Anybody as freaked out by current government borrowing as you describe is simply being hysterical. Sure the deficit at a historical high in absolute terms, but its nowhere near a historical high as percent of GDP.
While that's true, it's highly misleading. The only time the deficit was higher than it is now was during World War 2 and its immediate aftermath. The current deficit as a percentage of GDP is now even higher than it was during the Great Depression: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Publicly_Held_Federal_Debt_1790-2009.png
Remember that government debt is actually money that is borrowed by the government from the private sector and spent on government expenses, which means that, aside from that which is borrowed from the federal reserve system, it is money that could otherwise be invested in private business ventures. In the case of World War 2, there was good reason for such a high deficit: we were fighting a war of global proportions and diverting the majority of the country's resources towards it. There is no such excuse today. The deficit we have today exists solely because the government is too large and is overspending (on the wrong things, no less -- it would be one thing if it were spending most of that on infrastructure improvements that would benefit the country in the future, but instead it is squandering it on things that yield no significant return on the investment).
"The problem with learning everything about a system is that once that system becomes obsolete, all that work was wasted. After doing that a few times, we all drift toward learning the minimum required for the immediate problem. When that's not enough, we're grateful to have young folks around who still want to learn every little detail."
This is why the best approach, in my experience, is to nail the fundamentals, which do not change significantly over time. The rest can be looked up as needed or learned (and then discarded) as needed.
Is that as fast as simply knowing what you need to know outright? No, of course not. But it makes you far more adaptable.
Finally, when you learn that something doesn't work, it's important to learn why it doesn't work. Merely that it doesn't isn't terribly useful, because without knowing why it doesn't work, you'll have no means of evaluating whether or not it will work under different circumstances.
Learning without understanding is what I refer to as "cargo cult learning", and is to be avoided. Sadly, a lot of people engage in it, and as a result you wind up with people who are experienced but who lack understanding, and it's important to be able to distinguish between the two when hiring (this is why mere examination of a resume may largely be a waste of time -- there is no substitute for interviewing someone properly, and selecting someone for an interview based on their apparently massive or specific experience can, and often does, yield someone who will ultimately be less successful than would someone who has a solid grasp on the fundamentals but not as much and/or as directly targeted experience. All of which is to say that it's something of a crapshoot as regards resumes).
People make the mistake of buying into the notion that technology "changes quickly". It doesn't. The specific implementations do, but the fundamentals remain just that: fundamental. Understand those well and you'll be pretty much set for life, unless a sea change occurs on your watch (e.g., quantum computing becoming mainstream, and at that point you simply have new fundamentals to learn and master).
I was attributing this to Forbes malice, then i noted the message at the bottom of the slashdot page: Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity
In my experience, the reverse of Hanlon's Razor is far more often true: Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice.
Note that this doesn't exclude the possibility of both stupidity and malice at the same time, but regardless, it's generally easy to tell the difference between the two: stupidity affects the choice of actions and their execution, as well as the probability of getting caught, while malice affects the goals and the decision of which actions to take only, and is otherwise independent of execution. Actions which are inconsistent in both their effect and their apparent motive are generally the result of stupidity, since stupidity tends not to account for luck, and stupidity results in luck playing a larger role in both the choice of action and the execution. Actions which are inconsistent in their effect but consistent in their apparent motive are generally the result of malice attempting to masquerade as stupidity. Actions which are consistent in their effect are always the result of malice (when the effect is malicious or "evil", of course).
And in my experience, malice is much more often seen when measured that way than is stupidity. Hence the preference for the reverse of Hanlon's Razor (Hanlon's Rozar?).
Their "Municipal Wifi" covers a one block area around the courthouse, which probably just means the block that the courthouse is on. That's hardly "municipal".
Well, for that particular town, one block probably does cover the whole town!
