Mozilla was being used as a platform more than 10 years ago; not the browser but the framework underlying it which powered the browser, email client, irc chat, etc. I remember seeing a few books on it before Chrome even existed.
Apache has been running on everything forever; one could say similar things about using Apache for writing server software... in fact long before Chrome they made the common elements into a library called the Apache Runtime Library.
Lets not forget all the general frameworks out there which are not without their own complications but they are DESIGNED for this purpose instead of a spin off side project that is closely coupled to a single purpose.
All that said, making an HTML5 app with hooks into a browser engine looks to be the most portable with the least long term maintenance (aside from the issues with javascript - which are more style than language related, just like C++ it gives you plenty of rope with which to hang yourself.) More labor upfront, you bet it is... but to support every device quickly and not have to suffer every system upgrade (and support many versions of systems,) it probably pays off - more so with time.
JFK was a war hero. He went against our military, faced his own mistakes of misplaced trust and prevented WW3 when many lesser men wouldn't have. Political courage and physical courage. Reagan turned in names during the red scare witch hunt and if you watch it he looks like coward and probably would have named anybody they suggested; he may have done just that. He wasn't a big republican back in those days either.
It doesn't take courage to get shot by probably the biggest Secret Service blunder in their history and then to do a nice PR show (put on by the man who created Fox News) after pumped full of drugs. This is assuming he was actually shot because there is 1 extra bullet involved in that one (most likely they didn't want to admit somebody messed up more. Funny how people act in those situations, like somehow you farting might shift all blame of the unrelated error over to you.)
Star Wars was a business deal plain and simple. Big scam. Same with making many times the necessary nukes. Courage would have been opposing the military industrial complex.
How come just about every politician ends up doing nothing effective against the espionage departments? They may campaign for reform and then flip once they get into office or just pay lip service. I remember Obama speaking against Bush's wire tapping; then as expected, he gets in and nothing changes except his defense of that and all the other things we didn't know about (and the stuff we still haven't found out.)
Either Obama was lying and grandstanding back in the Senate or after he got in office he either changed his mind or somebody got to him. The CIA and NSA have way more power than the FBI ever did and many times the funding - they may not do much petty stuff against political opponents (everybody the parent listed) like Hoover did but that doesn't mean they don't act with other motives. I'm not implying he is squeaky clean, since those agencies specialize in information. We know the State Dept was involved in a lot of evil deeds, we don't know how much NSA info they use; we don't know what Israel does with the NSA information or how many other parties get special access.
Obama doesn't have a fraction of the courage of JFK. None of them do, except Carter and Bush Sr. and perhaps Nixon.
They've tapped Obama since before he was a Senator. Think about that fact for a minute. JFK probably didn't care that much if his wife found out about him fooling around (because she basically knew it already) so the fact the FBI knew of all the women maybe only deterred him from firing Hoover... who was using the FBI to do what the NSA does now but limited to political figures... and maybe a few communists. Hoover needed to be fired but JFK didn't, either he didn't know or it wasn't worth the cost.
Obama was never the type who'd take such REAL personal risk. If he were, he'd have been filtered out before he got anywhere close to the job. They'd find some Howard Dean like moment to excuse him out of the race; with the DFL establishment, the idiot media, and the GOP all exploiting any trumped up situation nobody could survive.
H-1B visas are a scam and they DO suppress wages - these corporations only like the market when it benefits themselves; when they have increased resource demands they do not want their costs to rise up. They get government to stop market forces.
Sure they pay H-1B people going rates but it keeps wages from RISING while supplying indentured servants which are naturally more desirable to MBAs.
They need to pay more if they want to attract talent, they need to TRAIN employees instead of expect them to list whatever buzzwords the HR drones have on their checklists. They need to RETAIN employees but with non-compete clauses, deportation (H1B,) short term market rewards, and golden parachutes they don't have to care about retention.
Good paying jobs with a path to citizenship and a good quality of life are what make people from around the world want to become citizens. REAL immigration reform would address the green card issues and completely destroy H-1B loophole. Then you have to restore business culture to the way it used to be by taking away their wishlist items which has created most our problems today. Remember what happened when George Lucas got everything he wanted and everybody listened to him unquestionably.... Giving successful people everything they want is not recreating what made them successful in the first place.
The Credit "industry" is one of the few big industries the USA still has. Cheap bastards never had a legitimate excuse - they simply do not want to spend the money or be the 1st one and compete with that extra overhead.
If they really cared about the issue and their losses (which I'm sure they have clever uses for,) they would LOBBY the US Government and regulation mandating chips would have happened already. The losses have to be significant enough.
Given the CIA was involved a while ago already and it likely has at least international implications that politicians are going to want to do something about it.
The dentistry analogy was about expertise vs experience - that was the context of the analogy.
School is not a business; therefore, making an analogy between schools and a dental businesses is a false analogy.
Illogical point but nice attempt to be clever.
Many private school parents feel they got their money's worth... but whether they did or not is another matter and there is plenty of psychology out there to explain a BIAS towards that BELIEF.
Public schools provide an equal footing for all to be educated and raise the quality of life for the whole society. That is their purpose in modern society. They do not hold back people wanting to give their child an unequal advantage who can afford to do so, that is, assuming their actions actually are advantageous. One has to remember that such people are already in the demographic of successful results within the public school system and would likely perform above average regardless. Without a time machine, you can't make a clear comparison.
When your adult child admits the preist sexually assaulted them because private schools lack the background checks and oversight the public schools have... you can still feel good about the quality of their education. Or when your child becomes disabled and has to change schools because the small private or charter doesn't have the resources to handle them...
Parents will buy into an irrational brand product for their children and they will for school choice as well. The difference between most poor and good schools is less than the difference in the quality of parenting. The "customer" doesn't want to ever be at fault. I can't choose which highway to drive on-- we only have one and do not want the tax burden for two or waste the space for a toll highway (and "subsidies" that come with building those.) Districts have troubles and it's usually from being top heavy-- but districts also save money; the best solution is a hybrid of older styled schools with tiny weak district centers and non-profits providing common services to pool resources (for profits promote corruption, raise costs, and are not always a better value but sometimes they are.) I have old relatives in all aspects of education - the charter fad is what they call this. we've gone from big to small districts before; but usually it's binary and the reality is that any system design is falsely judged when it's always the management of the system that is to blame.
