For 1 or 2 socket systems, at most, and for 2 socket systems, it depends upon the application(s) running.
AMD's still running on 3 year old tech/fabrication. Until their new lines come out starting this quarter, Intel's got the performance crown only. Multiple sockets is still ruled by AMD, something about NUMA....
I too am happy I can multi-task. I was doing that in 96, and stopped around 2000 when 2K/XP became the vehicle of choice and wouldn't properly support it, and still doesn't.
And I do remember the nastiness of individual drivers back then. Having an abstraction layer between the game and the driver is nice, as the abstraction layer can handle all features in software, using hardware directly when available.
You have to understand that game companies are pretty happy with MS overall. MS's dev tools are widely praised and their OS represents a platform that you can reach the majority of PC gamers on. They aren't going to make life much harder for themselves and their customers just because of an ideological pissing match. I'd agree that game companies would have to make an investment to create a non-platform specific API (OGL) since most fell into MS's DX trap. I also agree few would do so. I'd disagree that most are happy with the tools et al. Just read about the complaints about DX's various implementations or how convulted some API calls are, or the fact that MS has chosen to only have DX 10 features on Vista even though all the dev houses are running DX10 on XP. Maybe there's a torrent?
Duvel is an 8.5% top fermented ale. It is golden and generally one of the best heads you will see in a light colored beer. It also has a very unique flavor, with some fruitiness to it which I've not experienced in any other beer except perhaps the Belgium Moinette which costs just as much and is just a little bit lower on the scale for me.
Guiness is one of the few darker beers I like. I do not like overly malty beers, like Newcastle Brown Ale, for example. I'm also not a hop-head as I don't like my beer destroyed by an over abundance of hops. If you fall into this category, here's a short list of some beers I personally like:
Westmalle Tripel Brugge Tripple (very hard to find, have only seen it in the US once) Orval Ale St. Bernardus Abt 12 Chimay Red or Blue (Cinqs, the tan one, is quite a bit more fruity and somewhat sour) Rochefort 10 (this one has fruity overtones as well, but is very unique) Maredsous 10
These generally ship well, and range from $2.50 - $5 per bottle from what I've seen. They're all trappiste ales, except for Maredsous and St. Bernardus. There's one more official trappiste abbey, Westvleteren, whose Abt 12 is ranked as one of the best beers made. I've never seen it available in the US, so the next time I'm in Belgium, I'll stop by and try them out. Oh, one other note - these are actually more economical to buy and drink than your regular lagers/ales. Why? Because usually you'll only have 1 or 2. I'd classify everyone of these as a slow sipping beer.
If you like malty brews like Newcastle, many of the above come in dobbel/dubbel/double/8 variaties which are generally darker, and some triples also have a quadruple counterpart (also darker, but not quite as malty).
The best solution? Try them all and determine for yourself which ones you like. It's also a lot more fun.:)
Well, thanks. But I guess I was too subtle - the general bashing I see about windows involves those very things I mentioned, and a major one I left out - the registry. I won't even go into things like programs overwriting DLLs, or the fact that you can store program DLLs in the system directories to begin with, or the fact that every program seems to access the registry, even if you're playing minesweeper. (ok, that might be over the top, but I wouldn't be surprised) Those are all bad developer decisions, as they do not need to occur.
People who bash windows because it typically has a mouse with at least 2 mouse buttons are not whom I'm talking about. It's the folks who mention things that the layman translates into "%^*%&*)" that I concur with. Very few who bash Macs have that level.
There are some things that are annoying about a Mac, or any other OS for that matter, and some are downright bashworthy. Maybe I'll get an answer on how to do this one:
Why on earth can I not use the keyboard to navigate to various controls (e.g., drop-down box or checkbox) in Firefox (and some Safari controls) on a Mac? If it's not a text based control, you can't navigate to it. That's annoying.
Naah. I bash Windows regularly. I'm also a long time user, admin, programmer, and system/enterprise architect at one time. I'm rather familiar with it, and know at least something about a large number of shortcomings. I've also used DOS, DRDOS, VMS, Irix, Solaris, HP-UX, Linux (various flavors), OS/2, OSX among others with some more in-depth and many across multiple versions.
In my experience, people who bash windows typically have a reason to bash it. Even the proponents acknowledge there are problems with it. Everything from the GDI being moved into the kernel, the monolithic kernel design itself, the time-slicing approach, the inconsistent GUI, the inherently fragmenting filesystem, the horrible APIs, the bad networking stack, the poor power efficiency performance, the sleep/hibernate issues, etc are all solid reasons to bash it since others don't seem to have those problems even on the same hardware.
