Sigh, actually, you're right. I did go over the top. It's just that sometimes this unprofessionalism gets a little bit too much... and i just faced it a few hours ago. Anyway...
Well, ok. The same argument can be extended to ANY profession though. A good architect also needs to sit with the client to understand their needs and has to tackle both the highly demanding clients along with the easygoing ones. I'm not being so inflexible as to suggest that any delay is intolerable. I can understand having to wait once in a while. However, a trip to the doctor invariably takes away half a day (which is worth more than what i pay to the doctor, incidentally), as opposed to an hour with any other professional. I'm sure that after a few years, a good doctor would be easily able to predict the average time taken for a diagnosis (in my experience, good doctors are paradoxically faster!). Again, perhaps i'm being overly harsh, but i still feel that a disproportionately high number of doctors are in the same league as stock traders or pilots, when it comes to hubris. With due apologies to doctors who don't fit this category.
One question: Do the scientists have a moral obligation to get the parents' approval before they commence their experiments? Agreed, the extra fetuses or eggs would have been incinerated anyway. Nonetheless, a parent might still feel icky if they learnt that their fetuses are being used for experiments. In any case, the parents are paying the clinic to help them get a baby, NOT to aid stem cell research.
Disclaimer: I'm definitely not one of those anti stem-cell fanatics. That should not preclude us from raising moral or ethical issues about how these experiements are conducted, however. In any case, most doctors/researchers have such an inflated ego or god complex that they would not even think twice before trampling an individual's basic human values.
[rant] To digress wildly, why are doctors the only breed that give you an appointment after a week and *then* make you wait for 2 hours in the waiting room. Would you take the same shit if it was your carpenter or lawyer? Someone should sue their egotistical asses, i tell you.[/rant]
"I want to have several mailboxes under the same signin name."
Why don't you use GMail's forwarding feature to do this? Create 2-3 GMail accounts and forward all the emails to a single GMail account. This way, you only need to login to one single aggregated account. Additionally, you can also setup rules in your main account to labelize and archive the mails that you receive as forwards. This would not allow you to reply with the forwarded email ID however, which is a big drawback. Actually, your idea is quite neat. Allowing us to reply with alternate IDs and alternate email addresses is a very useful feature.
"Summary: Duel use facilities when getting government funding to save tax payers: Good."
Perhaps, "duel" would be the wrong choice of word here;-)
Jokes apart, the parent poster does have a valid point. While the use of military funding to finance a fundamental research project may initially sound like a good idea, it is also something that should be very carefully considered. While defence funded projects have benefited basic science in direct or indirect ways, it is not guaranteed to do so. Even if this funding comes without too many strings attached, what happens if the views of the scientists is in direct conflict with the views of their funding agency? Do they compromise on the integrity of their research goals because their obligation, even a moral one, towards their funder?
While i don't know the particulars of this joint effort, i still think that basic science should be kept as independant of corporate or military obligations as possible.
I think so too. Tie this with the fact that Google's buying a whole lot of dark fibre, it makes sense. They've already released the upgraded desktop search along with the sidebar. Deploying the IM through their toolbar or sidebar would be a piece of cake for Google. The question is: how do they make money from a VOIP service or even an IM application if they'll provide the service for free?
Hopefully, the fact that we just discovered an ice lake in Mars should provide NASA its much needed funding. On a slightly different note, why can't NASA work with private contractors to outsource their delivery vehicle research? I can understand their concerns of technology getting leaked, but don't the defense departments do it all the time? This can only benefit space research, right?
Sorry if i'm not too fond of Netscape. Back in the dotcom daze, most of us "web programmers" would typically spend half our time in developing web pages, and the other half in getting the damn thing to work in Netscape, especially fancy Javascript/DHTML and table/image alignment. Ok, Netscape did have a javascript console but that was about it. Then, there would be all the graphics designers sitting on top of our heads, asking us to reformat the entire table structure just because one lousy column was not displaying "just so" in Netscape and would spoil the gestalt of the page or some such. Then, we would change one itty-bitty column width from a number to a percentage which would, for some reason, screw up the entire goddamn page! Sigh.
I'm just an old dotcom fart rambling though, so take my rant with a pinch of salt:-)
IMHO, low power consumption might never make sense for nVidia or ATI. Unlike CPUs, cutting-edge GPUs are primarily targetted towards the avid gamer, who's playing his/her game on a desktop. Given this usage model, do you think that ATI or nVidia would refactor their entire design strategy to put power consumption ahead of performance? I don't think so, unless we're talking about mobile GPUs.