Like Ben Franklin said, any system is good if it is well administered (then he went on to say governments all fall into despotism; implying bad administration is the root of failure.) It's easy for computer minded people , legal minded, policy wonks, and alike to get stuck on systems design and ignore the true sources of trouble.
Choice is just an emotional appeal to life long consumer sheep who feel like they are free individuals because they can choose from a list of expensive drinks at Star Bucks or vote between two parties who almost the same (but spend billions highlighting their differences... spent that on twins and the public wouldn't even realize their DNA was the same.)
Education is NOT business. This is fundamental and when they fail at such basic concepts the outlook is bleak. The reality of this whole mess of fixing what was a good education system that wasn't broken is that BOTH political parties decided to fight over the area due to polling showing it's rise in importance to the voting populace (non-voters never matter.) It was lower priority in the past when less educated union protected jobs existed but as those outsourced or automated people needed education and the priority rose. Politicians responded. I think the business / consumer oriented perspective partially comes out from the fact politicians hire marketing companies to sell them like a bar of soap -- and it's all heavily biased towards the consumerism that drives the marketing industry. They sell you on their proposed education service / package deal which is sold to you just like any other product or service.
There are good teachers at bad schools and bad management greatly harming good schools... and bad kids and bad parents harming good schools. etc. If your community's public school sucks... then your community is partially to blame for this. Far more than 1 bad teacher is. The customer is NOT always right; and again, education is not a business-- children are not products and parents are NOT customers!
Parents are not experts in education anymore than they are experts in dentistry. Experience with the Dentist or healthy teeth (success without Dental experience) does not make you a dental expert. Yes, I have some education training and expertise; not much, but enough to see past the BS the takes up the whole discussion since it has become a political football.
I wont even touch the tribalism going on with parents who are perfectly happy to sacrifice other kids to give their DNA legacy an advantage... But "choice" appeals strongly to those types... and the racists and other bigots as well.
BTW, the data on Charters show they cost more and do not deliver more for the money; this despite the fact they usually have strong powers to BOOT OUT students back to the public system which can't reject anybody (another characteristic of public education business doesn't have.)
Your bad teacher might be a great teacher for somebody else. Don't be so self centered. Sure bad teachers exist, but every profession has failures who deserve to be fired... don't wreak the whole system trying to weed out 100% of the flaws. It's just like implementing big brother to make terrorism impossible.
You must not have done much. I knew pot heads; they were into it enough to know that not all Pot is the same and that a lot of Pot is NOT 100% pure. You may not have had the actual thing; it can come laced with other things. Some of these guys ended up into the other stuff later but not because Pot was the stepping stone; if anything was it was Tobacco, every single one I knew started with Tobacco. It was likely the laced stuff that got them into things they knew were dangerous (beyond Tobacco, contrary to what adults think, teens can reason beyond binary extremes... if anything it's parents who think in binary.)
Again, these problems are mostly solved by REGULATION. You don't have hard drugs laced into your Tobacco or Alcohol. Plus if somebody developed a tobacco plant that was foobar it wouldn't get into the regulated market and probably fade out of existence...
I never ever wanted to alter my brain chemistry, so I've not touched the legal (and more harmful) drugs. Plenty of opportunity and peer pressure; so I'm not some sheltered pious wimp like the non-hypocrites on the opposition.
I knew somebody who worked at Activision/Blizzard for a decade. They can almost click and build for any platform they want. Big companies who target more than 1 platform can cheaply target any other platforms. The marketing department and backroom deals decide what happens; it is rarely technical; as you find out in the real world.
Small developers, that is a different story. Nintendo needs 3rd parties less than ANYBODY in the industry and for their whole history too. Small developers are not a critical portion for the big 3.
Actually, it's psychology - the old base emotion stuff but I'm taking newer stuff I've read and claiming tribalism is an evolved base emotion and applying basic propaganda to it as they did with the other base emotions. We know humans evolved in tribes and I'm with the theory our brain power came from competition at the top of the food chain (it's rather obvious if you think about it.) In many ways propaganda is ahead of psychology because they do what works and proof or deeper understanding is not necessary. The fact they use it and it works is enough for me.
I only took one entry level anthropology course and it had little to do with tribes or so called "primitive" societies after the first few weeks.
It was easy to see over a decade ago that REAL computers will be for nerds once all the consumer devices are computerized so they no longer need a general purpose computer.
People bought computers to replace multiple old technologies (it cost many times more so it had to) from paper to typewriters to encyclopedias, CD collection, and now even the bookshelf. Most consumers didn't even scratch the surface of what the general PC could do.The general computer allows everything to converge on it because it's so flexible but it's also always going to be more complex. Once you can do what you want with the upgraded version of the old tech, you don't need the general computer. Outside of "pocket knife" like phones, divergence is the trend, not convergence.
Books never got far on the computer; but now eBooks are gaining ground like never before because of electronic book devices - which will gain ground against the book as long as the feature creep doesn't undermine the device's primary purpose - replacing a paper book. Your TV is increasingly smart and computerized all by itself and is mostly incompatible other than the shared cloud services, it's abilities are limited and again, anything to over generalize it will eventually undermine it's primary function. It's moving into the DVR and Blueray space; both of which are not really compatible with each other or the smart TV other than the image signal... not even the remotes are compatible enough to chuck any one of them. They have some overlap but they don't work together and the specialty add-on box is NOT desirable... consumers would prefer an app or plug-in device over another box. It could happen that cable TV boxes and SAT boxes become locked down apps for smart TVs... if they could converge against the generally divergent trend. A DVR could simply be storage and software on the TV; but again, we are still not converging (either way, it's still diverging from the PC.)
