No, it doesn't. Microsoft never, ever passes on an opportunity to expand its market share and sphere of influence. A deal with Real would mean just that.
Steve Jobs, on the other hand, is an opportunistic megalomaniac. When he's on top, he'll do everything cowboy style, pissing off everyone - when his success begins to falter again, he'll start making aliances. He's (and I say this with great admiration for what he has accomplished) an up-and-down rollercoster kind of businessman who forgets that he depends on other people as soon as he feels confident enough.
DMCA, (so-called)Patriot ActI&II, Increasing litigiousness (so that you need malpractice insurance now to be a software developer).
Now THAT would be a fun show! Just make the world really suck and it has to be dark and evil. That would make for some pretty interesting "hero" characters. Or make it a comedy: every 4th person on earth is a lawyer, the rest are paralegals and janitors and some minorities (like judges and music pirates). But, alas, we're getting yet another show that tells us - quite bluntly - that, - yes, the justice system still works and will always work - yes, we're living in a great, secure society and always will be - yes, if I obey nothing bad will happen to me - yes, I can trust today's decision makers that the world basically stays the same for me (except for maglev trains) - no, there is no need to think at all, clever lawyers will do that for you
Don't expect any cool tech references or innovation from this. It seems like a pretty standard law show with just about enough standard sci-fi things to make network PHBs believe that they are innovating. Networks don't go for new concepts right now, they're just combining already proven elements from older shows.
See, the average consumer is already scared about "modern life", it's all sooo comlicated and confusing. People get the feeling that they're lost in everyday life, tech/scientific advancement scares them if it doesn't come disguised as something familiar. The last thing Joe Sixpack wants to see on TV right now is a freaky, complicated show with scary new ideas. Just give them LA Law and Melrose Place all over again, everything will be fine.
Shows that tried to do something different have all failed recently, because they were not suitable for the average consumer. Firefly went down pretty fast - and to stay with the Joss Wedon thing - Angel got cancelled right away when they made their first remotely intelligent season. Those examples may be shows you like or dislike a lot, doesn't matter, just as long as you can acknowledge (for the sake of argument) that they were radically different from the simplified, standardized and sanitized world people have come to expect.
By the way, from a geek point of view, the research team for Century City doesn't seem to bright anyway. There is a poll in the website: Should bionic players be allowed to play professional baseball? - Yes, they have as much right as anyone - No, it's not fair to the other players - It's hard to say Obvious geek answer: if bionic extensions are superior to natural parts, just tune them down until they match average natural performance. (The example case was a bionic eye, it's really simple with that.) Yeah, so bionics can help you just enough to overcome a disability and it can make you a super athlete. But it doesn't have to be EITHER OR, does it? Can't it just be configured to make you "normal"? (OMG, I'm actually discussing a stupid TV show argument with myself, I must be pretty bored)
So, anyway... don't expect anything ground-breaking from this show. Speak after me: there *are* no new ideas. -/me waves hand jedi-like
Re:How and Why C# Was Made
on
How C# Was Made
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· Score: 2, Insightful
.NET is usable, but Java is something horrific.
I wonder why.NET-bashers never get modded down but anyone who dislikes Java goes to karma hell, LOL...
you know i am goign to post this on my account and everything because i really want someone to read it.
Instead of modding you up, I'm going to respond to this and btw I don't think you're that offtopic at all.
One problem you don't see is that any publicity this virus gets, any damage it does, it does it in the name of Linux. While you might think (for whatever reasons) this is a good thing, it really does nothing else than damage Linux' reputation and up SCO's credibility! That's exactly the image that SCO is trying to conjure up when they are talking about the community.
Hell, this virus might as well have been written by a SCO employee, because it does tremendous things for their PR. Also, on a side note, users that are stupid enough to execute those attachments are exactly the kind of people SCO is trying to convince (judges, PHBs).
whats the point in hating something so much, like down to your very core, if you dont turn slightly evil in the process?
There is no point in hating SCO. There would/will be, however, a point in hating the courts for giving them what they want. To use a worn analogy: if you give a weapon to a monkey and it kills someone with it, there is no point in blaming the monkey. There is no point in blaming SCO, but you should blame the people who allow them to succeed.
its just liek the MPAA. hate them till LOTR comes out on DVD. then youll all suck some nice MPAA cock to get a copy before the others. its almost like no one takes this shit seriously or you've all grown up and sold out. or i take it too seriously.
I hate them (or the RIAA in my case) because I'm not allowed to transfer stuff that I *bought* to my PC's harddrive. Currently I'm not allowed to build an MP3 library of the stuff I bought, because suddenly that's not fair use anymore. I don't hate giving money to people who have produced something for me. I hate them, because they use litigation to compensate for recessive earnings (sounds familiar?).
We will be looking for a little under $10 mill for a very unique software idea.
Oh my god. Don't do this unless you have some kind of semi-working prototype that you can show off with. Start small, don't go in there guns blazing full steam ahead, because chances are high you will crash. $10 mill is also a lot of money that must come back in soon, or investors will start to get ugly with you.
"Think Big" got tech in trouble. It will get most businesses in trouble. Don't do it, prove - also for yourself - that your concept is sound first, using as little resources as possible. If $10 mill is just the development costs that you have calculated, don't do the project AT ALL.
I don't know about you but the prices at rentacoder are pure fantasy values! Contracts like "I want a clone of Yahoo Groups done with Java for no more than $500"? Come on! Developers have to be crazy to do that shit! Is that the rotten odor of Scam City that I smell here?
My experiences were a little different, not entirely though.
