Oh, man, this has got to be straight out of that horrible corporate fad, TQM. We used to have a VP at the company I work for that would, upon meeting customers, ask them, "How may I delight you?" What a walking embarrassment!
These were just a few examples among hundreds! It never ceases to amaze me that otherwise normal people transform into communal corporate organisms who spew twaddle like this as a profession. The worst among them are inevitably the most famous. Look some of the stuff written by Jack Welch, Bill Gates, or Jeff Bezos. People like this do our performance ratings and control our careers! Gives me the willies.
Here are some corporate weasel words that I have come across that are not listed at the website.
Propel - "The new organizational structure will propel unprecedented gains in EBITDA performance."
Service Velocity - "We must seek to accellerate our service velcity to meet our customer's expectations."
Market Discontinuity - "The market discontinuities that now exist offer a unique opportunity for our company to increase marketshare and gain a lasting advantage over our competitors."
Delight the Customer - "We should not only satisfy, but seek to delight the customer."
There are a lot of good ideas in boost. I use them in my work all the time. But there is also a lot of junk. I would be very selective about adding any of these classes to libstdc++.
def fibonacci(a, b):
while True:
yield a
a, b = b, a+b
I find the indentation level syntax of Python to be vile, probably because I started as a Fortran programmer. There also seem to be a lot of gratuitous colons.
The ability to overload the behavior of standard functions (such as car/cdr) on objects I define.
You cannot undefine primative procedures like
car/cdr to mean something else. But there is nothing preventing you from defining my:car and handling any combination of arguments and types you want. This is a lot nicer than C++ where you have to use
clunky templates. In Scheme, procedures that smoothly handle multiple types and numbers of arguments are built right in.
The ability to create new "sequence" types or other types by adhering to a protocol (as in Python, by implementing __iter__ or __getitem__ in an object).
I don't understand this question, but there are no restrictions on the definition of new data structures of their representation.
Python, of course.. Rarely do I find anyone who thinks Perl is a sane choice for anything more than a 5-liner...
You're right. Perl's syntax is gross but I am too used to processing text files with it to change. I use Gentoo and I really admire the results they got with portage and Python. There is no question of the practicality of Python. I just think it is a butt ugly language. My hobby language is Scheme, but that is definitely a minority preference, and I have given up hope that it will be a widely used for Linux "glue" programming.
BSD sucks, unless you are an unscrupulous startup who wants to sell someone else's work as your own. GPL is mana from heaven.
Linux vs. FreeBSD
That is GNU/Linux please.
Emacs vs. vi
yydd13#$!?&%!... GNU/Emacs!
C++ vs. Java
Both suck for different reasons. C++ is a kaleidoscope of unnecessary syntax sugar, and a junkyard of unnecessary features. The CLASSPATH variable alone condemns Java.
Python vs. Perl
Perl
PHP vs. Ruby on Rails
Who cares?
Microsoft vs. SCO
Neither. They are both rapacious corporations bent on destruction of software freedom.
As to the Jihadis being killed in droves every day, I suppose that means we will eventually run out of them, right?
Some of us are old enough to remember the US government when they kept saying how many viet cong they had killed.
It eventually exceeded the population of North Vietnam. They used to call it "the credability gap."
How many years will the insurgency be "in their last throes?"
I am old enough to remember Vietnam. What I remember is an amateurish military campaign
directly commanded by an inept Whitehouse (Johnson), fought by reluctant, doped-out American conscripts against a determined enemy. None of
these factors exist in Iraq.
If and when the US military or Iraqi army subdue the insurgency, the battle-hardend remainder of the Jihadis will move on to the next country.
Assuming there are significant numbers of survivors. Where will they go? Iran I guess.
No problem there.
I'm glad you are so confident that the President's Iraq policy will produce a safer world.
There are a sizeable number of Americans that doubt that.
There is always a minority that wants a Republican President to fail. I emphasize, minority.
