James Branch Cabell, start with Jurgen: A comedy of Justice. Julian May, The Saga of Pliocene Exile -- though it's more contemporary and probably well read by people interested in this thread. Michael Moorecock, Tanith Lee, plus unknown authors for Gilgamesh, Beowulf, the elder eddas, The book of dun cow (Cattle raid of Cooly), Brian Boru, The Fianna, Morgan Llywelyn does good Celtic Mythos. The Mabinogion, The Fates of the Princes of Dyfed (part of the mabinogion).
There is a really good series I once found and the main character was a ming dynasty mystic/private detective. Never finished the series and can't remember the author.
Thats only the first layer of corruption. Add -- Company lays very expensive underwater fiber cable funded by stock purchases and bond issues. Cable in, but doesn't return nearly whats predicted. Company goes bankrupt. Bank and then finally hedge fund inherits the cable for 1/10 the cost. -- Stock holders screwed, bond holders screwed. Hedge fund makes huge profit selling ultra fast trading to other brokerage houses while secretly front-running the trades.
You're asking if you start feeling vulnerable and inadequate as you get older and more vulnerable. The answer is yes, unless you've reached self actualization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-actualization. You start feeling like a quarter horse in a thorough breed race and face the natural migration to management vis a vis The Peter Principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle.
You can try therapy and psychotropics, like a large number do and probably need, or you can grab hold of yourself and have a heart to heart. Reinvent yourself. Discover your strengths, work on your weaknesses. Look into why you are asking this question and what is it really masking. Old age and cunning has advantages over youth and vigor -- paraphrased from somewhere.
20-25% of online players are winning? No. On any given night, 20-25% might have won. But notwithstanding cheating, the true # of winning players is in the low single digits percentage.
It's unfortunate and I have some sympathy with those that were able to beat the online game without cheating and who made their living and have now had their account balances confiscated. However lets face reality, that probably represents 3% or less of online poker players. Meaning that a good estimate is that 97% of online poker players simply lost. Losers complain, some I daresay, may even think they've been cheated, people who think they've been cheated most certainly complain. Looks like those complaints have been heard.
The problem then is political opponents at the national level are all too happy to pay fines for breach of campaign laws and soft laws, It becomes a numbers game. Does the fine buy more political hay then say a valid expenditure? I don't know if anybody has mentioned it, but the hackers father Mike Kernell is a Democrat and politician from Tennesee, you don't have to stretch your imagination too much to see the point I'm making.
Almost every point in this post is wrong either by omission or assertion.
[snip..... The government does issue and permit fully automatic weapons to citizens in danger zones.... ]
The MoD is quite liberal in issuing gun permits to Jewish Israelis..... they're quite strict on issuing permits to non-Jewish Israelis.
Best Answer by far for small non mission critical apps. If you can't justify the cost of testing vs the cost of a bug, then you'll never get funding for a distinct project for testing. When you do fix a bug, you invariably code review and write a test app against it. When it comes to internal apps, testing is typically overlooked and bugs are fixed ad hoc or work around become tribal knowledge. But even the tiniest mission critical application needs to have a test suite developed side by side with the app in question. Think of the team that let slip the bug that crashed the mars probe. Not only will that slow your career down, it will scar you knowing that your bug cost billions of dollars and years of work hours.
To quote from the Ellison article "Ellison shut down development of Sun’s Rock microprocessor, a project which had struggled to get off the ground. “This processor had two incredible virtues: It was incredibly slow and it consumed vast amounts of energy. It was so hot that they had to put about 12 inches of cooling fans on top of it to cool the processor,” said Ellison. “It was just madness to continue that project.”"
he
Well Ellison gets one thing wrong. It wasn't 12 inches of cooling fans, it was 12 inches of solid copper heat sink topped by a fan. Sun took a failed Darpa project and tried to make it into a commercial venture. I was ready to dump my life savings into Lambert stock.
