Pretty close. Actually, I live in Portugal. The Spanish dictatorship ended when the dictator died, in 75. We overthrew ours in 74.
I don't think a two party democracy is a good thing. The parties tend to become very similar. Here, we have 6 parties in the Parliament, and it's good the small ones exist, to make a difference. We have 2 major parties, the Socialists and the Social-Democrats, that alternate in Government. The Socialists are left-wing and the others right-wing, but their actions when in power end up being the same: Power and money to the corporations, jobs for their fellows from the same party, screw the people.
Being able to choose the puppets is no good when the vast majority of the people doesn't give a shit about politics, economics, the environment, etc.
Thanks for the insight. I'm familiar with corporations, my country spent most of the XX century ruled by a corporative dictatorship. Our dictator was a big fan of Mussolini. Some time ago, I read the constitution those fascist assholes wrote in 1933 and found it so ridiculous it made me want to laugh.
I stopped laughing when I realised my country, after 30 years of democracy, is in fact ruled again by the same exact corporations, and in the same terms of the 1933 constitution. Just the constitution is not the same, and we have elections to choose which corporate puppets we'll put in the Parliament and Government for the next 4 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_density
Man, it's hard to compete with you, Canada is one of those in the bottom!
You sure have plenty of room to stretch your legs! I gave the USA as an example because I thought it was your country, and because I was there recently and got amazed at how some states the size of Spain have just a few million people. Compared to most of Europe, USA is "almost empty".
I live in Portugal, though it is not densely populated (it's in the middle of the list), compared to the USA, I feel like living in a crowded box.
The population reduced by 90%? Now that would be nice, no traffic jams, ghettos, crowded beaches, supermarket lines, etc. But it would take a LOT of time by natural causes, and genocide is definitely not my kind. So I'd better move to your country and enjoy the space.
Of course, if we don't stop destroying our planet, Mother Nature itself may get fed up and deal with us her way.
I don't think population should be reduced, just stop growing. Some countries in the world are almost empty, namely the USA and Russia. The main problems are caused by concentration in huge metropolis, leaving the rest of the country desert. It happens in my country, too.
About economic growth, I totally agree with you. Perpetual growth is not possible. Nowadays, we produce a lot more than the whole world population can consume. That causes periodical crisis, massive pollution and social problems.
A balance should be found. That will be the main issue in the XXI century, I think.
I don't think the population is that big, and I belive the population growth is going to slow down in the next years, as China and India begin to develop. The whole First World is facing demographic problems due to population reduction, now. It's mathematical, the more developed a country, the less the people have kids.
As to fusion, think about an infinite, clean power supply. Imagine you can depolute the rivers, recycle everything, turn deserts into forests, because energy is cheap. This is great. If the fusion, when possible, is offered to the world and not locked by private possession, it can solve our environmental problems for good.
I don't request free beer or gym, that's just bullshit. I didn't get a raise in 3,5 years.
I'm forced to work with granma's technology because nobody cares about improving our products' quality, our productivity or training people.
The one only affects me, but the second is really nasty on the future of my department, but apparently nobody gives a fuck about anything beyond the next week.
As soon as the market increases, hastalavista, baby. And the only ones they will have there are the scrap nobody wants anyway. The same as saying, they'll go down the can.
Actually I prefer Java, because it's more simple. Most of the time, syntactic sugar just annoys me.
Of course I hate writing getters and setters. All the major IDEs do that for you. I haven't written a getter or setter in ages.
Peer pressure is the issue. The reason lots of people work too much is because that way they can go over their peers who can't, or don't want to.
That way, there is no choice, because those who work more than the others, even when it hurts their personal life bad, are more successful, even when they're just as good, or worse, than their peers.
I see an increasing pressure on people to work more hours daily, even taking work home and working on weekends. Companies are increasing the demand on their empolyees' time, to a point when some people simply don't have a personal life. Those who don't want to take it, sooner or later are cast aside. If those pills existed, I'm sure they would be a huge success. And you didn't even need to force people to use them.
