Nobody suffered nearly as much destruction as Russia during WW2. Not nearly. The numbers of what was lost are bing-boggling. Let me quite from Paul Kennedy's fantastic book "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers":
Russia's population losses were appalling: [...] some 20-25 million Soviet citizens died prmeature deaths between 1941 and 1945. Since the casualties were mainly men, the consequent imbalance between the sexes greatly affected the country's demegraphic structure and caused a severe drop in the birthrate. The material damage [...] was so large as to be beyond normal imaginings:
Of the 11.6 million horses in occupied territory, 7 million were killed or taken away, as were 20 out of 23 million pigs. 137,000 tractors, 49,000 grain combines and large numbers of cowsheds and other farm buildings were destroyed. Transport was hit by the destruction of 65,000 kilometers of railway track, loss of or damage to 15,800 locomotives, 428,000 goods wagons, 4,280 river boats, and half of all the railway bridges in the occupied territory.
The primary reason East Germany recovered so much slower than West Germany was that the Soviet doctrine was to make the Germans pay for the damage they caused (entire factories were dismantled and shipped to Russia to replace factories there that had been destroyed), while the western Allies doctrine was to rebuild West Germany as a barrier against Socialism.
You cannot imagine the damage, even if you try.
A second main factor was the repressive politics of Stalin and the stupidity of the revolution to get rid of academics. If the world has learnt anything during the 20th century, it should be that you don't need nobles to run a country, but you do need educated people.
You are certainly right that soviet-style planned economy has proven itself to be less efficient in generating economic growth than capitalism. The historic facts make it clear that the race could have been much more close, however.
I'd like to paint a graph here, maybe one day, slashdot?
With the invention of technology, things become possible that were not before, and things become easier. People certainly wrote less when it meant putting chisel and hammer to stone. They certainly wrote more when clay tablets were invented, and more still with modern writing tools (papyrus I'll leave open to discussion).
Then there is a tipping point. At some point, technology becomes too convenient and too fast and depth is lost. Certainly when meeting someone meant travelling for days, you would make the most of that meeting. Now if you forgot something you can just recall. So there is less incentive to be thorough, but also less need.
However, a certain amount of depth is necessary to get to anything meaningful. A meme is not a philosophical discourse. Aphorisms have their place and always had, but they should be the result of a long, in-depth discussion.
This is not smartphone-specific. In management today, thin-slicing, the bullshit-bingo term for cutting through the crap, getting to the core of the problem fast, is one of the most vital skills. But you can not spend your entire day thin-slicing. Some problems actually are complicated and require taking into account all the small details. Knowing when to use thin-slicing and when to sit down and do a proper analysis is what differentiates good managers from great managers.
The same with conversations. There are many moments were a short back-and-forth on the phone or in text does the job. When you are just reconnecting with someone, you don't need the full details of their day. "What's up?" is exactly the level of conversation needed. But if someone needs a life advice, or when a serious relationship needs saving, or a mourning friend needs a shoulder, cutting to the core quick and applying a band-aid doesn't do it, and you still need that skill of long, deep conversation. In person, by voice or by text doesn't matter.
Smartphones, and that is their downside compared to other technology, don't really allow for that, they are designed for the short, fast interaction. I cannot imagine writing even this comment on a phone, much less a deep-meaning letter. Even for voice communication, for some reason, looking back, I've had longer conversations on landline phones than on mobile phones, despite the convenience factor that would suggest the opposite. There just is something in the technology that gently guides it toward the shallow, quick, the way post-it notes or index cards make you write shorter notes than a full-size notebook, even if you have enough of them that a novel would fit before you run out.
If by some accounting error I find myself to be a billionaire one day, I'll spend a good part of it on bribing the browser manufacturers into including at least one actual programming language. Not an abomination.
And whoever thought but using JS on the server side - death is too good for him.
I don't care what some city official wants. I decide which region of the city I want to go out in and which one not. There is zero reasoning to make some nonsense law about it. Next they'll think of regulating hairstyles like North Korea, or beards like ISIS.
However they have every right to tie their tax incentives and other corporate welfare to conditions. Totally within their rights there, they are forking over money so they can say "if..."
But if the company moves into the city without any tax benefits, I don't see which leg they hope to be standing on with this idea.
