The death rate is much lower in the US, fourfold lower in fact and in the third lowest grouping. The US does have a huge consumption of soda and fast food as both are cheap with their associated high grease and added sugar. So we have more diabetes than we used to, and perhaps worse cardiovascular disease, but compared worldwide, apparently not more so. Note - we also live longer, so some of these diseases, diabetes and heart disease, are more prevalent the older you get. Decades ago people were dying from complications from smoking and alcohol consumption, both of which have appeared to have been reduced some.
What the NSA does externally, as long as that activity is in accordance with all treaties etc, is acceptable, otherwise it might be taken as acts of war. Spying on foreigners has never been considered illegal. Snowden should not have said a word about the activities against foreign governments that were not in violation US law. For that he might be rightfully branded a traitor. Had he just blown the whistle on the illegal US spying, there might have been hope for him.
I'll have to agree with i kan reed, you're way way way on the outer fringes. How about the world lifeexpectancy link the AC gave you. Or, if you're a wikipedia truster you'll see the same thing - heart disease is the number one killer worldwide. The US rate is lower than the world wide rate, so maybe it's time to change your rant, like maybe drop it entirely and catch back up with the real world.
TBBA - It appears even the most minor google search will prove that hemp (cannabis) was not only a source of fiber for textiles and rope, but a common medicine as well. I sincerely doubt that would have been the case if it was significantly less strong than the common weak varieties today.
If a dollar bank lent a dollar, they borrow one of the magically created dollars from the Fed bank, which costs them a tiny amount to borrow, and give it to you, earning money on the difference in interest rates. When they make bad loans, and have to repay actual dollars to the Fed from the tiny difference in margins they make, they collapse quickly. Hence the deposit insurance protecting a portion of the deposit is essential.
That used to be the way things worked. Now, "smart" bankers have offloaded the risk by selling those loans, so they no longer own them.
Today, yes, in the 1700s and 1800s, no. To round out the facts, the general hemp plants grown at the time were not as strong as some available today, only because they hadn't done as much hybridization.
I think what we need is to recognize that creating and deploying software has consequences, and a such we need a developer license, similar to how being a surgeon or a lawyer requires a license.
But but but, how will this allow for those highly necessary H1Bs? Our economy would go down in flames!!!
Interesting points on the iOS-ification of OSX. There's several things I don't like about Lion and ML. Interestingly enough, that's not among the list. I use and manage to move about OSX from Tiger through ML in the exact same ways. The only changes I had to make was in what I used to launch various programs, like "ich" for iChat prior to Lion, and "mes" for Messenger in Lion+. Note - I use QuickSilver and keyboard Cmd-Tab / Cmd-` for all app launching / navigation, and these have been consistent across all versions since at least 10.4. The configuration options have changed in some cases, but overall it works out well enough.
Air Port - I didn't see 5.6, but 6.+ let's me do almost everything I need. The only thing it doesn't do is allow split networks and route/firewall from wireless to wired, but that may be only because I haven't dug deeply enough. I understand that the Airport extreme never had DNS capabilities, sadly. I'd be interested in what you can't do anymore.
Grand Central is supposed to be an improvement, in my experience it has led to less stability of the system. That's not to say the idea isn't good, but the implementation appears to have had adverse effects that are not fully debugged yet. Disappearing scrollbars on the desktop are mostly irrelevant to me, the few times I actually use them, I can mouse over as I scroll and they "pop" and you can use them as regular scrollbars. They certainly are cleaner looking. What I don't like is when they pop up and won't go away, and block your access to what you're trying to click IOW, they don't offset the underlying content, they overlay, which IMHO is a problem.
The SL->Lion/ML was the most annoying switch, since it involved a lot of renaming and some changing of control and configuration pieces. But, that said, at least the core admin pieces all stayed in the same place, only a few details were moved. I would have preferred that most stay where they were, but the "relearn" cost was maybe 2 minutes for a couple of them, and never more than 5 minutes. Compare that to MS's completely fubar network setup configuration pieces that are now in 3 different places and none are gotten to in the same way in 2 successive versions of the OS. I'd have to disagree that it's the same kind of thing.
