Yes. The kid fresh from high school knows PHP. Those who make a living off of it grok PHP.
I don't think you need to grok PHP to make a living off of it. You just need to be able to sell it convincingly. From what stats I've seen regarding the failure rate of IT projects in recent history, you don't even need to be able to make anything with it that works.
Thank you for your interest in Google Compute. The latest versions of the Google Toolbar do not support the Google Compute feature. If you would like to support the Folding@home project, please download the official Folding@home client.
So the correct way to put it is Google WAS working to cure cancer, but they are no longer doing so.
The article also says that Java is losing ground to Javascript and AJAX. I don't see how. The only Java they might possibly be competing with are applets, and those have been dead for quite some time now.
This is totally false. Applets are not dead, they are all over the place. They're not popular for user interfaces, but there are lots of web apps that use applets for networking and DHTML for the UI. This is where Java stands to lose ground to AJAX.
You don't make things that are inevitable safe by driving them underground into illegality and obscurity, and kids are inevitably going to be chatting online.
I do think the censoring of chat room names is a good idea though.
So instead of having a situation where perverts try to pick up kids, get caught and go to jail, we're going to have a situation where kids lie about their age logging on, and then when perverts get caught trying to pick them up, the perverts can say they believed the person they were chatting with was over 18 and it was all make-believe.
You have a very child like view of the world. You benefit from your neighbours prosperity, you benefit from your societies prosperity, you benefit from other societies prosperity. And I mean prosperity in the healthy, educated, productive and well-adjusted sense, not the dollar rich off the sweat of others sense.
Do you know what a depression is? It's what happens when too many of the people around you are doing poorly. When it happens, it doesn't matter worth a flying fuck how dollar rich you are, you're impoverished just like everyone else, squabbling for what riches remain from the days when people were prosperous.
You're changing the context of the discussion now. The last 5 years are full of examples of companies who never generated a dime in profit yet their stock was considered among the most valuable on earth. That is utterly irrelevant to the profitability of insurance companies; the reason why investment funds invest in them is BECAUSE they are blue chip stocks.
Nothing is risk free. But they are pretty damned close.
Insurance IS a damn near risk free way to make money. If everyone looking for a free meal ticket had the start up capital to play, they WOULD be doing it. You're not allowed to start an insurance company without a large wad of cash.
I notice that they are planning on setting up something similar to what Project Mayo did and what MySQL does. In the FAQ they mention that they intend on requiring contributions to their code tree to revert ownership to them so they can sell it closed source.
How does Inkscape compare on this licensing issue? Considering that Inkscape works now, while Xara X is non-free on windows, non-functional on any other operating system and will require that you allow them to sell your code contributions closed source, is there really any reason to contribute to it as a project rather than just cannibilizing it and improving Inkscape?
The best medical care system in the world comes from keeping the insurance companies out of it. Instead of paying a team of 12 to determine if you should be healed, then paying a doctor to heal you, we just get the doctor to heal you and call it a day. It's much more efficient, and enriches everyone except insurance salesmen.
Insurance was created as a concept to deal with the fact that in a purely capitalist society there is no sense of community or common good and no one will help you when you need it most. Does anyone actually consider it to be an efficient and effective means of addressing this need?
It screws end users because it follows a cycle. The first step is getting everyone all stirred up about how we need to create laws that hold professionals financially liable for their mistakes. The second step is creating an insurance infrastructure that protects professionals from this financial liability so they can continue to function. The third step is compelling the professionals to participate rather than giving them the option. The fourth and final step is in reducing the liability.
How does the end user lose? Well, they lose because when the music stops, there is a new class of middle men firmly entrenched who serve no useful purpose but get a big slice of the pie. You think big insurance companies don't collude on pricing to keep those profits high?
What he's saying is to sign and distribute your code using your legally registered corporation ABC Inc. and funnel everything out of the corporation into your pocket. That way when they try to sue ABC Inc. for their first born child, you can say "na na na na na, you loser, corporations don't have balls!"
CMMI doesn't guarantee good practice any more than membership in the Better Business Bureau guarantees good business. But I'd rather work in a shop that has CMMI in place than one that doesn't. It's insurance against the sort of death marches that create slapdash practice, shoddy product, and security holes in the first place.
That's where this sort of thing leads: insurance.
If something like this were to happen, there would be an immediate chilling effect on software development, followed by liability insurance policies similar to what doctors have. Software developers would start having this insurance, and then when the end users start making claims, the mighty insurance companies will simultaneously raise their rates and use their financial and political powers to buy laws that cap their liability.
Developers pay money, insurance companies get money, end users get screwed, politicians and executives get rich. This is called "building economic value".
I'm not being sarcastic. I built my computer based on research, parts may have been advertised, but I didn't see the ads. I bought my car used based on personal recommendations and researching in the red book. My internet provider advertises, but so do all the others and they offer the best quality of service, so I go with them. My food is fresh from local markets where possible, and I choose no-name brands over brand names where the option exists.
