If you link the top 10 or 100 super-computers together, does it (do they) become self-aware? I would like to see a survey on how many/.ers are self-aware, and the level of self-awareness.
"A person starts to live when he can live outside himself."
A. Einstein
Oh? Seems that Gates turned his company "around on a dime" in '95 when he realized that this thing called the internet was up and coming. Now, someone has reinvented the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) I am hoping for another "dime" turnaround. I am just saying that it has happended before.
My preference is for the CODASYL committee to get involved in THE DESIGN.
Actually, I have as small personal page for people who are looking for me to find me. It is here.
I am probably the only person in the world with a page that lists my name and my elementary school name. If you do a search on these terms "JOSEPH COTTON SEABREEZE" in google, you will not find my page. If you do a search in yahoo, then there it is at the top.
So Google is not king, by any marker other than market share.
...but the walkman and the transistor radio all came out Japan....
The first transistor radios were from the US. I have old RCA, Zenith, and GE radios (i collect them) dating in the late 1950's, well before the Japanese (sony etc) came out. We now think of transistor radios as Japanese because they took over the market thru the near-slave-level wages that they were paying their workers in the early 60's.
I invented the walkman in 1964. I was in the fourth grade. I soldered a 1/4 inch jack to my shortwave style headphones, and inserted it into my 6 transistor radio. I walked to school, rode my bike, etc. with them on. It was great. Everyone considered me to be geekey geek, even before the term was invented. I was picked last for sports, etc. Oh well.
LOOK UP JOSEPH COTTON SEABREEZE ON GOOGLE. Why doesn't it return my page? Now go to yahoo and do the same.
And why don't you consider 'select distinct' a built-in function?
Oh, but select distinct is definitely a built in function. However, it is not the function that I am looking for. Because if you select distinct on whole rows, you will get every row. I want a built in function that will select distinct on a few columns, but return the entire row.
What if we wanted to charge up that 191 kJ capacitor in, say, 10 seconds. That would require a 191 kJ / 10 s = 19.1 kW power supply. Hmmmm, don't think we'll be seeing one of those in a laptop bag anytime soon....
Why don't you consider 100 seconds instead of 10 seconds? This would require about 2000 watts, about the size of a medium room heater or microwave oven. This time span is just under two minutes, and yet uses household current levels. Doable. I would buy this device today. Is not sooner.
sig: me - do a search for Joseph Cotton Seabreeze in google and in yahoo. Where am I in google? Nowhere. Why is that? This page must be the only one on the internet with these words.
sql vs. procedural
on
The Art of SQL
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Now that the subject has been raised, my 2 cents.
I have found (and who can disagree (just trolling)) that at least half of the production databases that I have come across hare not normalized. Go figgure.
Anyway, this being the case, I have found that SQL is poor in handling a non-normalized table/database. (cant really call a non-normalized table as a database can we? (nuther troll))
For example. We keep a complete record for each person for each pay period. Even inactives.
I am asked to give a list of all active employees for a date range, and a lot of payroll detail, personal detail, etc. Guess what? Simple SQL gives a lot of duplicate names. I wish that there was a simple way filter. (Yes, I can do this in sql, but my point is that it is not handled natively in sql. I would like a simple command - give me all names and all their data for the latest pay period - something like that.
All procedural languages will handle this problem nicely.
I am interested to know from where you know this "...you're not legally trespassing until you have been told to leave, at least in California...". And more importantly, does it apply in other states? mail me
To LordLucless (582312)
My comment must have struck a nerve with you - you commented six times. You really did not understand my point, which may be the norm with you. Re-read, until you understand, grasshopper.
thousands of stars spread over an area nearly 5,000 times the size of a full moon
Well, let's see...the moon covers about 1/3 of an arc degree. 5000* 1/3 = 1666 degrees... in other words this galaxy wraps around us about 4.6 times... yeh, right.
...haven't played any computer game since Trek on a PDP-11. SUCH A WASTE of time. If my kids spent half the time that they play games on learning a computer language, then they would be pulling down six figure salaries. Afterall, sitting in front of a tube is sitting in front of a tube. I do that 8 hours a day. But I get big bucks for it.
Can I rant on crossword puzzles too? Basically, supporting old apps is the same as a giant crossword puzzle. Think about it. When was the last time you got paid to do a crossword?
