But sometimes its better...to grow up in an apartment with honest parents than in a house with people who will trade their society's future economic health for temporary comfort.
Something about those who would trade liberty for security deserve neither rings a bell here.
Try working a shitty job and being broke and destitute. I have done that... and close to that right now.
Believe me you wont care what language it is as long as you are out of that horrible situation. Be happy you have a job in a nice air conditioned office. Wanting respect and earning a paycheck can bring great happiness, creativity, and great productivity. What you acomplish is more important than the language you love. People are so spoiled today and a reality check for those unemployed from 2008 when the economy tanked to today will show it. I bet these out of work Linux programmers would drool to work in an office using VB.NET and not have to sell printers at Best Buy.
You know, having been there and done that, on pretty much all counts of your monologue, I can attest that while I'd program MS, I'd only do it 75% of my "work" time, the other 25% (at a minimum) would be spent trying to find something more tolerable. (and yes, I have done.NET programming recently... I'm still trying to forget it)
Interestingly enough, I have a friend that just moved to England, just outside of London. His connection is 512K up / 6M down, and he has an 8GB/month cap. He didn't mention what it costs, just that he missed his 5/15 FIOS connection a lot. It was the only broadband option he could get.
Also, "go back"? Stop looking at the past through rose colored glasses - there was always a lot of shit on the radio.
That is true, however, it was different material on different stations and in different cities. So occasionally you'd get a good station in there and at least were not assaulted by the same garbage as you drove across the country.
Now, no matter where you drive, you get one of the following as your choice: top 40, hip hop 40, country rock 40, light rock 40, and the ever so awesome dinosaur rock 80. Those particular choices are interchangeable no matter where in the country you are. There's something seriously wrong with that IMNSHO. It's gotten so that even classical is hard to come by.
Maybe some sort of Mandated "Public Access" AirTime/Channel might help.
(Just a wild thought off the top of my head, so feel free to rip it apart:) )
That actually could be an interesting solution. Perhaps schools/colleges being able to use the 7-9 am and 4-6pm time slots for "educational" broadcasting? The 1934 act had discussions of 25% of air time being used for public service including education after all. I'm sure such broadcasting on average would be better than the current bland gruel being served nationwide.
Success were those radio stations that were the most popular in their markets and could charge higher fees for commercials, thus also being more successful financially.
These current radio stations weren't successful. They were bought by investment groups in order to monopolize a limited resource from a previously tightly controlled market. This does not qualify as "success" to me but seems more like Mafia tactics.
Think of this situation: we have a big barrel of water with 6 faucets. Before, separate entities each controlled 1 faucet and while faucet rights could be sold, no one could control more than 1 faucet. If you didn't like the price at 1 faucet, you could always go to the next. Now the regulation of only being able to control 1 faucet is lifted, and the local group of thugs, err, enterprising underhanded shifty businessmen, get together and buy the right to 4 faucets, then start charging a lower rate than the other 2 can afford to stay in business, then buy them out too. Now they control all 6 faucets, and start mixing in squash flavor into all water dispensed as well as raising prices, because the squash flavor guy gets proceeds from the increase in squash candy that the populace is now more attuned to thanks to the flavor "enhancement". This kills off the various independent fruit candy makers, because the squash flavoring causes the fruit flavors to take on an unpleasant taste. There is no other source of water in this case.
If you truly wanted a free market, then the current monopoly on bandwidths used by these stations would need to be allowed to be used by all (not practically feasible I know)
But, some of us are old and jaded and don't get the whole social networking thing. Some of this stuff just reminds me of stuff I got bored with in the early-mid 90's and stopped using. Some of the technologies are the same, but it's largely the same inane gibberish as before.
Heck, even my 70 year old mother doesn't trust Facebook and has stopped using it. She finds it's more crap than useful. (I was more surprised she ever used it than that she had given up on it and largely stopped using it.)
For some of us, it reminds us a lot of the technologies we were using in the 80s, except with a slightly higher quality of gibberish because you could ban the dumbest users from BBS's and gain loyalty from those that were left.
I'd be more surprised that your mother stopped using it than started. The fact that a lot of AARP type folks are on FB should say something about how hip it is.
- ClearChannel and Infinity, who definitely stand to reap some benefits from this gov interference they're proposing?