I don't live like a hermit or a zealot avoiding things because their manufacturer has an advertising budget, but if I'm presented with a dozen choices in the marketplace and I don't have any logical basis for bias either way, I'll choose a brand I haven't heard of and check it out rather than going with one that I've seen advertised.
My routine rejects mass media and pop culture, leaves me clearer headed, saves me money, exposes me to more diversity and gives me what I consider to be a higher quality lifestyle. In the end, that is why I do it.
1) Don't watch TV because of ads 2) Get my seat at the theater then go out for a smoke till a few minutes into the movie to avoid ads 3) Block internet ads 4) Crack the DVDs I rent and copy the vobs as the popcorn is popping so I don't have to watch the ads 5) Changed corner stores because the nearest one has an LCD screen at the checkout streaming ads 6) Never buy anything I've seen advertised as a matter of policy because I saw it advertised 7) Never buy my kid anything she's seen on TV because she saw it there 8) Don't listen to the radio
I do all this because I find mass advertising offensive. Makes me angry as hell. I honestly believe it makes you stupid. Since I stopped permitting them to brainwash me regularly, what little tolerance I had for it has disappeared and I honestly don't understand how people I go to visit can put up with watching TV or using IE.
Mass media advertising ought to be illegal as far as I'm concerned.
What I see is that a number of project releases based on Firefox in some way, have "Fire" in their name. Are these going way of KDE which have "K" emphasized in their name?
They spend too much time in the company of people who think this is cool. They're kind of like a group of small town guys disco guys who tell each other how hip they all are, but never talk to enough girls to find out the truth.
That entirely depends on how fast you read. Personally, I'm a fast reader, although not freakish like those guys on late night television. I read two paperbacks cover to cover today, around 700 pages all up, and that was in addition to my regular daily routine and before eating supper.
I could probably read every childrens book ever published since the invention of the printing press in a few months if I wasn't working... something at a teenage level like the Bruno & Boots books would probably take me 20 minutes or so.
Most people - the overwhelming majority - are not competent to use a general purpose computer.
If this is true, why have they taken over the world? Why does every human being I know own and use one?
Little heads up... if your definition of competence excludes the overwhelming majority, and that overwhelming majority are effectively using the very tool you feel they are incompetent with on a daily basis, you might want to rethink your definition. It may pass muster with some idealized list you have in your head of what computer users should know, but it fails the "reality" test, where people who flunked out of high school are setting up their own websites and little old grannies are playing poker with their friends overseas.
Many of my friends took the free ride to the local state school, and found that their professors didn't teach
That's because they're not teachers, they're professors. Teachers squat down and make you the focus of their attention, professors stand on a soap box and speak their piece. It's an ancient term back from when people who were in university were presumed to be grown men conversing with their peers and not children who needed to be spoon fed by their mom.
This isn't the case with PostgreSQL or MySQL. You never get that "drug pusher" type of attitude.
Are you kidding? MySQL is TOTALLY a "get our hooks in drug pusher" kind of company. They're the "Project Mayo" of the DB world. Their development/business model revolves around getting everyone onboard with the open source version and then exploiting the open source development community with their policy that copyright to patches and improvements must be transfered to MySQL so they can then be sold closed-source.
And on top of all that, their product sucks. Good enough for internal content management or a free forum perhaps, but hardly something you'd trust with important data. They obviously agree, or they would have stuck to developing their existing codebase rather than using SAPs.
Why do people spend so much time cheerleading for these guys?
Have you ever considered that some people have a way they do things?
I don't like tabbed UI.
It wastes space.
It doesnt integrate into my workflow.
Pressing Ctrl-Tab is a lot harder than pressing Alt-Tab.
I like doing things MY way.
Why the fuck should I be forced to use tabbed UI in order to avoid what is obviously a bug in the software?
You sound like someone complaining that their screwdriver handle isn't as good for hammering as the hammer you're used to. Don't be such an idiot. If you don't like the tool, don't use it. But if you're going to use it, get a fucking brain and learn to use it in the fashion it was designed. If you were used to driving an automatic transmission and won a stick shift, would you drive around grinding your gears because a clutch isn't what you're used to? Because that would be on about the same level of idiocy as your post.
So let me get this straight... they're going to put wireless terrorist early warning systems into planes so that terrorists, using a simple handheld electronic device, can be made aware the instant that the flight attendants become suspicious of how their acting?
Man... US politicians must absolutely fucking hate their citizenry.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. The kid fresh from high school knows PHP. Those who make a living off of it grok PHP.
I don't think you need to grok PHP to make a living off of it. You just need to be able to sell it convincingly. From what stats I've seen regarding the failure rate of IT projects in recent history, you don't even need to be able to make anything with it that works.