Virtualization software takes care of that problem. As CPUs get faster and faster, this becomes less of a problem, and might even be a way to put those extra cores to use.
The point was that there are several distros out there that support a large percentage of current hardware. There's a live distro that has OpenGL examples on it (forgot the name at the moment) that runs. Just build on top of one of those. If you're using OpenGL and OpenAL, a lot of platform issues are no longer your problem under such a scenario.
Personally, I haven't figured out why game companies don't use their own bootable linux distro w/ OpenGL and end their dependence on the ever shifting MS platform once and for all.
Games used to be on bootable floppies, and worked. If you consider that currently Linux distros work pretty well, and can be highly customized to boot, it seems a reasonable approach.
Pretty funny. I won't get Vista for probably quite a while. Vista just isn't important to me for anything I do, and I haven't played the last 20 games to completion that I bought, so until I actually complete (or even start a couple) there's no reason for me to migrate to Vista.
As for the hardware, the DX10 cards (nVidia's 8800 GT'x' series) are awesome performers, but they're awesome even with XP, ie, do not require Vista. So the hardware gains seem to be available without DX10 although DX10 may expand on what's available.
Regarding Jobs and a mac, I bought a mac just as 10.3 was released (a PowerBook). I bought it partly because I wanted a nice small laptop that did a few things. It turned out to do most of my home needs so well that it took over all photo/video/mail duties from my Intel system. I just recently bought the Macbook Pro. Here's where it gets good. Despite years of MS indoctrination that caused me to "migrate" my PB account to a separate account the first time, I repeated the migration and my MBP account was exactly like my PB account, complete with all programs, settings, everything. To say it raised an eyebrow was an understatement. MS OSes can't even migrate accounts between two copies of the same version of the OS on the same platform, much less between two different platforms, with different OS versions and different application versions. Even my secure wireless settings were transferred.
That's why the Mac is gaining traction. It just works.
Why do IT people work 18 hours a day? Because the intern secretary was promoted to sr management when the CIO left and has 0 understanding of any technical issues. They read about the man-month, and figure hey, 4 programmers for 1 year, or 16 programmers and 3 months, not understanding the difficulties of scaling projects, nor taking the time to plan for modularization into manageable chunks.
Then there's the sales people promising the moon to seal the deal. I worked at one of those for 2.5 years. To be fair, it was probably the best programming job I had, despite the hours, because the one thing this company did was reward their programmers. 20% bonuses per year were common, up to 40% if you met your deadlines, not including stock options, and they were paid quarterly. Telecommuting was encouraged, and truth be told, 60 hours a week didn't seem like it, when you didn't have to spend 10-20 hours a week commuting.
It's beyond merely programming. You generally will reach your plateau of programming efficiency within 5-7 years, from what I've seen. After that, you may learn a trick here or there, but in generally, you're not going to get much more productive coding wise. Now, you will become better as you pick up design patterns, business knowledge, and other large picture items. Once you've done this, however, within another 5-10 years, you're peaked if you're still coding. If you're doing architecture, you have a little growth, but not much, as once you hit the architectural level, it's almost flat everywhere I've been, and there aren't many positions either, nor do they really pay much better than your super duper sr programmer, which, of course, we all are;)
So, this leaves management. For some reason, the pay cap is much higher for even lower-level management than the peak technical folks, or at least that's my impression from personal experience. Note that this includes the benies, such as bonuses, which are generally under a different and more generous criteria than bonuses for techies.
But, we can't all expect 10%/year or more increases in compensation every year. That's not really sustainable. My main issue is that you peak out in responsibility and growth rather early, and then you're pretty much left in the same position as your ordinary ditch-digger - same shit, different day.
Wow, get me a job with your former or current employers. Every project I've been on since 1999 has been behind schedule before the first line of code had even been thought of. Most were delivered early or on time with the last 5 years all being based on face time only, even if telecommuting or flex time were given lip service.