Smart phones like I said are an exception to the trend; but as we can see, it's a consumer device in a walled garden - even when business replaces PCs with smart phones wireless controlling operating your office space - it'll be a specialized set of tools in a walled environment with less flexibility. Most office computer needs are extremely limited and now migrating to the "cloud" where thin clients are all the rage.
Gaming is already diverging to all the different niche devices, each of which are well positioned for certain kinds or situations for playing games. Consoles in some form will exist but they'll be a slice of the market instead of defining the market. Just like the PC will be a small slice of the computer market.
Tribalism applied; it's actually basic Freud the same kind of stuff that gave birth to modern propaganda.
The tribal appeals work extremely well on primitive tribal minded people and is still somewhat effective on normal people. I would think the more extreme ones are the haters in these edge cases. It is not all that well hidden that there was an intentional strategy to attach traits to the tribal identity; denying global warming for example was actually planned. It is quite a brilliant way to control people; just as people wear, chant, and behave certain ways to be part of their "team" without much thought other than (I want to be in this group) people will tend to adopt positions of the group as well; the members indoctrinate each other but there is a strong pressure from the group identity underlying it all. You see it clearly in war propaganda, where the other tribe are baby eating inhuman monsters and merely doing something like them becomes unacceptable behavior. A recent example of how ridiculous (but effective) it can get is the "Freedom Fries" hate against our French ALLIES when the war propaganda machine turned against them.
Being a successful maverick/individualist businessman going against all odds etc, fits in well with the identity (as well as the tribal identity;) however, that doesn't have the level of propaganda behind it as these artificially appended traits which are also elevated to the level of it being taboo within the tribe. One can be in the tribe and be neutral on businessmen but if you are "green" that is a really huge taboo! It's as bad as taking a wife from an enemy tribe.
One could theorize... that these extra gullible tribal people are so easily gathered and controlled that all strongly cohesive groups form and thrive on this basis; therefore, such groups are tribal because non tribal groupings can't form that level of a monoculture (for lack of a better term.)
From what I've heard and read over the years, off the top of my head:
1) Software has more complexity than most everything else; big systems more so. Software can change faster and expectations change faster; it's not a machine that is going to be used for decades and needs to remain similar over that time for maintenance reasons.
2) 2 year cycles where political changes result in different pressures, demands, etc. I've heard this is a BIG problem with government projects from multiple sources. A lot of the time that new "oversight" is anything but a smokescreen for an agenda... sometimes it is intentionally to derail the process (for example, to make room to add another contractor.)
3) Moving targets! Specifications are not detailed enough and/or they change during development - especially across the 2 year political cycles. These regulations they pass can take a year just to be legally codified into enough detail to be useful and even then implementing it in software involves lawyers and additional decisions / interpretations in order to implement it. Then you have the legal cases which decide things that cause changes as well...
4) Short deadlines, high demands. This was a 5 year project and they had about 2-3 years of time and charged more money but throwing money at development doesn't speed it up with the same level quality as normal project pacing.
5) Consultants are paid by TIME not success. Ask anything you want, they'll say yes and just bill more hours. Failure just means more hours and successful completion is not a big motivation.
6) The more contractors who have to work together the more troubles are created.
7) The more governments and gov departments, the more hurdles you have. Like contractors but worse; especially, if those governments are not cooperative, competent, or responsive. Many state governments and politicians have been trying to harm this project.
8) Contracts, renewals, punishments are purely political, NOT results oriented. Failure only delays you until the next contract you bribe your way into - if you even end up fired at all. This company was probably #1 in getting contracts and not in their services provided; they'll get plenty of future contracts and probably do nothing to improve the quality of their services... as they likely did in the past. The entire political process is a huge target for attack by contractors; it's best to do it in house than contract to sufficiently large contractors who can manipulate the process.
9) Metrics. Measurements of success or failure are purely political. Even with contractual metrics specified upfront, politics trumps all reason or law. Specific goals can be met but general ones can be grandstanded -- or design flaws that were approved or demanded can be shifted from the actual culprits to the contractors.
10) Lawyers. Involved all over. If not the root of all evil, they are right afterwards. Don't award corp X the contract, get sued by corp X. Fire corp Y for failure to deliver, get sued by corp Y or the gov sues corp Y... Need a decision to move forward with some implementation detail? must run it by the lawyers 1st... that could end up in legal battles with multiple parties before being resolved and I'm not saying these legal battles all take place in court.
With billions of drug dollars in the banks watch them ask for more bailouts; that is, assuming you can pull that kind of money away from them overnight--- which you can't because they will not allow you to do that.
Gates may characterize it all honestly and accurately (I don't know, but assume he does,) his perspective is naturally going to be limited... at best... likely it'll be myopic. The press, they are much more myopic.
The fact he seems upset the Exec branch was trying to micromanage them indicates a lack of understanding or an arrogance of sorts.The Pentagon functions too autonomously. It's as if they think they are their own branch of government when they are completely under the Exec branch (except for declaring war - something Congress abdicated to the Exec long ago.) They are too big, too bloated, too corrupt, too dangerous to our republic, the industrial military complex NEEDS a lot of downsizing and more -real- management to keep them in check.
Congress doesn't have to say about it other than funding and Exec oversight. Since they are heavily tied into the industrial military complex they have to get their hands into everything - force the buying of fighter jets that can't fly in the rain, keep wasteful military bases in their districts, etc.
1) Nixon was not impeached. He quit before that inevitably would have happened. Back in those days Republicans were against Nixon because party loyalty didn't blind them so easily as it does today.
2) Nixon did many criminal things, only a few of which were being looked into at that time and some never were investigated like they should have been. Impeachment wasn't about the war.
3) The knowledge Nixon was a TRAITOR by conspiring with North Vietnam to prolong the war for his own personal gain was known BEFORE he was elected but Johnson was too much of a political coward to prosecute a presidential candidate fore treason (plus it would then be used as justification in the future as a political tactic by the unscrupulous.) This information wasn't known until the declassification of the Johnson tapes a few years ago... very few people knew about it. Yes, Johnson started that tape recording tradition which died with Nixon. Providing battle plans is treason, providing political plans and altering plans to aid the enemy is far far worse than say, telling them how to make a nuke.
