No, we don't have to choose a ideologue. Choosing such people usually results in long bloody civil wars, genocides, bloody power struggler, incompetence, even more incompetence, horribly badly designed programs, horribly badly designed laws, ego trips by politicians and finally a return to something even worse than where we started. Anyone who believes they are "right" period can never be trusted. Blind change is worse than no change.
Google is based on a clustered infrastructure in everything as I understand it. If a system dies they put a new one in, no problems. Costs less to hire the monkey to do that and there is no uptime hit. A lot of companies don't have 200 hundred servers and applications designed for clusters.
particularly for software which keeps itself up-to-date Most don't, a packaging system would at least solve this and better than a dozen separate auto-updaters. It also prevents 95% of the people from running up-to-date secure versions of free software on their systems. MS does auto-updates. Most corporate software does as well. All except some big OSS projects don't.
That works, oh wait the PhP installer doesn't put all the files that apache needs on the system. Time to get the zip. Oh wait, the files aren't in the right place. Time to move the files. Now time to move the config files. Even more fun when I want to backup the config files which are scattered in 3 different places, none of them the standard windows location for such things. I can do this, or I can use one of the all in one packages that solves the whole mess for me.
There's never been a need for a third-party application, but they exist because people (hint) are too damn lazy. I value my time and don't want to have to do something just because someone else was too lazy to code a proper installer for windows (*cough*apache*cough*).
I usually know the name of a program that I wish to download, it's easier to google a program than try to find what horrid butchery of its name was used for a url.
Uhh, lets see now. With a linux type package manager I could: -Actually install MySQL, PHP and Apache easily without having to use a third party package that holds them all. Yeah, windows is sure free of dependencies. Just great especially when your programs are inherently dependent on each other, oh wait no its a pain in the ass. -Download whatever packages I need without needing to deal with searching the web for the place to download this from. The whole find, download install file, run install file thing gets annoying pretty quickly. Especially when you have a bunch of software to download. -Queue uninstalls, god damn do I hate the fucking windows uninstaller where you need to uninstall, wait,uninstall next item. Thats not even counting how it fucking breaks in one way or another after a while on most systems I've used.
Packaging is a band aid on deeper problems with library incompatibility problems, the braindead scattering of software files all over the file system, and the completely pointless minor differences in Linux distributions. Unlike you I value my time and wasting it on pointless activity doesn't appeal to me. To download an open source program now I need to google for a program, check which website is the right one, following a redirect to a working site, find+click the link to the download section, find+click the windows download link, find the newest version to download, click "yes I want to download you nitwit" and then select a mirror. Possibly at some point I will be told "we're sorry there is no windows version except in cygwin, please download and install cygwin" which then forces me to go through the whole damn process of installing software for cygwin after I need half of this crap already. Also possibly after all this I learn that the program has been dead for 4 years and that there is a new version being run by a different developer under a new (slightly modified) name.
Lecture attendance registers (and alerting a student if they are about to miss a lecture) Kickass, now all you need to do is get a friend to bring your tag. Purely accidentally too, of course, if anyone were to ask. Then you get the fun of people not getting detected correctly and students having to spend 2 months arguing that they didn't miss all the classes (and so didn't fail the class). The prof is of course on a sabbatical (and didn't really pay attention to who attended anyways) and the TAs slept through the lectures. And since the system can never lie or be wrong the student must be lying.
Student security Such as? Oh no, I'm in a building that isn't my department so I can use the bathroom, better call the cops.
efficient computers/lighting (i.e. computers/lights turn on/off when someone enters/exits room) So the school has never heard of motion detectors I take it? Joy, now I'll need to bring a flashlight with me for all the times this more complex thus error prone detection system fails.
computer account security and log-on convenience. ...unless the tag is embedded in your arm you gain no security benefit unless there is a password as well. Then you gain no convenience benefit. Not to mention that you'd need a detector next to each computer as a tracking system (that is error prone likely) would be far from "Secure."
Yeah, I agree that there is good money in proper specialization but for that to truly pay off you need to find a good niche more than anything. And of course you need to have a backup option of some sort.
So get paid experience in multiple languages/areas by getting a job from the start that lets you do that, sure you may need to sacrifice a bit of pay or whatnot but it is better than the alternative. Personally I'd go insane if I had to focus on a single language in a single app for months on end. Hell I don't even like to focus on a single field for too long so I work on multiple minor projects at the same time.
I'm a statistician by training, I have from my current job paid experience in R, java, python and sql. Right now I'm also picking up some economics and I'll likely focus a lot more on that part as time goes on. Most of the team is getting experience in Java, perl and some statistics.
I'm bilingual (fluently) and have dual citizenship (one of which gives me EU citizenship as a bonus). I even have a residence and money in banks in both countries of citizenship. So yes, english is included in that statement.