Before the war was started, there were those who would have liked to continued the weapons inspections and international pressure to contain Saddam Hussein.
Yes, it had worked so well for the previous 12 years. I can understand why the international community wanted to continue 'pressure' Saddam. The skim was quite lucrative.
Since we can't seem to keep the Jihadis from entering Iraq whenever they feel like it,
I would not want to be an insurgent hiding in a mud hut in western Iraq.
Meanwhile, we do not have enough troops left over to provide creditable military option to deal with growing nuclear threats from N
rth Korea and Iran.
I don't know about Iran, but judging by Dear Leader's rhetoric, he is feeling a bit put too.
The more desparate you make the people in Iraq, the more recruits are easily available for terrorist groups.
Simply 'pressing more' doesn't achieve your goals of safety, it works against it.
The people of Iraq are being terrorized by a small number of Sunni Baathist "deadenders" and a larger number of radical Jihadis from all over the middle east. The insurgency does not draw heavily from the Iraqi populus. The insurgency is bad, in the short term, for the stability of
Iraq. But good in the long term because all of the rats are in one trap.
The Jihadis are being killed in droves every day.
They can't have a meeting above ground for fear of
being disintegrated by a 2000 pound bomb. 'Pressing more' has been entirely effective. Are you really suggesting that the Allies capitulate and leave the new Iraqi democracy to its fate? Do you really think that this will placate the Jihadis and keep them terrorising the west? Do you want to see new and more powerful Taliban regime in Iraq?
All the stupid people who thought war could make us safer are to blame for this. Thank you, Tony Blair. You stopped the IRA bombing london then started al Qaida doing it.
I sympathize with the people of London. But how can you possibly blame Tony Blair for the violent actions of someone else? Blair and Britain's armed forces
have acted honorably in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are helping to kick the shit out of the insurgents every day, God bless 'em! The radical Muslim element that still apparently skulks about England needs no provocation. They'll be found. My guess is that they will blow themselves up when they are cornered, like those fellows in Madrid.
Sure, you've paid taxes (cents) to support the project; but if you think that entitles you to the same rights as those whove expended blood, sweat and tears on the project, then you're a fool.
I don't see how mission data being more open is impinging on anyones rights. You aren't thinking clearly. Arbitrary and gratuitous hiding of interesting data for a select few is not in the public interest. If you think of science data as property in the material sense, you are also confused.
Why should some Joe Schmoe like you, who has contributed absolutely nothing to the project, be given access to the data before the project team has had their usual 12-month headstart?
It is pretty obvious. Joe Shmoes like me fund
these eggheads and want better performance out of them.
I posted a similar response for the Titan landing, where pictures where released with agonising slowness, and only accompanied by
blathering from researchers. These raw images should be posted (preferably a bittorrent) complete
with navigation and exposure information as soon
as they are recieved. NASA and JPL are pretty good
about PR, but the growing catalog of space imagery
is nowhere near as accessable and useable as it should be.
There is also a "Dead Sea Scrolls" attitude by
researchers toward raw data. They figure they
should be able to see results and cherry pick them
before the rest of us get so see anything significant.
The Titan landscape has proven to be so fantastic
I hope NASA considers sending a long lived rover
back soon. I think the recent Titan volcano VIMS image belongs on this list.
You are certainly welcome to believe that there's a sinister plot (of which I am unaware), but I think your theory is completely nutty both in premises and conclusion.
I am flattered that one of the principals
in this event has choosen to reply to my post.
Seems to me that you call my reasoning nutty without making any attempt to refute it. The facts I present are true. One would have to be pretty obtuse not to come my conclusions. Are you really trying to maintain that
O'Reilly is a neutral observer in the open source
slimfest against free software? The term sinister plot is yours. I would just use the word disengenuous.
