevent anything of the kind ever happening until the heat death of the universe.
Nope. My kids will do something else. Farmer or teacher or architect or chef or just about anything else, with my blessing. Of course that means Oracle, Google, Apple, Yahoo, HP and all the rest will become dependent on an external labor pool, with all the political and socioeconomic issues so implied, and when the cheese really gets binding and they are hemorrhaging trade secrets to off-shore competitors they'll fall on their swords claiming "it wasn't our fault!" and the US technology industry can start over from basic principles.
So yeah, maybe my grandchildren will be coders. That's cool, I could totally help them with their apps.
Been writing web applications for 15 years. Through 5 startups. Been outsourced twice, one time with the entire US team the week after closing an important B-round that we all worked really hard to land.
I have two kids. I've never suggested work in a technology field as a career choice for my own children. I'm glad they don't teach coding in schools, it's not good work. Coders are paid sh*t and used like toilet paper. All of our daily creativity and occasional brilliance ends up making the MBA pukes rich and rolling in blow.
I know a few geeks, not many of which could hold up their end of an intellectual conversation. I tire of them fairly quickly.
I also know a lot of engineers. There are a few nerds among them, but not many geeks. The engineers I know can talk all four legs off an Arcturian Megadonkey and then convince it to go for a walk afterwards.
Yes, I've wrapped a lot of subtle distinctions in all that. But that's really the point of the exercise. We all could stand to examine our definitions of a lot of things. I would start by examining one's definition of success.
More likely George discovered too late that there was already a really successful "Star____" television series out there and realized he didn't want to play second fiddle to that other guy.
That was a really elaborate ruse. With that much free time to cook up something like that, you'd think they could... oh I don't know... maybe just study for the test?
Or maybe the cheaters were just working up a movie script idea. Do a few months in the slammer, sell the rights, then buy a really good test tutor for next time.
heheheh... I got special mention! Slashtard of the Day!
Is 36K now "low index"? damn, I remember when it was still 1K to be low. Read a post maybe 10 years ago by a guy UIDed at around 300 and everyone changed the subject to "how did you first hear about/.?" Hey Commander Taco, those were the wild days, weren't they? Man look at all we've lost since then...
I'm pretty sure that "trading floor" goes back a ways. Like maybe 10,000 years or so. So does "a bunch of loud mouths standing around shouting prices". You can take a picture of people doing this kinda thing in every major city in the world, 24 hours a day, and could have do so at any time since the invention of the camera in 1837.
Anyone doing "climate predictions" on less than 80 years of data with 5 year smoothing, drawn from multiple data sources representing well dispersed sampling sites, is kidding themselves.
But go on, look for your ice age if that's what you want to do. Nature doesn't give a bent farthing what you want, you will get what you have coming to you, never fear. And once we hit 400ppm CO2 we're likely to get it up side the head, in spades, and with a twist of lemon.
That question struck me as interesting, so I Googled "cultural anthropology group marriage" and it turns out that "many of each" is rare, with no actual examples. However "brothers marrying a woman" (polyandry) and "sisters marrying a man" (polygyny) are common enough. This has even been recorded in dolphin mating where brothers will team up to fight off rivals, then share the captured female. There are obvious advantages in teaming up with someone you know if you can trust that other person/creature.
Maybe "brothers marry sisters" would work. I have cousins who did that, though in separate households (as far as anyone knew:) and I heard tell how the sisters helped each other with the brothers, and vv. Kinda neat. Though right now I couldn't tell you if they are all still married, or to the same person. If you follow my drift.
You are right; in the Pagan community in which I and my family circle polyamory is openly discussed at all age levels, though still seldom in a family (ie reproductive) context. In my original post I guess I was addressing more the practical matter of survival. Essentially, a lone monkey is a dead monkey. We used to have all kinds of social constructs surrounding us to support us; large families, vital churches, small close-knit communities. The world was smaller, expectations were limited, people turned to each other more readily. Or so it seems. I wasn't there:)
Now most of that is gone. Just dust, really a wasteland. If we really are headed into hard times economically, environmentally, energetically, or what have you then my guess is that yeah, we're going to notice how alone we all are.
