I would bet that Gates fell for a suckers move. There are lots of quick checkmates if one player is much better than the other. Besides chess ability has been proven to not be related to IQ. If Gates proved the Riemann hypothesis in an hour I would say yes, he is the greatest genius that ever lived but in the mean time Gates has a few ahead of him: Euclid, Newton, Euler, Riemann, Einstein, and Feynman just for starters.
I have been using Unix professionally since 1984. I have developed on most flavors, some of which are long dead. The first thing I would teach students is that Microsoft which rules not only the business world as no other company except IBM ever has. Microsoft has also taken most of the technical world as well. The market share for the engineering desktop was overwhelmingly either Unix or VAX (try not laugh at the deceased) has gone to Microsoft. The niche left to Unix is servers and some databases, the smallest end of the computing world. Windows 2003 now rules the server world as well (since 2006 by unit sales).
The big dirty secret is that Windows is based upon Unix!!! Microsoft's first product was Zenix a flavor of Unix albeit a bad and really really slow one. If you dig deep enough (and I have) all those Unix O/S calls are there. It is not a coincidence that 2 years after Cal Berkley thru Unix source code over the fence to the public domain Windows NT appeared. Originally laughable (ever tried to hook a modem up to NT 3?) at the time it is the undisputed king of the civilized world.
Any time someone is foolish enough to talk about Apple computers, I remind them they are toys, not work tools. When you can design a bridge for both stability, controls, and dynamics on a Mac, output the bill of materials and send design documents to the subcontractors that they can build and bill to. I will call it a tool. In the meantime it is a toy. So what are we left with? Not much really.
1) IBM Mainframe a very small niche
2) VxWorks (very very much Berkley BSD with an interrupt handler, and deterministic scheduler) and a bunch of other realtime O/S products that have market share like a Windows Phone (proof Microsoft makes mistakes)
3) Vaxes and Solaris boxes bought for next to nothing
4) my personal favorite the SGI beer cooler
You want students to be employable? Teach them Microsoft and Visual Studio and all the Microsoft business technology because the odds are they will email with Exchange, work on a Microsoft desktop, and store documents in SharePoint, plan products with Project, and store data in SQL Server and do big data/big data table in Hadoop with SQL Server extensions.
In 5 years Oracle will stop making Sun boxes that only zealots with government money buy. Oracle already loses money on their hardware each and every quarter; are you listening Larry?. When thinking about Oracle think of Data General, Silicon Graphics and Integraph. Java will continue its ossification and decay.
Facebook and Google use copious amounts of cheap Linux boxes. Linux is free because it really isn't much good. The world does not need Facebook which will be gone in 10 years and the rest of the world will realize Google is a front end and that the NSA has backend superuser access to everything Google does in spite of public denials.
Other than that Microsoft, in spite of all their mistakes, will continue to rule the world, except maybe cell phones, but no one needs a cell phone like they need food, clothing, shelter and a business desktop to do work.
Apple will eventually be $20/share again. Bill Gates is the richest man in the world because he deserves to be. Linus Torvalds doesn't matter. BSD Unix matters and Windows is a BSD box with a windowing system and development tool set that are richer than anything else in the computing world.
Feel free to denounce me as a fool, but I accurately predicted the demise of Digital Equipment, Integraph, SGI and Sun. A lot of shareholders would have done a whole lot better had they listened to me instead of, well almost everyone else. The price of Apple stock is a bubble, fundamentals aren't their, ask Ben Graham or Warren Buffet. Clip this paragraph of mine and 5 years from now you will realize how prescient I am and will have wished you sold your Apple stock. In the meantime I have to get back to work on Windows desktop.
I still have a place for Unix: I am looking for the perfect 1994 Silicon Graphics 'Predator' box for my bonus that I can turn into a beer cooler for the bonus room. Onyx boxes are too passé. VAX's makes nice end tables but have no visual panache like vintage SGI.
I worked as a prime contractor on the STS program both at the Cape and Marshall. I personally know an astronaut from the heyday. These are not the people you want on any project unless bankruptcy and failure are the goal. There is lterally nothing new in the space business except privatization. The technology is stuck right where Von Braun left it, chemical rockets are a dead end, nothing new unless we start using nuclear weapons as propulsion! Theodore Taylor had a superb design for this type of space craft but no one listened ebven though he designed virtually every fission weapon in the arsena (every engineer should read his biography it is superb).
See: http://www.lewrockwell.com/giles/giles31.html
It boils down to a simple concept that is well codified into law. It’s called the “Four Corners Doctrine” i.e. if it ain’t in the 4 corners of your employment contract it ain’t.