I mean, this is IT where things change quickly and at times unexpectedly. If you don't have at least a number of diverse skills then I can't say I feel sorry for you when your job gets axed. I may not be a guru in any one language but at least I won't be unemployed when that language dies out.
I've only had my bags delayed once, 6+ years ago on a small intra-state flight (prop plane). Their excuse was that due to turbulent weather the extra weight of the bags would have caused the plane to crash. The flight was a quarter full and half those people didn't have bags (didn't go to pick them up). Yeah, either they suck as BSing or I never wish to fly that route again.
To my great amazement they even got my bag to the correct final destination when they forced me to check it in at the gate (fuckers run out of overhead storage room), hand wrote a tag for it and I had a connecting flight.
I've told people, showed people and explained to people about spyware and viruses at work. The troublemakers had plenty of examples to follow: the 3/4 of people who don't have the same problem. I was more than helpful as well, more so than my job description required of me.
Finally the boss got tired of having to ask me to weekly clean up systems so he just killed the internet (to non work related sites) for everyone.
I don't know how to fill tires. I know how to pump gas 'cause I saw my dad pump gas when I was a kid, and he let me try it a few times. Similarly, I've thought kids a specific computer task (e.g. how to double click on an icon), and they've picked it up. It's not that they were smart enough to figure it out on their own or anything like that. They saw me double click on the icon, then they tried double clicking while I supervised, and now they know how. If nobody showed them how to double click, I wouldn't expect them to know how to do that. If nobody showed them how to pump gas, I wouldn't expect them to know how to do that. If you bought a car and didn't know how to fill the gas would you ask someone to show you or would you drive an extra 20 miles to a non self-service gas station?
Again, if computers came with "Computer attendants" who would tell you what to do, and if you could easily observe other computer users to see what they were doing and copy them, computers would be as easy to use as being a passenger in a plane. But we don't have these things, so using computers is more difficult than being a passenger in a plane. There are what, 200 books on computers for newbies in any bookstore? Almost everyone has someone they know that also knows computers. See my initial example.
Again, because someone told you. When you get stiches, your first instinct is to scratch at them, 'cause it itches. The doctor will tell you not to do that. So now you know. You might not have known if nobody told you. See my initial example, if stitches were like computers people would rip them out constantly and just go have the doctor put them back in.
I don't know how to code an OS or even compile one from sratch truly. A better analogy is that someone doesn't know how to pump gas or fill their tires.
i can't separate waste from water to make it drinkable again.
Yet you know that drinking sewage water would not be good for you.
i can't start or fly a commercial airplane.
Yet you know how one flies, generally, and how to properly be a passenger on one. I doubt you've tried to get out in mid-flight for example.
i am completely incapable of stitching up a wound...
Yet you know not to rip apart stitches or when you may need to get stitches (or go to a hospital).
No, I was wrong in my previous reply. If measured by money and number of fortune 500 companies than NYC beats the whole Bay Area. If you include more than just the city (the Bay Area does cover a larger area asfaik) then it trumps by a factor of two if not more. Btw, The Bay Area would come out 29th if compared against the economies of the world while as was mentioned NYC comes out quite a bit higher.
So while this is a pork barrel project it is nonetheless true that NYC is probably the single most important economic area in the US.
Could you please provide a source for that statement?
All I find is that SV is 16% of the California GDP. The later is $1.6 Trillion so SV comes out to roughly $256 billion. The data I find on New York City lists its GDP as roughly $457.3 billion while the NY metro area (a better comparison to SV than NYC alone) come out at $901 billion.
So apparently, or rather unless you have better sources, NYC is a more important economic center than SV.
And we're going to do it in a manner that makes no sense to me. Let's bury all the cables, because terrorists have demonstrated that they want to blow up electric towers. Now they will just aim for the generation facilities. The cables in manhattan asfaik are already buried, this is just an upgrade to the current system. since they are already buried the cost is minimal compared to having to actually move them underground.
In the meantime, Seattle, LA, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, Miami, Houston, Washington DC, etc all will have 'vulnerable' powerlines. So in reality, we are just throwing another giant chunk of money in the Anti-Terrorism wastebasket. NYC as a whole has 8million people, the greater NYC areas has something like 20 million. The power grid is so highly interconnected that you probably have 50 million people that'd be affected at worst. It is the single largest city and urban area in the US by far and houses the most important financial markets in the US so yes it is the first choice in such matters.
If it was that big of a threat, wouldn't we be spending billions doing it everywhere? Well I don't think NYC can tell other cities what to do but if they want to then they can request some money for their own projects as well.