This is a problem for people who learned to copy-paste from StackOverflow instead of learning to read documentation.
True, but - a lot of "modern" solutions are basically built to work like that. I'm doing some hobby stuff in a Javascript framework right now (not my choice, the only tool available for this job) and doing copy-paste is literally the only way to get things working because there are so many virtually identical ways to get to the same goal and none of them are explained anywhere or make an intuitive sense that the fastest and only reliable way to get it working is to go through teh stackoverflow solutions until you find the one that works for your particular combination of patchwork bullshit.
Entire generations of coders grow up being copy-paste people not because they are lazy, but because their ecosystem supports this as the most viable way.
"You know Linux Desktop is a junk OS from the fact an app may require version 2.5 of a library and another one might require no more than 2.4, and Desktop Linux offers no way around the problem."
There are about ten different ways in which you can run different versions of the same library on the same system. Absolutely not a problem. True, however, that many of them require you do know the system and be comfortable with the CLI. That is a no-go for ordinary users.
Seriously. If you're one of the three people here who haven't read it, go and do.
I'm already not using windos anywhere and haven't for over a decade, except at work where it is (sadly) still the standard. If they seriously move this way, I will campaign hard at work to move the default desktop to something else.
I have high hopes that they did it too late. The monopoly is not as strong as it used to be, for many people windos is just the default, they could use something else if they cared. A few single-platform apps are the reason holding them back, and of course, sadly, games.
Can you just give me a browser that is really good?
The Unix philosophy is to have tools do one job, do it well, and integrate with other tools for more complicated jobs. That is how the commandline became a powerhouse that is bested by graphical tools only in a few select areas, and that can pack a solution to a problem that some companies want to sell you dedicated tools for into a short stackoverflow posting.
Stop focussing on the bells and whistles. Give me a good browser. Then, if I want a design tool, I'll get one. If I want a screensharing tool, I'll get one. If I want a screenshot utility, I'll get one. You get the idea.
Doesn't mean those tools can't be your tools, if they are good. But don't mix them into my browser.
Too many top-level managers don't understand what a terrible work environment an open floor plan is, especially if you need to use your brain to work. Interesting how I've never seen one of them work in an open office...
Without going into details - management handled their responsibilities badly and then tried to offload the problem on my back.
Stupid move when you're working in IT security and get regular calls from headhunters.
Top-level boss saved the situation, now I'm still working for him, but in another one of his companies. Examples of terrible and great management side-by-side. Oh yes, the CEO of that company, the guy who made this mess, doesn't work there anymore. Would be interesting to hear his version of the story.
It's not like OpenGL is much of a standard. A large number of apps and games on Windows don't use OpenGL anyway, so if you want cross-platform, you used to do DirectX + OpenGL and now you'll do DirectX + Metal ( + OpenGL if you care about Linux).
Putin is a trained KGB agent. You seriouly think he and his people would come up with something so obvious and stupid and easily detectable? Seriously?
The problem with the hysteria, both the anti-Trump and the anti-Russia one, is that it is a stupidity epidemic. It contains too much disdain and makes you underestimate them. Both. Trump, for all the spectacle and shouting, actually did a few things right. And Putin, whatever you think about him, is not an idiot.
I'm sure the Russians are spying on the Americans - just like vice versa. But they would be idiots to do it like this. Someone watched too many stupid Hollywood spy movies.
I test-drove a Tesla Model S (P100D) and I disliked the controls on that one so much I decided against it. And I own Tesla stock and would've really wanted it to be my dream car, but it wasn't. I just believe that haptics are important in a car, as I don't want to take my eyes off the road.
I really, really like what they are doing in the exterior design, in the engine and all those "car" parts. I really dislike what they are doing in the "driver" part. I still believe Tesla will be successful and I see why they are doing it (much easier and faster-to-market).
So here I am, waiting for the Model T or whatever, when they have the basics running, secure revenue stream, and they finally have the time to let some actual driver-experience designers do that part of the car, because everything else about it is great.
And I say that as someone who used it for half a decade and then dropped it in disgust. What they did with 4 is just terrible, but that is my personal opinion based on the fact that they broke almost every use-case I have. If you come to it with a fresh mind and without preconceptions, it is probably much cleaner and even better now.