- The RIAA, who stands to get a kickback for supporting this and adding the cost of the devices which will harm consumers?
- The couple of marketeers posing as independent middle men that, as essentially paid representatives of the 5 major distributors, promote whatever those 5 wish to push blocking out everyone else?
Anything about any of those 3 sound like legitimate success to you? Or does it sound more like Mafia business practices?
I personally would rather have the extra battery life instead of an FM receiver. I barely use the radio in my car as it is, and never the one in my house. If they want people to listen to radio again, as probably the underlying purpose of this misguided effort is, I would propose an immediate ban on ownership of more than 8 radio stations by any single entity and no more than 2 stations in any market. (ie, no more clear channel or infinity) Let's go back to individuals deciding what gets played on the radio and perhaps we'll get some truly interesting music back on the airwaves instead of the same "top 40" as decided by some tone deaf marketeer across the entire country.
You are either confused yourself, or deliberately confusing people.
I am neither. You however....
CLR has two types of "pointers" -... As for unsafe pointers - you cannot reference a managed object (on GC heap) with an unsafe pointer! Go ahead, try it - "Object* o" won't even compile in C#, and that's because the CLR type system does not allow unmanaged pointers to managed types.
Hmm - does that sound like compiler or runtime checking to you?
As for providing code, that would require completely fabricating new code on a completely new system for you. Seems a bit steep just to make a point that anyone that knows anything about reflection and C# has already experienced at least once.
Hmm, yep, except there is no run time checking for type safety. You can merrily pass any (pointer referenced) object through any number of function calls and not throw any exceptions. All that's required is a little reflection.
Are you talking about Java here? Because you cannot do it in C#.
You are incorrect. This is exactly what happens in and underneath C#, and it's because the CLR has to accommodate C/C++ which utilize unsafe pointers. In short, there can be no run time type checking.
In Java, this will throw a ClassCastException on the first function call.
Hmm, yep, except there is no run time checking for type safety. You can merrily pass any (pointer referenced) object through any number of function calls and not throw any exceptions. All that's required is a little reflection.
Unsafe code (pointers) to support C++, Cobol and Fortran compilers running on the CLI.
And this is the reason there is no type safety - because in the VM, LCD forces this upon you.
64-bit arrays (although part of the spec, only Mono implements this).
And there are features in the spec that MS doesn't support after 4 major versions? Say it isn't so!
Then there are.NET collections which are.... basic at best. The concurrency toolset - much better alternatives in JDK5 onward. Dynamic code generation is also available (BCEL).
And then there's the documentation. I never thought I'd actually think highly of Javadocs, but a nice 9 month stint through MS's documentation made me pine for the relatively concise and accurate Javadocs.
I doubt any other tablet will have the media fawning over it to the degree they did with the iPad. I also doubt any other manufacturer has the number of followers who would buy one no matter what its capabilities are. Apple does enjoy certain marketing advantages (that they've earned to a degree) that others don't have.
Media fawning? I recall the media completely dismissing the iPad as irrelevant, the butt of certain unsavory jokes, and positions that just stated "why?". And then it came out and those same naysayers couldn't get out of each other's way fast enough to buy one and use it to write their new view as they were using it.
The iPad succeeded because Apple successfully identified what was needed and delivered a solution adequate to fill that need, even if many didn't see the need until after the iPad came out. After all, an oft repeated mantra was along the lines of "many have built tablets before, and they have all failed to achieve mass adoption, why does Apple think they can do it differently"? Perhaps because Apple truly does "Think Different" and does so successfully.
You've got to be kidding me. Each node was only 2 quad core processors, with 16 500GB drives (big potential disk IO per node) but this system doesn't even begin to scratch the very bottom of the top 500 list.
I just can't image that if even the bottom rung of the top 500 was even slightly interested in this record, that they wouldn't blow this team out of the water.
I believe technically it's not an infringement until you distribute.
This has been something the content companies have been pushing so hard for so long that people are actually spouting their line that copying in and of itself is illegal (it's not and never was meant to be, or at least wasn't until some of the very recent laws came about)
Recall that original copyright law was put into effect to prevent someone from profiting off another's work without compensation for a limited time, after which the work would go into the public domain. Since then the Disney laws have made a mockery of the original intent.
