That's bollocks Are you seriously saying that a load of rocket fuel for a small rocket costs as much as the cost of a 7 year development with probably hundreds of staff, and subcontractor companies?
Repeat after me. A million is not a billion is not a trillion. And none of them are a gajillion, which is how you must be analysing these costs.
Tim Berners-Lee and W3C should put a license on http such that it is not permitted to serve content via http that cannot be freely linked to. Locking content down by password, encryption etc. would still be permitted, but if content appears on an http server on the open Internet, it is legal to link to it with whatever anchor text. It would still be possible to bring a case for slander or libel if the anchor text were slanderous or libelous, but otherwise, link restriction would not be compatible with the license to use http or by extension an http server.
I forgot to mention that a "new world order" would of course be morally bankrupt and indefensible if it did not include a universal democratic franchise to determine its leadership.
The idea of the United States of America assuming hegemony over the world (without extending the vote to everyone so ruled) is evil, and counter to the principles of the US constitution.
One person, one vote. It is so simple. Yet clearly so difficult. The bottom line is that those who have fought and organized successfully for power do not ever want to give it to "the people".
Since the Internet's reach is global, and the communications and transactions that take place on it are global, it only makes sense that a global legal jurisdiction needs to be set up to deal with such issues.
This law regime needs to trump national laws.
Its establishment would require negotiation of appropriate universal standards. It is interesting to speculate whether this would have to tend toward the least restricting and punitive law or the most. I suspect that "the least" or some average of the rules in powerful and sane and democratic states is the only thing that might work.
I'm only saying what makes sense. Not what is likely to happen any time soon.
Webapps are here to stay, for several reasons having to do with the economics of their delivery and maintainability.
As developer organization, you upgrade in one place, flip a switch, deploy it, and you are done. All, or a controlled subset of your customers, is now running the new version.
And most importantly, you control what versions and how many versions your software customers are running, thus slashing maintenance costs.
Also, everyone encounters the same bugs. Believe me, that is a feature not a bug, as it leads to quicker discovery and of necessity quicker resolution of the bugs, which is good for the customers, all of them, despite their own laziness in upgrading their s/w.
Regarding the thin client problem. Thick client web apps are just in their infancy, and will almost certainly dominate in the long run, after some serious platform wars.
Because you may have to pay tax on them (as a taxable benefit) well before you could ever liquidate them, if ever.
If you are certain the company is going public in the near future, on a real stock exchange (not the OTC:BB or Pink Sheets or something scammy like that), and you think the company will maintain decent stock value for longer than your vesting period PLUS the legal holding period you have to hold your shares (maybe 1 year after actually receiving the shares),
then, and only then, go for it...
Oh and I forgot to mention. How many more rounds of financing (and stock dilution) is the company going to go through before you can sell your shares? Will your 10% of the company be 1%, or 0.001%. That sort of dilution happens in the seedy end of the corporate finance world all the time, as companies are subject to reverse takeovers and other bizarre ripoff schemes.
And the rest is either d*f*ing or sl*shd*ting, or informal socializing sometimes called status meetings, no matter what your punch clock says. It's connected to the levels of neurotransmitter chemicals in your brain, which run down throughout the day and faster with more or deeper thinking (also faster with coffee or jolt.).
I for one would dread the quality of design or software produced by regular 10-hour day programmers.
I was pleased to see 37 signals uses 4 days a week. Maybe you could recuperate enough on that schedule to work slightly longer productive cores of your creative day (maybe 6 or 7 hours?)
If performance to half way round the world was comparable to performance locally, oh what a world it would be! We might see breakthroughs in international co-operation, from the grassroots popular level up. Nationalist isolationism would be relegated to the old farts (defined as one who has never twittered. Shit that's me.)
Yes I know there are unavoidable speed of light related latency issues with distance, but I'm saying that efforts should be made to make raw throughput (bandwidth) comparable from arbitrary point to arbitrary point on the Internet, and that work should be done to keep latency to the bare minimum mandated by physics.
