The alternative to a money compensation was mentioned as a swap for land of equal value. Since someone is going to make an issue of that then swap them for some land in the city where smaller parcels are valued higher and, hopefully, all the excavation for relics has already been done.
You're still assuming that the government is in possession of land both valuable enough and in sufficient quantity to swap with landowners that have ruins on their property. Belize has ruins everywhere. It's a largely rural country anyway. The largest city has less than 80,000 people and it's much bigger than any other town in the country.
The problem with that solution is that Belize is not a wealthy country and the government is not in a position to buy up all the land that contains Mayan ruins. There are thousands of un-excavated buildings located all over the country.
Visual impressiveness is rarely an indication of archaeological importance. In fact, something that looks like a pile of rocks is often a structure that hasn't been studied yet. The fantastic pyramids and temples you see are often the result of best-guess reconstruction.
I agree. My point was that in the few pictures I was able to find of it prior to being destroyed, it didn't look like much more than what could have been a natural limestone formation covered by vegetation. Again I think it's a stretch, but it's possible the workers didn't realize they were digging up a temple. After reading some of the local news coverage though, this seems very unlikely.
Anyway, I'm disappointed that the article pictured the wrong temple and I suspect that it might have been intentional.
I was just in Belize a few weeks ago and while the destruction of any Mayan ruins is tragic, I don't think Nohmul was quite what it's being made out to be. The few pictures I could find of the actual Nohmul temple are much different than the picture in the linked article. I remember no mention of it when trying to select ruins to go see. It doesn't seem like it was a big tourist draw.
I was at Laminai and that is a truly impressive set of structures. There are lots of unexcavated buildings still there and the remarkable thing is that the look just like hills. Though it's a stretch, it's not outside the realm of possibility that workers at Noh mul were unaware of the significance of what looked like a pile of rocks until they started working. The landowner surely would have known.
My step-dad worked in construction his whole life and he loved it. He loved building things. Well after "retiring" he'd putter around in the workshop he had in the garage. Not long before he died he had me helping him build these modular tables and benches he could reposition for doing various things. His health had deteriorated quite a bit by this point and I strongly suspected he would die before getting much if any use from these tables.
To me it seemed kind of pointless and physically it wasn't easy for him. As I suspected, it was only a few months later that he ended up in the hospital because of his ongoing heart problems, suffered a stroke and died.
These tables were monstrous and incomplete. Nobody wanted them, so eventually they were dismantled.
The missing part of the story is that this man survived over 40 years after open heart surgery and was relatively active in spite of several heat attacks and periodic bouts with other debilitating health problems. Part of the reason he managed to do this was that in spite of his often poor health he never stopped living the life he wanted to live. He may very well have known he'd never finish the tables, but he loved the process. It got him up in the morning.
I think lots of people when faced with mortality will spend more time with their families and trying to do the things they wished they had been doing all their lives. Some people were already doing it. That may be the case with Jobs. I'm not saying he wasn't a jerk and that he didn't have regrets. I'm sure he did. But that doesn't change what brought him joy.
Weren't laptops freakishly expensive just to be used for everything a PC already did?
The fact is that laptops don't do everything as well as tablets. They're very difficult to use unless you have a flat surface to set them on. They take up more room. The batteries don't last as long. For the most part the lack a mature touch interface. They don't typically have displays that can be used in multiple orientations and they suck even worse for taking pictures than a tablet does.
To me even the name "surface" demonstrates how clueless Microsoft is when it comes to tablets. Their commercials show a bunch of people using Surfaces on tables. The beauty of a tablet is that you don't need a desk or table. You can use it while standing, sitting under a tree, or laying in bed.
Like it or not, I think we'll be seeing something different going forward. Instead of having one device that can do it all, the direction is to make your stuff available to all your devices. So rather than having tablet double as a desktop computer, the goal is to have the content accessible from either.
Anybody who knows business knows that they're not all alike and what works well for one can be a huge mistake for another. Things change. Tying yourself to one vendor might appear to make things easier now but will likely cost you at some point.