If you take those two statements together, you'll see something had to give, and it was working hours. Only in the past 2 years have I forced the issue of the 40 hour work week back into my life. I'm now somewhere between 40-45 hours a week instead of 70-95, and I still manage to deliver those ridiculous deadlines. What I have noticed is that I am now working 6-8 straight hours a day (as compared to the estimated 3 hours of value add work in some government survey I'm too lazy to pull up - that's due to email, phone calls, meetings, people interrupting you, the web, bathroom breaks, coffee breaks, etc) If you think about it, that makes a lot of sense, as most of the/. community reads/. during work hours....;)
But, I'll make this comment, after many years in IT, my upward career swing is stalling. Does that have to do with my attitude? Undoubtedly, as traveling more than 10% is out of the question for the next couple of years (kids can have that effect). It also has to do with the realization that I'm already at an apex of sorts, and there's really no opportunities for advancement without career development of the sort that involves major changes (sr architect (technical) -> technical director (mgmt)). Unfortunately, the particular type job I'm looking for typically involves geographically spread out operations and 25%+ travel. This causes a conundrum where I have to decide whether to travel, or work below my level. Pick your evil.
I'm sure I'm not the only "older programmer" out there that's realized this.
I would disagree. It's really easy - his royal highness decrees "document all your APIs by EOM, or lose your bonuses and all your options" and you'd be amazed how quickly it'd be done.
I'd make one change in that statement: for the most part, programming is a whole bunch of simple boring math. It is, however, a lot of logical analysis which is sometimes quite complex. Unless, of course, you're programming some scientific algorithm, but for the most part, the bulk is business programming which is bare basic algebra.
Defintely! Websphere's an ok appserver. It'll run fine, but the clustering is subpar, BEA's Weblogic has a much better performing clustering solution. So does Resin, which sells the commercial enterprise version for something like a $500 license. Actually, I've only cursorily examined Resin, but it appears from the documentation to follow the designated in-memory replication approach used by the best BEA solution, which has 5 different approaches to clustering, only 2 of which scale well, and only the in-memory one that scales transparently.
As long as you don't use proprietary components, you shouldn't care what appserver you run on. Write to the spec, develop on whatever you want, then deploy and test to Websphere. It's a much better and faster running solution, and keeps you honest.
Well, they believe that killing babies is wrong because they believe God said so. Not much of an issue there - someone either believes that or not. As for the question of when life begins, if you absolutely have to have a single point, conception seems least arbitrary.
Actually, they believe God said not to kill (babies included), and they define "baby" as occuring at the moment of conception.
Is the moment of conception the least arbitrary? I'm not so sure. The Chinese used to not name children until they were a year old. The Greeks were known to place a flawed or unwanted baby out on the mountain for the gods to decide whether they lived or not. Basically, the point I'm trying to make here is when does it become human? Is it a cell? Is it a specialized cell? Considering you can pull a cell and manipulate the DNA, making it unique, did you create a human? If you add the appropriate enzymes, chemicals, etc to create blastocyst, will it be human then? Or is it some point later on? I would argue that it's some point later on, but exactly at what point I couldn't tell you. Certainly before age 2. Absolutely well after conception.
Back to the main point though - if "God says killing is bad", and that's the reason to attempt to ban new stem cell lines from being created, what are they going to do with all the fertilized eggs that are leftovers in fertilization? What about the death penalty? (I throw that one in because it has never ceased to amaze me that on the one hand it's a "pro-life" argument, but on the other they vigorously support the death penalty. I probably shouldn't have added that, it's a tangent and a slant...)
Why existing lines are "OK", and new ones not boggles the logical mind.
That, actually, is perfectly logical: the embryos the existing lines were taken from are already dead and can't get any deader, while any new lines would require destroying new embryos. It's not the stem cell line that's immoral in their mind, it's the act required to obtain it in the first place.
Hmmm. Interesting argument. I guess that's why there was no furor over the documentation of Nazi medical experiments in WWII? Perfectly all right to use the results?
Immorally obtained items remain immoral. This is an example of twisting logic and rationalization that defies explanation. In the case of Christians, any fundamentalist Christian is a hypocrit, because there's not a way in the world you can live according to the words written in the bible. QED.