You can't count on self-funding a startup and paying everyone based only on some custom projects up front.
Basically me and two friends (we were doing hobby programming stuff in my parent's basement) threw all our savings together and started with that. From the start, we were sure that we didn't want any outside money or help for that matter. We decided that we'd either be totally successful or be totally defeated and ruined.
So yeah, go figure, the costs of running the operation alone were eating us alive. Come month 3, I had to begin to eat those horrible noodles for 0.30 cents a meal. No car, no appartment, nothing - I slept on the couch in my office for a while. (At least we had showers and a kitchen, too!)
And all the time we were hoping for the big breakthrough that would send us skyrocketing, well... of course, it didn't come. The dot-com bust was melting most of the companies that we were doing business with.
Then, something happened. Only it didn't so much happen as perhaps "develop". We kept doing it, kept learning, continued to make better stuff - and after 5 horrible months, we were able to pay ourselves the first time! Man, that was one cool moment, wouldn't want to miss that experience!!! In the next months, more money started flowing in and we survived. Before, we were so close to give up! We're in our 4th year now, we're not rich or anything, but now there are 10 people working for us and things are really beginning to be great. Of course, money is still bad, we might still be earning more if we decided to quit and do grunt development for another shop or something like that. But nevertheless I get the feeling of accomplishment, because it may not be much, but it's totally ours!
I believe that it is tough right now Yes, the climate is bad. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't try this out if you want to. Do it while you're young, even if it goes down the drain you still have that experience. I believe lots of startups fail because the founders discover that it just isn't for them. If you're not dependent on venture capital or have any investors interfering with your things, you can go a long way running on pure willpower alone.
All that said, the deals are still out there. And it beats sitting around the house even if it isn't particularly lucrative. Total agreement here!:)
And if you're the obsessive guy like me, chant with me now:
MUST.NOT.FAIL.MUST.NOT.FAIL.FAILURE.IS.NOT.AN.OP TI ON...
I saw it over and over again on TV and thought, well, at least it was instant and there's nothing left... I was wrong and I now have deep sorrow for these individuals.
Well, that's one way of looking at it. On the other hand, each day thousands of people die horrible deaths (probably much more painful than 2 minutes of panic + 10 msecs it takes for your body to disintegrate). Being exposed to the open air at the speed the capsule was going is instant death.
One more thing about this "crew member came to rest beside a country road" business. Don't let those ethically correct media phrases confuse you - what "came to rest" there was a charred ribcage and almost half of a human head that hit the road at 200 mph. Let's say it like it is, huh! (not sure about those 200 mph, though)
My company does unpaid interships and I'll tell you why:
At most other shops, interns are paid, allright, mostly to make coffee and do the tasks no one wants to do. And it's OK that they get money for that.
At our company, interns receive a personal training plan and are basically treated like students. The employees are encouraged to spend lots of time with them, teaching them what they know. Our interns work on real projects, and are getting real experience with their desired field of work. This costs the company a bunch of money, because time and resources are diverted to implement these training plans.
So, no, we're not paying them additional money but when they leave (and some get assimilated by us), they know a whole lot more about their future jobs. Getting this knowledge across basically costs us money that - let's face it - we're never getting back in any way. It's true, an intern also produces stuff during her stay, but the value of that doesn't compare at all.
...provided that you have two or more identical drives from the same manufacturer. I used a removable drive bay where I alternately swap between two trays containing drives with identical specs. Just umount the drive, unlock the bay, swap the drives, lock the bay, mount the drive. Works! To my knowledge the drives must be identical because the BIOS only reads the configuration once - at boot time - and after that never again. The trick with identical drives works (I think) because the computer cannot tell whether it is actually the *same* drive that had just been hibernated. The umount/mount works because umount forces all remaining data to be committed to storage and mount re-reads the drive data (like directories and stuff).
Scientists who dispute that HIV causes all AIDS illnesses (pointing out that HIV, if responsible, acts differently than any other virus known to man in about a dozen ways) and postulate other hypotheses - for instance, that drug usage, including the chemotherapy drugs like AZT used for AIDS treatment, causes the immunodeficiencies, are barred from conferences and their papers are blacklisted.
Those scientists are blocklisted because they fail to educate themselves about the simple workings of an HIV infection *AND* because they are harmful for the pharmaceutical companies who seek to make billions off of infected people.
Understand: strictly speaking AIDS is not an illness, it is the label for a set of symptoms. To understand how those symptoms some to be you have to know that the HIV destroys a patient's immune system. It does not, however, by itself cause any illness!
Now imagine, you have no immune system! You start accumulating all softs of diseases, because your immune system normally defends you against all kinds of infections, cancer and certain aging effects. And *this* is the state they simply called AIDS, it is the absence of any mentionable immune defense, when illnesses start to overwhelm your body. Of course, aggressive chemical treatment can batte some of these illnesses for you - at least for a while, but it comes at the price of further destryoing your body.
There is really no way out with HIV. The only hope you have is keeping HIV from destroying your system completely. How this works is largely unknown, but we know that HIV inserts a genetic sequence into immune cells (like a buffer overflow exploit in software), a sequence that will disable those cells at a later point im time. It's all about never reaching that point...
Re:Ah, the power of heresy!
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What You Can't Say
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· Score: 2, Insightful
OK, flame me now... No, I think your points are interesting, though I do not agree with them:)
our consciousness, our imaginations, our creations: all these are simply manifestations of our genetically-implanted instincts for survival Except, that most of those are not genetical, because really most of our minds is formed by personal experience. Genes just build up the CPU, but it is really life experience and internal/external feedback loops that actually creates our software. And because it is software, we are so incredibly flexible, can learn new things, adapt and evolve beyond genetic evolution. This is an important concept that started with mammals, I believe. It's all in the software!
