I'll tell you another reason to use public member variables: OOP doesn't have such a thing as a "public readable" variable, that is, a variable that member functions can change, and which can be read but not changed by non-member functions. The article lavishes praise on const, but this is one form of limited access a lot of OOP languages do not support.
There's a lot of dogma about coding practices, and I was happy to see the article take some of them on. Brevity is good. So, no useless comments, even no comments at all. I also liked the restrained use of blank lines. And, as you say about public variables, it cuts down on the verbosity. I didn't see any mention about the length of variable names, but I have no problem with "Egyptian Hieroglyphics", if you will, that is, dropping vowels from variable names of limited scope. I will also put several short statements on the same line. I see nothing wrong with, for example, assigning data to several member variables on 1 line, like this: "p.x=2; p.y=3; p.z=-4;". particularly when it is often doable as a single simple member copy assignment.
People who disagree about the desirability of brevity are welcome to use COBOL and XSLT.
Are you under the impression that I am fat and unhealthy, and am making excuses for it? Sure sounds like you and several other ACs think so. If you think that, you're wrong. I notice also that you ACs take the hardest line on willpower and personal responsibility. But see here, there are such things as external factors. Things beyond your control. And some of these things do indeed affect your weight.
It's pretty mean to slam people for being pigs, and characterize reasons as excuses, when there are indeed many external factors such as plastics in the food that are known to interfere with the body's signals. An example from cars: You can seriously hurt the power or fuel economy of a car by enriching the fuel mixture, getting the timing a little off, and many other factors. Combustion engines are delicate, finicky beasts. One change that caused problems with older vehicles was the elimination of leaded fuel. Engines run a little hotter, and it turned out that this was enough to cause the exhaust valves of some engines designed for leaded fuel to burn up. They would then not seal tightly, which of course caused power and fuel economy to plummet. Fortunately, the solution was easy: Hardened seats for the exhaust valves.
Now, whose fault is this problem with exhaust valves? Is it the engine's fault for not taking personal responsibility? Shouldn't have drank that unleaded gas? Of course not! Maybe it's the driver's fault? Is the average driver supposed to be an expert on the dietary needs of combustion engines? Rather like medical advice to take certain pills for the rest of your life, should the driver purchase lead additive from auto parts stores for every tank of gas for the rest of that car's life? Perhaps it's the auto manufacturer's fault? Or is it the government's fault for forcing this dietary change? But, getting rid of leaded fuel was overall a big win.
Quit playing blame and punish games. Obesity is a problem. Let's find the causes. Whenever we have enough info to act, let's make some changes. There will be some losers, and a likely one is the soft drink industry. But that's not really punishment, no matter how punished they may feel. Can't be helped, that's change. They ought to take responsibility themselves, and work on other lines of business rather than snivel about being victims of government interference and regulation or whatever. Stiff upper lip.
A pithy answer like "Eat less and exercise" obviously doesn't cut it. That's like the joke about how to put a giraffe in a refrigerator. You open the refrigerator, put the giraffe in, and close the door.
Some findings and facts that have received some publicity lately:
Gut microbes adapt to the food you eat, so that simple calorie counting is not accurate. Fat people can gain weight on less food, because their gut microbes are more efficient.
Sleep deprivation is another cause of weight gain.
Chemicals such as Bisphenol A mimic hormones. Many other plastics are also problematic. They get into our bodies because we use them for food containers and linings. Once in the body, they screw with our metabolism. One common effect is weight gain.
The food industry's first priority is not our health, it's their bottom line. Most of us are also suckers for this, often measuring the value of food solely by price. It would be expecting too much to hope that the cheapest food is reasonably healthy, and of course it isn't. Breakthroughs that extend the shelf life of fresh food cheaply would be huge.
There are a bunch of other lifestyle factors that can cause weight problems: too much sitting, pollution, artificial lighting, stress, and disease. The obesity epidemic is not going to be solved with a "Just Say No" campaign to cheeseburgers.
I find exercise for the sake of exercise alone boring. Much more fun to add a bit of subversive activity. What do I mean?
Take along some chalk, and mark up the sidewalk. Put a brief History of the Earth, something like "4.5 billion years ago: Earth forms, 542 million years ago: Cambrian explosion, 65 million years ago: meteor causes extinction of dinosaurs", on the sidewalk near a church, particularly one known to push Creationism. Put down some facts about Global Warming near a gas station.
But what is the real cost of our profligate use of artificial lighting? The cost in energy is not much per fixture, but we have so many that it is a significant portion of our energy usage. It screws up our circadian rhythms, at considerable costs in additional health problems. It also kills millions of insects which have evolved to orient on moonlight in order to fly straight so they can spread out. Instead, these insects now fly in circles around our lights until they are gobbled up by predators or drop from exhaustion. There aren't yet enough artificial lights to outshine the moon everywhere, but insects are surely already evolving to change this behavior. Meantime, possibly our crops are not being pollinated as well. Insects are extremely important to the environment, and we're messing them up. Doesn't matter that we didn't mean to do it. Anyone who is worried about "frankenfood" but is oblivious to this is afraid of the wrong things. Then there is astronomy. Quite a few observatories have had to move away from light pollution.
Why exactly do we have to have such well lit streets? The biggest reason is to cut down on nighttime automobile accidents. Next biggest is crime prevention. If autopiloting cars become the norm, they may well be equipped with night vision capabilities that eliminate the top reason. As for crime, we have so much remote video surveillance that could use infrared we hardly need have people standing watch at the site with light for them.
That's a kind of bias we humans favor. Wouldn't it be better if we enhanced our night vision, instead of using brighter headlights and street lights? Or, don't drive at night, rather than try to banish darkness?
Better to cure allergies to cats, rather than breed hypoallergenic cats? Cure allergies to cedar trees, rather than chop them all down? Go to bed when the sun sets, instead of using artificial lighting?
But no. Our society is sacred. The world must change to suit us, not the other way around. Individuals must change to better fit society's requirements. Someday, perhaps we'll have a cure for sleep. No one will ever have to sleep again!
If I got "gamed" in this fashion, and as long as they are healthy, at least I'd have healthy children! And that, even if it was only for my money and for a short time, a woman who is able to bear children chose me. That thinking is in any case too cynical-- complaining that she's only digging for gold when she did in fact bear you a child is like complaining that a car you received as a gift takes too much gas, or is not your favorite color. Many men would give their all for healthy children.
The $5000 tax credit is a joke. Caring for a child costs far more than $5000/year, unless you can't (or don't bother with) such niceties as adequate nutrition, a reasonably safe environment, and a decent education. Think of the pay you must forgo to stay at home to care for a child. Or you must pay for daycare, which alone costs at least $5k/year. It's not seriously meant to cover the expense of raising a child, but only to lessen the burden a little bit. Quite possibly it is that small because a bunch of smug moralists for whom having more children is entirely too easy are worried about "welfare queens" and "octomoms". They aren't even worried about overpopulation, only that people stick to Biblical notions of how families should be formed. And perhaps you are too. The evidence is that we are actually not a monogamous species.
I really don't see what you're complaining about. Some of us would gladly pay alimony.
Software from Europe? Linus Torvalds is from Finland. Julian Seward, the author of Valgrind and bzip2, is from Britain. The US produces more software, yes, but is that because of patents? I suggest it's because the US has a more entrepreneurial tradition, a more adventurous spirit, and that is because we are descended from the more adventurous Europeans who chose to come here at a time when crossing the ocean was a risky, blind leap of faith, and practically a one way trip. In the 19th century, Britain was the technology leader, and America shamelessly appropriated any ideas it wanted, ignoring Britain's furious complaints about patent violations and the like.
