did you really say that Android is on borrowed time??
that's just utterly ridiculous...even if Google stopped work on it today, the OS community and the huge worldwide installed userbase would keep it going forever, just like Linus did with unix.
Android is going to be with us forever.
I'd top that with an even bolder statement: in 10 years time, unless something totally unforseeable happens, 'mobile' will mean 'Samsung gadget running Android' much the same way desktop computer meant Wintel up to only a few years ago, with maybe a upper single digit market share for Apple serving a hipster niche.
I don't have an opinion on whether it's justified or not, as it is none of my business, but why is it that nearly every American geek, at least on the internet, hates this president more than any other in living memory? What specifically, did he do to piss off the geeks?
What, do you mean that there's more to it than just typing over the DNA sequence from a paper and printing the offending protein out on the protein printer?
I'm not seeing any evidence to support that. Going by recent history, the US seems perfectly happy to trample over its allies to secure its putative interests.
I don't see much evidence for this. For allies, the US hegemony has been predominantly benign. For a comparison, look at the various 'allies' the Russians had during the cold war.
I think your confusion may stem from your definition of ally, which I imagine includes unwilling vassals.
An ally is someone you share a joint interest with. Someone who has something unique to offer that some random other doesn't have (such as cultural ties, great resources or a strategic location), and vice-versa. The relationship is one of 'you scratch my back, I scratch your back, because we both want to or need to'. An ally is someone whose interests you will occasionally put before your own when the situation demands it.
A vassal is someone who serves your interest. The relationship is like employer vs employee (you scratch my back for a reward) or master vs servant (you scratch my back or else). You don't reward a vassal more than his services are worth to you, and occasionally one will be made redundant in favor of another one.
If your country doesn't have special cultural ties with the US, and has nothing unique to offer, you're deluding yourself if you think you are an ally. You're a vassal.
As for his embellishments on his CV, I was under the impression that a US CV was expected to be rather 'boastfully' worded. If you're simply frank and realistic, or worse, modest, on your CV, you'll still be assumed to be exaggerating, so you'll come across as below average.
However..
If someone in protest to government espionage defect, first to China, and then to Russia of all places, to seek greater transparency and privacy, then that shows some exceptionally poor judgement...
That ice age permafrost is in danger of pronounced melting too.
I think you're confusing (near) surface permafrost in the arctic, due to the average annual temperature being below freezing, and ice age permafrost 300 ft below the surface that's there because the average conditions there over the Quaternary period has been 'covered with an ice sheet' - even if that hasn't been the case in 10,000 years. In most places, I imagine (no data available that I'm aware of), what's buried that deep will probably stay there whether it's frozen or not.
Why does any mention of ice or antarctica have to turn into an ideological battle over the climate?
This melt water is forming at the bottom, beneat an ice sheet that's more than two and a half miles thick in places. It's completely shielded from the climate, which acts on the surface and on the ocean.
There are places in northern Europe, siberia, alaska, canada, where a few hundred feet below the surface you still find permafrost left over from the last ice age. It's so far from the surface that it apparently takes more than 10,000 years to melt.
Java had a problem with the JCP not working, then the Sun to Oracle transition, and Apache getting elbowed out. It's a miracle a new version even came out in the first place.
C# never had a community process to worry about, and moved forward all the time. It has had closures, lambdas, function points etc. for quite a while now.
Working at a bank, we were still stuck with Websphere 6.0, and thus JSE 1.4, around the time JSE 1.7 was released.
Websphere 6.1, with JSE 1.5 support, was available from 2007, about 4 years after 1.5 was released, iirc, but such an upgrade has so much (potential) impact that some corporations take several years to do it.
Many of those 23 year olds are being paid over 100k a year. Their lack of experience in obsolete things isn't holding them back. As long as you've graduated to a real job by your mid 30's, it's a great start to a career. You just stop advancing if you stick with it too long, because of the short half life of experience in this field.
And thanks to the way the van Gogh museum restricts access to the scans and issues only 260 overpriced copies, most people will never get to see these paintings, or replicas, in person either.