I don't think anyone "missed the boat" by being over 30. Economically, you don't start feeling any pain until you hit 40. Socially, when your kids start to stretch out and find the world you start to wish you had more adults around just to talk to them. Then, you get old. A house full of old people who love one another is going to have an easier time that two old people, or one.
Forget sex. Think new social constructs. For my money, if I went around the wheel again I'd find sisters and "marry" them both (well one legally, the other in a hand-fasting) and start the whole "social ark" all over again from scratch. I still might, at that. Though not my wife's actual sister, who is nutty as a fruitcake and abusive as hell. I look at her and think she should could have used some sisterly help in all those broken marriages.
Getting back to the topic of the thread; being alone is stressful, more on some than others. Maybe being in tri-part relationships is the opposite effect, given certain rules. Polyamory as the new Prozac, I mean, the only side effect being a different take on the real meaning of commitment. Those of us who can and are willing should seriously try.
Hah! You funny. You can unhand them of what they are trying to steal and *then* let them go. Assuming the real owner doesn't "escort" them to the nearest alley for a "discussion" then they walk.
The idea is, if you have a human-based security check at the door it raises the barrier to success and introduces an element of risk (AKA "I'm calling the cops on your punk ass.") Chucky Cheese uses the method to discourage pedophiles and childnappings. I sense that it works.
This is entirely correct; the market leading browser is non-standard in many ways, and that breaks standards as a concept, or might have. But that is just a tactic towards a strategic goal, and it was the strategic goal to which I alluded in my post. Standards largely won out, so today we say IE is borken rather than saying it is the One True Way. Nice play, MS.
Standards are like the white blood cells of the Internet, and are the chief way that the system is able to work at all given the complexity and chaos of its origins. Without standards, it would eventually fall apart due to internal "diseases" born of the Not Coded Here mentality of corporations. MS probably wasn't so worried about the threat of email, or IRC, or gopher-space. But a graphic application that ran over resources and data spaces not-on-the-desktop must have made Bill Gates soil himself.
Very much so I feel the same way. In fact, as a software developer I fear that I create nothing of real value to future generations, while consuming resources those generations will wish they had. My life of consumption without lasting benefit is offset by only two things: 1) I'm building a home from used/recycled materials that ought to last 100 years, and 2) I have two very smart and capable children that I am educating to NOT do what I have done.
I feed my family with my job, but my job is stupid and meaningless in the larger picture. There is a better way, I am heading there as fast as I can, and then I won't be for rent anymore.
I didn't RTFA to get their cut on this, but my opinion after many years as a web developer has been that MS more-or-less deliberately left IE borken just to make the web hard to use for most users. The security gaffs that left Windows pwnable might have been real issues, but I think the rest was a strategic gamble to keep people locked into the "your desktop is the only reality" Matrix-ish crapola that keeps them raking in the cash on OS and Office sales. Only the web sort of went ahead and won anyway, mostly. IE being F.U.B.A.R. is now just a sad joke.
If that's the case, then IE should indeed by fixable, and probably easily. There might be former/reformed MS coders in the readership who could comment on this. Guys and gals; did you do as good a job on IE as you wanted to? Or was there a certain shaved ape making "suggestions" about priorities that left IE crippled?
Use a UV-readable marker to mark peoples' arms with a sekret sign (of the beast!) and a random number, and then mark their equipment same-wise. Then, nobody gets out with a boxen who 1) isn't marked on the arm with the sekret sign + number, and 2) has equipage marked the same.
Any reliable wife will tell you that what she needs most on any given day is a wife. We compensate for monogamy by hiring wives for our wives; house cleaners, babysitters, daycare, diaper service, food delivery. Also, by living (well in the US) in a throw-away technical society we have striped away the need to make or repair clothes (sewing), prepare complex meals (eating out), corresponding (email, phone) and many other things that women "had" to do or felt needed to be done in a proper society.