For both these companies, their technology leadership is currently defined by the performance of their top-end graphics card. They're also perpetually playing catch-up with each other to reclaim the performance throne, on roughly a 6-month cycle. There's no way that nVidia would be able to command a $600 price tag for their 7800GTX if it gave the same performance as a 6800GT AND only consumed say, 30W. Nobody would buy it.
" This does help solve the problem of distrobution however."
I'm surprised that the/. speeling nazis didn't find your typo distrobing. Either that, or "distrobution" is a legitimate word for proliferating Linux distros;-)
"However, video games don't give back the same benefits as say, food, energy and transportation."
Of course it does, albeit indirectly.
Video games provide food to the thousands who're involved in making, selling, and distributing video games.
Video games provide transportation and power by encouraging people to stay at home and play video games, which reduces the number of people and vehicles on road, which reduces the overall energy consumption of your city as well the number of people copulating in your city... or even in your home:-)
Yes, i do realize that my post, in retrospect, came across as a rant. You're right. $500 would be a more practical number. My point was only that if a person wants to become debt-free, no matter how big the debt, he/she CAN do it, if they have the necessary discipline. $500 a month in savings does add up to quite a bit over the years.
I was also assuming that the person under the debt would be able to allocate one income completely towards savings, assuming that their spouse is working as well, or that they're living a frugal bachelor's life.
Well, in that case, i apologize. I was guilty of assuming the (lack of) capabilities of Grasshopper without trying it out first. It does sound much more capable if it supports all of the above. Lack of Remoting support is ok. It's a pain in the nether to configure in.NET itself anyway:-)
I will give it a try now. My basic contention had only been that in order to maintain the ported code effectively, we would need people with special skillsets and who're at least very good in one platform and reasonably good in another.
I did come on too strongly in my previous post as well. It's just that my previous experience with porting applications has usually resulted in a mess. A large part of it was also that the original system itself was a mess to begin with!
"Three years later, he is dismissed from the university, $30,000 in debt to federal loans. "... "This guy can't get a good job, his grades are crap, and he realizes that he was born to be a mechanic working for $11 bucks an hour. He is happy that he has something better than working for $7 an hour in McDonalds."
$11 an hour x 10 hrs a day = $110 $110 x 6 = $660 a week = $2640 a month
Assuming $640 (or even $1640) a month as living expenses (i know, i know this can vary wildly, but i'm assuming that the person is living frugally, cooks his/her own food, doesn't have a family to solely support etc.), a person living on a mechanic's wages can potentially save $1000-$2000 a month = $24000 a year. Even if the person only manages to save $12000 a year instead of $24000, he/she can easily pay off their $30000 federal loan in only 3 years.
You know what i dislike? Not a person who's down and out, but a person who refuses to admit that he/she is down and out. Instead of reconstructing their lives, this category of people will still blow money like water, not work hard enough, will still retain an ego due to which they'll not shop at WalMart, and be perpetually in debt.
Sorry if this came across as a flamebait. It's just that i fail to understand people who keep whining, do nothing to sove the situation, and still manage to harbor illusions of grandeur while they're at it. What the heck's the difference between having a drink at your home with your friends (which would cost you 50c a shot) instead of going to a pub and blowing 3 bucks a shot just to drown your sorrows (which ironically would be caused by your debt in the first place)? Fair enough, if you can afford to do it, but illogical otherwise.
" How is this different from ordinary.NET development. You get weird and untraceable bugs in.NET normally."
The same can be said for ANY platform. The number of bugs that you'll encounter is a function of the quality of your system architecture and the quality of code that you write, NOT the platform. The.NET framework, in its current stage (1.1) is a reasonably stable and robust platform, and is no better or worse than the other alternatives.
"My guess is that you are either a student (Or recent Grad), work for a government agency, or Non Profit agency, education, or a Really big company that has a lot of disposable money. time-consuming == waisted money."
Yes, i do work in a reasonably big company, and i've developed over 10 medium-scale and enterprise solutions. Believe you me, no company has money to throw away. Every decision has to be justified across several parameters, namely ROI, stability, performance, maintainability, and so on. Furthermore, funding for a project comes out of a department, not from the company itself. Hence, your argument of a big company having a limitless budget is irrelevant, as the (big company's) department budget is never limitless. In fact, it might be much less that the budget of say, a startup or a much smaller company.
Again, i'm not saying that the plugin serves no purpose. All i'm saying is that this mechanism of porting to a different platform is only limited for simple and non-critical applications. As a project manager or a technical lead, are you willing to stake your reputation (or your career) and say that the ported Java code will be as stable as the original.NET code?