As to your investment scenario, that depends. If my goal to make a little money without much risk, then I would take a conservative approach, which may mean company ABC. Figuring in the choice is an assessment of the odds of the patent system being drastically reformed. I would guess that's very low. But if my goal is otherwise-- making money may not be the only reason to invest!-- then I might well go with XYZ. I actually do invest in green energy companies, and have lost money on this. But I figure the losses a little differently. If just one of those investments leads to a breakthrough that weans us off oil, then I feel I will be amply repaid even if I see no money through some swindle such as all my shares being made worthless in a bankruptcy, while an outside buyer gets to scoop up the results cheap. I know very well that the market is rigged in just this fashion, and that patents actually make this problem worse. Piracy is a real equalizer here. It's a flaw that our capitalist system does not account for quite a few costs and benefits, is vulnerable to this kind of manipulation and fraud, and is not well policed because the crooks have weakened and corrupted the people we have put in place to enforce what little we still have in the way of law. The SEC is not doing its job. So I also keep an ear open for alternatives to the stock markets. GPL is one such alternative. Makes sure that no matter what games these criminal fools play with intellectual properties, our work does not end up locked up, buried, and lost.
Imagine if some university makes a breakthrough with batteries that make the electric car practical, and a company acquires exclusive rights to this technology. Then suppose this company is driven into bankruptcy and taken over by the oil industry, who decides it will be more profitable to their existing business to keep this new tech from seeing the light of day for as long as possible. For years there have been these urban legends of the magical mythical 100 MPG carburettor that was kept from the public. The oil companies bribed the auto manufacturers to bury it. Or the auto manufacturers themselves decided to bury it. These legends persist because it is quite plausible to suggest companies would do such anti-social things.
Now, you ask how to encourage innovation. Patents and copyrights are supposed to do just that. But do they really? I would say the evidence is at the least very mixed on that point, and even does show that they actually retard innovation. So, what do we do instead? One option is nothing at all. Abolish all patents, and replace them with nothing. Innovation is its own reward. The first mover advantage is enough. Another option is to go to some kind of patronage system. This worked quite well in the past. For instance, European music flourished as the dozens of small independent states competed with one another in matters of culture as well as war and commerce. No respectable court lacked a court composer. Competitive patronage also got us to the moon. Niel Armstrong said "a man" (or just "man") and "mankind", not "an American" and "America". America got the honor of being the sponsor, the patron, of this huge accomplishment. It was much the same with the transcontinental railroad. Private corporations did the work, but it would never have happened without governmen
As has been said before, correlation is not causation.
Is Europe such a wasteland of software innovation? I don't uncritically accept that proposition. How do you measure that? I hope you aren't using number of patents granted as a measure, as it should be obvious that will very badly skew the results towards the US.
I also don't buy the idea that excluding others is the way to profit. Sure, it profits the company that is granted an exclusion, but is this to the profit of the public as a whole? Because a company can get an exclusive grant, a monopoly in other words, you think that will encourage them to produce more things that are worthy of such a grant, and so it is a net profit for all. We have many studies showing that this is not the case, that instead monopolies lead to stagnation and gouging. Why should a company struggle to come up with new stuff when they can milk what they have? Indeed, they often go to war against new products that might undermine their cash cow. Consider how Ma Bell held back telephony. You couldn't get so much as a longer cord for a handset, let alone a second phone attached to your line without Ma Bell charging you an additional monthly fee. The only reason we ever had the ridiculous 110 baud acoustic modems was to get around Ma Bell's obstructionism. We knew they were a bad idea and a waste of money. The RIAA is still clinging hard to the CD, and screaming that digital downloads are just piracy. I wonder how long stores will continue to carry these horribly inefficient means of music delivery. If the RIAA could, they would not hesitate to enforce patents on the mp3 format, or anything else related to digital downloads, solely to prop up CD sales.
You're looking at it wrong. You're quibbling over where the line should be drawn, when there shouldn't be a line at all.
The problem is this attitude that you should know better than to violate a patent, ignorance is no excuse. Naturally, this is followed by the notion that violators should be punished. That's all very well, except for all kinds of issues. Has it occurred to you to question the patentability of the ideas that were granted patents? Most of all, the ideal of how the patent system should work is completely impractical. In this ideal, before you do anything, you're supposed to perform a search to make sure you aren't violating any patents. That in itself is completely backwards-- you should have no fear of unintentionally violating any patents because they are not supposed to be obvious! It shouldn't be necessary to do a patent search at all, because the chance of accidentally infringing should be so low that it likely won't happen. Instead, as we all know, way too many too obvious patents have been granted. Then, when you find patents which cover what you need, and you will, you're supposed to find the owners, if you can, and negotiate with them for a license. If just one can't be found, you can't proceed. If just one says no, which is allowed, you can't proceed. You have to find another way. At this point, you've spent a great deal of time, money, and effort on legal matters, and gotten nowhere towards your real goal. And the outcome was foreordained. The odds of running into a roadblock are nearly 100%. Yet patent proponents seem to seriously expect businesses to operate in this fashion, and base their punishments on this thinking. If only RIM had done a proper patent search, they would have found NTP! But in the real world, no one can afford this kind of effort, and no one does.
The solution? Do a big review and throw out a bunch of patents on the grounds that they are too obvious? That could help, but it's not enough. It doesn't change the problem that patents are still a massive hindrance to business and innovation. No, the real solution is to make patents less of a burden. Removing an entire class of things, such as software, from patentability would help more. But I think even more is needed. Switch to a permissive model. No more exclusivity. Patent holders should not have the right to drag infringers into court, not have the right to say no. Infringement should not be a naughty act. Don't even call it infringement, call it something like "making use of". Then patent holders should be able to merely point out that someone is using an idea they published, and apply to a separate organization for compensation. No more of this harsh punishment. No more vicious, damaging court fights.
knowing that end users will use it in an infringing manner
I have difficulty with this notion that a mere user can infringe. You don't quite say a user can be an infringer, but it's just a small step further from what you do say, and it's a step that has been taken and not immediately pushed back. That's what led to SCO demanding those $699 license fees from end users, and actually collecting a few times. I never felt that was proper. And I have not heard that those license fees were returned.
It is the producer who commits infringement, not a user. How is a user supposed to know whether a device or program infringes a patent, without performing a close inspection of it? Or is the user to rely on hearsay? If a particular model of Toyota infringes a patent, do all drivers of that model have to fear a shakedown or a lawsuit from the patent holder? Or repossession of the vehicle? Is merely renting or borrowing that model of car enough to infringe? Of course not!
I think these questions are wide of the mark. So much that used to require mechanical devices of considerable complexity can now be done entirely with software. A good example is a clock. A grandfather clock is a ridiculously archaic, hugely space wasting mechanical device of limited portability prone to frequent breakdowns and in need of regular attention. One of the big problems of navigation up to the 18th century was how to keep accurate time on ship, so you could figure out what longitude you were at. Big pendulums don't work on rocking, moving platforms such as ships. Now we can easily keep time with quartz crystals, and have our computers display the time any way we like. Clocks were obviously patentable and frequently were patented. Should they still be patentable, today?
But as I said, I think that's the wrong sort of question. It's like the classic question of good vs evil. You should obviously choose the good side, and a superficial look instantly points to patents as the good side. Upon reflection it's not so clear that what appears to be the good side really is good. Patents have somehow attained the status of being thought the "good" side, while patent infringers are "evil" pirates who "steal" ideas. We are being asked to comment on where this line between good and evil should be redrawn, as it has obviously been moved too far towards lumping a lot of good activity in with the evil side. Faust decided against both sides. And that's what we should do. Don't play this game of redrawing the lines. The parties running the show are corrupt and biased. They wish to perpetuate their ways, which is a conflict of interest. Do as Faust did, and throw the whole damn system out!