O'Reilly publishes 2 books by Raymond. Onlamp.com
is run by O'Reilly. O'Reilly benefits very much from its association with the OpenSource camp headed by Raymond. O'Reilly is also a natural enemy of free software because of the FSF call for free documentation, and its ambivalence toward corporations. Raymond also hates the FSF. He has been out of the spotlight for some time
and needs to get noticed (i.e. say something controvertial). What better way for both to get some shots in than a flamebait interview sure make its way over to the ready audience at slashdot?
This article is a phony astroturf campaign by two entities (O'Reilly and Raymond) who have vested interests in the survival of the muzzy "open source" philosophy. It is more infomercial than interview. Why these yahoos feel qualified to influence the future course of the Linux kernel, I'll never know.
Noodling for catfish is popular in Oklahoma. I would argue that, after tractor pull, it is the greatest contribution of redneck culture to American sport. I hope that news of the Mekong Catfish will lead
Oklahoma's best to the ultimate challenge. Who will be catching whom?
God speed to those bright eyed, idealistic, diverse over-acheivers who will ride that great ticking bomb into space. And if the worst happens, I will enjoy the spectacle!
By chance I read your recent posts about China.
It saddens me that someone with such well argued
and contrary (on this moronic forum anyway) opinions is on my foes list. Not anymore.
To date, there has only been one manual landing of the space shuttle, by a marine pilot that I can't remember the name of, every other landing has been fully controlled by the on-board computers. Tim
I have heard the opposite. I thought the only fully automated landing was STS-2 with the famous "wheelie" flight control anomaly. All other landings (post HAC to rollout) have been made by hand. Does anyone out there know anything about this?
I would definitely like to see an unmanned shuttle launch before it is retired. That would be useful R&D.
Sure. And overhauling them after each flight has turned out to cost far more than building new single-use engines. US taxpayers have been soaked for countless $Billions over 3 decades in this epic demonstration of the phrase "penny wise, pound foolish".
All true. Your only highlight that the Buran design was even more deficient than the shuttle, which is my point.
And Buran worked fine, and was in many ways superior to the Shuttle - it, for example, contained jet engines that allowed for a powered landing - Shuttle can't pull up for another landing attempt, Buran could.
The shuttle has at least proved that an unpowered landing is perfectly safe. It would be absurd to add the weight cost of engines and fuel
just for a go around capability. A robust flight control system is far more efficient. Buran also had no viable electrical power generation. The vehicle was stuffed with batteries on its only flight! That is why it only ever flew a single orbit. So much for the "better" shuttle. It was
a child's replica initiated by a paranoid Leonid Brezhnev. The Russians still do not use fuel cells 40 years after they were introduced on American Gemini spacecraft.
It also had no main engines - they were in the huge booster that mimic the shuttle main fuel tank.
..Making Buran one of the costliest and wasteful launch systems ever conceived. Each Energia flight threw away the 4 main H2O2 engines and 4 Kerosene/O2 boosters none of which was reused. Compare this to the shuttle where the SRB motor casings and the SSME's can be used many times.
Buran also had no firecrackers (solid rocket boosters), and instead used only liquid fuels - making challenger-style boom impossible.
Since Challenger, the SRBs have flown 176 times
with a perfect safety record. I have always questioned why solid fueled boosters are looked down apon for human space flight. The new NASA administrator is almost certain to favor a derivative of the SRB for a CEV launch capability. You often hear that liquid fueled rockets are safer because they can be shut down. As a passenger in hypersonic I would not be happy to be flying hypersonically next to a highly pressurized fuel tank and have a malfunctioning engine shut down. That was ok on the Saturn because of the series staging and spare thrust capacity. But on the shuttle with parallel staging such a booster shutdown would be deadly. Such "firecrackers" will very likely be the basis of a launch abort system as well. That alone says something about the safety and reliability of solid fuel.
It only flew once, unmanned. A feat Shuttle can't do, by the way, as it can't land unmanned.
