Hear, hear... I wish the Reagan mythology were known as such and not taken as fact. . . The facts are that the Soviet satellites were crumbling away DECADES before Reagan hit the White House
A house of cards can stand forever until someone knocks it down.
I'll leave it to the historians of a later age to figure out how much Reagan did. I don't think anybody can argue that he had some influence, but the collapse of the USSR was, so far as I can tell, a done deal long before Reagan came on the scene.
As you say, the historians will have the last word, but I think Reagan deserves credit for this one. The "Great Communicator" did a great job of spreading the word about a new missle defense system that was never really planned. Why inform your enemies of what you're really doing? There was some smoke and mirrors, and some known informants got some realistic documents. The USSR went into emergency defense spending mode, and the house of cards collapsed. I think his "Tear Down This Wall" speech was an offer to let the Soviet leadership save face. Russia may not be democratic, but neither are most of the rest of the old soviet block. The USSR is no more. Give this one to the Gipper.
Did you know there's never been a communist economy in a democratic political system? Every communist state has been run by a dictatorship or some form. All dicatorships fail when the dictator makes a wrong move and his enemies take advantage of the error.
I'd guess there is a schism between the goals of the two. A communist economy has to be based on central planning and allocation equally, while a democracy is about garnering power and benefits to the majority or the privileged plurality. And before anyone goes knee-jerk reactive, I'm a conservative, and I'm just talking about the theoretical systems involved -- there has never been a large-scale democracy, so we don't know if a capitalist economy would work with that either.
The best case government is a benevolent dictatorship (but like true democracies, there haven't been any). If you were offered the opportunity, don't you believe you could do a better job of running the country than the scoundrels in power? If you had the best interests of the citizens at heart, what economic sytem would work best?
I suppose YMMV with the school. We had a number of students transfer from CIS to education when they didn't make the cut. CIS required a "B" in all core classes, while education just required a passing grade. My university has high standards for CIS grads.
I know I'm not too impressed with my kids' teachers. Some have been good, but some can't spell or even write a complete sentence. It's sad when they write letters to the local newspaper complaining about their pay and can't write a coherent paragraph. Some grammar Nazi teacher is bound to pick this comment apart.:)
Yes, exactly. Business is about the easiest thing you can major in, in any college, at any level. It's "education" for people who want a degree but are scared of using their brains.
Actually, I think it's the education major that you duck into when failing your real major. Strangely enough, I never had a single professor whose major degree or doctorate was education. That's not to say I have a high opinion of MBA's - I don't.
Since when did universities become life training institutions?
About since the time there were universities? They are supposed to train people for a professional life in the real world, at least from the charters I've seen. Not that it really works.
They also prohibited managers from saying anything good about people on their reviews (I'm not joking or exaggerating)
Are you at liberty to say what company that was? In our company (60,000+ employees), if you don't get something good on your review, you're on the way out. I haven't kissed butt in a while, and reviews are next month. Hopefully, my performance will save me.:)
But they made some bad judgements. Stuff like repeatedly emphasising that you don't need to be the brightest, in fact they take on 2.1 and 2.2 grade students. While this is great, it's not quite what you say to recruit the guys that won the coding competition...
Yeah. That reminds me of a Lockheed (IIRC) rep that came into one class, and said he wasn't interested in 4.0 students because they were socially inept. When I was leaving, the professor asked me if I wasn't going to give the rep my information. I said, "No, I have to go home and tell my wife and two kids I'm socially inept and not elligible for employment at Lockheed."
Well what's scary is in every university recruiting event, M$ has taken some of the smartest programming young talents I have ever seen. Where is the progress? The products get buggier every year. The products get more bloated and triple in size.
Has MS really snagged the best talent? I went to a programming contest which was a thinly veiled recruitment for MS. It was our university's first year there. The MS rep (who did the interviews) was so smart that she admitted at the awards dinner that she was there to recruit people from her alma mater so they could have their own email alias. That automatically eliminated the winning team from a different college. In recent years, I have been thankful for that strange quirk in what could have been my fate. MS doesn't necessarily get the best - they get Microsofties.
MCI/WorldCom/MCI also recruited heavily at our campus. They didn't take the brightest, they took the most attractive and the most malleable. Ask a meaningful question during an interview, and you're out. Now, all those attractive, gullible drones are out of a job. So sad.
I agree with Grandparent. Though MS is evil, thier developement tools are pretty good. I'm still at a "first hit free" MS school, but have some experience with linux tools. Maybe I have just never seen the "good" linux tools, but I love working with Visual Studio.