After all, SCO is just trying to make a decent living. Aren't we all? Those evil Free Software evildoers are the ones who are causing harm, imagine giving away for free important stuff that took years to develop at SCO: A reliable, robust operating system.
SCO is righteous, you are evil,/.
Shame on you!
Millions of people around the world sniff coke and shoot heroin. Coke not only is highly injuring by itself, I saw on TV how they manufacture it, and it involves yummy stuff like gasoline and sulphuric acid. They sniff and shoot it, to get high, until their brains melt.
Others smoke tobacco like crazy, others eat junk food loaded with chemicals, others drink booze, and so on. People drive cars and motorcycles like they were in a racing track. Others skip nights of sleep to dance all night, leading to deafness and nervous problems. LOTS of people work too much, leading to serious health problems, kids with traumas, divorces, etc.
Why do you think those "be a workaholic" pills wouldn't be used? I'm already seeing the ads: "Get money and success, we'll tell you how".
Americans look like Microsoft hating zealots compared to my fellow citizens. Even universities and schools sold their asses to the Darth Gates Evil Empire. And now they hatch the Micro$oft drones of the future.
I coded tons of stuff in PL/SQL, back in the good ole days days I worked with Oracle (sigh). Despite its limitations, it's not a bad language for business rules, and I did pretty complicated stuff with it.
Now I'm forced to use stored procedures in MSSQL. I hate the T-SQL language with all my guts, and I wish I could have a dime for everytime I told my team we should be dropping them and favor business logic in the middle tier. But they love that crap, so I'm mandated to use it, too.:-(
Looking back now, I realise that my extensive use of stored procedures and triggers really wasn't a good choice. They tend to complicate the databases and make them hard to understand. I favor a clean object-oriented or service-oriented model (depending on the domain) on top of a vanilla relacional model, with thorough and well-thought use of integrity constraints.
An example:
Some years ago I wrote a system that imported a massive amount of data to an Oracle data warehouse. It envolved parsing some weird binary files and stuffing some tables with data every single day by 2AM. The data had to go through some complicated calculations before being stored.
I wrote a program in C++ that parsed the files and called some stored procedures to do the business stuff. The parameters for the calculations were stored in a dozen tables with some thousands rows. This took 5 hours/day when the system was designed, which was considered acceptable.
A year later, due to business growth, the system was taking 21 hours to do the import. This had to be fixed. For days, I reviewed all of the PL/SQL code I had written, and found nothing that could be optimised. I ended up reviewing all the database parameters (IANA DBA) and ended up shorting the processing time to 12 hours, which is barely acceptable. If the daily data volume continues to grow, a major refactoring is to be done.
One thing that occurred to me was to change the business logic from PL/SQL to C++ and do all the calculation stuff inside the parsing program, using some tricks. The program would load the parameter data to some hash tables and other data structures and perform all calculations this way. I think I could save a lot of processing time this way, but the business logic is so complicated that I cannot possibly do that without creating another project from scratch. The golden rule is: "If it ain't broken, don't fix it", and the business logic in this system is one of the triumphs in my engineering career. Since the day it was written, it never had a single bug, not even in the testing phase.
My boss doesn't have any time to learn this kind of frothy stuff about technology. Hummm, by the way, my tech coworkers don't have time for these frothy matters too...
(sigh) Life sucks...
I think you misunderstood some points. I didn't write about desktop computers, and I definitely didn't write about Mr. Joe User. And I'm not a hardcore Linux user.
I just think a monoculture is a very bad thing, and an M$ one is just as bad as a Linux or Mac one.
I know some Microsoft drones, I work with them, and I just hate their grin when something that's not Microsoft comes to talk. They just don't consider anything non-M$ to be a serious alternative for anything. It pisses me off!
About the standards stuff, yeah, you're right.
When I was studying for my bachelor degree, in a highly regarded engineering school in my country, I had my first OS insight with Unix, and I learned all that client-server, IPC, socket, etc. stuff in some Linux servers we had there, programming in C and C++. Linux with Samba were our file servers, etc. This was some years ago.