It's the willingness to resort to these methods, of putting the ideology before the people who get hurt in the process, that makes these groups fundamentalistic. That's what fundamentalism is: an unshaking conviction that you're right and everyone who disagrees is either evil, stupid or mad
I'd disagree - it doesn't make them fundamentalists, it makes them dangerous driven lunatics. Why? Because what you describe is not only applicable to the most dangerous of fundamentalists, but extends out to any group that tries to control others. Saddam, Kaddafi, Amin, Stalin, Lenin, Mao and Hitler were not about religion, but power, wealth and subjugation. They had no delusions that those who disagreed were evil, stupid, or mad, they were just people in the way of their need for absolute power. (OK, except for Hitler, since he may have been in the later stages of syphillus, no one really knows what he thought)
Besides, most religions I know off don't teach that the ghosts of dead people are in the habit of returning to their old haunts
Christians believe in angels, Hindus believe in reincarnation, and every pagan religion I'm aware of has some statement about the departed and how the living should care for the departed or they'll suffer in some way by the departed coming back to affect them. The only major ones I'm unsure of are Bhuddism and Islam.
You're conveniently forgetting that there's two assumptions at work here: "God doesn't want you killing babies" and "embryos are babies or equal to babies". The latter doesn't logically follow from the former. Who said either one was logical? They are on record as stating that life (human life) starts at conception, which is why they oppose any harvesting of stem cells from embryos that are about to be destroyed. I note they deftly side-step the issue of whether destroying them in the first place is wrong. That's another whole argument that could go on for thousands of postings and brings in more worms than you can crush with a tank.
And in any case, assuming you're talking about the US Government, it didn't ban stem cell research, it merely refused to fund it.
Certain factions, I'm sure, would like to ban stem cell research. However, doing so would alienate an minimum estimated 60% of the voters, so they allowed existing lines to be used as a "compromise". Why existing lines are "OK", and new ones not boggles the logical mind.
However, you're forgetting that fundamentalism is not limited to religion. Take Soviet Russia, for example: the state was officially atheist, yet it had no trouble subjugating its own citizens and brainwashing children....Basically, you're listing the fruits of human nature, not religion.
I'd think this is true of any group that wants to control a larger group. There are only a few proven methods to do so: controlling force, indoctrination, and subjugation by various means. That fundamentalists use one or more of these methods does not make others that use them fundamentalist.
But you seem to be agreeing with me that the vocal atheists share many qualities of a fundamentalist, then? I'd agree that both use some of the same techniques. I have not personally met a vocal atheist, so I can't speak to their qualities.
You can't prove any of them. You can't prove any of them false, either. Which is why taking the position that all of them are false, and trying to convince other people of that, is similar to taking a position that any is correct and trying to convince other people of that. That's the reason why some people keep on claiming that atheism is a religion: active atheism requires believing an unprovable position (that there is no God). That's quite similar to claiming that an anti-unicorn believer is an active believer if they actively espouse that there are no unicorns (insert your choice of non-existant entity for "unicorn"). But I agree that proving the non-existance of something is an extremely difficult, if not impossible, task. It's why religion over the course of human history has increasing become more ephemeral, to the point that now they're unprovable. Take heaven, for example. It's "up", but apparently we can never get there by going "up", because "up" is essentially infinite, so the argument would always be "it's further up". Yet our dear departed can travel "down" to watch "over" us. Yet we cannot see them nor can we cover the distance to get to where "they" now reside, even though they do it in short order. Wait, there's this speed of light thing... oh, they're not limited by the laws of physics... It all starts to sound like magic to me.
Yep, that would explain the large number of premium-when-released iPods, the Treo and Palm pilots, flat screen TVs, HDTVs, nVidia 8800 Gxx's (not even a complete gadget!!!) Macbook (Pro)s, Alienware anything, etc etc etc.
The PS3 is having difficulty because, in a word, it sucks. It's more than a day late and a dollar short.
I'll give you a different take on the "Smart Phone" limitations. I, for one, haven't bought one because of the size, power requirements, and sheer onconvience of using and carrying one. Along comes Apple, and appears to make this simple, easy to use, intuitive, and, to top it off, good looking. Oh, and need we mention that you can also run your familiar interfaces on it provided you like Macs to begin with? No special "browser" needed. No new learning how to browse the web. A PDA you can actually use. My current LG phone's calendering option is so convulted to setup that I don't use it. The contact list is "locked", or they think it is, so I cannot manage it easily nor sync it with my computer. The iPhone does away with all of that. It will appeal to a large group of people that are carrying both a cell phone and an iPod, if you add PDA and/or pocket PC to that, you'll just add to the attraction.
I prefer the original US limits of 14 years, plus another 14 years, both needing explicit registration and I believe a copy of the registered work. However, I do modernize that with automatic copyright for a period of a year to register. That would be better. You'll make most of your money within the first 4-5 years nowadays anyways.