Please explain exactly what it is that Linux IDEs and other tools don't have when compared to MS. If you need your IDE to write code for you, perhaps you're in the wrong profession? Maybe I should rephrase that: If you need an MS IDE to write code for you, you are definitely in the wrong profession. MS != computer.
Now as for security, sure, hundreds of script kiddies use those development tools to create virii for the windows vulnerabilities; if those same script kiddies had as big and dumb an audience, linux would be just as riddled with trouble.
What the heck does Window's development tools have to do with Windows security? It seems like you're talking about the cargo versus the truck.
It's tax time, so today I visited the Windows partition to install the tax software. I'm proactive (I love that word) about this stuff, so I already have SP2 installed (from a CD burned under Linux) a couple of months ago. The tax software installs, but I notice a lot of network traffic that doesn't stop. Update Manager finally pops up a window saying something "Powered by Sonic" wants to be updated. I say no, but the traffic continues.
I go to the Windows Security Center (whatever) and check the firewall. Apparently all it does is look at incoming connections. I turn off automatic updates, and Windows complains loudly that this is unsecure.
I enable security logging and try to open the log file to see what's going on. I'm not allowed to look at the log because another program is using it. Okay, what good is it?
Network traffic is still going full bore, so I pull the network connection. That works of course, and nothing complains about it either. I wait a few minutes and bring the connection back up. No strange traffic.
I download ZoneAlarm using Netscape and update the spybot and Adaware.
Reboot
Run the spyware and adware stuff. Catch some tracking cookies - nothing major. Install ZoneAlarm.
Reboot
Finish ZA installation. The Sonic thing wants out again. Deny. Something called BackWeb wants to set up as server. Deny. The AV software wants out to update. Allow. The AV software updates and needs a . . .
Reboot
Deny everything that wants out while making some permanent. Why doesn't the Windows firewall watch this stuff? I'm sure someone will enlighten me.
Start the tax software. It wants to be updated. Allow. I've got at least four programs now sucking up resources just watching each other. I'm tired. Taxes can wait until tomorrow.
IMO you failed to argue with the morons who put those idiots in charge.
There's some validity to that, but as Honest Abe pointed out, you can fool all (or most of) the people some of the time (and get elected). If you argue hard enough though, you can still have an effect - Ashcroft's leaving, and some of his more draconian regulations are being dismantled.
If you don't argue with idiots, you will find yourself ruled by policies set by idiots. I won't go into all the idiotic legislation we have because we failed to argue hard enough with the idiots in charge.
What we keep discovering, the hard way, is that there really isn't any COTS software to do what we need it to.
I hear that. We had a major project starting up, and a top manager decided we would use COTS software because he knew that "we would be leveraging the superior talent at commercial software companies," it would be cheaper, and it would take less time to completion. (Translation: he read an article in Computerworld.)
After the RFP, they selected a company that claimed their software did everything needed. At one point the adaptation problems were so bad that the vendor had a contractor at our site for several months. He was put in an office two doors down from mine, and one day there were loud noises of equipment being slammed around and this guy yelling, "I hate this *&%!%$$ place!" They delivered a highly-customized version six months behind schedule with cost overruns. The finished product was painfully slow and loaded with bugs. (A response to a query in less than a minute was not one of the requirements, the vendor said.) The bug-fix period only lasted for six months, during which only some of the bugs got fixed.
Since then, we've been paying for the rest of the bug fixes plus support on this supposedly OTS product. It has been several years, and the need for a replacement is obvious. A team was put together to analyze the problem, and they recommended to management that we build a product in-house to meet our unique needs since the costs would be less than the previous COTS "solution", and the maintenance would be cheaper. Management put out a RFP to the COTS vendors.
The moral of this unhappy story is that you can do everything in your power to assist management and give them good advice, but you can't make them smart or willing to admit a mistake.
Maybe this is what the author really meant to say: When it comes to developing software today, reinventing the wheel should be a last resort, not a first instinct.
What the author is saying is you shouldn't build a house because there is a company that makes double-wide trailers, and one size fits all. It's more nonsense from a guy known for spouting nonsense, and that's the best reason to ignore it.
Keep in mind, the commercialization of technology is one of the things that made it possible for the US to develop so much of it. Boeing has a Hell of a lot more money to spend on the next fighter plane if it's bottom line was kept strong by the sale of passenger planes, and those passenger planes need middle class businessmen riding in them for any economy of scale to kick in.
Boeing is a poor example to use. The company is in a death spiral because, like so many other American companies, the management has been systematically liquidating the value that was earned through decades of R&D and giving it to a few people at the top who don't care about that or any other company. It's very sad - capitalism at its worst.