Seriously, there should be an international standards organisation with teeth mandating highly redundant, high-performance interconnectivity worldwide. It's a matter of life and death.
We are well into a project that has JBoss SEAM as its basis, but required significant mods to give us multi-database capability and a FLEX front end. So instead of a community maintained opinionated meta-framework, we now have our own super complex, fragile framework cluster(****).
It is also effectively a dense, opaque yarnball. The stack traces of exceptions are so long, due to the interceptor architecture, that the Java stack trace displaying algorithm gives up and prints...
So my advice would be, at the risk of trolling, but I intend it as a serious debate position, don't start with something as excessively complex as JEE technology.
Because JEE technology is barely manageable, maybe, if you stick EXACTLY to the most popular opinionated meta-framework for it, but if you deviate off the straight and narrow path, you are on your own in a dense jungle with a dull machete.
Here in Canada our mainstream newspapers and main news TV programs are all owned by two large corporations, CTVGlobeMedia and CanWestGlobal, whose editorial stance is somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun.
I mean the term democratic socialist media mogul is kind of an oxymoron isn't it.
It will be interesting to see if the blogosphere ends up with any particular bias that is different than what good citizens are pablum-fed in their daily TV news broadcast.
I surely hope so.
Although I am not sure that the move from people all having one spoon-fed opinion to a state of truthy factoid bombardment from all sides leading to a catatonic equal acceptance of or non-committal to any old statement or viewpoint is really a victory.
Crowd chants: "WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS" "WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS" "WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS"
Pathetic squeaky voice in background: "umm, errr, I'm not."
So since it takes, not six years, but six years LONGER, to come up with anything truly significant, it must mean that A) Most scientific papers are full of nought but drivel, detritus, and dutifully determined data, and B) Significant breakthroughs will be hard to come by, as most scientists toil wasting their time publishing the drivel in order to be well accepted in their exclusive communities. The geniuses will be driven mad by the death of their career and loss of income as they try to concentrate, for years, on teasing out a single significant insight, at the sacrifice of the many papers and conference cocktail parties. A bit sad really. It's a good thing that the google AI machine will be making the significant insights from now on.
Yes. There is a paradox for sure. Make your open source, simple, flexible, with good, interoperating default configuration, and you're out of a support job.
I've always been suspicious of the model because it seems to promote the foisting of sub-par, and particularly, excessively complex and undocumented software on the software consumer.
Don't worry. We have a crack team of the gurus who made this spaghetti, and they can grate some cheese on it to make it palatable, for a fee. Hmmmm.
What about just operating, for a fee, information or transaction services that use software that you helped write, and charging for the complete delivery of the service, and the offloading of "all" IT administration from the customer.
Without stooping to namecalling, I will retort that the basis of morality is actually evolutionary game theory, and specifically, the energy efficiency that comes with co-operation.
It is thermodynamically more efficient (per increment of survival probability) to co-operate as larger societal organisms, where conflict is upsized to the boundary of the group, and where individuals can trust each other and therefore specialize and combine their labor.
Moral rules and principles are attempts to codify the ethical behaviours which are precisely those behaviours that further the ability to co-operate in society for a prolonged period.
So since God is just a concept invented to quell fears, instill other fears, and encourage groupiness, and since a concept can't actually give us rights (both the god concept and the rights concept are clearly human-given), you are saying then by inference that all taxation is immoral, if I'm not mistaken.
The auto industry bailout if any should be contingent on specific targets for improvement in fleet CO2 emmissions per mile travelled.
Manufacturers should be assisted to the extent that they commit to actual and rapid progress in this direction compared to the current overall US-manufactured car and truck fleet average.
If this were the bailout principle, TESLA would clearly qualify for major support, and the big 3 would qualify to the extent that they commit to shift focus onto accelerating and producing their R&D projects like VOLT and the hydrogen vehicles.
The Bush administration, with its fine misunderestimated mathematical minds, who also calculated that if Osama Bin Laden was hiding on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, we should go defeat him in Baghdad.