A few years ago, we had some folks in our IT department fuming that we weren't willing to use IE specific features to deal with certain challenges. Guess what? Several months later Apple came out with the iPad and we were able to deploy them to our field staff for use with a particular web application shortly following the iPad's release. Moving from laptops to iPads was a huge win for us. It was the right device at the time. But we didn't lock ourselves into Mobile Safari either. Now needs and the tablet market have changed. It looks like an Android device will best give us what we need for the next couple of years. Again, with little effort, we can make the switch.
OS X and iOS use a mach kernel that was developed at Carnegie Mellon. OS X in particular is a descendent of NeXTStep which predates linux and is closer to BSD.
Apple has benefited from the popularity of linux in a number of ways but to say it would be nothing without linux is not at all accurate.
I got my certification years ago and my card was falling apart. So I recently went to the PADI website to see what it would take to get a new one. I was shocked at how easily they'd give out another card. With very little verification of who you claim to be, they'll send out a new card to any address you want, - and update the photo to one that you upload.
Not sure how it works at Yahoo but the manager's where I work (including myself) have other stuff to do along with managing their employees. Some of the people who report to me work on projects that are managed by somebody else. If they're in the office at least I have a better idea of what's going on with them. It makes managing for me easier, more efficient, - and less expensive for the company. Frankly, the LESS time I spend on making sure my employees are doing what they're supposed to, the more time I can spend on what will contribute to bottom line. Also as a manager, it's easier to pick up on when something isn't going right when you can SEE your staff and how they interact with others.
I intentionally hire people who will happily do their job with minimal supervision. That being said, I can guarantee you that certain people who work for me that are otherwise good employees would become huge slackers if they didn't have to come into the office. They need that interaction with their peers to keep focused.
There's one guy who wouldn't slack per say, but he'd avoid interaction with people that he sees as useless distractions. But what are useless distractions to him are usually things that need to be addressed in the larger picture.
Slacking aside, anybody whose done agile development knows that there are efficiency gains when people are located within close proximity of each other.
Finally, I'm not completely opposed to working at home. I think there are times when it's best to stay out of the office if you need to focus on a single task and you have a deadline. There are other times that people need to work from home for personal reasons and I'm fine with that. But for the people that work for me, at least for the type of work they do, it's better if they spend most of their work hours at the office.
First of all, if you look a few posts above you'll see that bicyclists do "pony up", just not in the form of gas taxes, unless they also own a car (which many do). Second of all, how would you arrive at what a fair tax would be?
Finally, you're missing the bigger picture. Supporting an auto-centric culture has costs to society beyond just building and maintaining roads. Are you disputing that? Choosing to bike rather than drive helps mitigate those costs. The more people that bike, the lower those costs are. Cycling in the long run "saves" society money vs driving. If anything cyclists should be getting a tax break.
Cities are building bike lanes, bike paths, and promoting bike share programs in order to get more people to bike rather than drive because they see that has having benefits to their city and the larger society. Why would you further tax behavior you're trying to promote?
When gas taxes are large enough cover the real costs of the automobile to society, maybe then we can talk about taxing bicyclists to help cover the costs of roads.
1. Gas taxes alone don't over the cost of building and maintaining roads
2. Bicycles cause a minute fraction of the wear and tear
3. Bicyclists pay other taxes some of which get funneled to road construction/maintenance
4. Many people who bike to work and other places also drive cars and buy gas (and pay the gas taxes)
5. The continued demand for fossil fuel and the pollution created by motor vehicles have other real costs to society that all taxpayers pay the price for, whether they drive or not.
You're limited as to what you can do on the hardware side by an OS you don't control.
WTF are you even talking about? The MFGs control the OS -- It's open sourced and even re-skinned quite frequently. Hell, you could create a whole new chipset and instruction besides x86 or ARM -- Completely change the hardware, and still put Android on it. That's why C compilers exist. Apple has the same luxury...
The MFGs control the OS? Really? So they can change whatever they want? Even the kernel? What if they don't want to release the source?
What happens if HTC makes significant tweaks to the OS to accommodate some fancy new feature (not just a new processor) like a foldable display? Then Google releases "Grape Yogurt" or whatever they want to call the latest and greatest version of Android which features an updated kernel. Are the HTC users just going to be able to upgrade and still have the display work? Don't think so. Are they going to be pissed that they can't? You bet.