Well, in many of my classes we weren't allowed anything but a pencil for a test. Everything else was provided.
In others, you could bring a calculator, however, since they were multi-step problems, you still had to write everything out. The calculator was really only good for checking that you'd correctly manipulated the numbers.
In a couple you could bring in anything you wanted. You were given 3 hours. The average score was under 45% with the maximum being barely 80%.
You actually had to understand the material and be able to problem solve with what you'd learned.
The more correct phone analogy for your car analogy would be try removing the innards of the phone battery, using tools made of highly reactive materials.
The correct car analogy would be to replace the ECU unit with an aftermarket unit. It's done all the time in certain circles, much like those that wish to mod phones. To further go down and tie the 2 analogies together, now imagine car manufacturers put air bag explosives on the ECU socket. Would you buy such a car?
There is another solution to this though. It doesn't really matter where the corporation is, what matters is where it's produced. Let's take rubber kickballs, something that is simple, easy, and almost completely machine made. Right now Toys-R-Us sells them from China. Why? There's little labor involved in production. As for labor involved for shipping - you have the packing in China, shipping overseas, unpacking in the US by union workers, packing back up on trucks, unpacking at a distribution center, then repacking and shipping to stores. How is that cheaper than producing locally and removing all those other costs? Could it be because there are no safety and environmental pollution laws in China? I'd say YES.
So, how to fix this? Inspect every item that comes into a port and charge the importer to cover the cost. Test a representative item to ensure it meets our quality standards (lead and cadmium in children's toys for example). If it comes from a country with lax environmental and safety laws, test more items. If it comes from a country with strict laws then perhaps only token testing would be done. This evens the additional cost burden of importing for countries that have good safety, environmental, and wage laws vs those that do not. It also would promote local manufacturing over moving offshore, as your item will see little if any price reduction by such a move.
As we have seen, local manufacturing is key to several things, including more rapid recovery from recessions and as providing an engine for innovation. (After all, why innovate if you aren't producing anything?) Thus you could sell this under "Homeland Security" and "Think of the children" as well as several others. Corporations would be upset, but moving offshore doesn't help them.
Consumers have more computer choice now than they had in 1995 or 2000.
You really think so? I'd say we have less choice now than in either of those years, although the choices we have now are more accessible from a consumer viewpoint. I will agree that the dominant (and ascending) player in 1995 and 2000 is waning, and that's a good thing.
Normal English strongly implies it does. If you say to someone I have several pieces of fruit and one of them is a banana, when in fact two of them are bananas, most people would call that lying. One could argue that strictly speaking the statement was true: you did have one banana, you just also had an additional banana, but that level of honesty is only tolerated in politicians. If you had said "at least one of which is a banana" that would be fine, otherwise the statement is deliberately misleading.
No, there's nothing wrong with saying that. All that has been said is that one fruit is confirmed to be a banana. What if they had a bag of fruit, pulled one out and said "one is a banana"? Context alone would disprove your point.
Excellent points on the "new tech" merely being faster, bigger, and simpler, but nothing really "new". I've seen quite a few things repacked over the years and sold as "new". The iPhone is nice in that it does what it does well. The large majority of the apps available for the iPhone are worthless and AT&T's network is crappy but usable in my area. I haven't found an Android phone I like yet, and haven't really played with the software enough to know whether it's at least as good.
I especially love how "young technicians" flail about in their "new hot language" only to realize that geez, this is a pile of crap I've created years (ok, maybe 1 year) later, at least for those few that do eventually gain some understanding. PHP comes to mind here.
There's also the other end of the spectrum, with geezers promoting yet another round of crap: Java EJBs anyone? EJBs are supposed to allow those inexperienced young technicians be productive but fails to deliver because they are not interested in something so restrictive and uninspiring.
If you're not working 100 hours/wk for yourself, you generally won't retire after 10 years at any company. Even working for yourself, there's a less than 1 in 10 chance it will work out.
Now if you got a second job, and banked that second income, you'd have 10 years of cash built up (minus extra taxes plus potential income unless you lose it all in that great gamble known as the stock market)
The long and the short of it is: work 40Hr/wk and have a life. On their deathbed, no one wishes they had worked more.
Slashdot Mirror
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Unless you're watching Fox News.....