The van Gogh museum has a lot of works by van Gogh, dozens, maybe hundreds, but none of the ones people actually want to see. The nice ones are in private collections, or in famous musea in New York. You see, the van Gogh museum was founded with the works that the van Gogh family (read: Theo's widow) wasn't able to sell, even after creating the hype around Vincent after his hysteric death.
You may call it genius, but it's probably better described as dumb chance.
Vincent van Gogh didn't take up painting, or any kind of art, until his late 20's, and it shows. By looking at his early work objectively (meaning all but his very latest work), clearly shows him for what he really was: someone who, with very limited skill, tried to imitate Monet and his one sided friend Gauguin (van Gogh was too obtuse or too self absorbed to realize Gauguin didn't exactly like him back). Because he lacked the skill, and most of all because he was a lazy perpetual drunk, he couldn't be bothered to carefully place all those dots, and used bold strokes instead. That the result was something 'new' or at least idiosyncratic may not have been the result of an artistic, creative process, but rather of the lack of one. In his life, by all accounts he was a horrible narcissistic and neurotic freak, living as a parasite on his brother's back. The only time anything resembling talent started to shine through, was when he was confined to a psychiatric institution. It was only here, temporarily cut off from drinking and whoring, where he actually managed to put in the work, and created something that objectively (once you strip away the hype) could be described as art.
The rest of his career, he created infantile, amateuristic illustrations rather than art, but created the timeless hype by living his life as a kind of self destructive performance art.
In a way, it's best to think of him as the Sid Vicious of painting.
Freedom is an illusion made possible by not wanting or expecting things you cannot or are not allowed to do or have.
If your deepest desires are simple things, such as to own a house, a car or to visit Africa, there are steps you could take to make it happen, and you feel free. If your deepest desire is to be free from having infidels and immodest women around you, a libertarian society might feel much more stifling than a strict, traditional one.
If your deepest desire is to be young again and get a second chance at your wasted youth, or to have been born as something else, you might feel horribly limited and constricted no matter where you are.
SpaceX has nothing to do with space exploration - the business model is making money with commercial space flight. Think launching satellites, resupplying the space station, for a fee. They will not be boldly going where no man has gone before, they will not be looking for life on other planets.
There's no money in space exploration, unless the government buys their equipment or services, like it has used the equipment and services of other companies in the past.
I get the impression that BG feels he has enough money, and he seems to be trying to spend it wisely, not to invest it in a cool but high risk start up.
Bonobos are further back on the evolutionary scale, call it 5 million years before they become intelligent (massive guesstimate).
Is a Bobobo a primitive human any more than a fish is a primitive frog? Apes are as highly evolved as we are, just in a differrent direction. Why would they become intelligent? Would a bigger brain make them better at mating while dangling from a branch? Life on Earth thrived for about 3 billion years before we came along, and unless everything else is exterminated, we're unlikely to be evolution's endpoint.
Yes, but that was a long time ago. MySQL had minimum complexity for a DB but it also had minimal performance in anything but simple lookups. (With those it was stupid fast.) To imply that is still sufficient reason to remain on MySQL is to vet your product using a type of user inertia to stifle movement from a now-lesser product to a perhaps better one. That is what Microsoft does to reduce defections from e.g., Office to Open Office.
I don't know why, but I can't get rid of the suspicion that if you kickstarted another billion to Monty all of this would go away...
In my experience, oracle's enterprise edition database has minimal performance for anything but simple lookups too. All relational databases I have worked with slow down dramatically once you start moving too much business logic into your sql queries.
MySQL/isam sacrificed acid compliance for great performance on simple hardware, which turned out to be an acceptable tradeoff for a newly emerging workload. This, combined with the fact that it was backed by a company rather than a group of volunteers as with Posgresql made it take off.
I've worked for a customer with a product owner who really believed in agile, and it was great.
Now I'm working for a customer with a product owner who doesn't really believe in agile, and it's not so good. At the end of a sprint, if there are any stories not in the 'done' column, he's disappointed that we haven't delivered what was promised. He feels you can't just put these back on the backlog for the next sprint, but we should be working late to finish them before the next sprint starts. When you ask him to prioritize, everything is important! It feels like every sprint we have to work a bit harder than the last one, and after two weeks, the result is always the same: customer disappointed. It's stressful, and counter productive too. We find ourselves reluctant to start anything new in the last day or two before the demo, because if it's not 'done' by the demo, we have some explaining to do.