Using old parts I've been running such a setup since 2006. VIA EPIA at 1+ Ghz set with powerd to run half that speed most the time. Plus since it runs at 12V I have two power bricks on it for redundant power supplies. The WRT54G would eventually lock up with heavy P2P traffic or something; which is why I went to pfsense which was infinitely superior. Probably still is.
It's being replaced as soon as I can get that new low power AMD server chip that gets down to the VIA chip's power level (of 7 years ago...) not having SATA and ECC (I want to do ZFS) is now a problem and freeNAS is better suited. pfSense really shouldn't be used for a fileserver (but it does now have ZFS too.) I figure the pfsense box will run under 20W without the HDs and fan; it's pulling 40-80W now.
It does not matter WHO says the truth or if they are wrong 99% of the time.
One shouldn't brainlessly discredit a source simply because you don't like something they said and reliable sources you do like shouldn't be mindlessly believed either.
The benefit of people who are extreme or go beyond what you and I consider "reasonable" is that they are usually quite MOTIVATED to do a lot of the labor for you. Their conclusions could be insane but their labor doesn't have to be entirely useless all that supporting evidence could be solid or just 1 or 2 items flawed (it's the end conclusions where the big errors happen.) I saw plenty of good information gathered by the author of that one webpage (the rest the site has some crazy shit) and while it builds towards some nutty sounding stuff but that doesn't discredit the collection of former NSA agent's interviews or related Daily Show clips etc.
Sure some claims are beyond reasonable or even mentally "off balance" but it is still a relative judgement call for ignorant people listening to something they don't want to believe. Remember all the cranks saying upsetting things about the CIA, NSA, State Dept, Iraq war, Echelon, "detainee" "abuse", corruption, etc? Turns out they were correct... some were wrong about most everything else and others were 100% correct the whole time - but we treat both with no respect and lump them together... instead we trust our news media who got it all wrong up until it was undeniable. The cult of personality has a basis in irrational human behavior; don't fall into other forms of it.
This is especially important to note as that linked page focuses around NSA leaker Russell Tice who only had his word and reputation with zero hard evidence trying to stir up some real congressional oversight. The government smeared him and then people like yourself had an easy way out so you didn't have to consider the upsetting things he was saying. He was a "nut" so anything he said you didn't like was easily ignored... back 5+ years ago. Government is guilty until proven innocent; that precept is why we have term limits, separation of powers, democracy, a free press, free speech, etc.
Rather than make C++ appeal to people who probably should stay in their high level languages, I think they should be putting their time into productivity. As much as I liked to spend time in C++ not writing any actual code playing with macros, templates, etc. in addition to finding new ways to hang myself; I don't find myself doing C++ anymore - I just don't like fooling around enough (yet I still do perl for fun; does that make sense?)
I think all the man power needs to be put into technical development not fluffy graphics libraries. I'm not as big on portable compiling as I am for some kind of binary format and linking system that would make it easier for an old program to run on a newer OS without needing all these virtual machines. Not exactly Google's NaCl (or whatever it's called) or a byte code but an attempt to address such issues. Not for java style portability, but something so legacy software can run without easily breaking (which it can do even with Java over time) and yes, it would get into OS turf... just like many other languages do as far as how library code is linked and loaded.
It's been a long time away for me... I've not looked at C++11 but here is a wishlist: Text output needs improvement more than we need graphics. More debugging, logging, dummy functions, test case related standardization - more dynamic binding, runtime introspection features and other things that go against the initial design goals but ONLY in limited contexts, such as debugging and testing; thereby, retaining the intent of C++ but unleashing it for development purposes (such as a console or recompiling running code and replacing it.) This would fit in with their trend to be all things to everybody without changing/breaking the past decisions. It would be difficult to implement in some cases; but it's a debug mode.
I've always wanted named parameters; which could have been handled completely on the compiler side without run time penalty. ADA style typing was always appealing, for some things. How about something like JSON object literals? Native RegExp literals? A built-in parser generator (grammar definitions that produce parsing code you don't need to mess with.) Easier internationalization.... forget drawing lines, give me a great way to print "hello world" in many languages; or localize time and dates. A Money class to avoid common errors (use of float.) Configuration API. Apache's memory pool system seemed cool to me (APR,) garbage collecting not so much. Parallel processing features (if not already some, work on more-- again thinking of productivity and debugging.) We still don't have a multiple level break yet, correct? (like an exception but more limited in scope and as fast as a goto. Don't freak out, I didn't endorse goto.) I wouldn't mind a way to define a graph literal... I assume we must have a String object that handles unicode issues... we didn't last time I touched C++. Unicode source files... that allowed use of math operators like root... which have unicode characters... Just ideas... to help bloat the compiler.
The source link may not be so great, it does bring up a lot of true information that can be confirmed elsewhere. There are other leakers who have given us HUGE leaks over the years that have not gotten enough attention or people simply forgot
While it is not likely these are good people, officials in these government positions are TRAPPED by their jobs.
If they do the right thing, they end up in the same position as Snowden with the whole corrupt powerful establishment against them (plus the suckers) and if they serve the establishment (where they have a successful history) then they go on public record as liars. As far as legal consequences, almost nothing happens to them for lying to congress; in addition, that can be greatly mitigated by telling the truth in secret hearings... so they are technically not lying to congress (just most of congress, in public.)
It is grandstanding but mostly it's political posturing by Sanders, so later the public will see them as liars who can't be trusted with the power they have taken (arguably given.)
No, not you. you were just the one near the top. I didn't have a score filter on and was moderating until I posted this reply. You don't have to live around people who are willfully ignorant (because their faith is threatened) and I do - I'm still hearing their BS about global dimming they haven't read a thing about. The amount of unjustified confidence in this society is disgusting.
Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla was being used as a platform more than 10 years ago; not the browser but the framework underlying it which powered the browser, email client, irc chat, etc. I remember seeing a few books on it before Chrome even existed.
Apache has been running on everything forever; one could say similar things about using Apache for writing server software... in fact long before Chrome they made the common elements into a library called the Apache Runtime Library.
Lets not forget all the general frameworks out there which are not without their own complications but they are DESIGNED for this purpose instead of a spin off side project that is closely coupled to a single purpose.
All that said, making an HTML5 app with hooks into a browser engine looks to be the most portable with the least long term maintenance (aside from the issues with javascript - which are more style than language related, just like C++ it gives you plenty of rope with which to hang yourself.) More labor upfront, you bet it is... but to support every device quickly and not have to suffer every system upgrade (and support many versions of systems,) it probably pays off - more so with time.
thank you.
JFK was a war hero. He went against our military, faced his own mistakes of misplaced trust and prevented WW3 when many lesser men wouldn't have. Political courage and physical courage. Reagan turned in names during the red scare witch hunt and if you watch it he looks like coward and probably would have named anybody they suggested; he may have done just that. He wasn't a big republican back in those days either.
It doesn't take courage to get shot by probably the biggest Secret Service blunder in their history and then to do a nice PR show (put on by the man who created Fox News) after pumped full of drugs. This is assuming he was actually shot because there is 1 extra bullet involved in that one (most likely they didn't want to admit somebody messed up more. Funny how people act in those situations, like somehow you farting might shift all blame of the unrelated error over to you.)
Star Wars was a business deal plain and simple. Big scam. Same with making many times the necessary nukes. Courage would have been opposing the military industrial complex.
How come just about every politician ends up doing nothing effective against the espionage departments? They may campaign for reform and then flip once they get into office or just pay lip service. I remember Obama speaking against Bush's wire tapping; then as expected, he gets in and nothing changes except his defense of that and all the other things we didn't know about (and the stuff we still haven't found out.)
Either Obama was lying and grandstanding back in the Senate or after he got in office he either changed his mind or somebody got to him. The CIA and NSA have way more power than the FBI ever did and many times the funding - they may not do much petty stuff against political opponents (everybody the parent listed) like Hoover did but that doesn't mean they don't act with other motives. I'm not implying he is squeaky clean, since those agencies specialize in information. We know the State Dept was involved in a lot of evil deeds, we don't know how much NSA info they use; we don't know what Israel does with the NSA information or how many other parties get special access.
Obama doesn't have a fraction of the courage of JFK. None of them do, except Carter and Bush Sr. and perhaps Nixon.
They've tapped Obama since before he was a Senator. Think about that fact for a minute. JFK probably didn't care that much if his wife found out about him fooling around (because she basically knew it already) so the fact the FBI knew of all the women maybe only deterred him from firing Hoover... who was using the FBI to do what the NSA does now but limited to political figures... and maybe a few communists. Hoover needed to be fired but JFK didn't, either he didn't know or it wasn't worth the cost.
Obama was never the type who'd take such REAL personal risk. If he were, he'd have been filtered out before he got anywhere close to the job. They'd find some Howard Dean like moment to excuse him out of the race; with the DFL establishment, the idiot media, and the GOP all exploiting any trumped up situation nobody could survive.
H-1B visas are a scam and they DO suppress wages - these corporations only like the market when it benefits themselves; when they have increased resource demands they do not want their costs to rise up. They get government to stop market forces.
Sure they pay H-1B people going rates but it keeps wages from RISING while supplying indentured servants which are naturally more desirable to MBAs.
They need to pay more if they want to attract talent, they need to TRAIN employees instead of expect them to list whatever buzzwords the HR drones have on their checklists. They need to RETAIN employees but with non-compete clauses, deportation (H1B,) short term market rewards, and golden parachutes they don't have to care about retention.
Good paying jobs with a path to citizenship and a good quality of life are what make people from around the world want to become citizens. REAL immigration reform would address the green card issues and completely destroy H-1B loophole. Then you have to restore business culture to the way it used to be by taking away their wishlist items which has created most our problems today. Remember what happened when George Lucas got everything he wanted and everybody listened to him unquestionably.... Giving successful people everything they want is not recreating what made them successful in the first place.
The Credit "industry" is one of the few big industries the USA still has. Cheap bastards never had a legitimate excuse - they simply do not want to spend the money or be the 1st one and compete with that extra overhead.
If they really cared about the issue and their losses (which I'm sure they have clever uses for,) they would LOBBY the US Government and regulation mandating chips would have happened already. The losses have to be significant enough.
Given the CIA was involved a while ago already and it likely has at least international implications that politicians are going to want to do something about it.
The dentistry analogy was about expertise vs experience - that was the context of the analogy.
School is not a business; therefore, making an analogy between schools and a dental businesses is a false analogy.
Illogical point but nice attempt to be clever.
Many private school parents feel they got their money's worth... but whether they did or not is another matter and there is plenty of psychology out there to explain a BIAS towards that BELIEF.
Public schools provide an equal footing for all to be educated and raise the quality of life for the whole society. That is their purpose in modern society. They do not hold back people wanting to give their child an unequal advantage who can afford to do so, that is, assuming their actions actually are advantageous. One has to remember that such people are already in the demographic of successful results within the public school system and would likely perform above average regardless. Without a time machine, you can't make a clear comparison.
When your adult child admits the preist sexually assaulted them because private schools lack the background checks and oversight the public schools have... you can still feel good about the quality of their education. Or when your child becomes disabled and has to change schools because the small private or charter doesn't have the resources to handle them...
Parents will buy into an irrational brand product for their children and they will for school choice as well. The difference between most poor and good schools is less than the difference in the quality of parenting. The "customer" doesn't want to ever be at fault. I can't choose which highway to drive on-- we only have one and do not want the tax burden for two or waste the space for a toll highway (and "subsidies" that come with building those.) Districts have troubles and it's usually from being top heavy-- but districts also save money; the best solution is a hybrid of older styled schools with tiny weak district centers and non-profits providing common services to pool resources (for profits promote corruption, raise costs, and are not always a better value but sometimes they are.) I have old relatives in all aspects of education - the charter fad is what they call this. we've gone from big to small districts before; but usually it's binary and the reality is that any system design is falsely judged when it's always the management of the system that is to blame.