When I got into the professional world I found that Linux was highly disregarded. Lots of managers used to grin and disregard it as "kid's stuff". And they thought about Unix machines as "legacy". To them, NT was hot stuff!!!
Now, I'm back to school to graduate, and they utterly sold their souls to Bill! Everything is M$ now, OS classes focus on Windows, development classes focus on Microsoft stuff. The Linux servers are slowly being replaced by Windoze boxes. The teachers that try to resist this invasion are cast aside. I shiver looking at the young kids there and imagining my country's IT industry invaded by brainwashed Microsoft drones. It makes me sad that the school which introduced me to Linux is now formatting the minds of the future generations on behalf of Darth Gates and his Evil Empire. I even heard a teacher saying "standards get in the way of progress".
How come Bill has his fist up their ass like this?
it's clear to me that the winners in the software game will be the ones who can write more, better code faster. They won't be purists and they won't care if they lose a few CPU ticks on garbage collection and runtime security if it means they win the development contract and deliver on time.
Every new project, I warn about security issues. They says I'm being picky. I say "This is going to haunt us later". They answer "This must be delivered really fast. If we care about security, we won't be able to do it. Nobody will try to break it, relax".
It always comes back to haunt us.
Besides, doing a good job in security won't give you any credit. Bosses and customers don't know whether you are writing safe code, they are only concerned if it works and will be delivered on schedule. And your coworker that writes unsafe code is better regarded by everyone because "This boy can really get the work done". Security is invisible, and the lack of it will only be noticed, if ever, much later.
Blaming it on the programmer is easy. But the programmer does what he is told, and the winning strategy is "screw security".
Slashdot Mirror
As he wrote, the system costs "per capita" as much as yours, so your VAT argument is moot.
Coffee in through the nose is not good coffee.
That makes you a Java junky, I guess.
Pretty close. Actually, I live in Portugal. The Spanish dictatorship ended when the dictator died, in 75. We overthrew ours in 74.
I don't think a two party democracy is a good thing. The parties tend to become very similar. Here, we have 6 parties in the Parliament, and it's good the small ones exist, to make a difference. We have 2 major parties, the Socialists and the Social-Democrats, that alternate in Government. The Socialists are left-wing and the others right-wing, but their actions when in power end up being the same: Power and money to the corporations, jobs for their fellows from the same party, screw the people.
Being able to choose the puppets is no good when the vast majority of the people doesn't give a shit about politics, economics, the environment, etc.
Thanks for the insight. I'm familiar with corporations, my country spent most of the XX century ruled by a corporative dictatorship. Our dictator was a big fan of Mussolini. Some time ago, I read the constitution those fascist assholes wrote in 1933 and found it so ridiculous it made me want to laugh.
I stopped laughing when I realised my country, after 30 years of democracy, is in fact ruled again by the same exact corporations, and in the same terms of the 1933 constitution. Just the constitution is not the same, and we have elections to choose which corporate puppets we'll put in the Parliament and Government for the next 4 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_density
Man, it's hard to compete with you, Canada is one of those in the bottom! You sure have plenty of room to stretch your legs!
I gave the USA as an example because I thought it was your country, and because I was there recently and got amazed at how some states the size of Spain have just a few million people. Compared to most of Europe, USA is "almost empty".
I live in Portugal, though it is not densely populated (it's in the middle of the list), compared to the USA, I feel like living in a crowded box.
The population reduced by 90%? Now that would be nice, no traffic jams, ghettos, crowded beaches, supermarket lines, etc. But it would take a LOT of time by natural causes, and genocide is definitely not my kind. So I'd better move to your country and enjoy the space.
Of course, if we don't stop destroying our planet, Mother Nature itself may get fed up and deal with us her way.
I don't think population should be reduced, just stop growing. Some countries in the world are almost empty, namely the USA and Russia. The main problems are caused by concentration in huge metropolis, leaving the rest of the country desert. It happens in my country, too.
About economic growth, I totally agree with you. Perpetual growth is not possible. Nowadays, we produce a lot more than the whole world population can consume. That causes periodical crisis, massive pollution and social problems.