Oh and the same minds who calculated that even though co2 lets in visible-light and ultraviolet energy from the Sun and reflects and traps in infra-red energy that radiates back off the Earth, it won't cause global warming, because that would reduce oil sale revenues.
It's honestly quite a shocker that this cunningly devised plan didn't work.
I will burn a virtual hole in the back of your head with my imaginary laser vision, for the crime of perceiving yourself as more important not only than one particular random other person, but of the sum of the value of all those people in line behind you. That is highly antisocial behavior.
Jump into line in front of me and start smoking, however, and I WILL kill you in self defense.
The (admittedly mythical) average personal computer user probably cares about these factors:
1. Will it die a horrible viral or worm-ridden death as soon as I attach it to the Internet, or turn into a zombie slave?
2. Are there enough useful applications on it?
3. Are the applications data-interoperable with other peoples' data files and similar applications?
4. Are the applications easy to learn and use, and do they stick to simple easy to remember and transfer user interface conventions.... 9. Is it fast enough (all OSs are these days for most common uses).
-and the ability to seek more recent and more reliable storage sites on the net based on stats and newness of net-connected storage site
-and the ability to copy themselves to multiple sites and keep track of how vital a community of copies they are and panic and breed if they get too low in number
-ability to rewrap their encryption to newer standards
-open standards for metadata and data formats and permanent URN for the program & version needed to interpret the data
-and don't even think about trying to patent this. I wrote it up 10 years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
That's bollocks
Are you seriously saying that a load of rocket fuel for a small rocket costs as much as the cost of a 7 year development with probably hundreds of staff, and subcontractor companies?
Repeat after me. A million is not a billion is not a trillion. And none of them are a gajillion, which is how you must be analysing these costs.
Tim Berners-Lee and W3C should put a license on http such that it is not permitted to serve content via http that cannot be freely linked to. Locking content down by password, encryption etc. would still be permitted, but if content appears on an http server on the open Internet, it is legal to link to it with whatever anchor text. It would still be possible to bring a case for slander or libel if the anchor text were slanderous or libelous, but otherwise, link restriction would not be compatible with the license to use http or by extension an http server.
Problem solved.
I forgot to mention that a "new world order" would of course be morally bankrupt and indefensible if it did not include a universal democratic franchise to determine its leadership.
The idea of the United States of America assuming hegemony over the world (without extending the vote to everyone so ruled) is evil, and counter to the principles of the US constitution.
One person, one vote. It is so simple. Yet clearly so difficult. The bottom line is that those who have fought and organized successfully for power do not ever want to give it to "the people".
Since the Internet's reach is global, and the communications and transactions that take place on it are global, it only makes sense that a global legal jurisdiction needs to be set up to deal with such issues.
This law regime needs to trump national laws.
Its establishment would require negotiation of appropriate universal standards. It is interesting to speculate whether this would have to tend toward the least restricting and punitive law or the most. I suspect that "the least" or some average of the rules in powerful and sane and democratic states is the only thing that might work.
I'm only saying what makes sense. Not what is likely to happen any time soon.
Net architecture is politics.
Webapps are here to stay, for several reasons having to do with the economics of their delivery and maintainability.
As developer organization, you upgrade in one place, flip a switch, deploy it, and you are done. All, or a controlled subset of your customers, is now running the new version.
And most importantly, you control what versions and how many versions your software customers are running, thus slashing maintenance costs.
Also, everyone encounters the same bugs. Believe me, that is a feature not a bug, as it leads to quicker discovery and of necessity quicker resolution of the bugs, which is good for the customers, all of them, despite their own laziness in upgrading their s/w.
Regarding the thin client problem. Thick client web apps are just in their infancy, and will almost certainly dominate in the long run, after some serious platform wars.
Because you may have to pay tax on them (as a taxable benefit) well before you could ever liquidate them, if ever.
If you are certain the company is going public in the near future, on a real stock exchange (not the OTC:BB or Pink Sheets or something scammy like that), and you think the company will maintain decent stock value for longer than your vesting period PLUS the legal holding period you have to hold your shares (maybe 1 year after actually receiving the shares),
then, and only then, go for it...
