Actually, it's been shown that if you jog moderately, on average you'll increase your lifespan by approximately the time you spent jogging. Not a dramatic outcome, unfortunately.
This is probably pointless, but I'll answer you anyway. With regard to skills:
o I started programming in 1969, in PDP-8 assembler, well before my voice changed. o Then I wrote a bunch of games and utilities in high school, many of which were widely distributed (pre-Internet). o Then I went to MIT for six years, and wrote a parallelizing C compiler for my Master's thesis. o At that point I had already used a dozen programming languages and assembler languages, most of which I've forgotten. o Since then, I've written operating systems, compilers, linkers, editors, CSMA networks, real-time apps, financial services apps, web-based transaction apps. o I've shipped product to over 20,000 customers -- built it, supported it, enhanced it, managed a development group, managed whole development organizations (teams as large as 100, and as small as 3). You name it, I've probably written it. o I regularly use "latest rage" programming languages and environments. o I've started three companies and made significant money with two of them.
I used to be contemptuous of application productivity enhancers. Then, one day, I had to figure out why our clock was being cleaned, feature-wise and development-time-wise, by one random nut in a garage using PowerBuilder, who was somehow able to turn out GUI-based application software 10x faster than our whole team could.
I learned an important lesson from that. Success is all about how much you can accomplish given limited quantities of time. Any tool that gets you there faster should be embraced. At one of my start-ups, I made tons of money using VB, but we wouldn't have made a plugged nickel if we had used C++. Our development time would have tripled, and we'd have missed the market window completely.
I'll close with this thought: I really *HATE* VB. I hate the syntax, the stupid conventions, the limitations, the bugs, the bad behaviors, the limitations on the controls, etc., etc. OK? There, I've said it. But, having said that, VB is an important tool in my quiver, and I know exactly how and when to use that tool to clean the clocks of arrogant techno-nerds when we run into them competitively. Fortunately for me, the world is full of them, and they just don't seem to catch on. I hope they are all resonating strongly to your posts.
I won't recycle the arguments that are all over the net, which you are free to read. VB.Net is nothing like VB. It is a macro front end to generate C#, and it breaks all the rules of "approachable, easy, quick, simple" that made VB great.
VB doesn't "suck rat testicles." You're just flat wrong.
Parent is the best post in the thread. The modern programming environments are so "heavy" with setup that people don't want to touch them. Visual Studio, despite an earlier post claiming the contrary, is a huge pain in the ass, yet is considered by many to be best-in-class in terms of "just works". Don't even talk to me about setting up Apache on my home machine with Tomcat and JBOSS or whatever. And I don't want to hear about how easy it is to install/configure/compile [your favorite environment] from [your favorite sourcecode repository]. It's fundamentally easy, yes, nobody is arguing about that. But if you are a novice and you don't know any magic, and you don't have any context for understanding what the hell the HOWTOs are talking about, you're just plain stuck. You can haunt the message boards and hope someone will help you, and usually someone will. But that requires a lot of persistence and patience. Bottom line is, you don't walk up to the machine knowing how to do anything. Someone has to set up the environment for you.
And that's why Visual Basic and PowerBuilder are the fastest and possibly the best development environments ever invented for ordinary human beings who have a programming task to accomplish. Fire the environment up, everything is obvious; real gui apps work right away; everything is easy. Which is why it's such a shame that VB, at least, has been replaced by the abortion that is VB.Net.
Actually, the majority is almost always conservative, no matter what generation you consider. We have had rather few progressive Presidents, wouldn't you say? Didn't matter whether the boomers were young or old. The Boomers were too young to vote for Kennedy. The choice in 1964 was between Goldwater, who wanted to expand the war in Vietnam, and Johnson, who claimed he didn't, but did. Johnson was a fluke. Nobody knew he had a liberal social policy agenda, he was a conservative Southern democrat who Kennedy put on the ticket in order to win Texas. After Johnson we elected Nixon, by landslides, just when the boomers started voting en mass. Then we chose Carter, a conservative, religious southern Democrat, over the half-dead Jerry Ford, hardly a progressive choice. Then 12 years of Reagan and Bush I -- our most conservative Presidents since Hoover -- during the prime years of 30-something Boomer voting! 8 years of Clinton, who cut welfare to the bone and accomplished nothing on any progressive agenda. Then 8 years of (gack) Bush II.