We need a "default is yes" system, not a "default is no" system like we have now. Use whatever ideas you like without fear of having to pay anyone anything, and sort out who deserves what later in a positive, non punitive manner. You do not pay to use ideas, instead, we would have various organizations whose job is to do that. No more hunts for patents and their holders, no more refusal to deal at any price, no more exclusive rights, no more monopolies!
Yeah, seems nearly everyone's been in a Dilbert workplace. I've been through my share. I wondered if I was just unlucky to end up working for such evil fools, but it seems not-- it's very common.
If management books and other wisdom tell us that managers are doing it all wrong, if we know better, why do we keep doing it wrong?
I can think of several whys. Firstly, I think we push ourselves too hard, and the temptation to resort to slavedriving despite knowing that it doesn't work, is too great for most to resist. When managers are under the gun, they see no reason why their employees shouldn't share their pain. And why do we push ourselves so hard? I've been wondering if it's that the US is in relative decline, but we, like many other declining powers throughout history, are clinging desperately to our supposed place. Or perhaps it's that the level of corruption is very high, and rather than deal with the crime, society has allowed thieves and their incompetent relatives to stay in control. They can't very well blame themselves so they blame us, ruthlessly pushing us to make up the shortfalls caused by all the theft. The SEC in particular has done a miserable job of policing the stock market. They sit on fraud cases until they expire thanks to the statute of limitations, and the fraudsters get off Scot free.
And next, on the point of nepotism, the way we choose successors for corporate leadership is Medieval. The boss retires or dies, and his son takes over for no better reason than he inherited most of the stock. When the son does not merit a position of such authority and responsibility, but gets it anyway, then there's trouble. The market does not work nearly efficiently enough to weed out corporations headed by fools, who are in any case entirely too well protected by market distorting, unfair advantages.
Next, power corrupts. Managers have too much power, and even decent people turn into monsters. Our society is set up so that anyone who doesn't have a job really feels the pain. Might end up on the streets, homeless, we're just that harsh. No health care either. But that's hardly all. We also crap all over the unemployed for being such losers. They're suspect people. Unemployment having such a stigma gives management way too much leverage. Used to be that being fired did major damage to your job prospects and career. It's still bad, but thankfully no longer fatal.
Finally, we're terrible at choosing managers. Sometimes it seems they picked the very worst person available. One way in which upper management often gets it wrong is in mistaking a loudmouth for a proactive person. Then the rest of the employees have to suffer working under an arrogant, loudmouthed idiot who is anxious to keep his own incompetence covered up using the tried and true methods that got him there, which is to talk up a storm of bullshit to snow everyone above. It can take months of misery for the talker to finally run out of excuses and evasions. And then upper management does it again-- picks the next loudmouth.
Extreme copyright and patent law could indeed cause the foundation of society to crumble!
We are one of the few animal species that cooperate and collaborate with each other. It isn't just our great intelligence that put us on top of the animal kingdom. Our cooperative society is arguably as important. If we are to meet the challenges we face, problems such as global warming, nuclear proliferation, and dangers we don't even yet realize exist, we need our greatest tool, our ability to collaborate. These intellectual property trolls would take that from us and sell it back piecemeal, in a "sum of the parts are much, much less than the whole" value destroying manner, for a price so high as to make it of little to no worth, and claim that they have the right to do this to us all, because "property is property", when in fact information is most decidedly NOT property. They don't want only "ownership" of discrete ideas, they also want to be the gatekeepers through which all cooperation must pass. Cooperation shall not happen until they price and approve it.
We could have had the digital public library by now, if not for copyright law. Think what such a public good is and means. Everything ever published, stored in a way that can be massively searched and queried in an instant, billions of times per hour. A traditional dead tree library could never support such activity. Imagine the number of people who routinely search the Internet all trying to do the same with a few card catalogs in the Library of Congress. You'd have to wait days just for your turn at a card catalog, there'd be so many people in line. You couldn't do any correlative searching at all without the sort of tremendous effort that used to be devoted to such endeavors as creating log tables. Your ability to find research relevant to whatever question you have is hopelessly inefficient. Mostly, people would not and could not do much inquiry because it takes too much time. Who can guess what we could have discovered by now, if only public libraries were allowed to digitize? Cures for cancer, AIDS, malaria, Alzheimer's, and more. More answers. Dare anyone decide any one answer is not vital to our very survival, without knowing what those answers are?
I looked into tankless when our gas powered tank water heater sprang a leak a few years ago. I concluded that converting wasn't worth it. Better to go with a solar water heating system. Also, that's the most efficient use of sunlight. Heat water first, then generate electricity from whatever is left over.
Unfortunately, I could not find a solar system for a sane price. It was $350 for a low quality new tank, or $1000 for tankless plus another $400 to convert the house to use it, or $5000 for solar. So I went with the cheap $350 tank as a stopgap. I hope in 6 years time, when the new tank heater nears the end of life, that solar will be more reasonably priced.
In any case, the tone of the article bothers me. This is the kind of obvious stuff-- really obvious with a big DUH-- that we should have been doing decades ago. It's free energy, and ought to have been harvested all along. It was worth doing even in the 1960's, when energy was ridiculously cheap. But the article talks as if there's some kind of altruism and enlightened thinking required to get designers not to be so stupid. Any time you hear of natives regarding the whites with contempt for their foolish and arrogantly wasteful ways, this is what they mean. Centuries before the Europeans reached the Americas, they could build houses that stayed cool in the summer without A/C. Builders bang out very badly designed cookie cutter homes with no regard for the variables of a particular location, and so you have idiocy like A/C units located on the west side of a home, large expanses of windows facing north, fireplaces so poorly located and designed that they might even cool a house down more if used, and more. Our housing has improved, but it's still incredibly bad.
Evaluating candidates is a hard problem made harder by the foibles of the evaluators. Too often they have unworthy agendas.
I look for projects which are significantly meaty for their time in industry... enough job changes failing to do that suggests a lack of motivation or aptitude neither of which I want.
That's exactly the kind of subjective evaluation I'm complaining about. IT really is crazy, and it's tough for people, even highly competent people, to do good, meaty work that matters. There's not much a lowly IT worker can do when management steers a project or even the entire company into a ditch. A good worker could perhaps avoid screwball companies, if there was more choice. Workers who graduated just when the economy crashed are screwed. There are studies showing this. They aren't going to have the opportunities and the choices, and their resumes won't look as pretty. Then an evaluator like you decides there must be something wrong with those workers.
I can accept that things happen differently in non-technical mega corporations and/or places without a critical mass of software people
Even businesses that specialize in software engineering make really poor decisions in what ought to be their core competence. I worked briefly for just such a company. They had a choice between me and another software engineer, and chose the other fellow. Turned out he was a horrible programmer, and 3 months later they hired me to fix the mess he made. This guy's garbage could provide fodder for a month's worth of dailywtf stories. How could they miss so badly there? But that was hardly all. The entire project was a financial disaster for them. They put the coders in a position where either they had to win the contract, or the company would have no work for them. So the coders, quite naturally, hugely underestimated the effort required. Said it would take 6 weeks. Note that I was brought in 3 months after the start. 4 months after I started, I was the only person left working on the project. I finished my part, and that was the only part of the project that was delivered. The rest was canceled. The irate customer would have sued them had they delivered nothing at all, so my efforts saved them from that.