I might have actual emails dating all the way back to at least 94. I know we were sending URLs back and forth then for new sites of interest. But why would I need that when URLs, or URIs, specific purpose was to be able to transmit link information and email's primary purpose was to transmit information? What will they patent next - cars picking up people from point A and dropping off at point B?
I'll agree MS is doing everything they can to alienate every single one of their customers/developers all at the same time.
I must have missed Apple's fubar last year, unless you're talking about the Mac Pro. In a way, what they announced this year was what I was expecting - a more mini like box component wise. The upgrade in GPUs is significant this time around, although high end gamers won't be impressed. That was never the Mac Pro's target audience anyways. Being able to run 4K video is more important IMHO. The bigger problem they had was with changes to "pro" level apps, and the OS itself. While 10.7/10.8 may have improvements under the hood, I personally find both less stable than 10.6, which was rock-solid for me anyways.
It all depends on your view. I'm not against entry level developers, I just don't believe it's effective to use them in new development. Ever. It takes longer to convey your needs than it does to do it yourself. Unless you're investing in them to ramp them up to mid-level devs as fast as possible and account for that in your timeline. I have done that, but it's definitely a hit to the timeline, especially for smaller teams. You can also sometimes use them for smaller end components if they're closer to mid-level.
I agree fully with your incompetent management statement - even the best architect can be screwed by them, if they're ham-strung by stupid decisions (Using Documentum as a relational DB comes to mind from one case I know about). And I never stated that highly paid devs are good, only that poorly paid devs are almost universally bad, especially when it comes to outsourcers, offshore ones specifically. I qualified my statement since there's probably a poor sap out there somewhere that's poorly paid and not bad, and for whatever reason hasn't yet sought a new job.
Actually, I'm complaining about the fundamental approach of Spring, which breaks compile time checking, and liberally utilizes dynamic proxies. All of this complicates code, and I don't find that it improves development over actually designing and using straight JDK features. It obfuscates and unnecessarily abstracts everything it touches, and I've yet to see one case where it actually solved a problem. I stated years ago that Spring was a solution looking for a problem. That is still true.
Doubtful IMHO. Check the speed with which that market is declining. Yes, they still own it, but it's less than 50% of the consumer device market at this point, and in the US a minimum of 10% of desktops are macs. People are no longer tied to MS for any of their needs, and MS is starting to feel that pinch. Witness their pricing schemes of late that have increased costs to cover their revenue projections. MS is in a shrinking market, and will soon be only a large player, if they are not already.
I'd say that's a nice retort to blaming the languages for the low-quality devs, you missed a couple though: both languages allow incompetent code monkeys to fill out features without killing systems, usually, and business, above all, wants cheap development for features. So this compounds their other mistakes, where they just don't hire those good architects / programmers, because they cost too much. Why pay 100K for a dev when I can get a team of 10 offshore devs for 80K? Surely that team of 10 can outperform a single 100K dev? Well, no. Not if you hire a decent dev. (100K chosen because it's a reasonable round number - 80K is from an actual project I was on once) Needless to say, the team of 10 failed to deliver in 6 months and the work was done from scratch in 40 days by 2 devs, because they added the work on top of what they were already doing.
This isn't the only anecdotal reference to outsourced failures I have. I've not seen any success stories where the offshoring saved money and time, or even got partial functionality in a workable system delivered on time. In almost every case they would have been better off having local devs. The remaining cases should have been cancelled or completely redefined before start.
Microsoft has had the benefit of being the single controller of the.NET framework whilst Java has been victim of design by committee a lot of the time. This is why the.NET framework has managed to stay tidier and more focussed, but as I said in my other post what does it matter, because who the fuck sticks to just the core framework anyway when there are things like Spring out there?