But sometimes its better ...to grow up in an apartment with honest parents than in a house with people who will trade their society's future economic health for temporary comfort.
Something about those who would trade liberty for security deserve neither rings a bell here.
Try working a shitty job and being broke and destitute. I have done that ... and close to that right now.
Believe me you wont care what language it is as long as you are out of that horrible situation. Be happy you have a job in a nice air conditioned office. Wanting respect and earning a paycheck can bring great happiness, creativity, and great productivity. What you acomplish is more important than the language you love. People are so spoiled today and a reality check for those unemployed from 2008 when the economy tanked to today will show it. I bet these out of work Linux programmers would drool to work in an office using VB.NET and not have to sell printers at Best Buy.
You know, having been there and done that, on pretty much all counts of your monologue, I can attest that while I'd program MS, I'd only do it 75% of my "work" time, the other 25% (at a minimum) would be spent trying to find something more tolerable. (and yes, I have done .NET programming recently... I'm still trying to forget it)
Interestingly enough, I have a friend that just moved to England, just outside of London. His connection is 512K up / 6M down, and he has an 8GB/month cap. He didn't mention what it costs, just that he missed his 5/15 FIOS connection a lot. It was the only broadband option he could get.
You forgot Hack/NetHack
Also, "go back"? Stop looking at the past through rose colored glasses - there was always a lot of shit on the radio.
That is true, however, it was different material on different stations and in different cities. So occasionally you'd get a good station in there and at least were not assaulted by the same garbage as you drove across the country.
Now, no matter where you drive, you get one of the following as your choice: top 40, hip hop 40, country rock 40, light rock 40, and the ever so awesome dinosaur rock 80. Those particular choices are interchangeable no matter where in the country you are. There's something seriously wrong with that IMNSHO. It's gotten so that even classical is hard to come by.
I don't know.
Maybe some sort of Mandated "Public Access" AirTime/Channel might help.
(Just a wild thought off the top of my head, so feel free to rip it apart :) )
That actually could be an interesting solution. Perhaps schools/colleges being able to use the 7-9 am and 4-6pm time slots for "educational" broadcasting? The 1934 act had discussions of 25% of air time being used for public service including education after all. I'm sure such broadcasting on average would be better than the current bland gruel being served nationwide.
Success were those radio stations that were the most popular in their markets and could charge higher fees for commercials, thus also being more successful financially.
These current radio stations weren't successful. They were bought by investment groups in order to monopolize a limited resource from a previously tightly controlled market. This does not qualify as "success" to me but seems more like Mafia tactics.
Think of this situation: we have a big barrel of water with 6 faucets. Before, separate entities each controlled 1 faucet and while faucet rights could be sold, no one could control more than 1 faucet. If you didn't like the price at 1 faucet, you could always go to the next. Now the regulation of only being able to control 1 faucet is lifted, and the local group of thugs, err, enterprising underhanded shifty businessmen, get together and buy the right to 4 faucets, then start charging a lower rate than the other 2 can afford to stay in business, then buy them out too. Now they control all 6 faucets, and start mixing in squash flavor into all water dispensed as well as raising prices, because the squash flavor guy gets proceeds from the increase in squash candy that the populace is now more attuned to thanks to the flavor "enhancement". This kills off the various independent fruit candy makers, because the squash flavoring causes the fruit flavors to take on an unpleasant taste. There is no other source of water in this case.
If you truly wanted a free market, then the current monopoly on bandwidths used by these stations would need to be allowed to be used by all (not practically feasible I know)
But, some of us are old and jaded and don't get the whole social networking thing. Some of this stuff just reminds me of stuff I got bored with in the early-mid 90's and stopped using. Some of the technologies are the same, but it's largely the same inane gibberish as before.
Heck, even my 70 year old mother doesn't trust Facebook and has stopped using it. She finds it's more crap than useful. (I was more surprised she ever used it than that she had given up on it and largely stopped using it.)
For some of us, it reminds us a lot of the technologies we were using in the 80s, except with a slightly higher quality of gibberish because you could ban the dumbest users from BBS's and gain loyalty from those that were left.
I'd be more surprised that your mother stopped using it than started. The fact that a lot of AARP type folks are on FB should say something about how hip it is.
Who is successful here?