Oh and I forgot to mention. How many more rounds of financing (and stock dilution) is the company going to go through before you can sell your shares? Will your 10% of the company be 1%, or 0.001%. That sort of dilution happens in the seedy end of the corporate finance world all the time, as companies are subject to reverse takeovers and other bizarre ripoff schemes.
Cheers and good luck.
Cynicism and complaint are the resorts of losers and followers.
You try governing sometime, and see how many seconds you last before your foot is firmly
lodged in your mouth.
And the rest is either d*f*ing or sl*shd*ting, or informal socializing sometimes called status meetings, no matter what your punch clock says. It's connected to the levels of neurotransmitter chemicals in your brain, which run down throughout the day and faster with more or deeper thinking (also faster with coffee or jolt.).
I for one would dread the quality of design or software produced by regular 10-hour day programmers.
I was pleased to see 37 signals uses 4 days a week. Maybe you could recuperate enough on that schedule to work slightly longer productive cores of your creative day (maybe 6 or 7 hours?)
If performance to half way round the world was comparable to performance locally, oh what a world it would be! We might see breakthroughs in international co-operation, from the grassroots popular level up. Nationalist isolationism would be relegated to the old farts (defined as one who has never twittered. Shit that's me.)
Yes I know there are unavoidable speed of light related latency issues with distance, but I'm saying that efforts should be made to make raw throughput (bandwidth) comparable from arbitrary point to arbitrary point on the Internet, and that work should be done to keep latency to the bare minimum mandated by physics.
Seriously, there should be an international standards organisation with teeth mandating highly redundant, high-performance interconnectivity worldwide. It's a matter of
life and death.
Redundant routes duh
We are well into a project that has JBoss SEAM as its basis, but required significant mods to give us multi-database capability and a FLEX front end. So instead of a community maintained opinionated meta-framework, we now have our own super complex, fragile framework cluster(****).
It is also effectively a dense, opaque yarnball. The stack traces of exceptions are so long, due to the interceptor architecture, that the Java stack trace displaying algorithm gives up and prints ...
So my advice would be, at the risk of trolling, but I intend it as a serious debate position, don't start with something as excessively complex as JEE technology.
Because JEE technology is barely manageable, maybe, if you stick EXACTLY to the most popular opinionated meta-framework for it, but if you deviate off the straight and narrow path, you are on your own in a dense jungle with a dull machete.
I for one welcome.
Here in Canada our mainstream newspapers and main news TV programs are all owned by two large corporations, CTVGlobeMedia and CanWestGlobal, whose editorial stance is somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun.
I mean the term democratic socialist media mogul is kind of an oxymoron isn't it.
It will be interesting to see if the blogosphere ends up with any particular bias that is different than what good citizens are pablum-fed in their daily TV news broadcast.
I surely hope so.
Although I am not sure that the move from people all having one spoon-fed opinion to a state of truthy factoid bombardment from all sides leading to a catatonic equal acceptance of or non-committal to any old statement or viewpoint is really a victory.
Crowd chants:
"WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS"
"WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS"
"WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS"
Pathetic squeaky voice in background:
"umm, errr, I'm not."
The more just, accepted, legitimate, and mature is a nation's government, the less paranoid and totalitarian it becomes.
or perish, in the scientific academic world.
So since it takes, not six years, but six years LONGER, to
come up with anything truly significant, it must mean that
A) Most scientific papers are full of nought but
drivel, detritus, and dutifully determined data, and
B) Significant breakthroughs will be hard to come by,
as most scientists toil wasting their time publishing
the drivel in order to be well accepted in their exclusive
communities. The geniuses will be driven mad by the
death of their career and loss of income as they try to
concentrate, for years, on teasing out a single significant
insight, at the sacrifice of the many papers and
conference cocktail parties.
A bit sad really. It's a good thing that the google
AI machine will be making the significant insights
from now on.
Yes. There is a paradox for sure.
Make your open source, simple, flexible,
with good, interoperating default configuration,
and you're out of a support job.