Scott McNealy ran his company like a Microsoft hater. His strategy was like that of a Microsoft hater. There were proposals at Sun as early as 1999 regarding cloud computing, internet based Operating systems and back office apps -- but it required a strategic alliance with other corporations and those alliances never happened. I would have lost 100's of millions of $$ making sure that Google used my Hardware and my OS. The Centurian knows why the battle was lost, but the Dux had no clue.
Regarding hardware, Sun obviously had problems. Chief being its marketing cycle. Sun put out some very good hardware, but seemed to have follow up and road map problems. The E10k was a great server when introduced and very good life cycle, but the follow up to the E10k wasn't an incremental improvement, it was a Bigger, slower and cost more and couldn't even compete well with the E10k and there are very specific reasons why this happened. It wasn't even a gamble, failure was guaranteed. It had to do with Sun Corporate Cultural Superiority Complex.
As for the software side
On the software side, Sun engaged in a political battle vs open source rather than dealing with it as a practical matter. With a big fat wallet pumped up from the dot com boom, they took a piss on everyone involved with Open Source. They were afraid of open source and falsely embraced it as that big fat wallet was bleed dry.
Larry Ellison has similar problems. Open Source isn't part of the Oracle business plan.
By all means do so. But it will be transparent beings that you're a corporation and incorporated within the state in question, and you won't be doing it in a public corp.. at least not for long.
I don't understand why this problem has become complex, other then planned complexity for planned loopholes
The law should be really simple. Senate campaign contributions shall originate in the State the Senator is running in. Meaning *any* private donations must come from citizens of that state, held to the standard that they filed taxes in that state. Any corporate donations must originate from corporations incorporated within that state. Any of the so called 501's or Political action committees donations must come from political action committees registered within that state who can only accept donations from individuals who are citizens of that state, or incorporated withint that state. There can be *NO* nationalized money pool from outside the State Party. Same for Governor, same for congressmen.
Campaign fundraisers in California should be prohibited to Candidates running in New York.
Well, seeing how the Constitution goes about defining the method and means of it's own change, It's kinda hard to believe it is a "Living Document". A perfect example of a living document is in George Orwell's Animal Farm. The 'constitution' the pigs drew up post farm revolution. That's what happens to rights based on "living documents". Oh and the founding fathers were for the most part Deists. Kinda like the clock maker argument.
That's a quick throw together and a remarketing of an existing product. Lets get down to clustering at the hardware Bus level with crossbar busses and processors distributed further out from the core system. Add dynamically instanced domains for on-the-fly resource management. Built in multi-port network switch and Jbod rack or two.
What is better? An engineering driven company or a Sales team driven company? As much as I hate to admit it (as a systems engineer), the sales team force not only want to sell stuff that generates high sales commission, but they want to sell stuff that actually is in demand. Sun's sales force team was excellent in both knowledge and expertise.
And
High ticket items, mean higher profit margins to corporations too. While some do strike it rich with high volume short lived product, Post 1995 sun was not going to do that with Desktops based on near proprietary OS (Solaris) and very expensive and exclusive chip sets (sparc, ultra-sparc), nor could they compete at the X86 level with off the shelf engineering with companies like Gateway, Dell, HP, Compaq.
Where they failed miserably was development expense and magnitude of increase of applicability of the high end servers. The San Diego team of High end server design that they acquired from SGI/Cray -- the guys that very expensive, but very much in demand E10k came from, never quite became part of core Sun Development, due to both distance and tribal tendencies from within Sun. Very much like, if you didn't work within 25 miles of corporate HQ or have a badge # below 300 -- you were not really part of the family, but a distant cousin or crazy Uncle/Aunt type.
Sparc is dead (at least I hope so) as far as U.S development is concerned. Sun pissed away too much money developing Sparc chipsets post 1999/2001 -- when it became clear that X86 architecture was coming into its own. Sun should have stuck with AMD and explored more ways to make Enterprise versions of X86. Spending more R&D money in an ever shrinking niche market when off the shelf components were making leaps and bounds was not a good business decision. I certainly hope Oracle doesn't intend on going down this proven money sink
hole.