Will the plugin successfully translate a remoting application, a web service with SOAP serialization, an ASP.NET application that extensively uses HTTP Handlers and HTTP Modules?? A lot of features that exist in.NET, and ASP.NET/IIS don't even have an equivalent in the other frameworks. How about something as simple as delegates or the ASP.NET support for out-of-process sessions (state servers), which you NEED for a web farm deployment?
I think that half-baked solutions like this plugin is a bad idea, at least for code that will land up in production servers. I would prefer a vanilla implementation anyday. By porting a.NET assembly (or IL code) to Java bytecode, i would be unnecessarily increasing the chances of getting wierd or untraceable bugs. Then, there's the question of maintaining the ported code.
A better albeit more time-consuming solution would be to rewrite the source code itself. The plugin in question might possibly be of some use if we need to quickly port a small application from.NET to Java. But for an enterprise or complex system, no way!
This sounds more like an auditing software. It looks like this tool would allow you to scan an existing codebase to check for the existence of open-source code nuggets. Considering the licensing minefields that exist today, it's probably a good thing for a release manager to do before a "release to production". This is especially so because a lot of developers routinely copy-paste code from the net and usually don't read the license accompanying the code.
IMHO, this is quite an innovative tool, and would save a release or a project manager a lot of headaches in terms of legal compliance.
You're wrong. The laptop from which i'm posting is centrally administered. There's an agent running on my computer all the time that periodically runs a security compilance check, anti-virus scan, and automatically deploys a patch or a service pack.
I agree that my idea is not very well formulated (just thought of it). I'm also open to other alternatives. However, i do feel that the concept of an ISP providing these kind of services has some merit. Marketers kill to get direct access to their customers that ISPs enjoy. Agreed that there are very serious privacy concerns. Cost is also a big factor. However, the enterprise management softwares available today do allow ISPs or other vendors to automate this process. The cost in such a scenario would be minimal, IMHO.
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Sigh, actually, you're right. I did go over the top. It's just that sometimes this unprofessionalism gets a little bit too much... and i just faced it a few hours ago. Anyway...
Well, ok. The same argument can be extended to ANY profession though. A good architect also needs to sit with the client to understand their needs and has to tackle both the highly demanding clients along with the easygoing ones. I'm not being so inflexible as to suggest that any delay is intolerable. I can understand having to wait once in a while. However, a trip to the doctor invariably takes away half a day (which is worth more than what i pay to the doctor, incidentally), as opposed to an hour with any other professional. I'm sure that after a few years, a good doctor would be easily able to predict the average time taken for a diagnosis (in my experience, good doctors are paradoxically faster!). Again, perhaps i'm being overly harsh, but i still feel that a disproportionately high number of doctors are in the same league as stock traders or pilots, when it comes to hubris. With due apologies to doctors who don't fit this category.
One question: Do the scientists have a moral obligation to get the parents' approval before they commence their experiments? Agreed, the extra fetuses or eggs would have been incinerated anyway. Nonetheless, a parent might still feel icky if they learnt that their fetuses are being used for experiments. In any case, the parents are paying the clinic to help them get a baby, NOT to aid stem cell research.
Disclaimer: I'm definitely not one of those anti stem-cell fanatics. That should not preclude us from raising moral or ethical issues about how these experiements are conducted, however. In any case, most doctors/researchers have such an inflated ego or god complex that they would not even think twice before trampling an individual's basic human values.
[rant] To digress wildly, why are doctors the only breed that give you an appointment after a week and *then* make you wait for 2 hours in the waiting room. Would you take the same shit if it was your carpenter or lawyer? Someone should sue their egotistical asses, i tell you.[/rant]
"I want to have several mailboxes under the same signin name."
Why don't you use GMail's forwarding feature to do this? Create 2-3 GMail accounts and forward all the emails to a single GMail account. This way, you only need to login to one single aggregated account. Additionally, you can also setup rules in your main account to labelize and archive the mails that you receive as forwards. This would not allow you to reply with the forwarded email ID however, which is a big drawback. Actually, your idea is quite neat. Allowing us to reply with alternate IDs and alternate email addresses is a very useful feature.
"Summary:
;-)
Duel use facilities when getting government funding to save tax payers: Good."
Perhaps, "duel" would be the wrong choice of word here
Jokes apart, the parent poster does have a valid point. While the use of military funding to finance a fundamental research project may initially sound like a good idea, it is also something that should be very carefully considered. While defence funded projects have benefited basic science in direct or indirect ways, it is not guaranteed to do so. Even if this funding comes without too many strings attached, what happens if the views of the scientists is in direct conflict with the views of their funding agency? Do they compromise on the integrity of their research goals because their obligation, even a moral one, towards their funder?