I, for one, am ashamed of our Big Brother Overlords. The USA is done. Stick a fork in it. what in god's name are you smoking, how the hell is this big brother? They're not watching you, they're not controlling you, they're not restricting your freedom. They're building a f-ing cable. You're the one whose paranoid, except its not about safety but about losing it which is just as bad in some ways (cry wolf and missing the obvious losses of it).
I agree. The point is that modern "democracies" aren't true democracies, safety measures were implemented for that very reason. The US has the constitution (and it's amendments such as the bill of rights) to prevent tyranny of the majority. Checks and balances, representative democracy and even the electoral college (the idea being that the state representatives could vote against their state's voter's decision if need be) were also part of this. Even the courts which abuse their powers at times are an important element moderating the power of the masses.
The US crime rate has been on a decrease for the past decade, it is now at the lowest level since the 60s. The UK on the other hand has had a constantly increasing crime rate in that time period asfaik. Interestingly enough the two countries have equal crime rates in general although the UK has a higher rate for robberies (and the like) while the US leans towards homicides.
So first of all, don't talk about stuff you don't even have the faintest idea about. Second of all, no the US doesn't have bigger problems.
True democracies don't do well because the masses are idiots and politicians pray on said idiots. After all in a democracy it only matters that 51% support something while the rest can go screw themselves (or revolt more likely).
No, the reserves of uranium that can eb extracted at current costs using current methods for current (ie: decades old) reactors will run out in 50 years or so. There is plenty of uranium in other sources and the cost of the fuel is a relatively small part of the cost of running a reactor (and the cost of extracting it is an even smaller part of that cost). Furthermore there are non-uranium sources of fuel for nuclear fission as well as sources based on other (more plentiful) isotopes of uranium. Then there are reactors that reuse the "waste" from current reactors and generate energy from that.
Saying 50 years is akin to saying that 100 years ago there was only a small amount of oil in the world because the easy to get sources (which they naturally went for first) were limited while ignoring all the other known sources that they simply didn't go for due to cost (at the time that is).
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No, we don't have to choose a ideologue. Choosing such people usually results in long bloody civil wars, genocides, bloody power struggler, incompetence, even more incompetence, horribly badly designed programs, horribly badly designed laws, ego trips by politicians and finally a return to something even worse than where we started.
Anyone who believes they are "right" period can never be trusted. Blind change is worse than no change.
Google is based on a clustered infrastructure in everything as I understand it. If a system dies they put a new one in, no problems. Costs less to hire the monkey to do that and there is no uptime hit. A lot of companies don't have 200 hundred servers and applications designed for clusters.
I usually know the name of a program that I wish to download, it's easier to google a program than try to find what horrid butchery of its name was used for a url.
Uhh, lets see now. With a linux type package manager I could:
-Actually install MySQL, PHP and Apache easily without having to use a third party package that holds them all. Yeah, windows is sure free of dependencies. Just great especially when your programs are inherently dependent on each other, oh wait no its a pain in the ass.
-Download whatever packages I need without needing to deal with searching the web for the place to download this from. The whole find, download install file, run install file thing gets annoying pretty quickly. Especially when you have a bunch of software to download.
-Queue uninstalls, god damn do I hate the fucking windows uninstaller where you need to uninstall, wait,uninstall next item. Thats not even counting how it fucking breaks in one way or another after a while on most systems I've used.
The biggest barrier to switching for many users is that they won't be able to use their old apps on the new OS. This solves that problem.
He can't be worse than anyone else who has a chance of getting elected.
Yeah, I agree that there is good money in proper specialization but for that to truly pay off you need to find a good niche more than anything. And of course you need to have a backup option of some sort.
So get paid experience in multiple languages/areas by getting a job from the start that lets you do that, sure you may need to sacrifice a bit of pay or whatnot but it is better than the alternative. Personally I'd go insane if I had to focus on a single language in a single app for months on end. Hell I don't even like to focus on a single field for too long so I work on multiple minor projects at the same time.
I'm a statistician by training, I have from my current job paid experience in R, java, python and sql. Right now I'm also picking up some economics and I'll likely focus a lot more on that part as time goes on. Most of the team is getting experience in Java, perl and some statistics.
I'm bilingual (fluently) and have dual citizenship (one of which gives me EU citizenship as a bonus). I even have a residence and money in banks in both countries of citizenship. So yes, english is included in that statement.
I mean, this is IT where things change quickly and at times unexpectedly. If you don't have at least a number of diverse skills then I can't say I feel sorry for you when your job gets axed. I may not be a guru in any one language but at least I won't be unemployed when that language dies out.
I've only had my bags delayed once, 6+ years ago on a small intra-state flight (prop plane). Their excuse was that due to turbulent weather the extra weight of the bags would have caused the plane to crash. The flight was a quarter full and half those people didn't have bags (didn't go to pick them up). Yeah, either they suck as BSing or I never wish to fly that route again.