Spring.... Possibly the single fastest way to completely destroy compile time checks that exists for no benefit and make finding that 2 minute bug take all day. It effectively removes most of the benefits of a smart IDE, even with the SpringSource plugin. Got 100 autowired beans, now which one was injected into page 6 of a view set by controller 23 that extends controller 12? (numbers used to hide the guilty). By gosh there's no way to tell without running a debugger and double checking that you actually got the right one, because Joe added a new bean that happens to have the same base name, and that's why everything is crap now, 12 hours later. In Joe's defense, he's working on a component that goes across multiple applications so he's not familiar with what's going on in those apps, nor can he be with a million lines of code or more.
That's just one anecdote in a long long long list of Spring fueled errors over the years. I've yet to see where Spring doesn't unnecessarily complicate code, add in extra layers, and remove compile time checks and the ability to step through the code in a deterministic manner. In the end, the best solution is just not to use it.
Usually you'd do that only to rescind the offending thing while still getting something else, still evil, in under the guise of being a good guy. This was so over the top that they may seriously have hurt their release, they managed to get a bunch of people excited over a Sony product, of all things, and have probably set the stage for a monster disappointment. Then again, with MS it's every other release.... That could hold true again.
I'm just waiting to see what stupid trick Sony is going to try now, as they certainly can't have a winning product in this decade.
Skype was never end to end encryption - and servers kept logs, in plain text. Skype was the epitome of a useless shell of security, as has now clearly been proven by MS's admissions. And no back door was needed. MS itself was scanning Skype messages and testing URLs. Skype and "secure" can only occur in the same sentence with "is not".
And you do realize that Windows 7/8 stills runs in the exact same manner as Windows Vista, right? And I can still run DOS, Windows 3.x, Windows NT and Windows 95 applications on a stock Windows 8 machine.
The last time I checked on this, an entire suite of programs from pre-Vista would not run on Vista+. Otherwise there wouldn't have been stories like: this or the MS compatibility center which has a not surprising list of software with "Status Varies", the only listing other than "Compatible", and no way to sort on incompatible software. The win16 APIs are only partially functional on Vista+, running in an emulated mode only and with what one person I read at the time described "with less success than WINE". As far as the user context goes, that's a whole different story, and the breakage MS did with W7 / 2008 R2 under the covers was large, if your software played with any of those APIs. Entire segments of functionality are gone, but don't worry - no errors will be thrown, they're just NOOPs now.
Microsoft (or at least Raymond Chen and his colleagues) seem to go to huge lengths to make the APIs in their operating systems extremely stable, from a compatibility point of view. Which I believe is what the grandparent was referring to when he said "write once, works 3 years from now."
Hmm, must have forgotten that huge swath of programs that failed to run on Vista+, for starters. Or things that required updates for Win7/2008 R2. Or the Office products that were incompatible with prior products on purpose in an effort to force upgrades (worked with Office 97, not so much with 2003 or whatever the first docx version was, nor with the 2010 "upgrade", which keeps warning you about potential compatibility errors and please run a check, even when there are no errors. But most funny, the article you linked is more about the bad effects that occur when you arbitrarily change error messages than any other thing. Also, this appears to be about MS DOS 7 (aka Win95) and has nothing to do with Windows APIs.
And yet more than a few of those urbanites are going to say "WTF?" on the phone home requirement and the "friend brought a game over and we can't play it". Actually, the latter will be first, followed by the "can't migrate games to a new console when the old one dies in 3 months" followed by the "what's this phone home requirement?"
Word of mouth passes fast, and the stink on this one will kill it. You'd think they'd learned something from Vista and Win8. Guess not.