Ninty percent of my work when working on old programs is TRYING TO FIGGUR OUT THE DATA STRUCTURES. Not the code. The Data.
How about the 25 different letters used in the field cryptically named "F-STATUS"?
OR a date in a field named "D-Date"?
Document your DATA structures you code-monkeys!
The cure for the "scratch syndrome" would be simple reduncancy. Write all data twice, in different sections of the disk. Yeah, so a 800GB disk now becomes a 400 GB disk. So what? Now you really have to scratch it up to make it unreadable. You still have 400 good gigabytes of space, which is a lot more than today's 4 to 8 GBs per disk.
Or, all you Computer Science types can work up a good bit check algorythm that can put those scrached out bits back.
To confirm you're not a script,
please type the text shown in this image:
MICroSOFt SUCks.
One of my gripes is that Google can not find me. I have put my personal identification information on a page, e.g. complete name, schools attended, cities lived in, etc. If I enter these into Google, it still will not find that page. I would think that my page with my specific info would be unique, and someone searching for this page with this specific info should be able to find it.
Really. Mainframes are still IBM's big ticket items (no pun intended). The Slashdot community, which seems to be so infatuated with tiny things, still doesn't get it. So, right guys, the total amount of COBOL code, running on mainframes, has been reduced from 90% of all computer code in 1990, to "only" 50% of all computer source code now. IBM is saying with this transaction, that they know where big business is looking. Check the stock price; the Street also thinks that this is a good move.
I wonder when content-based search for media will be possible. Content-based image retrieval for example.
Waddaya wanna do? Draw a stick figure in MS Paint and have it find your next dream date on Frumster?
In your dreams, habibi....
Last time I was in New York, they were on Eastern Standard Time. -5 hours. That would put the time just before closing at 4:30pm.
Otherwise, who cares?
I do know of a techie that had just bought an expensive house, and invested everything else on margin into NASDAQ. He lost everything, lost his job, got divorced. OTOH, I kept my COBOL job, and am doing ok, B"H.
The bubble burst just about the time that the SEC was investigating Microsoft. Correlation?
Skill obsolescence is the number one issue
on
Women Leaving I.T.
·
· Score: 1
"Skill obsolescence is the number one issue for I.T. workers," Professor Deb Armstrong of the University of Arkansas told NewsFactor.
Nobody else replying has mentioned this issue, and it is the main point of the article. (Do I get extra points for realizing this?)
Anyway, skill obsolescence will kill any career. My main question is "why do all these skills need to change so rapidly, that every five years I need to relearn what I already know?" Does a truck driver need to relearn to drive? What careers require this level of re-learning? Doctors? Lawyers? Well, maybe tax accountants, but that is another story.
And is this shift in skills really necessary? For instance, what computer project do you know of that could *not* have been done in COBOL, especially one of the new OO versions? Truth is, that almost any project can be done in an old technology, as well as new, if you want.
The skills change so rapidly because of the compitition between Microsoft and all the other dev platform makers. When the dev platform was controled by and designed for the benefit of the end user (for example, IBM COBOL for big corporations) you see that the dev platform hardly ever changed. Microsoft forces change because this change is good for Microsoft, but not necesarally good for the end users. I went from ASP to ASP.NET, without noticing any benefits to my clients.
This post is slightly off topic compared to the other posts, but my point is really, according to the lead article, the main reason that women leave IT. Perhaps this should be a new thread.
"If you're applying for a COBOL position doing payroll applications, they probably won't care that you've written Apache modules..."
The fact that you have a lot of computer technical skills shows that you could certainly master COBOL in a week. COBOL WAS DESIGNED TO BE EASY TO CODE, AND IT IS.
However, the management will be eyeing you to jump ship just as soon as a "more modern" opportunity lands at your doorstep.
So, it depends on how desparate the management is to find a COBOL guy. If it comes down to a choice between some one like me, with 30 years as a COBOL developer, and you with your Free/Open Source contributions experience, the choice would be clear, even though you would probably could code just as well as me in a few days, and your other workplace skills would equal mine.
Looking at the numbers...
You can't really have "COBOL 6,713" and no MVS/zOS? There is pretty much a one to one correspondence in COBOL and MVS.