John Stuart Mill said, "I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it." Mill goes on to say that since there are undeniably a lot of stupid people, the Conservatives will always be a very powerful party. Perhaps this is closer to the explanation you are looking for.
I thought my rant was pretty funny, actually. I am my own best audience.
But your response is kinda weird. I don't know ANYONE who takes their physical security that seriously. Perhaps Michael Moore is right -- our biggest enemy is fear itself, and a culture and news media that promotes it.
Congratulations, you go to college. Here's the first lecture in Physical Security 101:
Any house can be broken into, simply by smashing a window or a slider with a large rock or brick -- an object that you don't even have to bring with you. You can probably find it right in the garden. There's no need for some imaginary and deeply clever criminal to snoop around peering at garage door openers and license registrations. The obvious corollary to this is that there's little need for you to lock your door in the first place, or to worry about where you hide the key if you DO lock the door. A locked door isn't going to stop anyone who is serious about wanting to get in -- serious enough, that is, not to care about breaking a window.
So put away your "Secret Agent" DVDs and relax, for God's sake. Take a Valium.
True. But actually IBM's experience is a pretty accurate analog to this thread.
VM370 was a dog. Why? Because they relied on hardware traps and software simulation of CCW's (channel command words), to run the host operating system "perfectly."
A hack to this, used by National CSS and other timesharing vendors (because, remember that CP/CMS was open source software and VM370 was just one implementation of it), was to replace CCW's inside CMS with specific traps for OS services. The result was that National CSS could run 250+ users on VP/CSS (its version of CP/CMS) whereas IBM could manage only 70 on the same hardware.
Well, his point is that he can't see another Thompson rising out of the gaming/tech/infobabble world that he believes constitutes pop culture.
Unfortunately, his point is nonsense, because Thompson wasn't writing about pop culture. Thompson may have written for Rolling Stone, but that had very little to do with what he was talking about. He wasn't talking about music, although he quotes lyrics of the time throughout his pieces; he wasn't talking about drugs, although he was (supposedly) reporting on them indirectly by allowing them to twist his perceptions; he really was talking about politics and real American culture.
The reason we related to him was that we were all going through a transformation in the 60's and 70's in which government turned out to be wrong almost all of the time, and counterculture turned out to be right almost all of the time. Vietnam was wrong; we were right. The War On Drugs was (and is) silly; we were right about that, too. Politicians were (are) idiots; we were right about that one as well.
Thompson showed us that the Emperor had no clothes. But now that everyone knows the Emperor has no clothes, how do we proceed from here? Our news programs and newspapers, fighting for diminishing ratings, are a joke. Anything sensational is hyped; nothing can be believed. The few sensible organs left are drowned out by hysteria from all sides -- and get things totally wrong themselves. Our college towns are full of hybrid-buying idiots who complacently save a few gallons of gasoline without factoring in the huge cost (environmental and real) of battery disposal when the car is junked.
What we need is leadership, not observation. Nobody will "wake up" the average American, who still believes in staggering numbers that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for 9/11. It's just pointless. That's the same average American who supported the Vietnam War, and who believes that we can somehow legislate morality by arresting prostitutes, cracking down on illegal gambling, and criminalizing drug use -- despite 5,000 years of recorded history that should teach us, if it teaches us anything at all, that none of these things has ever been, nor ever will be, possible.
No, the next Hunter Thompson won't be showing us how idiotic our politicians and culture really are. We should know that by now. We need the exact opposite of Hunter Thompson. We need some positive energy, and some interesting new ideas. Just for example, what if we legalized drugs?