My wife and I, married almost 14 years and with two kids, have discussed "getting" (not sure how to put it) a second wife. She's not opposed to it, understands it completely, but we haven't had a chance to try it yet. Since we live sustainably and don't take advantage of the many means to rent a wife, we don't really have much choice except to look for help. If you are going to use a woman that way, then you should support her, I feel. Renting is just a way to use something and throw it away, in the end. And paying for services that a woman could do herself is expensive the realm of the rich.
I don't know how having two wives would make me live longer as such, never gave it any thought, but it would reduce how much I worry about our family economy if I had two wives working as sisters to hold everything together, get back to simpler ways of doing things by hand and without technology. Homeschooling, food preparation and gardening are suddenly easier. My wife works so hard... she needs a wife.
[PS: Some will chorus "then help her do her work you smuck!" To which I reply "Ah, but I'm the one building the house." You see, when you really adopt the idea of do-it-yerself you bite off this enormous load of work that nobody even thinks about any more.]
Well maybe you shaped the flour but you didn't make the bread, the Sun did via the agency of plants, who are the only ones can reorganize CO2. Plants reorganize CO2 into starches using energy from the Sun. You harvest the grain and reorganize the berries into flour using energy from the Sun. Adding additional materials you reorganize it all again into dough, then bake it using energy from the Sun. Maybe you ship it around the planet, using energy from the Sun. *Then* you exchange it. Then someone eats it and it's gone to fertilizer, eventually back into some combination of CO2 and methane mostly, again awaiting reorganization into something complex.
Rinse. Repeat.
Money/value/wealth are all proxies for sunlight, and we cannot make sunlight (though we *did* dig it up and pump it out of the ground for a short while.) Someone "pays" the baker for being clever about pulling off his bit of slight-of-hand. The value add is the knowledge of how to make all the parts swing together. Otherwise, there is nothing of value, outside of the sunlight, which itself is critical and was before we arrived on the scene and invented futures markets. We are literally surrounded by things that would be of immense value if only someone would reorganize them a little for us. Oil companies do this with crude. Carpenters do this with wood. The only value-add here is their knowledge. The things we continue to find useless are useless because nobody has noticed a use for them. Though we are starting to get hip to the intrinsic value of sunlight.
So one could say that we hallucinate what is useless as easily as we hallucinate what is of greatest value. The idea that there is value or money in any of it starts and ends in our heads, as individuals, perhaps as cultures, and under the hood it is just the gears of the Sun churning the soil and seawater of this small planet into interesting shapes that hallucinate that they are important and rich.
Most wealth is hallucinated, and can evaporate in an instant upon waking. Look at housing. Look at stocks. Look at the "tulip craze". Valuation bubbles are just shared dreams of making wealth from nothing at all, then sanity asserts itself. You end up with nothing for your nothing, which is just as the universe intended it. [See: First Law of Thermodynamics] And all your furious wheel-spinning actually eats up a lot of useful energy, decreasing real wealth/value and hastening macroeconomic collapse and ultimately the heat death of the universe. [See: Second Law of Thermodynamics]
Nobody can actually "make" wealth. There is only so much real wealth because there is only so much reality to move around. The rest is an agreement of sorts about the value of things in exchange before those things evaporate. That agreement can fall apart almost instantly once enough people awaken and move on. [See: End of Oil]
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The web app I am working now sells for $5000 per CPU, and runs in Fortune 100 network environments providing cloud network security services.
I have worked on it for 3 years and once it's running with the full feature set my job as lead UI coder could be outsourced to a team in Hungary who would then do the bug fixes. And I absolutely expect that is what will happen.
You are not in my industry, or else you are not in my league.
Oracle, Google, Apple, Yahoo, HP and all the rest have an army of lobbyists in Washington DC specifically to prevent anything of the kind ever happening until the heat death of the universe.
Nope. My kids will do something else. Farmer or teacher or architect or chef or just about anything else, with my blessing. Of course that means Oracle, Google, Apple, Yahoo, HP and all the rest will become dependent on an external labor pool, with all the political and socioeconomic issues so implied, and when the cheese really gets binding and they are hemorrhaging trade secrets to off-shore competitors they'll fall on their swords claiming "it wasn't our fault!" and the US technology industry can start over from basic principles.