M4/M5 and DC series are almost exclusively designed by Fujitsu, except for some odds and ends "thrown as a bone" to Sun. Things like Power supply Specifications, choice of which DVD drives and Disk Drives to use, non-active component boards, and *some* U.S agency compliance responsibilities made me..... uhhh, Sun Engineers feel like we were becoming sustaining Engineering people for a product we had little to absolutely no design control or responsibility for. Oh yea, well we did get to design some power cords. Woo Hoo! Power cord engineering is what I... uh, they wanted to do after 15 years of Systems Engineering experience.
I don't know how it's going to work for Sun Hardware Engineering when under Oracle. I think they are smart people and have a different perspective then what was developed at Sun from the bubble burst to now -- But I hope they have something synergistic in mind, rather then Bifurcated product lines. I would like to see Database Transactional off-load processors down to the I/O level.. such as TCP offload engines and specialty I/O designed to deliver transactional data directly to the clients.
As for sideline products, I expect things like Java to be spun off and sold to interested 3rd parties, while I believe Solaris will be kept and well supported for a good while yet as probably government dictated conditions of the merger. Governments don't like when their support disapears over night for things they intended on using for a long time. Open office is a popular alternative to the expensive and bloated MS Office so I think Oracle will keep Staroffice and try to make something of it. Mysql will be supported in name only, and don't be surprised if starts to look more and more like Oracle.
Well first thought is why worry? That's your competition there. Sounds like easy street to me.
Second thought is to tell you how it is. Yes, you will find people sliding everywhere. Keep your head about you and don't burn yourself out trying to outperform slackers. Keeping a good work ethic yourself and working your pace and you will gravitate upwards. You'll start getting all the cool projects and recognition you want. Make sure your name is on everything you do. Project Managers gravitate to those that meet deadlines with quality work, but not only that, they also like to see continuous progress. Technical people who are always J.I.T with their milestones do not continuously put out top quality product. This becomes evident during code, design and dependency reviews. They might not say anything -- a good Propject Manager probably won't, or hint so obtusely that it goes right over the slackers head.. but the others know.
Then, when times are lean and projects are scarce the slackers get culled from the herd.
Another thing, don't be so quick to assume that somebody is a slacker just because they don't work like you. People do problem solve while doing other things and people do split their day with periods of intense concentration (planning, design, layout) with down and recuperative time (browsing, chatting, foosball). It is understood for the most part that salaried people, particularly design and planning engineers generally think about their projects problems and dependencies quite a bit when not at work.
So, if you're new and starting out on the bottom rung of the ladder as a coder, coding somebody else's conceptual design or implementing their plans you are going to have a lot more hands on time at work then the more senior people.
While this may work in poker, particularly NL poker where having a larger bankroll actually gives you and advantage... it doesn't hold true for the carnival type games. While the gambler's risk of ruin is certainly true, having 100x the bankroll vs 'fractional edge' doesn't mean you are going to end up with all the money.
The Web information is just a tool. I dont' find the subject of misuse or missapplication very interesting. What would be interesting is accuracy and locations.
Online searching of medical information has been very good for me, health wise, and getting healthy wise.
You ever develop a propensity for syncope. Followed by waking up surrounded by passwerbys askign if your okay.... you'll know what I mean.
I voted for McCain/Palin because I have and Oedipus complex
But in reality, I voted for McCain/Palin because Obama couldn't convince me he was anything more then a suite and tie. I had sworn that I would vote for Hillary before I would vote for McCain. This was because I thought Hillary was vindictive, ornerous, exotic in her methods of reprisals, and just a plain mean sonofabitch who gets even at any slight, perceived or otherwise. Somebody I thought would be great to continue the war on terror.
I just remember McCain as a curmudgeon who gave Bush a hard time at every opportunity. But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. Obama out manuevered Hillary (which in itself makes him capable of being a good president), And McCain picked Palin. Who I think was truly an ingenius and inspirational pick.
Now, if you go out and explore other peoples "ordinary" peoples choices for President or nominees, you'll find that for the most part its just like picking your favorite football or baseball team. There is no rhyme or reason, perhaps just a single issue sticks in their head. But largely, it's just capriciousness.