I also believe that copyrights shouldn't be transferable to corporations. They should stay with the individuals responsible. Now that would create some incentive for a corporation to keep the people involved in creation happy. It certainly would spell the end of the entertainment distribution industry as we know it.
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For 1 or 2 socket systems, at most, and for 2 socket systems, it depends upon the application(s) running.
AMD's still running on 3 year old tech/fabrication. Until their new lines come out starting this quarter, Intel's got the performance crown only. Multiple sockets is still ruled by AMD, something about NUMA....
And I do remember the nastiness of individual drivers back then. Having an abstraction layer between the game and the driver is nice, as the abstraction layer can handle all features in software, using hardware directly when available. You have to understand that game companies are pretty happy with MS overall. MS's dev tools are widely praised and their OS represents a platform that you can reach the majority of PC gamers on. They aren't going to make life much harder for themselves and their customers just because of an ideological pissing match. I'd agree that game companies would have to make an investment to create a non-platform specific API (OGL) since most fell into MS's DX trap. I also agree few would do so. I'd disagree that most are happy with the tools et al. Just read about the complaints about DX's various implementations or how convulted some API calls are, or the fact that MS has chosen to only have DX 10 features on Vista even though all the dev houses are running DX10 on XP. Maybe there's a torrent?
Duvel is an 8.5% top fermented ale. It is golden and generally one of the best heads you will see in a light colored beer. It also has a very unique flavor, with some fruitiness to it which I've not experienced in any other beer except perhaps the Belgium Moinette which costs just as much and is just a little bit lower on the scale for me.
:)
Guiness is one of the few darker beers I like. I do not like overly malty beers, like Newcastle Brown Ale, for example. I'm also not a hop-head as I don't like my beer destroyed by an over abundance of hops. If you fall into this category, here's a short list of some beers I personally like:
Westmalle Tripel
Brugge Tripple (very hard to find, have only seen it in the US once)
Orval Ale
St. Bernardus Abt 12
Chimay Red or Blue (Cinqs, the tan one, is quite a bit more fruity and somewhat sour)
Rochefort 10 (this one has fruity overtones as well, but is very unique)
Maredsous 10
These generally ship well, and range from $2.50 - $5 per bottle from what I've seen. They're all trappiste ales, except for Maredsous and St. Bernardus. There's one more official trappiste abbey, Westvleteren, whose Abt 12 is ranked as one of the best beers made. I've never seen it available in the US, so the next time I'm in Belgium, I'll stop by and try them out. Oh, one other note - these are actually more economical to buy and drink than your regular lagers/ales. Why? Because usually you'll only have 1 or 2. I'd classify everyone of these as a slow sipping beer.
If you like malty brews like Newcastle, many of the above come in dobbel/dubbel/double/8 variaties which are generally darker, and some triples also have a quadruple counterpart (also darker, but not quite as malty).
The best solution? Try them all and determine for yourself which ones you like. It's also a lot more fun.
Well, thanks. But I guess I was too subtle - the general bashing I see about windows involves those very things I mentioned, and a major one I left out - the registry. I won't even go into things like programs overwriting DLLs, or the fact that you can store program DLLs in the system directories to begin with, or the fact that every program seems to access the registry, even if you're playing minesweeper. (ok, that might be over the top, but I wouldn't be surprised) Those are all bad developer decisions, as they do not need to occur.
People who bash windows because it typically has a mouse with at least 2 mouse buttons are not whom I'm talking about. It's the folks who mention things that the layman translates into "%^*%&*)" that I concur with. Very few who bash Macs have that level.
There are some things that are annoying about a Mac, or any other OS for that matter, and some are downright bashworthy. Maybe I'll get an answer on how to do this one:
Why on earth can I not use the keyboard to navigate to various controls (e.g., drop-down box or checkbox) in Firefox (and some Safari controls) on a Mac? If it's not a text based control, you can't navigate to it. That's annoying.
a) thx ;)
b) only when everything and the kitchen sink is thrown in.
Naah. I bash Windows regularly. I'm also a long time user, admin, programmer, and system/enterprise architect at one time. I'm rather familiar with it, and know at least something about a large number of shortcomings. I've also used DOS, DRDOS, VMS, Irix, Solaris, HP-UX, Linux (various flavors), OS/2, OSX among others with some more in-depth and many across multiple versions.
