A billion dollars? What if I drove to my local Fry's Electronis, and bought IP cams, all-weather cable, cheap routers and switches, and asked you to watch the border from the screen you're on now?
Oh, and maybe we could have 5,000 iPads or iPhones available for pickup at Apple stores so Border Patrol agents could watch too.
I could load the stuff in my pickup, you could set up the WAN, and I'm guessing we'd still have $990 million dollars left to buy up some little-used, suddenly available high tech IR and radar detector form Government surplus...
A nation that puts plastic in its baby food to fake protein levels
If you hold an entire nation accountable for the actions of a few individuals (who are currently in jail), then I have quite a few US citizens to point out to you.
"nation" was too broad a word. On the other hand, not quite meeting specs to increase profits is pretty widespread... More widespread, maybe, than in the US or EU.
And back to the topic at hand: Modern stealth fighters have very tight specifications.
A nation that puts plastic in its baby food to fake protein levels has quality control issues that will fail a phony fighter at fifty thousand feet. Remember the failure of the counterfeit aerospace bolts it ships to the west.
You can't overcome the demanding laws of physics by proclamation, family privilege, or deceit. Consequently, China's reverse-engineered Russian fighter engines don't match up. (And Russia has refused to sell them it's F22 class power plants because they're tired of getting ripped off. )
Don't even get me started on mastering the voodoo of stealth...
In short, we'll see what they have when it's super-cruising at altitude with working combat systems: Not when its taxi-ing at seal level.
Your assertion that Python travels well is a strong point.
Visual Basic and VBA have very accessible OO environments, but mostly over MS Windows. Which is a serious limitation.
Reviewing this thread, I think that the capability of writing lucid code was the key feature I was trying to advance. If you can name wisely and have the basic syntax of the language, even if purposely verbose, read like pseudo code then I think we're on the same page.
Line numbers and gosub/goto s haven't been used since the mid80s.
Ever program with a VBA object model, using Intellisense prompting? Name a better, more complete, and useful IDE environment...
Count curly brackets all you want. Regard semicolons as essential. But you can't craft code that reads like simple English in any other language. Well named objects only make BASIC better.
BASIC is like the O'Reilly cover that was chosen for it: A big friendly St. Bernard or a language.
If you haven't built dozens of useful, maintainable, systems quickly, with small teams, maybe you should keep an open mind...?
I strongly agree with this post regarding soul and the question of where is the observer who is me? It is a challenge to proponents of strong AI and the Singularity.
I recently attended an Open house at IBM Almaden where their roadmap with DARPA on a memresistor "brain" was laid out. After the presentation I turned to Sr IBM researcher and said " I have a big problem with this approach.". He replied " yeh... How do you program the thing!"
Each human brain's trillion trillion web of connections is unique and was formed over years of training and experience... Childhood. You can't copy any individuals connections into a new matrix, and we are a long ways away from giving memresitor chips childhoods.
I remember an academic study, trying to find it, that established that the optimal strategy in trade relations turns out to be simple tit for tat. if your trading partner cooperates you cooperate. If they defect - you defect until they return to a tactic of cooperation.
What tactic do we think the Chinese government is currently employing?
I'd actually appreciate a friendly email from my ISP informing me that they are detecting strange traffic from my IP address and suggesting that I might want to check for a Botnet infection. Detecting sneaky outgoing traffic and other malfeasance is beyond the technical range of many customers.
They might even provide links to resources I could use to detect and remove the Bot. They might even make these resources free, useful (Like pretested and configured against the current signature and MO of the Botnets they're seeing) and come off as concerned and helpful.
This is one area where our interests and the ISP's are aligned. Starting the process with a "cutoff" seems like a lose-lose...
The fundamental question is: Should Google be snooping and publishing MAC locations at all?
Do I have the right to opt out of their system - albeit at the cost of not automatically getting the shortest rout to my nearest pizza place on my iPad without manually entering my address?
What happens when the first battered wife is tracked down and murdered by her husband at a woman's shelter because her hacker smart husband crafts an exploit?
Sarah McGlaughlin has a song lyric: "So you're working, building on a mystery, and choosing so carefully..."
I think another way to pose this poster's comments is: Are extended, overloaded, polymorphic etc object coding techniques always the optimal engineering solution?