None of the business needs you described sound like something that couldn't be done by just about any UNIX-like OS with appropriate applications (Oracle Financials, JD Edwards OneWorld, SAP). Even the hardware failures you mentioned can be handled with clustering and having cold, warm, and hot spares on hand. And just about any enterprise SAN or NAS has a phone-home feature.
The clustering you're talking about is implemented in software. For instance, in Oracle. The pieces of software that manage the transaction (mainly the database) have to be cluster aware and do the right thing in the event of a failure.
On a mainframe, all the redundancy and hot-swap capability is down at the hardware and OS level, so there's no need for anything, including the database, to know anything about clustering, failover, or any of that junk. In fact, this is true even [i]across sites[/i]: you can set up mainframes in different locations and everything will fail over automatically at the OS level to the alternate site and keep going without realizing anything has happened.
If Unix is capable of this, I haven't heard of it, but in my case that's not saying much because I haven't had my head in it at this level for a while.
Think of this in programming terms: In the ORIGINAL base class (constitution) there is no real way for Congress to abrogate sovereign immunity unless there is an express exception in the base class itself. However, when the 14th amendment came along LATER and amended the constitution (think of the constitution as a new inherited class with slightly different properties) it DID give Congress a window to (sometimes) abrogate a State's sovereign immunity.
This would have gone over better if it were a car analogy...
Here, let me try: "Think of this in car terms: In the engine computer program's original base class (constitution)..."
this is a really exciting experiment.... if there is any viable trace of life down there, this robot will find it.
It would be even more exciting if this were a Terminator robot, complete with remote Authentic Terminator Display, minigun, etc. As you say, if there's any trace of life down there, it'll find it...and kill it! And it'll all be televised. Exciting stuff!
The only problem is, where is it going to find the right clothes to blend into Martian society? The Martian idea of a "bar" is probably vastly different from what any terminator knows of...
Disclaimer: I work for IBM. The thoughts posted are my own, and do not necessarily reflect those of IBM.
Just once, I'd like to see someone state in their disclaimer "I work for IBM. The thoughts posted are those of IBM, because what IBM thinks, I think. IBM owns me."
Or how about "I work for IBM. The thoughts posted are those of IBM, because what I think, IBM thinks. IBM is my biatch."
I like the latter better, though the former might be more realistic.:-)
This is patent law I'm talking about, prior art doesn't matter!
Sadly, the above is not just funny, but is also insightful, given the number of patents with prior art (some of which, if I'm not mistaken, were essentially dups of prior patents!) that the USPTO has rubber-stamped...
I agree that the term "obvious to a practitioner in the art" needs to be more narrowly defined, but the problem with basing obviousness on what seems obvious later is that a lot of things seem obvious after-the-fact that were in fact fairly innovative.
"Fairly innovative" doesn't cut it here. We're talking about granting a 20-year monopoly on some implementation idea. The idea needs to be quite a bit more than merely "fairly innovative" to be deserving of such a monopoly.
And so, I'd say that if something is obvious even in hindsight, that alone is sufficient reason to forbid a patent on it.
That means the version MS is submitting is a "special" version that is nothing like what the end product will actually be. Microsoft isn't stupid enough to be honest in a situation like this.
And even if the antitrust people have enough brains to figure that out, they won't do anything about it.
This is just another measure by our corporate-run government to fool the population into believing the government is on the average person's side, when nothing could be further from the truth.
They did not patent the crap execution of the idea, just the idea itself.
And this is why the patent should be thrown out.
Patents were intended to give the patentholder exclusive control over the use of a method for a limited period of time. Methods can cover a lot, but in the end they should be specific. In the Olde Days, patent applicants were required to submit prototypes of their inventions.
If the end result of the patent is to fence off a concept and not an implementation, then the patent itself is, I think, invalid.
They can when their cash assets alone total more than 50 billion dollars and they make record profits despite the release of a lackluster operating system.
They can when they essentially own the government.
The naive optimism of some people, especially in the context of this forum, really astonishes me sometimes...