You should have known this not when you got fired but when you got “HIRED!” No such thing as friends is business pal, allies and enemies is a better model, read Sun-Tzu.
You never had that $100 million because you were stupid. Better a friendship based on business than a business based upon friendship. Zuckerberg fucked you and now he is fucking his stockholders because at this point he is lost. Facebook's business model is not Google and eventually the whole world will realize it is spyware, then the stock tanks. Zuckerberg is probably selling his as fast as he can. He is not the next Bill Gates, more like Apple, a fad. Fads fade, Apple stock will be $20/share again. Facebook will go to zero sooner. Remember how awesome Novell, the VAX and Silicon Graphics were?
The long history of failure in econometrics is because it is predicated on a bad axiom that of continuous functions. Human desire and human action vary in all human beings all the time which cannot be quantified.
A better approach is to use graph theory, lattice theory, and functional integration to find bounds on inequalitites from which trends can be observed. The future is always opaque!
Economics is the 'science' with the worst results, it really should not be called a hard science but a social science. No other discipline fails as often, or has as many bad results as economics/econometrics.
This result is from an arrogant post doc who has yet to learn how little he knows.
"An educated man knows how little he knows."
~Marquis De Laplace
I was an engineering manager for a NASA primae contractor for almost a decade, I have some experience.
The "tether" will be multiple materials, wires, cable, sheathing etc, thus will be anisotropic so you will need a stress tensor for each material (now you will have to solve systems of partial differential equations).
Each material will be in the non-linear zone which means solutions do not exist at all so the Stable Manifold Theorem will have to be invoked in order to create a "model". This model will not be real, but will be something that can be used for computation. The forces of destruction will be real and cannot be vanguished by saying that they approach zero (just becuase you want them to) and can be neglected.
A finite element grid will have to be set up over the entire 100,000km tether, this will be way to large for any currently conceivable computer system. Grid computing won't wok cbecuase the grid synchronization overhead will be greater than the computstion itself, unless you want to wait an eternity.
The forces themselves will be gravity, lift, drag, friction, surface boundary friction, plus viscous forces from the atmosphere and the solar wind. The tether will be a geodesic which means we will have to factor in the anisotropic natures of the forces as well as the materials. Do not forget magnetic forces since this cable will have a current in a magnetic, coriolis forces since it will be in orbit around a prolate obloid
Stop reading science fiction, and sober up pal, the last one snapped and this one would snap as well except it will never be built, NASA actually having acquired some experience here.
The rudeness of quantum mechanics, beyond non-linearity, is that all bonds strengths are finite which acts as a bound on such silliness.
This is folly, and as usual we want taxpayers to pick up the tab. The tether would snap long before it got to be 100,000km long. The non-linear forces would snap it. NASA already tried this less than a mile long in space and it snapped.
Of course it is sick, NO ONE writes software for free. This is the big lie of open source. All participants have ulterior motives, get a better job, be seen as an expert (when in fact you are not), start a money loser and hope deep pockets will buy you out with a big pay day so you really did not work for free (Red Hat/JBoss). Once the money never comes the old operant conditioning kicks in and the extinction response is on its way.
Bill Gates was right (as always) stop stealing software and pay for it! What about all the crippled enterprises that have bought all this half-ass ware? XP Programming where programmers rule, not managers, where schedules are impossible to predict (think about that one). The code is "too cheap to measure" like java: write once, debug forever.
The worst thing a business can have is someone else's source code, they want a product that works and the support that goes with it.
Sun has the been at the forefront of wrecking the IT industry with this disingenuous crap. Solaris lost on the desktop, it lost in the data center and is draining the American economy with the illusion of free ware. Scott McNealy is the anti-christ of IT. He sells the maxmimum of his stock as the SEC will allow while the stockeholders take it from behoind and his disatrous business model sucks equity doen the big unix hole.
Here's the source code is a virtual 'F*ck You letter'. I learned that bitter lesson more than 15 years ago when a vendor called and asked where I wanted the 1 million plus lines of source code escrow to be delivered. I said the null file!
The future is not whayt it used to be, blame Scott McNealy, but you'll have yo do it from outside the bars of his gated community. Gates beat him like a rented mule. Unix is a dead horse, dismount and bury it. Have fun "worling" form your linux desktop
You are right on the money with the tin foil hat! However you might want to put it under a scully cap, run it all the way down to your shoulder, make the breathing holes point down. Also put on a pair of welding goggles since they will have a high metal content or glasses made from leaded crystal. Don't wear a paper dress the spark the hat gives off could ignite it.
You may also want to put a kevlar vest on with a nice aluminum foil covering so the tasers will not work either.
