Try handing out GameBoy's at your next presentation. Better yet, set up a online game for the same timeslot as your quarterly meeting.
Most people find the most tivial and petty distractions to be far more interesting than something that's not packed full of blood, fire, explosions, or sex. I've seen people get entranced by pencil twirling instead of end-of-quarter reports. Sure, they can stop the twirling at any time to pay attention, but it's not like you can stop a Zergling rush at any time to make a meaningful comment based on the half-heard ramblings of someone you're not really following 100%.
And don't say the word multitasking. Most of the time that's just the lame excuse for being rude to the person who you're not giving your attention. Sure, maybe they don't deserve it, poorly prepared presentation or meeting, but that's still not going to undo the fact that you're partially ignoring them.
In speech courses, you first learn to organize your information.
The second thing you learn is not to compete with your presentation materials. Certainly laptops will become the target of the replaced textbook vendors in the K12 arena, and that means students will be busily reading the textbook searching for the example "just like this problem" and basically paying any left-over attention to the teacher.
A darker, more sinister, view would be that teachers embrace the rich presentation and basically take a back seat to it, allowing the laptop to teach while they act as "guides" or "learning adminsitrators" in the student's self-pursuit of knowledge. And these are the "happy" endings, the "unhappy" endings include finding out how to LAN pary Starcraft on the school provided laptops so no learing is done.
The schools are just factories for making a working class, college for making a white collar worker, Master's for making a manger, and Doctor's for making a professor. Sure exceptions exist, but my most wealthy friends command a good sense of bookkeeping, a strong work ethic, a desire to learn things, and an indifference as to how they learn it. School is fine, but so are books bought from the bookstore, or working with a professional a few years to understand the business.
That said, large scale success is still mostly luck exploited by those who know enough to exploit it.
PS. Two great posts, back-to-back (read your one-of-the-guys post too).
Galileo's claims were not scoffed at, he did a very good job of presenting his evidence.
Unfortunately, the Church (the Catholic Church, the only Church of mention at that time) took his theories very seriously, and that's why they put Galileo to the test, demanding that he basically rebuke himself. When they discovered that they couldn't put the cat back into the bag, they basically asked for an apology. None of this would have been necessary if the Church didn't act as the supreme authority for all physical knowledge, but hey, God is omniescent and the Pope is the mouthpiece of God, and there you go.
Columbus wasn't scoffed at when he said the Earth was round, that is a common modern misconception. In Columbus's time, approximately 50% of all Spanish citizens believed that the Earth was round, based on the excellent Porteguese and Dutch map-making skills, it was hard to NOT notice the only way to make coasts meet was to project them on a sphere.
Quantum Physics wasn't scoffed at for scientific reasons, it was scoffed at because a religous believing super-star of physics wouldn't accept a theory that allowed randomness to drive the lowest basic forces. Ironically, it was Albert Einstein's early works that opened the door for seeing physics through "Quantum Physics" eyes, but the same Albert Einsteins decried quantum physics as being too random, and not capturing the "devine design of God", leading to the famous quote (which has never been proved or disproved) that "God does not play dice."
So basically, all of your examples belies a mis-understanding of history, and you admit the company has shady looking characters, and you STILL expect us to hold out hope that they aren't out to fleece VC investors of hard-earned cash? Hope springs eternal, but so does stupidity. Don't promote things that even you feel a reservation in promoting, be true to yourself.
Well, back in 1990's I was working on a "plan" to take a newly discovered cell cycle regulatory protein and pack it into a phage (virus) for targeted delivery to cancerous tissues. Let's just say that it was a lot harder than it sounds. I've heard that there were some mild successes, but I haven't heard of a complete viral cancer strategy. In a twist of fate, a few cancers are know well known to be caused by viruses.
As for the meat industry, I think this is a horrible idea. First, the United States doesn't do enough research to really know what's going on here. Back in the 90's there were fewer research scientits per capita in the U.S. than in most countries, and I doubt it's improved much. I would be shocked to know if there are any meat surface ecologists who have done research which might indicate that the absence of this bacteria allows slower growing, more deadly bacteria (which are unaffected by this virus, as viruses are typically very specific) to take foothold.
And yes, it (according to meat industry "scientists") is going to save the lives of 7.4 people per million. Honestly, I don't think that the 7.4 number should be taken too seriously. Such a small number is equal to 0.000000074% of the people who eat meat, yet we're going to apply the virus salve to 100% of the meat? Applying it to 50% of the meat will only change the ration by 50% leaving 0.0000000037% of the population affected.
In addition, it's not clear to me that the 7.4 per million died from eating bacteria infected meat. Such small numbers are very difficult to measure accurately, and there's no indication of the standard deviation or standard error. There's not even an indication of the sample size. If the sample size was in the 100's of thousands, a single mis-diagnosed person could provide nearly all of the "evidence".
This seems like a quick way to lengthen the shelf life of meat, not a life saving measure. Industry backed research always targets the bottom line, because that's where they justify their paychecks. How else do you think they had research findings that proved cigarette smoking wasn't the main cause of lung cancer all of these years?