That was one of my personally more successful efforts. Yet overall, the project was a failure. But I've been in groups where a sense of futility and doom hung over everything. Everyone can see the train wreck coming, and no one can do anything about it. We were required to solve an extremely difficult and not too well defined problem, in the face of cutthroat competition from rival companies seeking to take that work away from us. Management had little idea of the difficulties, and no interest in learning what they were asking for, or even agreeing on some plan. Instead, they resorted to the lowest of dirty office politics, saying anything whatever that they thought might save their jobs for another few weeks. Bad enough that they were clueless on the technical issues, but they weren't even any good at basic planning. Each was more interested in being the man with the plan, thinking that being the architect of the solution was the ticket to job security. So they fought each other over what the plan would be, and we were viciously savaged for our supposed incompetence, laziness, lack of initiative, etc. Do some work, only to be told it's worthless and you should have known better, and now you're going to be written up for having wasted valuable time. Some people have the arrogance to blithely blow that kind of criticism off, but I always have a bit of doubt, and found the constant questioning and accusations downright soul crushing. One manager told me to buck up, because it's better than being shot at in the Vietnam War, as he was. Maybe not. Better to have my self respect, even if I have to dodge real bullets, than to halfway believe I really am a naive, wimpy, worthless, quitter crybab
Employers have only themselves to blame for the "shortage". They reject perfectly good candidates out of hand, for the craziest subjective non-reasons, then complain there's a shortage. They have weird ideas about the extraneous qualities they think they want. Like, why is age discrimination rampant? They believe young coders are more easily bullied into working longer hours, and will take less pay. If they want to reject a programmer for being too old, they make up some other bullcrap excuse why, or don't even bother with that. They also desire what they call "loyalty" (while showing no loyalty themselves towards their employees), which really means they want the candidate who is not a "flight risk". They want a candidate within a "good" range of debt and desperation-- not so much that he will steal from the company, but not so little that he can afford to walk away. Evaluating that aspect of a person is very difficult, since they're not supposed to do that at all so they can't outright ask for the information they want. However, credit scores certainly help with that.
Employers are terrible at evaluating candidates. Can't tell a good programmer from a smooth talking bullshit artist. Nor, on the more subjective criteria, are they much good at telling the crazies apart from the merely desperate. The best they can do is hit prospects with a test on trivia about a particular language, the sort of stuff you shouldn't memorize but should look up in a reference. Quick, name all the reserved words in C++! If you can't do it, then you must not be an expert C++ programmer. If you try to explain why knowing that is not important, then you get that question "wrong", and are tagged as a BS artist to boot. I've had a so-called technical interview end after just 1 trivia question. They refuse to allow any time for training, demanding that new hires "hit the ground running". Candidates are expected to train themselves at their own expense beforehand.
I keep hoping, but interstellar is extremely difficult. It won't happen in our lifetimes. To get to Alpha Centauri in just 70 years requires acceleration to near 0.1c. That takes way more energy than we can currently give our probes. Thinking that a gravity assist can help significantly with that is like thinking you can make your car go significantly faster by having a person stand beside the road and blow air at your back as you pass.
Maybe we could eventually swing something on the order of 700 years. But just 70 years is really pushing the longevity of our current designs. Plutonium doesn't last long enough. In any case, how to make a probe last 700 years is only half the problem. Keeping a project alive, relevant data fresh on current media, and people trained for such a length of time would be the other half. 700 years is an awful long time for circumstance to scuttle the project. Can NASA or any other agency last that long? Can the US?
What's with this urge to punish? What has Marvell done that's so evil? Other than being a powerful US corporation, that is.
A good system would not be so punitive. And the application is so arbitrary and uneven. It isn't even clear that any crime was committed at all, and levying harsh punishments in such situations is just plain evil. I'll whip up a car analogy: two people are arguing over who owns a car and go to court. The court orders that the car be destroyed, and for good measure, that their driveways be ripped up. Then one of the disputants is ordered to buy a new car for the use of the other, and if unable to pay, is forced to sell their house. Which one pays for the new car for the other is determined by coin flip. That'll learn them! Wouldn't be long before that court withered into irrelevance as everyone avoided it like the plague.
If we had a decent patronage system in place, CMU would like it that someone is using ideas they researched, as they could apply for funds from the various patrons, and Marvell and anyone else could use any ideas they wanted without having to get permission or worry about some confused, crazy jury slamming them with a disproportionate "remedy".
Try to open any.doc that another company sent you. It will be f'cked.
That's a problem with the closed, locked down, and deliberately screwed up.doc file format, not LibreOffice. Even MS Office sometimes screws up on their own.doc files, failing perhaps deliberately to maintain backward compatibility. Use.odt, and you'll be fine. And tell the other company to quit using.doc. They could at least use PDF. We won't free ourselves from file format lock in if we don't try.
Try to create a DB
Are you crazy? I would not use any office suite for a real database. MS Access is one of the worst. Use Postgres, MariaDB (a MySQL fork), or one of the many proprietary DBs or even a NoSQL DB.
Plagued with problems? More problems than MS Office has? As I said, specifics or it ain't true. Don't give people crap, give us facts. Show me a list of show stopper problems, and while you're at it, a collection of files that demonstrate the problems.
I often hear this contention about LibreOffice, yet somehow the people making such a claim never explain why it is inferior. Can you point to a list of useful features that MS Office has and LibreOffice lacks? Or critical flaws with LibreOffice that make it unready for "enterprise" use? I would really like to see such a list. If you cannot, why shouldn't I take you for one of the many shills that appear to infest this site, particularly after you slang my alleged lack of experience in the "real" business world? When you say "get work done", you really out yourself as an MS apologist. I've heard that before from other MS supporters. It seems like MS has adopted that phrase as an unofficial slogan.
No, the cost of MS Office is not trivial. The up front price is only a small piece of the total cost of ownership. What of the upgrade treadmill? File format lock in? Inability to read old documents? The costs of constantly having to migrate documents into and out of Office is not trivial. It's a real pain to email documents back and forth for a number of reasons. These MS apps are entirely too eager and will accidentally launch viruses with one wrong mouse click, or even no click at all. And thanks to them being given too much privilege in the MS Windows OSes, they can thoroughly infect users' computers. So you have to buy security software, another cost. Security software bogs the computer down (more cost), and can't protect against all that much. Also, because the file format is not open, security software has a harder time detecting infections in MS Office files. Often, email filters resort to stripping out MS Office files entirely, and PDF has to be used for emails. So what do you do to collaborate? Use some kind of internal network for your collaboration, perhaps a VPN or perhaps shared accounts in the cloud. Then there's corporate espionage. How do you know MS Office isn't forwarding your work to MS headquarters? More likely, they're gathering data about you. That could be for perfectly wholesome reasons. You can also never tell when the big software company that you're dependent upon will screw up. You think having big daddy hold your hand is good, and it can be. But sometimes big daddy's hold is painful. Need a bug fixed? You're stuck waiting on their pleasure. If they're too busy, you can't hire someone else to fix it for you-- no source code. They've been known to go too far on occasion, initiating drastic action on a mere accusation and shutting users down until they can prove they aren't pirates. Do you recall the fiasco known as Windows Genuine Advantage? I don't believe MS is dumb enough to use the BSA too much, but that they do it at all is still pretty dumb.
Those are not nebulous talking points of a political agenda, those are aspects that carry real costs.
I wonder if this whole story is veiled astroturfing. $50 per year per person is a good deal?! Compared to an online game like WoW, maybe, but not compared to free, and I suspect not compared to a support contract for that free software. Funny how the only producers mentioned by name were MS and Google. No other office suite, such as LibreOffice, was mentioned.
As for collaboration, I don't know. Should distributed version control be built into a word processor app? Why not just have a plugin for git, mercurial, subversion, or whatever? An office suite is bound to do version control worse if they try to do it themselves. And as for the cloud, how about a distributed file system such as gluster, and VPN?
We're wiser to that sort of thing, and it won't be easy, maybe not even possible to get away with it. Even if they do pass some terrible bill, it may be struck down in court. Or it may be simply ignored.