There is no other reason for existence, no god, no destiny, no karma. / We simply operate, like the very intelligent automatons we are. Some religions argue that searching for The Reason *is* the reason for your life. As an atheist, I'm inclined to agree. As higher lifeforms, we are free to find and set a reason for our individual lifes. Lower lifeforms are more genetically "pre-configured", for them the highest form of self-determination is their personality: a set of likes and dislikes. Even for them, life is more than mere existance! All lifeforms with decent brainpower (including us) are not simply intelligent automatons, they just live *inside* intelligent automatons.
Men solve technical problems, women organize social networks. Young men learn and work, young women dance and like to look pretty. Yeah well, the jury is still out on that one, because humans are so incredibly programmable it is kina hard to distinguish between genetic presets and social indoctrination. What we do know is, however, that men and women are not *that* different in many aspects as traditionalists would have you believe. Even the old hunter-gatherer theories are just an awkward example that uses an image of a certain culture (which may or may not have existed) to drive home points in favor of large genetic presets. But human history has shown way to much diversity in cultures to argue in favor of the archetypical "stoneage" society as the one that is pre-programmed into our genes.
While we're at it, consider also that most societies are based on raw muscle power to determine rank, which kind of forces women to the lower (more house-wifey) roles because they lack that muscle strength to assume rank. This however does say nothing about female capabilities or preferences themselves, it just says something about what role men have in store for "inferior" ranking society members.
Just because you understand fluid mechanics does not mean you cannot enjoy surfing a great wave. Exactly, but also recognize that knowing "fluid mechanics" is just the first step. Basically we (individually and as a society) can be anything we want and can set our own goals and reasons. Isn't that a cool thing?
By definition sound is pressure variations in air.
Not quite, sound can be pressure variations in any medium. For example, this is how whales communicate over distances of hundreds of miles - but producing sound in water.
No, the whole thing is misleading because of something else. Apparently the pressure waves in the early universe didn't have the right frequency to be heard at all - this is why Cramer decided to play them back faster than they actually were, thereby not only making them audible but also altering those waves to have qualities that they originally didn't have.
Cramer had to scale the frequencies 100,000 billion billion times.
You know, if you start playing around with frequencies, you could just as easily make a high ringing noise out of it all rather than a deep hum, it makes no difference because in both cases those are not the "original" sound waves anyway.
I develop with JSP and PHP, too. In my experience, PHP is vastly superior to JSP when it comes to web applications. PHP let's me do what must be done in a very straightforward way. Because PHP is a scripting language, it comes with certain advantages in dynamicity (?) that Java can never offer. In the web-world it's all templates and stuff that includes other stuff which in turn includes other stuff. With PHP you can build a very non-redundant web application that is highly dynamic.
Java was not designed to handle the string-laden environment of the WWW. The fact that Sun simply wants everything on earth to run on Java doesn't mean that it's actually productive to do so. And trust me, we had a fair share of web-based Java projects.
The only thing that bothers me in PHP is, it's ugly-ass object paradigm - if there even is such a thing. I have been hoping PHP would advance more towards namespaces and stuff like that - but hey you never know what the future holds! But it makes up for it with it's really fun function library. With some skills you can write very high level code to attack some pretty high level problems.
just try switching from MySQL to Oracle, and you'll see what I mean That's really not a problem if you're using an extra DB layer that can be maintained separately - just like you should when using *any* language. And as someone who has written DB layers in Java and PHP I can attest that writing it in PHP was much easier than with Java, leading to more stability too.
Oh, and PHP's speed is absolutely horrible compared to Java, I guess it's slower by a factor of 10 or more (because it compiles pages every time from scratch - duh).
Are people in third world countries more likely to endager their lives because their life expectancy is only half that of the first world?
Actually, yes. Most poor countries value a human life at much less compared to industrial nations. I suppose because there is so much dying going on all the time, you really have to start supressing the importance of death or you will go crazy. (A madness which in turn, possibly, results in killing sprees and such which are quite common in the third world.)
It's a horrible spiral because the less you value life, the more people you kill, which makes other people value life even less, and so on...
I think the more interesting point, and one the article failed to mention, is where are all these people going to live, what are they going to eat, and who is going to pay for 240 years of retirement?
With that high a life expectancy there should really be no retirement *at all*, because the very reason for permanent retirement would cease to exist.
What we really need are shorter lifespans so the species will evolve faster!
We're already sophisticated enough to outpace our evolutionary development by a factor of... uhm... a gazillion? If you "forked" the human race now, to create a species that lives only for a few days to really speed up evloution, even this sped up process of nature would be slower than the real humans' mental/technological progress by almost the same factor! And, in contrast to evolution, we're speeding up exponentially. We have left the realm of what evolution could ever do for us when the first human built the first mechanical tool. Evolution is a basic process that gets you so far, but once you're intelligent enough to use tools and sentient enough to reflect on your life, then you're entering a new improvement process loosely called "culture"!
First of all, the birthrate would have to be chopped. Deathrate would have to be equal to the birthrate. The population growth formula cannot stand to have the death factor nulled out.
Nah, as you said, we'll just have to colonize some extraterrestrial planets a bit. There is much room to grow, given good technology (which people with much time on their hands could develop better). Also, slowdown of propagation comes automatically with better living standards (which technology will also facilitate for everyone given enough time). Interestingly, that's opposite to animals who actually grow in numbers if resources are good.