I'm a conservative libertarian. I want Marijuana legalized. I don't believe in national health care, but I do want nationalized health insurance... or even nationalized insurance of all sorts because insurance serves a very very usefull national social function -- while regulated healthcare would be a disaster and serve to create a "class" system between the rich having the best health care, and the poor having the basic minimum healthcare.
I'm for limiting the bonuses and wages of top corporate executives... because it's become an ol' boy network, and has or is creating an aristocracy of sorts. I do not believe Roe vs. Wade should be reversed. I believe it should be entirely erased from Federal existence. Not because I'm pro-choice, or pro-life, but because It's not the Job of the Federal government to either approve or dissaprove of such things.
I believe the 17th ammendment should be repealed in such a manner that individual states determine how they select their senators. I believe campaign finance should be such that if you don't live and pay taxes in the state of your politician, then you can't donate money to them.
I believe it should be a crime for candidates to accept illegal contributions, not a crime for somebody to illegally contribute.
I believe the Whitehouse door should be painted Shamrock Green.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a really good series I once found and the main character was a ming dynasty mystic/private detective. Never finished the series and can't remember the author.
Thats only the first layer of corruption. Add -- Company lays very expensive underwater fiber cable funded by stock purchases and bond issues. Cable in, but doesn't return nearly whats predicted. Company goes bankrupt. Bank and then finally hedge fund inherits the cable for 1/10 the cost. -- Stock holders screwed, bond holders screwed. Hedge fund makes huge profit selling ultra fast trading to other brokerage houses while secretly front-running the trades.
You can try therapy and psychotropics, like a large number do and probably need, or you can grab hold of yourself and have a heart to heart. Reinvent yourself. Discover your strengths, work on your weaknesses. Look into why you are asking this question and what is it really masking. Old age and cunning has advantages over youth and vigor -- paraphrased from somewhere.
Courage, perseverance and planning.
20-25% of online players are winning? No. On any given night, 20-25% might have won. But notwithstanding cheating, the true # of winning players is in the low single digits percentage.
It's unfortunate and I have some sympathy with those that were able to beat the online game without cheating and who made their living and have now had their account balances confiscated. However lets face reality, that probably represents 3% or less of online poker players. Meaning that a good estimate is that 97% of online poker players simply lost. Losers complain, some I daresay, may even think they've been cheated, people who think they've been cheated most certainly complain. Looks like those complaints have been heard.
The problem then is political opponents at the national level are all too happy to pay fines for breach of campaign laws and soft laws, It becomes a numbers game. Does the fine buy more political hay then say a valid expenditure? I don't know if anybody has mentioned it, but the hackers father Mike Kernell is a Democrat and politician from Tennesee, you don't have to stretch your imagination too much to see the point I'm making.
Well, to bastardize Carl Von Clousewitz ...."Violence is Politics by another means".
Almost every point in this post is wrong either by omission or assertion. [snip ..... The government does issue and permit fully automatic weapons to citizens in danger zones .... ]
The MoD is quite liberal in issuing gun permits to Jewish Israelis. .... they're quite strict on issuing permits to non-Jewish Israelis.
Best Answer by far for small non mission critical apps. If you can't justify the cost of testing vs the cost of a bug, then you'll never get funding for a distinct project for testing. When you do fix a bug, you invariably code review and write a test app against it. When it comes to internal apps, testing is typically overlooked and bugs are fixed ad hoc or work around become tribal knowledge. But even the tiniest mission critical application needs to have a test suite developed side by side with the app in question. Think of the team that let slip the bug that crashed the mars probe. Not only will that slow your career down, it will scar you knowing that your bug cost billions of dollars and years of work hours.
USS Gerald R. Ford? You have to be kidding me. What's next. USS Chevy Chase?
he
Well Ellison gets one thing wrong. It wasn't 12 inches of cooling fans, it was 12 inches of solid copper heat sink topped by a fan. Sun took a failed Darpa project and tried to make it into a commercial venture. I was ready to dump my life savings into Lambert stock.