If the masses think the laws are there to enforce justice, and the media is "Fair and Biased" they won't notice they're being manipulated and controlled for the benefit of the wealthy.
One interesting question is, who will appoint the bankruptcy executors, and what will their interests be. It may happen that they would willingly give IBM total access to all internal records as a part of settling the suits.
I'm not at all familiar with bankruptcy, but aren't companies in (Ch. 11) bankruptcy allowed to put their own plan forward and remain in control if the court agrees? It seems like Northwestern Corp and a some airlines (to mention a few) have done so.
Hello, what do you think the phrase 'dying from old age' means? It's a generic term to describe dying from one of a number of ailments that commonly kill old people, such as heart attack and liver failure.
Nonsense. Heart attacks and liver failure often come from self-destructive behavior (and I'm currently tempting fate as much as I can). Dying from old age is death from things like cancer, Alzheimers, hardening of the arteries, hypertension, bone loss and the resulting damage from falls - the body just wears out, and one "cause" wins out over the others.
But, in any case, if they can't arrest aging for 25 more years, I don't think I'd enjoy living forever in that condition, supposing I made it that far.
No, I don't. It has been a bad day, and I really dislike that sugary cliche with its overtones of moral superiority. I don't have to celebrate the moronity of management or the cluelessness of the BOFH running the system I'm replacing. *Steams* Bang! BANG! BANG! *Kick* Celebrate that, cliche monger.
I think Webcartoonist D.C. Simpson said it best, discussing CNN's Crossfire, how extremist lunatics on the Right are branded as mainstream and meanwhile moderate Leftists are considered extremist
I don't really have a dog in this fight, but that sounds more like your opinion of where the center is and which way you obviously lean than anything about the media. Then, since you apparently agree with the text you've quoted:
I admire Mr. Kinsley as a journalist very much, but the fact that Crossfire pits conciliatory, fair-minded, let's-look-at-all-sides objectivists like Kinsley against frothing partisan right-wingers like Pat Buchanan is exactly the problem with Crossfire.
You mean the same "frothing partisan right-winger" Pat Buchanan who writes against the dangers of neoconservatives and their philosophy of preventative war? The Buchanan who warned against going to war with Iraq and predicted the very situation we now face when the President did so? The Buchanan who suggested we should let the U.N. weapons inspectors finish their job, and that the U.S. should build a consensus with our allies before going to war? That frothing, extremist, right-wing lunatic who sounds an awful lot like like a left-wing presidential candidate?
Did you really need to post a dozen paragraphs to say you believe right-wing = bad and left-wing = good?
Slashdot Mirror
Hear, hear... I wish the Reagan mythology were known as such and not taken as fact. . . The facts are that the Soviet satellites were crumbling away DECADES before Reagan hit the White House
A house of cards can stand forever until someone knocks it down.
I'll leave it to the historians of a later age to figure out how much Reagan did. I don't think anybody can argue that he had some influence, but the collapse of the USSR was, so far as I can tell, a done deal long before Reagan came on the scene.
As you say, the historians will have the last word, but I think Reagan deserves credit for this one. The "Great Communicator" did a great job of spreading the word about a new missle defense system that was never really planned. Why inform your enemies of what you're really doing? There was some smoke and mirrors, and some known informants got some realistic documents. The USSR went into emergency defense spending mode, and the house of cards collapsed. I think his "Tear Down This Wall" speech was an offer to let the Soviet leadership save face. Russia may not be democratic, but neither are most of the rest of the old soviet block. The USSR is no more. Give this one to the Gipper.
Did you know there's never been a communist economy in a democratic political system? Every communist state has been run by a dictatorship or some form. All dicatorships fail when the dictator makes a wrong move and his enemies take advantage of the error.
I'd guess there is a schism between the goals of the two. A communist economy has to be based on central planning and allocation equally, while a democracy is about garnering power and benefits to the majority or the privileged plurality. And before anyone goes knee-jerk reactive, I'm a conservative, and I'm just talking about the theoretical systems involved -- there has never been a large-scale democracy, so we don't know if a capitalist economy would work with that either.
The best case government is a benevolent dictatorship (but like true democracies, there haven't been any). If you were offered the opportunity, don't you believe you could do a better job of running the country than the scoundrels in power? If you had the best interests of the citizens at heart, what economic sytem would work best?
I used to play cello in Soviet orchestra, now I sell froggie pops
The people in your country must have strange tastes. Frozen amphibians, yum. ;)
I suppose YMMV with the school. We had a number of students transfer from CIS to education when they didn't make the cut. CIS required a "B" in all core classes, while education just required a passing grade. My university has high standards for CIS grads.