In my experience, the answer is no.
Take the eternal mantra, particularly in the corporate domain, of writing reusable code. You can't reuse it if the guy who wrote it is gone and it imports and includes objects sourced from dozens or hundreds of other files, libraries, namespaces... (grab your rotten tomatoes know and get ready to throw!) A well written application, in assembler, C or Visual Basic or a page of ASP or PHP can be read as a self documenting whole and modified reliably and QA'd decisively.
Now covered in fresh tomato sauce, I freely admit that different tasks require different tools. But as someone who often has to focus on the business purpose of the code and not my personal mindset, simple readablity often trumps all else. And to the loon who attacked the original poster - attitudes like your closed mindedness make you the problem.
I crewed on SF Bay, where it's often very windy, with a guy named Emmanuel. Emmanuel vacationed on the East coast, where winds are often lighter, with his friend Bergstrom. I'm not sure about the spelling of his name, but I thought he deserved credit for his law ( which we used to quote frequently... )
These three lessons may not all be in any one book, but they can help in the real world:
1) Learn what SQL Injection is and how to defend against it. It will ruin your day and could severely damage your current employment situation.
2) Abstract your schema from your front-end applications. Stored procedures are easy to write and can provide security and if well written stop injection attacks. They will let you change your database design without breaking your deployed apps. Just update the internal code in the P. Middleware and objects can do this, too.
3) Bergstrom's law of sailing says: "You can get away with anything in less than 5 knots of wind." Similarly, any little box or blade with 2 to 4 gs of RAM can easily handle 5 to 10 million row tables. Dedicate the server to MySQL or MS SQL so they can cache and buffer efficiently and they will outperform much bigger boxes trying to run too many schemas and DBs concurrently. Learn to index. Don't be too puritanical about normalization. Returning a customer address should require 6 joins. And remember that moving that moving large recordsets across the LANWAN may take much more time than the server query.
You probably already know all this... but maybe someone else reading this doesn't.
Complete code and hardware for sophisticated projects. The adverts will bring you up to speed on what's available for system on a chip, embedded controllers, etc. Deeper than Make. Hobbyists can try out robotics. Scientists can build useful data loggers, remote telemetry, etc. Newbies can learn the basics of writing and compiling code and downloading it to small devices of all sorts. System boards and compiler environments complete for under $40.
Also try ladyada.net for complete hardware kits and Ardino system boards, etc. Learning to solder is fun and gives one an almost mystical reconnection to the roots of our digital age...
I have trouble believing TSQL (the MS SQL Server flavor of SQL) has less practioners than Lua, LISP or go. With three times more servers than oracle and all the MS shops out there - Can this be right?
All the attempts at humorous responses aside, The Shuttle pickups, Chinese blowups, X37B, and all previously announced intercepts were in low earth orbit - 100s of miles up. This satellite is 23,500 miles up...
Everyone seems to have had fun with their 5's for funny posts. Sort of like the real world.
What companies really need are coders who put code out there. Maybe not perfect the first go-around... But infinitely more useful than stooges with road maps, project plans, PowerPoints, and good meeting manners.
SQL is NOT the Physical Storage or RDBMS engine
on
The NoSQL Ecosystem
·
· Score: 1
Can we agree that SQL is a high level language for capturing the set theory query logic and is COMPLETELY INDEPENDENT of the engine and physical storage that actually generates the query plan and makes the heads fly to cache and return data?
Don't imagine. Anticipate...
Don't you think there at least three or maybe four governments that could bring down the Internet with a keystroke?
But, like the MAD standoff that prevents an EMP pulse in orbit taking away everything (EVEN YOUR TV!!!! AND TOYOTA!!!!) a de facto truce based on not knowing which crowd with torches, pitchforks and bricked netbooks would topple which government first holds sway.
Or is it alread0%x3jd88 3mrj0ojpo.....Boo!
If working down on the corporate cube farm has shown me anything - it's that non-technical managers produce atrocious applications. Unbelievably expensive. Too slow to be used in spite of the cost. Rejected by users, because they are seldom part of the development team.
I can predict, fairly accurately, the outcome of a corporate development effort from the answer to these questions:
Is the business sponsor and the user team deeply involved in an Agile/Iterative way throughout the development effort?