While i don't know the particulars of this joint effort, i still think that basic science should be kept as independant of corporate or military obligations as possible.
and you could call it a hydricer, while you're at it.
that succeeding generations will now be called regenerations?
I think so too. Tie this with the fact that Google's buying a whole lot of dark fibre, it makes sense. They've already released the upgraded desktop search along with the sidebar. Deploying the IM through their toolbar or sidebar would be a piece of cake for Google. The question is: how do they make money from a VOIP service or even an IM application if they'll provide the service for free?
Hopefully, the fact that we just discovered an ice lake in Mars should provide NASA its much needed funding. On a slightly different note, why can't NASA work with private contractors to outsource their delivery vehicle research? I can understand their concerns of technology getting leaked, but don't the defense departments do it all the time? This can only benefit space research, right?
Read more about EFI here.
First look at this hack reminded me of the Bowers & Wilkins PV1. IMHO, a much much better deathstar subwoofer.
Sigh. If only i could afford one of these babies.
Sorry if i'm not too fond of Netscape. Back in the dotcom daze, most of us "web programmers" would typically spend half our time in developing web pages, and the other half in getting the damn thing to work in Netscape, especially fancy Javascript/DHTML and table/image alignment. Ok, Netscape did have a javascript console but that was about it. Then, there would be all the graphics designers sitting on top of our heads, asking us to reformat the entire table structure just because one lousy column was not displaying "just so" in Netscape and would spoil the gestalt of the page or some such. Then, we would change one itty-bitty column width from a number to a percentage which would, for some reason, screw up the entire goddamn page! Sigh.
:-)
I'm just an old dotcom fart rambling though, so take my rant with a pinch of salt
IMHO, low power consumption might never make sense for nVidia or ATI. Unlike CPUs, cutting-edge GPUs are primarily targetted towards the avid gamer, who's playing his/her game on a desktop. Given this usage model, do you think that ATI or nVidia would refactor their entire design strategy to put power consumption ahead of performance? I don't think so, unless we're talking about mobile GPUs.
For both these companies, their technology leadership is currently defined by the performance of their top-end graphics card. They're also perpetually playing catch-up with each other to reclaim the performance throne, on roughly a 6-month cycle. There's no way that nVidia would be able to command a $600 price tag for their 7800GTX if it gave the same performance as a 6800GT AND only consumed say, 30W. Nobody would buy it.
" This does help solve the problem of distrobution however."
/. speeling nazis didn't find your typo distrobing. Either that, or "distrobution" is a legitimate word for proliferating Linux distros ;-)
I'm surprised that the
True, with this barrage of puns, the old moderators should be exhausted by now.
Considering that this is a case-mod, they're also appropriately named mod-raters.
"However, video games don't give back the same benefits as say, food, energy and transportation."
:-)
Of course it does, albeit indirectly.
Video games provide food to the thousands who're involved in making, selling, and distributing video games.
Video games provide transportation and power by encouraging people to stay at home and play video games, which reduces the number of people and vehicles on road, which reduces the overall energy consumption of your city as well the number of people copulating in your city... or even in your home
Yes, i do realize that my post, in retrospect, came across as a rant. You're right. $500 would be a more practical number. My point was only that if a person wants to become debt-free, no matter how big the debt, he/she CAN do it, if they have the necessary discipline. $500 a month in savings does add up to quite a bit over the years.
I was also assuming that the person under the debt would be able to allocate one income completely towards savings, assuming that their spouse is working as well, or that they're living a frugal bachelor's life.
Well, in that case, i apologize. I was guilty of assuming the (lack of) capabilities of Grasshopper without trying it out first. It does sound much more capable if it supports all of the above. Lack of Remoting support is ok. It's a pain in the nether to configure in .NET itself anyway :-)
I will give it a try now. My basic contention had only been that in order to maintain the ported code effectively, we would need people with special skillsets and who're at least very good in one platform and reasonably good in another.
I did come on too strongly in my previous post as well. It's just that my previous experience with porting applications has usually resulted in a mess. A large part of it was also that the original system itself was a mess to begin with!
"Three years later, he is dismissed from the university, $30,000 in debt to federal loans. " ...
"This guy can't get a good job, his grades are crap, and he realizes that he was born to be a mechanic working for $11 bucks an hour. He is happy that he has something better than working for $7 an hour in McDonalds."