:)
I know I'm not too impressed with my kids' teachers. Some have been good, but some can't spell or even write a complete sentence. It's sad when they write letters to the local newspaper complaining about their pay and can't write a coherent paragraph. Some grammar Nazi teacher is bound to pick this comment apart.
Yes, exactly. Business is about the easiest thing you can major in, in any college, at any level. It's "education" for people who want a degree but are scared of using their brains.
Actually, I think it's the education major that you duck into when failing your real major. Strangely enough, I never had a single professor whose major degree or doctorate was education. That's not to say I have a high opinion of MBA's - I don't.
Since when did universities become life training institutions?
About since the time there were universities? They are supposed to train people for a professional life in the real world, at least from the charters I've seen. Not that it really works.
You can never get tired of monkey boy.
Not true. Once was enough. Ugh. Didn't he know that Secret had an anti-perspirant powerful enough for men?
They also prohibited managers from saying anything good about people on their reviews (I'm not joking or exaggerating)
Are you at liberty to say what company that was? In our company (60,000+ employees), if you don't get something good on your review, you're on the way out. I haven't kissed butt in a while, and reviews are next month. Hopefully, my performance will save me. :)
But they made some bad judgements. Stuff like repeatedly emphasising that you don't need to be the brightest, in fact they take on 2.1 and 2.2 grade students. While this is great, it's not quite what you say to recruit the guys that won the coding competition...
Yeah. That reminds me of a Lockheed (IIRC) rep that came into one class, and said he wasn't interested in 4.0 students because they were socially inept. When I was leaving, the professor asked me if I wasn't going to give the rep my information. I said, "No, I have to go home and tell my wife and two kids I'm socially inept and not elligible for employment at Lockheed."
Well what's scary is in every university recruiting event, M$ has taken some of the smartest programming young talents I have ever seen. Where is the progress? The products get buggier every year. The products get more bloated and triple in size.
Has MS really snagged the best talent? I went to a programming contest which was a thinly veiled recruitment for MS. It was our university's first year there. The MS rep (who did the interviews) was so smart that she admitted at the awards dinner that she was there to recruit people from her alma mater so they could have their own email alias. That automatically eliminated the winning team from a different college. In recent years, I have been thankful for that strange quirk in what could have been my fate. MS doesn't necessarily get the best - they get Microsofties.
MCI/WorldCom/MCI also recruited heavily at our campus. They didn't take the brightest, they took the most attractive and the most malleable. Ask a meaningful question during an interview, and you're out. Now, all those attractive, gullible drones are out of a job. So sad.
I agree with Grandparent. Though MS is evil, thier developement tools are pretty good. I'm still at a "first hit free" MS school, but have some experience with linux tools. Maybe I have just never seen the "good" linux tools, but I love working with Visual Studio.
Please explain exactly what it is that Linux IDEs and other tools don't have when compared to MS. If you need your IDE to write code for you, perhaps you're in the wrong profession? Maybe I should rephrase that: If you need an MS IDE to write code for you, you are definitely in the wrong profession. MS != computer.
Now as for security, sure, hundreds of script kiddies use those development tools to create virii for the windows vulnerabilities; if those same script kiddies had as big and dumb an audience, linux would be just as riddled with trouble.
What the heck does Window's development tools have to do with Windows security? It seems like you're talking about the cargo versus the truck.
It's tax time, so today I visited the Windows partition to install the tax software. I'm proactive (I love that word) about this stuff, so I already have SP2 installed (from a CD burned under Linux) a couple of months ago. The tax software installs, but I notice a lot of network traffic that doesn't stop. Update Manager finally pops up a window saying something "Powered by Sonic" wants to be updated. I say no, but the traffic continues.
IMO you failed to argue with the morons who put those idiots in charge.
There's some validity to that, but as Honest Abe pointed out, you can fool all (or most of) the people some of the time (and get elected). If you argue hard enough though, you can still have an effect - Ashcroft's leaving, and some of his more draconian regulations are being dismantled.
Wonderful essay. Thanks for the link!
Wonderful essay?
If you don't argue with idiots, you will find yourself ruled by policies set by idiots. I won't go into all the idiotic legislation we have because we failed to argue hard enough with the idiots in charge.What we keep discovering, the hard way, is that there really isn't any COTS software to do what we need it to.
I hear that. We had a major project starting up, and a top manager decided we would use COTS software because he knew that "we would be leveraging the superior talent at commercial software companies," it would be cheaper, and it would take less time to completion. (Translation: he read an article in Computerworld.)