I still think that I could complete my career as a COBOL programmer....
...when you are the one to support and maintain the system developed using Agile Programming.
Here are a few "features" of AP...
bad or no documentation
unstructured code
varying methods (of doing anything...I do not mean methods in the OO sense)
bugs bugs and more bugs to fix
did I mention documentation? Oh, just read the code to find out what it is "supposed" to do.
In short, AP is fast and saves money in the short term, but costs much more (in maintenance costs) in the long term. It's great for the initial developers, but hell for anyone who comes in after.
AP is the same as development using CMM level 1 (or zero sometimes) methodologies. (and there is no level zero)
Slashdot Mirror
To go along with your vacuum head.
I would like to see a survey on how many
"A person starts to live when he can live outside himself." A. Einstein
Oh? Seems that Gates turned his company "around on a dime" in '95 when he realized that this thing called the internet was up and coming. Now, someone has reinvented the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) I am hoping for another "dime" turnaround. I am just saying that it has happended before.
My preference is for the CODASYL committee to get involved in THE DESIGN.
Ironically, by posting this on slashdot, I will get a higher rating on google.
Actually, I have as small personal page for people who are looking for me to find me. It is here. I am probably the only person in the world with a page that lists my name and my elementary school name. If you do a search on these terms "JOSEPH COTTON SEABREEZE" in google, you will not find my page. If you do a search in yahoo, then there it is at the top. So Google is not king, by any marker other than market share.
The first transistor radios were from the US. I have old RCA, Zenith, and GE radios (i collect them) dating in the late 1950's, well before the Japanese (sony etc) came out. We now think of transistor radios as Japanese because they took over the market thru the near-slave-level wages that they were paying their workers in the early 60's.
I invented the walkman in 1964. I was in the fourth grade. I soldered a 1/4 inch jack to my shortwave style headphones, and inserted it into my 6 transistor radio. I walked to school, rode my bike, etc. with them on. It was great. Everyone considered me to be geekey geek, even before the term was invented. I was picked last for sports, etc. Oh well.
LOOK UP JOSEPH COTTON SEABREEZE ON GOOGLE. Why doesn't it return my page? Now go to yahoo and do the same.
Oh, but select distinct is definitely a built in function. However, it is not the function that I am looking for. Because if you select distinct on whole rows, you will get every row. I want a built in function that will select distinct on a few columns, but return the entire row.
Why don't you consider 100 seconds instead of 10 seconds? This would require about 2000 watts, about the size of a medium room heater or microwave oven. This time span is just under two minutes, and yet uses household current levels. Doable. I would buy this device today. Is not sooner.
sig: me - do a search for Joseph Cotton Seabreeze in google and in yahoo. Where am I in google? Nowhere. Why is that? This page must be the only one on the internet with these words.
I have found (and who can disagree (just trolling)) that at least half of the production databases that I have come across hare not normalized. Go figgure.
Anyway, this being the case, I have found that SQL is poor in handling a non-normalized table/database. (cant really call a non-normalized table as a database can we? (nuther troll))
For example. We keep a complete record for each person for each pay period. Even inactives.
I am asked to give a list of all active employees for a date range, and a lot of payroll detail, personal detail, etc. Guess what? Simple SQL gives a lot of duplicate names. I wish that there was a simple way filter. (Yes, I can do this in sql, but my point is that it is not handled natively in sql. I would like a simple command - give me all names and all their data for the latest pay period - something like that.
All procedural languages will handle this problem nicely.
metaphors be with you
I am interested to know from where you know this "...you're not legally trespassing until you have been told to leave, at least in California...". And more importantly, does it apply in other states? mail me
To LordLucless (582312)
My comment must have struck a nerve with you - you commented six times. You really did not understand my point, which may be the norm with you. Re-read, until you understand, grasshopper.
thousands of stars spread over an area nearly 5,000 times the size of a full moon
... in other words this galaxy wraps around us about 4.6 times...
Well, let's see...the moon covers about 1/3 of an arc degree. 5000* 1/3 = 1666 degrees
yeh, right.
...haven't played any computer game since Trek on a PDP-11. SUCH A WASTE of time. If my kids spent half the time that they play games on learning a computer language, then they would be pulling down six figure salaries. Afterall, sitting in front of a tube is sitting in front of a tube. I do that 8 hours a day. But I get big bucks for it.