After all, Rush is a dyed-in-the-wool new-age Republican (a.k.a. neocon), who believes corporations have a Right to make a buck, even if by doing so they make life harder for the people in the very same society those corporations shelter themselves in, right?
Let him experience first-hand the consequences of that view.
I can mount HPFS drives under Win2k using pinball.sys from 3.51
So in order to mount an HPFS" filesystem under Windows, you have to use their 3D Pinball game kernel module?
I don't know what's worse, that they figured a game module was the logical place to put HPFS filesystem code, or that they decided that Pinball performance was so "critical" under NT 3.51 that they had to put it in the kernel!
Jumper, which is scheduled to be released on Feb. 14, is a sci-fi thriller about a man, played by Hayden Christensen, who discovers he has the ability to teleport himself anywhere, anytime.
...
Christensen's character discovers that he's not the only Jumper alive and that there's a secret organization of people sworn to kill all Jumpers because they believe the teleporters' ability makes them a danger to everyone else. Actor Samuel L. Jackson plays the man in charge of tracking down and killing the Jumpers.
Samuel L. Jackson (upon seeing Christensen for the first time): You!. You cut my hand off, bitch! [Busts out a lightsaber with with the words "Bad Motherfucker" inscribed on it and ignites it]. Now you gonna pay!
Hayden Christensen: What the... ?!? [Teleports away]
Samuel L. Jackson (muttering to himself): Motherfucker do that shit to me, he better paralyze my ass cuz I'll kill the motherfucker, know what I'm sayin'?
This IS NOT ABOUT RELIGION: is about money, power and the violated right of actual people in Italy and elsewhere.
What, you mean the Church is the same old Church with the same old motivations (money and power), same old people (those who crave money and power), etc. as it has been for the past 1500 years or so, with only the methods having changed?
Well, as long as we are on the subject, how about the overuse of SQL databases for non-relational information? MySQL is no beast, but in my company, there is a SQL Server on almost every box and many of them are storing stuff that is non-relational and could be accessed more quickly in a direct access file.
"Accessed more quickly"?
Maybe. But there are advantages to storing it in a SQL database:
If you suddenly have to relate your data to other data that's already in the database, you don't need to do a lot of extra work to make it happen. Namely, you don't suddenly have to convert the original data to a database, rewrite the app to work with it, etc.
You don't have to write code to parse the data into fields, etc., because the database already hands it to you that way.
Searching is relatively painless -- just use the appropriate WHERE clause. Even full-text indexing can be had for "free" if the database supports it and you use it.
Performance tuning becomes a matter of creating a few appropriate indexes, assuming the application isn't doing something stupid.
The tools to view and manipulate the data outside the application itself are already written and well-known. More to the point, you don't need to use the application itself in order to manipulate the data like you would if you were using some app-specific file format.
If you weren't stupid in how you wrote the application, you can change database engines without too much pain if that proves to be necessary/useful.
It doesn't take much to be better off sticking your data into a SQL database even if your data isn't relational in nature, as long as the data relationships you do have are relatively straightforward.
If they'd forgotten Thompson and Guilliani, I might agree, but given the evidence, there seems to be a concerted effort to keep Paul from running at all.
What else did you expect? The media is owned by very few (two or three) very large corporations, and large corporations love corporate control over the government because it gives them more power. And you can be sure the media does deals with other large corporations that share the same goals for the same reasons.
Ron Paul is an anathema to people/corporations who want corporate control over the government. So naturally he can't be allowed to win. The media will use all its influence to make sure that the person who wins the Presidency is a corporate stooge just like his/her last few predecessors.