There's major differences between a hypervisor based virtualization system and a fatter emulation method. Such differences tend to express themselves in all sorts of odd places, where you might otherwise expect a unifying API.
So why is Oracle crying about it? Instead of complaining that other companies need to get their act together and bind two different solutions to a problem in a way that serves Oracle, Oracle could write one management interface that does what they want for each of the two environments and perform the "integration" themselves on the client-side.
Oracle is a software company with resources that most other software companies would only dream about. If it was critical to Oracle's success, they wouldn't be clamoring about others needing to do it, they'd do it themselves.
Why the upper limit on the speed of the vechile?
A lower limit is easy to understand, eventually you'll run out of time to conduct the "race", but an upper limit seems perplexing.
Is the track not designed to accommodate higher speeds?
Is it an attempt to limit driver injury in case of catastrophic failure?
Is it an insurance requirement?
Is is an attempt to prevent single burn cycle entrants?
Just curious.
The fat cats in Hollywood mostly produce money, which gets used to plan the next project, build houses, buy cars, buy food, and throw parties. Most of these activities consume some miniscule amount of electricity, but there's only a small number of "fat cats" which can sustain their lifestyle at any given time. So, from an electricity consumption viewpoint, the "fat cats" probably don't out-do the gaming console set. I'm not going to consider production of movie electricity consumption in this argument, because that consumption really does produce something, even if you don't care for the film it produced. Come to think of it, car production, house production, and food production all produce something, so it's not a fair comparison to console electricty leakage.
People in third world countries rarely produce twelve children, as they have limited ability to access modern medicine and birth puts the mother at some risk to her life. Desire for large families are the norm in third world countries, but so are high rates of infant mortality, death by treatable disease, and death by industrial / farming accidents. In the end, we haven't seen Africa outnumber China even though China has a governmental imposed limit on child birth and Africa does not impose such limits. Birth in a third world country doesn't require the use of electricity, and even if electricity is used for child birth, it would hardly be considered wasted electricity, unless you have become so detached from humanity that you consider 3rd world inhabitants such non-people that they should be tabulated like cattle or sheep.
Considering the environmental impact of generating energy that's not being used for any purpose other than to keep your console turned off is not the same as considering if there are other items that may generate more environmental impact, some of which may be putting the energy to some purposeful work. Adding a few red herrings, like "fat cats" and "3rd world overpopulation" hardly clarifies the point.
No, that market probably doesn't fit their portfolio. But that's why they're expanding into the online grocery store business. Companies that have the means look for ways to make more money.
In my mind it's the delivery costs that have killed many online grocery stores in our area. Houston is very spread out, and although one of the first online grocery services was launched here, it failed miserably due to delivery issues. Sure, it takes time for people to adjust to a new culture, so the customer's weren't there. Also, at that time only a fraction of the grocery shopping population really had much on-line time, and 90% of that was dial up.
To give an idea of how far changed the online grocery business has become, the service that I'm referring to actually hired people to shop in the grocery store for you, and then drove the groceries to your house. Naturally it failed, being the quintissential example of a poor exeuction of a neat idea.
I believe it was called pea-pod, but it's been too many years.
Finger prints are very hard to fake. Sure, you COULD do it, but DNA is designed to facilitate replication.
A few dollars and a PCR machine, and there's enough DNA to "taint" anything I want. If I already have the DNA, I can frame someone with DNA "evidence" and the current miseducated jury will proclaim the 100% match to be 100% proof.
So you should be worried about databases of DNA. There's no worry about using the DNA itself, just the governmental agencies posessing it. If a court orders I give a DNA sample to test against existing evidence, I can't see the easy ability for abuse (I'm not considering the self-incrimination angle.)
A database is a much different matter.
Looks like Mr. John Doe has finally gone too far. Pull his DNA file, duplicate it in mass, and
spread it around the next dead homeless person you find. Who knew he was socially unbalanced and
liked to kill homeless people? Well, those political activists were always a strange bunch! A
few years in prison will help him sort is out.
When did it become appropriate for the government to own a piece of you? A fingerprint is an external feature, but DNA is a part of you. Ceratinly it will be put to noble uses, but like anything that is available, sooner or later it will also be put to much less than noble uses. That's just human nature.
Were the other machines broken at the other locations?
Were the other locations comparable in social setting, economics, job opportunity, racial makeup, educational level, etc. as the location with the broken machine?
You don't have to be a lawyer to see how this could be un-equal opportunity, especially if certain machines seem to be broken more often than others.
I believe he was more concerned about the right to apply for a job.
If a paper application was reviewd by a person, pray tell, how does that differ from an electronic application being reviewd by a person? Or are you saying that Kroger uses such an automated application process that all hiring decisions are made without human intervention?
Even in such a marvel of computer assisted HR replacement, I assume that a human probably wrote the software, so if you want to argue against bias, there's always a way to prove that some form of human bias exists, because the entire concept of working for someone else is a human created idea, performed by humans, and allowed by humans.