What bothers me is these bastards are trying things they know are against the will of the majority and the public interest. When they try sneakiness, that's a sign they know an act doesn't have public support. They're supposed to represent us, not special interests. What do they prove when they ignore the express will of the people? That representative democracy doesn't work? That the only way we can get a fair deal is to start a revolution? The US has been in a long slide towards greater inequality, with deliberate neglect of a variety of problems.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll tell you another reason to use public member variables: OOP doesn't have such a thing as a "public readable" variable, that is, a variable that member functions can change, and which can be read but not changed by non-member functions. The article lavishes praise on const, but this is one form of limited access a lot of OOP languages do not support.
There's a lot of dogma about coding practices, and I was happy to see the article take some of them on. Brevity is good. So, no useless comments, even no comments at all. I also liked the restrained use of blank lines. And, as you say about public variables, it cuts down on the verbosity. I didn't see any mention about the length of variable names, but I have no problem with "Egyptian Hieroglyphics", if you will, that is, dropping vowels from variable names of limited scope. I will also put several short statements on the same line. I see nothing wrong with, for example, assigning data to several member variables on 1 line, like this: "p.x=2; p.y=3; p.z=-4;". particularly when it is often doable as a single simple member copy assignment.
People who disagree about the desirability of brevity are welcome to use COBOL and XSLT.
Are you under the impression that I am fat and unhealthy, and am making excuses for it? Sure sounds like you and several other ACs think so. If you think that, you're wrong. I notice also that you ACs take the hardest line on willpower and personal responsibility. But see here, there are such things as external factors. Things beyond your control. And some of these things do indeed affect your weight.
It's pretty mean to slam people for being pigs, and characterize reasons as excuses, when there are indeed many external factors such as plastics in the food that are known to interfere with the body's signals. An example from cars: You can seriously hurt the power or fuel economy of a car by enriching the fuel mixture, getting the timing a little off, and many other factors. Combustion engines are delicate, finicky beasts. One change that caused problems with older vehicles was the elimination of leaded fuel. Engines run a little hotter, and it turned out that this was enough to cause the exhaust valves of some engines designed for leaded fuel to burn up. They would then not seal tightly, which of course caused power and fuel economy to plummet. Fortunately, the solution was easy: Hardened seats for the exhaust valves.
Now, whose fault is this problem with exhaust valves? Is it the engine's fault for not taking personal responsibility? Shouldn't have drank that unleaded gas? Of course not! Maybe it's the driver's fault? Is the average driver supposed to be an expert on the dietary needs of combustion engines? Rather like medical advice to take certain pills for the rest of your life, should the driver purchase lead additive from auto parts stores for every tank of gas for the rest of that car's life? Perhaps it's the auto manufacturer's fault? Or is it the government's fault for forcing this dietary change? But, getting rid of leaded fuel was overall a big win.
Quit playing blame and punish games. Obesity is a problem. Let's find the causes. Whenever we have enough info to act, let's make some changes. There will be some losers, and a likely one is the soft drink industry. But that's not really punishment, no matter how punished they may feel. Can't be helped, that's change. They ought to take responsibility themselves, and work on other lines of business rather than snivel about being victims of government interference and regulation or whatever. Stiff upper lip.
A pithy answer like "Eat less and exercise" obviously doesn't cut it. That's like the joke about how to put a giraffe in a refrigerator. You open the refrigerator, put the giraffe in, and close the door.
Some findings and facts that have received some publicity lately:
There are a bunch of other lifestyle factors that can cause weight problems: too much sitting, pollution, artificial lighting, stress, and disease. The obesity epidemic is not going to be solved with a "Just Say No" campaign to cheeseburgers.
I find exercise for the sake of exercise alone boring. Much more fun to add a bit of subversive activity. What do I mean?
Take along some chalk, and mark up the sidewalk. Put a brief History of the Earth, something like "4.5 billion years ago: Earth forms, 542 million years ago: Cambrian explosion, 65 million years ago: meteor causes extinction of dinosaurs", on the sidewalk near a church, particularly one known to push Creationism. Put down some facts about Global Warming near a gas station.
But what is the real cost of our profligate use of artificial lighting? The cost in energy is not much per fixture, but we have so many that it is a significant portion of our energy usage. It screws up our circadian rhythms, at considerable costs in additional health problems. It also kills millions of insects which have evolved to orient on moonlight in order to fly straight so they can spread out. Instead, these insects now fly in circles around our lights until they are gobbled up by predators or drop from exhaustion. There aren't yet enough artificial lights to outshine the moon everywhere, but insects are surely already evolving to change this behavior. Meantime, possibly our crops are not being pollinated as well. Insects are extremely important to the environment, and we're messing them up. Doesn't matter that we didn't mean to do it. Anyone who is worried about "frankenfood" but is oblivious to this is afraid of the wrong things. Then there is astronomy. Quite a few observatories have had to move away from light pollution.
Why exactly do we have to have such well lit streets? The biggest reason is to cut down on nighttime automobile accidents. Next biggest is crime prevention. If autopiloting cars become the norm, they may well be equipped with night vision capabilities that eliminate the top reason. As for crime, we have so much remote video surveillance that could use infrared we hardly need have people standing watch at the site with light for them.
That's a kind of bias we humans favor. Wouldn't it be better if we enhanced our night vision, instead of using brighter headlights and street lights? Or, don't drive at night, rather than try to banish darkness?
Better to cure allergies to cats, rather than breed hypoallergenic cats? Cure allergies to cedar trees, rather than chop them all down? Go to bed when the sun sets, instead of using artificial lighting?
But no. Our society is sacred. The world must change to suit us, not the other way around. Individuals must change to better fit society's requirements. Someday, perhaps we'll have a cure for sleep. No one will ever have to sleep again!
Heretic!
English is perfect! There is no room for improvement! Mark Twain was wrong!
If I got "gamed" in this fashion, and as long as they are healthy, at least I'd have healthy children! And that, even if it was only for my money and for a short time, a woman who is able to bear children chose me. That thinking is in any case too cynical-- complaining that she's only digging for gold when she did in fact bear you a child is like complaining that a car you received as a gift takes too much gas, or is not your favorite color. Many men would give their all for healthy children.
The $5000 tax credit is a joke. Caring for a child costs far more than $5000/year, unless you can't (or don't bother with) such niceties as adequate nutrition, a reasonably safe environment, and a decent education. Think of the pay you must forgo to stay at home to care for a child. Or you must pay for daycare, which alone costs at least $5k/year. It's not seriously meant to cover the expense of raising a child, but only to lessen the burden a little bit. Quite possibly it is that small because a bunch of smug moralists for whom having more children is entirely too easy are worried about "welfare queens" and "octomoms". They aren't even worried about overpopulation, only that people stick to Biblical notions of how families should be formed. And perhaps you are too. The evidence is that we are actually not a monogamous species.
I really don't see what you're complaining about. Some of us would gladly pay alimony.
Software from Europe? Linus Torvalds is from Finland. Julian Seward, the author of Valgrind and bzip2, is from Britain. The US produces more software, yes, but is that because of patents? I suggest it's because the US has a more entrepreneurial tradition, a more adventurous spirit, and that is because we are descended from the more adventurous Europeans who chose to come here at a time when crossing the ocean was a risky, blind leap of faith, and practically a one way trip. In the 19th century, Britain was the technology leader, and America shamelessly appropriated any ideas it wanted, ignoring Britain's furious complaints about patent violations and the like.
