No one has touched upon it, but I'll give it a shot:
Why in Oracle's name are we still amassing paper on our desks???
I used to be extremely messy, with post-its and papers scattered around in piles and finally mounds. In the mid to late 80's I started to think - 'wait a minute! I've got this wonderful information processing machine, and I know how to program it - why don't I go paperless?'
The first thing I started with was text based - mostly chicken scratch on post-it notes. I transcribed the current 'open' items in this category into my computer (I had one of the early laptops at that time), and started to refer to my notes in the computer. More importantly I forced myself to use the computer to enter new notes!
After that I started to investigate other options. For names and addresses I found a virtual 'rolodex' program - goodbye paper based address book. I built up a bibliography list of books I owned as well as ones I was interested in aquiring, with brief descriptions of their contents - this went into a database, so I could search the dataset.
Over the years this system has become more sophisticated. I have blogs, a wiki, and a CMS (content management) system that I use to collect and search for my writings. On my computer is a virtual post-it 'sticky notes' program that I use to scratch out quick notes, and I've started to digitize, upload, and meta-tag just about anything I get my hands on. Some of these systems are connected to databases to provide access to additional information sources through the web.
My desk at home is essentially empty. Everything important resides in my laptop, or on a server that I can access from my laptop.
At work, when people try to hand me paper, I tell them to put it up on our work CMS system (that I put into place for that purpose) -- now most folks are getting into it, and seeing the advantage of being able to go to the website, and search for the doc there, instead of trying to keep track of it themselves on paper. What little paper I am not able to redirect is either filed (e.g. finance and billing records - some battles you can not win), or in one small folder that sits on my desk called 'working'; if the item is small enough, I either scan it, or transcribe it into my own notes in the computer. Most things are generated electronically - so people are usually willing to either send me an electronic copy, or upload it to the website themselves. The added benefit of having documents online is as changes occur - you don't have to worry about keeping your paper version syncronized with the online version.
What clutter there is has been 'virtualized' (e.g. working documents and scraps on my computer) - and much of it has simply gone away (nice to be able to slap a document into a CMS, attach some meaningful - and searchable - meta information about the document, and then forget about it). I try to limit the time I spend on paper, prefering an electronic document on my desktop to paper, and a URL for the document to the electronic document on my desktop.
I also spend much less time 'cleaning up' than my neighbors - because I largely don't have to (put a book or two on the shelf and I'm done). It amazes me how much cruft people print out and pile in their offices. It doesn't have to be that way - it is the 21st Century after all...:)
It sounds like the display of your complex information would be better (and more cheaply) served by a Beowulf high performance computing cluster. If the folks down at NASA can do it...
Anything that is high performance or needs to be tightly integrated with hardware or other local applications will remain on the desktop. (Video games, or productivity applications that have to interoperate - e.g. apps like video editing, sound editing and the merging of these into one product)
Anything that needs to be shared with a large group of people will migrate to the web - either as input to a content management system, or as a mashup of information from various systems for particular applications.
Of course nothing is set in stone. The multiplayer video game, while having a strong client side display engine and interface, also connects to servers to pass state information for all the players. Conversely, the information in a web based system could start life in a desktop application with the appropriate network hooks to move the data to web applications easily allowing more flexibility for the tastes of users.
I think Apple has the best mix of these approaches in their OS.
Do we really need to store everything online? Probably not; where it makes sense I think we'll do it (and we'll continue to). It will remain on the desktop where it doesn't.
Yes you do. Reverse the meaning of everything you said regarding your company and that is what it is like at my shop - with one caviat: if you do production Unix system development you at least have the development cluster to spread your real work out on in most cases. While we have vanilla Windows machines on our desktop, we also have a decent *nix workstation for doing remote development - I can't complain.
It would be very bad if I were a Windows-only developer - on more than one level. It would be worse yet if I only worked with MS Office documents and spreadsheets...(shiver! - I've busted the limitations of Office's spreadsheets, and ran system resources out on more than one occaision on my Windows box - it can't hack large datasets - more so with puny memory and CPU specs on the vanilla desktops).
I will probably have nightmares about this for a week...:p
Tomorrow I am buying a Macbook for my daughter, and a Macbook Pro for myself. This replaces two Windows boxes in my network (which will be reborn as Linux servers).