Poor Madam Curie and many others did non-scientific, informal, non-rigorous testing. That is, they died at early ages from a host of maladies that typically were not seen before, or were not seen in people so young.
Don't think that you must test something to know if it will kill you. There is no formal testing program with human participants to see if freeway crashes are really as fatal or "enjoyable" as they appear.
There was a facinating period of time in human history where the new power of atomic radiation was believed to be the ultimate energy drink. Radithor and others http://www.orau.org/PTP/collection/quackcures/quac kcures.htm eventually led to the death of many people, sometimes by tumors, sometimes by weird means such as the bones becoming brittle and collapsing like dust.
In addition, it's not fully un=tested. In 1949 Quaker Oats fed mentally retarted school children (in America, no less) radioactive isotopes to study their effects on the human body. A few cases have been leaked indicating that the Department of Enery in coordination with physicians in America injected poor Black men with Plutonium isotopes, another leaked study shows people being purposefully exposed to radiation ten time higher than normal. I imagine that the leaked studies are few in comparison to the non-leaked studies.
And don't think that such things don't happen in the United States. Look at the Tuskagee Syphillis experiment, where they literally infected people with Syphillis and then refused medical treatment, lying to them about the disease to see how impactful the entire course of the infection would take. To keep people on the program, they warned them that their "free medial treamements" would be discontinued if they sought advice from other physicians, and they selected poor under-educated test subjects which would basically require free "treatment" as opposed to real, paid medical advice.
I happen to be one of those few fools that have both a degree in Biology and in Computer Science. And at one time I relied on my research skills in Biology as my ONLY income, until the dreaded and softly spoken "balancing" of the budget that spelled doom to most low level Biologists of my time.
It is hard to mix the two. This is even more frustrating if you're marginally inclined to understand where things come from and how they are designed. Some of the earliest proponets of object oriented software programming envisioned "cells" of code that "signaled" each other. It's no cooincidence that Biological terms were used, because that (I've now forgotten) person held a Biology degree. The iterative (or step-wise) approach identically mirrors the laborious procedures for running most lab jobs. I consider myself blessed to have a firm grasp on both techniques, but there are plenty of others who have managed to master both.
Today, I'm told that my Biology degree has little to do with my work, and that it has no bearing on my career as a software developer. I understand the misconception behind such a statement; however, I do not share that opinion. To some degree, ALL of the natural sciences are related, and ALL research and fact finding skills can be leveraged in other environments. I'm shocked at the poor quality of "professional" Biological software, but then again, it's mostly written by Biologists that have the domain knowledge, but lack the skills to produce polished software. Even when they attempt to hire, there's precious few people out there with enough skill to know if they are hiring good programmers, leading to skill poor shops shipping the best they can produce.
I'm sure that not all shops are skill poor, but I had an opportunity to work for a Biological company that was writing software where I didn't see a real opportunity. The position promised a worse hierachy in terms of status and prestige, with fewer opportunities for me to contribute than its non-Biology competitors. Maybe I was unlucky, and parhaps I picked the one bad example to interview with. They were telling me things about their software development that made my CS blood run cold, expecting me to admin 80 computers "on the side" and offering to pay me about 70% the going rate.
Fewer people really want programmers, because it is unclear to a non-development company what a programmer can offer, but it is clear what a DBA can offer. Reliable reporting, offline data storage and retrieval, performance analysis, and data warehousing needs are directly tied to the survival of many businesses. The things a computer science person can offer might be able to exceed that of a DBA, but it's not as certain it will. Given the conservative bent of today, I'd say that most companies feel they can't afford a risk. Perhaps it partially explains the appeal of finding candidates with a 100% buzzword match compliance?
Do you realize that hypersonic wind tunnels routinely test thier models for what amounts to a maximum of around 8 seconds?
Given that they can collect tons of data within those 8 seconds to do real, pratical measurements that they then extrapolate over the relatively (but longer) durations of missle flight, etc. I'd wager that the 6 seconds of scramjet powered flight won't pose much of a problem for the data gathering phase.
But don't believe me, just check Slashdot's January (2006) posting about the relatively silent (aka laminar wind flow) mach 6 wind tunnel put together at Perdue. It is vacuum driven, with only 8 seconds of measurements per run, and nobody seemed to be upset about that at all.
You should forget up2date. It was sort of RedHat only / proprietary since it required access to RedHat servers and a subscription. If you didn't subscribe, there was limited support (for awhile) to up2date servers, and then only for limited bandwidth.
Eventually they did rework up2date to be configurable to point to non-RedHat servers, and then up2date seemed to work ok. But by then I had become so accustomed to "yum" that I barely even considered checking if up2date worked correctly. If I recall correctly (and I might be wrong) this was done by routing up2date through yum.
FC5 (I've been using their test releases) has a much nicer GUI installer of RPMs. I forgot it's name. It's even simpler than up2date, and it comes pre-properly configured to point to the right servers. Still, I find myself using yum. Old habits are hard to break, and yum does the job for me nicely.