As to your investment scenario, that depends. If my goal to make a little money without much risk, then I would take a conservative approach, which may mean company ABC. Figuring in the choice is an assessment of the odds of the patent system being drastically reformed. I would guess that's very low. But if my goal is otherwise-- making money may not be the only reason to invest!-- then I might well go with XYZ. I actually do invest in green energy companies, and have lost money on this. But I figure the losses a little differently. If just one of those investments leads to a breakthrough that weans us off oil, then I feel I will be amply repaid even if I see no money through some swindle such as all my shares being made worthless in a bankruptcy, while an outside buyer gets to scoop up the results cheap. I know very well that the market is rigged in just this fashion, and that patents actually make this problem worse. Piracy is a real equalizer here. It's a flaw that our capitalist system does not account for quite a few costs and benefits, is vulnerable to this kind of manipulation and fraud, and is not well policed because the crooks have weakened and corrupted the people we have put in place to enforce what little we still have in the way of law. The SEC is not doing its job. So I also keep an ear open for alternatives to the stock markets. GPL is one such alternative. Makes sure that no matter what games these criminal fools play with intellectual properties, our work does not end up locked up, buried, and lost.
Imagine if some university makes a breakthrough with batteries that make the electric car practical, and a company acquires exclusive rights to this technology. Then suppose this company is driven into bankruptcy and taken over by the oil industry, who decides it will be more profitable to their existing business to keep this new tech from seeing the light of day for as long as possible. For years there have been these urban legends of the magical mythical 100 MPG carburettor that was kept from the public. The oil companies bribed the auto manufacturers to bury it. Or the auto manufacturers themselves decided to bury it. These legends persist because it is quite plausible to suggest companies would do such anti-social things.
Now, you ask how to encourage innovation. Patents and copyrights are supposed to do just that. But do they really? I would say the evidence is at the least very mixed on that point, and even does show that they actually retard innovation. So, what do we do instead? One option is nothing at all. Abolish all patents, and replace them with nothing. Innovation is its own reward. The first mover advantage is enough. Another option is to go to some kind of patronage system. This worked quite well in the past. For instance, European music flourished as the dozens of small independent states competed with one another in matters of culture as well as war and commerce. No respectable court lacked a court composer. Competitive patronage also got us to the moon. Niel Armstrong said "a man" (or just "man") and "mankind", not "an American" and "America". America got the honor of being the sponsor, the patron, of this huge accomplishment. It was much the same with the transcontinental railroad. Private corporations did the work, but it would never have happened without governmen
As has been said before, correlation is not causation.
Is Europe such a wasteland of software innovation? I don't uncritically accept that proposition. How do you measure that? I hope you aren't using number of patents granted as a measure, as it should be obvious that will very badly skew the results towards the US.
I also don't buy the idea that excluding others is the way to profit. Sure, it profits the company that is granted an exclusion, but is this to the profit of the public as a whole? Because a company can get an exclusive grant, a monopoly in other words, you think that will encourage them to produce more things that are worthy of such a grant, and so it is a net profit for all. We have many studies showing that this is not the case, that instead monopolies lead to stagnation and gouging. Why should a company struggle to come up with new stuff when they can milk what they have? Indeed, they often go to war against new products that might undermine their cash cow. Consider how Ma Bell held back telephony. You couldn't get so much as a longer cord for a handset, let alone a second phone attached to your line without Ma Bell charging you an additional monthly fee. The only reason we ever had the ridiculous 110 baud acoustic modems was to get around Ma Bell's obstructionism. We knew they were a bad idea and a waste of money. The RIAA is still clinging hard to the CD, and screaming that digital downloads are just piracy. I wonder how long stores will continue to carry these horribly inefficient means of music delivery. If the RIAA could, they would not hesitate to enforce patents on the mp3 format, or anything else related to digital downloads, solely to prop up CD sales.
You're looking at it wrong. You're quibbling over where the line should be drawn, when there shouldn't be a line at all.
The problem is this attitude that you should know better than to violate a patent, ignorance is no excuse. Naturally, this is followed by the notion that violators should be punished. That's all very well, except for all kinds of issues. Has it occurred to you to question the patentability of the ideas that were granted patents? Most of all, the ideal of how the patent system should work is completely impractical. In this ideal, before you do anything, you're supposed to perform a search to make sure you aren't violating any patents. That in itself is completely backwards-- you should have no fear of unintentionally violating any patents because they are not supposed to be obvious! It shouldn't be necessary to do a patent search at all, because the chance of accidentally infringing should be so low that it likely won't happen. Instead, as we all know, way too many too obvious patents have been granted. Then, when you find patents which cover what you need, and you will, you're supposed to find the owners, if you can, and negotiate with them for a license. If just one can't be found, you can't proceed. If just one says no, which is allowed, you can't proceed. You have to find another way. At this point, you've spent a great deal of time, money, and effort on legal matters, and gotten nowhere towards your real goal. And the outcome was foreordained. The odds of running into a roadblock are nearly 100%. Yet patent proponents seem to seriously expect businesses to operate in this fashion, and base their punishments on this thinking. If only RIM had done a proper patent search, they would have found NTP! But in the real world, no one can afford this kind of effort, and no one does.
The solution? Do a big review and throw out a bunch of patents on the grounds that they are too obvious? That could help, but it's not enough. It doesn't change the problem that patents are still a massive hindrance to business and innovation. No, the real solution is to make patents less of a burden. Removing an entire class of things, such as software, from patentability would help more. But I think even more is needed. Switch to a permissive model. No more exclusivity. Patent holders should not have the right to drag infringers into court, not have the right to say no. Infringement should not be a naughty act. Don't even call it infringement, call it something like "making use of". Then patent holders should be able to merely point out that someone is using an idea they published, and apply to a separate organization for compensation. No more of this harsh punishment. No more vicious, damaging court fights.
knowing that end users will use it in an infringing manner
I have difficulty with this notion that a mere user can infringe. You don't quite say a user can be an infringer, but it's just a small step further from what you do say, and it's a step that has been taken and not immediately pushed back. That's what led to SCO demanding those $699 license fees from end users, and actually collecting a few times. I never felt that was proper. And I have not heard that those license fees were returned.
It is the producer who commits infringement, not a user. How is a user supposed to know whether a device or program infringes a patent, without performing a close inspection of it? Or is the user to rely on hearsay? If a particular model of Toyota infringes a patent, do all drivers of that model have to fear a shakedown or a lawsuit from the patent holder? Or repossession of the vehicle? Is merely renting or borrowing that model of car enough to infringe? Of course not!
I think these questions are wide of the mark. So much that used to require mechanical devices of considerable complexity can now be done entirely with software. A good example is a clock. A grandfather clock is a ridiculously archaic, hugely space wasting mechanical device of limited portability prone to frequent breakdowns and in need of regular attention. One of the big problems of navigation up to the 18th century was how to keep accurate time on ship, so you could figure out what longitude you were at. Big pendulums don't work on rocking, moving platforms such as ships. Now we can easily keep time with quartz crystals, and have our computers display the time any way we like. Clocks were obviously patentable and frequently were patented. Should they still be patentable, today?
But as I said, I think that's the wrong sort of question. It's like the classic question of good vs evil. You should obviously choose the good side, and a superficial look instantly points to patents as the good side. Upon reflection it's not so clear that what appears to be the good side really is good. Patents have somehow attained the status of being thought the "good" side, while patent infringers are "evil" pirates who "steal" ideas. We are being asked to comment on where this line between good and evil should be redrawn, as it has obviously been moved too far towards lumping a lot of good activity in with the evil side. Faust decided against both sides. And that's what we should do. Don't play this game of redrawing the lines. The parties running the show are corrupt and biased. They wish to perpetuate their ways, which is a conflict of interest. Do as Faust did, and throw the whole damn system out!
We need a "default is yes" system, not a "default is no" system like we have now. Use whatever ideas you like without fear of having to pay anyone anything, and sort out who deserves what later in a positive, non punitive manner. You do not pay to use ideas, instead, we would have various organizations whose job is to do that. No more hunts for patents and their holders, no more refusal to deal at any price, no more exclusive rights, no more monopolies!