- ClearChannel and Infinity, who definitely stand to reap some benefits from this gov interference they're proposing?
- The RIAA, who stands to get a kickback for supporting this and adding the cost of the devices which will harm consumers?
- The couple of marketeers posing as independent middle men that, as essentially paid representatives of the 5 major distributors, promote whatever those 5 wish to push blocking out everyone else?
Anything about any of those 3 sound like legitimate success to you? Or does it sound more like Mafia business practices?
I personally would rather have the extra battery life instead of an FM receiver. I barely use the radio in my car as it is, and never the one in my house. If they want people to listen to radio again, as probably the underlying purpose of this misguided effort is, I would propose an immediate ban on ownership of more than 8 radio stations by any single entity and no more than 2 stations in any market. (ie, no more clear channel or infinity) Let's go back to individuals deciding what gets played on the radio and perhaps we'll get some truly interesting music back on the airwaves instead of the same "top 40" as decided by some tone deaf marketeer across the entire country.
You are either confused yourself, or deliberately confusing people.
I am neither. You however....
CLR has two types of "pointers" - ... As for unsafe pointers - you cannot reference a managed object (on GC heap) with an unsafe pointer! Go ahead, try it - "Object* o" won't even compile in C#, and that's because the CLR type system does not allow unmanaged pointers to managed types.
Hmm - does that sound like compiler or runtime checking to you?
As for providing code, that would require completely fabricating new code on a completely new system for you. Seems a bit steep just to make a point that anyone that knows anything about reflection and C# has already experienced at least once.
Hmm, yep, except there is no run time checking for type safety. You can merrily pass any (pointer referenced) object through any number of function calls and not throw any exceptions. All that's required is a little reflection.
Are you talking about Java here? Because you cannot do it in C#.
You are incorrect. This is exactly what happens in and underneath C#, and it's because the CLR has to accommodate C/C++ which utilize unsafe pointers. In short, there can be no run time type checking.
In Java, this will throw a ClassCastException on the first function call.
Hmm, yep, except there is no run time checking for type safety. You can merrily pass any (pointer referenced) object through any number of function calls and not throw any exceptions. All that's required is a little reflection.
And this is the reason there is no type safety - because in the VM, LCD forces this upon you.
And there are features in the spec that MS doesn't support after 4 major versions? Say it isn't so!
Then there are .NET collections which are .... basic at best. The concurrency toolset - much better alternatives in JDK5 onward. Dynamic code generation is also available (BCEL).
And then there's the documentation. I never thought I'd actually think highly of Javadocs, but a nice 9 month stint through MS's documentation made me pine for the relatively concise and accurate Javadocs.
I doubt any other tablet will have the media fawning over it to the degree they did with the iPad. I also doubt any other manufacturer has the number of followers who would buy one no matter what its capabilities are. Apple does enjoy certain marketing advantages (that they've earned to a degree) that others don't have.
Media fawning? I recall the media completely dismissing the iPad as irrelevant, the butt of certain unsavory jokes, and positions that just stated "why?". And then it came out and those same naysayers couldn't get out of each other's way fast enough to buy one and use it to write their new view as they were using it.
The iPad succeeded because Apple successfully identified what was needed and delivered a solution adequate to fill that need, even if many didn't see the need until after the iPad came out. After all, an oft repeated mantra was along the lines of "many have built tablets before, and they have all failed to achieve mass adoption, why does Apple think they can do it differently"? Perhaps because Apple truly does "Think Different" and does so successfully.
Now if Apple would support FLAC, I'd be happier.
You've got to be kidding me. Each node was only 2 quad core processors, with 16 500GB drives (big potential disk IO per node) but this system doesn't even begin to scratch the very bottom of the top 500 list.
I just can't image that if even the bottom rung of the top 500 was even slightly interested in this record, that they wouldn't blow this team out of the water.
I believe technically it's not an infringement until you distribute.
This has been something the content companies have been pushing so hard for so long that people are actually spouting their line that copying in and of itself is illegal (it's not and never was meant to be, or at least wasn't until some of the very recent laws came about)
Recall that original copyright law was put into effect to prevent someone from profiting off another's work without compensation for a limited time, after which the work would go into the public domain. Since then the Disney laws have made a mockery of the original intent.
Well, in many of my classes we weren't allowed anything but a pencil for a test. Everything else was provided.