No, but in the same vein, you don't think Apple loses money on each sale, do you?
If so, we would have our first loss trailer. Differing from the loss leader, the loss trailer is designed so after the company makes it's profit on the initial sale, it offers a below cost service, so the more you use the product, the smaller the total realized profit margin will become. This should hook consumers into buying multiple copies of the product, but never using them.
Get a grip, Apple could make one cent per sale and still make millions.
1.To Heathkit
2.The fall of Dr. Norton
3.Shadows of UUNET
4.Borland, stop hurting youself
5.Have you seen my Atari today?
6.An Amiga I can't afford
7.Memories of a text adventure game
8.My talk with Hays (compatible)
9.He's not just my penguin anymore
Companies grow up, they move away from their roots and strain the friendships they fostered. Apple extended to many people years of hacking fun, fostering an environment of computer understanding and comraderie. In return, that community extended it's friendship and remained vehementally loyal. A good friend is hard to find, hard to lose, and hard to forget.
But Apple hasn't been true to it's garage hacking roots for many, many years. Some of their devices are specifically built to be hack unfriendly. Their audience isn't the same makeup and composition of the old "old-timers", and when you tell a new mac addict about building your own paddles / joystick for the II+, they sort of look at you and say "That's neat, I have a Sidewinder joystick". They're buying the mac for good reasons; security, ease of maintenance, (more) consistent UI design, etc. But, in the end, they are more likele to be consumers of the technology, and only possibly consumers of the few hacks that get created for those platforms.
As a company, Apple has decided to cater to that crowd, and finiancially they may not have a choice. Their computers (and other devices) are coming pre-packaged in slick boxes with all of the image gimmicks that are usually reserved for high end perfumes. It's becoming even more about image than before. The image market will always have hordes of people who will be happy with knock-offs and pirated copies of the Mac OS, as it feeds into the "keeping up with the Jones'" mentality.
Much of the Macintosh's product image is in the software, and Apple has decided that CPU and hardware details aren't vital to that formula. Losing control of the software means losing control of the Mac market.
Things may change; the pendulum may swing back. These sites may go online again. People can find a happy medium. But human nature is not dismissable, and I'm sure a few people are thinking along the lines of this quote:
"I think that if your friends don't like that you think a little different than they do, then maybe you shouldn't want them as friends. And, you should consider the loss of friendship their loss, not yours." --Chelsey Collinsdale
I don't think Apple deserves to be demonized over this, but I hope they don't play their hand too strongly. Perhaps it is best not to befriend a company, as they "are always constant, except in (their) affections." -- Oscar Wilde (taken out of context, of course!)
But to start, use SVN. There's not a good reason to use something else, and having the history of your changes will (in some ways) be far more important than having the code itself. If SVN is a bear to put up with, and it's just you, you might consider RCS, but RCS will eventually make you jump through so many hoops that sooner or later you'll be looking at SVN.
After that, you'll need to recode your code to become more useful over time. At first, the solution fits the problem, and the problem fits the website, and that fits the specific task you were trying to perform. After some time, your needs will change. The second time you want to use your code, you'll notice that it doesn't really fit. This is where your challenge starts.
Challenge yourself to NOT write the 2nd and 3rd products that use your code to make compromises for the "way this library needs to be used". Rework parts of the library to make it more useful in more situations, and rework both the old and the new projects to use the new library.
Then try to make a third application that uses the library in a slightly different way. Once again, don't write the application to fit the library, but modify the library to fit the way the application uses it. At the same time, check that the old applications both keep working on the rewritten libarary's code, and keep them up to date with the changes in the library.
After a few trips on this merry-go-round, you'll begin to notice a few things about code maintenance, code reusability, and code maturity. Sure, you could just read about it in a book, but that would rob you of an education. You MUST see it happen in person to understand it. If you're doing things "correctly" you'll notice a few things:
1. Each time you write a new applicaiton, the library needs to change less and less, but it's still easy to use. 2. Good libraries don't force different applications to be written the same way. Bad libraries require the application to be written in ways that make using the library uncomfortable. 3. It's impossible to make code reusable without some understanding of the various ways you might be likely to use it.
The real test is when you find yourself writing documentation for your library so you can hand it off to someone else to use without the need for them to see your source. Sure, you could give them a copy of the source code too, but if they have to read it, you've only made it reusable for you, and that's a small audience to learn from.
Good luck, and don't worry if you fall short. Writing good, flexible, reusable libraries is often much harder than writing the applications that use them. Just remember, it's not a library if only one application uses it. It's not flexible if only one style of application uses it. It's not good if you have to read it's source code or documentation that looks like it could be source code.
Slashdot Mirror
While you're at it, how about a nice game of chess?
Try handing out GameBoy's at your next presentation. Better yet, set up a online game for the same timeslot as your quarterly meeting.