No amount of legislation will make Gauss's law go away.
I already do.
Google spy's on everybody, if you think otherwise you do not understand the technology.
Apple provides computers for those who analyse value from fashion net result after 25 years of head to head competition with Microsoft: Apple's price is too much for too little for too long.
Vista is awful, a memory hog, slow performance, security a knowledgeable user has no need for. Things you might want like bitlocker are so screwed up no one uses them, the gadgets are nice, a grest place for spyware to show up. I love microsoft and hate apple, but as an engineer I have to be real.
XP will be phased out, then reintroduced with another name to get sucklers to buy the same thing twice. Think of the phase out of classic coke in the 80's which was nothing more than a clever ruse to take Pepsi's market share and get a lot of priceless free publicity.
My first computer was a Mac. (1985). The mantra for Mac users continues unabated thanks to the Jobs-Sculley axis of evil: "apple products are for suckers that pay too much for too little for too long". By a PC, throw your Mac away and use the money you save for somehting usable like preventing hunger, or global warming, or environmental recycling of junk apples.
Sculley's idiocy and Jobs incompetence has turned the Mac products into Vax's and made Bill Gates the richest man in the world.
I managed a 20 man development team using Java/J2EE for 5 years and all I can say it was a real disaster. The whole open source thing has given the false impression that the barrier to entry is low and products can be had for cheap. Not true, all you get, is pretenders/posers that sling the buzzwords but with no experience. I had to recruit 15 of the developers during the dot com bust. The resumes I saw all had a common thread: 5 years or less experience, average time on job less than a year, but a steady procession of fancy titles with little or no product development experience, vastly inflated expectations and salary claims. It took me hundreds of hours to weed through almost a thousand resumes to find 15 good ones. Forget the technology how many years on the job, was there a commercial product released that someone actually uses.
The worst part of it was that senior management fell for the buzzwords and promoted people to senior positions that had never released a single product and spent their time memorizing buzzwords and downloading demos. One delivered an application that ping'd printers and called it a network monitoring system, then he architected a database for a product by serializing blobs and storing them remotely, deserializing blobs across multiple generations of JRE releases is, to put it mildly, problematic.
Then came XP a very poor substitute for the proven techniques of analysis and design. A whole cadre of project managers have been developed whose sole skill is asking the question 'are you done yet'? You get experts at playing name that tune: I can name that tune in one note. Somehow these people alway manage to switch projects after the credit is given but before the release. That's a Design Anti Pattern for certain.
Release! I would call it more like an escape leaving a bloody trail in their wake. Say what you want about the military industrial complex they do make products that actually work.
The whole Java/J2EE things has been a scam, it was designed to thwart Microsoft on the desktop and the datacenter. Sun lost that badly and the stockholders have suffered tremendously for McNealy et al disastrous visoin of the computing future. Sun now gives away Java, Solaris, Sun Studio, MySQL and Star Office. If I was a stockholder in Sun I would go after these boobs in a class action suit. They have wrecked the industry for years to com.
In a strange way this plays right into the hands of the big boys SAP, Oracle, IBM who can actually deliver systems. As I have said it's not the tool, but the person using it. Eric Clapton certainly makes my guitar sound better than I can. In the end Sun tanked themselves and everyone that bought into their model. The finest example Red Hat with $2 billion dollar market cap for a year when they lost $100K on $10 million in sales. Sadly it was our future in 401K's that paid the price. McNealy sells his stock and tells you to buy it.
Put the crack pipe down, put your hands over your head, and step away from the computer!
Godel's Proof that there are an infinite number of true but unprovable conjectures would argue that we are real and not digital. No amount of information processing can prove these to be true like an infinite number of turing machines executing an infinite number of instructions.
QED
The above does not say anything about the physical universe be a state function in the mind of a higher dimensional entity that we are a subspace of.
I told my brother to dump his SGI stock they day the announced their purchase of Alias and Wavefront (1995). I lived in Huntsville AL at the time and was watching Integraph melt down right in front of me. Why? No one but IBM makes money in hardware and software, it's simple. It was true in 1969, 1979, 1989, 1995, and 2006. Besides the exec's pocketed all the cash, the hits are being taken by stupid "hitech" investors and your 401K's. SGI's technology was always doomed, the MIPS chips were too expensive, and it was only a matter of time until cheap graphics processors for the PC became available because when all is said and done they implement matrix algebra, a technology that has been around for two centuries. SGI is following DG, Integraph and DEC into the same toilet of executive arrogance. Losing their ass in hardware which is a commodity and failing to innovate in software where the real fortunes are made. Once again Microsoft pulls their pants off and hangs them in a tree. Anybody holding Sun stock should sell it while it is still sellable (SUN executives sure are, they may not be as rich as they once were but they are not stupid, I'm talking to you Scott McNealy)
I remember attending a seminar that Dr. Cicerone put on at my college (1974) where he told us with straight face that ozone holes would be giving everyone skin cancer by the 1990's. Now he wants money to block the sun. How about if we just lay this numbskull off he never gets it right. Bad science run amok when conjoined with public funding. He and Paul Erhlich should retire and tell each other the apocalyptic fantasy stories. Maybe we should start capping volcanoes and build umbrellas over continents. Just another public sector clown that has never had a real job.