In my experience, people who bash windows typically have a reason to bash it. Even the proponents acknowledge there are problems with it. Everything from the GDI being moved into the kernel, the monolithic kernel design itself, the time-slicing approach, the inconsistent GUI, the inherently fragmenting filesystem, the horrible APIs, the bad networking stack, the poor power efficiency performance, the sleep/hibernate issues, etc are all solid reasons to bash it since others don't seem to have those problems even on the same hardware.
Virtualization software takes care of that problem. As CPUs get faster and faster, this becomes less of a problem, and might even be a way to put those extra cores to use.
The point was that there are several distros out there that support a large percentage of current hardware. There's a live distro that has OpenGL examples on it (forgot the name at the moment) that runs. Just build on top of one of those. If you're using OpenGL and OpenAL, a lot of platform issues are no longer your problem under such a scenario.
Personally, I haven't figured out why game companies don't use their own bootable linux distro w/ OpenGL and end their dependence on the ever shifting MS platform once and for all.
Games used to be on bootable floppies, and worked. If you consider that currently Linux distros work pretty well, and can be highly customized to boot, it seems a reasonable approach.
Pretty funny. I won't get Vista for probably quite a while. Vista just isn't important to me for anything I do, and I haven't played the last 20 games to completion that I bought, so until I actually complete (or even start a couple) there's no reason for me to migrate to Vista.
As for the hardware, the DX10 cards (nVidia's 8800 GT'x' series) are awesome performers, but they're awesome even with XP, ie, do not require Vista. So the hardware gains seem to be available without DX10 although DX10 may expand on what's available.
Regarding Jobs and a mac, I bought a mac just as 10.3 was released (a PowerBook). I bought it partly because I wanted a nice small laptop that did a few things. It turned out to do most of my home needs so well that it took over all photo/video/mail duties from my Intel system. I just recently bought the Macbook Pro. Here's where it gets good. Despite years of MS indoctrination that caused me to "migrate" my PB account to a separate account the first time, I repeated the migration and my MBP account was exactly like my PB account, complete with all programs, settings, everything. To say it raised an eyebrow was an understatement. MS OSes can't even migrate accounts between two copies of the same version of the OS on the same platform, much less between two different platforms, with different OS versions and different application versions. Even my secure wireless settings were transferred.
That's why the Mac is gaining traction. It just works.
Then there's the sales people promising the moon to seal the deal. I worked at one of those for 2.5 years. To be fair, it was probably the best programming job I had, despite the hours, because the one thing this company did was reward their programmers. 20% bonuses per year were common, up to 40% if you met your deadlines, not including stock options, and they were paid quarterly. Telecommuting was encouraged, and truth be told, 60 hours a week didn't seem like it, when you didn't have to spend 10-20 hours a week commuting.
It's beyond merely programming. You generally will reach your plateau of programming efficiency within 5-7 years, from what I've seen. After that, you may learn a trick here or there, but in generally, you're not going to get much more productive coding wise. Now, you will become better as you pick up design patterns, business knowledge, and other large picture items. Once you've done this, however, within another 5-10 years, you're peaked if you're still coding. If you're doing architecture, you have a little growth, but not much, as once you hit the architectural level, it's almost flat everywhere I've been, and there aren't many positions either, nor do they really pay much better than your super duper sr programmer, which, of course, we all are ;)
So, this leaves management. For some reason, the pay cap is much higher for even lower-level management than the peak technical folks, or at least that's my impression from personal experience. Note that this includes the benies, such as bonuses, which are generally under a different and more generous criteria than bonuses for techies.
But, we can't all expect 10%/year or more increases in compensation every year. That's not really sustainable. My main issue is that you peak out in responsibility and growth rather early, and then you're pretty much left in the same position as your ordinary ditch-digger - same shit, different day.
Wow, get me a job with your former or current employers. Every project I've been on since 1999 has been behind schedule before the first line of code had even been thought of. Most were delivered early or on time with the last 5 years all being based on face time only, even if telecommuting or flex time were given lip service.