I know a host of others at my office who have the Mac bug, resulting in sales of several Macbooks, Mac Minis and a Mac Pro. Later in the year I plan on replacing my wife's PC with a Mac Mini.
I think this might be the year we see a dent made in Window's stranglehold on the home market. Of course, I won't really care too much about all that because all of my home computer hopes and dreams won't be pinned on Microsoft any longer.
Most people don't buy Apple's stuff due to the marketing. They buy Apple's stuff because it works and because it's easy to use.
Yep - because it is tightly integrated with a specific hardware 'set' -- everything is tuned to work correctly right out of the box.
An OEM WinTel box should be at that level, but usually falls behind because the OEM has a more difficult time trying to make the latest Windows offering play nice with their gear.
Once you have more money than anyone on the planet, being 'charitable' is easy - and provides a nice tax shelter for the money you don't show us that is still in your financial instruments. The good will that builds for the company you founded (and certainly hold large amounts of stock in) is just stock-value-inflating icing on the cake.
Bravo! Don't be upset when I fail to give you a standing ovation.
I've 'rescued' many computers from the dump - all of them put together from mix and match parts, and a brain transplant (Linux). I've got all the Pentium II or better machines I've owned, and even rescued a 486 laptop and shoehorned Slackware 10 onto it - and grafted a curses based window system (twin) onto it for added usability.
So I plan to hit the used computer store and garage sale market hard now that Vista has come out. I'll be able to finally put together that 100 node Beowulf cluster I've always been wanting...cheap!
I've got an old 486 laptop that I managed to shoehorn Slackware Linux on board. There was no USB ports or CDROM drive that I could use to do the install. So I went out and bought a box of 3 1/2" floppies - probably the last I'll ever need. I put the boot and root images on two of these, and installed the OS using a parallel port zip drive to deliver the application packages. The zip drive makes a much better sneaker/backup net for my old machines than floppies; I went out and got a bunch of internal IDE zip drives which I intend to install on all of them (not a priority, because I've got network to all of the machines except the laptop - so I offload backups across the net instead.
All of my remaining 'hand-me-down' machines are pentium 3 or better now -- so I probably won't have to resort to floppies ever again, unless I decide to start an old computer museum (not likely).
The new multicore systems are good for everyone - regardless of whether your application can take advantage of multiple cores or not. The new technology is certainly no reason to throw away existing code or skills.
You can run multiple processes (applications) on different processors - and I know for a fact that this is how Sun multiprocessor systems operate. For example, if you are using a Sun 420 (4 processors) - it can run 4 applications at 100% CPU utilization - which means you can get 4 times the work done that an equivalent single processor machine would normally be able to accomplish (+/- overhead for shared memory management). The operating system handles this, and schedules which processes get the various CPUs. I would imagine this is how Linux support also works (but don't quote me because I don't know for sure - someone in the audience can pipe in here).
So, there is no downside, as far as I am concerned. For your average end user of a home (laptop) system, having a dual core 64 bit system will allow him to run his favorite game on one processor, and TeamSpeak voice comms on the other - spreading out the work between the two processors for more efficient overall experience on the machine. For business users, having multicore machines is already making their operations more efficient, even without special software to make one application take advantage of multiple processors.
Eventually someone will build a module to allow developers to more easily generate applications that take advantage of the new capabilities on multiprocessor systems. There are only two arenas where I see this worth the effort: Video Gaming/Rendering (rendering and network bottlenecks abound - hence moves to offload CPU intensive algorithms to the video card to get every ounce of performance), and Super Computing/AI (where aggrigation and analysis of large datasets is costly); everything else I can think of will work fine without the need to split the threads of execution between processors.
Just because you can do a thing doesn't mean you should rush out and do it.
I got an Amiga 1000 in 1985, and used it extensively. Now, this was before my exposure to DOS - my two machines before that were a TI99a, and an Atari 800xl.
It shaped my concept of what an operating system should be at a time when Windows was little more than a dos shell application, and the Macintosh was a monochrome icon holding tank - neither of which would do preemptive multitasking then - or for many years to come. It was a multimedia computer before there was a concept of that in the mainstream. It had many of the capabilities that we take for granted today - as others have mentioned.