After the RFP, they selected a company that claimed their software did everything needed. At one point the adaptation problems were so bad that the vendor had a contractor at our site for several months. He was put in an office two doors down from mine, and one day there were loud noises of equipment being slammed around and this guy yelling, "I hate this *&%!%$$ place!" They delivered a highly-customized version six months behind schedule with cost overruns. The finished product was painfully slow and loaded with bugs. (A response to a query in less than a minute was not one of the requirements, the vendor said.) The bug-fix period only lasted for six months, during which only some of the bugs got fixed.
Since then, we've been paying for the rest of the bug fixes plus support on this supposedly OTS product. It has been several years, and the need for a replacement is obvious. A team was put together to analyze the problem, and they recommended to management that we build a product in-house to meet our unique needs since the costs would be less than the previous COTS "solution", and the maintenance would be cheaper. Management put out a RFP to the COTS vendors.
The moral of this unhappy story is that you can do everything in your power to assist management and give them good advice, but you can't make them smart or willing to admit a mistake.
Maybe this is what the author really meant to say: When it comes to developing software today, reinventing the wheel should be a last resort, not a first instinct.
What the author is saying is you shouldn't build a house because there is a company that makes double-wide trailers, and one size fits all. It's more nonsense from a guy known for spouting nonsense, and that's the best reason to ignore it.
Keep in mind, the commercialization of technology is one of the things that made it possible for the US to develop so much of it. Boeing has a Hell of a lot more money to spend on the next fighter plane if it's bottom line was kept strong by the sale of passenger planes, and those passenger planes need middle class businessmen riding in them for any economy of scale to kick in.
Boeing is a poor example to use. The company is in a death spiral because, like so many other American companies, the management has been systematically liquidating the value that was earned through decades of R&D and giving it to a few people at the top who don't care about that or any other company. It's very sad - capitalism at its worst.
If the masses think the laws are there to enforce justice, and the media is "Fair and Biased" they won't notice they're being manipulated and controlled for the benefit of the wealthy.
You've been watching FOX news, haven't you?
One interesting question is, who will appoint the bankruptcy executors, and what will their interests be. It may happen that they would willingly give IBM total access to all internal records as a part of settling the suits.
I'm not at all familiar with bankruptcy, but aren't companies in (Ch. 11) bankruptcy allowed to put their own plan forward and remain in control if the court agrees? It seems like Northwestern Corp and a some airlines (to mention a few) have done so.
the new system uses your own cells and just causes them to grow at high speed...
I'll bet Lexmark figures out a way to limit the number of cells grown.
When I read it, I was thinking more about coming into work Monday morning and finding sample organs in the fax machine tray. Ewwww.
Hello, what do you think the phrase 'dying from old age' means? It's a generic term to describe dying from one of a number of ailments that commonly kill old people, such as heart attack and liver failure.
Nonsense. Heart attacks and liver failure often come from self-destructive behavior (and I'm currently tempting fate as much as I can). Dying from old age is death from things like cancer, Alzheimers, hardening of the arteries, hypertension, bone loss and the resulting damage from falls - the body just wears out, and one "cause" wins out over the others.
But, in any case, if they can't arrest aging for 25 more years, I don't think I'd enjoy living forever in that condition, supposing I made it that far.
You need to celebrate diversity.
No, I don't. It has been a bad day, and I really dislike that sugary cliche with its overtones of moral superiority. I don't have to celebrate the moronity of management or the cluelessness of the BOFH running the system I'm replacing. *Steams* Bang! BANG! BANG! *Kick* Celebrate that, cliche monger.
I think Webcartoonist D.C. Simpson said it best, discussing CNN's Crossfire, how extremist lunatics on the Right are branded as mainstream and meanwhile moderate Leftists are considered extremist
I don't really have a dog in this fight, but that sounds more like your opinion of where the center is and which way you obviously lean than anything about the media. Then, since you apparently agree with the text you've quoted:
I admire Mr. Kinsley as a journalist very much, but the fact that Crossfire pits conciliatory, fair-minded, let's-look-at-all-sides objectivists like Kinsley against frothing partisan right-wingers like Pat Buchanan is exactly the problem with Crossfire.
You mean the same "frothing partisan right-winger" Pat Buchanan who writes against the dangers of neoconservatives and their philosophy of preventative war? The Buchanan who warned against going to war with Iraq and predicted the very situation we now face when the President did so? The Buchanan who suggested we should let the U.N. weapons inspectors finish their job, and that the U.S. should build a consensus with our allies before going to war? That frothing, extremist, right-wing lunatic who sounds an awful lot like like a left-wing presidential candidate?
Did you really need to post a dozen paragraphs to say you believe right-wing = bad and left-wing = good?