Most people find the most tivial and petty distractions to be far more interesting than something that's not packed full of blood, fire, explosions, or sex. I've seen people get entranced by pencil twirling instead of end-of-quarter reports. Sure, they can stop the twirling at any time to pay attention, but it's not like you can stop a Zergling rush at any time to make a meaningful comment based on the half-heard ramblings of someone you're not really following 100%.
And don't say the word multitasking. Most of the time that's just the lame excuse for being rude to the person who you're not giving your attention. Sure, maybe they don't deserve it, poorly prepared presentation or meeting, but that's still not going to undo the fact that you're partially ignoring them.
Hear, hear!!
In speech courses, you first learn to organize your information.
The second thing you learn is not to compete with your presentation materials. Certainly laptops will become the target of the replaced textbook vendors in the K12 arena, and that means students will be busily reading the textbook searching for the example "just like this problem" and basically paying any left-over attention to the teacher.
A darker, more sinister, view would be that teachers embrace the rich presentation and basically take a back seat to it, allowing the laptop to teach while they act as "guides" or "learning adminsitrators" in the student's self-pursuit of knowledge. And these are the "happy" endings, the "unhappy" endings include finding out how to LAN pary Starcraft on the school provided laptops so no learing is done.
The schools are just factories for making a working class, college for making a white collar worker, Master's for making a manger, and Doctor's for making a professor. Sure exceptions exist, but my most wealthy friends command a good sense of bookkeeping, a strong work ethic, a desire to learn things, and an indifference as to how they learn it. School is fine, but so are books bought from the bookstore, or working with a professional a few years to understand the business.
That said, large scale success is still mostly luck exploited by those who know enough to exploit it.
PS. Two great posts, back-to-back (read your one-of-the-guys post too).
Err....
Galileo's claims were not scoffed at, he did a very good job of presenting his evidence.
Unfortunately, the Church (the Catholic Church, the only Church of mention at that time) took his theories very seriously, and that's why they put Galileo to the test, demanding that he basically rebuke himself. When they discovered that they couldn't put the cat back into the bag, they basically asked for an apology. None of this would have been necessary if the Church didn't act as the supreme authority for all physical knowledge, but hey, God is omniescent and the Pope is the mouthpiece of God, and there you go.
Columbus wasn't scoffed at when he said the Earth was round, that is a common modern misconception. In Columbus's time, approximately 50% of all Spanish citizens believed that the Earth was round, based on the excellent Porteguese and Dutch map-making skills, it was hard to NOT notice the only way to make coasts meet was to project them on a sphere.
Quantum Physics wasn't scoffed at for scientific reasons, it was scoffed at because a religous believing super-star of physics wouldn't accept a theory that allowed randomness to drive the lowest basic forces. Ironically, it was Albert Einstein's early works that opened the door for seeing physics through "Quantum Physics" eyes, but the same Albert Einsteins decried quantum physics as being too random, and not capturing the "devine design of God", leading to the famous quote (which has never been proved or disproved) that "God does not play dice."
So basically, all of your examples belies a mis-understanding of history, and you admit the company has shady looking characters, and you STILL expect us to hold out hope that they aren't out to fleece VC investors of hard-earned cash? Hope springs eternal, but so does stupidity. Don't promote things that even you feel a reservation in promoting, be true to yourself.
Well, back in 1990's I was working on a "plan" to take a newly discovered cell cycle regulatory protein and pack it into a phage (virus) for targeted delivery to cancerous tissues. Let's just say that it was a lot harder than it sounds. I've heard that there were some mild successes, but I haven't heard of a complete viral cancer strategy. In a twist of fate, a few cancers are know well known to be caused by viruses.
As for the meat industry, I think this is a horrible idea. First, the United States doesn't do enough research to really know what's going on here. Back in the 90's there were fewer research scientits per capita in the U.S. than in most countries, and I doubt it's improved much. I would be shocked to know if there are any meat surface ecologists who have done research which might indicate that the absence of this bacteria allows slower growing, more deadly bacteria (which are unaffected by this virus, as viruses are typically very specific) to take foothold.
And yes, it (according to meat industry "scientists") is going to save the lives of 7.4 people per million. Honestly, I don't think that the 7.4 number should be taken too seriously. Such a small number is equal to 0.000000074% of the people who eat meat, yet we're going to apply the virus salve to 100% of the meat? Applying it to 50% of the meat will only change the ration by 50% leaving 0.0000000037% of the population affected.
In addition, it's not clear to me that the 7.4 per million died from eating bacteria infected meat. Such small numbers are very difficult to measure accurately, and there's no indication of the standard deviation or standard error. There's not even an indication of the sample size. If the sample size was in the 100's of thousands, a single mis-diagnosed person could provide nearly all of the "evidence".
This seems like a quick way to lengthen the shelf life of meat, not a life saving measure. Industry backed research always targets the bottom line, because that's where they justify their paychecks. How else do you think they had research findings that proved cigarette smoking wasn't the main cause of lung cancer all of these years?
There's major differences between a hypervisor based virtualization system and a fatter emulation method. Such differences tend to express themselves in all sorts of odd places, where you might otherwise expect a unifying API.