1) We immediately balance the Federal budget with the money saved from drug enforcement programs. 2) We put every tin-horn dictator/rebel/warlord/gangster out of business, from Afghanistan to Myanmar to Colombia to Mexico. Let the free market prevail. Coke for a dime! 3) We grow the finest marijuana in the world, right here in the USA. Let Phillip Morris market it for us and make some real money. 4) Oh my goodness! The crime rate just went to zero! I wonder why? 5) And, unfortunately, it looks like there are a lot of addicts out there who are probably going to die from drug use. Some of them are family members and loved ones. But, they'll be dead whether we legalize drugs or not. At least they'll be able to afford their fix, hold down some sort of job, put a roof over their heads, and die in peace, without robbing us every few days to support their habit.
Too radical? Well, what we're doing right now isn't working at all.
65K is not pocket change. It's VP-level discretionary spending at many companies, and you better believe it gets questioned. AS IF people just write checks. Cheesh. If that were true, I wouldn't have to fight tooth and nail for every contract we get.
I like this idea a lot. Pursuant to someone who posted earlier about how dumb people seem to be, and how phishers pray on that dumbness, hey, there's a lot of smart people as well. I get phishing attempts multiple times per day. If I had a way to screw the phishers by sending them to a honeypot bank account, I would do it as a community service, and so would about a zillion other people who play here.
I don't think I'm missing the point. Your point was, "indemnification clauses is [sic] bad for open source projects." My point was, "then try selling your software to a large company without one."
As far as affording litigation, who can afford litigation? If you're sued, you're screwed. So if you want the business, you write the indemnity clause and cross your fingers that nobody sues you.
In the bigger picture, everyone who writes software will ultimately be screwed by software patents and the vultures who collect them. Apparently very few people outside our industry comprehend this train-wreck-about-to-happen. Even in this forum, well-meaning people believe, incorrectly, that the patent system is "protecting the little guy."
So the way I look at it, a train wreck has to be allowed to happen. Indemnity clauses or no indemnity clauses, it doesn't really matter much from a legal standpoint. Eventually there will be a disaster. Before change can occur, we'll have to wait for the trolls to shut down something really important and vital. It's really too bad, for example, that RIM wasn't shut down. That would have sent a strong message to everyone in power that the laws must change.
Just try selling software to a large company without an indemnification clause. You can leave the idemnification clause out, but sorry, nobody will be stopping at your lemonade stand.
Steal their idea. Do it better. History is full of examples of the second (or third) guy in winning the prize. Why not a new filter setting? Give me options. Show me user-submitted articles Digg-style. Show me editor-submitted articles/. - style. Show me both, in side-by-side windows. Maybe have the editors pick "best of Digg" after everyone has had their say, to weed out the crap.
The key is to be agile, keep innovating, grab and implement the best ideas.
Which pretty much shows that most of Australia is uninhabited desert. Try running the solar race in Boston or San Francisco or anywhere else where it... um... rains.
Interestingly, some tidy fortunes have been made by small shops building useful AS/400 applications. Those beasts never die.
At one time, this was a sure way to make money:
1. Find a hot-selling and useful business app that only runs on some other hardware, say x86. 2. Invest the time and patience to wade through 9,000 pages of obscure IBM wonkery ("those guys have a different word for EVERYTHING"), enough time at least to create a reasonable development environment for yourself. 3. Code the app. 4. Profit.
"either the bearings go in the fans making them inefficient & noisy or a fan or PSU dies altogether."
Bearing rot seems counter-intuitive, as quiet fans turn much more slowly. As for the PSU, you gets what you pays for. We overbuy the hell out of the PSU.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's been shown that if you jog moderately, on average you'll increase your lifespan by approximately the time you spent jogging. Not a dramatic outcome, unfortunately.