Is the actual technical side of the development led by a technical manager with real authority?
Does he or she have their choice of tools and technology without interference from above or corporate IT's "Best Practices"?
Are requirements managed flexibly, with early deliverables of basic functionality followed up be newly discovered needs?
The biggest breakthrough in coding, reflected in the biographies of the coder interviewed, is a return to smaller teams, guided by involved end users. In other words, rediscovering earlier practices and respect for the lessons of the Mythical Man Month.
Your summary takes the mystery out basic Joomla very succinctly.
But, the strength of Joomla is its reliance on PHP and CSS to create disciplined and efficient templates for database-driven commercial web sites. Does anyone have recommendations for books/sites that dig deeper into PHP and CSS techniques for producing insanely great Joomla templates and sites? Even most un-free Joomla templates are little more than rectangular puzzle boards with your choice of yucky colors...
Also... how does Joomla scale? Has anyone migrated a site from friends and family visiting to a full-on Slashdot tsunamai of hits? How did you host the site for peak performance?
I write production code without a net and on tight deadlines.
Given my druthers I'd step back five to ten years and keep each component to a single page.
Many of the articles points are cute, valid and bring back happy memories of making hard problems go on the old day's slow boxes, but they don't compare to the overhead of writing current code in today's production environments. (How about Vista being more bloated and slow than XP?)
Think of the chain of single point failures when you are dependent on thousand's of other programmer's commercial objects performing EXACTLY as documented.
These chain breaks are common... what can you do if you trust and are betrayed by someone else's slow or buggy object? And the verbosity of declaring hundreds of properties to display, say, a simple web page are preposterous.
What if you have a demanding app, or just don't need the overhead of every marketing guy's punch list of features slowing down your code?
Perhaps we were better off, and more productive somewhere between manual memory management and pointers in C... and today.
Slashdot Mirror
A billion dollars? What if I drove to my local Fry's Electronis, and bought IP cams, all-weather cable, cheap routers and switches, and asked you to watch the border from the screen you're on now?
Oh, and maybe we could have 5,000 iPads or iPhones available for pickup at Apple stores so Border Patrol agents could watch too.
I could load the stuff in my pickup, you could set up the WAN, and I'm guessing we'd still have $990 million dollars left to buy up some little-used, suddenly available high tech IR and radar detector form Government surplus...
Maybe it takes an X-Prize.
"And Russia has refused to sell them it's F22 class power plants because they're tired of getting ripped off."
I guess the laws of English are a bit easier to overcome. it's means it is, BTW.
I'm apostatic about apostrophes...
A nation that puts plastic in its baby food to fake protein levels
If you hold an entire nation accountable for the actions of a few individuals (who are currently in jail), then I have quite a few US citizens to point out to you.
"nation" was too broad a word. On the other hand, not quite meeting specs to increase profits is pretty widespread... More widespread, maybe, than in the US or EU.
And back to the topic at hand: Modern stealth fighters have very tight specifications.
... to validate a combat-worthy modern fighter.
A nation that puts plastic in its baby food to fake protein levels has quality control issues that will fail a phony fighter at fifty thousand feet. Remember the failure of the counterfeit aerospace bolts it ships to the west.
You can't overcome the demanding laws of physics by proclamation, family privilege, or deceit. Consequently, China's reverse-engineered Russian fighter engines don't match up. (And Russia has refused to sell them it's F22 class power plants because they're tired of getting ripped off. )
Don't even get me started on mastering the voodoo of stealth...
In short, we'll see what they have when it's super-cruising at altitude with working combat systems: Not when its taxi-ing at seal level.
Your assertion that Python travels well is a strong point.
Visual Basic and VBA have very accessible OO environments, but mostly over MS Windows. Which is a serious limitation.
Reviewing this thread, I think that the capability of writing lucid code was the key feature I was trying to advance. If you can name wisely and have the basic syntax of the language, even if purposely verbose, read like pseudo code then I think we're on the same page.
I don't have my dog eared copy with me...
(but Newfies are big, smart, friendly, and loyal dogs!)
Line numbers and gosub/goto s haven't been used since the mid80s.
Ever program with a VBA object model, using Intellisense prompting? Name a better, more complete, and useful IDE environment...