Like Ben Franklin said, any system is good if it is well administered (then he went on to say governments all fall into despotism; implying bad administration is the root of failure.) It's easy for computer minded people , legal minded, policy wonks, and alike to get stuck on systems design and ignore the true sources of trouble.
Choice is just an emotional appeal to life long consumer sheep who feel like they are free individuals because they can choose from a list of expensive drinks at Star Bucks or vote between two parties who almost the same (but spend billions highlighting their differences... spent that on twins and the public wouldn't even realize their DNA was the same.)
Education is NOT business. This is fundamental and when they fail at such basic concepts the outlook is bleak. The reality of this whole mess of fixing what was a good education system that wasn't broken is that BOTH political parties decided to fight over the area due to polling showing it's rise in importance to the voting populace (non-voters never matter.) It was lower priority in the past when less educated union protected jobs existed but as those outsourced or automated people needed education and the priority rose. Politicians responded. I think the business / consumer oriented perspective partially comes out from the fact politicians hire marketing companies to sell them like a bar of soap -- and it's all heavily biased towards the consumerism that drives the marketing industry. They sell you on their proposed education service / package deal which is sold to you just like any other product or service.
There are good teachers at bad schools and bad management greatly harming good schools... and bad kids and bad parents harming good schools. etc. If your community's public school sucks... then your community is partially to blame for this. Far more than 1 bad teacher is. The customer is NOT always right; and again, education is not a business-- children are not products and parents are NOT customers!
Parents are not experts in education anymore than they are experts in dentistry. Experience with the Dentist or healthy teeth (success without Dental experience) does not make you a dental expert. Yes, I have some education training and expertise; not much, but enough to see past the BS the takes up the whole discussion since it has become a political football.
I wont even touch the tribalism going on with parents who are perfectly happy to sacrifice other kids to give their DNA legacy an advantage... But "choice" appeals strongly to those types... and the racists and other bigots as well.
BTW, the data on Charters show they cost more and do not deliver more for the money; this despite the fact they usually have strong powers to BOOT OUT students back to the public system which can't reject anybody (another characteristic of public education business doesn't have.)
Your bad teacher might be a great teacher for somebody else. Don't be so self centered. Sure bad teachers exist, but every profession has failures who deserve to be fired... don't wreak the whole system trying to weed out 100% of the flaws. It's just like implementing big brother to make terrorism impossible.
You must not have done much. I knew pot heads; they were into it enough to know that not all Pot is the same and that a lot of Pot is NOT 100% pure. You may not have had the actual thing; it can come laced with other things. Some of these guys ended up into the other stuff later but not because Pot was the stepping stone; if anything was it was Tobacco, every single one I knew started with Tobacco. It was likely the laced stuff that got them into things they knew were dangerous (beyond Tobacco, contrary to what adults think, teens can reason beyond binary extremes... if anything it's parents who think in binary.)
Again, these problems are mostly solved by REGULATION. You don't have hard drugs laced into your Tobacco or Alcohol. Plus if somebody developed a tobacco plant that was foobar it wouldn't get into the regulated market and probably fade out of existence...
I never ever wanted to alter my brain chemistry, so I've not touched the legal (and more harmful) drugs. Plenty of opportunity and peer pressure; so I'm not some sheltered pious wimp like the non-hypocrites on the opposition.
I knew somebody who worked at Activision/Blizzard for a decade. They can almost click and build for any platform they want. Big companies who target more than 1 platform can cheaply target any other platforms. The marketing department and backroom deals decide what happens; it is rarely technical; as you find out in the real world.
Small developers, that is a different story. Nintendo needs 3rd parties less than ANYBODY in the industry and for their whole history too. Small developers are not a critical portion for the big 3.
Hey, is this the same Accenture that used to be Arthur Anderson, the ones who helped create the Enron mess and then renamed themselves afterwards?
Actually, it's psychology - the old base emotion stuff but I'm taking newer stuff I've read and claiming tribalism is an evolved base emotion and applying basic propaganda to it as they did with the other base emotions. We know humans evolved in tribes and I'm with the theory our brain power came from competition at the top of the food chain (it's rather obvious if you think about it.) In many ways propaganda is ahead of psychology because they do what works and proof or deeper understanding is not necessary. The fact they use it and it works is enough for me.
I only took one entry level anthropology course and it had little to do with tribes or so called "primitive" societies after the first few weeks.
It was easy to see over a decade ago that REAL computers will be for nerds once all the consumer devices are computerized so they no longer need a general purpose computer.
People bought computers to replace multiple old technologies (it cost many times more so it had to) from paper to typewriters to encyclopedias, CD collection, and now even the bookshelf. Most consumers didn't even scratch the surface of what the general PC could do.The general computer allows everything to converge on it because it's so flexible but it's also always going to be more complex. Once you can do what you want with the upgraded version of the old tech, you don't need the general computer. Outside of "pocket knife" like phones, divergence is the trend, not convergence.
Books never got far on the computer; but now eBooks are gaining ground like never before because of electronic book devices - which will gain ground against the book as long as the feature creep doesn't undermine the device's primary purpose - replacing a paper book. Your TV is increasingly smart and computerized all by itself and is mostly incompatible other than the shared cloud services, it's abilities are limited and again, anything to over generalize it will eventually undermine it's primary function. It's moving into the DVR and Blueray space; both of which are not really compatible with each other or the smart TV other than the image signal... not even the remotes are compatible enough to chuck any one of them. They have some overlap but they don't work together and the specialty add-on box is NOT desirable... consumers would prefer an app or plug-in device over another box. It could happen that cable TV boxes and SAT boxes become locked down apps for smart TVs... if they could converge against the generally divergent trend. A DVR could simply be storage and software on the TV; but again, we are still not converging (either way, it's still diverging from the PC.)