How will an immortal make a living? They can't be retired. It's financially impossible.
If you're immortal, there is no need to retire, right? Who wants to retire permanently anyway? I think nearly everyone want to have some purpose.
What will the oldsters do, watch TV for 200 years? The notion of being useless with age comes from the ongoing degradation that constantly disables our bodily functions bit by bit. If you remove this downward spiral, an older person will have much more to offer mentally than a younger person!
"Conservative" isn't the word for the social atmosphere of such a world. Fear of changes comes from either early educational influences or from the fear of being overtaken by an advancing society. Both factors become more irrelevant with "immortalized" people, because early education fades away with time, and without a failing body and mind, advances won't leave you helplessly confused anymore.
How's memory going to work, when accumulated experience overwhelms the brains ability to cross-reference it all?
We already have much room to grow with our brains (once they stop rotting away), the brain will just filter out irrelevant info in favor of stronger concepts without any help. With medical help (e.g. implants or artificially induced neuron production), capacity and power can be increased nearly infinitly.
Immortality can be counted on bringing about the stagnation of most aspects of society. I mean now, things change as those who are invested in the way things are die off, but when they can't be counted on dying off, progress must happen rather more slowly.
I think thats just plain wrong. What you are talking about is applicable to evolutionary processes, which are beyond the scope of human history anyway.
No. Imagine everyone gets really much more time to study, to learn, to invent new things. Would that be the age of stagnation?
Today, you have a down time of ~20 years before a human being can contribute to society. That's because that time has to be spent to learn even the *basics* required for most of the things we would call contribution to society.
After that follows a period of 30-40 years in which "contribution" is constantly declining due to health degradation, after that time you typically just idly wait to die.
Doesn't sound very efficient anyway, even discounting the emotional bias I have because I don't want to end my existence just yet.
We're at a point in our development were our world is so sophisticated, it is mostly not driven forth by sheer random creativity (the only domain where the young dominate, because they don't have learned proper error correction yet) instead its hard work, study, knowledge and self-improvement that drives us to achieve.
Remember that saying, about that just when you finally figured out life, it's too late to actually live? That's because the development of our mind is now seperated from the purely evolutionary processes, instead of advancing numbers or genes we now strive to advance ourselves individually. And the saying is true because 30-40 active years are not enough to fulfill our desire to live.
I think with "immortality", even casting aside the assumption of improved progress that I described, you have a concept that dominates the dreams of most people in some or the other way. Religion, if you think about it, is the ultimate denial of mortality! Most of us just want to have more time to figure it all out!
There is no progress gained by dying. Dying is essential for genetic evolution, not for human progress. If you actually would die now, nothing would be gained - but unspeakably valuable things would be lost forever.
counseling you question here was through a Presbyterian minister, with no monetary profit involved.
So I too generalized and stereotyped, my apologies.
Although there is nothing wrong with seeking our own understanding, we ignore the wisdom of others at our peril.
I think that's exactly the point. We're feeding so much wisdom-of-others into our life, there is hardly any chance to gather your *own* wisdom, to make your own mistakes, to take your own risks even if it's not psychologically/religiously the right thing to do. There is not much to learn, not to improve on if you're not going through life at your own peril. Advice is great, but I think people should always question that advice. While that may or (more likely) may not apply to your personal situation is not a judgement I can make without guessing around. But I still believe that the original observation holds true for a large number of people at the core of our society.
Disclaimer: I know, it's kind of cheesy, but I really don't want to (nor can I possibly) make definite assumptions about individual people that I don't know personally. Even though it's ironic in regard to some statements I make, one has to generalize somewhat if you want to talk about things like society.
So in that light
I'm sorry, but your rant has no basis applied to my statement.
you're right of course, but your statement was still a good trigger for what I wanted to say, without regard to your personal situation.
Yah sure, I don't want to generalize here - but people who have never published software for a large number of users probably ought to know that even a large number of beta testers will always oversee a significant number of bugs if the software is appropriately large. That's because with our current development tools, both free and commercial software is always prone to any number of strange bugs, some of them even only detected out in the field under strange circumstances.
Even if you test very thoroughly, there are always bugs (even obvious ones) that slip through, it's just a matter of probability. And we're going to have those problems for some time to come, until software finally moves to higher-level development for which we do have neither the technology nor the technique yet.
But the realization that tech support is bad? OMG, just thinking about tech support makes me cringe! (Allright, maybe that's because I'm from Germany, where tech support is not only *always* grossly incompetent but also employs *only* people with the most insulting manners - I believe Germany is the world's leader in that respect!)
Paying people to tell us how were supposed to feel
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The Introvert Advantage
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· Score: 3, Interesting
it tires me to be around them, so I need to schedule "alone-time" to recharge. On the other hand, my wife is solidly extroverted, so she needs to have "socialization-time" scheduled.
Yeah, nowadays it's so important that you lead a clean, counseled, thoroughly scheduled life!
So what to do with the stereotype if you find out that you actually need to schedule both social- and alone-time in order to recharge?
I bet the counselor wouldn't find that a very acceptable result, and likely wouldn't rest before having successfully talked her customer into matching a stereotype group that neatly fits into her book.
Don't get me wrong - I don't want to rant against counseling (but I do anyway). It just seems that nowadays everyone's life must be planned and optimized by "experts", that sometimes really ticks me off. As if people are generally unable to find out about their own feelings without being constantly helped and directed.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it doesn't. Microsoft never, ever passes on an opportunity to expand its market share and sphere of influence. A deal with Real would mean just that.