Count curly brackets all you want. Regard semicolons as essential. But you can't craft code that reads like simple English in any other language. Well named objects only make BASIC better.
BASIC is like the O'Reilly cover that was chosen for it: A big friendly St. Bernard or a language.
If you haven't built dozens of useful, maintainable, systems quickly, with small teams, maybe you should keep an open mind...?
Read the Cisco vulnerability report: root control of the device...
Think where this teleconferencing suites are used: The Whitehouse, Pentagon, Central Command and every three star command...
Who might want to lurk on some reality TV?
I strongly agree with this post regarding soul and the question of where is the observer who is me? It is a challenge to proponents of strong AI and the Singularity.
I recently attended an Open house at IBM Almaden where their roadmap with DARPA on a memresistor "brain" was laid out. After the presentation I turned to Sr IBM researcher and said " I have a big problem with this approach.". He replied " yeh... How do you program the thing!"
Each human brain's trillion trillion web of connections is unique and was formed over years of training and experience... Childhood. You can't copy any individuals connections into a new matrix, and we are a long ways away from giving memresitor chips childhoods.
Let alone souls..
I remember an academic study, trying to find it, that established that the optimal strategy in trade relations turns out to be simple tit for tat. if your trading partner cooperates you cooperate. If they defect - you defect until they return to a tactic of cooperation.
What tactic do we think the Chinese government is currently employing?
I'd actually appreciate a friendly email from my ISP informing me that they are detecting strange traffic from my IP address and suggesting that I might want to check for a Botnet infection. Detecting sneaky outgoing traffic and other malfeasance is beyond the technical range of many customers.
They might even provide links to resources I could use to detect and remove the Bot. They might even make these resources free, useful (Like pretested and configured against the current signature and MO of the Botnets they're seeing) and come off as concerned and helpful.
This is one area where our interests and the ISP's are aligned. Starting the process with a "cutoff" seems like a lose-lose...
The fundamental question is: Should Google be snooping and publishing MAC locations at all?
Do I have the right to opt out of their system - albeit at the cost of not automatically getting the shortest rout to my nearest pizza place on my iPad without manually entering my address?
What happens when the first battered wife is tracked down and murdered by her husband at a woman's shelter because her hacker smart husband crafts an exploit?
Sarah McGlaughlin has a song lyric: "So you're working, building on a mystery, and choosing so carefully..."
I think another way to pose this poster's comments is: Are extended, overloaded, polymorphic etc object coding techniques always the optimal engineering solution?
In my experience, the answer is no.
Take the eternal mantra, particularly in the corporate domain, of writing reusable code. You can't reuse it if the guy who wrote it is gone and it imports and includes objects sourced from dozens or hundreds of other files, libraries, namespaces... (grab your rotten tomatoes know and get ready to throw!) A well written application, in assembler, C or Visual Basic or a page of ASP or PHP can be read as a self documenting whole and modified reliably and QA'd decisively.
Now covered in fresh tomato sauce, I freely admit that different tasks require different tools. But as someone who often has to focus on the business purpose of the code and not my personal mindset, simple readablity often trumps all else. And to the loon who attacked the original poster - attitudes like your closed mindedness make you the problem.
I crewed on SF Bay, where it's often very windy, with a guy named Emmanuel. Emmanuel vacationed on the East coast, where winds are often lighter, with his friend Bergstrom. I'm not sure about the spelling of his name, but I thought he deserved credit for his law ( which we used to quote frequently... )
"Returning a customer address " SHOULDN'T "require 6 joins."
My bad!
These three lessons may not all be in any one book, but they can help in the real world:
1) Learn what SQL Injection is and how to defend against it. It will ruin your day and could severely damage your current employment situation.
2) Abstract your schema from your front-end applications. Stored procedures are easy to write and can provide security and if well written stop injection attacks. They will let you change your database design without breaking your deployed apps. Just update the internal code in the P. Middleware and objects can do this, too.
3) Bergstrom's law of sailing says: "You can get away with anything in less than 5 knots of wind." Similarly, any little box or blade with 2 to 4 gs of RAM can easily handle 5 to 10 million row tables. Dedicate the server to MySQL or MS SQL so they can cache and buffer efficiently and they will outperform much bigger boxes trying to run too many schemas and DBs concurrently. Learn to index. Don't be too puritanical about normalization. Returning a customer address should require 6 joins. And remember that moving that moving large recordsets across the LANWAN may take much more time than the server query.
