The guy was a biochemistry PhD, but the "twist the genetics" bit is pretty impressive concept considering it was written in the 50s. Book aside, it's pretty impressive what's going on in genomic research lately. The only question is that if unexpected behavior in human engineered code causes a bad time for a computer system, does unexpected behavior in a human engineered organism stay local or will it impact the larger environmental "runtime".
I'm off topic, but I love Iceland. The geography, the people, the language, the history. If there was more of a tech scene there, I'd try everything to move there. I'm originally from a snowy and frozen middle-of-nowhere bit of Canada, so even the Icelandic winter seems awesome to me!
It's the "-f" that's scary. Heck, I "rm -r" at least once a month, but when that "-f" is needed, then it's double and triple check time, proceeded by a feeling of dread as my finger depresses the return key.
Assuming 400 years sticks, most of my ancestors arrived in North America just shy of 300 ago, from France, England, and Ireland. I'm sure I'm not the only one of "mixed" descent. Which branch represents the "native" homeland that we're supposed to go back to?
You were lucky to have a curved TV! We used to have a round TV with 2 lines of resolution. The refresh rate was 1 frame per day. It would take us an entire lifetime to watch a 30 minute show!
That's nothing, you should see the pent-up demand for buggy whips!!! That market has about 100 years of "delayed" sales, it's gonna be yuuuuuuuuuge!!! Hell, joking aside I'm going to use a variant of that in my slide decks: "This isn't a drop in sales, it's pent up demand!"
Don't be so pessimistic! Once the AI figures out 98% of us are consuming system resources in a pseudo-zombie state, it'll code up the equivalent of a unix "kill" program to "release" those resources back to the system. I saw a documentary with Arnold Schwarzenegger that covered this topic a while back.
Agile is definitely not my friend. It's an veiled excuse for stakeholders to avoid making up their minds from the get go and having engineering pay the price for it. Figure out what you want, write it all down, and we'll give you WIP demos as we go along, if you agree to not say a word. You've changed your mind, that's great, write it up for v1.x. Agile correctly assumes that stakeholders don't know what they want, and as a result it's a playbook for missed deadlines, bloated features, and cost overruns. There are good bits to Agile, morning stand-ups (face-to-face), emphasis on simplicity, and defined blocks of work (personal responsibility), but the rest is Kool Aid, and not the good kind, like the peach-mango Kool Aid kind.
I'm surprised Comcast hasn't done this already. Anyhow, in Canada that seems to be more and more the norm. I know Bell, Rogers and Videotron all offer home and mobile bundles. Hell, now I'm even more surprised it hasn't happened here. I was thinking about AT&T + DirectTV but even they don't seem to offer a bundle that includes cellular. Antitrust concerns maybe?
Tim Cook is one hell of a COO, the guy knows how to get hardware made. The problem is he's not a product CEO like SJ was. I feel Tim should move back to COO and bring in a product guy like Tony Fadell or Scott Forstall to run the show. The recent defections are likely a sign that things aren't good internally at Apple.
To be fair, that's only if you reside in Canada. The US does the same, but it's worse, they tax you on worldwide income regardless of if you reside in the US or not.
Do you really think people will be running C# on all the Linux boxes these systems run on? Beyond Exchange servers and SQLServer, I know of few server side apps running on Windows servers.
All true... but I'd bet Sparc played some role in deciding that ints would be big endian in Java. I have a hard time believing that network byte order was the sole deciding factor.
Sub-$1000 laptops and PCs are absolutely not for "serious computer users". Apple has somewhere north of 70% of the $1000+\ market. An $800 Acer gaming rig is NOT for serious computer users. Gamers, yes, developers, absolutely not. If you ever go to a proper tech company / conference / meet up... it's virtually all Macs. Granted, there are some high end Windows machines in the >$1000 range, and a some power users do use them, but they're the minority. Don't take my word for it, here are the same facts from ZDnet:
You might not like this, but IIT is only considered a top tier university in India. It has little to no reputation in North America / Europe. Most respected world university rankings rank it in the middle of the pack, along the lines of Iowa State and Oregon State.
Wow, you would hate Silicon Valley and pretty much every top tier startup because pretty much all I've seen there are Apple laptops. I guess the vast majority of engineers at Google, Facebook, Palantir, Dropbox, Quora, Uber, AirBNB, Twitter, and Tesla are just "really not that bright" compared to you. Wait, do you think maybe it could be that you're not as bright as you think you are? Nah!
The guy we hired to replace him wrote it from the ground up in a month.
You smell that? Do you smell that? Technical debt, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of technical debt in the morning. You know one time we had a code sprint, for 4 weeks. When it was all over I code reviewed. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' bug. The smell, you know that stale pizza smell, the whole room. Smelled like... a nightmare to come.
Slashdot Mirror
The guy was a biochemistry PhD, but the "twist the genetics" bit is pretty impressive concept considering it was written in the 50s. Book aside, it's pretty impressive what's going on in genomic research lately. The only question is that if unexpected behavior in human engineered code causes a bad time for a computer system, does unexpected behavior in a human engineered organism stay local or will it impact the larger environmental "runtime".
I'm pretty sure you meant Hertzfeld, not Herzog in that SJ citation.