Steve Jobs, on the other hand, is an opportunistic megalomaniac. When he's on top, he'll do everything cowboy style, pissing off everyone - when his success begins to falter again, he'll start making aliances. He's (and I say this with great admiration for what he has accomplished) an up-and-down rollercoster kind of businessman who forgets that he depends on other people as soon as he feels confident enough.
DMCA, (so-called)Patriot ActI&II, Increasing litigiousness (so that you need malpractice insurance now to be a software developer).
Now THAT would be a fun show! Just make the world really suck and it has to be dark and evil. That would make for some pretty interesting "hero" characters.
Or make it a comedy: every 4th person on earth is a lawyer, the rest are paralegals and janitors and some minorities (like judges and music pirates).
But, alas, we're getting yet another show that tells us - quite bluntly - that,
- yes, the justice system still works and will always work
- yes, we're living in a great, secure society and always will be
- yes, if I obey nothing bad will happen to me
- yes, I can trust today's decision makers that the world basically stays the same for me (except for maglev trains)
- no, there is no need to think at all, clever lawyers will do that for you
Don't expect any cool tech references or innovation from this. It seems like a pretty standard law show with just about enough standard sci-fi things to make network PHBs believe that they are innovating. Networks don't go for new concepts right now, they're just combining already proven elements from older shows.
/me waves hand jedi-like
See, the average consumer is already scared about "modern life", it's all sooo comlicated and confusing. People get the feeling that they're lost in everyday life, tech/scientific advancement scares them if it doesn't come disguised as something familiar. The last thing Joe Sixpack wants to see on TV right now is a freaky, complicated show with scary new ideas. Just give them LA Law and Melrose Place all over again, everything will be fine.
Shows that tried to do something different have all failed recently, because they were not suitable for the average consumer. Firefly went down pretty fast - and to stay with the Joss Wedon thing - Angel got cancelled right away when they made their first remotely intelligent season. Those examples may be shows you like or dislike a lot, doesn't matter, just as long as you can acknowledge (for the sake of argument) that they were radically different from the simplified, standardized and sanitized world people have come to expect.
By the way, from a geek point of view, the research team for Century City doesn't seem to bright anyway. There is a poll in the website:
Should bionic players be allowed to play professional baseball?
- Yes, they have as much right as anyone
- No, it's not fair to the other players
- It's hard to say
Obvious geek answer: if bionic extensions are superior to natural parts, just tune them down until they match average natural performance. (The example case was a bionic eye, it's really simple with that.) Yeah, so bionics can help you just enough to overcome a disability and it can make you a super athlete. But it doesn't have to be EITHER OR, does it? Can't it just be configured to make you "normal"? (OMG, I'm actually discussing a stupid TV show argument with myself, I must be pretty bored)
So, anyway... don't expect anything ground-breaking from this show. Speak after me: there *are* no new ideas.
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.NET is usable, but Java is something horrific.
.NET-bashers never get modded down but anyone who dislikes Java goes to karma hell, LOL...
I wonder why
Um... parent is a troll - exactly how?
Because you don't agree?
you know i am goign to post this on my account and everything because i really want someone to read it.
Instead of modding you up, I'm going to respond to this and btw I don't think you're that offtopic at all.
One problem you don't see is that any publicity this virus gets, any damage it does, it does it in the name of Linux. While you might think (for whatever reasons) this is a good thing, it really does nothing else than damage Linux' reputation and up SCO's credibility! That's exactly the image that SCO is trying to conjure up when they are talking about the community.
Hell, this virus might as well have been written by a SCO employee, because it does tremendous things for their PR. Also, on a side note, users that are stupid enough to execute those attachments are exactly the kind of people SCO is trying to convince (judges, PHBs).
whats the point in hating something so much, like down to your very core, if you dont turn slightly evil in the process?
There is no point in hating SCO. There would/will be, however, a point in hating the courts for giving them what they want. To use a worn analogy: if you give a weapon to a monkey and it kills someone with it, there is no point in blaming the monkey. There is no point in blaming SCO, but you should blame the people who allow them to succeed.
its just liek the MPAA. hate them till LOTR comes out on DVD. then youll all suck some nice MPAA cock to get a copy before the others. its almost like no one takes this shit seriously or you've all grown up and sold out. or i take it too seriously.
I hate them (or the RIAA in my case) because I'm not allowed to transfer stuff that I *bought* to my PC's harddrive. Currently I'm not allowed to build an MP3 library of the stuff I bought, because suddenly that's not fair use anymore. I don't hate giving money to people who have produced something for me. I hate them, because they use litigation to compensate for recessive earnings (sounds familiar?).
Ehem, move over, time for me to be Mr. Wise Arse.
We will be looking for a little under $10 mill for a very unique software idea.
Oh my god. Don't do this unless you have some kind of semi-working prototype that you can show off with. Start small, don't go in there guns blazing full steam ahead, because chances are high you will crash. $10 mill is also a lot of money that must come back in soon, or investors will start to get ugly with you.
"Think Big" got tech in trouble. It will get most businesses in trouble. Don't do it, prove - also for yourself - that your concept is sound first, using as little resources as possible. If $10 mill is just the development costs that you have calculated, don't do the project AT ALL.
I don't know about you but the prices at rentacoder are pure fantasy values! Contracts like "I want a clone of Yahoo Groups done with Java for no more than $500"? Come on! Developers have to be crazy to do that shit!
Is that the rotten odor of Scam City that I smell here?
My experiences were a little different, not entirely though.
:)
P TI ON...
You can't count on self-funding a startup and paying everyone based only on some custom projects up front.