In the late '80s and up until the early '90s I was stuck with using DOS and Windows applications and programming environments - neither of which were satisfactory after my experience with the Amiga. So having the Amiga was both a blessing and a curse; while it gave me a window into the future, I had to suffer with the substandard Intel single-tasking PC clone systems, which took off. Thankfully Linux came along - and I was one of the early adopters of that - over a decade now.
Is Amiga dead as an OS? Many of the things that people found useful in the Amiga can be found today in Linux (applications that just work, less resource intensive, preemptive multitasking, excellent development environment etc). I think from a practical perspective, there is no need to use the Amiga. Nonetheless, it does have some advantages, not the least of which is its small installed base - a similar benefit that Linux once had (tight knit community for assistance, lack of a serious attack from crackers, etc).
P.S. -- I remember playing 'Arctic Fox', and using an IBM PC emulator on the Amiga in the mid-80s. What other software did folks fondly remember using on the Amiga?
For languages much different than this their whole paradigms are different, and many of the tasks themselves are no longer the same.
A good point. One example would be implimenting a fast hash algorithm in C; in Perl and Python this is accomplished for you via hash and dictionary objects respectively. In those languages, you simply assign key,value pairs to the hash/dictionary variable type; later you can do a fast search e.g. in python: value=myhash[key] or equivalent in perl: $value=$myhash[$key]; Interestingly, the hash algorithm in both of these examples is implimented in C under the hood.
On modern computers, getting the last iota of cpu cycles is less important than saving developer time in most cases. This is particularly true given more demand for software in organizations than there are developers to fill those needs. In an environment where users are clamoring for results, using traditional means is not reasonable, hence the development of higher level constructs.
Only under special circumstances would you need to resort to ultra tight programming (via C or assembler) - jobs where the number of cpu cycles is large (e.g. complex supercomputing applications), or the resources available are small (e.g. embedded systems) - and this problem domain is so small as to be the least likely case.
In a formal logical sense, all turing complete languages are equivalently powerful.
This is true - if you are only measuring the application running on the computer. What this doesn't measure are the man-hours required to accomplish equivalent tasks in each given language. I think I've illustrated why we should be selective when considering ease of development, versus system performance; in most cases you want to err on the side of more efficient development - because that is most likely where your problem domain will lay. Of course, if you work as a research scientist at a supercomputing lab, then you may come to a different conclusion.
I would say 90% of it is communications, and the remaining 10% is management's view.
If you communicate what you want to do and why you want to do it in a positive light - then you can't fail.
The best way to get management to budge is to illustrate why X is more cost effective over the near and long term when compared to the status quo. Of course you also have to be able to deliver - not really a problem if you are motivated to learn and grow new technologies anyway.
There are several folks in my organization who've been in management, who stepped down for various reasons - not the least of which was recognizing their own limits - finding that sweet spot where their productivity and value to the company is maximized.
The more I communicate with others in this field, the more I realize I must work for an unusually good company in this regard.
I made a conscious choice to step down. I did it to get onto a project that is the new core of our business in cutting edge technology. I took a cut in pay. That being said, I get to get my hands dirty in the new technology, and I parlay my experience with the business into being a key player on the team for architectural and development decisions. I'm 42.
So, the Peter Principle works as long as you let it work. You don't have to become a fat cat sitting in a corner office getting fatter - unless you want to.
The PERFORM Act would require satellite, cable and Internet broadcasters to pay fair market value for the performance of digital music. Additionally, the bill would require the use of readily available and cost-effective technology to prevent music theft,"..."By their description, that means requiring all such services to pay "fair market value" for the use of copyright music libraries. The bill's sponsors argue the existing regime must change because it applies different royalty rates, depending on what medium transmits the music."
This is about royalty payments and preventing theft for the traditional record labels. This is *not* about limiting legitimately free music (which doesn't have royalty payments associated with it by definition). So if you write a song, record it, an release it under a free (e.g. creative commons) license, then you can distribute it however you like without limitation. I don't see how any reasonable person would interpret that any differently - and that is how it would go down if brought to court.
The sky is not falling - but there might be a fight ahead regarding the interpretation of the meaning of this if it is passed.
The Annotea Project is a W3C project that ties together standards that allow attaching metadata to web pages without altering the contents of the object.