A balance should be found. That will be the main issue in the XXI century, I think.
Yeah, sure, capitalists don't point AKs to anybody's head.
They use UZIs.
I don't think the population is that big, and I belive the population growth is going to slow down in the next years, as China and India begin to develop. The whole First World is facing demographic problems due to population reduction, now. It's mathematical, the more developed a country, the less the people have kids.
As to fusion, think about an infinite, clean power supply. Imagine you can depolute the rivers, recycle everything, turn deserts into forests, because energy is cheap. This is great. If the fusion, when possible, is offered to the world and not locked by private possession, it can solve our environmental problems for good.
I don't request free beer or gym, that's just bullshit. I didn't get a raise in 3,5 years.
I'm forced to work with granma's technology because nobody cares about improving our products' quality, our productivity or training people.
The one only affects me, but the second is really nasty on the future of my department, but apparently nobody gives a fuck about anything beyond the next week.
As soon as the market increases, hastalavista, baby. And the only ones they will have there are the scrap nobody wants anyway. The same as saying, they'll go down the can.
Actually I prefer Java, because it's more simple. Most of the time, syntactic sugar just annoys me.
Of course I hate writing getters and setters. All the major IDEs do that for you. I haven't written a getter or setter in ages.
Peer pressure is the issue. The reason lots of people work too much is because that way they can go over their peers who can't, or don't want to.
That way, there is no choice, because those who work more than the others, even when it hurts their personal life bad, are more successful, even when they're just as good, or worse, than their peers.
I see an increasing pressure on people to work more hours daily, even taking work home and working on weekends. Companies are increasing the demand on their empolyees' time, to a point when some people simply don't have a personal life. Those who don't want to take it, sooner or later are cast aside. If those pills existed, I'm sure they would be a huge success. And you didn't even need to force people to use them.
After all, SCO is just trying to make a decent living. Aren't we all? Those evil Free Software evildoers are the ones who are causing harm, imagine giving away for free important stuff that took years to develop at SCO: A reliable, robust operating system. /.
SCO is righteous, you are evil,
Shame on you!
Garl Mc Tribe
Millions of people around the world sniff coke and shoot heroin. Coke not only is highly injuring by itself, I saw on TV how they manufacture it, and it involves yummy stuff like gasoline and sulphuric acid. They sniff and shoot it, to get high, until their brains melt.
Others smoke tobacco like crazy, others eat junk food loaded with chemicals, others drink booze, and so on. People drive cars and motorcycles like they were in a racing track. Others skip nights of sleep to dance all night, leading to deafness and nervous problems. LOTS of people work too much, leading to serious health problems, kids with traumas, divorces, etc.
Why do you think those "be a workaholic" pills wouldn't be used? I'm already seeing the ads: "Get money and success, we'll tell you how".
Americans look like Microsoft hating zealots compared to my fellow citizens. Even universities and schools sold their asses to the Darth Gates Evil Empire. And now they hatch the Micro$oft drones of the future.
So now, we'll have two Java clones, .NET and PHP?
Don't be naive, man. One thing I learned in this world is: "If they can, they will".
If you're paid to do something, you might as well enjoy it.
Hey man, after 9 hours in front of a computer, isn't sex a good alternative to programming?
I coded tons of stuff in PL/SQL, back in the good ole days days I worked with Oracle (sigh). Despite its limitations, it's not a bad language for business rules, and I did pretty complicated stuff with it. :-(
Now I'm forced to use stored procedures in MSSQL. I hate the T-SQL language with all my guts, and I wish I could have a dime for everytime I told my team we should be dropping them and favor business logic in the middle tier. But they love that crap, so I'm mandated to use it, too.
Looking back now, I realise that my extensive use of stored procedures and triggers really wasn't a good choice. They tend to complicate the databases and make them hard to understand. I favor a clean object-oriented or service-oriented model (depending on the domain) on top of a vanilla relacional model, with thorough and well-thought use of integrity constraints.