Basically me and two friends (we were doing hobby programming stuff in my parent's basement) threw all our savings together and started with that. From the start, we were sure that we didn't want any outside money or help for that matter. We decided that we'd either be totally successful or be totally defeated and ruined.
So yeah, go figure, the costs of running the operation alone were eating us alive. Come month 3, I had to begin to eat those horrible noodles for 0.30 cents a meal. No car, no appartment, nothing - I slept on the couch in my office for a while. (At least we had showers and a kitchen, too!)
And all the time we were hoping for the big breakthrough that would send us skyrocketing, well... of course, it didn't come. The dot-com bust was melting most of the companies that we were doing business with.
Then, something happened. Only it didn't so much happen as perhaps "develop". We kept doing it, kept learning, continued to make better stuff - and after 5 horrible months, we were able to pay ourselves the first time! Man, that was one cool moment, wouldn't want to miss that experience!!! In the next months, more money started flowing in and we survived. Before, we were so close to give up! We're in our 4th year now, we're not rich or anything, but now there are 10 people working for us and things are really beginning to be great. Of course, money is still bad, we might still be earning more if we decided to quit and do grunt development for another shop or something like that. But nevertheless I get the feeling of accomplishment, because it may not be much, but it's totally ours!
I believe that it is tough right now
Yes, the climate is bad. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't try this out if you want to. Do it while you're young, even if it goes down the drain you still have that experience. I believe lots of startups fail because the founders discover that it just isn't for them. If you're not dependent on venture capital or have any investors interfering with your things, you can go a long way running on pure willpower alone.
All that said, the deals are still out there. And it beats sitting around the house even if it isn't particularly lucrative.
Total agreement here!
And if you're the obsessive guy like me, chant with me now:
MUST.NOT.FAIL.MUST.NOT.FAIL.FAILURE.IS.NOT.AN.O
I saw it over and over again on TV and thought, well, at least it was instant and there's nothing left... I was wrong and I now have deep sorrow for these individuals.
Well, that's one way of looking at it. On the other hand, each day thousands of people die horrible deaths (probably much more painful than 2 minutes of panic + 10 msecs it takes for your body to disintegrate). Being exposed to the open air at the speed the capsule was going is instant death.
One more thing about this "crew member came to rest beside a country road" business. Don't let those ethically correct media phrases confuse you - what "came to rest" there was a charred ribcage and almost half of a human head that hit the road at 200 mph. Let's say it like it is, huh! (not sure about those 200 mph, though)
My company does unpaid interships and I'll tell you why:
At most other shops, interns are paid, allright, mostly to make coffee and do the tasks no one wants to do. And it's OK that they get money for that.
At our company, interns receive a personal training plan and are basically treated like students. The employees are encouraged to spend lots of time with them, teaching them what they know. Our interns work on real projects, and are getting real experience with their desired field of work. This costs the company a bunch of money, because time and resources are diverted to implement these training plans.
So, no, we're not paying them additional money but when they leave (and some get assimilated by us), they know a whole lot more about their future jobs. Getting this knowledge across basically costs us money that - let's face it - we're never getting back in any way. It's true, an intern also produces stuff during her stay, but the value of that doesn't compare at all.
Parent is not a troll. Strange maybe, but on topic. Who modded this?
...provided that you have two or more identical drives from the same manufacturer. I used a removable drive bay where I alternately swap between two trays containing drives with identical specs.
Just umount the drive, unlock the bay, swap the drives, lock the bay, mount the drive. Works!
To my knowledge the drives must be identical because the BIOS only reads the configuration once - at boot time - and after that never again. The trick with identical drives works (I think) because the computer cannot tell whether it is actually the *same* drive that had just been hibernated. The umount/mount works because umount forces all remaining data to be committed to storage and mount re-reads the drive data (like directories and stuff).
/me puts on tin-foiled hat
Scientists who dispute that HIV causes all AIDS illnesses (pointing out that HIV, if responsible, acts differently than any other virus known to man in about a dozen ways) and postulate other hypotheses - for instance, that drug usage, including the chemotherapy drugs like AZT used for AIDS treatment, causes the immunodeficiencies, are barred from conferences and their papers are blacklisted.
Those scientists are blocklisted because they fail to educate themselves about the simple workings of an HIV infection *AND* because they are harmful for the pharmaceutical companies who seek to make billions off of infected people.
Understand: strictly speaking AIDS is not an illness, it is the label for a set of symptoms. To understand how those symptoms some to be you have to know that the HIV destroys a patient's immune system. It does not, however, by itself cause any illness!
Now imagine, you have no immune system! You start accumulating all softs of diseases, because your immune system normally defends you against all kinds of infections, cancer and certain aging effects. And *this* is the state they simply called AIDS, it is the absence of any mentionable immune defense, when illnesses start to overwhelm your body. Of course, aggressive chemical treatment can batte some of these illnesses for you - at least for a while, but it comes at the price of further destryoing your body.
There is really no way out with HIV. The only hope you have is keeping HIV from destroying your system completely. How this works is largely unknown, but we know that HIV inserts a genetic sequence into immune cells (like a buffer overflow exploit in software), a sequence that will disable those cells at a later point im time. It's all about never reaching that point...
OK, flame me now... :)
No, I think your points are interesting, though I do not agree with them
our consciousness, our imaginations, our creations: all these are simply manifestations of our genetically-implanted instincts for survival
Except, that most of those are not genetical, because really most of our minds is formed by personal experience. Genes just build up the CPU, but it is really life experience and internal/external feedback loops that actually creates our software. And because it is software, we are so incredibly flexible, can learn new things, adapt and evolve beyond genetic evolution. This is an important concept that started with mammals, I believe. It's all in the software!