Slashdot Mirror
The death rate is much lower in the US, fourfold lower in fact and in the third lowest grouping. The US does have a huge consumption of soda and fast food as both are cheap with their associated high grease and added sugar. So we have more diabetes than we used to, and perhaps worse cardiovascular disease, but compared worldwide, apparently not more so. Note - we also live longer, so some of these diseases, diabetes and heart disease, are more prevalent the older you get. Decades ago people were dying from complications from smoking and alcohol consumption, both of which have appeared to have been reduced some.
What the NSA does externally, as long as that activity is in accordance with all treaties etc, is acceptable, otherwise it might be taken as acts of war. Spying on foreigners has never been considered illegal. Snowden should not have said a word about the activities against foreign governments that were not in violation US law. For that he might be rightfully branded a traitor. Had he just blown the whistle on the illegal US spying, there might have been hope for him.
It's not their job nor charter to violate the 4th amendment. They did both in spirit and in fact, regardless what the nitpickers at the DOJ say.
were there any alarm words you left out?
I'll have to agree with i kan reed, you're way way way on the outer fringes. How about the world lifeexpectancy link the AC gave you. Or, if you're a wikipedia truster you'll see the same thing - heart disease is the number one killer worldwide. The US rate is lower than the world wide rate, so maybe it's time to change your rant, like maybe drop it entirely and catch back up with the real world.
TBBA - It appears even the most minor google search will prove that hemp (cannabis) was not only a source of fiber for textiles and rope, but a common medicine as well. I sincerely doubt that would have been the case if it was significantly less strong than the common weak varieties today.
If a dollar bank lent a dollar, they borrow one of the magically created dollars from the Fed bank, which costs them a tiny amount to borrow, and give it to you, earning money on the difference in interest rates. When they make bad loans, and have to repay actual dollars to the Fed from the tiny difference in margins they make, they collapse quickly. Hence the deposit insurance protecting a portion of the deposit is essential.
That used to be the way things worked. Now, "smart" bankers have offloaded the risk by selling those loans, so they no longer own them.
Today, yes, in the 1700s and 1800s, no. To round out the facts, the general hemp plants grown at the time were not as strong as some available today, only because they hadn't done as much hybridization.
I think what we need is to recognize that creating and deploying software has consequences, and a such we need a developer license, similar to how being a surgeon or a lawyer requires a license.
But but but, how will this allow for those highly necessary H1Bs? Our economy would go down in flames!!!
Interesting points on the iOS-ification of OSX. There's several things I don't like about Lion and ML. Interestingly enough, that's not among the list. I use and manage to move about OSX from Tiger through ML in the exact same ways. The only changes I had to make was in what I used to launch various programs, like "ich" for iChat prior to Lion, and "mes" for Messenger in Lion+. Note - I use QuickSilver and keyboard Cmd-Tab / Cmd-` for all app launching / navigation, and these have been consistent across all versions since at least 10.4. The configuration options have changed in some cases, but overall it works out well enough.
Air Port - I didn't see 5.6, but 6.+ let's me do almost everything I need. The only thing it doesn't do is allow split networks and route/firewall from wireless to wired, but that may be only because I haven't dug deeply enough. I understand that the Airport extreme never had DNS capabilities, sadly. I'd be interested in what you can't do anymore.
Grand Central is supposed to be an improvement, in my experience it has led to less stability of the system. That's not to say the idea isn't good, but the implementation appears to have had adverse effects that are not fully debugged yet. Disappearing scrollbars on the desktop are mostly irrelevant to me, the few times I actually use them, I can mouse over as I scroll and they "pop" and you can use them as regular scrollbars. They certainly are cleaner looking. What I don't like is when they pop up and won't go away, and block your access to what you're trying to click IOW, they don't offset the underlying content, they overlay, which IMHO is a problem.
The SL->Lion/ML was the most annoying switch, since it involved a lot of renaming and some changing of control and configuration pieces. But, that said, at least the core admin pieces all stayed in the same place, only a few details were moved. I would have preferred that most stay where they were, but the "relearn" cost was maybe 2 minutes for a couple of them, and never more than 5 minutes. Compare that to MS's completely fubar network setup configuration pieces that are now in 3 different places and none are gotten to in the same way in 2 successive versions of the OS. I'd have to disagree that it's the same kind of thing.