Slashdot Mirror
While that's true, it's highly misleading. The only time the deficit was higher than it is now was during World War 2 and its immediate aftermath. The current deficit as a percentage of GDP is now even higher than it was during the Great Depression: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Publicly_Held_Federal_Debt_1790-2009.png
Remember that government debt is actually money that is borrowed by the government from the private sector and spent on government expenses, which means that, aside from that which is borrowed from the federal reserve system, it is money that could otherwise be invested in private business ventures. In the case of World War 2, there was good reason for such a high deficit: we were fighting a war of global proportions and diverting the majority of the country's resources towards it. There is no such excuse today. The deficit we have today exists solely because the government is too large and is overspending (on the wrong things, no less -- it would be one thing if it were spending most of that on infrastructure improvements that would benefit the country in the future, but instead it is squandering it on things that yield no significant return on the investment).
This is why the best approach, in my experience, is to nail the fundamentals, which do not change significantly over time. The rest can be looked up as needed or learned (and then discarded) as needed.
Is that as fast as simply knowing what you need to know outright? No, of course not. But it makes you far more adaptable.
Finally, when you learn that something doesn't work, it's important to learn why it doesn't work. Merely that it doesn't isn't terribly useful, because without knowing why it doesn't work, you'll have no means of evaluating whether or not it will work under different circumstances.
Learning without understanding is what I refer to as "cargo cult learning", and is to be avoided. Sadly, a lot of people engage in it, and as a result you wind up with people who are experienced but who lack understanding, and it's important to be able to distinguish between the two when hiring (this is why mere examination of a resume may largely be a waste of time -- there is no substitute for interviewing someone properly, and selecting someone for an interview based on their apparently massive or specific experience can, and often does, yield someone who will ultimately be less successful than would someone who has a solid grasp on the fundamentals but not as much and/or as directly targeted experience. All of which is to say that it's something of a crapshoot as regards resumes).
People make the mistake of buying into the notion that technology "changes quickly". It doesn't. The specific implementations do, but the fundamentals remain just that: fundamental. Understand those well and you'll be pretty much set for life, unless a sea change occurs on your watch (e.g., quantum computing becoming mainstream, and at that point you simply have new fundamentals to learn and master).
In my experience, the reverse of Hanlon's Razor is far more often true: Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice.
Note that this doesn't exclude the possibility of both stupidity and malice at the same time, but regardless, it's generally easy to tell the difference between the two: stupidity affects the choice of actions and their execution, as well as the probability of getting caught, while malice affects the goals and the decision of which actions to take only, and is otherwise independent of execution. Actions which are inconsistent in both their effect and their apparent motive are generally the result of stupidity, since stupidity tends not to account for luck, and stupidity results in luck playing a larger role in both the choice of action and the execution. Actions which are inconsistent in their effect but consistent in their apparent motive are generally the result of malice attempting to masquerade as stupidity. Actions which are consistent in their effect are always the result of malice (when the effect is malicious or "evil", of course).
And in my experience, malice is much more often seen when measured that way than is stupidity. Hence the preference for the reverse of Hanlon's Razor (Hanlon's Rozar?).
Well, for that particular town, one block probably does cover the whole town!
Have you guys still not learned?
The law doesn't change in the face of the influential and powerful being inconvenienced by it. Enforcement of it does.
The clustering you're talking about is implemented in software. For instance, in Oracle. The pieces of software that manage the transaction (mainly the database) have to be cluster aware and do the right thing in the event of a failure.
On a mainframe, all the redundancy and hot-swap capability is down at the hardware and OS level, so there's no need for anything, including the database, to know anything about clustering, failover, or any of that junk. In fact, this is true even [i]across sites[/i]: you can set up mainframes in different locations and everything will fail over automatically at the OS level to the alternate site and keep going without realizing anything has happened.
If Unix is capable of this, I haven't heard of it, but in my case that's not saying much because I haven't had my head in it at this level for a while.
There, fixed that for you. Backups aren't worth a damn if the planet gets blown up by space aliens.
At least it's obvious what hand gesture to associate with the "skip this ad" function...
This would have gone over better if it were a car analogy...
Here, let me try: "Think of this in car terms: In the engine computer program's original base class (constitution) ..."
It would be even more exciting if this were a Terminator robot, complete with remote Authentic Terminator Display, minigun, etc. As you say, if there's any trace of life down there, it'll find it...and kill it! And it'll all be televised. Exciting stuff!