This is probably pointless, but I'll answer you anyway. With regard to skills:
o I started programming in 1969, in PDP-8 assembler, well before my voice changed.
o Then I wrote a bunch of games and utilities in high school, many of which were widely distributed (pre-Internet).
o Then I went to MIT for six years, and wrote a parallelizing C compiler for my Master's thesis.
o At that point I had already used a dozen programming languages and assembler languages, most of which I've forgotten.
o Since then, I've written operating systems, compilers, linkers, editors, CSMA networks, real-time apps, financial services apps, web-based transaction apps.
o I've shipped product to over 20,000 customers -- built it, supported it, enhanced it, managed a development group, managed whole development organizations (teams as large as 100, and as small as 3). You name it, I've probably written it.
o I regularly use "latest rage" programming languages and environments.
o I've started three companies and made significant money with two of them.
I used to be contemptuous of application productivity enhancers. Then, one day, I had to figure out why our clock was being cleaned, feature-wise and development-time-wise, by one random nut in a garage using PowerBuilder, who was somehow able to turn out GUI-based application software 10x faster than our whole team could.
I learned an important lesson from that. Success is all about how much you can accomplish given limited quantities of time. Any tool that gets you there faster should be embraced. At one of my start-ups, I made tons of money using VB, but we wouldn't have made a plugged nickel if we had used C++. Our development time would have tripled, and we'd have missed the market window completely.
I'll close with this thought: I really *HATE* VB. I hate the syntax, the stupid conventions, the limitations, the bugs, the bad behaviors, the limitations on the controls, etc., etc. OK? There, I've said it. But, having said that, VB is an important tool in my quiver, and I know exactly how and when to use that tool to clean the clocks of arrogant techno-nerds when we run into them competitively. Fortunately for me, the world is full of them, and they just don't seem to catch on. I hope they are all resonating strongly to your posts.
I won't recycle the arguments that are all over the net, which you are free to read. VB.Net is nothing like VB. It is a macro front end to generate C#, and it breaks all the rules of "approachable, easy, quick, simple" that made VB great.
VB doesn't "suck rat testicles." You're just flat wrong.
Parent is the best post in the thread. The modern programming environments are so "heavy" with setup that people don't want to touch them. Visual Studio, despite an earlier post claiming the contrary, is a huge pain in the ass, yet is considered by many to be best-in-class in terms of "just works". Don't even talk to me about setting up Apache on my home machine with Tomcat and JBOSS or whatever. And I don't want to hear about how easy it is to install/configure/compile [your favorite environment] from [your favorite sourcecode repository]. It's fundamentally easy, yes, nobody is arguing about that. But if you are a novice and you don't know any magic, and you don't have any context for understanding what the hell the HOWTOs are talking about, you're just plain stuck. You can haunt the message boards and hope someone will help you, and usually someone will. But that requires a lot of persistence and patience. Bottom line is, you don't walk up to the machine knowing how to do anything. Someone has to set up the environment for you.
And that's why Visual Basic and PowerBuilder are the fastest and possibly the best development environments ever invented for ordinary human beings who have a programming task to accomplish. Fire the environment up, everything is obvious; real gui apps work right away; everything is easy. Which is why it's such a shame that VB, at least, has been replaced by the abortion that is VB.Net.
Mills' comment does not preclude your observation.
Actually, the majority is almost always conservative, no matter what generation you consider. We have had rather few progressive Presidents, wouldn't you say? Didn't matter whether the boomers were young or old. The Boomers were too young to vote for Kennedy. The choice in 1964 was between Goldwater, who wanted to expand the war in Vietnam, and Johnson, who claimed he didn't, but did. Johnson was a fluke. Nobody knew he had a liberal social policy agenda, he was a conservative Southern democrat who Kennedy put on the ticket in order to win Texas. After Johnson we elected Nixon, by landslides, just when the boomers started voting en mass. Then we chose Carter, a conservative, religious southern Democrat, over the half-dead Jerry Ford, hardly a progressive choice. Then 12 years of Reagan and Bush I -- our most conservative Presidents since Hoover -- during the prime years of 30-something Boomer voting! 8 years of Clinton, who cut welfare to the bone and accomplished nothing on any progressive agenda. Then 8 years of (gack) Bush II.