Another foolish and oft repeated misconception. The only reason the shuttle doesn't fly unmanned is the polical clout of the astronaut corps. Do you think a shuttle commander has a hand on the stick at anytime from launch to landing? NASA basically gives the stick over to the pilot when the shuttle is lined up with the runway and has enough energy to reach its end. If humans were not aboard the shuttle would be happy and capable of landing and rollout as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, man, this has got to be straight out of that horrible corporate fad, TQM. We used to have a VP at the company I work for that would, upon meeting customers, ask them, "How may I delight you?" What a walking embarrassment!
These were just a few examples among hundreds! It never ceases to amaze me that otherwise normal people transform into communal corporate organisms who spew twaddle like this as a profession. The worst among them are inevitably the most famous. Look some of the stuff written by Jack Welch, Bill Gates, or Jeff Bezos. People like this do our performance ratings and control our careers! Gives me the willies.
There are a lot of good ideas in boost. I use them in my work all the time. But there is also a lot of junk. I would be very selective about adding any of these classes to libstdc++.
This means transparent RPC is possible in Python and not in Scheme.
Oh. Maybe you should tell this guy to give it up.
I find the indentation level syntax of Python to be vile, probably because I started as a Fortran programmer. There also seem to be a lot of gratuitous colons.
The ability to overload the behavior of standard functions (such as car/cdr) on objects I define.
You cannot undefine primative procedures like car/cdr to mean something else. But there is nothing preventing you from defining my:car and handling any combination of arguments and types you want. This is a lot nicer than C++ where you have to use clunky templates. In Scheme, procedures that smoothly handle multiple types and numbers of arguments are built right in.
The ability to create new "sequence" types or other types by adhering to a protocol (as in Python, by implementing __iter__ or __getitem__ in an object).
I don't understand this question, but there are no restrictions on the definition of new data structures of their representation.
Today, as in the olden days, this:
i MAX_COUNT, i++
would fail to compile.
Python, of course.. Rarely do I find anyone who thinks Perl is a sane choice for anything more than a 5-liner...
You're right. Perl's syntax is gross but I am too used to processing text files with it to change. I use Gentoo and I really admire the results they got with portage and Python. There is no question of the practicality of Python. I just think it is a butt ugly language. My hobby language is Scheme, but that is definitely a minority preference, and I have given up hope that it will be a widely used for Linux "glue" programming.
BSD License vs. GPL
BSD sucks, unless you are an unscrupulous startup who wants to sell someone else's work as your own. GPL is mana from heaven.
Linux vs. FreeBSD
That is GNU/Linux please.
Emacs vs. vi
yydd13#$!?&%!... GNU/Emacs!
C++ vs. Java
Both suck for different reasons. C++ is a kaleidoscope of unnecessary syntax sugar, and a junkyard of unnecessary features. The CLASSPATH variable alone condemns Java.
Python vs. Perl
Perl
PHP vs. Ruby on Rails
Who cares?
Microsoft vs. SCO
Neither. They are both rapacious corporations bent on destruction of software freedom.
As to the Jihadis being killed in droves every day, I suppose that means we will eventually run out of them, right? Some of us are old enough to remember the US government when they kept saying how many viet cong they had killed. It eventually exceeded the population of North Vietnam. They used to call it "the credability gap." How many years will the insurgency be "in their last throes?"
I am old enough to remember Vietnam. What I remember is an amateurish military campaign directly commanded by an inept Whitehouse (Johnson), fought by reluctant, doped-out American conscripts against a determined enemy. None of these factors exist in Iraq.
If and when the US military or Iraqi army subdue the insurgency, the battle-hardend remainder of the Jihadis will move on to the next country.
Assuming there are significant numbers of survivors. Where will they go? Iran I guess. No problem there.
I'm glad you are so confident that the President's Iraq policy will produce a safer world. There are a sizeable number of Americans that doubt that.
There is always a minority that wants a Republican President to fail. I emphasize, minority.
Before the war was started, there were those who would have liked to continued the weapons inspections and international pressure to contain Saddam Hussein.
Yes, it had worked so well for the previous 12 years. I can understand why the international community wanted to continue 'pressure' Saddam. The skim was quite lucrative.