What people don't understand about PHP is that nobody sane uses bare-bones PHP these days. The first thing you do is pick a framework. People miss that because many other languages basically come with their own framework, while PHP offers several.
I recently ditched PHP for reasons unrelated to the language (needed a fullstack framework). I'm now writing backend and frontend code in Javascript and boy do I want my PHP back.
I strongly recommend you ditch PHP and make a tiny hobby project in whatever candidate language(s) you have in mind. Languages are like ex'es- sometimes you're happy to be rid of them, and sometimes with a little bit of distance you realize just what you lost. Unlike ex, your programming language can be ditched as a trial.
So ditch PHP for a while and try something else. It will make you see more clearly, and allow you to make a better decision.
I have such a Deja Vu with respects to this case and the Microsoft anti-trust case. There it was browser, here it is search, but the methods are so similar.
Until today I thought Google might be of a different breed than Microsoft. I stand corrected.
What is holding us back is hyped technology. Not reliable, proven-to-work "outdated" tech.
I recently returned to some web development after many years of absence. Don't want to tell the whole story here, that's maybe for a longer article somewhere, but OMG is the whole environment splintered and incredibly fragile. Half the modules or libraries you need are not maintained any longer because the author has moved on to the newest hype. Almost everything is replaced by something else before it is mature, so most of what you are using is essentially alpha or at best beta.
There is very little that new tech can do that old tech can't. The new stuff just does it more flashy. What is the most reliable and unproblematic part of the whole stack for me? PostgreSQL. Not some Node.js or npm (sorry, obsoleted, yarn now) or Angular (sorry, obsoleted, React now. Oh wait, obsoleted, Vue now).
There is a lot of marketing hype going on and much of the hype technologies isn't so much rocket science. "Big data" - that's just a lot of data combined with algorithms for which we finally have the storage and processing power. Nothing that would surprise a 1960s computer scientist. "Machine learning" - again we now have the power to do it and made some advances in how to build neural networks etc. but in the end there's not much there that's not 50 years old. "The Cloud" - a nifty hosting-on-demand system with containers, a mainframe operator would look at it and go "interesting approach".
Where I agree is that legacy systems are a major headache. But that is rarely a technology issue.
Don't know what kind of world you are living in, but class warfare is a reality for the majority of us and everyone else on the planet, yes. Those who have a vastly unequal share of everything are, naturally, interested in keeping it. As resources are limited, that means keeping it out of the hands of others. There are some unlimited, or at least limitless share-able resources such as knowledge, but everything else is finite, even if (for example in the digital realm) the limits are quite high.
But land is the ultimate finite resource, and owning a large part of it has for millenia been the sign of wealth and power.
They wouldn't be able to defend them from squatters, and they'll have nothing to actually pay their security WITH.
Which is exactly why they have such meetings to think about such issues.
This is colossally stupid. When the "end times" comes, the wealthiest people on earth are going to be the vast majority of 3rd (and maybe 2nd) world farmers who still have skills needed to continue to produce food.
The wealthiest people on Earth are spending money and effort to ensure that you are wrong. That is what the article is all about.
There is nothing sinister going on. You and I we spend a few percent or so of our income on securing our future against catastrophies, in the form of insurance. These guys do the same, just on a larger scale.
If you want to attract tech companies, the by far best incentive is to have an educated workforce that provides them with hiring opportunities. Also all kinds of companies like good infrastructure.
There are people you have to spell that out to? Can't be.
The credit card system is run by cartels who extract billions in profit from every transaction in exchange for doing nothing.
And that won't change. Only the players will. Maybe it won't be credit cards anymore, but the new players will simply do the same thing - make profit on transactions.
(and remember: If you get a service or a good for free, that doesn't mean it actually is for free. It only means you are not the customer, you are the product)
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody suffered nearly as much destruction as Russia during WW2. Not nearly. The numbers of what was lost are bing-boggling. Let me quite from Paul Kennedy's fantastic book "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers":
Russia's population losses were appalling: [...] some 20-25 million Soviet citizens died prmeature deaths between 1941 and 1945. Since the casualties were mainly men, the consequent imbalance between the sexes greatly affected the country's demegraphic structure and caused a severe drop in the birthrate. The material damage [...] was so large as to be beyond normal imaginings:
Of the 11.6 million horses in occupied territory, 7 million were killed or taken away, as were 20 out of 23 million pigs. 137,000 tractors, 49,000 grain combines and large numbers of cowsheds and other farm buildings were destroyed. Transport was hit by the destruction of 65,000 kilometers of railway track, loss of or damage to 15,800 locomotives, 428,000 goods wagons, 4,280 river boats, and half of all the railway bridges in the occupied territory.