I might have actual emails dating all the way back to at least 94. I know we were sending URLs back and forth then for new sites of interest. But why would I need that when URLs, or URIs, specific purpose was to be able to transmit link information and email's primary purpose was to transmit information? What will they patent next - cars picking up people from point A and dropping off at point B?
I'll agree MS is doing everything they can to alienate every single one of their customers/developers all at the same time.
I must have missed Apple's fubar last year, unless you're talking about the Mac Pro. In a way, what they announced this year was what I was expecting - a more mini like box component wise. The upgrade in GPUs is significant this time around, although high end gamers won't be impressed. That was never the Mac Pro's target audience anyways. Being able to run 4K video is more important IMHO. The bigger problem they had was with changes to "pro" level apps, and the OS itself. While 10.7/10.8 may have improvements under the hood, I personally find both less stable than 10.6, which was rock-solid for me anyways.
It all depends on your view. I'm not against entry level developers, I just don't believe it's effective to use them in new development. Ever. It takes longer to convey your needs than it does to do it yourself. Unless you're investing in them to ramp them up to mid-level devs as fast as possible and account for that in your timeline. I have done that, but it's definitely a hit to the timeline, especially for smaller teams. You can also sometimes use them for smaller end components if they're closer to mid-level.
I agree fully with your incompetent management statement - even the best architect can be screwed by them, if they're ham-strung by stupid decisions (Using Documentum as a relational DB comes to mind from one case I know about). And I never stated that highly paid devs are good, only that poorly paid devs are almost universally bad, especially when it comes to outsourcers, offshore ones specifically. I qualified my statement since there's probably a poor sap out there somewhere that's poorly paid and not bad, and for whatever reason hasn't yet sought a new job.
Actually, I'm complaining about the fundamental approach of Spring, which breaks compile time checking, and liberally utilizes dynamic proxies. All of this complicates code, and I don't find that it improves development over actually designing and using straight JDK features. It obfuscates and unnecessarily abstracts everything it touches, and I've yet to see one case where it actually solved a problem. I stated years ago that Spring was a solution looking for a problem. That is still true.
I guess "authorities" in your case is "the people" since the authorities are the problem in this case.
Doubtful IMHO. Check the speed with which that market is declining. Yes, they still own it, but it's less than 50% of the consumer device market at this point, and in the US a minimum of 10% of desktops are macs. People are no longer tied to MS for any of their needs, and MS is starting to feel that pinch. Witness their pricing schemes of late that have increased costs to cover their revenue projections. MS is in a shrinking market, and will soon be only a large player, if they are not already.
I'd say that's a nice retort to blaming the languages for the low-quality devs, you missed a couple though: both languages allow incompetent code monkeys to fill out features without killing systems, usually, and business, above all, wants cheap development for features. So this compounds their other mistakes, where they just don't hire those good architects / programmers, because they cost too much. Why pay 100K for a dev when I can get a team of 10 offshore devs for 80K? Surely that team of 10 can outperform a single 100K dev? Well, no. Not if you hire a decent dev. (100K chosen because it's a reasonable round number - 80K is from an actual project I was on once) Needless to say, the team of 10 failed to deliver in 6 months and the work was done from scratch in 40 days by 2 devs, because they added the work on top of what they were already doing.
This isn't the only anecdotal reference to outsourced failures I have. I've not seen any success stories where the offshoring saved money and time, or even got partial functionality in a workable system delivered on time. In almost every case they would have been better off having local devs. The remaining cases should have been cancelled or completely redefined before start.
Microsoft has had the benefit of being the single controller of the .NET framework whilst Java has been victim of design by committee a lot of the time. This is why the .NET framework has managed to stay tidier and more focussed, but as I said in my other post what does it matter, because who the fuck sticks to just the core framework anyway when there are things like Spring out there?