I'm off topic, but I love Iceland. The geography, the people, the language, the history. If there was more of a tech scene there, I'd try everything to move there. I'm originally from a snowy and frozen middle-of-nowhere bit of Canada, so even the Icelandic winter seems awesome to me!
I agree about Office, but Xbox is not a profit driver for Microsoft. The division barely manages to break even.
Those videos are pretty much my idea of hell. Hopefully we'll implement the tube transport system from Futurama before it gets that bad here.
It's the "-f" that's scary. Heck, I "rm -r" at least once a month, but when that "-f" is needed, then it's double and triple check time, proceeded by a feeling of dread as my finger depresses the return key.
Assuming 400 years sticks, most of my ancestors arrived in North America just shy of 300 ago, from France, England, and Ireland. I'm sure I'm not the only one of "mixed" descent. Which branch represents the "native" homeland that we're supposed to go back to?
I'll have to try this. I've always wondered what it feels like to get tasered and clubbed over the head with a flashlight.
You were lucky to have a curved TV! We used to have a round TV with 2 lines of resolution. The refresh rate was 1 frame per day. It would take us an entire lifetime to watch a 30 minute show!
^^^THIS^^^ ... on the intertubes this is about as close as one can get to 100% certainty.
I'm guessing their website was written with Clarion, it's hard on the eyes and borderline unusable
That's nothing, you should see the pent-up demand for buggy whips!!! That market has about 100 years of "delayed" sales, it's gonna be yuuuuuuuuuge!!! Hell, joking aside I'm going to use a variant of that in my slide decks: "This isn't a drop in sales, it's pent up demand!"
Don't be so pessimistic! Once the AI figures out 98% of us are consuming system resources in a pseudo-zombie state, it'll code up the equivalent of a unix "kill" program to "release" those resources back to the system. I saw a documentary with Arnold Schwarzenegger that covered this topic a while back.
Agile is definitely not my friend. It's an veiled excuse for stakeholders to avoid making up their minds from the get go and having engineering pay the price for it. Figure out what you want, write it all down, and we'll give you WIP demos as we go along, if you agree to not say a word. You've changed your mind, that's great, write it up for v1.x. Agile correctly assumes that stakeholders don't know what they want, and as a result it's a playbook for missed deadlines, bloated features, and cost overruns. There are good bits to Agile, morning stand-ups (face-to-face), emphasis on simplicity, and defined blocks of work (personal responsibility), but the rest is Kool Aid, and not the good kind, like the peach-mango Kool Aid kind.
I'm surprised Comcast hasn't done this already. Anyhow, in Canada that seems to be more and more the norm. I know Bell, Rogers and Videotron all offer home and mobile bundles. Hell, now I'm even more surprised it hasn't happened here. I was thinking about AT&T + DirectTV but even they don't seem to offer a bundle that includes cellular. Antitrust concerns maybe?
Tim Cook is one hell of a COO, the guy knows how to get hardware made. The problem is he's not a product CEO like SJ was. I feel Tim should move back to COO and bring in a product guy like Tony Fadell or Scott Forstall to run the show. The recent defections are likely a sign that things aren't good internally at Apple.
To be fair, that's only if you reside in Canada. The US does the same, but it's worse, they tax you on worldwide income regardless of if you reside in the US or not.
Do you really think people will be running C# on all the Linux boxes these systems run on? Beyond Exchange servers and SQLServer, I know of few server side apps running on Windows servers.
All true ... but I'd bet Sparc played some role in deciding that ints would be big endian in Java. I have a hard time believing that network byte order was the sole deciding factor.
See the little red arrow pointing down beside C#:
Tiobe
see the negative number beside C# here:
PYPL
I think you're wrong.
Sub-$1000 laptops and PCs are absolutely not for "serious computer users". Apple has somewhere north of 70% of the $1000+\ market. An $800 Acer gaming rig is NOT for serious computer users. Gamers, yes, developers, absolutely not. If you ever go to a proper tech company / conference / meet up ... it's virtually all Macs. Granted, there are some high end Windows machines in the >$1000 range, and a some power users do use them, but they're the minority. Don't take my word for it, here are the same facts from ZDnet:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-apple-took-over-the-only-segment-of-the-pc-market-that-still-matters/
Shit ... so Apple was prescient in removing all USB ports on their latest laptops.
.. top universities like IIT ...
You might not like this, but IIT is only considered a top tier university in India. It has little to no reputation in North America / Europe. Most respected world university rankings rank it in the middle of the pack, along the lines of Iowa State and Oregon State.
Wow, you would hate Silicon Valley and pretty much every top tier startup because pretty much all I've seen there are Apple laptops. I guess the vast majority of engineers at Google, Facebook, Palantir, Dropbox, Quora, Uber, AirBNB, Twitter, and Tesla are just "really not that bright" compared to you. Wait, do you think maybe it could be that you're not as bright as you think you are? Nah!
The guy we hired to replace him wrote it from the ground up in a month.
... a nightmare to come.
You smell that? Do you smell that? Technical debt, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of technical debt in the morning. You know one time we had a code sprint, for 4 weeks. When it was all over I code reviewed. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' bug. The smell, you know that stale pizza smell, the whole room. Smelled like
- Software Architect Bill Kilgore