To my great amazement they even got my bag to the correct final destination when they forced me to check it in at the gate (fuckers run out of overhead storage room), hand wrote a tag for it and I had a connecting flight.
Finally the boss got tired of having to ask me to weekly clean up systems so he just killed the internet (to non work related sites) for everyone. I don't know how to fill tires. I know how to pump gas 'cause I saw my dad pump gas when I was a kid, and he let me try it a few times. Similarly, I've thought kids a specific computer task (e.g. how to double click on an icon), and they've picked it up. It's not that they were smart enough to figure it out on their own or anything like that. They saw me double click on the icon, then they tried double clicking while I supervised, and now they know how. If nobody showed them how to double click, I wouldn't expect them to know how to do that. If nobody showed them how to pump gas, I wouldn't expect them to know how to do that. If you bought a car and didn't know how to fill the gas would you ask someone to show you or would you drive an extra 20 miles to a non self-service gas station? Again, if computers came with "Computer attendants" who would tell you what to do, and if you could easily observe other computer users to see what they were doing and copy them, computers would be as easy to use as being a passenger in a plane. But we don't have these things, so using computers is more difficult than being a passenger in a plane. There are what, 200 books on computers for newbies in any bookstore? Almost everyone has someone they know that also knows computers. See my initial example. Again, because someone told you. When you get stiches, your first instinct is to scratch at them, 'cause it itches. The doctor will tell you not to do that. So now you know. You might not have known if nobody told you. See my initial example, if stitches were like computers people would rip them out constantly and just go have the doctor put them back in.
i don't know how to rebuild an engine.
I don't know how to code an OS or even compile one from sratch truly. A better analogy is that someone doesn't know how to pump gas or fill their tires.
i can't separate waste from water to make it drinkable again.
Yet you know that drinking sewage water would not be good for you.
i can't start or fly a commercial airplane.
Yet you know how one flies, generally, and how to properly be a passenger on one. I doubt you've tried to get out in mid-flight for example.
i am completely incapable of stitching up a wound...
Yet you know not to rip apart stitches or when you may need to get stitches (or go to a hospital).
No, I was wrong in my previous reply. If measured by money and number of fortune 500 companies than NYC beats the whole Bay Area. If you include more than just the city (the Bay Area does cover a larger area asfaik) then it trumps by a factor of two if not more. Btw, The Bay Area would come out 29th if compared against the economies of the world while as was mentioned NYC comes out quite a bit higher.
So while this is a pork barrel project it is nonetheless true that NYC is probably the single most important economic area in the US.
Could you please provide a source for that statement?
All I find is that SV is 16% of the California GDP. The later is $1.6 Trillion so SV comes out to roughly $256 billion. The data I find on New York City lists its GDP as roughly $457.3 billion while the NY metro area (a better comparison to SV than NYC alone) come out at $901 billion.
So apparently, or rather unless you have better sources, NYC is a more important economic center than SV.
Silicon Valley has a larger area and is more decentralized, as a result the cost of any initiative is much larger and more complex.
I agree.
The point is that modern "democracies" aren't true democracies, safety measures were implemented for that very reason. The US has the constitution (and it's amendments such as the bill of rights) to prevent tyranny of the majority. Checks and balances, representative democracy and even the electoral college (the idea being that the state representatives could vote against their state's voter's decision if need be) were also part of this. Even the courts which abuse their powers at times are an important element moderating the power of the masses.
The US crime rate has been on a decrease for the past decade, it is now at the lowest level since the 60s. The UK on the other hand has had a constantly increasing crime rate in that time period asfaik. Interestingly enough the two countries have equal crime rates in general although the UK has a higher rate for robberies (and the like) while the US leans towards homicides.
So first of all, don't talk about stuff you don't even have the faintest idea about. Second of all, no the US doesn't have bigger problems.
True democracies don't do well because the masses are idiots and politicians pray on said idiots. After all in a democracy it only matters that 51% support something while the rest can go screw themselves (or revolt more likely).
No, the reserves of uranium that can eb extracted at current costs using current methods for current (ie: decades old) reactors will run out in 50 years or so. There is plenty of uranium in other sources and the cost of the fuel is a relatively small part of the cost of running a reactor (and the cost of extracting it is an even smaller part of that cost). Furthermore there are non-uranium sources of fuel for nuclear fission as well as sources based on other (more plentiful) isotopes of uranium. Then there are reactors that reuse the "waste" from current reactors and generate energy from that.
Saying 50 years is akin to saying that 100 years ago there was only a small amount of oil in the world because the easy to get sources (which they naturally went for first) were limited while ignoring all the other known sources that they simply didn't go for due to cost (at the time that is).