Can I rant on crossword puzzles too? Basically, supporting old apps is the same as a giant crossword puzzle. Think about it. When was the last time you got paid to do a crossword?
Ninty percent of my work when working on old programs is TRYING TO FIGGUR OUT THE DATA STRUCTURES. Not the code. The Data.
How about the 25 different letters used in the field cryptically named "F-STATUS"? OR a date in a field named "D-Date"?
Document your DATA structures you code-monkeys!
To confirm you're not a script, please type the text shown in this image: MICroSOFt SUCks.
A current search on Dogpile finds me via Yahoo.
One of my gripes is that Google can not find me. I have put my personal identification information on a page, e.g. complete name, schools attended, cities lived in, etc. If I enter these into Google, it still will not find that page. I would think that my page with my specific info would be unique, and someone searching for this page with this specific info should be able to find it.
Really. Mainframes are still IBM's big ticket items (no pun intended). The Slashdot community, which seems to be so infatuated with tiny things, still doesn't get it. So, right guys, the total amount of COBOL code, running on mainframes, has been reduced from 90% of all computer code in 1990, to "only" 50% of all computer source code now. IBM is saying with this transaction, that they know where big business is looking. Check the stock price; the Street also thinks that this is a good move.
Wow - what a find. Now I know why my 80 meter ham transmitter glows in the dark. Oh- wait - that's because of the electron tubes.
I wonder when content-based search for media will be possible. Content-based image retrieval for example.
Waddaya wanna do? Draw a stick figure in MS Paint and have it find your next dream date on Frumster? In your dreams, habibi....
Last time I was in New York, they were on Eastern Standard Time. -5 hours. That would put the time just before closing at 4:30pm.
Otherwise, who cares?
I do know of a techie that had just bought an expensive house, and invested everything else on margin into NASDAQ. He lost everything, lost his job, got divorced. OTOH, I kept my COBOL job, and am doing ok, B"H.
The bubble burst just about the time that the SEC was investigating Microsoft. Correlation?
Nobody else replying has mentioned this issue, and it is the main point of the article. (Do I get extra points for realizing this?)
Anyway, skill obsolescence will kill any career. My main question is "why do all these skills need to change so rapidly, that every five years I need to relearn what I already know?" Does a truck driver need to relearn to drive? What careers require this level of re-learning? Doctors? Lawyers? Well, maybe tax accountants, but that is another story.
And is this shift in skills really necessary? For instance, what computer project do you know of that could *not* have been done in COBOL, especially one of the new OO versions? Truth is, that almost any project can be done in an old technology, as well as new, if you want.
The skills change so rapidly because of the compitition between Microsoft and all the other dev platform makers. When the dev platform was controled by and designed for the benefit of the end user (for example, IBM COBOL for big corporations) you see that the dev platform hardly ever changed. Microsoft forces change because this change is good for Microsoft, but not necesarally good for the end users. I went from ASP to ASP.NET, without noticing any benefits to my clients.
This post is slightly off topic compared to the other posts, but my point is really, according to the lead article, the main reason that women leave IT. Perhaps this should be a new thread.
The fact that you have a lot of computer technical skills shows that you could certainly master COBOL in a week. COBOL WAS DESIGNED TO BE EASY TO CODE, AND IT IS.
However, the management will be eyeing you to jump ship just as soon as a "more modern" opportunity lands at your doorstep.
So, it depends on how desparate the management is to find a COBOL guy. If it comes down to a choice between some one like me, with 30 years as a COBOL developer, and you with your Free/Open Source contributions experience, the choice would be clear, even though you would probably could code just as well as me in a few days, and your other workplace skills would equal mine.
Looking at the numbers...
You can't really have "COBOL 6,713" and no MVS/zOS? There is pretty much a one to one correspondence in COBOL and MVS.
I still think that I could complete my career as a COBOL programmer....
Here are a few "features" of AP...
In short, AP is fast and saves money in the short term, but costs much more (in maintenance costs) in the long term. It's great for the initial developers, but hell for anyone who comes in after.
AP is the same as development using CMM level 1 (or zero sometimes) methodologies. (and there is no level zero)