Microsoft is in it deep now.
Google IS working to cure cancer after all.
From the bottom of the page you linked to:
Thank you for your interest in Google Compute. The latest versions of the Google Toolbar do not support the Google Compute feature. If you would like to support the Folding@home project, please download the official Folding@home client.
So the correct way to put it is Google WAS working to cure cancer, but they are no longer doing so.
The article also says that Java is losing ground to Javascript and AJAX. I don't see how. The only Java they might possibly be competing with are applets, and those have been dead for quite some time now.
This is totally false. Applets are not dead, they are all over the place. They're not popular for user interfaces, but there are lots of web apps that use applets for networking and DHTML for the UI. This is where Java stands to lose ground to AJAX.
Whatever. I've never used Ruby, I'm just thinking of being able to tell people that I get paid a fortune to build crud all day.
Rails can automatically create a full set of CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, and Delete) operations and views on any database table.
Best. Quote. Ever.
You don't make things that are inevitable safe by driving them underground into illegality and obscurity, and kids are inevitably going to be chatting online.
I do think the censoring of chat room names is a good idea though.
So instead of having a situation where perverts try to pick up kids, get caught and go to jail, we're going to have a situation where kids lie about their age logging on, and then when perverts get caught trying to pick them up, the perverts can say they believed the person they were chatting with was over 18 and it was all make-believe.
Brilliant.
You have a very child like view of the world. You benefit from your neighbours prosperity, you benefit from your societies prosperity, you benefit from other societies prosperity. And I mean prosperity in the healthy, educated, productive and well-adjusted sense, not the dollar rich off the sweat of others sense.
Do you know what a depression is? It's what happens when too many of the people around you are doing poorly. When it happens, it doesn't matter worth a flying fuck how dollar rich you are, you're impoverished just like everyone else, squabbling for what riches remain from the days when people were prosperous.
You're changing the context of the discussion now. The last 5 years are full of examples of companies who never generated a dime in profit yet their stock was considered among the most valuable on earth. That is utterly irrelevant to the profitability of insurance companies; the reason why investment funds invest in them is BECAUSE they are blue chip stocks.
Nothing is risk free. But they are pretty damned close.
Insurance IS a damn near risk free way to make money. If everyone looking for a free meal ticket had the start up capital to play, they WOULD be doing it. You're not allowed to start an insurance company without a large wad of cash.
I notice that they are planning on setting up something similar to what Project Mayo did and what MySQL does. In the FAQ they mention that they intend on requiring contributions to their code tree to revert ownership to them so they can sell it closed source.
How does Inkscape compare on this licensing issue? Considering that Inkscape works now, while Xara X is non-free on windows, non-functional on any other operating system and will require that you allow them to sell your code contributions closed source, is there really any reason to contribute to it as a project rather than just cannibilizing it and improving Inkscape?
The best medical care system in the world comes from keeping the insurance companies out of it. Instead of paying a team of 12 to determine if you should be healed, then paying a doctor to heal you, we just get the doctor to heal you and call it a day. It's much more efficient, and enriches everyone except insurance salesmen.
Insurance was created as a concept to deal with the fact that in a purely capitalist society there is no sense of community or common good and no one will help you when you need it most. Does anyone actually consider it to be an efficient and effective means of addressing this need?
It screws end users because it follows a cycle. The first step is getting everyone all stirred up about how we need to create laws that hold professionals financially liable for their mistakes. The second step is creating an insurance infrastructure that protects professionals from this financial liability so they can continue to function. The third step is compelling the professionals to participate rather than giving them the option. The fourth and final step is in reducing the liability.
How does the end user lose? Well, they lose because when the music stops, there is a new class of middle men firmly entrenched who serve no useful purpose but get a big slice of the pie. You think big insurance companies don't collude on pricing to keep those profits high?
What he's saying is to sign and distribute your code using your legally registered corporation ABC Inc. and funnel everything out of the corporation into your pocket. That way when they try to sue ABC Inc. for their first born child, you can say "na na na na na, you loser, corporations don't have balls!"
So to speak.
CMMI doesn't guarantee good practice any more than membership in the Better Business Bureau guarantees good business. But I'd rather work in a shop that has CMMI in place than one that doesn't. It's insurance against the sort of death marches that create slapdash practice, shoddy product, and security holes in the first place.
That's where this sort of thing leads: insurance.
If something like this were to happen, there would be an immediate chilling effect on software development, followed by liability insurance policies similar to what doctors have. Software developers would start having this insurance, and then when the end users start making claims, the mighty insurance companies will simultaneously raise their rates and use their financial and political powers to buy laws that cap their liability.
Developers pay money, insurance companies get money, end users get screwed, politicians and executives get rich. This is called "building economic value".