/. community reads /. during work hours.... ;)
If you take those two statements together, you'll see something had to give, and it was working hours. Only in the past 2 years have I forced the issue of the 40 hour work week back into my life. I'm now somewhere between 40-45 hours a week instead of 70-95, and I still manage to deliver those ridiculous deadlines. What I have noticed is that I am now working 6-8 straight hours a day (as compared to the estimated 3 hours of value add work in some government survey I'm too lazy to pull up - that's due to email, phone calls, meetings, people interrupting you, the web, bathroom breaks, coffee breaks, etc) If you think about it, that makes a lot of sense, as most of the
But, I'll make this comment, after many years in IT, my upward career swing is stalling. Does that have to do with my attitude? Undoubtedly, as traveling more than 10% is out of the question for the next couple of years (kids can have that effect). It also has to do with the realization that I'm already at an apex of sorts, and there's really no opportunities for advancement without career development of the sort that involves major changes (sr architect (technical) -> technical director (mgmt)). Unfortunately, the particular type job I'm looking for typically involves geographically spread out operations and 25%+ travel. This causes a conundrum where I have to decide whether to travel, or work below my level. Pick your evil.
I'm sure I'm not the only "older programmer" out there that's realized this.
I would disagree. It's really easy - his royal highness decrees "document all your APIs by EOM, or lose your bonuses and all your options" and you'd be amazed how quickly it'd be done.
Come to think of it, you're right - I should have stated that as "barely uses basic algebra".
it's not line of sight. Note the "suborbital" phrase in the summary?
I'd make one change in that statement: for the most part, programming is a whole bunch of simple boring math. It is, however, a lot of logical analysis which is sometimes quite complex. Unless, of course, you're programming some scientific algorithm, but for the most part, the bulk is business programming which is bare basic algebra.
My response had nothing to do with the now GGGP. The current GGP made a claim that perfect copies were required. I pointed out that was a fallacy.
Defintely! Websphere's an ok appserver. It'll run fine, but the clustering is subpar, BEA's Weblogic has a much better performing clustering solution. So does Resin, which sells the commercial enterprise version for something like a $500 license. Actually, I've only cursorily examined Resin, but it appears from the documentation to follow the designated in-memory replication approach used by the best BEA solution, which has 5 different approaches to clustering, only 2 of which scale well, and only the in-memory one that scales transparently.
As long as you don't use proprietary components, you shouldn't care what appserver you run on. Write to the spec, develop on whatever you want, then deploy and test to Websphere. It's a much better and faster running solution, and keeps you honest.
It does not have to be an absolute lossless copy, merely a good quality copy.
Hint - there is no perfect photographic copy that can be made with film.... it's inherently lossy.
Well, they believe that killing babies is wrong because they believe God said so. Not much of an issue there - someone either believes that or not. As for the question of when life begins, if you absolutely have to have a single point, conception seems least arbitrary.
Actually, they believe God said not to kill (babies included), and they define "baby" as occuring at the moment of conception.
Is the moment of conception the least arbitrary? I'm not so sure. The Chinese used to not name children until they were a year old. The Greeks were known to place a flawed or unwanted baby out on the mountain for the gods to decide whether they lived or not. Basically, the point I'm trying to make here is when does it become human? Is it a cell? Is it a specialized cell? Considering you can pull a cell and manipulate the DNA, making it unique, did you create a human? If you add the appropriate enzymes, chemicals, etc to create blastocyst, will it be human then? Or is it some point later on? I would argue that it's some point later on, but exactly at what point I couldn't tell you. Certainly before age 2. Absolutely well after conception.
Back to the main point though - if "God says killing is bad", and that's the reason to attempt to ban new stem cell lines from being created, what are they going to do with all the fertilized eggs that are leftovers in fertilization? What about the death penalty? (I throw that one in because it has never ceased to amaze me that on the one hand it's a "pro-life" argument, but on the other they vigorously support the death penalty. I probably shouldn't have added that, it's a tangent and a slant...)
That, actually, is perfectly logical: the embryos the existing lines were taken from are already dead and can't get any deader, while any new lines would require destroying new embryos. It's not the stem cell line that's immoral in their mind, it's the act required to obtain it in the first place.
Hmmm. Interesting argument. I guess that's why there was no furor over the documentation of Nazi medical experiments in WWII? Perfectly all right to use the results?
Immorally obtained items remain immoral. This is an example of twisting logic and rationalization that defies explanation. In the case of Christians, any fundamentalist Christian is a hypocrit, because there's not a way in the world you can live according to the words written in the bible. QED.