Scott McNealy ran his company like a Microsoft hater. His strategy was like that of a Microsoft hater. There were proposals at Sun as early as 1999 regarding cloud computing, internet based Operating systems and back office apps -- but it required a strategic alliance with other corporations and those alliances never happened. I would have lost 100's of millions of $$ making sure that Google used my Hardware and my OS. The Centurian knows why the battle was lost, but the Dux had no clue.
As for the software side
On the software side, Sun engaged in a political battle vs open source rather than dealing with it as a practical matter. With a big fat wallet pumped up from the dot com boom, they took a piss on everyone involved with Open Source. They were afraid of open source and falsely embraced it as that big fat wallet was bleed dry.
Larry Ellison has similar problems. Open Source isn't part of the Oracle business plan.
No I didn't. Re-read the OP.
By all means do so. But it will be transparent beings that you're a corporation and incorporated within the state in question, and you won't be doing it in a public corp .. at least not for long.
The law should be really simple. Senate campaign contributions shall originate in the State the Senator is running in. Meaning *any* private donations must come from citizens of that state, held to the standard that they filed taxes in that state. Any corporate donations must originate from corporations incorporated within that state. Any of the so called 501's or Political action committees donations must come from political action committees registered within that state who can only accept donations from individuals who are citizens of that state, or incorporated withint that state. There can be *NO* nationalized money pool from outside the State Party. Same for Governor, same for congressmen.
Campaign fundraisers in California should be prohibited to Candidates running in New York.
Well, seeing how the Constitution goes about defining the method and means of it's own change, It's kinda hard to believe it is a "Living Document". A perfect example of a living document is in George Orwell's Animal Farm. The 'constitution' the pigs drew up post farm revolution. That's what happens to rights based on "living documents". Oh and the founding fathers were for the most part Deists. Kinda like the clock maker argument.
That's a quick throw together and a remarketing of an existing product. Lets get down to clustering at the hardware Bus level with crossbar busses and processors distributed further out from the core system. Add dynamically instanced domains for on-the-fly resource management. Built in multi-port network switch and Jbod rack or two.
And
High ticket items, mean higher profit margins to corporations too. While some do strike it rich with high volume short lived product, Post 1995 sun was not going to do that with Desktops based on near proprietary OS (Solaris) and very expensive and exclusive chip sets (sparc, ultra-sparc), nor could they compete at the X86 level with off the shelf engineering with companies like Gateway, Dell, HP, Compaq.
Where they failed miserably was development expense and magnitude of increase of applicability of the high end servers. The San Diego team of High end server design that they acquired from SGI/Cray -- the guys that very expensive, but very much in demand E10k came from, never quite became part of core Sun Development, due to both distance and tribal tendencies from within Sun. Very much like, if you didn't work within 25 miles of corporate HQ or have a badge # below 300 -- you were not really part of the family, but a distant cousin or crazy Uncle/Aunt type.
hole.
M4/M5 and DC series are almost exclusively designed by Fujitsu, except for some odds and ends "thrown as a bone" to Sun. Things like Power supply Specifications, choice of which DVD drives and Disk Drives to use, non-active component boards, and *some* U.S agency compliance responsibilities made me ..... uhhh, Sun Engineers feel like we were becoming sustaining Engineering people for a product we had little to absolutely no design control or responsibility for. Oh yea, well we did get to design some power cords. Woo Hoo! Power cord engineering is what I ... uh, they wanted to do after 15 years of Systems Engineering experience.
I don't know how it's going to work for Sun Hardware Engineering when under Oracle. I think they are smart people and have a different perspective then what was developed at Sun from the bubble burst to now -- But I hope they have something synergistic in mind, rather then Bifurcated product lines. I would like to see Database Transactional off-load processors down to the I/O level .. such as TCP offload engines and specialty I/O designed to deliver transactional data directly to the clients.