McNealy is being dumped becuase he deserves it. In 1991 I made the comment in a meeting with some Integraph founder relatives that anybody that made hardware and software except IBM would eventually go out of business, because only IBM has made that combo work. They all laughed, I must be an idiot.
Let's look at the list: Data General, Motorola, Prime, DEC, Apollo, Next,
On life support, but terminal: Silicon Graphics, Sun
Purists might argue Integraph is still in business, but not in hardware and a lot smaller. The others were bought for market share or components, not their business models.
McNealy is making dinosaurs in the age of small more intelligent (and wealthier mammals, ie x86). His business model has sucked for a decade. Unfortunately he is not paying the financial price for his failures, your 401K's did.
Java was never about free computing and making the world better, it was about beating the Microsoft desktop and is a dismal failure. The hardware is laughable, the SPARC was a leader in 1989. Today no one cares. Sun joins Apple on the list of serious competitors that Gates beat like a rented mule.
I remember refusing to pay $10 to see the Rolling Stones during their 1972 tour (back when they were entertaining, not embarassing) becuase it was just too much money. Most shows were $6 or $7 (Allmans, Santana, Neil Young). I think the first time I paid more than $10 for a ticket was when Bob Dylan came out of retirement in 1973.
Now I stay home becuase no entertainer is worth what they now ask. Let market forces work.
More people are living longer in a less polluted envronment world wide. Sounds good to me. The price of food is done virtually everywhere. Mankind is massively more prosperous now than 300 years thanks and only thanks to capitalism: private ownership of the means production and individiual decision on to best use that capital. The big disasters have all been government disasters.
Let's think back than a little ways:
Stalins Agriculture: 20 million+ dead on htat one
Mao's Great Leap Forward (into the cemetery apparently): 50 million+ dead on that fiasco
Rachel Carson wrong book (and it has been proven wrong) about DDT caused another 50 million people have needessly died from malaria that DDT eradicates.
Werner Ehard and his bullshit, he gets nothing right, if he owned cemeteries no one would die.
GW's fuck up in Iraq, less thsn 100K dead, looks like a move in the roght direction to me.
As a former Prime Contractor to multiple Federal agencies I have witnessed much of what passes for work at the taxpayers expense. Just think how much fun it will be now that we have every porn site in the world indexed for free.
It's not a war on terror, it's a war on the taxpayers and productive enterprise.
It is very straighforward to write a program in windows C++ that is crash free. You wrap the outer main in a structured excpetion handler for all crash events. This will make the program uncrashable it the expense of orphaning, that is leaking, heap memory. This is a bad idea as it will protect bad code from it's own, deserved demise.
You want crash proof code? You should spend more time in QA than development and start with a good design. Iterate until the code behaves as desired.
This is not a technology issue it is a cultural issue. History is replete with inferior cultures that fail.
Let's first remember that the author (Oberg) is a self-serving bureaucrat (NASA employee) http://g.msn.com/0MN2ET7/2?http://www.msnbc.msn.co m/id/11031097/from/ET/&&CM=EmailThis&CE=1/>
Much criticsim from official circles of Feynmann's analysis has clouded the accuracy of his assessment. The Nobel Laureate Physicist looked at the safety statistics and concluded 1 out of 25 shuttle flights would end disasterously. NASA's official number was that the risk was "too small to measure" ie parts per million or less. Given that we have lost 2 ships in less than 200 flights it would seem that Feynmann was much closer to the truth than NASA (what a surprise).
As a former NASA prime contractor I am familiar with the mendacity of these bozos (it's a miracle we have not lost a lot more astronauts).
The socialists at Scientific American always get it wrong when they discuss economic issues, probably because they do not understand economics, but just parrot the socialist clap trap from academic "sages" like MIT's Paul Krugman or Noam Chmosky (who isn't an economist). Copper production is down because prices are down. EPA regs have shut down large copper mines under questionable criteria (as all gov't statistics are). Nothing will spur copper production like higher prices. The industrializing world's demand will spur production using new technology and new sources and all of a sudden the shortage will be gone. Unless of course we let the socialists at Sci Am regulate and create an artificial shortage.