And yet in a heartbeat I would drop your buzzword-driven developer and hire a developer who had a solid knowledge of data structures and algorithms, operating systems and related topics, networking and distributed systems, concurrent systems, testing and strategies for error detection/recovery, requirements capture and modelling and other high-level functions, different programming styles and software architectures, and other similarly general foundations. I'd even do it without even asking which programming language(s) the developer with the solid foundations used lately.
In your experience, do older developers have solid knowledge of data structures, algorithms, OS and related topics, networking and distributed systems, etc, etc? That sounds more like skills of a recent college graduate, with no kids and plenty of time for hacking and going to conferences.
The 1970's climate scare was global cooling, which was ultimately dropped as incorrect. That gives a large precedent to not caring about (regardless of denying or not) the next climate scare.
Global cooling incorrect? Ice ages are a theory very well supported by evidence. As long as there are still permanent ice caps on the poles and glaciers in the mountains, there is no indication whatsoever that the holocene is a 'post' glacial. We are 10000 years into an interglacial, which on average have been lasting about 10k years. The 'flips' between glaciation and interglacial are very sudden (on a geological scale) after a period of slow decline. This wasn't a baseless climate scare, because there is every reason to assume the next glaciation will happen 'soon' (on a geological scale), it is just not known exactly when the 'flip' will take place. It was prudent to think about the consequences then, just as it still is today. If you feel a warming climate is bad, wait until the snow doesn't melt one summer.
Most likely, South Korea would supply most of the ground troops and assume all of the nation building duties. The main risk for the USA would be provoking China or Russia into getting involved.
Slashdot Mirror
did you really say that Android is on borrowed time??
that's just utterly ridiculous...even if Google stopped work on it today, the OS community and the huge worldwide installed userbase would keep it going forever, just like Linus did with unix.
Android is going to be with us forever.
I'd top that with an even bolder statement: in 10 years time, unless something totally unforseeable happens, 'mobile' will mean 'Samsung gadget running Android' much the same way desktop computer meant Wintel up to only a few years ago, with maybe a upper single digit market share for Apple serving a hipster niche.
I don't have an opinion on whether it's justified or not, as it is none of my business, but why is it that nearly every American geek, at least on the internet, hates this president more than any other in living memory? What specifically, did he do to piss off the geeks?
What, do you mean that there's more to it than just typing over the DNA sequence from a paper and printing the offending protein out on the protein printer?
I'm not seeing any evidence to support that. Going by recent history, the US seems perfectly happy to trample over its allies to secure its putative interests.
I don't see much evidence for this. For allies, the US hegemony has been predominantly benign. For a comparison, look at the various 'allies' the Russians had during the cold war.
I think your confusion may stem from your definition of ally, which I imagine includes unwilling vassals.
An ally is someone you share a joint interest with. Someone who has something unique to offer that some random other doesn't have (such as cultural ties, great resources or a strategic location), and vice-versa. The relationship is one of 'you scratch my back, I scratch your back, because we both want to or need to'. An ally is someone whose interests you will occasionally put before your own when the situation demands it.
A vassal is someone who serves your interest. The relationship is like employer vs employee (you scratch my back for a reward) or master vs servant (you scratch my back or else). You don't reward a vassal more than his services are worth to you, and occasionally one will be made redundant in favor of another one.
If your country doesn't have special cultural ties with the US, and has nothing unique to offer, you're deluding yourself if you think you are an ally. You're a vassal.
As for his embellishments on his CV, I was under the impression that a US CV was expected to be rather 'boastfully' worded. If you're simply frank and realistic, or worse, modest, on your CV, you'll still be assumed to be exaggerating, so you'll come across as below average.
However..
If someone in protest to government espionage defect, first to China, and then to Russia of all places, to seek greater transparency and privacy, then that shows some exceptionally poor judgement...
IBM hasn't been about 'selling machines' in a long time.
That ice age permafrost is in danger of pronounced melting too.