John Stuart Mill said, "I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it." Mill goes on to say that since there are undeniably a lot of stupid people, the Conservatives will always be a very powerful party. Perhaps this is closer to the explanation you are looking for.
I thought my rant was pretty funny, actually. I am my own best audience.
But your response is kinda weird. I don't know ANYONE who takes their physical security that seriously. Perhaps Michael Moore is right -- our biggest enemy is fear itself, and a culture and news media that promotes it.
Congratulations, you go to college. Here's the first lecture in Physical Security 101:
Any house can be broken into, simply by smashing a window or a slider with a large rock or brick -- an object that you don't even have to bring with you. You can probably find it right in the garden. There's no need for some imaginary and deeply clever criminal to snoop around peering at garage door openers and license registrations. The obvious corollary to this is that there's little need for you to lock your door in the first place, or to worry about where you hide the key if you DO lock the door. A locked door isn't going to stop anyone who is serious about wanting to get in -- serious enough, that is, not to care about breaking a window.
So put away your "Secret Agent" DVDs and relax, for God's sake. Take a Valium.
You win for best comment in this thread. Gummy bears. Loved it.
True. But actually IBM's experience is a pretty accurate analog to this thread.
VM370 was a dog. Why? Because they relied on hardware traps and software simulation of CCW's (channel command words), to run the host operating system "perfectly."
A hack to this, used by National CSS and other timesharing vendors (because, remember that CP/CMS was open source software and VM370 was just one implementation of it), was to replace CCW's inside CMS with specific traps for OS services. The result was that National CSS could run 250+ users on VP/CSS (its version of CP/CMS) whereas IBM could manage only 70 on the same hardware.
Smart software beats smart hardware every time.
I don't think this comment deserves "Troll." The poster has a point.
Far more likely that one of our fellow idiots will figure out some way to use this new discovery to kill us all.
Precisely, we do this all the time.
Well, his point is that he can't see another Thompson rising out of the gaming/tech/infobabble world that he believes constitutes pop culture.
Unfortunately, his point is nonsense, because Thompson wasn't writing about pop culture. Thompson may have written for Rolling Stone, but that had very little to do with what he was talking about. He wasn't talking about music, although he quotes lyrics of the time throughout his pieces; he wasn't talking about drugs, although he was (supposedly) reporting on them indirectly by allowing them to twist his perceptions; he really was talking about politics and real American culture.
The reason we related to him was that we were all going through a transformation in the 60's and 70's in which government turned out to be wrong almost all of the time, and counterculture turned out to be right almost all of the time. Vietnam was wrong; we were right. The War On Drugs was (and is) silly; we were right about that, too. Politicians were (are) idiots; we were right about that one as well.
Thompson showed us that the Emperor had no clothes. But now that everyone knows the Emperor has no clothes, how do we proceed from here? Our news programs and newspapers, fighting for diminishing ratings, are a joke. Anything sensational is hyped; nothing can be believed. The few sensible organs left are drowned out by hysteria from all sides -- and get things totally wrong themselves. Our college towns are full of hybrid-buying idiots who complacently save a few gallons of gasoline without factoring in the huge cost (environmental and real) of battery disposal when the car is junked.
What we need is leadership, not observation. Nobody will "wake up" the average American, who still believes in staggering numbers that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for 9/11. It's just pointless. That's the same average American who supported the Vietnam War, and who believes that we can somehow legislate morality by arresting prostitutes, cracking down on illegal gambling, and criminalizing drug use -- despite 5,000 years of recorded history that should teach us, if it teaches us anything at all, that none of these things has ever been, nor ever will be, possible.
No, the next Hunter Thompson won't be showing us how idiotic our politicians and culture really are. We should know that by now. We need the exact opposite of Hunter Thompson. We need some positive energy, and some interesting new ideas. Just for example, what if we legalized drugs?