So why is Oracle crying about it? Instead of complaining that other companies need to get their act together and bind two different solutions to a problem in a way that serves Oracle, Oracle could write one management interface that does what they want for each of the two environments and perform the "integration" themselves on the client-side.
Oracle is a software company with resources that most other software companies would only dream about. If it was critical to Oracle's success, they wouldn't be clamoring about others needing to do it, they'd do it themselves.
Why the upper limit on the speed of the vechile? A lower limit is easy to understand, eventually you'll run out of time to conduct the "race", but an upper limit seems perplexing. Is the track not designed to accommodate higher speeds? Is it an attempt to limit driver injury in case of catastrophic failure? Is it an insurance requirement? Is is an attempt to prevent single burn cycle entrants? Just curious.
The fat cats in Hollywood mostly produce money, which gets used to plan the next project, build houses, buy cars, buy food, and throw parties. Most of these activities consume some miniscule amount of electricity, but there's only a small number of "fat cats" which can sustain their lifestyle at any given time. So, from an electricity consumption viewpoint, the "fat cats" probably don't out-do the gaming console set. I'm not going to consider production of movie electricity consumption in this argument, because that consumption really does produce something, even if you don't care for the film it produced. Come to think of it, car production, house production, and food production all produce something, so it's not a fair comparison to console electricty leakage.
People in third world countries rarely produce twelve children, as they have limited ability to access modern medicine and birth puts the mother at some risk to her life. Desire for large families are the norm in third world countries, but so are high rates of infant mortality, death by treatable disease, and death by industrial / farming accidents. In the end, we haven't seen Africa outnumber China even though China has a governmental imposed limit on child birth and Africa does not impose such limits. Birth in a third world country doesn't require the use of electricity, and even if electricity is used for child birth, it would hardly be considered wasted electricity, unless you have become so detached from humanity that you consider 3rd world inhabitants such non-people that they should be tabulated like cattle or sheep.
Considering the environmental impact of generating energy that's not being used for any purpose other than to keep your console turned off is not the same as considering if there are other items that may generate more environmental impact, some of which may be putting the energy to some purposeful work. Adding a few red herrings, like "fat cats" and "3rd world overpopulation" hardly clarifies the point.
No, that market probably doesn't fit their portfolio. But that's why they're expanding into the online grocery store business. Companies that have the means look for ways to make more money.
In my mind it's the delivery costs that have killed many online grocery stores in our area. Houston is very spread out, and although one of the first online grocery services was launched here, it failed miserably due to delivery issues. Sure, it takes time for people to adjust to a new culture, so the customer's weren't there. Also, at that time only a fraction of the grocery shopping population really had much on-line time, and 90% of that was dial up.
To give an idea of how far changed the online grocery business has become, the service that I'm referring to actually hired people to shop in the grocery store for you, and then drove the groceries to your house. Naturally it failed, being the quintissential example of a poor exeuction of a neat idea.
I believe it was called pea-pod, but it's been too many years.
So do you peel the banana before or after you lock it?
Finger prints are very hard to fake. Sure, you COULD do it, but DNA is designed to facilitate replication.
A few dollars and a PCR machine, and there's enough DNA to "taint" anything I want. If I already have the DNA, I can frame someone with DNA "evidence" and the current miseducated jury will proclaim the 100% match to be 100% proof.
So you should be worried about databases of DNA. There's no worry about using the DNA itself, just the governmental agencies posessing it. If a court orders I give a DNA sample to test against existing evidence, I can't see the easy ability for abuse (I'm not considering the self-incrimination angle.)
A database is a much different matter.
Looks like Mr. John Doe has finally gone too far. Pull his DNA file, duplicate it in mass, and
spread it around the next dead homeless person you find. Who knew he was socially unbalanced and
liked to kill homeless people? Well, those political activists were always a strange bunch! A
few years in prison will help him sort is out.
When did it become appropriate for the government to own a piece of you? A fingerprint is an external feature, but DNA is a part of you. Ceratinly it will be put to noble uses, but like anything that is available, sooner or later it will also be put to much less than noble uses. That's just human nature.
Were the other machines broken at the other locations?
Were the other locations comparable in social setting, economics, job opportunity, racial makeup, educational level, etc. as the location with the broken machine?
You don't have to be a lawyer to see how this could be un-equal opportunity, especially if certain machines seem to be broken more often than others.
I believe he was more concerned about the right to apply for a job.
If a paper application was reviewd by a person, pray tell, how does that differ from an electronic application being reviewd by a person? Or are you saying that Kroger uses such an automated application process that all hiring decisions are made without human intervention?
Even in such a marvel of computer assisted HR replacement, I assume that a human probably wrote the software, so if you want to argue against bias, there's always a way to prove that some form of human bias exists, because the entire concept of working for someone else is a human created idea, performed by humans, and allowed by humans.
Poor Madam Curie and many others did non-scientific, informal, non-rigorous testing. That is, they died at early ages from a host of maladies that typically were not seen before, or were not seen in people so young.
c kcures.htm eventually led to the death of many people, sometimes by tumors, sometimes by weird means such as the bones becoming brittle and collapsing like dust.