In others, you could bring a calculator, however, since they were multi-step problems, you still had to write everything out. The calculator was really only good for checking that you'd correctly manipulated the numbers.
In a couple you could bring in anything you wanted. You were given 3 hours. The average score was under 45% with the maximum being barely 80%.
You actually had to understand the material and be able to problem solve with what you'd learned.
The more correct phone analogy for your car analogy would be try removing the innards of the phone battery, using tools made of highly reactive materials.
The correct car analogy would be to replace the ECU unit with an aftermarket unit. It's done all the time in certain circles, much like those that wish to mod phones. To further go down and tie the 2 analogies together, now imagine car manufacturers put air bag explosives on the ECU socket. Would you buy such a car?
There is another solution to this though. It doesn't really matter where the corporation is, what matters is where it's produced. Let's take rubber kickballs, something that is simple, easy, and almost completely machine made. Right now Toys-R-Us sells them from China. Why? There's little labor involved in production. As for labor involved for shipping - you have the packing in China, shipping overseas, unpacking in the US by union workers, packing back up on trucks, unpacking at a distribution center, then repacking and shipping to stores. How is that cheaper than producing locally and removing all those other costs? Could it be because there are no safety and environmental pollution laws in China? I'd say YES.
So, how to fix this? Inspect every item that comes into a port and charge the importer to cover the cost. Test a representative item to ensure it meets our quality standards (lead and cadmium in children's toys for example). If it comes from a country with lax environmental and safety laws, test more items. If it comes from a country with strict laws then perhaps only token testing would be done. This evens the additional cost burden of importing for countries that have good safety, environmental, and wage laws vs those that do not. It also would promote local manufacturing over moving offshore, as your item will see little if any price reduction by such a move.
As we have seen, local manufacturing is key to several things, including more rapid recovery from recessions and as providing an engine for innovation. (After all, why innovate if you aren't producing anything?) Thus you could sell this under "Homeland Security" and "Think of the children" as well as several others. Corporations would be upset, but moving offshore doesn't help them.
Consumers have more computer choice now than they had in 1995 or 2000.
You really think so? I'd say we have less choice now than in either of those years, although the choices we have now are more accessible from a consumer viewpoint. I will agree that the dominant (and ascending) player in 1995 and 2000 is waning, and that's a good thing.
Normal English strongly implies it does. If you say to someone I have several pieces of fruit and one of them is a banana, when in fact two of them are bananas, most people would call that lying. One could argue that strictly speaking the statement was true: you did have one banana, you just also had an additional banana, but that level of honesty is only tolerated in politicians. If you had said "at least one of which is a banana" that would be fine, otherwise the statement is deliberately misleading.
No, there's nothing wrong with saying that. All that has been said is that one fruit is confirmed to be a banana. What if they had a bag of fruit, pulled one out and said "one is a banana"? Context alone would disprove your point.
There are plenty of sub $100 devices. Using Google Maps in this way will require a license. Check out for alternatives.
How I wish I could mod you up.
Excellent points on the "new tech" merely being faster, bigger, and simpler, but nothing really "new". I've seen quite a few things repacked over the years and sold as "new". The iPhone is nice in that it does what it does well. The large majority of the apps available for the iPhone are worthless and AT&T's network is crappy but usable in my area. I haven't found an Android phone I like yet, and haven't really played with the software enough to know whether it's at least as good.
I especially love how "young technicians" flail about in their "new hot language" only to realize that geez, this is a pile of crap I've created years (ok, maybe 1 year) later, at least for those few that do eventually gain some understanding. PHP comes to mind here.
There's also the other end of the spectrum, with geezers promoting yet another round of crap: Java EJBs anyone? EJBs are supposed to allow those inexperienced young technicians be productive but fails to deliver because they are not interested in something so restrictive and uninspiring.
If you're not working 100 hours/wk for yourself, you generally won't retire after 10 years at any company. Even working for yourself, there's a less than 1 in 10 chance it will work out.
Now if you got a second job, and banked that second income, you'd have 10 years of cash built up (minus extra taxes plus potential income unless you lose it all in that great gamble known as the stock market)
The long and the short of it is: work 40Hr/wk and have a life. On their deathbed, no one wishes they had worked more.