Since we can't seem to keep the Jihadis from entering Iraq whenever they feel like it,
I would not want to be an insurgent hiding in a mud hut in western Iraq.
Meanwhile, we do not have enough troops left over to provide creditable military option to deal with growing nuclear threats from N rth Korea and Iran.
I don't know about Iran, but judging by Dear Leader's rhetoric, he is feeling a bit put too.
The more desparate you make the people in Iraq, the more recruits are easily available for terrorist groups.
Simply 'pressing more' doesn't achieve your goals of safety, it works against it.
The people of Iraq are being terrorized by a small number of Sunni Baathist "deadenders" and a larger number of radical Jihadis from all over the middle east. The insurgency does not draw heavily from the Iraqi populus. The insurgency is bad, in the short term, for the stability of Iraq. But good in the long term because all of the rats are in one trap. The Jihadis are being killed in droves every day. They can't have a meeting above ground for fear of being disintegrated by a 2000 pound bomb. 'Pressing more' has been entirely effective. Are you really suggesting that the Allies capitulate and leave the new Iraqi democracy to its fate? Do you really think that this will placate the Jihadis and keep them terrorising the west? Do you want to see new and more powerful Taliban regime in Iraq?
All the stupid people who thought war could make us safer are to blame for this. Thank you, Tony Blair. You stopped the IRA bombing london then started al Qaida doing it.
I sympathize with the people of London. But how can you possibly blame Tony Blair for the violent actions of someone else? Blair and Britain's armed forces have acted honorably in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are helping to kick the shit out of the insurgents every day, God bless 'em! The radical Muslim element that still apparently skulks about England needs no provocation. They'll be found. My guess is that they will blow themselves up when they are cornered, like those fellows in Madrid.
Then that puts me back in the Devonian era (1985), when I did the same thing in Vax Fortran and assembler!
Sure, you've paid taxes (cents) to support the project; but if you think that entitles you to the same rights as those whove expended blood, sweat and tears on the project, then you're a fool.
I don't see how mission data being more open is impinging on anyones rights. You aren't thinking clearly. Arbitrary and gratuitous hiding of interesting data for a select few is not in the public interest. If you think of science data as property in the material sense, you are also confused.
Why should some Joe Schmoe like you, who has contributed absolutely nothing to the project, be given access to the data before the project team has had their usual 12-month headstart?
It is pretty obvious. Joe Shmoes like me fund these eggheads and want better performance out of them.
I posted a similar response for the Titan landing, where pictures where released with agonising slowness, and only accompanied by blathering from researchers. These raw images should be posted (preferably a bittorrent) complete with navigation and exposure information as soon as they are recieved. NASA and JPL are pretty good about PR, but the growing catalog of space imagery is nowhere near as accessable and useable as it should be.
There is also a "Dead Sea Scrolls" attitude by researchers toward raw data. They figure they should be able to see results and cherry pick them before the rest of us get so see anything significant.
The Titan landscape has proven to be so fantastic I hope NASA considers sending a long lived rover back soon. I think the recent Titan volcano VIMS image belongs on this list.
You are certainly welcome to believe that there's a sinister plot (of which I am unaware), but I think your theory is completely nutty both in premises and conclusion.
I am flattered that one of the principals in this event has choosen to reply to my post. Seems to me that you call my reasoning nutty without making any attempt to refute it. The facts I present are true. One would have to be pretty obtuse not to come my conclusions. Are you really trying to maintain that O'Reilly is a neutral observer in the open source slimfest against free software? The term sinister plot is yours. I would just use the word disengenuous.
O'Reilly publishes 2 books by Raymond. Onlamp.com is run by O'Reilly. O'Reilly benefits very much from its association with the OpenSource camp headed by Raymond. O'Reilly is also a natural enemy of free software because of the FSF call for free documentation, and its ambivalence toward corporations. Raymond also hates the FSF. He has been out of the spotlight for some time and needs to get noticed (i.e. say something controvertial). What better way for both to get some shots in than a flamebait interview sure make its way over to the ready audience at slashdot?