Oh, and doesn't Google have its own Android brand? Nexus right? But I'm sure it's a completely level playing field and whoever gets to make the next Nexus phone won't get any advantages at all over the other handset makers when it comes to access to the latest and greatest Android stuff.;)
Anyway, yes technically they can change what they want with some limitations but from a practical standpoint they are beholden to Google. Which might kinda suck since Google now owns its own handset maker (Motorola).
The problem with using a commodity OS is that you do not get much, if any, slack when you start doing stupid things. HTC's stupid things were locking bootloaders, getting rid of replaceable batteries, and getting rid of microSD slots.
This resulted in everyone knowledgeable, who previously recommended HTC devices to everyone, dropping them like a bad habit and instead recommending Samsung.
Among geeks perhaps, but the vast majority of market doesn't care much about that stuff if at all. They'd rather replace their phone every few years than worry about the battery and they have no concept of what a bootloader is.
is that you end up trying to differentiate primarily in hardware or price. You're limited as to what you can do on the hardware side by an OS you don't control. There can only be so many successful players in a market like that.
I'm 48 and I used to joke with my wife that I'd need to grow a pony tail when I was 40. Still don't have one but I haven't had to look for work so I'm not ruling it out.
Fair or not, software development is seen as a young person's (mostly male) occupation. And regardless of the field you're in, there's often this natural progression towards management that's not a good fit for everyone, especially in technical fields. So whether or not you're as capable as a younger person, you're at a disadvantage if you're looking for work as a developer.
But age won't stop you from getting an interview, so I think honing your interview skills would be extremely beneficial regardless of what line of work you decide to pursue.
As to whether or not you decide to stick with software is up to you. The most important question is do you enjoy doing it? If so, then by all means, bring your skills up to date and never, never let them get out of date. Don't become just a java developer or a php developer. Be a developer period who views the language as merely a tool. Part of your job will be to constantly learning how to use new tools.
My point is that we all probably believe stuff that's not even close to being accurate. Many of us are even passionate about these things that we've been taught or that we'd really really like to believe because they fit our world view. That doesn't make us crazy. It makes us normal.
The minute you start treating somebody like they're batshit crazy, you've severely diminished any chance of getting them to see your side.
Why do you think congress has such a hard time getting anything accomplished? It's because they're so bent on diminishing the other side's position that it makes agreeing with each other on anything extremely difficult.
I wouldn't have suggested "very unintelligent" or "very much on the fringe" as alternatives anyway. I'm not a Mormon nor am I a believer in any particular faith. Many faiths have teachings that I respect while at the same time propose things that I find unbelievable. I don't know why you'd want to single out any one of the major faiths in particular as being more crazy than another. My guess is that many of the things that Western society (even secular society) holds dear today will be seen as crazy and foolish 200 years from now.
Words matter. It's entirely possible to be honest without being crass. Tactful expression of one's opinions is far more effective.
Does it reflect poorly on the linux community? Don't know about that one. Anybody that's even aware that a linux community exists is probably far more interested in technology than Linus's opinions of various politicians. On the other hand I can't think of a single way it could reflect well on the community.
Not sure exactly what your point is. OS/2 for many years was a joint and dysfunctional development effort between Microsoft and IBM. It eventually turned into a pretty decent OS and though technically superior to Windows (prior to NT at least), it never really caught on for a number reasons. By the time IBM took full control of OS/2 the mass market opportunity had already passed them by. It did take them awhile to accept that.
Plenty of big hardware companies that got their OS from somewhere else have failed. Think of all the UNIX workstation and server manufacturers that have fallen by the wayside.
Sony made some great PDAs but were hamstrung by Palm whose OS development stagnated.
In short I don't think you can really make the argument that the only way to be successful as a hardware manufacturer is to get the OS from somebody else. All you can really say is that it's hard to stay on top as a technology company.
Most companies tend to collapse over time. Think of all the PC manufacturers who got their OS from MS but are now long gone.
By contrast IBM has done pretty well designing both hardware and the OS that runs on them. Their mainframe business has been around for 60 years. Their PC business, - which followed your preferred model, was abandoned years ago.
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The alternative to a money compensation was mentioned as a swap for land of equal value. Since someone is going to make an issue of that then swap them for some land in the city where smaller parcels are valued higher and, hopefully, all the excavation for relics has already been done.