The Amaya web browser/editor is a W3C project that serves as a testbed for the consortium's standards - including an annotea implimentation (the most interesting part of the project imho).
Basically, you can keep your own local metadata, or have a central shared resource with that implimentation. Of course, you could build your own implimentation that has other properties (merging/sharing annotations/tags etc...)
...something I have noticed few people think about: a PC or laptop is basically a tool that is sold that encourages people to fuck with it...it's a blank slate, a universal tool to be done with whatever someone wants.
A PC (and I'm not talking about an OEM model for the grandma - I am talking about a purpose built game box) by definition makes the best gaming system:
1. You can upgrade it. 2. It can handle complex controls via keyboard mapping and add-on controllers (for, say flight simulation and other complex games I wouldn't want to play on a console) to satisfy your personal preferences. 3. It is multipurpose - it can balance my checkbook, search the web, write the great american novel, build another software program to extend its capabilities to entertain, enlighten or get some number crunching done.
Game consoles are fun, for awhile. For any serious simulations or games (MMOGs, Flight/Combat Sims), the PC is a better platform - it scales better than the game console and provides better opportunities to extend its useful lifespan. Finally, you can easily turn it into a development system.
If you did a little research, you would see that the current leader of Sealand is an ex military officer - who I am sure has surrounded himself with like-minded and capable folks.
It should also be noted that a Dutch and German group attacked and took over Sealand - holding the leader's son hostage. He was able to counter-attack and take back the place - and held the attackers as prisoners of war, until diplomats from their respective countries made contact to get them back.
He has also sent shots across the bow of UK Navy boats that in the early years attempted to take the place back.
I wouldn't go anywhere near that place unless I had an invitation.
In the US we have debit cards that operate as both an ATM card, and equivalent to a credit card - only drawing the cash from the bank account instead of a line of credit.
So - the only time I have to enter my pin number is at the ATM. For all other purchases I use it like a credit card (and save the ATM surcharge as well).
You are absolutely right - business logic has to be code, primarily because it is constantly changing as marketing assumptions change, new products are introduced, and old products are deprecated.
Slashdot Mirror
No one has touched upon it, but I'll give it a shot:
:)
Why in Oracle's name are we still amassing paper on our desks???
I used to be extremely messy, with post-its and papers scattered around in piles and finally mounds. In the mid to late 80's I started to think - 'wait a minute! I've got this wonderful information processing machine, and I know how to program it - why don't I go paperless?'
The first thing I started with was text based - mostly chicken scratch on post-it notes. I transcribed the current 'open' items in this category into my computer (I had one of the early laptops at that time), and started to refer to my notes in the computer. More importantly I forced myself to use the computer to enter new notes!
After that I started to investigate other options. For names and addresses I found a virtual 'rolodex' program - goodbye paper based address book. I built up a bibliography list of books I owned as well as ones I was interested in aquiring, with brief descriptions of their contents - this went into a database, so I could search the dataset.
Over the years this system has become more sophisticated. I have blogs, a wiki, and a CMS (content management) system that I use to collect and search for my writings. On my computer is a virtual post-it 'sticky notes' program that I use to scratch out quick notes, and I've started to digitize, upload, and meta-tag just about anything I get my hands on. Some of these systems are connected to databases to provide access to additional information sources through the web.
My desk at home is essentially empty. Everything important resides in my laptop, or on a server that I can access from my laptop.
At work, when people try to hand me paper, I tell them to put it up on our work CMS system (that I put into place for that purpose) -- now most folks are getting into it, and seeing the advantage of being able to go to the website, and search for the doc there, instead of trying to keep track of it themselves on paper. What little paper I am not able to redirect is either filed (e.g. finance and billing records - some battles you can not win), or in one small folder that sits on my desk called 'working'; if the item is small enough, I either scan it, or transcribe it into my own notes in the computer. Most things are generated electronically - so people are usually willing to either send me an electronic copy, or upload it to the website themselves. The added benefit of having documents online is as changes occur - you don't have to worry about keeping your paper version syncronized with the online version.