Yeah, seems nearly everyone's been in a Dilbert workplace. I've been through my share. I wondered if I was just unlucky to end up working for such evil fools, but it seems not-- it's very common.
If management books and other wisdom tell us that managers are doing it all wrong, if we know better, why do we keep doing it wrong?
I can think of several whys. Firstly, I think we push ourselves too hard, and the temptation to resort to slavedriving despite knowing that it doesn't work, is too great for most to resist. When managers are under the gun, they see no reason why their employees shouldn't share their pain. And why do we push ourselves so hard? I've been wondering if it's that the US is in relative decline, but we, like many other declining powers throughout history, are clinging desperately to our supposed place. Or perhaps it's that the level of corruption is very high, and rather than deal with the crime, society has allowed thieves and their incompetent relatives to stay in control. They can't very well blame themselves so they blame us, ruthlessly pushing us to make up the shortfalls caused by all the theft. The SEC in particular has done a miserable job of policing the stock market. They sit on fraud cases until they expire thanks to the statute of limitations, and the fraudsters get off Scot free.
And next, on the point of nepotism, the way we choose successors for corporate leadership is Medieval. The boss retires or dies, and his son takes over for no better reason than he inherited most of the stock. When the son does not merit a position of such authority and responsibility, but gets it anyway, then there's trouble. The market does not work nearly efficiently enough to weed out corporations headed by fools, who are in any case entirely too well protected by market distorting, unfair advantages.
Next, power corrupts. Managers have too much power, and even decent people turn into monsters. Our society is set up so that anyone who doesn't have a job really feels the pain. Might end up on the streets, homeless, we're just that harsh. No health care either. But that's hardly all. We also crap all over the unemployed for being such losers. They're suspect people. Unemployment having such a stigma gives management way too much leverage. Used to be that being fired did major damage to your job prospects and career. It's still bad, but thankfully no longer fatal.
Finally, we're terrible at choosing managers. Sometimes it seems they picked the very worst person available. One way in which upper management often gets it wrong is in mistaking a loudmouth for a proactive person. Then the rest of the employees have to suffer working under an arrogant, loudmouthed idiot who is anxious to keep his own incompetence covered up using the tried and true methods that got him there, which is to talk up a storm of bullshit to snow everyone above. It can take months of misery for the talker to finally run out of excuses and evasions. And then upper management does it again-- picks the next loudmouth.
Extreme copyright and patent law could indeed cause the foundation of society to crumble!
We are one of the few animal species that cooperate and collaborate with each other. It isn't just our great intelligence that put us on top of the animal kingdom. Our cooperative society is arguably as important. If we are to meet the challenges we face, problems such as global warming, nuclear proliferation, and dangers we don't even yet realize exist, we need our greatest tool, our ability to collaborate. These intellectual property trolls would take that from us and sell it back piecemeal, in a "sum of the parts are much, much less than the whole" value destroying manner, for a price so high as to make it of little to no worth, and claim that they have the right to do this to us all, because "property is property", when in fact information is most decidedly NOT property. They don't want only "ownership" of discrete ideas, they also want to be the gatekeepers through which all cooperation must pass. Cooperation shall not happen until they price and approve it.
We could have had the digital public library by now, if not for copyright law. Think what such a public good is and means. Everything ever published, stored in a way that can be massively searched and queried in an instant, billions of times per hour. A traditional dead tree library could never support such activity. Imagine the number of people who routinely search the Internet all trying to do the same with a few card catalogs in the Library of Congress. You'd have to wait days just for your turn at a card catalog, there'd be so many people in line. You couldn't do any correlative searching at all without the sort of tremendous effort that used to be devoted to such endeavors as creating log tables. Your ability to find research relevant to whatever question you have is hopelessly inefficient. Mostly, people would not and could not do much inquiry because it takes too much time. Who can guess what we could have discovered by now, if only public libraries were allowed to digitize? Cures for cancer, AIDS, malaria, Alzheimer's, and more. More answers. Dare anyone decide any one answer is not vital to our very survival, without knowing what those answers are?
I looked into tankless when our gas powered tank water heater sprang a leak a few years ago. I concluded that converting wasn't worth it. Better to go with a solar water heating system. Also, that's the most efficient use of sunlight. Heat water first, then generate electricity from whatever is left over.
Unfortunately, I could not find a solar system for a sane price. It was $350 for a low quality new tank, or $1000 for tankless plus another $400 to convert the house to use it, or $5000 for solar. So I went with the cheap $350 tank as a stopgap. I hope in 6 years time, when the new tank heater nears the end of life, that solar will be more reasonably priced.
In any case, the tone of the article bothers me. This is the kind of obvious stuff-- really obvious with a big DUH-- that we should have been doing decades ago. It's free energy, and ought to have been harvested all along. It was worth doing even in the 1960's, when energy was ridiculously cheap. But the article talks as if there's some kind of altruism and enlightened thinking required to get designers not to be so stupid. Any time you hear of natives regarding the whites with contempt for their foolish and arrogantly wasteful ways, this is what they mean. Centuries before the Europeans reached the Americas, they could build houses that stayed cool in the summer without A/C. Builders bang out very badly designed cookie cutter homes with no regard for the variables of a particular location, and so you have idiocy like A/C units located on the west side of a home, large expanses of windows facing north, fireplaces so poorly located and designed that they might even cool a house down more if used, and more. Our housing has improved, but it's still incredibly bad.
Evaluating candidates is a hard problem made harder by the foibles of the evaluators. Too often they have unworthy agendas.
I look for projects which are significantly meaty for their time in industry ... enough job changes failing to do that suggests a lack of motivation or aptitude neither of which I want.
That's exactly the kind of subjective evaluation I'm complaining about. IT really is crazy, and it's tough for people, even highly competent people, to do good, meaty work that matters. There's not much a lowly IT worker can do when management steers a project or even the entire company into a ditch. A good worker could perhaps avoid screwball companies, if there was more choice. Workers who graduated just when the economy crashed are screwed. There are studies showing this. They aren't going to have the opportunities and the choices, and their resumes won't look as pretty. Then an evaluator like you decides there must be something wrong with those workers.
I can accept that things happen differently in non-technical mega corporations and/or places without a critical mass of software people
Even businesses that specialize in software engineering make really poor decisions in what ought to be their core competence. I worked briefly for just such a company. They had a choice between me and another software engineer, and chose the other fellow. Turned out he was a horrible programmer, and 3 months later they hired me to fix the mess he made. This guy's garbage could provide fodder for a month's worth of dailywtf stories. How could they miss so badly there? But that was hardly all. The entire project was a financial disaster for them. They put the coders in a position where either they had to win the contract, or the company would have no work for them. So the coders, quite naturally, hugely underestimated the effort required. Said it would take 6 weeks. Note that I was brought in 3 months after the start. 4 months after I started, I was the only person left working on the project. I finished my part, and that was the only part of the project that was delivered. The rest was canceled. The irate customer would have sued them had they delivered nothing at all, so my efforts saved them from that.