You're still assuming that the government is in possession of land both valuable enough and in sufficient quantity to swap with landowners that have ruins on their property. Belize has ruins everywhere. It's a largely rural country anyway. The largest city has less than 80,000 people and it's much bigger than any other town in the country.
The problem with that solution is that Belize is not a wealthy country and the government is not in a position to buy up all the land that contains Mayan ruins. There are thousands of un-excavated buildings located all over the country.
Visual impressiveness is rarely an indication of archaeological importance. In fact, something that looks like a pile of rocks is often a structure that hasn't been studied yet. The fantastic pyramids and temples you see are often the result of best-guess reconstruction.
I agree. My point was that in the few pictures I was able to find of it prior to being destroyed, it didn't look like much more than what could have been a natural limestone formation covered by vegetation. Again I think it's a stretch, but it's possible the workers didn't realize they were digging up a temple. After reading some of the local news coverage though, this seems very unlikely.
Anyway, I'm disappointed that the article pictured the wrong temple and I suspect that it might have been intentional.
I was just in Belize a few weeks ago and while the destruction of any Mayan ruins is tragic, I don't think Nohmul was quite what it's being made out to be. The few pictures I could find of the actual Nohmul temple are much different than the picture in the linked article. I remember no mention of it when trying to select ruins to go see. It doesn't seem like it was a big tourist draw.
I was at Laminai and that is a truly impressive set of structures. There are lots of unexcavated buildings still there and the remarkable thing is that the look just like hills. Though it's a stretch, it's not outside the realm of possibility that workers at Noh mul were unaware of the significance of what looked like a pile of rocks until they started working. The landowner surely would have known.
My step-dad worked in construction his whole life and he loved it. He loved building things. Well after "retiring" he'd putter around in the workshop he had in the garage. Not long before he died he had me helping him build these modular tables and benches he could reposition for doing various things. His health had deteriorated quite a bit by this point and I strongly suspected he would die before getting much if any use from these tables.
To me it seemed kind of pointless and physically it wasn't easy for him. As I suspected, it was only a few months later that he ended up in the hospital because of his ongoing heart problems, suffered a stroke and died.
These tables were monstrous and incomplete. Nobody wanted them, so eventually they were dismantled.
The missing part of the story is that this man survived over 40 years after open heart surgery and was relatively active in spite of several heat attacks and periodic bouts with other debilitating health problems. Part of the reason he managed to do this was that in spite of his often poor health he never stopped living the life he wanted to live. He may very well have known he'd never finish the tables, but he loved the process. It got him up in the morning.
I think lots of people when faced with mortality will spend more time with their families and trying to do the things they wished they had been doing all their lives. Some people were already doing it. That may be the case with Jobs. I'm not saying he wasn't a jerk and that he didn't have regrets. I'm sure he did. But that doesn't change what brought him joy.
Weren't laptops freakishly expensive just to be used for everything a PC already did?
The fact is that laptops don't do everything as well as tablets. They're very difficult to use unless you have a flat surface to set them on. They take up more room. The batteries don't last as long. For the most part the lack a mature touch interface. They don't typically have displays that can be used in multiple orientations and they suck even worse for taking pictures than a tablet does.
To me even the name "surface" demonstrates how clueless Microsoft is when it comes to tablets. Their commercials show a bunch of people using Surfaces on tables. The beauty of a tablet is that you don't need a desk or table. You can use it while standing, sitting under a tree, or laying in bed.
Like it or not, I think we'll be seeing something different going forward. Instead of having one device that can do it all, the direction is to make your stuff available to all your devices. So rather than having tablet double as a desktop computer, the goal is to have the content accessible from either.
Wow.
Anybody who knows business knows that they're not all alike and what works well for one can be a huge mistake for another. Things change. Tying yourself to one vendor might appear to make things easier now but will likely cost you at some point.
A few years ago, we had some folks in our IT department fuming that we weren't willing to use IE specific features to deal with certain challenges. Guess what? Several months later Apple came out with the iPad and we were able to deploy them to our field staff for use with a particular web application shortly following the iPad's release. Moving from laptops to iPads was a huge win for us. It was the right device at the time. But we didn't lock ourselves into Mobile Safari either. Now needs and the tablet market have changed. It looks like an Android device will best give us what we need for the next couple of years. Again, with little effort, we can make the switch.