I think you're confusing (near) surface permafrost in the arctic, due to the average annual temperature being below freezing, and ice age permafrost 300 ft below the surface that's there because the average conditions there over the Quaternary period has been 'covered with an ice sheet' - even if that hasn't been the case in 10,000 years. In most places, I imagine (no data available that I'm aware of), what's buried that deep will probably stay there whether it's frozen or not.
Why does any mention of ice or antarctica have to turn into an ideological battle over the climate?
This melt water is forming at the bottom, beneat an ice sheet that's more than two and a half miles thick in places. It's completely shielded from the climate, which acts on the surface and on the ocean.
There are places in northern Europe, siberia, alaska, canada, where a few hundred feet below the surface you still find permafrost left over from the last ice age. It's so far from the surface that it apparently takes more than 10,000 years to melt.
The true crime of the prequels wasn't that they were childish, mediocre and kind of stupid
It was that they made us realize that the original movies had always been childish, mediocre and kind of stupid.
... (not in the least because it is made out of gasoline). ... injecting gasoline ...
No, it's made out of codeine from over the counter cough medicine. The synthesis path is on the wikipedia page for desomorphine.
Too late, as in 'look at C#'
Java had a problem with the JCP not working, then the Sun to Oracle transition, and Apache getting elbowed out. It's a miracle a new version even came out in the first place.
C# never had a community process to worry about, and moved forward all the time. It has had closures, lambdas, function points etc. for quite a while now.
Java uptake is usually 1 to 2 years not 4.
Wow, nice. 1 to 2 years wouldn't be so bad.
Working at a bank, we were still stuck with Websphere 6.0, and thus JSE 1.4, around the time JSE 1.7 was released.
Websphere 6.1, with JSE 1.5 support, was available from 2007, about 4 years after 1.5 was released, iirc, but such an upgrade has so much (potential) impact that some corporations take several years to do it.
Many of those 23 year olds are being paid over 100k a year. Their lack of experience in obsolete things isn't holding them back. As long as you've graduated to a real job by your mid 30's, it's a great start to a career. You just stop advancing if you stick with it too long, because of the short half life of experience in this field.
And thanks to the way the van Gogh museum restricts access to the scans and issues only 260 overpriced copies, most people will never get to see these paintings, or replicas, in person either.
The van Gogh museum has a lot of works by van Gogh, dozens, maybe hundreds, but none of the ones people actually want to see. The nice ones are in private collections, or in famous musea in New York. You see, the van Gogh museum was founded with the works that the van Gogh family (read: Theo's widow) wasn't able to sell, even after creating the hype around Vincent after his hysteric death.
You may call it genius, but it's probably better described as dumb chance.
Vincent van Gogh didn't take up painting, or any kind of art, until his late 20's, and it shows. By looking at his early work objectively (meaning all but his very latest work), clearly shows him for what he really was: someone who, with very limited skill, tried to imitate Monet and his one sided friend Gauguin (van Gogh was too obtuse or too self absorbed to realize Gauguin didn't exactly like him back). Because he lacked the skill, and most of all because he was a lazy perpetual drunk, he couldn't be bothered to carefully place all those dots, and used bold strokes instead. That the result was something 'new' or at least idiosyncratic may not have been the result of an artistic, creative process, but rather of the lack of one. In his life, by all accounts he was a horrible narcissistic and neurotic freak, living as a parasite on his brother's back. The only time anything resembling talent started to shine through, was when he was confined to a psychiatric institution. It was only here, temporarily cut off from drinking and whoring, where he actually managed to put in the work, and created something that objectively (once you strip away the hype) could be described as art.
The rest of his career, he created infantile, amateuristic illustrations rather than art, but created the timeless hype by living his life as a kind of self destructive performance art.
In a way, it's best to think of him as the Sid Vicious of painting.
Freedom is an illusion made possible by not wanting or expecting things you cannot or are not allowed to do or have.
If your deepest desires are simple things, such as to own a house, a car or to visit Africa, there are steps you could take to make it happen, and you feel free. If your deepest desire is to be free from having infidels and immodest women around you, a libertarian society might feel much more stifling than a strict, traditional one.
If your deepest desire is to be young again and get a second chance at your wasted youth, or to have been born as something else, you might feel horribly limited and constricted no matter where you are.