The primary reason East Germany recovered so much slower than West Germany was that the Soviet doctrine was to make the Germans pay for the damage they caused (entire factories were dismantled and shipped to Russia to replace factories there that had been destroyed), while the western Allies doctrine was to rebuild West Germany as a barrier against Socialism.
You cannot imagine the damage, even if you try.
A second main factor was the repressive politics of Stalin and the stupidity of the revolution to get rid of academics. If the world has learnt anything during the 20th century, it should be that you don't need nobles to run a country, but you do need educated people.
You are certainly right that soviet-style planned economy has proven itself to be less efficient in generating economic growth than capitalism. The historic facts make it clear that the race could have been much more close, however.
I'd like to paint a graph here, maybe one day, slashdot?
With the invention of technology, things become possible that were not before, and things become easier. People certainly wrote less when it meant putting chisel and hammer to stone. They certainly wrote more when clay tablets were invented, and more still with modern writing tools (papyrus I'll leave open to discussion).
Then there is a tipping point. At some point, technology becomes too convenient and too fast and depth is lost. Certainly when meeting someone meant travelling for days, you would make the most of that meeting. Now if you forgot something you can just recall. So there is less incentive to be thorough, but also less need.
However, a certain amount of depth is necessary to get to anything meaningful. A meme is not a philosophical discourse. Aphorisms have their place and always had, but they should be the result of a long, in-depth discussion.
This is not smartphone-specific. In management today, thin-slicing, the bullshit-bingo term for cutting through the crap, getting to the core of the problem fast, is one of the most vital skills. But you can not spend your entire day thin-slicing. Some problems actually are complicated and require taking into account all the small details. Knowing when to use thin-slicing and when to sit down and do a proper analysis is what differentiates good managers from great managers.
The same with conversations. There are many moments were a short back-and-forth on the phone or in text does the job. When you are just reconnecting with someone, you don't need the full details of their day. "What's up?" is exactly the level of conversation needed. But if someone needs a life advice, or when a serious relationship needs saving, or a mourning friend needs a shoulder, cutting to the core quick and applying a band-aid doesn't do it, and you still need that skill of long, deep conversation. In person, by voice or by text doesn't matter.
Smartphones, and that is their downside compared to other technology, don't really allow for that, they are designed for the short, fast interaction. I cannot imagine writing even this comment on a phone, much less a deep-meaning letter. Even for voice communication, for some reason, looking back, I've had longer conversations on landline phones than on mobile phones, despite the convenience factor that would suggest the opposite. There just is something in the technology that gently guides it toward the shallow, quick, the way post-it notes or index cards make you write shorter notes than a full-size notebook, even if you have enough of them that a novel would fit before you run out.
My bad. I didn't realize that /. comments are source code. Probably for Skynet. That explains a lot.
How do you figure?
"Sorry, we are using DirectX" is the #1 answer that developers give on why they won't port their game to macOS or Linux.
Yes, OpenGL is a standard. It just isn't like everyone uses only OpenGL. Sadly. I'd be in favor of having DirectX die, just the reality is otherwise.
If by some accounting error I find myself to be a billionaire one day, I'll spend a good part of it on bribing the browser manufacturers into including at least one actual programming language. Not an abomination.
And whoever thought but using JS on the server side - death is too good for him.
Here's your brownie point for taking a phrase too literal:
(b)
I don't care what some city official wants. I decide which region of the city I want to go out in and which one not. There is zero reasoning to make some nonsense law about it. Next they'll think of regulating hairstyles like North Korea, or beards like ISIS.
However they have every right to tie their tax incentives and other corporate welfare to conditions. Totally within their rights there, they are forking over money so they can say "if..."
But if the company moves into the city without any tax benefits, I don't see which leg they hope to be standing on with this idea.