So yeah, maybe my grandchildren will be coders. That's cool, I could totally help them with their apps.
Been writing web applications for 15 years. Through 5 startups. Been outsourced twice, one time with the entire US team the week after closing an important B-round that we all worked really hard to land.
I have two kids. I've never suggested work in a technology field as a career choice for my own children. I'm glad they don't teach coding in schools, it's not good work. Coders are paid sh*t and used like toilet paper. All of our daily creativity and occasional brilliance ends up making the MBA pukes rich and rolling in blow.
So I guess it's no big mystery why he's gone now, is it.
come to mind for some reason.
"NASA wanted the shot before it retires the shuttle fleet after one final mission in July."
Then this is just a consolation prize. 12 years to finally get at the iconic moment.
So much fail.
I know a few geeks, not many of which could hold up their end of an intellectual conversation. I tire of them fairly quickly.
I also know a lot of engineers. There are a few nerds among them, but not many geeks. The engineers I know can talk all four legs off an Arcturian Megadonkey and then convince it to go for a walk afterwards.
Yes, I've wrapped a lot of subtle distinctions in all that. But that's really the point of the exercise. We all could stand to examine our definitions of a lot of things. I would start by examining one's definition of success.
More likely George discovered too late that there was already a really successful "Star____" television series out there and realized he didn't want to play second fiddle to that other guy.
That was a really elaborate ruse. With that much free time to cook up something like that, you'd think they could ... oh I don't know ... maybe just study for the test?
Or maybe the cheaters were just working up a movie script idea. Do a few months in the slammer, sell the rights, then buy a really good test tutor for next time.
"Trolling idiot" works too. Tho I imagine this guy works for NYSE or their PR attack dogs.
NYSE is locked in a death spiral with the other Exchanges. Bad Things are happening to their revenue model. Cry me a river...
Oh, I actually wrote some fiction on the NYSE and high-freq trading. Totally fictitious all around (I've never even been there) but funny as heck IMO:
madscienceunlimited.com/fiction/theexchange.html
I guess I'll get a take-down order now lulz. But at least I didn't include a picture of the trading floor.
heheheh ... I got special mention! Slashtard of the Day!
Is 36K now "low index"? damn, I remember when it was still 1K to be low. Read a post maybe 10 years ago by a guy UIDed at around 300 and everyone changed the subject to "how did you first hear about /.?" Hey Commander Taco, those were the wild days, weren't they? Man look at all we've lost since then ...
I'm pretty sure that "trading floor" goes back a ways. Like maybe 10,000 years or so. So does "a bunch of loud mouths standing around shouting prices". You can take a picture of people doing this kinda thing in every major city in the world, 24 hours a day, and could have do so at any time since the invention of the camera in 1837.
Prior art bitches.
Anyone doing "climate predictions" on less than 80 years of data with 5 year smoothing, drawn from multiple data sources representing well dispersed sampling sites, is kidding themselves.
But go on, look for your ice age if that's what you want to do. Nature doesn't give a bent farthing what you want, you will get what you have coming to you, never fear. And once we hit 400ppm CO2 we're likely to get it up side the head, in spades, and with a twist of lemon.
That question struck me as interesting, so I Googled "cultural anthropology group marriage" and it turns out that "many of each" is rare, with no actual examples. However "brothers marrying a woman" (polyandry) and "sisters marrying a man" (polygyny) are common enough. This has even been recorded in dolphin mating where brothers will team up to fight off rivals, then share the captured female. There are obvious advantages in teaming up with someone you know if you can trust that other person/creature.
Maybe "brothers marry sisters" would work. I have cousins who did that, though in separate households (as far as anyone knew :) and I heard tell how the sisters helped each other with the brothers, and vv. Kinda neat. Though right now I couldn't tell you if they are all still married, or to the same person. If you follow my drift.