Smart phones like I said are an exception to the trend; but as we can see, it's a consumer device in a walled garden - even when business replaces PCs with smart phones wireless controlling operating your office space - it'll be a specialized set of tools in a walled environment with less flexibility. Most office computer needs are extremely limited and now migrating to the "cloud" where thin clients are all the rage.
Gaming is already diverging to all the different niche devices, each of which are well positioned for certain kinds or situations for playing games. Consoles in some form will exist but they'll be a slice of the market instead of defining the market. Just like the PC will be a small slice of the computer market.
Tribalism applied; it's actually basic Freud the same kind of stuff that gave birth to modern propaganda.
The tribal appeals work extremely well on primitive tribal minded people and is still somewhat effective on normal people. I would think the more extreme ones are the haters in these edge cases. It is not all that well hidden that there was an intentional strategy to attach traits to the tribal identity; denying global warming for example was actually planned. It is quite a brilliant way to control people; just as people wear, chant, and behave certain ways to be part of their "team" without much thought other than (I want to be in this group) people will tend to adopt positions of the group as well; the members indoctrinate each other but there is a strong pressure from the group identity underlying it all. You see it clearly in war propaganda, where the other tribe are baby eating inhuman monsters and merely doing something like them becomes unacceptable behavior. A recent example of how ridiculous (but effective) it can get is the "Freedom Fries" hate against our French ALLIES when the war propaganda machine turned against them.
Being a successful maverick/individualist businessman going against all odds etc, fits in well with the identity (as well as the tribal identity;) however, that doesn't have the level of propaganda behind it as these artificially appended traits which are also elevated to the level of it being taboo within the tribe. One can be in the tribe and be neutral on businessmen but if you are "green" that is a really huge taboo! It's as bad as taking a wife from an enemy tribe.
One could theorize... that these extra gullible tribal people are so easily gathered and controlled that all strongly cohesive groups form and thrive on this basis; therefore, such groups are tribal because non tribal groupings can't form that level of a monoculture (for lack of a better term.)
From what I've heard and read over the years, off the top of my head:
1) Software has more complexity than most everything else; big systems more so. Software can change faster and expectations change faster; it's not a machine that is going to be used for decades and needs to remain similar over that time for maintenance reasons.
2) 2 year cycles where political changes result in different pressures, demands, etc. I've heard this is a BIG problem with government projects from multiple sources. A lot of the time that new "oversight" is anything but a smokescreen for an agenda... sometimes it is intentionally to derail the process (for example, to make room to add another contractor.)
3) Moving targets! Specifications are not detailed enough and/or they change during development - especially across the 2 year political cycles. These regulations they pass can take a year just to be legally codified into enough detail to be useful and even then implementing it in software involves lawyers and additional decisions / interpretations in order to implement it. Then you have the legal cases which decide things that cause changes as well...
4) Short deadlines, high demands. This was a 5 year project and they had about 2-3 years of time and charged more money but throwing money at development doesn't speed it up with the same level quality as normal project pacing.
5) Consultants are paid by TIME not success. Ask anything you want, they'll say yes and just bill more hours. Failure just means more hours and successful completion is not a big motivation.
6) The more contractors who have to work together the more troubles are created.
7) The more governments and gov departments, the more hurdles you have. Like contractors but worse; especially, if those governments are not cooperative, competent, or responsive. Many state governments and politicians have been trying to harm this project.
8) Contracts, renewals, punishments are purely political, NOT results oriented. Failure only delays you until the next contract you bribe your way into - if you even end up fired at all. This company was probably #1 in getting contracts and not in their services provided; they'll get plenty of future contracts and probably do nothing to improve the quality of their services... as they likely did in the past. The entire political process is a huge target for attack by contractors; it's best to do it in house than contract to sufficiently large contractors who can manipulate the process.
9) Metrics. Measurements of success or failure are purely political. Even with contractual metrics specified upfront, politics trumps all reason or law. Specific goals can be met but general ones can be grandstanded -- or design flaws that were approved or demanded can be shifted from the actual culprits to the contractors.
10) Lawyers. Involved all over. If not the root of all evil, they are right afterwards. Don't award corp X the contract, get sued by corp X. Fire corp Y for failure to deliver, get sued by corp Y or the gov sues corp Y... Need a decision to move forward with some implementation detail? must run it by the lawyers 1st... that could end up in legal battles with multiple parties before being resolved and I'm not saying these legal battles all take place in court.
With billions of drug dollars in the banks watch them ask for more bailouts; that is, assuming you can pull that kind of money away from them overnight--- which you can't because they will not allow you to do that.
Gates may characterize it all honestly and accurately (I don't know, but assume he does,) his perspective is naturally going to be limited... at best... likely it'll be myopic. The press, they are much more myopic.
The fact he seems upset the Exec branch was trying to micromanage them indicates a lack of understanding or an arrogance of sorts .The Pentagon functions too autonomously. It's as if they think they are their own branch of government when they are completely under the Exec branch (except for declaring war - something Congress abdicated to the Exec long ago.) They are too big, too bloated, too corrupt, too dangerous to our republic, the industrial military complex NEEDS a lot of downsizing and more -real- management to keep them in check.
Congress doesn't have to say about it other than funding and Exec oversight. Since they are heavily tied into the industrial military complex they have to get their hands into everything - force the buying of fighter jets that can't fly in the rain, keep wasteful military bases in their districts, etc.
1) Nixon was not impeached. He quit before that inevitably would have happened. Back in those days Republicans were against Nixon because party loyalty didn't blind them so easily as it does today.
2) Nixon did many criminal things, only a few of which were being looked into at that time and some never were investigated like they should have been. Impeachment wasn't about the war.
3) The knowledge Nixon was a TRAITOR by conspiring with North Vietnam to prolong the war for his own personal gain was known BEFORE he was elected but Johnson was too much of a political coward to prosecute a presidential candidate fore treason (plus it would then be used as justification in the future as a political tactic by the unscrupulous.) This information wasn't known until the declassification of the Johnson tapes a few years ago... very few people knew about it. Yes, Johnson started that tape recording tradition which died with Nixon. Providing battle plans is treason, providing political plans and altering plans to aid the enemy is far far worse than say, telling them how to make a nuke.