The only problem is, where is it going to find the right clothes to blend into Martian society? The Martian idea of a "bar" is probably vastly different from what any terminator knows of...
Just once, I'd like to see someone state in their disclaimer "I work for IBM. The thoughts posted are those of IBM, because what IBM thinks, I think. IBM owns me."
Or how about "I work for IBM. The thoughts posted are those of IBM, because what I think, IBM thinks. IBM is my biatch."
I like the latter better, though the former might be more realistic. :-)
Sadly, the above is not just funny, but is also insightful, given the number of patents with prior art (some of which, if I'm not mistaken, were essentially dups of prior patents!) that the USPTO has rubber-stamped...
"Fairly innovative" doesn't cut it here. We're talking about granting a 20-year monopoly on some implementation idea. The idea needs to be quite a bit more than merely "fairly innovative" to be deserving of such a monopoly.
And so, I'd say that if something is obvious even in hindsight, that alone is sufficient reason to forbid a patent on it.
That means the version MS is submitting is a "special" version that is nothing like what the end product will actually be. Microsoft isn't stupid enough to be honest in a situation like this.
And even if the antitrust people have enough brains to figure that out, they won't do anything about it.
This is just another measure by our corporate-run government to fool the population into believing the government is on the average person's side, when nothing could be further from the truth.
And this is why the patent should be thrown out.
Patents were intended to give the patentholder exclusive control over the use of a method for a limited period of time. Methods can cover a lot, but in the end they should be specific. In the Olde Days, patent applicants were required to submit prototypes of their inventions.
If the end result of the patent is to fence off a concept and not an implementation, then the patent itself is, I think, invalid.
They can when their cash assets alone total more than 50 billion dollars and they make record profits despite the release of a lackluster operating system.
They can when they essentially own the government.
The naive optimism of some people, especially in the context of this forum, really astonishes me sometimes...
...to the call center in India!
After all, Rush is a dyed-in-the-wool new-age Republican (a.k.a. neocon), who believes corporations have a Right to make a buck, even if by doing so they make life harder for the people in the very same society those corporations shelter themselves in, right?
Let him experience first-hand the consequences of that view.
"I feel happy! I feel happy" -- my HD-DVD player
So in order to mount an HPFS" filesystem under Windows, you have to use their 3D Pinball game kernel module?
I don't know what's worse, that they figured a game module was the logical place to put HPFS filesystem code, or that they decided that Pinball performance was so "critical" under NT 3.51 that they had to put it in the kernel!
Samuel L. Jackson (upon seeing Christensen for the first time): You! . You cut my hand off, bitch! [Busts out a lightsaber with with the words "Bad Motherfucker" inscribed on it and ignites it]. Now you gonna pay!
Hayden Christensen: What the ... ?!? [Teleports away]
Samuel L. Jackson (muttering to himself): Motherfucker do that shit to me, he better paralyze my ass cuz I'll kill the motherfucker, know what I'm sayin'?
I wrote:
Yeah, same old people. They must be vampires or something. :-)
What, you mean the Church is the same old Church with the same old motivations (money and power), same old people (those who crave money and power), etc. as it has been for the past 1500 years or so, with only the methods having changed?
Say it ain't so!
"Accessed more quickly"?
Maybe. But there are advantages to storing it in a SQL database:
It doesn't take much to be better off sticking your data into a SQL database even if your data isn't relational in nature, as long as the data relationships you do have are relatively straightforward.
What else did you expect? The media is owned by very few (two or three) very large corporations, and large corporations love corporate control over the government because it gives them more power. And you can be sure the media does deals with other large corporations that share the same goals for the same reasons.
Ron Paul is an anathema to people/corporations who want corporate control over the government. So naturally he can't be allowed to win. The media will use all its influence to make sure that the person who wins the Presidency is a corporate stooge just like his/her last few predecessors.