That was one of my personally more successful efforts. Yet overall, the project was a failure. But I've been in groups where a sense of futility and doom hung over everything. Everyone can see the train wreck coming, and no one can do anything about it. We were required to solve an extremely difficult and not too well defined problem, in the face of cutthroat competition from rival companies seeking to take that work away from us. Management had little idea of the difficulties, and no interest in learning what they were asking for, or even agreeing on some plan. Instead, they resorted to the lowest of dirty office politics, saying anything whatever that they thought might save their jobs for another few weeks. Bad enough that they were clueless on the technical issues, but they weren't even any good at basic planning. Each was more interested in being the man with the plan, thinking that being the architect of the solution was the ticket to job security. So they fought each other over what the plan would be, and we were viciously savaged for our supposed incompetence, laziness, lack of initiative, etc. Do some work, only to be told it's worthless and you should have known better, and now you're going to be written up for having wasted valuable time. Some people have the arrogance to blithely blow that kind of criticism off, but I always have a bit of doubt, and found the constant questioning and accusations downright soul crushing. One manager told me to buck up, because it's better than being shot at in the Vietnam War, as he was. Maybe not. Better to have my self respect, even if I have to dodge real bullets, than to halfway believe I really am a naive, wimpy, worthless, quitter crybab
Employers have only themselves to blame for the "shortage". They reject perfectly good candidates out of hand, for the craziest subjective non-reasons, then complain there's a shortage. They have weird ideas about the extraneous qualities they think they want. Like, why is age discrimination rampant? They believe young coders are more easily bullied into working longer hours, and will take less pay. If they want to reject a programmer for being too old, they make up some other bullcrap excuse why, or don't even bother with that. They also desire what they call "loyalty" (while showing no loyalty themselves towards their employees), which really means they want the candidate who is not a "flight risk". They want a candidate within a "good" range of debt and desperation-- not so much that he will steal from the company, but not so little that he can afford to walk away. Evaluating that aspect of a person is very difficult, since they're not supposed to do that at all so they can't outright ask for the information they want. However, credit scores certainly help with that.
Employers are terrible at evaluating candidates. Can't tell a good programmer from a smooth talking bullshit artist. Nor, on the more subjective criteria, are they much good at telling the crazies apart from the merely desperate. The best they can do is hit prospects with a test on trivia about a particular language, the sort of stuff you shouldn't memorize but should look up in a reference. Quick, name all the reserved words in C++! If you can't do it, then you must not be an expert C++ programmer. If you try to explain why knowing that is not important, then you get that question "wrong", and are tagged as a BS artist to boot. I've had a so-called technical interview end after just 1 trivia question. They refuse to allow any time for training, demanding that new hires "hit the ground running". Candidates are expected to train themselves at their own expense beforehand.
I keep hoping, but interstellar is extremely difficult. It won't happen in our lifetimes. To get to Alpha Centauri in just 70 years requires acceleration to near 0.1c. That takes way more energy than we can currently give our probes. Thinking that a gravity assist can help significantly with that is like thinking you can make your car go significantly faster by having a person stand beside the road and blow air at your back as you pass.
Maybe we could eventually swing something on the order of 700 years. But just 70 years is really pushing the longevity of our current designs. Plutonium doesn't last long enough. In any case, how to make a probe last 700 years is only half the problem. Keeping a project alive, relevant data fresh on current media, and people trained for such a length of time would be the other half. 700 years is an awful long time for circumstance to scuttle the project. Can NASA or any other agency last that long? Can the US?
Barring catastrophe, we will eventually do it.
What's with this urge to punish? What has Marvell done that's so evil? Other than being a powerful US corporation, that is.
A good system would not be so punitive. And the application is so arbitrary and uneven. It isn't even clear that any crime was committed at all, and levying harsh punishments in such situations is just plain evil. I'll whip up a car analogy: two people are arguing over who owns a car and go to court. The court orders that the car be destroyed, and for good measure, that their driveways be ripped up. Then one of the disputants is ordered to buy a new car for the use of the other, and if unable to pay, is forced to sell their house. Which one pays for the new car for the other is determined by coin flip. That'll learn them! Wouldn't be long before that court withered into irrelevance as everyone avoided it like the plague.
If we had a decent patronage system in place, CMU would like it that someone is using ideas they researched, as they could apply for funds from the various patrons, and Marvell and anyone else could use any ideas they wanted without having to get permission or worry about some confused, crazy jury slamming them with a disproportionate "remedy".
Try to open any .doc that another company sent you. It will be f'cked.
That's a problem with the closed, locked down, and deliberately screwed up .doc file format, not LibreOffice. Even MS Office sometimes screws up on their own .doc files, failing perhaps deliberately to maintain backward compatibility. Use .odt, and you'll be fine. And tell the other company to quit using .doc. They could at least use PDF. We won't free ourselves from file format lock in if we don't try.
Try to create a DB
Are you crazy? I would not use any office suite for a real database. MS Access is one of the worst. Use Postgres, MariaDB (a MySQL fork), or one of the many proprietary DBs or even a NoSQL DB.
But thanks for the list, however short.
Plagued with problems? More problems than MS Office has? As I said, specifics or it ain't true. Don't give people crap, give us facts. Show me a list of show stopper problems, and while you're at it, a collection of files that demonstrate the problems.
I often hear this contention about LibreOffice, yet somehow the people making such a claim never explain why it is inferior. Can you point to a list of useful features that MS Office has and LibreOffice lacks? Or critical flaws with LibreOffice that make it unready for "enterprise" use? I would really like to see such a list. If you cannot, why shouldn't I take you for one of the many shills that appear to infest this site, particularly after you slang my alleged lack of experience in the "real" business world? When you say "get work done", you really out yourself as an MS apologist. I've heard that before from other MS supporters. It seems like MS has adopted that phrase as an unofficial slogan.
No, the cost of MS Office is not trivial. The up front price is only a small piece of the total cost of ownership. What of the upgrade treadmill? File format lock in? Inability to read old documents? The costs of constantly having to migrate documents into and out of Office is not trivial. It's a real pain to email documents back and forth for a number of reasons. These MS apps are entirely too eager and will accidentally launch viruses with one wrong mouse click, or even no click at all. And thanks to them being given too much privilege in the MS Windows OSes, they can thoroughly infect users' computers. So you have to buy security software, another cost. Security software bogs the computer down (more cost), and can't protect against all that much. Also, because the file format is not open, security software has a harder time detecting infections in MS Office files. Often, email filters resort to stripping out MS Office files entirely, and PDF has to be used for emails. So what do you do to collaborate? Use some kind of internal network for your collaboration, perhaps a VPN or perhaps shared accounts in the cloud. Then there's corporate espionage. How do you know MS Office isn't forwarding your work to MS headquarters? More likely, they're gathering data about you. That could be for perfectly wholesome reasons. You can also never tell when the big software company that you're dependent upon will screw up. You think having big daddy hold your hand is good, and it can be. But sometimes big daddy's hold is painful. Need a bug fixed? You're stuck waiting on their pleasure. If they're too busy, you can't hire someone else to fix it for you-- no source code. They've been known to go too far on occasion, initiating drastic action on a mere accusation and shutting users down until they can prove they aren't pirates. Do you recall the fiasco known as Windows Genuine Advantage? I don't believe MS is dumb enough to use the BSA too much, but that they do it at all is still pretty dumb.
Those are not nebulous talking points of a political agenda, those are aspects that carry real costs.
I wonder if this whole story is veiled astroturfing. $50 per year per person is a good deal?! Compared to an online game like WoW, maybe, but not compared to free, and I suspect not compared to a support contract for that free software. Funny how the only producers mentioned by name were MS and Google. No other office suite, such as LibreOffice, was mentioned.
As for collaboration, I don't know. Should distributed version control be built into a word processor app? Why not just have a plugin for git, mercurial, subversion, or whatever? An office suite is bound to do version control worse if they try to do it themselves. And as for the cloud, how about a distributed file system such as gluster, and VPN?
We're wiser to that sort of thing, and it won't be easy, maybe not even possible to get away with it. Even if they do pass some terrible bill, it may be struck down in court. Or it may be simply ignored.
What bothers me is these bastards are trying things they know are against the will of the majority and the public interest. When they try sneakiness, that's a sign they know an act doesn't have public support. They're supposed to represent us, not special interests. What do they prove when they ignore the express will of the people? That representative democracy doesn't work? That the only way we can get a fair deal is to start a revolution? The US has been in a long slide towards greater inequality, with deliberate neglect of a variety of problems.