Don't think that you must test something to know if it will kill you. There is no formal testing program with human participants to see if freeway crashes are really as fatal or "enjoyable" as they appear.
There was a facinating period of time in human history where the new power of atomic radiation was believed to be the ultimate energy drink. Radithor and others http://www.orau.org/PTP/collection/quackcures/qua
In addition, it's not fully un=tested. In 1949 Quaker Oats fed mentally retarted school children (in America, no less) radioactive isotopes to study their effects on the human body. A few cases have been leaked indicating that the Department of Enery in coordination with physicians in America injected poor Black men with Plutonium isotopes, another leaked study shows people being purposefully exposed to radiation ten time higher than normal. I imagine that the leaked studies are few in comparison to the non-leaked studies.
And don't think that such things don't happen in the United States. Look at the Tuskagee Syphillis experiment, where they literally infected people with Syphillis and then refused medical treatment, lying to them about the disease to see how impactful the entire course of the infection would take. To keep people on the program, they warned them that their "free medial treamements" would be discontinued if they sought advice from other physicians, and they selected poor under-educated test subjects which would basically require free "treatment" as opposed to real, paid medical advice.
So now you're arguing for less-than-intelligent design?
I happen to be one of those few fools that have both a degree in Biology and in Computer Science. And at one time I relied on my research skills in Biology as my ONLY income, until the dreaded and softly spoken "balancing" of the budget that spelled doom to most low level Biologists of my time.
It is hard to mix the two. This is even more frustrating if you're marginally inclined to understand where things come from and how they are designed. Some of the earliest proponets of object oriented software programming envisioned "cells" of code that "signaled" each other. It's no cooincidence that Biological terms were used, because that (I've now forgotten) person held a Biology degree. The iterative (or step-wise) approach identically mirrors the laborious procedures for running most lab jobs. I consider myself blessed to have a firm grasp on both techniques, but there are plenty of others who have managed to master both.
Today, I'm told that my Biology degree has little to do with my work, and that it has no bearing on my career as a software developer. I understand the misconception behind such a statement; however, I do not share that opinion. To some degree, ALL of the natural sciences are related, and ALL research and fact finding skills can be leveraged in other environments. I'm shocked at the poor quality of "professional" Biological software, but then again, it's mostly written by Biologists that have the domain knowledge, but lack the skills to produce polished software. Even when they attempt to hire, there's precious few people out there with enough skill to know if they are hiring good programmers, leading to skill poor shops shipping the best they can produce.
I'm sure that not all shops are skill poor, but I had an opportunity to work for a Biological company that was writing software where I didn't see a real opportunity. The position promised a worse hierachy in terms of status and prestige, with fewer opportunities for me to contribute than its non-Biology competitors. Maybe I was unlucky, and parhaps I picked the one bad example to interview with. They were telling me things about their software development that made my CS blood run cold, expecting me to admin 80 computers "on the side" and offering to pay me about 70% the going rate.
Fewer people really want programmers, because it is unclear to a non-development company what a programmer can offer, but it is clear what a DBA can offer. Reliable reporting, offline data storage and retrieval, performance analysis, and data warehousing needs are directly tied to the survival of many businesses. The things a computer science person can offer might be able to exceed that of a DBA, but it's not as certain it will. Given the conservative bent of today, I'd say that most companies feel they can't afford a risk. Perhaps it partially explains the appeal of finding candidates with a 100% buzzword match compliance?
Do you realize that hypersonic wind tunnels routinely test thier models for what amounts to a maximum of around 8 seconds?
Given that they can collect tons of data within those 8 seconds to do real, pratical measurements that they then extrapolate over the relatively (but longer) durations of missle flight, etc. I'd wager that the 6 seconds of scramjet powered flight won't pose much of a problem for the data gathering phase.
But don't believe me, just check Slashdot's January (2006) posting about the relatively silent (aka laminar wind flow) mach 6 wind tunnel put together at Perdue. It is vacuum driven, with only 8 seconds of measurements per run, and nobody seemed to be upset about that at all.
You should forget up2date. It was sort of RedHat only / proprietary since it required access to RedHat servers and a subscription. If you didn't subscribe, there was limited support (for awhile) to up2date servers, and then only for limited bandwidth.
Eventually they did rework up2date to be configurable to point to non-RedHat servers, and then up2date seemed to work ok. But by then I had become so accustomed to "yum" that I barely even considered checking if up2date worked correctly. If I recall correctly (and I might be wrong) this was done by routing up2date through yum.
FC5 (I've been using their test releases) has a much nicer GUI installer of RPMs. I forgot it's name. It's even simpler than up2date, and it comes pre-properly configured to point to the right servers. Still, I find myself using yum. Old habits are hard to break, and yum does the job for me nicely.
Well, you might be pulling my leg, but if you're not... CTF = Capture The Flag
Yeah, that worked for Tru64. Oh wait...