You are right; in the Pagan community in which I and my family circle polyamory is openly discussed at all age levels, though still seldom in a family (ie reproductive) context. In my original post I guess I was addressing more the practical matter of survival. Essentially, a lone monkey is a dead monkey. We used to have all kinds of social constructs surrounding us to support us; large families, vital churches, small close-knit communities. The world was smaller, expectations were limited, people turned to each other more readily. Or so it seems. I wasn't there :)
Now most of that is gone. Just dust, really a wasteland. If we really are headed into hard times economically, environmentally, energetically, or what have you then my guess is that yeah, we're going to notice how alone we all are.
I don't think anyone "missed the boat" by being over 30. Economically, you don't start feeling any pain until you hit 40. Socially, when your kids start to stretch out and find the world you start to wish you had more adults around just to talk to them. Then, you get old. A house full of old people who love one another is going to have an easier time that two old people, or one.
Forget sex. Think new social constructs. For my money, if I went around the wheel again I'd find sisters and "marry" them both (well one legally, the other in a hand-fasting) and start the whole "social ark" all over again from scratch. I still might, at that. Though not my wife's actual sister, who is nutty as a fruitcake and abusive as hell. I look at her and think she should could have used some sisterly help in all those broken marriages.
Getting back to the topic of the thread; being alone is stressful, more on some than others. Maybe being in tri-part relationships is the opposite effect, given certain rules. Polyamory as the new Prozac, I mean, the only side effect being a different take on the real meaning of commitment. Those of us who can and are willing should seriously try.
Hah! You funny. You can unhand them of what they are trying to steal and *then* let them go. Assuming the real owner doesn't "escort" them to the nearest alley for a "discussion" then they walk.
The idea is, if you have a human-based security check at the door it raises the barrier to success and introduces an element of risk (AKA "I'm calling the cops on your punk ass.") Chucky Cheese uses the method to discourage pedophiles and childnappings. I sense that it works.
And tis still l33tful.
This is entirely correct; the market leading browser is non-standard in many ways, and that breaks standards as a concept, or might have. But that is just a tactic towards a strategic goal, and it was the strategic goal to which I alluded in my post. Standards largely won out, so today we say IE is borken rather than saying it is the One True Way. Nice play, MS.
Standards are like the white blood cells of the Internet, and are the chief way that the system is able to work at all given the complexity and chaos of its origins. Without standards, it would eventually fall apart due to internal "diseases" born of the Not Coded Here mentality of corporations. MS probably wasn't so worried about the threat of email, or IRC, or gopher-space. But a graphic application that ran over resources and data spaces not-on-the-desktop must have made Bill Gates soil himself.
Thanks for the critique.
-- act fast decide fast --
Thank you for the question. It's a valid one.
Very much so I feel the same way. In fact, as a software developer I fear that I create nothing of real value to future generations, while consuming resources those generations will wish they had. My life of consumption without lasting benefit is offset by only two things: 1) I'm building a home from used/recycled materials that ought to last 100 years, and 2) I have two very smart and capable children that I am educating to NOT do what I have done.
I feed my family with my job, but my job is stupid and meaningless in the larger picture. There is a better way, I am heading there as fast as I can, and then I won't be for rent anymore.
-- act fast decide fast --
I didn't RTFA to get their cut on this, but my opinion after many years as a web developer has been that MS more-or-less deliberately left IE borken just to make the web hard to use for most users. The security gaffs that left Windows pwnable might have been real issues, but I think the rest was a strategic gamble to keep people locked into the "your desktop is the only reality" Matrix-ish crapola that keeps them raking in the cash on OS and Office sales. Only the web sort of went ahead and won anyway, mostly. IE being F.U.B.A.R. is now just a sad joke.
If that's the case, then IE should indeed by fixable, and probably easily. There might be former/reformed MS coders in the readership who could comment on this. Guys and gals; did you do as good a job on IE as you wanted to? Or was there a certain shaved ape making "suggestions" about priorities that left IE crippled?
Use a UV-readable marker to mark peoples' arms with a sekret sign (of the beast!) and a random number, and then mark their equipment same-wise. Then, nobody gets out with a boxen who 1) isn't marked on the arm with the sekret sign + number, and 2) has equipage marked the same.