There is no other reason for existence, no god, no destiny, no karma. / We simply operate, like the very intelligent automatons we are.
Some religions argue that searching for The Reason *is* the reason for your life. As an atheist, I'm inclined to agree. As higher lifeforms, we are free to find and set a reason for our individual lifes. Lower lifeforms are more genetically "pre-configured", for them the highest form of self-determination is their personality: a set of likes and dislikes. Even for them, life is more than mere existance! All lifeforms with decent brainpower (including us) are not simply intelligent automatons, they just live *inside* intelligent automatons.
Men solve technical problems, women organize social networks. Young men learn and work, young women dance and like to look pretty.
Yeah well, the jury is still out on that one, because humans are so incredibly programmable it is kina hard to distinguish between genetic presets and social indoctrination. What we do know is, however, that men and women are not *that* different in many aspects as traditionalists would have you believe. Even the old hunter-gatherer theories are just an awkward example that uses an image of a certain culture (which may or may not have existed) to drive home points in favor of large genetic presets. But human history has shown way to much diversity in cultures to argue in favor of the archetypical "stoneage" society as the one that is pre-programmed into our genes.
While we're at it, consider also that most societies are based on raw muscle power to determine rank, which kind of forces women to the lower (more house-wifey) roles because they lack that muscle strength to assume rank. This however does say nothing about female capabilities or preferences themselves, it just says something about what role men have in store for "inferior" ranking society members.
Just because you understand fluid mechanics does not mean you cannot enjoy surfing a great wave.
Exactly, but also recognize that knowing "fluid mechanics" is just the first step. Basically we (individually and as a society) can be anything we want and can set our own goals and reasons. Isn't that a cool thing?
By definition sound is pressure variations in air.
Not quite, sound can be pressure variations in any medium. For example, this is how whales communicate over distances of hundreds of miles - but producing sound in water.
No, the whole thing is misleading because of something else. Apparently the pressure waves in the early universe didn't have the right frequency to be heard at all - this is why Cramer decided to play them back faster than they actually were, thereby not only making them audible but also altering those waves to have qualities that they originally didn't have.
Cramer had to scale the frequencies 100,000 billion billion times.
You know, if you start playing around with frequencies, you could just as easily make a high ringing noise out of it all rather than a deep hum, it makes no difference because in both cases those are not the "original" sound waves anyway.
I develop with JSP and PHP, too. In my experience, PHP is vastly superior to JSP when it comes to web applications. PHP let's me do what must be done in a very straightforward way. Because PHP is a scripting language, it comes with certain advantages in dynamicity (?) that Java can never offer. In the web-world it's all templates and stuff that includes other stuff which in turn includes other stuff. With PHP you can build a very non-redundant web application that is highly dynamic.
Java was not designed to handle the string-laden environment of the WWW. The fact that Sun simply wants everything on earth to run on Java doesn't mean that it's actually productive to do so. And trust me, we had a fair share of web-based Java projects.
The only thing that bothers me in PHP is, it's ugly-ass object paradigm - if there even is such a thing. I have been hoping PHP would advance more towards namespaces and stuff like that - but hey you never know what the future holds!
But it makes up for it with it's really fun function library. With some skills you can write very high level code to attack some pretty high level problems.
just try switching from MySQL to Oracle, and you'll see what I mean
That's really not a problem if you're using an extra DB layer that can be maintained separately - just like you should when using *any* language. And as someone who has written DB layers in Java and PHP I can attest that writing it in PHP was much easier than with Java, leading to more stability too.
Oh, and PHP's speed is absolutely horrible compared to Java, I guess it's slower by a factor of 10 or more (because it compiles pages every time from scratch - duh).
Are people in third world countries more likely to endager their lives because their life expectancy is only half that of the first world?
Actually, yes. Most poor countries value a human life at much less compared to industrial nations. I suppose because there is so much dying going on all the time, you really have to start supressing the importance of death or you will go crazy. (A madness which in turn, possibly, results in killing sprees and such which are quite common in the third world.)
It's a horrible spiral because the less you value life, the more people you kill, which makes other people value life even less, and so on...
I think the more interesting point, and one the article failed to mention, is where are all these people going to live, what are they going to eat, and who is going to pay for 240 years of retirement?
With that high a life expectancy there should really be no retirement *at all*, because the very reason for permanent retirement would cease to exist.
What we really need are shorter lifespans so the species will evolve faster!
We're already sophisticated enough to outpace our evolutionary development by a factor of... uhm... a gazillion?
If you "forked" the human race now, to create a species that lives only for a few days to really speed up evloution, even this sped up process of nature would be slower than the real humans' mental/technological progress by almost the same factor!
And, in contrast to evolution, we're speeding up exponentially. We have left the realm of what evolution could ever do for us when the first human built the first mechanical tool.
Evolution is a basic process that gets you so far, but once you're intelligent enough to use tools and sentient enough to reflect on your life, then you're entering a new improvement process loosely called "culture"!
First of all, the birthrate would have to be chopped. Deathrate would have to be equal to the birthrate. The population growth formula cannot stand to have the death factor nulled out.
Nah, as you said, we'll just have to colonize some extraterrestrial planets a bit. There is much room to grow, given good technology (which people with much time on their hands could develop better).
Also, slowdown of propagation comes automatically with better living standards (which technology will also facilitate for everyone given enough time). Interestingly, that's opposite to animals who actually grow in numbers if resources are good.