It's the willingness to resort to these methods, of putting the ideology before the people who get hurt in the process, that makes these groups fundamentalistic. That's what fundamentalism is: an unshaking conviction that you're right and everyone who disagrees is either evil, stupid or mad
I'd disagree - it doesn't make them fundamentalists, it makes them dangerous driven lunatics. Why? Because what you describe is not only applicable to the most dangerous of fundamentalists, but extends out to any group that tries to control others. Saddam, Kaddafi, Amin, Stalin, Lenin, Mao and Hitler were not about religion, but power, wealth and subjugation. They had no delusions that those who disagreed were evil, stupid, or mad, they were just people in the way of their need for absolute power. (OK, except for Hitler, since he may have been in the later stages of syphillus, no one really knows what he thought)
Besides, most religions I know off don't teach that the ghosts of dead people are in the habit of returning to their old haunts
Christians believe in angels, Hindus believe in reincarnation, and every pagan religion I'm aware of has some statement about the departed and how the living should care for the departed or they'll suffer in some way by the departed coming back to affect them. The only major ones I'm unsure of are Bhuddism and Islam.
I believe the common term is "supernatural"
The price drop means that no one wants them, and no one's willing to pony up more that MSRP.
If you'll stop by your local store, surprise - there's a PS3 or three on the shelf.
And in any case, assuming you're talking about the US Government, it didn't ban stem cell research, it merely refused to fund it.
Certain factions, I'm sure, would like to ban stem cell research. However, doing so would alienate an minimum estimated 60% of the voters, so they allowed existing lines to be used as a "compromise". Why existing lines are "OK", and new ones not boggles the logical mind.However, you're forgetting that fundamentalism is not limited to religion. Take Soviet Russia, for example: the state was officially atheist, yet it had no trouble subjugating its own citizens and brainwashing children....Basically, you're listing the fruits of human nature, not religion.
I'd think this is true of any group that wants to control a larger group. There are only a few proven methods to do so: controlling force, indoctrination, and subjugation by various means. That fundamentalists use one or more of these methods does not make others that use them fundamentalist. But you seem to be agreeing with me that the vocal atheists share many qualities of a fundamentalist, then? I'd agree that both use some of the same techniques. I have not personally met a vocal atheist, so I can't speak to their qualities. You can't prove any of them. You can't prove any of them false, either. Which is why taking the position that all of them are false, and trying to convince other people of that, is similar to taking a position that any is correct and trying to convince other people of that. That's the reason why some people keep on claiming that atheism is a religion: active atheism requires believing an unprovable position (that there is no God). That's quite similar to claiming that an anti-unicorn believer is an active believer if they actively espouse that there are no unicorns (insert your choice of non-existant entity for "unicorn"). But I agree that proving the non-existance of something is an extremely difficult, if not impossible, task. It's why religion over the course of human history has increasing become more ephemeral, to the point that now they're unprovable. Take heaven, for example. It's "up", but apparently we can never get there by going "up", because "up" is essentially infinite, so the argument would always be "it's further up". Yet our dear departed can travel "down" to watch "over" us. Yet we cannot see them nor can we cover the distance to get to where "they" now reside, even though they do it in short order. Wait, there's this speed of light thing... oh, they're not limited by the laws of physics... It all starts to sound like magic to me.Yep, that would explain the large number of premium-when-released iPods, the Treo and Palm pilots, flat screen TVs, HDTVs, nVidia 8800 Gxx's (not even a complete gadget!!!) Macbook (Pro)s, Alienware anything, etc etc etc.
The PS3 is having difficulty because, in a word, it sucks. It's more than a day late and a dollar short.
I'll give you a different take on the "Smart Phone" limitations. I, for one, haven't bought one because of the size, power requirements, and sheer onconvience of using and carrying one. Along comes Apple, and appears to make this simple, easy to use, intuitive, and, to top it off, good looking. Oh, and need we mention that you can also run your familiar interfaces on it provided you like Macs to begin with? No special "browser" needed. No new learning how to browse the web. A PDA you can actually use. My current LG phone's calendering option is so convulted to setup that I don't use it. The contact list is "locked", or they think it is, so I cannot manage it easily nor sync it with my computer. The iPhone does away with all of that. It will appeal to a large group of people that are carrying both a cell phone and an iPod, if you add PDA and/or pocket PC to that, you'll just add to the attraction.
I prefer the original US limits of 14 years, plus another 14 years, both needing explicit registration and I believe a copy of the registered work. However, I do modernize that with automatic copyright for a period of a year to register. That would be better. You'll make most of your money within the first 4-5 years nowadays anyways.
I also believe that copyrights shouldn't be transferable to corporations. They should stay with the individuals responsible. Now that would create some incentive for a corporation to keep the people involved in creation happy. It certainly would spell the end of the entertainment distribution industry as we know it.