What clutter there is has been 'virtualized' (e.g. working documents and scraps on my computer) - and much of it has simply gone away (nice to be able to slap a document into a CMS, attach some meaningful - and searchable - meta information about the document, and then forget about it). I try to limit the time I spend on paper, prefering an electronic document on my desktop to paper, and a URL for the document to the electronic document on my desktop.
I also spend much less time 'cleaning up' than my neighbors - because I largely don't have to (put a book or two on the shelf and I'm done). It amazes me how much cruft people print out and pile in their offices. It doesn't have to be that way - it is the 21st Century after all...
It sounds like the display of your complex information would be better (and more cheaply) served by a Beowulf high performance computing cluster. If the folks down at NASA can do it...
Natalie Portman and Hot Grits are optional. (j/k)
The reality will be a hybrid system:
Anything that is high performance or needs to be tightly integrated with hardware or other local applications will remain on the desktop. (Video games, or productivity applications that have to interoperate - e.g. apps like video editing, sound editing and the merging of these into one product)
Anything that needs to be shared with a large group of people will migrate to the web - either as input to a content management system, or as a mashup of information from various systems for particular applications.
Of course nothing is set in stone. The multiplayer video game, while having a strong client side display engine and interface, also connects to servers to pass state information for all the players. Conversely, the information in a web based system could start life in a desktop application with the appropriate network hooks to move the data to web applications easily allowing more flexibility for the tastes of users.
I think Apple has the best mix of these approaches in their OS.
Do we really need to store everything online? Probably not; where it makes sense I think we'll do it (and we'll continue to). It will remain on the desktop where it doesn't.
Yes you do. Reverse the meaning of everything you said regarding your company and that is what it is like at my shop - with one caviat: if you do production Unix system development you at least have the development cluster to spread your real work out on in most cases. While we have vanilla Windows machines on our desktop, we also have a decent *nix workstation for doing remote development - I can't complain.
It would be very bad if I were a Windows-only developer - on more than one level. It would be worse yet if I only worked with MS Office documents and spreadsheets...(shiver! - I've busted the limitations of Office's spreadsheets, and ran system resources out on more than one occaision on my Windows box - it can't hack large datasets - more so with puny memory and CPU specs on the vanilla desktops).
I will probably have nightmares about this for a week...
Tomorrow I am buying a Macbook for my daughter, and a Macbook Pro for myself. This replaces two Windows boxes in my network (which will be reborn as Linux servers).
I know a host of others at my office who have the Mac bug, resulting in sales of several Macbooks, Mac Minis and a Mac Pro. Later in the year I plan on replacing my wife's PC with a Mac Mini.
I think this might be the year we see a dent made in Window's stranglehold on the home market. Of course, I won't really care too much about all that because all of my home computer hopes and dreams won't be pinned on Microsoft any longer.
Yep - because it is tightly integrated with a specific hardware 'set' -- everything is tuned to work correctly right out of the box.
An OEM WinTel box should be at that level, but usually falls behind because the OEM has a more difficult time trying to make the latest Windows offering play nice with their gear.
Try using 'slapt-get' to speed things along...
Two words: Tax Shelter
Once you have more money than anyone on the planet, being 'charitable' is easy - and provides a nice tax shelter for the money you don't show us that is still in your financial instruments. The good will that builds for the company you founded (and certainly hold large amounts of stock in) is just stock-value-inflating icing on the cake.
Bravo! Don't be upset when I fail to give you a standing ovation.
I've 'rescued' many computers from the dump - all of them put together from mix and match parts, and a brain transplant (Linux). I've got all the Pentium II or better machines I've owned, and even rescued a 486 laptop and shoehorned Slackware 10 onto it - and grafted a curses based window system (twin) onto it for added usability.
So I plan to hit the used computer store and garage sale market hard now that Vista has come out. I'll be able to finally put together that 100 node Beowulf cluster I've always been wanting...cheap!
I've got an old 486 laptop that I managed to shoehorn Slackware Linux on board. There was no USB ports or CDROM drive that I could use to do the install. So I went out and bought a box of 3 1/2" floppies - probably the last I'll ever need. I put the boot and root images on two of these, and installed the OS using a parallel port zip drive to deliver the application packages. The zip drive makes a much better sneaker/backup net for my old machines than floppies; I went out and got a bunch of internal IDE zip drives which I intend to install on all of them (not a priority, because I've got network to all of the machines except the laptop - so I offload backups across the net instead.