Isn't perfect, but tis l33tful.
Any reliable wife will tell you that what she needs most on any given day is a wife. We compensate for monogamy by hiring wives for our wives; house cleaners, babysitters, daycare, diaper service, food delivery. Also, by living (well in the US) in a throw-away technical society we have striped away the need to make or repair clothes (sewing), prepare complex meals (eating out), corresponding (email, phone) and many other things that women "had" to do or felt needed to be done in a proper society.
My wife and I, married almost 14 years and with two kids, have discussed "getting" (not sure how to put it) a second wife. She's not opposed to it, understands it completely, but we haven't had a chance to try it yet. Since we live sustainably and don't take advantage of the many means to rent a wife, we don't really have much choice except to look for help. If you are going to use a woman that way, then you should support her, I feel. Renting is just a way to use something and throw it away, in the end. And paying for services that a woman could do herself is expensive the realm of the rich.
I don't know how having two wives would make me live longer as such, never gave it any thought, but it would reduce how much I worry about our family economy if I had two wives working as sisters to hold everything together, get back to simpler ways of doing things by hand and without technology. Homeschooling, food preparation and gardening are suddenly easier. My wife works so hard... she needs a wife.
[PS: Some will chorus "then help her do her work you smuck!" To which I reply "Ah, but I'm the one building the house." You see, when you really adopt the idea of do-it-yerself you bite off this enormous load of work that nobody even thinks about any more.]
FTW that was epic funny. Nominated for Slashdot Top 100 Most Funny and Topical Posts Evar.
Well maybe you shaped the flour but you didn't make the bread, the Sun did via the agency of plants, who are the only ones can reorganize CO2. Plants reorganize CO2 into starches using energy from the Sun. You harvest the grain and reorganize the berries into flour using energy from the Sun. Adding additional materials you reorganize it all again into dough, then bake it using energy from the Sun. Maybe you ship it around the planet, using energy from the Sun. *Then* you exchange it. Then someone eats it and it's gone to fertilizer, eventually back into some combination of CO2 and methane mostly, again awaiting reorganization into something complex.
Rinse. Repeat.
Money/value/wealth are all proxies for sunlight, and we cannot make sunlight (though we *did* dig it up and pump it out of the ground for a short while.) Someone "pays" the baker for being clever about pulling off his bit of slight-of-hand. The value add is the knowledge of how to make all the parts swing together. Otherwise, there is nothing of value, outside of the sunlight, which itself is critical and was before we arrived on the scene and invented futures markets. We are literally surrounded by things that would be of immense value if only someone would reorganize them a little for us. Oil companies do this with crude. Carpenters do this with wood. The only value-add here is their knowledge. The things we continue to find useless are useless because nobody has noticed a use for them. Though we are starting to get hip to the intrinsic value of sunlight.
So one could say that we hallucinate what is useless as easily as we hallucinate what is of greatest value. The idea that there is value or money in any of it starts and ends in our heads, as individuals, perhaps as cultures, and under the hood it is just the gears of the Sun churning the soil and seawater of this small planet into interesting shapes that hallucinate that they are important and rich.
act fast decide fast
If I were doing helpdesk I'd work this link into MOST of my replies:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cZC67wXUTs
It is *that* helpful.
-cb
Most wealth is hallucinated, and can evaporate in an instant upon waking. Look at housing. Look at stocks. Look at the "tulip craze". Valuation bubbles are just shared dreams of making wealth from nothing at all, then sanity asserts itself. You end up with nothing for your nothing, which is just as the universe intended it. [See: First Law of Thermodynamics] And all your furious wheel-spinning actually eats up a lot of useful energy, decreasing real wealth/value and hastening macroeconomic collapse and ultimately the heat death of the universe. [See: Second Law of Thermodynamics]
Nobody can actually "make" wealth. There is only so much real wealth because there is only so much reality to move around. The rest is an agreement of sorts about the value of things in exchange before those things evaporate. That agreement can fall apart almost instantly once enough people awaken and move on. [See: End of Oil]
($ActFast||$DecideFast)