How will an immortal make a living? They can't be retired. It's financially impossible.
If you're immortal, there is no need to retire, right? Who wants to retire permanently anyway? I think nearly everyone want to have some purpose.
What will the oldsters do, watch TV for 200 years?
The notion of being useless with age comes from the ongoing degradation that constantly disables our bodily functions bit by bit. If you remove this downward spiral, an older person will have much more to offer mentally than a younger person!
"Conservative" isn't the word for the social atmosphere of such a world.
Fear of changes comes from either early educational influences or from the fear of being overtaken by an advancing society. Both factors become more irrelevant with "immortalized" people, because early education fades away with time, and without a failing body and mind, advances won't leave you helplessly confused anymore.
How's memory going to work, when accumulated experience overwhelms the brains ability to cross-reference it all?
We already have much room to grow with our brains (once they stop rotting away), the brain will just filter out irrelevant info in favor of stronger concepts without any help. With medical help (e.g. implants or artificially induced neuron production), capacity and power can be increased nearly infinitly.
You _will_ die an unnatural death, murder, car crash, or other type of accident.
;-)
Well ask terminally ill people about the beauty of dying naturally.
I think dying fast and spectacularly might be slightly better...
Immortality can be counted on bringing about the stagnation of most aspects of society. I mean now, things change as those who are invested in the way things are die off, but when they can't be counted on dying off, progress must happen rather more slowly.
I think thats just plain wrong. What you are talking about is applicable to evolutionary processes, which are beyond the scope of human history anyway.
No. Imagine everyone gets really much more time to study, to learn, to invent new things. Would that be the age of stagnation?
Today, you have a down time of ~20 years before a human being can contribute to society. That's because that time has to be spent to learn even the *basics* required for most of the things we would call contribution to society.
After that follows a period of 30-40 years in which "contribution" is constantly declining due to health degradation, after that time you typically just idly wait to die.
Doesn't sound very efficient anyway, even discounting the emotional bias I have because I don't want to end my existence just yet.
We're at a point in our development were our world is so sophisticated, it is mostly not driven forth by sheer random creativity (the only domain where the young dominate, because they don't have learned proper error correction yet) instead its hard work, study, knowledge and self-improvement that drives us to achieve.
Remember that saying, about that just when you finally figured out life, it's too late to actually live? That's because the development of our mind is now seperated from the purely evolutionary processes, instead of advancing numbers or genes we now strive to advance ourselves individually. And the saying is true because 30-40 active years are not enough to fulfill our desire to live.
I think with "immortality", even casting aside the assumption of improved progress that I described, you have a concept that dominates the dreams of most people in some or the other way. Religion, if you think about it, is the ultimate denial of mortality! Most of us just want to have more time to figure it all out!
There is no progress gained by dying. Dying is essential for genetic evolution, not for human progress. If you actually would die now, nothing would be gained - but unspeakably valuable things would be lost forever.
counseling you question here was through a Presbyterian minister, with no monetary profit involved.
So I too generalized and stereotyped, my apologies.
Although there is nothing wrong with seeking our own understanding, we ignore the wisdom of others at our peril.
I think that's exactly the point. We're feeding so much wisdom-of-others into our life, there is hardly any chance to gather your *own* wisdom, to make your own mistakes, to take your own risks even if it's not psychologically/religiously the right thing to do. There is not much to learn, not to improve on if you're not going through life at your own peril. Advice is great, but I think people should always question that advice. While that may or (more likely) may not apply to your personal situation is not a judgement I can make without guessing around. But I still believe that the original observation holds true for a large number of people at the core of our society.
Disclaimer: I know, it's kind of cheesy, but I really don't want to (nor can I possibly) make definite assumptions about individual people that I don't know personally. Even though it's ironic in regard to some statements I make, one has to generalize somewhat if you want to talk about things like society.
So in that light
I'm sorry, but your rant has no basis applied to my statement.
you're right of course, but your statement was still a good trigger for what I wanted to say, without regard to your personal situation.
customers are used as an army of unpaid testers.
Yah sure, I don't want to generalize here - but people who have never published software for a large number of users probably ought to know that even a large number of beta testers will always oversee a significant number of bugs if the software is appropriately large. That's because with our current development tools, both free and commercial software is always prone to any number of strange bugs, some of them even only detected out in the field under strange circumstances.
Even if you test very thoroughly, there are always bugs (even obvious ones) that slip through, it's just a matter of probability. And we're going to have those problems for some time to come, until software finally moves to higher-level development for which we do have neither the technology nor the technique yet.
But the realization that tech support is bad? OMG, just thinking about tech support makes me cringe! (Allright, maybe that's because I'm from Germany, where tech support is not only *always* grossly incompetent but also employs *only* people with the most insulting manners - I believe Germany is the world's leader in that respect!)
it tires me to be around them, so I need to schedule "alone-time" to recharge. On the other hand, my wife is solidly extroverted, so she needs to have "socialization-time" scheduled.
Yeah, nowadays it's so important that you lead a clean, counseled, thoroughly scheduled life!
So what to do with the stereotype if you find out that you actually need to schedule both social- and alone-time in order to recharge?
I bet the counselor wouldn't find that a very acceptable result, and likely wouldn't rest before having successfully talked her customer into matching a stereotype group that neatly fits into her book.
Don't get me wrong - I don't want to rant against counseling (but I do anyway). It just seems that nowadays everyone's life must be planned and optimized by "experts", that sometimes really ticks me off. As if people are generally unable to find out about their own feelings without being constantly helped and directed.