This is a problem for people who learned to copy-paste from StackOverflow instead of learning to read documentation.
True, but - a lot of "modern" solutions are basically built to work like that. I'm doing some hobby stuff in a Javascript framework right now (not my choice, the only tool available for this job) and doing copy-paste is literally the only way to get things working because there are so many virtually identical ways to get to the same goal and none of them are explained anywhere or make an intuitive sense that the fastest and only reliable way to get it working is to go through teh stackoverflow solutions until you find the one that works for your particular combination of patchwork bullshit.
Entire generations of coders grow up being copy-paste people not because they are lazy, but because their ecosystem supports this as the most viable way.
"You know Linux Desktop is a junk OS from the fact an app may require version 2.5 of a library and another one might require no more than 2.4, and Desktop Linux offers no way around the problem."
There are about ten different ways in which you can run different versions of the same library on the same system. Absolutely not a problem. True, however, that many of them require you do know the system and be comfortable with the CLI. That is a no-go for ordinary users.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...
Seriously. If you're one of the three people here who haven't read it, go and do.
I'm already not using windos anywhere and haven't for over a decade, except at work where it is (sadly) still the standard. If they seriously move this way, I will campaign hard at work to move the default desktop to something else.
I have high hopes that they did it too late. The monopoly is not as strong as it used to be, for many people windos is just the default, they could use something else if they cared. A few single-platform apps are the reason holding them back, and of course, sadly, games.
Can you just give me a browser that is really good?
The Unix philosophy is to have tools do one job, do it well, and integrate with other tools for more complicated jobs. That is how the commandline became a powerhouse that is bested by graphical tools only in a few select areas, and that can pack a solution to a problem that some companies want to sell you dedicated tools for into a short stackoverflow posting.
Stop focussing on the bells and whistles. Give me a good browser. Then, if I want a design tool, I'll get one. If I want a screensharing tool, I'll get one. If I want a screenshot utility, I'll get one. You get the idea.
Doesn't mean those tools can't be your tools, if they are good. But don't mix them into my browser.
Oh yes, this.
Too many top-level managers don't understand what a terrible work environment an open floor plan is, especially if you need to use your brain to work. Interesting how I've never seen one of them work in an open office...
Without going into details - management handled their responsibilities badly and then tried to offload the problem on my back.
Stupid move when you're working in IT security and get regular calls from headhunters.
Top-level boss saved the situation, now I'm still working for him, but in another one of his companies. Examples of terrible and great management side-by-side. Oh yes, the CEO of that company, the guy who made this mess, doesn't work there anymore. Would be interesting to hear his version of the story.
It's not like OpenGL is much of a standard. A large number of apps and games on Windows don't use OpenGL anyway, so if you want cross-platform, you used to do DirectX + OpenGL and now you'll do DirectX + Metal ( + OpenGL if you care about Linux).
It's sad that everything has become political and you cannot be sure that there are any security reasons for these listings.
Putin is a trained KGB agent. You seriouly think he and his people would come up with something so obvious and stupid and easily detectable? Seriously?
The problem with the hysteria, both the anti-Trump and the anti-Russia one, is that it is a stupidity epidemic. It contains too much disdain and makes you underestimate them. Both. Trump, for all the spectacle and shouting, actually did a few things right. And Putin, whatever you think about him, is not an idiot.
I'm sure the Russians are spying on the Americans - just like vice versa. But they would be idiots to do it like this. Someone watched too many stupid Hollywood spy movies.
I test-drove a Tesla Model S (P100D) and I disliked the controls on that one so much I decided against it. And I own Tesla stock and would've really wanted it to be my dream car, but it wasn't. I just believe that haptics are important in a car, as I don't want to take my eyes off the road.
I really, really like what they are doing in the exterior design, in the engine and all those "car" parts. I really dislike what they are doing in the "driver" part. I still believe Tesla will be successful and I see why they are doing it (much easier and faster-to-market).
So here I am, waiting for the Model T or whatever, when they have the basics running, secure revenue stream, and they finally have the time to let some actual driver-experience designers do that part of the car, because everything else about it is great.
Definitely check out Symfony.
And I say that as someone who used it for half a decade and then dropped it in disgust. What they did with 4 is just terrible, but that is my personal opinion based on the fact that they broke almost every use-case I have. If you come to it with a fresh mind and without preconceptions, it is probably much cleaner and even better now.