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I would bet that Gates fell for a suckers move. There are lots of quick checkmates if one player is much better than the other. Besides chess ability has been proven to not be related to IQ. If Gates proved the Riemann hypothesis in an hour I would say yes, he is the greatest genius that ever lived but in the mean time Gates has a few ahead of him: Euclid, Newton, Euler, Riemann, Einstein, and Feynman just for starters.
The big dirty secret is that Windows is based upon Unix!!! Microsoft's first product was Zenix a flavor of Unix albeit a bad and really really slow one. If you dig deep enough (and I have) all those Unix O/S calls are there. It is not a coincidence that 2 years after Cal Berkley thru Unix source code over the fence to the public domain Windows NT appeared. Originally laughable (ever tried to hook a modem up to NT 3?) at the time it is the undisputed king of the civilized world.
Any time someone is foolish enough to talk about Apple computers, I remind them they are toys, not work tools. When you can design a bridge for both stability, controls, and dynamics on a Mac, output the bill of materials and send design documents to the subcontractors that they can build and bill to. I will call it a tool. In the meantime it is a toy. So what are we left with? Not much really.
1) IBM Mainframe a very small niche
2) VxWorks (very very much Berkley BSD with an interrupt handler, and deterministic scheduler) and a bunch of other realtime O/S products that have market share like a Windows Phone (proof Microsoft makes mistakes)
3) Vaxes and Solaris boxes bought for next to nothing
4) my personal favorite the SGI beer cooler
You want students to be employable? Teach them Microsoft and Visual Studio and all the Microsoft business technology because the odds are they will email with Exchange, work on a Microsoft desktop, and store documents in SharePoint, plan products with Project, and store data in SQL Server and do big data/big data table in Hadoop with SQL Server extensions.
In 5 years Oracle will stop making Sun boxes that only zealots with government money buy. Oracle already loses money on their hardware each and every quarter; are you listening Larry?. When thinking about Oracle think of Data General, Silicon Graphics and Integraph. Java will continue its ossification and decay.
Facebook and Google use copious amounts of cheap Linux boxes. Linux is free because it really isn't much good. The world does not need Facebook which will be gone in 10 years and the rest of the world will realize Google is a front end and that the NSA has backend superuser access to everything Google does in spite of public denials.
Other than that Microsoft, in spite of all their mistakes, will continue to rule the world, except maybe cell phones, but no one needs a cell phone like they need food, clothing, shelter and a business desktop to do work.
Apple will eventually be $20/share again. Bill Gates is the richest man in the world because he deserves to be. Linus Torvalds doesn't matter. BSD Unix matters and Windows is a BSD box with a windowing system and development tool set that are richer than anything else in the computing world.
Feel free to denounce me as a fool, but I accurately predicted the demise of Digital Equipment, Integraph, SGI and Sun. A lot of shareholders would have done a whole lot better had they listened to me instead of, well almost everyone else. The price of Apple stock is a bubble, fundamentals aren't their, ask Ben Graham or Warren Buffet. Clip this paragraph of mine and 5 years from now you will realize how prescient I am and will have wished you sold your Apple stock. In the meantime I have to get back to work on Windows desktop.
I still have a place for Unix: I am looking for the perfect 1994 Silicon Graphics 'Predator' box for my bonus that I can turn into a beer cooler for the bonus room. Onyx boxes are too passé. VAX's makes nice end tables but have no visual panache like vintage SGI.
I worked as a prime contractor on the STS program both at the Cape and Marshall. I personally know an astronaut from the heyday. These are not the people you want on any project unless bankruptcy and failure are the goal. There is lterally nothing new in the space business except privatization. The technology is stuck right where Von Braun left it, chemical rockets are a dead end, nothing new unless we start using nuclear weapons as propulsion! Theodore Taylor had a superb design for this type of space craft but no one listened ebven though he designed virtually every fission weapon in the arsena (every engineer should read his biography it is superb). See: http://www.lewrockwell.com/giles/giles31.html
It boils down to a simple concept that is well codified into law. It’s called the “Four Corners Doctrine” i.e. if it ain’t in the 4 corners of your employment contract it ain’t. You should have known this not when you got fired but when you got “HIRED!” No such thing as friends is business pal, allies and enemies is a better model, read Sun-Tzu. You never had that $100 million because you were stupid. Better a friendship based on business than a business based upon friendship. Zuckerberg fucked you and now he is fucking his stockholders because at this point he is lost. Facebook's business model is not Google and eventually the whole world will realize it is spyware, then the stock tanks. Zuckerberg is probably selling his as fast as he can. He is not the next Bill Gates, more like Apple, a fad. Fads fade, Apple stock will be $20/share again. Facebook will go to zero sooner. Remember how awesome Novell, the VAX and Silicon Graphics were?