Spring.... Possibly the single fastest way to completely destroy compile time checks that exists for no benefit and make finding that 2 minute bug take all day. It effectively removes most of the benefits of a smart IDE, even with the SpringSource plugin. Got 100 autowired beans, now which one was injected into page 6 of a view set by controller 23 that extends controller 12? (numbers used to hide the guilty). By gosh there's no way to tell without running a debugger and double checking that you actually got the right one, because Joe added a new bean that happens to have the same base name, and that's why everything is crap now, 12 hours later. In Joe's defense, he's working on a component that goes across multiple applications so he's not familiar with what's going on in those apps, nor can he be with a million lines of code or more.
That's just one anecdote in a long long long list of Spring fueled errors over the years. I've yet to see where Spring doesn't unnecessarily complicate code, add in extra layers, and remove compile time checks and the ability to step through the code in a deterministic manner. In the end, the best solution is just not to use it.
Usually you'd do that only to rescind the offending thing while still getting something else, still evil, in under the guise of being a good guy. This was so over the top that they may seriously have hurt their release, they managed to get a bunch of people excited over a Sony product, of all things, and have probably set the stage for a monster disappointment. Then again, with MS it's every other release.... That could hold true again.
I'm just waiting to see what stupid trick Sony is going to try now, as they certainly can't have a winning product in this decade.
Whew, that chair was clos.....
Skype was never end to end encryption - and servers kept logs, in plain text. Skype was the epitome of a useless shell of security, as has now clearly been proven by MS's admissions. And no back door was needed. MS itself was scanning Skype messages and testing URLs. Skype and "secure" can only occur in the same sentence with "is not".
And you do realize that Windows 7/8 stills runs in the exact same manner as Windows Vista, right? And I can still run DOS, Windows 3.x, Windows NT and Windows 95 applications on a stock Windows 8 machine.
The last time I checked on this, an entire suite of programs from pre-Vista would not run on Vista+. Otherwise there wouldn't have been stories like: this or the MS compatibility center which has a not surprising list of software with "Status Varies", the only listing other than "Compatible", and no way to sort on incompatible software. The win16 APIs are only partially functional on Vista+, running in an emulated mode only and with what one person I read at the time described "with less success than WINE". As far as the user context goes, that's a whole different story, and the breakage MS did with W7 / 2008 R2 under the covers was large, if your software played with any of those APIs. Entire segments of functionality are gone, but don't worry - no errors will be thrown, they're just NOOPs now.
Microsoft (or at least Raymond Chen and his colleagues) seem to go to huge lengths to make the APIs in their operating systems extremely stable, from a compatibility point of view. Which I believe is what the grandparent was referring to when he said "write once, works 3 years from now."
Hmm, must have forgotten that huge swath of programs that failed to run on Vista+, for starters. Or things that required updates for Win7/2008 R2. Or the Office products that were incompatible with prior products on purpose in an effort to force upgrades (worked with Office 97, not so much with 2003 or whatever the first docx version was, nor with the 2010 "upgrade", which keeps warning you about potential compatibility errors and please run a check, even when there are no errors. But most funny, the article you linked is more about the bad effects that occur when you arbitrarily change error messages than any other thing. Also, this appears to be about MS DOS 7 (aka Win95) and has nothing to do with Windows APIs.
And yet more than a few of those urbanites are going to say "WTF?" on the phone home requirement and the "friend brought a game over and we can't play it". Actually, the latter will be first, followed by the "can't migrate games to a new console when the old one dies in 3 months" followed by the "what's this phone home requirement?"
Word of mouth passes fast, and the stink on this one will kill it. You'd think they'd learned something from Vista and Win8. Guess not.
And I'm not too sure about Office.
Yes, I'm aware the joke would have been better if the last word was cockroaches, but Office is already sliding into irrelevance.