You probably already know all this... but maybe someone else reading this doesn't.
Complete code and hardware for sophisticated projects. The adverts will bring you up to speed on what's available for system on a chip, embedded controllers, etc. Deeper than Make. Hobbyists can try out robotics. Scientists can build useful data loggers, remote telemetry, etc. Newbies can learn the basics of writing and compiling code and downloading it to small devices of all sorts. System boards and compiler environments complete for under $40. Also try ladyada.net for complete hardware kits and Ardino system boards, etc. Learning to solder is fun and gives one an almost mystical reconnection to the roots of our digital age...
I have trouble believing TSQL (the MS SQL Server flavor of SQL) has less practioners than Lua, LISP or go. With three times more servers than oracle and all the MS shops out there - Can this be right?
All the attempts at humorous responses aside, The Shuttle pickups, Chinese blowups, X37B, and all previously announced intercepts were in low earth orbit - 100s of miles up. This satellite is 23,500 miles up...
Everyone seems to have had fun with their 5's for funny posts. Sort of like the real world. What companies really need are coders who put code out there. Maybe not perfect the first go-around... But infinitely more useful than stooges with road maps, project plans, PowerPoints, and good meeting manners.
Can we agree that SQL is a high level language for capturing the set theory query logic and is COMPLETELY INDEPENDENT of the engine and physical storage that actually generates the query plan and makes the heads fly to cache and return data?
Structured
Query
Language
not
Stupid
Quixotic
Layout
(Of tables, pages, indexes, drives, heads,spindles, SANs, etc...)
Right?
Don't imagine. Anticipate... Don't you think there at least three or maybe four governments that could bring down the Internet with a keystroke? But, like the MAD standoff that prevents an EMP pulse in orbit taking away everything (EVEN YOUR TV!!!! AND TOYOTA!!!!) a de facto truce based on not knowing which crowd with torches, pitchforks and bricked netbooks would topple which government first holds sway. Or is it alread0%x3jd88 3mrj0ojpo.....Boo!
If working down on the corporate cube farm has shown me anything - it's that non-technical managers produce atrocious applications. Unbelievably expensive. Too slow to be used in spite of the cost. Rejected by users, because they are seldom part of the development team.
I can predict, fairly accurately, the outcome of a corporate development effort from the answer to these questions:
Is the business sponsor and the user team deeply involved in an Agile/Iterative way throughout the development effort?
Is the actual technical side of the development led by a technical manager with real authority?
Does he or she have their choice of tools and technology without interference from above or corporate IT's "Best Practices"?
Are requirements managed flexibly, with early deliverables of basic functionality followed up be newly discovered needs?
The biggest breakthrough in coding, reflected in the biographies of the coder interviewed, is a return to smaller teams, guided by involved end users. In other words, rediscovering earlier practices and respect for the lessons of the Mythical Man Month.
But, the strength of Joomla is its reliance on PHP and CSS to create disciplined and efficient templates for database-driven commercial web sites. Does anyone have recommendations for books/sites that dig deeper into PHP and CSS techniques for producing insanely great Joomla templates and sites? Even most un-free Joomla templates are little more than rectangular puzzle boards with your choice of yucky colors...
Also... how does Joomla scale? Has anyone migrated a site from friends and family visiting to a full-on Slashdot tsunamai of hits? How did you host the site for peak performance?
Given my druthers I'd step back five to ten years and keep each component to a single page.
Many of the articles points are cute, valid and bring back happy memories of making hard problems go on the old day's slow boxes, but they don't compare to the overhead of writing current code in today's production environments. (How about Vista being more bloated and slow than XP?)
Think of the chain of single point failures when you are dependent on thousand's of other programmer's commercial objects performing EXACTLY as documented.
These chain breaks are common... what can you do if you trust and are betrayed by someone else's slow or buggy object? And the verbosity of declaring hundreds of properties to display, say, a simple web page are preposterous.
What if you have a demanding app, or just don't need the overhead of every marketing guy's punch list of features slowing down your code?
Perhaps we were better off, and more productive somewhere between manual memory management and pointers in C... and today.