SpaceX has nothing to do with space exploration - the business model is making money with commercial space flight. Think launching satellites, resupplying the space station, for a fee. They will not be boldly going where no man has gone before, they will not be looking for life on other planets.
There's no money in space exploration, unless the government buys their equipment or services, like it has used the equipment and services of other companies in the past.
I get the impression that BG feels he has enough money, and he seems to be trying to spend it wisely, not to invest it in a cool but high risk start up.
Bonobos are further back on the evolutionary scale, call it 5 million years before they become intelligent (massive guesstimate).
Is a Bobobo a primitive human any more than a fish is a primitive frog? Apes are as highly evolved as we are, just in a differrent direction. Why would they become intelligent? Would a bigger brain make them better at mating while dangling from a branch? Life on Earth thrived for about 3 billion years before we came along, and unless everything else is exterminated, we're unlikely to be evolution's endpoint.
Yes, but that was a long time ago. MySQL had minimum complexity for a DB but it also had minimal performance in anything but simple lookups. (With those it was stupid fast.) To imply that is still sufficient reason to remain on MySQL is to vet your product using a type of user inertia to stifle movement from a now-lesser product to a perhaps better one. That is what Microsoft does to reduce defections from e.g., Office to Open Office.
I don't know why, but I can't get rid of the suspicion that if you kickstarted another billion to Monty all of this would go away...
In my experience, oracle's enterprise edition database has minimal performance for anything but simple lookups too. All relational databases I have worked with slow down dramatically once you start moving too much business logic into your sql queries.
MySQL/isam sacrificed acid compliance for great performance on simple hardware, which turned out to be an acceptable tradeoff for a newly emerging workload. This, combined with the fact that it was backed by a company rather than a group of volunteers as with Posgresql made it take off.
I've worked for a customer with a product owner who really believed in agile, and it was great.
Now I'm working for a customer with a product owner who doesn't really believe in agile, and it's not so good. At the end of a sprint, if there are any stories not in the 'done' column, he's disappointed that we haven't delivered what was promised. He feels you can't just put these back on the backlog for the next sprint, but we should be working late to finish them before the next sprint starts. When you ask him to prioritize, everything is important! It feels like every sprint we have to work a bit harder than the last one, and after two weeks, the result is always the same: customer disappointed. It's stressful, and counter productive too. We find ourselves reluctant to start anything new in the last day or two before the demo, because if it's not 'done' by the demo, we have some explaining to do.
Netbeans is great if what you want to do is develop applets and desktop applications in Java.
That's just not what 90% (educated guess) of Java developers are doing.
And yet in a heartbeat I would drop your buzzword-driven developer and hire a developer who had a solid knowledge of data structures and algorithms, operating systems and related topics, networking and distributed systems, concurrent systems, testing and strategies for error detection/recovery, requirements capture and modelling and other high-level functions, different programming styles and software architectures, and other similarly general foundations. I'd even do it without even asking which programming language(s) the developer with the solid foundations used lately.
In your experience, do older developers have solid knowledge of data structures, algorithms, OS and related topics, networking and distributed systems, etc, etc? That sounds more like skills of a recent college graduate, with no kids and plenty of time for hacking and going to conferences.
The 1970's climate scare was global cooling, which was ultimately dropped as incorrect. That gives a large precedent to not caring about (regardless of denying or not) the next climate scare.
Global cooling incorrect? Ice ages are a theory very well supported by evidence. As long as there are still permanent ice caps on the poles and glaciers in the mountains, there is no indication whatsoever that the holocene is a 'post' glacial. We are 10000 years into an interglacial, which on average have been lasting about 10k years. The 'flips' between glaciation and interglacial are very sudden (on a geological scale) after a period of slow decline. This wasn't a baseless climate scare, because there is every reason to assume the next glaciation will happen 'soon' (on a geological scale), it is just not known exactly when the 'flip' will take place. It was prudent to think about the consequences then, just as it still is today. If you feel a warming climate is bad, wait until the snow doesn't melt one summer.
From my experience, the cycle more describes a "typical" workaholic.
CC.
A Hacker Specific addition would be a remarkably short number of cycles before age related obsolescence is reached.
Most likely, South Korea would supply most of the ground troops and assume all of the nation building duties. The main risk for the USA would be provoking China or Russia into getting involved.