An example:
Some years ago I wrote a system that imported a massive amount of data to an Oracle data warehouse. It envolved parsing some weird binary files and stuffing some tables with data every single day by 2AM. The data had to go through some complicated calculations before being stored.
I wrote a program in C++ that parsed the files and called some stored procedures to do the business stuff. The parameters for the calculations were stored in a dozen tables with some thousands rows. This took 5 hours/day when the system was designed, which was considered acceptable.
A year later, due to business growth, the system was taking 21 hours to do the import. This had to be fixed. For days, I reviewed all of the PL/SQL code I had written, and found nothing that could be optimised. I ended up reviewing all the database parameters (IANA DBA) and ended up shorting the processing time to 12 hours, which is barely acceptable. If the daily data volume continues to grow, a major refactoring is to be done.
One thing that occurred to me was to change the business logic from PL/SQL to C++ and do all the calculation stuff inside the parsing program, using some tricks. The program would load the parameter data to some hash tables and other data structures and perform all calculations this way. I think I could save a lot of processing time this way, but the business logic is so complicated that I cannot possibly do that without creating another project from scratch. The golden rule is: "If it ain't broken, don't fix it", and the business logic in this system is one of the triumphs in my engineering career. Since the day it was written, it never had a single bug, not even in the testing phase.
My boss doesn't have any time to learn this kind of frothy stuff about technology. Hummm, by the way, my tech coworkers don't have time for these frothy matters too...
(sigh) Life sucks...
That is plain bigotry. What makes Indians more likely to be terrorists than you americans? Forgot Charles Manson, McVeigh, etc? Shame on you.
I think you misunderstood some points. I didn't write about desktop computers, and I definitely didn't write about Mr. Joe User. And I'm not a hardcore Linux user.
I just think a monoculture is a very bad thing, and an M$ one is just as bad as a Linux or Mac one.
I know some Microsoft drones, I work with them, and I just hate their grin when something that's not Microsoft comes to talk. They just don't consider anything non-M$ to be a serious alternative for anything. It pisses me off!
About the standards stuff, yeah, you're right.
When I was studying for my bachelor degree, in a highly regarded engineering school in my country, I had my first OS insight with Unix, and I learned all that client-server, IPC, socket, etc. stuff in some Linux servers we had there, programming in C and C++. Linux with Samba were our file servers, etc. This was some years ago.
When I got into the professional world I found that Linux was highly disregarded. Lots of managers used to grin and disregard it as "kid's stuff". And they thought about Unix machines as "legacy". To them, NT was hot stuff!!!
Now, I'm back to school to graduate, and they utterly sold their souls to Bill! Everything is M$ now, OS classes focus on Windows, development classes focus on Microsoft stuff. The Linux servers are slowly being replaced by Windoze boxes. The teachers that try to resist this invasion are cast aside.
I shiver looking at the young kids there and imagining my country's IT industry invaded by brainwashed Microsoft drones.
It makes me sad that the school which introduced me to Linux is now formatting the minds of the future generations on behalf of Darth Gates and his Evil Empire. I even heard a teacher saying "standards get in the way of progress".
How come Bill has his fist up their ass like this?
So, UK, Germany and France don't exist? Even Spain has more people than Canada.
it's clear to me that the winners in the software game will be the ones who can write more, better code faster. They won't be purists and they won't care if they lose a few CPU ticks on garbage collection and runtime security if it means they win the development contract and deliver on time.
Every new project, I warn about security issues. They says I'm being picky. I say "This is going to haunt us later". They answer "This must be delivered really fast. If we care about security, we won't be able to do it. Nobody will try to break it, relax".
It always comes back to haunt us.
Besides, doing a good job in security won't give you any credit. Bosses and customers don't know whether you are writing safe code, they are only concerned if it works and will be delivered on schedule. And your coworker that writes unsafe code is better regarded by everyone because "This boy can really get the work done". Security is invisible, and the lack of it will only be noticed, if ever, much later.
Blaming it on the programmer is easy. But the programmer does what he is told, and the winning strategy is "screw security".