The long history of failure in econometrics is because it is predicated on a bad axiom that of continuous functions. Human desire and human action vary in all human beings all the time which cannot be quantified. A better approach is to use graph theory, lattice theory, and functional integration to find bounds on inequalitites from which trends can be observed. The future is always opaque! Economics is the 'science' with the worst results, it really should not be called a hard science but a social science. No other discipline fails as often, or has as many bad results as economics/econometrics. This result is from an arrogant post doc who has yet to learn how little he knows. "An educated man knows how little he knows." ~Marquis De Laplace
I was an engineering manager for a NASA primae contractor for almost a decade, I have some experience. The "tether" will be multiple materials, wires, cable, sheathing etc, thus will be anisotropic so you will need a stress tensor for each material (now you will have to solve systems of partial differential equations). Each material will be in the non-linear zone which means solutions do not exist at all so the Stable Manifold Theorem will have to be invoked in order to create a "model". This model will not be real, but will be something that can be used for computation. The forces of destruction will be real and cannot be vanguished by saying that they approach zero (just becuase you want them to) and can be neglected. A finite element grid will have to be set up over the entire 100,000km tether, this will be way to large for any currently conceivable computer system. Grid computing won't wok cbecuase the grid synchronization overhead will be greater than the computstion itself, unless you want to wait an eternity. The forces themselves will be gravity, lift, drag, friction, surface boundary friction, plus viscous forces from the atmosphere and the solar wind. The tether will be a geodesic which means we will have to factor in the anisotropic natures of the forces as well as the materials. Do not forget magnetic forces since this cable will have a current in a magnetic, coriolis forces since it will be in orbit around a prolate obloid Stop reading science fiction, and sober up pal, the last one snapped and this one would snap as well except it will never be built, NASA actually having acquired some experience here. The rudeness of quantum mechanics, beyond non-linearity, is that all bonds strengths are finite which acts as a bound on such silliness.
This is folly, and as usual we want taxpayers to pick up the tab. The tether would snap long before it got to be 100,000km long. The non-linear forces would snap it. NASA already tried this less than a mile long in space and it snapped.
Of course it is sick, NO ONE writes software for free. This is the big lie of open source. All participants have ulterior motives, get a better job, be seen as an expert (when in fact you are not), start a money loser and hope deep pockets will buy you out with a big pay day so you really did not work for free (Red Hat/JBoss). Once the money never comes the old operant conditioning kicks in and the extinction response is on its way. Bill Gates was right (as always) stop stealing software and pay for it! What about all the crippled enterprises that have bought all this half-ass ware? XP Programming where programmers rule, not managers, where schedules are impossible to predict (think about that one). The code is "too cheap to measure" like java: write once, debug forever. The worst thing a business can have is someone else's source code, they want a product that works and the support that goes with it. Sun has the been at the forefront of wrecking the IT industry with this disingenuous crap. Solaris lost on the desktop, it lost in the data center and is draining the American economy with the illusion of free ware. Scott McNealy is the anti-christ of IT. He sells the maxmimum of his stock as the SEC will allow while the stockeholders take it from behoind and his disatrous business model sucks equity doen the big unix hole. Here's the source code is a virtual 'F*ck You letter'. I learned that bitter lesson more than 15 years ago when a vendor called and asked where I wanted the 1 million plus lines of source code escrow to be delivered. I said the null file! The future is not whayt it used to be, blame Scott McNealy, but you'll have yo do it from outside the bars of his gated community. Gates beat him like a rented mule. Unix is a dead horse, dismount and bury it. Have fun "worling" form your linux desktop
You are right on the money with the tin foil hat! However you might want to put it under a scully cap, run it all the way down to your shoulder, make the breathing holes point down. Also put on a pair of welding goggles since they will have a high metal content or glasses made from leaded crystal. Don't wear a paper dress the spark the hat gives off could ignite it. You may also want to put a kevlar vest on with a nice aluminum foil covering so the tasers will not work either. No amount of legislation will make Gauss's law go away.
The F22 did not come from the skunk works. It was designed and built in Marietta Georgia. I should know I worked on it.
I already do. Google spy's on everybody, if you think otherwise you do not understand the technology. Apple provides computers for those who analyse value from fashion net result after 25 years of head to head competition with Microsoft: Apple's price is too much for too little for too long.