What people don't understand about PHP is that nobody sane uses bare-bones PHP these days. The first thing you do is pick a framework. People miss that because many other languages basically come with their own framework, while PHP offers several.
I recently ditched PHP for reasons unrelated to the language (needed a fullstack framework). I'm now writing backend and frontend code in Javascript and boy do I want my PHP back.
I strongly recommend you ditch PHP and make a tiny hobby project in whatever candidate language(s) you have in mind. Languages are like ex'es- sometimes you're happy to be rid of them, and sometimes with a little bit of distance you realize just what you lost. Unlike ex, your programming language can be ditched as a trial.
So ditch PHP for a while and try something else. It will make you see more clearly, and allow you to make a better decision.
I have such a Deja Vu with respects to this case and the Microsoft anti-trust case. There it was browser, here it is search, but the methods are so similar.
Until today I thought Google might be of a different breed than Microsoft. I stand corrected.
Can I have some of whatever they are smoking?
What is holding us back is hyped technology. Not reliable, proven-to-work "outdated" tech.
I recently returned to some web development after many years of absence. Don't want to tell the whole story here, that's maybe for a longer article somewhere, but OMG is the whole environment splintered and incredibly fragile. Half the modules or libraries you need are not maintained any longer because the author has moved on to the newest hype. Almost everything is replaced by something else before it is mature, so most of what you are using is essentially alpha or at best beta.
There is very little that new tech can do that old tech can't. The new stuff just does it more flashy. What is the most reliable and unproblematic part of the whole stack for me? PostgreSQL. Not some Node.js or npm (sorry, obsoleted, yarn now) or Angular (sorry, obsoleted, React now. Oh wait, obsoleted, Vue now).
There is a lot of marketing hype going on and much of the hype technologies isn't so much rocket science. "Big data" - that's just a lot of data combined with algorithms for which we finally have the storage and processing power. Nothing that would surprise a 1960s computer scientist. "Machine learning" - again we now have the power to do it and made some advances in how to build neural networks etc. but in the end there's not much there that's not 50 years old. "The Cloud" - a nifty hosting-on-demand system with containers, a mainframe operator would look at it and go "interesting approach".
Where I agree is that legacy systems are a major headache. But that is rarely a technology issue.
Is this some sort of attempt at class warfare?
Don't know what kind of world you are living in, but class warfare is a reality for the majority of us and everyone else on the planet, yes. Those who have a vastly unequal share of everything are, naturally, interested in keeping it. As resources are limited, that means keeping it out of the hands of others. There are some unlimited, or at least limitless share-able resources such as knowledge, but everything else is finite, even if (for example in the digital realm) the limits are quite high.
But land is the ultimate finite resource, and owning a large part of it has for millenia been the sign of wealth and power.
They wouldn't be able to defend them from squatters, and they'll have nothing to actually pay their security WITH.
Which is exactly why they have such meetings to think about such issues.
This is colossally stupid. When the "end times" comes, the wealthiest people on earth are going to be the vast majority of 3rd (and maybe 2nd) world farmers who still have skills needed to continue to produce food.
The wealthiest people on Earth are spending money and effort to ensure that you are wrong. That is what the article is all about.
There is nothing sinister going on. You and I we spend a few percent or so of our income on securing our future against catastrophies, in the form of insurance. These guys do the same, just on a larger scale.
If you want to attract tech companies, the by far best incentive is to have an educated workforce that provides them with hiring opportunities. Also all kinds of companies like good infrastructure.
There are people you have to spell that out to? Can't be.
I love these holier-than-thou posts about these other enlightened countries,
You misunderstand me. I am not lauding other countries. I am criticising the US. Other countries have their own issues.
when it comes to enforcing prohibition as their drug control policy
one policy does not make a society. You seem oddly fixated on this one thing, which is not even anywhere near any part of the original topic.
The credit card system is run by cartels who extract billions in profit from every transaction in exchange for doing nothing.
And that won't change. Only the players will. Maybe it won't be credit cards anymore, but the new players will simply do the same thing - make profit on transactions.
(and remember: If you get a service or a good for free, that doesn't mean it actually is for free. It only means you are not the customer, you are the product)