$11 an hour x 10 hrs a day = $110
$110 x 6 = $660 a week = $2640 a month
Assuming $640 (or even $1640) a month as living expenses (i know, i know this can vary wildly, but i'm assuming that the person is living frugally, cooks his/her own food, doesn't have a family to solely support etc.), a person living on a mechanic's wages can potentially save $1000-$2000 a month = $24000 a year. Even if the person only manages to save $12000 a year instead of $24000, he/she can easily pay off their $30000 federal loan in only 3 years.
You know what i dislike? Not a person who's down and out, but a person who refuses to admit that he/she is down and out. Instead of reconstructing their lives, this category of people will still blow money like water, not work hard enough, will still retain an ego due to which they'll not shop at WalMart, and be perpetually in debt.
Sorry if this came across as a flamebait. It's just that i fail to understand people who keep whining, do nothing to sove the situation, and still manage to harbor illusions of grandeur while they're at it. What the heck's the difference between having a drink at your home with your friends (which would cost you 50c a shot) instead of going to a pub and blowing 3 bucks a shot just to drown your sorrows (which ironically would be caused by your debt in the first place)? Fair enough, if you can afford to do it, but illogical otherwise.
" How is this different from ordinary .NET development. You get weird and untraceable bugs in .NET normally."
.NET framework, in its current stage (1.1) is a reasonably stable and robust platform, and is no better or worse than the other alternatives.
.NET code?
.NET, and ASP.NET/IIS don't even have an equivalent in the other frameworks. How about something as simple as delegates or the ASP.NET support for out-of-process sessions (state servers), which you NEED for a web farm deployment?
The same can be said for ANY platform. The number of bugs that you'll encounter is a function of the quality of your system architecture and the quality of code that you write, NOT the platform. The
"My guess is that you are either a student (Or recent Grad), work for a government agency, or Non Profit agency, education, or a Really big company that has a lot of disposable money. time-consuming == waisted money."
Yes, i do work in a reasonably big company, and i've developed over 10 medium-scale and enterprise solutions. Believe you me, no company has money to throw away. Every decision has to be justified across several parameters, namely ROI, stability, performance, maintainability, and so on. Furthermore, funding for a project comes out of a department, not from the company itself. Hence, your argument of a big company having a limitless budget is irrelevant, as the (big company's) department budget is never limitless. In fact, it might be much less that the budget of say, a startup or a much smaller company.
Again, i'm not saying that the plugin serves no purpose. All i'm saying is that this mechanism of porting to a different platform is only limited for simple and non-critical applications. As a project manager or a technical lead, are you willing to stake your reputation (or your career) and say that the ported Java code will be as stable as the original
Will the plugin successfully translate a remoting application, a web service with SOAP serialization, an ASP.NET application that extensively uses HTTP Handlers and HTTP Modules?? A lot of features that exist in
I think that half-baked solutions like this plugin is a bad idea, at least for code that will land up in production servers. I would prefer a vanilla implementation anyday. By porting a .NET assembly (or IL code) to Java bytecode, i would be unnecessarily increasing the chances of getting wierd or untraceable bugs. Then, there's the question of maintaining the ported code.
.NET to Java. But for an enterprise or complex system, no way!
A better albeit more time-consuming solution would be to rewrite the source code itself. The plugin in question might possibly be of some use if we need to quickly port a small application from
"It's time for you to put your mouth where our balls are!"
Presumably, a lot of dodging also happens in this process.
This sounds more like an auditing software. It looks like this tool would allow you to scan an existing codebase to check for the existence of open-source code nuggets. Considering the licensing minefields that exist today, it's probably a good thing for a release manager to do before a "release to production". This is especially so because a lot of developers routinely copy-paste code from the net and usually don't read the license accompanying the code.
IMHO, this is quite an innovative tool, and would save a release or a project manager a lot of headaches in terms of legal compliance.
"AdSense would also be accepting graphical advertising as well"
:-)
Are we seeing an AdSense ad graphic on top of the page because, uh.. this is an article on AdSense ad graphics?
You're wrong. The laptop from which i'm posting is centrally administered. There's an agent running on my computer all the time that periodically runs a security compilance check, anti-virus scan, and automatically deploys a patch or a service pack.
I agree that my idea is not very well formulated (just thought of it). I'm also open to other alternatives. However, i do feel that the concept of an ISP providing these kind of services has some merit. Marketers kill to get direct access to their customers that ISPs enjoy. Agreed that there are very serious privacy concerns. Cost is also a big factor. However, the enterprise management softwares available today do allow ISPs or other vendors to automate this process. The cost in such a scenario would be minimal, IMHO.