Vista is awful, a memory hog, slow performance, security a knowledgeable user has no need for. Things you might want like bitlocker are so screwed up no one uses them, the gadgets are nice, a grest place for spyware to show up. I love microsoft and hate apple, but as an engineer I have to be real. XP will be phased out, then reintroduced with another name to get sucklers to buy the same thing twice. Think of the phase out of classic coke in the 80's which was nothing more than a clever ruse to take Pepsi's market share and get a lot of priceless free publicity.
My first computer was a Mac. (1985). The mantra for Mac users continues unabated thanks to the Jobs-Sculley axis of evil: "apple products are for suckers that pay too much for too little for too long". By a PC, throw your Mac away and use the money you save for somehting usable like preventing hunger, or global warming, or environmental recycling of junk apples.
Sculley's idiocy and Jobs incompetence has turned the Mac products into Vax's and made Bill Gates the richest man in the world.
I managed a 20 man development team using Java/J2EE for 5 years and all I can say it was a real disaster. The whole open source thing has given the false impression that the barrier to entry is low and products can be had for cheap. Not true, all you get, is pretenders/posers that sling the buzzwords but with no experience. I had to recruit 15 of the developers during the dot com bust. The resumes I saw all had a common thread: 5 years or less experience, average time on job less than a year, but a steady procession of fancy titles with little or no product development experience, vastly inflated expectations and salary claims. It took me hundreds of hours to weed through almost a thousand resumes to find 15 good ones. Forget the technology how many years on the job, was there a commercial product released that someone actually uses. The worst part of it was that senior management fell for the buzzwords and promoted people to senior positions that had never released a single product and spent their time memorizing buzzwords and downloading demos. One delivered an application that ping'd printers and called it a network monitoring system, then he architected a database for a product by serializing blobs and storing them remotely, deserializing blobs across multiple generations of JRE releases is, to put it mildly, problematic. Then came XP a very poor substitute for the proven techniques of analysis and design. A whole cadre of project managers have been developed whose sole skill is asking the question 'are you done yet'? You get experts at playing name that tune: I can name that tune in one note. Somehow these people alway manage to switch projects after the credit is given but before the release. That's a Design Anti Pattern for certain. Release! I would call it more like an escape leaving a bloody trail in their wake. Say what you want about the military industrial complex they do make products that actually work. The whole Java/J2EE things has been a scam, it was designed to thwart Microsoft on the desktop and the datacenter. Sun lost that badly and the stockholders have suffered tremendously for McNealy et al disastrous visoin of the computing future. Sun now gives away Java, Solaris, Sun Studio, MySQL and Star Office. If I was a stockholder in Sun I would go after these boobs in a class action suit. They have wrecked the industry for years to com. In a strange way this plays right into the hands of the big boys SAP, Oracle, IBM who can actually deliver systems. As I have said it's not the tool, but the person using it. Eric Clapton certainly makes my guitar sound better than I can. In the end Sun tanked themselves and everyone that bought into their model. The finest example Red Hat with $2 billion dollar market cap for a year when they lost $100K on $10 million in sales. Sadly it was our future in 401K's that paid the price. McNealy sells his stock and tells you to buy it. Put the crack pipe down, put your hands over your head, and step away from the computer!
Godel's Proof that there are an infinite number of true but unprovable conjectures would argue that we are real and not digital. No amount of information processing can prove these to be true like an infinite number of turing machines executing an infinite number of instructions.
QED
The above does not say anything about the physical universe be a state function in the mind of a higher dimensional entity that we are a subspace of.
I told my brother to dump his SGI stock they day the announced their purchase of Alias and Wavefront (1995). I lived in Huntsville AL at the time and was watching Integraph melt down right in front of me. Why? No one but IBM makes money in hardware and software, it's simple. It was true in 1969, 1979, 1989, 1995, and 2006. Besides the exec's pocketed all the cash, the hits are being taken by stupid "hitech" investors and your 401K's. SGI's technology was always doomed, the MIPS chips were too expensive, and it was only a matter of time until cheap graphics processors for the PC became available because when all is said and done they implement matrix algebra, a technology that has been around for two centuries. SGI is following DG, Integraph and DEC into the same toilet of executive arrogance. Losing their ass in hardware which is a commodity and failing to innovate in software where the real fortunes are made. Once again Microsoft pulls their pants off and hangs them in a tree. Anybody holding Sun stock should sell it while it is still sellable (SUN executives sure are, they may not be as rich as they once were but they are not stupid, I'm talking to you Scott McNealy)
I remember attending a seminar that Dr. Cicerone put on at my college (1974) where he told us with straight face that ozone holes would be giving everyone skin cancer by the 1990's. Now he wants money to block the sun. How about if we just lay this numbskull off he never gets it right. Bad science run amok when conjoined with public funding. He and Paul Erhlich should retire and tell each other the apocalyptic fantasy stories. Maybe we should start capping volcanoes and build umbrellas over continents. Just another public sector clown that has never had a real job.