All of my remaining 'hand-me-down' machines are pentium 3 or better now -- so I probably won't have to resort to floppies ever again, unless I decide to start an old computer museum (not likely).
The new multicore systems are good for everyone - regardless of whether your application can take advantage of multiple cores or not. The new technology is certainly no reason to throw away existing code or skills.
You can run multiple processes (applications) on different processors - and I know for a fact that this is how Sun multiprocessor systems operate. For example, if you are using a Sun 420 (4 processors) - it can run 4 applications at 100% CPU utilization - which means you can get 4 times the work done that an equivalent single processor machine would normally be able to accomplish (+/- overhead for shared memory management). The operating system handles this, and schedules which processes get the various CPUs. I would imagine this is how Linux support also works (but don't quote me because I don't know for sure - someone in the audience can pipe in here).
So, there is no downside, as far as I am concerned. For your average end user of a home (laptop) system, having a dual core 64 bit system will allow him to run his favorite game on one processor, and TeamSpeak voice comms on the other - spreading out the work between the two processors for more efficient overall experience on the machine. For business users, having multicore machines is already making their operations more efficient, even without special software to make one application take advantage of multiple processors.
Eventually someone will build a module to allow developers to more easily generate applications that take advantage of the new capabilities on multiprocessor systems. There are only two arenas where I see this worth the effort: Video Gaming/Rendering (rendering and network bottlenecks abound - hence moves to offload CPU intensive algorithms to the video card to get every ounce of performance), and Super Computing/AI (where aggrigation and analysis of large datasets is costly); everything else I can think of will work fine without the need to split the threads of execution between processors.
Just because you can do a thing doesn't mean you should rush out and do it.
I got an Amiga 1000 in 1985, and used it extensively. Now, this was before my exposure to DOS - my two machines before that were a TI99a, and an Atari 800xl.
It shaped my concept of what an operating system should be at a time when Windows was little more than a dos shell application, and the Macintosh was a monochrome icon holding tank - neither of which would do preemptive multitasking then - or for many years to come. It was a multimedia computer before there was a concept of that in the mainstream. It had many of the capabilities that we take for granted today - as others have mentioned.
In the late '80s and up until the early '90s I was stuck with using DOS and Windows applications and programming environments - neither of which were satisfactory after my experience with the Amiga. So having the Amiga was both a blessing and a curse; while it gave me a window into the future, I had to suffer with the substandard Intel single-tasking PC clone systems, which took off. Thankfully Linux came along - and I was one of the early adopters of that - over a decade now.
Is Amiga dead as an OS? Many of the things that people found useful in the Amiga can be found today in Linux (applications that just work, less resource intensive, preemptive multitasking, excellent development environment etc). I think from a practical perspective, there is no need to use the Amiga. Nonetheless, it does have some advantages, not the least of which is its small installed base - a similar benefit that Linux once had (tight knit community for assistance, lack of a serious attack from crackers, etc).
P.S. -- I remember playing 'Arctic Fox', and using an IBM PC emulator on the Amiga in the mid-80s. What other software did folks fondly remember using on the Amiga?
This was actually a smart move - this caters to the needs of our future robot overlords.
A good point. One example would be implimenting a fast hash algorithm in C; in Perl and Python this is accomplished for you via hash and dictionary objects respectively. In those languages, you simply assign key,value pairs to the hash/dictionary variable type; later you can do a fast search e.g. in python: value=myhash[key]
or equivalent in perl:
$value=$myhash[$key];
Interestingly, the hash algorithm in both of these examples is implimented in C under the hood.
On modern computers, getting the last iota of cpu cycles is less important than saving developer time in most cases. This is particularly true given more demand for software in organizations than there are developers to fill those needs. In an environment where users are clamoring for results, using traditional means is not reasonable, hence the development of higher level constructs.
Only under special circumstances would you need to resort to ultra tight programming (via C or assembler) - jobs where the number of cpu cycles is large (e.g. complex supercomputing applications), or the resources available are small (e.g. embedded systems) - and this problem domain is so small as to be the least likely case.