OS X and iOS use a mach kernel that was developed at Carnegie Mellon. OS X in particular is a descendent of NeXTStep which predates linux and is closer to BSD.
Apple has benefited from the popularity of linux in a number of ways but to say it would be nothing without linux is not at all accurate.
I got my certification years ago and my card was falling apart. So I recently went to the PADI website to see what it would take to get a new one. I was shocked at how easily they'd give out another card. With very little verification of who you claim to be, they'll send out a new card to any address you want, - and update the photo to one that you upload.
...I like to sit my laptop next to my gaming desktop while I do this!
You're not exactly making a strong case for allowing people to work at home.
Not sure how it works at Yahoo but the manager's where I work (including myself) have other stuff to do along with managing their employees. Some of the people who report to me work on projects that are managed by somebody else. If they're in the office at least I have a better idea of what's going on with them. It makes managing for me easier, more efficient, - and less expensive for the company. Frankly, the LESS time I spend on making sure my employees are doing what they're supposed to, the more time I can spend on what will contribute to bottom line. Also as a manager, it's easier to pick up on when something isn't going right when you can SEE your staff and how they interact with others.
I intentionally hire people who will happily do their job with minimal supervision. That being said, I can guarantee you that certain people who work for me that are otherwise good employees would become huge slackers if they didn't have to come into the office. They need that interaction with their peers to keep focused.
There's one guy who wouldn't slack per say, but he'd avoid interaction with people that he sees as useless distractions. But what are useless distractions to him are usually things that need to be addressed in the larger picture.
Slacking aside, anybody whose done agile development knows that there are efficiency gains when people are located within close proximity of each other.
Finally, I'm not completely opposed to working at home. I think there are times when it's best to stay out of the office if you need to focus on a single task and you have a deadline. There are other times that people need to work from home for personal reasons and I'm fine with that. But for the people that work for me, at least for the type of work they do, it's better if they spend most of their work hours at the office.
First of all, if you look a few posts above you'll see that bicyclists do "pony up", just not in the form of gas taxes, unless they also own a car (which many do). Second of all, how would you arrive at what a fair tax would be?
Finally, you're missing the bigger picture. Supporting an auto-centric culture has costs to society beyond just building and maintaining roads. Are you disputing that? Choosing to bike rather than drive helps mitigate those costs. The more people that bike, the lower those costs are. Cycling in the long run "saves" society money vs driving. If anything cyclists should be getting a tax break.
Cities are building bike lanes, bike paths, and promoting bike share programs in order to get more people to bike rather than drive because they see that has having benefits to their city and the larger society. Why would you further tax behavior you're trying to promote?
Maybe I'll just reword the above to say this:
When gas taxes are large enough cover the real costs of the automobile to society, maybe then we can talk about taxing bicyclists to help cover the costs of roads.
1. Gas taxes alone don't over the cost of building and maintaining roads
2. Bicycles cause a minute fraction of the wear and tear
3. Bicyclists pay other taxes some of which get funneled to road construction/maintenance
4. Many people who bike to work and other places also drive cars and buy gas (and pay the gas taxes)
5. The continued demand for fossil fuel and the pollution created by motor vehicles have other real costs to society that all taxpayers pay the price for, whether they drive or not.
You're limited as to what you can do on the hardware side by an OS you don't control.
WTF are you even talking about? The MFGs control the OS -- It's open sourced and even re-skinned quite frequently. Hell, you could create a whole new chipset and instruction besides x86 or ARM -- Completely change the hardware, and still put Android on it. That's why C compilers exist. Apple has the same luxury...
The MFGs control the OS? Really? So they can change whatever they want? Even the kernel? What if they don't want to release the source?
;)
What happens if HTC makes significant tweaks to the OS to accommodate some fancy new feature (not just a new processor) like a foldable display? Then Google releases "Grape Yogurt" or whatever they want to call the latest and greatest version of Android which features an updated kernel. Are the HTC users just going to be able to upgrade and still have the display work? Don't think so. Are they going to be pissed that they can't? You bet.
Oh, and doesn't Google have its own Android brand? Nexus right? But I'm sure it's a completely level playing field and whoever gets to make the next Nexus phone won't get any advantages at all over the other handset makers when it comes to access to the latest and greatest Android stuff.