As for sideline products, I expect things like Java to be spun off and sold to interested 3rd parties, while I believe Solaris will be kept and well supported for a good while yet as probably government dictated conditions of the merger. Governments don't like when their support disapears over night for things they intended on using for a long time. Open office is a popular alternative to the expensive and bloated MS Office so I think Oracle will keep Staroffice and try to make something of it. Mysql will be supported in name only, and don't be surprised if starts to look more and more like Oracle.
Second thought is to tell you how it is. Yes, you will find people sliding everywhere. Keep your head about you and don't burn yourself out trying to outperform slackers. Keeping a good work ethic yourself and working your pace and you will gravitate upwards. You'll start getting all the cool projects and recognition you want. Make sure your name is on everything you do. Project Managers gravitate to those that meet deadlines with quality work, but not only that, they also like to see continuous progress. Technical people who are always J.I.T with their milestones do not continuously put out top quality product. This becomes evident during code, design and dependency reviews. They might not say anything -- a good Propject Manager probably won't, or hint so obtusely that it goes right over the slackers head .. but the others know.
Then, when times are lean and projects are scarce the slackers get culled from the herd.
Another thing, don't be so quick to assume that somebody is a slacker just because they don't work like you. People do problem solve while doing other things and people do split their day with periods of intense concentration (planning, design, layout) with down and recuperative time (browsing, chatting, foosball). It is understood for the most part that salaried people, particularly design and planning engineers generally think about their projects problems and dependencies quite a bit when not at work.
So, if you're new and starting out on the bottom rung of the ladder as a coder, coding somebody else's conceptual design or implementing their plans you are going to have a lot more hands on time at work then the more senior people.
If you seriously think that this was inadvertent, they you should probably read more Machiavelli
While this may work in poker, particularly NL poker where having a larger bankroll actually gives you and advantage ... it doesn't hold true for the carnival type games. While the gambler's risk of ruin is certainly true, having 100x the bankroll vs 'fractional edge' doesn't mean you are going to end up with all the money.
Online searching of medical information has been very good for me, health wise, and getting healthy wise.
You ever develop a propensity for syncope. Followed by waking up surrounded by passwerbys askign if your okay. ... you'll know what I mean.
Just like in Computer 101 -- GIGO. Usagi yo.
But in reality, I voted for McCain/Palin because Obama couldn't convince me he was anything more then a suite and tie. I had sworn that I would vote for Hillary before I would vote for McCain. This was because I thought Hillary was vindictive, ornerous, exotic in her methods of reprisals, and just a plain mean sonofabitch who gets even at any slight, perceived or otherwise. Somebody I thought would be great to continue the war on terror.
I just remember McCain as a curmudgeon who gave Bush a hard time at every opportunity. But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. Obama out manuevered Hillary (which in itself makes him capable of being a good president), And McCain picked Palin. Who I think was truly an ingenius and inspirational pick.
Now, if you go out and explore other peoples "ordinary" peoples choices for President or nominees, you'll find that for the most part its just like picking your favorite football or baseball team. There is no rhyme or reason, perhaps just a single issue sticks in their head. But largely, it's just capriciousness.
I'm a conservative libertarian. I want Marijuana legalized. I don't believe in national health care, but I do want nationalized health insurance ... or even nationalized insurance of all sorts because insurance serves a very very usefull national social function -- while regulated healthcare would be a disaster and serve to create a "class" system between the rich having the best health care, and the poor having the basic minimum healthcare.
I'm for limiting the bonuses and wages of top corporate executives ... because it's become an ol' boy network, and has or is creating an aristocracy of sorts. I do not believe Roe vs. Wade should be reversed. I believe it should be entirely erased from Federal existence. Not because I'm pro-choice, or pro-life, but because It's not the Job of the Federal government to either approve or dissaprove of such things.
I believe the 17th ammendment should be repealed in such a manner that individual states determine how they select their senators. I believe campaign finance should be such that if you don't live and pay taxes in the state of your politician, then you can't donate money to them.
I believe it should be a crime for candidates to accept illegal contributions, not a crime for somebody to illegally contribute.
I believe the Whitehouse door should be painted Shamrock Green.
And thats my opinion, and I'm sticking to it.