Using old parts I've been running such a setup since 2006. VIA EPIA at 1+ Ghz set with powerd to run half that speed most the time. Plus since it runs at 12V I have two power bricks on it for redundant power supplies. The WRT54G would eventually lock up with heavy P2P traffic or something; which is why I went to pfsense which was infinitely superior. Probably still is.
It's being replaced as soon as I can get that new low power AMD server chip that gets down to the VIA chip's power level (of 7 years ago...) not having SATA and ECC (I want to do ZFS) is now a problem and freeNAS is better suited. pfSense really shouldn't be used for a fileserver (but it does now have ZFS too.) I figure the pfsense box will run under 20W without the HDs and fan; it's pulling 40-80W now.
It does not matter WHO says the truth or if they are wrong 99% of the time.
One shouldn't brainlessly discredit a source simply because you don't like something they said and reliable sources you do like shouldn't be mindlessly believed either.
The benefit of people who are extreme or go beyond what you and I consider "reasonable" is that they are usually quite MOTIVATED to do a lot of the labor for you. Their conclusions could be insane but their labor doesn't have to be entirely useless all that supporting evidence could be solid or just 1 or 2 items flawed (it's the end conclusions where the big errors happen.) I saw plenty of good information gathered by the author of that one webpage (the rest the site has some crazy shit) and while it builds towards some nutty sounding stuff but that doesn't discredit the collection of former NSA agent's interviews or related Daily Show clips etc.
Sure some claims are beyond reasonable or even mentally "off balance" but it is still a relative judgement call for ignorant people listening to something they don't want to believe. Remember all the cranks saying upsetting things about the CIA, NSA, State Dept, Iraq war, Echelon, "detainee" "abuse", corruption, etc? Turns out they were correct... some were wrong about most everything else and others were 100% correct the whole time - but we treat both with no respect and lump them together... instead we trust our news media who got it all wrong up until it was undeniable. The cult of personality has a basis in irrational human behavior; don't fall into other forms of it.
This is especially important to note as that linked page focuses around NSA leaker Russell Tice who only had his word and reputation with zero hard evidence trying to stir up some real congressional oversight. The government smeared him and then people like yourself had an easy way out so you didn't have to consider the upsetting things he was saying. He was a "nut" so anything he said you didn't like was easily ignored... back 5+ years ago. Government is guilty until proven innocent; that precept is why we have term limits, separation of powers, democracy, a free press, free speech, etc.
Rather than make C++ appeal to people who probably should stay in their high level languages, I think they should be putting their time into productivity. As much as I liked to spend time in C++ not writing any actual code playing with macros, templates, etc. in addition to finding new ways to hang myself; I don't find myself doing C++ anymore - I just don't like fooling around enough (yet I still do perl for fun; does that make sense?)
I think all the man power needs to be put into technical development not fluffy graphics libraries. I'm not as big on portable compiling as I am for some kind of binary format and linking system that would make it easier for an old program to run on a newer OS without needing all these virtual machines. Not exactly Google's NaCl (or whatever it's called) or a byte code but an attempt to address such issues. Not for java style portability, but something so legacy software can run without easily breaking (which it can do even with Java over time) and yes, it would get into OS turf... just like many other languages do as far as how library code is linked and loaded.
It's been a long time away for me... I've not looked at C++11 but here is a wishlist:
Text output needs improvement more than we need graphics. More debugging, logging, dummy functions, test case related standardization - more dynamic binding, runtime introspection features and other things that go against the initial design goals but ONLY in limited contexts, such as debugging and testing; thereby, retaining the intent of C++ but unleashing it for development purposes (such as a console or recompiling running code and replacing it.) This would fit in with their trend to be all things to everybody without changing/breaking the past decisions. It would be difficult to implement in some cases; but it's a debug mode.
I've always wanted named parameters; which could have been handled completely on the compiler side without run time penalty. ADA style typing was always appealing, for some things. How about something like JSON object literals? Native RegExp literals? A built-in parser generator (grammar definitions that produce parsing code you don't need to mess with.) Easier internationalization.... forget drawing lines, give me a great way to print "hello world" in many languages; or localize time and dates. A Money class to avoid common errors (use of float.) Configuration API. Apache's memory pool system seemed cool to me (APR,) garbage collecting not so much. Parallel processing features (if not already some, work on more-- again thinking of productivity and debugging.) We still don't have a multiple level break yet, correct? (like an exception but more limited in scope and as fast as a goto. Don't freak out, I didn't endorse goto.) I wouldn't mind a way to define a graph literal... I assume we must have a String object that handles unicode issues... we didn't last time I touched C++. Unicode source files... that allowed use of math operators like root... which have unicode characters...
Just ideas... to help bloat the compiler.
The source link may not be so great, it does bring up a lot of true information that can be confirmed elsewhere. There are other leakers who have given us HUGE leaks over the years that have not gotten enough attention or people simply forgot
While it is not likely these are good people, officials in these government positions are TRAPPED by their jobs.
If they do the right thing, they end up in the same position as Snowden with the whole corrupt powerful establishment against them (plus the suckers) and if they serve the establishment (where they have a successful history) then they go on public record as liars. As far as legal consequences, almost nothing happens to them for lying to congress; in addition, that can be greatly mitigated by telling the truth in secret hearings... so they are technically not lying to congress (just most of congress, in public.)
It is grandstanding but mostly it's political posturing by Sanders, so later the public will see them as liars who can't be trusted with the power they have taken (arguably given.)
No, not you. you were just the one near the top. I didn't have a score filter on and was moderating until I posted this reply. You don't have to live around people who are willfully ignorant (because their faith is threatened) and I do - I'm still hearing their BS about global dimming they haven't read a thing about. The amount of unjustified confidence in this society is disgusting.