I'm not being sarcastic. I built my computer based on research, parts may have been advertised, but I didn't see the ads. I bought my car used based on personal recommendations and researching in the red book. My internet provider advertises, but so do all the others and they offer the best quality of service, so I go with them. My food is fresh from local markets where possible, and I choose no-name brands over brand names where the option exists.
I don't live like a hermit or a zealot avoiding things because their manufacturer has an advertising budget, but if I'm presented with a dozen choices in the marketplace and I don't have any logical basis for bias either way, I'll choose a brand I haven't heard of and check it out rather than going with one that I've seen advertised.
My routine rejects mass media and pop culture, leaves me clearer headed, saves me money, exposes me to more diversity and gives me what I consider to be a higher quality lifestyle. In the end, that is why I do it.
I would prefer to do without. And where necessary, I do. And I'm raising a kid that will do the same.
So, in a word, yes.
1) Don't watch TV because of ads
2) Get my seat at the theater then go out for a smoke till a few minutes into the movie to avoid ads
3) Block internet ads
4) Crack the DVDs I rent and copy the vobs as the popcorn is popping so I don't have to watch the ads
5) Changed corner stores because the nearest one has an LCD screen at the checkout streaming ads
6) Never buy anything I've seen advertised as a matter of policy because I saw it advertised
7) Never buy my kid anything she's seen on TV because she saw it there
8) Don't listen to the radio
I do all this because I find mass advertising offensive. Makes me angry as hell. I honestly believe it makes you stupid. Since I stopped permitting them to brainwash me regularly, what little tolerance I had for it has disappeared and I honestly don't understand how people I go to visit can put up with watching TV or using IE.
Mass media advertising ought to be illegal as far as I'm concerned.
What I see is that a number of project releases based on Firefox in some way, have "Fire" in their name. Are these going way of KDE which have "K" emphasized in their name?
They spend too much time in the company of people who think this is cool. They're kind of like a group of small town guys disco guys who tell each other how hip they all are, but never talk to enough girls to find out the truth.
That entirely depends on how fast you read. Personally, I'm a fast reader, although not freakish like those guys on late night television. I read two paperbacks cover to cover today, around 700 pages all up, and that was in addition to my regular daily routine and before eating supper.
I could probably read every childrens book ever published since the invention of the printing press in a few months if I wasn't working... something at a teenage level like the Bruno & Boots books would probably take me 20 minutes or so.
Perhaps your prof was a slow reader.
Most people - the overwhelming majority - are not competent to use a general purpose computer.
If this is true, why have they taken over the world? Why does every human being I know own and use one?
Little heads up... if your definition of competence excludes the overwhelming majority, and that overwhelming majority are effectively using the very tool you feel they are incompetent with on a daily basis, you might want to rethink your definition. It may pass muster with some idealized list you have in your head of what computer users should know, but it fails the "reality" test, where people who flunked out of high school are setting up their own websites and little old grannies are playing poker with their friends overseas.
Many of my friends took the free ride to the local state school, and found that their professors didn't teach
That's because they're not teachers, they're professors. Teachers squat down and make you the focus of their attention, professors stand on a soap box and speak their piece. It's an ancient term back from when people who were in university were presumed to be grown men conversing with their peers and not children who needed to be spoon fed by their mom.
This isn't the case with PostgreSQL or MySQL. You never get that "drug pusher" type of attitude.
Are you kidding? MySQL is TOTALLY a "get our hooks in drug pusher" kind of company. They're the "Project Mayo" of the DB world. Their development/business model revolves around getting everyone onboard with the open source version and then exploiting the open source development community with their policy that copyright to patches and improvements must be transfered to MySQL so they can then be sold closed-source.
And on top of all that, their product sucks. Good enough for internal content management or a free forum perhaps, but hardly something you'd trust with important data. They obviously agree, or they would have stuck to developing their existing codebase rather than using SAPs.
Why do people spend so much time cheerleading for these guys?
Have you ever considered that some people have a way they do things?
I don't like tabbed UI.
It wastes space.
It doesnt integrate into my workflow.
Pressing Ctrl-Tab is a lot harder than pressing Alt-Tab.
I like doing things MY way.
Why the fuck should I be forced to use tabbed UI in order to avoid what is obviously a bug in the software?
You sound like someone complaining that their screwdriver handle isn't as good for hammering as the hammer you're used to. Don't be such an idiot. If you don't like the tool, don't use it. But if you're going to use it, get a fucking brain and learn to use it in the fashion it was designed. If you were used to driving an automatic transmission and won a stick shift, would you drive around grinding your gears because a clutch isn't what you're used to? Because that would be on about the same level of idiocy as your post.
So let me get this straight... they're going to put wireless terrorist early warning systems into planes so that terrorists, using a simple handheld electronic device, can be made aware the instant that the flight attendants become suspicious of how their acting?
Man... US politicians must absolutely fucking hate their citizenry.