I've always been suspicious of the model
because it seems to promote the foisting
of sub-par, and particularly, excessively
complex and undocumented software on the
software consumer.
Don't worry. We have a crack team of the gurus
who made this spaghetti, and they can grate
some cheese on it to make it palatable, for
a fee. Hmmmm.
What about just operating, for a fee,
information or transaction services that use software
that you helped write, and charging for the complete
delivery of the service, and the offloading of "all"
IT administration from the customer.
Without stooping to namecalling,
I will retort that the basis of morality
is actually evolutionary game theory, and
specifically, the energy efficiency that
comes with co-operation.
It is thermodynamically more efficient
(per increment of survival probability)
to co-operate as larger societal organisms,
where conflict is upsized to the boundary
of the group, and where individuals can
trust each other and therefore specialize
and combine their labor.
Moral rules and principles are attempts to codify the ethical behaviours which are precisely those behaviours
that further the ability to co-operate in
society for a prolonged period.
See http://criticality.wordpress.com/2008/03/22/upsizing-social-friction-energetic-considerations-in-social-dynamics/
for details
So since God is just a concept invented to quell fears, instill other fears, and encourage groupiness, and since a concept can't actually give us rights (both the god concept and the rights concept are clearly human-given), you are saying then by inference that all taxation is immoral, if I'm not mistaken.
The auto industry bailout if any should be contingent on specific targets for improvement in fleet CO2 emmissions per mile travelled.
Manufacturers should be assisted to the extent that they commit to actual and rapid progress in this direction compared to the current overall US-manufactured car and truck fleet average.
If this were the bailout principle, TESLA would clearly qualify for major support, and the big 3 would qualify to the extent that they commit to shift focus onto accelerating and producing their R&D projects like VOLT and the hydrogen vehicles.
"if a belief is held by a person's "culture or subculture," it is not a delusion"
I guess that explains why Americans were not
psychotic when they believed in the
famous "weapons of mass delusion" in Iraq.
The Bush administration, with
its fine misunderestimated mathematical minds,
who also calculated that if Osama Bin Laden
was hiding on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border,
we should go defeat him in Baghdad.
Oh and the same minds who calculated that
even though co2 lets in visible-light and ultraviolet
energy from the Sun and reflects and traps in infra-red
energy that radiates back off the Earth, it won't cause
global warming, because that would reduce oil
sale revenues.
It's honestly quite a shocker that this cunningly
devised plan didn't work.
I will burn a virtual hole in the back of your head with my imaginary laser vision, for the crime of perceiving yourself as more important not only than one particular random other person, but of the sum of the value of all those people in line behind you. That is highly antisocial behavior.
Jump into line in front of me and start smoking, however, and
I WILL kill you in self defense.
The (admittedly mythical) average personal computer user probably cares about these factors:
1. Will it die a horrible viral or worm-ridden death as soon as I attach it to the Internet, or turn into a zombie slave?
2. Are there enough useful applications on it?
3. Are the applications data-interoperable with other peoples' data files and similar applications?
4. Are the applications easy to learn and use, and do they stick to simple easy to remember and transfer user interface conventions. ...
9. Is it fast enough (all OSs are these days for most common uses).
with a self-preservation instinct
-and the ability to seek more recent and
more reliable storage sites
on the net based on stats and newness of
net-connected storage site
-and the ability to copy themselves to
multiple sites and keep track of how vital
a community of copies they are and panic
and breed if they get too low in number
-ability to rewrap their encryption to newer
standards
-open standards for metadata and data formats
and permanent URN for the program & version
needed to interpret the data
-and don't even think about trying to patent this.
I wrote it up 10 years ago.
It would only stand a chance if it is open.
The terrorists win.
I cut large letters into my backyard lawn spelling out a message.
Sometime later the satellites take a photo of it and include it in Google Earth.
Only my evil co-conspirators know where to go to look for it.
Hahahahahahaahaahaaaaaa!
And maybe smoke signals if we need more bandwidth and less latency in our "chatter".