Anyway, yes technically they can change what they want with some limitations but from a practical standpoint they are beholden to Google. Which might kinda suck since Google now owns its own handset maker (Motorola).
yes.. you actually have to compete on quality and features instead of artificial lock in.
What lock in? I know lots of people that have gone back and forth between an iPhone and various Android phones.
All I'm saying is that it's a lot harder to compete on features when you've tied yourself to the same OS that most of the rest of the market is using.
The problem with using a commodity OS is that you do not get much, if any, slack when you start doing stupid things. HTC's stupid things were locking bootloaders, getting rid of replaceable batteries, and getting rid of microSD slots.
This resulted in everyone knowledgeable, who previously recommended HTC devices to everyone, dropping them like a bad habit and instead recommending Samsung.
Among geeks perhaps, but the vast majority of market doesn't care much about that stuff if at all. They'd rather replace their phone every few years than worry about the battery and they have no concept of what a bootloader is.
is that you end up trying to differentiate primarily in hardware or price. You're limited as to what you can do on the hardware side by an OS you don't control. There can only be so many successful players in a market like that.
I'm 48 and I used to joke with my wife that I'd need to grow a pony tail when I was 40. Still don't have one but I haven't had to look for work so I'm not ruling it out.
Fair or not, software development is seen as a young person's (mostly male) occupation. And regardless of the field you're in, there's often this natural progression towards management that's not a good fit for everyone, especially in technical fields. So whether or not you're as capable as a younger person, you're at a disadvantage if you're looking for work as a developer.
But age won't stop you from getting an interview, so I think honing your interview skills would be extremely beneficial regardless of what line of work you decide to pursue.
As to whether or not you decide to stick with software is up to you. The most important question is do you enjoy doing it? If so, then by all means, bring your skills up to date and never, never let them get out of date. Don't become just a java developer or a php developer. Be a developer period who views the language as merely a tool. Part of your job will be to constantly learning how to use new tools.
My point is that we all probably believe stuff that's not even close to being accurate. Many of us are even passionate about these things that we've been taught or that we'd really really like to believe because they fit our world view. That doesn't make us crazy. It makes us normal.
The minute you start treating somebody like they're batshit crazy, you've severely diminished any chance of getting them to see your side.
Why do you think congress has such a hard time getting anything accomplished? It's because they're so bent on diminishing the other side's position that it makes agreeing with each other on anything extremely difficult.
Effectual words?
Impact?
What impact did he really have?
I wouldn't have suggested "very unintelligent" or "very much on the fringe" as alternatives anyway. I'm not a Mormon nor am I a believer in any particular faith. Many faiths have teachings that I respect while at the same time propose things that I find unbelievable. I don't know why you'd want to single out any one of the major faiths in particular as being more crazy than another. My guess is that many of the things that Western society (even secular society) holds dear today will be seen as crazy and foolish 200 years from now.
Words matter. It's entirely possible to be honest without being crass. Tactful expression of one's opinions is far more effective.
Does it reflect poorly on the linux community? Don't know about that one. Anybody that's even aware that a linux community exists is probably far more interested in technology than Linus's opinions of various politicians. On the other hand I can't think of a single way it could reflect well on the community.
Not sure exactly what your point is. OS/2 for many years was a joint and dysfunctional development effort between Microsoft and IBM. It eventually turned into a pretty decent OS and though technically superior to Windows (prior to NT at least), it never really caught on for a number reasons. By the time IBM took full control of OS/2 the mass market opportunity had already passed them by. It did take them awhile to accept that.
Plenty of big hardware companies that got their OS from somewhere else have failed. Think of all the UNIX workstation and server manufacturers that have fallen by the wayside.
Sony made some great PDAs but were hamstrung by Palm whose OS development stagnated.
In short I don't think you can really make the argument that the only way to be successful as a hardware manufacturer is to get the OS from somebody else. All you can really say is that it's hard to stay on top as a technology company.
Most companies tend to collapse over time. Think of all the PC manufacturers who got their OS from MS but are now long gone.
By contrast IBM has done pretty well designing both hardware and the OS that runs on them. Their mainframe business has been around for 60 years. Their PC business, - which followed your preferred model, was abandoned years ago.