1) We immediately balance the Federal budget with the money saved from drug enforcement programs.
2) We put every tin-horn dictator/rebel/warlord/gangster out of business, from Afghanistan to Myanmar to Colombia to Mexico. Let the free market prevail. Coke for a dime!
3) We grow the finest marijuana in the world, right here in the USA. Let Phillip Morris market it for us and make some real money.
4) Oh my goodness! The crime rate just went to zero! I wonder why?
5) And, unfortunately, it looks like there are a lot of addicts out there who are probably going to die from drug use. Some of them are family members and loved ones. But, they'll be dead whether we legalize drugs or not. At least they'll be able to afford their fix, hold down some sort of job, put a roof over their heads, and die in peace, without robbing us every few days to support their habit.
Too radical? Well, what we're doing right now isn't working at all.
65K is not pocket change. It's VP-level discretionary spending at many companies, and you better believe it gets questioned. AS IF people just write checks. Cheesh. If that were true, I wouldn't have to fight tooth and nail for every contract we get.
Thank you. You get my virtual mod points. Still chuckling.
I like this idea a lot. Pursuant to someone who posted earlier about how dumb people seem to be, and how phishers pray on that dumbness, hey, there's a lot of smart people as well. I get phishing attempts multiple times per day. If I had a way to screw the phishers by sending them to a honeypot bank account, I would do it as a community service, and so would about a zillion other people who play here.
I don't think I'm missing the point. Your point was, "indemnification clauses is [sic] bad for open source projects." My point was, "then try selling your software to a large company without one."
As far as affording litigation, who can afford litigation? If you're sued, you're screwed. So if you want the business, you write the indemnity clause and cross your fingers that nobody sues you.
In the bigger picture, everyone who writes software will ultimately be screwed by software patents and the vultures who collect them. Apparently very few people outside our industry comprehend this train-wreck-about-to-happen. Even in this forum, well-meaning people believe, incorrectly, that the patent system is "protecting the little guy."
So the way I look at it, a train wreck has to be allowed to happen. Indemnity clauses or no indemnity clauses, it doesn't really matter much from a legal standpoint. Eventually there will be a disaster. Before change can occur, we'll have to wait for the trolls to shut down something really important and vital. It's really too bad, for example, that RIM wasn't shut down. That would have sent a strong message to everyone in power that the laws must change.
Just try selling software to a large company without an indemnification clause. You can leave the idemnification clause out, but sorry, nobody will be stopping at your lemonade stand.
You and your buddies, come on over. I have some fish in a barrel for you to practice on next.
Steal their idea. Do it better. History is full of examples of the second (or third) guy in winning the prize. Why not a new filter setting? Give me options. Show me user-submitted articles Digg-style. Show me editor-submitted articles /. - style. Show me both, in side-by-side windows. Maybe have the editors pick "best of Digg" after everyone has had their say, to weed out the crap.
The key is to be agile, keep innovating, grab and implement the best ideas.
Which pretty much shows that most of Australia is uninhabited desert. Try running the solar race in Boston or San Francisco or anywhere else where it... um... rains.
Um, actually you DO know you're losing it. That's even scarier.
Interestingly, some tidy fortunes have been made by small shops building useful AS/400 applications. Those beasts never die.
At one time, this was a sure way to make money:
1. Find a hot-selling and useful business app that only runs on some other hardware, say x86.
2. Invest the time and patience to wade through 9,000 pages of obscure IBM wonkery ("those guys have a different word for EVERYTHING"), enough time at least to create a reasonable development environment for yourself.
3. Code the app.
4. Profit.
May still be, for all I know.
"either the bearings go in the fans making them inefficient & noisy or a fan or PSU dies altogether."
Bearing rot seems counter-intuitive, as quiet fans turn much more slowly. As for the PSU, you gets what you pays for. We overbuy the hell out of the PSU.