This is true - if you are only measuring the application running on the computer. What this doesn't measure are the man-hours required to accomplish equivalent tasks in each given language. I think I've illustrated why we should be selective when considering ease of development, versus system performance; in most cases you want to err on the side of more efficient development - because that is most likely where your problem domain will lay. Of course, if you work as a research scientist at a supercomputing lab, then you may come to a different conclusion.
I would say 90% of it is communications, and the remaining 10% is management's view.
If you communicate what you want to do and why you want to do it in a positive light - then you can't fail.
The best way to get management to budge is to illustrate why X is more cost effective over the near and long term when compared to the status quo. Of course you also have to be able to deliver - not really a problem if you are motivated to learn and grow new technologies anyway.
There are several folks in my organization who've been in management, who stepped down for various reasons - not the least of which was recognizing their own limits - finding that sweet spot where their productivity and value to the company is maximized.
The more I communicate with others in this field, the more I realize I must work for an unusually good company in this regard.
I made a conscious choice to step down. I did it to get onto a project that is the new core of our business in cutting edge technology. I took a cut in pay. That being said, I get to get my hands dirty in the new technology, and I parlay my experience with the business into being a key player on the team for architectural and development decisions. I'm 42.
So, the Peter Principle works as long as you let it work. You don't have to become a fat cat sitting in a corner office getting fatter - unless you want to.
I have to agree with others here - if you are trying to break security on a live site, you are liable - given current laws.
On the other hand, why not set up your own lab and use that for testing? No one is going to prosecute you for breaking into your own gear.
Publishing "IIS has X vulnerability", is much better than saying "I found X vulnerability in IIS on Y's site". 'Y' won't appreciate it very much...
This is about royalty payments and preventing theft for the traditional record labels. This is *not* about limiting legitimately free music (which doesn't have royalty payments associated with it by definition). So if you write a song, record it, an release it under a free (e.g. creative commons) license, then you can distribute it however you like without limitation. I don't see how any reasonable person would interpret that any differently - and that is how it would go down if brought to court.
The sky is not falling - but there might be a fight ahead regarding the interpretation of the meaning of this if it is passed.
The Annotea Project is a W3C project that ties together standards that allow attaching metadata to web pages without altering the contents of the object.
The Amaya web browser/editor is a W3C project that serves as a testbed for the consortium's standards - including an annotea implimentation (the most interesting part of the project imho).
Basically, you can keep your own local metadata, or have a central shared resource with that implimentation. Of course, you could build your own implimentation that has other properties (merging/sharing annotations/tags etc...)
A PC (and I'm not talking about an OEM model for the grandma - I am talking about a purpose built game box) by definition makes the best gaming system:
1. You can upgrade it.
2. It can handle complex controls via keyboard mapping and add-on controllers (for, say flight simulation and other complex games I wouldn't want to play on a console) to satisfy your personal preferences.
3. It is multipurpose - it can balance my checkbook, search the web, write the great american novel, build another software program to extend its capabilities to entertain, enlighten or get some number crunching done.
Game consoles are fun, for awhile. For any serious simulations or games (MMOGs, Flight/Combat Sims), the PC is a better platform - it scales better than the game console and provides better opportunities to extend its useful lifespan. Finally, you can easily turn it into a development system.
From that perspective, I would imagine it's not what they are running, but what their administration is allowing them to do with it.
You might want to rethink that 91 degrees.
If you did a little research, you would see that the current leader of Sealand is an ex military officer - who I am sure has surrounded himself with like-minded and capable folks.
It should also be noted that a Dutch and German group attacked and took over Sealand - holding the leader's son hostage. He was able to counter-attack and take back the place - and held the attackers as prisoners of war, until diplomats from their respective countries made contact to get them back.
He has also sent shots across the bow of UK Navy boats that in the early years attempted to take the place back.
I wouldn't go anywhere near that place unless I had an invitation.
In the US we have debit cards that operate as both an ATM card, and equivalent to a credit card - only drawing the cash from the bank account instead of a line of credit.
So - the only time I have to enter my pin number is at the ATM. For all other purchases I use it like a credit card (and save the ATM surcharge as well).
The choice is simple - either continue to accept the old business model, or don't. It is up to all of us to make that choice for ourselves.
You are absolutely right - business logic has to be code, primarily because it is constantly changing as marketing assumptions change, new products are introduced, and old products are deprecated.