No, but in the same vein, you don't think Apple loses money on each sale, do you?
If so, we would have our first loss trailer. Differing from the loss leader, the loss trailer is designed so after the company makes it's profit on the initial sale, it offers a below cost service, so the more you use the product, the smaller the total realized profit margin will become. This should hook consumers into buying multiple copies of the product, but never using them.
Get a grip, Apple could make one cent per sale and still make millions.
Thanks for the catch. I sometimes proofread, but must have missed it.
Tried to get in one about the 300 baud acoustic coupler, but couldn't work it into an appropriate title. TRS-80 doesn't roll off the tounge easily.
There's lots of titles that could have been...
Maybe a compilation could be assembled:
Poems from My Childhood
1.To Heathkit
2.The fall of Dr. Norton
3.Shadows of UUNET
4.Borland, stop hurting youself
5.Have you seen my Atari today?
6.An Amiga I can't afford
7.Memories of a text adventure game
8.My talk with Hays (compatible)
9.He's not just my penguin anymore
Companies grow up, they move away from their roots and strain the friendships they fostered. Apple extended to many people years of hacking fun, fostering an environment of computer understanding and comraderie. In return, that community extended it's friendship and remained vehementally loyal. A good friend is hard to find, hard to lose, and hard to forget.
But Apple hasn't been true to it's garage hacking roots for many, many years. Some of their devices are specifically built to be hack unfriendly. Their audience isn't the same makeup and composition of the old "old-timers", and when you tell a new mac addict about building your own paddles / joystick for the II+, they sort of look at you and say "That's neat, I have a Sidewinder joystick". They're buying the mac for good reasons; security, ease of maintenance, (more) consistent UI design, etc. But, in the end, they are more likele to be consumers of the technology, and only possibly consumers of the few hacks that get created for those platforms.
As a company, Apple has decided to cater to that crowd, and finiancially they may not have a choice. Their computers (and other devices) are coming pre-packaged in slick boxes with all of the image gimmicks that are usually reserved for high end perfumes. It's becoming even more about image than before. The image market will always have hordes of people who will be happy with knock-offs and pirated copies of the Mac OS, as it feeds into the "keeping up with the Jones'" mentality.
Much of the Macintosh's product image is in the software, and Apple has decided that CPU and hardware details aren't vital to that formula. Losing control of the software means losing control of the Mac market.
Things may change; the pendulum may swing back. These sites may go online again. People can find a happy medium. But human nature is not dismissable, and I'm sure a few people are thinking along the lines of this quote:
"I think that if your friends don't like that you think a little different than they do, then maybe you shouldn't want them as friends. And, you should consider the loss of friendship their loss, not yours." --Chelsey Collinsdale
I don't think Apple deserves to be demonized over this, but I hope they don't play their hand too strongly. Perhaps it is best not to befriend a company, as they "are always constant, except in (their) affections." -- Oscar Wilde (taken out of context, of course!)
Storing your code is just the beginning.
But to start, use SVN. There's not a good reason to use something else, and having the history of your changes will (in some ways) be far more important than having the code itself. If SVN is a bear to put up with, and it's just you, you might consider RCS, but RCS will eventually make you jump through so many hoops that sooner or later you'll be looking at SVN.
After that, you'll need to recode your code to become more useful over time. At first, the solution fits the problem, and the problem fits the website, and that fits the specific task you were trying to perform. After some time, your needs will change. The second time you want to use your code, you'll notice that it doesn't really fit. This is where your challenge starts.
Challenge yourself to NOT write the 2nd and 3rd products that use your code to make compromises for the "way this library needs to be used". Rework parts of the library to make it more useful in more situations, and rework both the old and the new projects to use the new library.
Then try to make a third application that uses the library in a slightly different way. Once again, don't write the application to fit the library, but modify the library to fit the way the application uses it. At the same time, check that the old applications both keep working on the rewritten libarary's code, and keep them up to date with the changes in the library.
After a few trips on this merry-go-round, you'll begin to notice a few things about code maintenance, code reusability, and code maturity. Sure, you could just read about it in a book, but that would rob you of an education. You MUST see it happen in person to understand it. If you're doing things "correctly" you'll notice a few things:
1. Each time you write a new applicaiton, the library needs to change less and less, but it's still easy to use.
2. Good libraries don't force different applications to be written the same way. Bad libraries require the application to be written in ways that make using the library uncomfortable.
3. It's impossible to make code reusable without some understanding of the various ways you might be likely to use it.
The real test is when you find yourself writing documentation for your library so you can hand it off to someone else to use without the need for them to see your source. Sure, you could give them a copy of the source code too, but if they have to read it, you've only made it reusable for you, and that's a small audience to learn from.
Good luck, and don't worry if you fall short. Writing good, flexible, reusable libraries is often much harder than writing the applications that use them. Just remember, it's not a library if only one application uses it. It's not flexible if only one style of application uses it. It's not good if you have to read it's source code or documentation that looks like it could be source code.
Sincerely,
ELB