McNealy is being dumped becuase he deserves it. In 1991 I made the comment in a meeting with some Integraph founder relatives that anybody that made hardware and software except IBM would eventually go out of business, because only IBM has made that combo work. They all laughed, I must be an idiot. Let's look at the list: Data General, Motorola, Prime, DEC, Apollo, Next, On life support, but terminal: Silicon Graphics, Sun Purists might argue Integraph is still in business, but not in hardware and a lot smaller. The others were bought for market share or components, not their business models. McNealy is making dinosaurs in the age of small more intelligent (and wealthier mammals, ie x86). His business model has sucked for a decade. Unfortunately he is not paying the financial price for his failures, your 401K's did. Java was never about free computing and making the world better, it was about beating the Microsoft desktop and is a dismal failure. The hardware is laughable, the SPARC was a leader in 1989. Today no one cares. Sun joins Apple on the list of serious competitors that Gates beat like a rented mule.
I remember refusing to pay $10 to see the Rolling Stones during their 1972 tour (back when they were entertaining, not embarassing) becuase it was just too much money. Most shows were $6 or $7 (Allmans, Santana, Neil Young). I think the first time I paid more than $10 for a ticket was when Bob Dylan came out of retirement in 1973. Now I stay home becuase no entertainer is worth what they now ask. Let market forces work.
Turn the shit off and read a book, plenty of good ones out there. The boob tube will steal your soul (what's left anyway)
More people are living longer in a less polluted envronment world wide. Sounds good to me. The price of food is done virtually everywhere. Mankind is massively more prosperous now than 300 years thanks and only thanks to capitalism: private ownership of the means production and individiual decision on to best use that capital. The big disasters have all been government disasters. Let's think back than a little ways: Stalins Agriculture: 20 million+ dead on htat one Mao's Great Leap Forward (into the cemetery apparently): 50 million+ dead on that fiasco Rachel Carson wrong book (and it has been proven wrong) about DDT caused another 50 million people have needessly died from malaria that DDT eradicates. Werner Ehard and his bullshit, he gets nothing right, if he owned cemeteries no one would die. GW's fuck up in Iraq, less thsn 100K dead, looks like a move in the roght direction to me.
As a former Prime Contractor to multiple Federal agencies I have witnessed much of what passes for work at the taxpayers expense. Just think how much fun it will be now that we have every porn site in the world indexed for free. It's not a war on terror, it's a war on the taxpayers and productive enterprise.
It is very straighforward to write a program in windows C++ that is crash free. You wrap the outer main in a structured excpetion handler for all crash events. This will make the program uncrashable it the expense of orphaning, that is leaking, heap memory. This is a bad idea as it will protect bad code from it's own, deserved demise. You want crash proof code? You should spend more time in QA than development and start with a good design. Iterate until the code behaves as desired. This is not a technology issue it is a cultural issue. History is replete with inferior cultures that fail.
Let's first remember that the author (Oberg) is a self-serving bureaucrat (NASA employee)o m/id/11031097/from/ET/&&CM=EmailThis&CE=1 />
Much criticsim from official circles of Feynmann's analysis has clouded the accuracy of his assessment. The Nobel Laureate Physicist looked at the safety statistics and concluded 1 out of 25 shuttle flights would end disasterously. NASA's official number was that the risk was "too small to measure" ie parts per million or less. Given that we have lost 2 ships in less than 200 flights it would seem that Feynmann was much closer to the truth than NASA (what a surprise).
http://g.msn.com/0MN2ET7/2?http://www.msnbc.msn.c
As a former NASA prime contractor I am familiar with the mendacity of these bozos (it's a miracle we have not lost a lot more astronauts).
The socialists at Scientific American always get it wrong when they discuss economic issues, probably because they do not understand economics, but just parrot the socialist clap trap from academic "sages" like MIT's Paul Krugman or Noam Chmosky (who isn't an economist). Copper production is down because prices are down. EPA regs have shut down large copper mines under questionable criteria (as all gov't statistics are). Nothing will spur copper production like higher prices. The industrializing world's demand will spur production using new technology and new sources and all of a sudden the shortage will be gone. Unless of course we let the socialists at Sci Am regulate and create an artificial shortage.