This article is a phony astroturf campaign by two entities (O'Reilly and Raymond) who have vested interests in the survival of the muzzy "open source" philosophy. It is more infomercial than interview. Why these yahoos feel qualified to influence the future course of the Linux kernel, I'll never know.
Noodling for catfish is popular in Oklahoma. I would argue that, after tractor pull, it is the greatest contribution of redneck culture to American sport. I hope that news of the Mekong Catfish will lead Oklahoma's best to the ultimate challenge. Who will be catching whom?
God speed to those bright eyed, idealistic, diverse over-acheivers who will ride that great ticking bomb into space. And if the worst happens, I will enjoy the spectacle!
By chance I read your recent posts about China. It saddens me that someone with such well argued and contrary (on this moronic forum anyway) opinions is on my foes list. Not anymore.
To date, there has only been one manual landing of the space shuttle, by a marine pilot that I can't remember the name of, every other landing has been fully controlled by the on-board computers. Tim
I have heard the opposite. I thought the only fully automated landing was STS-2 with the famous "wheelie" flight control anomaly. All other landings (post HAC to rollout) have been made by hand. Does anyone out there know anything about this?
I would definitely like to see an unmanned shuttle launch before it is retired. That would be useful R&D.
Sure. And overhauling them after each flight has turned out to cost far more than building new single-use engines. US taxpayers have been soaked for countless $Billions over 3 decades in this epic demonstration of the phrase "penny wise, pound foolish".
All true. Your only highlight that the Buran design was even more deficient than the shuttle, which is my point.
And Buran worked fine, and was in many ways superior to the Shuttle - it, for example, contained jet engines that allowed for a powered landing - Shuttle can't pull up for another landing attempt, Buran could.
The shuttle has at least proved that an unpowered landing is perfectly safe. It would be absurd to add the weight cost of engines and fuel just for a go around capability. A robust flight control system is far more efficient. Buran also had no viable electrical power generation. The vehicle was stuffed with batteries on its only flight! That is why it only ever flew a single orbit. So much for the "better" shuttle. It was a child's replica initiated by a paranoid Leonid Brezhnev. The Russians still do not use fuel cells 40 years after they were introduced on American Gemini spacecraft.
It also had no main engines - they were in the huge booster that mimic the shuttle main fuel tank.
..Making Buran one of the costliest and wasteful launch systems ever conceived. Each Energia flight threw away the 4 main H2O2 engines and 4 Kerosene/O2 boosters none of which was reused. Compare this to the shuttle where the SRB motor casings and the SSME's can be used many times.
Buran also had no firecrackers (solid rocket boosters), and instead used only liquid fuels - making challenger-style boom impossible.
Since Challenger, the SRBs have flown 176 times with a perfect safety record. I have always questioned why solid fueled boosters are looked down apon for human space flight. The new NASA administrator is almost certain to favor a derivative of the SRB for a CEV launch capability. You often hear that liquid fueled rockets are safer because they can be shut down. As a passenger in hypersonic I would not be happy to be flying hypersonically next to a highly pressurized fuel tank and have a malfunctioning engine shut down. That was ok on the Saturn because of the series staging and spare thrust capacity. But on the shuttle with parallel staging such a booster shutdown would be deadly. Such "firecrackers" will very likely be the basis of a launch abort system as well. That alone says something about the safety and reliability of solid fuel.
It only flew once, unmanned. A feat Shuttle can't do, by the way, as it can't land unmanned.
Another foolish and oft repeated misconception. The only reason the shuttle doesn't fly unmanned is the polical clout of the astronaut corps. Do you think a shuttle commander has a hand on the stick at anytime from launch to landing? NASA basically gives the stick over to the pilot when the shuttle is lined up with the runway and has enough energy to reach its end. If humans were not aboard the shuttle would be happy and capable of landing and rollout as well.