It's not a question of belief, but of weighing the evidence.
Unlike millions of other "visionaries" and tinkerers and "inventors", Tesla delivered on most of his visions, even the outragous ones. From everything we know about him and his work, it stands to reason that his unrealised inventions were at least on the level of DaVinci - you know, DaVincis helicopters or tanks would not have worked in the exact way he scribbled them, but he got the basic principles right and with a few adaptations...
There are two simple principles there. One, courtesy of Nassim Taleb: Things that can't go on forever, don't.. It is obvious that the population cannot go to infinity. So it will stop growing sooner or later. The only question is: When? And also: How painful is that going to be for everyone?
The other is that trends typically go on for much longer than predicted. Peak Oil was first predicted for the 1920s. Then the 1960s. Then around 2000. At the moment some estimates say it'll be in the 2030s.
Obviously, one day oil will run out. But from this and many similar estimates we learn that we tend to see gloom and doom arrive too early, typically.
There's no sign that population growth will suddenly decline sharply. So it's going to be at least a few more generations before peak humans.
Why didn't we just KEEP all that oil for ourselves if profit was our motive?
Because that would cause a huge international stink with repercussions that nobody can forsee or control. Having a friend in possession of that oil, who sells it to you then turns around to buy stuff from you for it is actually more profitable than owning it.
but we are not just pirates looking for profit and plunder to take by military force.
Didn't say that. Piracy is a low-profit-margin business. There's been a saying since the financial crises: Small-time criminals rob banks. Big-time criminals own banks.
Face it, if we where, we would basically dominate all the world's natural resources for we have unmatched military power
You learnt in Vietnam how little that means when it's about controlling a country, not just invading it. You need soldiers in the streets to control a country against their citizens will, and you simply don't have enough of those and are not willing enough to sacrifice them in large numbers. That precludes any kind of long-term, large-scale land grab.
Turning enemies into allies through a regime change, however, has largely worked since 1945. Sure, it's not perfect, but it works often enough to keep it as a good strategy.
we are really about stability for the middle east and it's people,
You just said that with a straight face? How you managed?
We hand out the ability for self determination, for respect of basic human rights to others and ask for little in return.
Except loyalty, trade deals and access to strategic positions. Make no mistake, there isn't one military action that the US conducted that wasn't to its own advantage. What I'll grant you is that many of them are also to the advantage of others. Ending the Barbary Coast slave trade is something that deserves respect. But it happened because US ships were affected.
It is unfair and demeaning to the men and women who have shed their blood serving you
I'm not bashing veterans. I'm bashing the politics that sends them to their death in the name of geopolitical power and profit margins.
about how the US has a glorious past punching Nazis in WWII?
Let's not forget that the Nazi part of America filled Madison Square Garden as late as 1939. One of the reasons that the US initially stayed out of the war was fatigue from WW1, but the other was that the Nazis had, in fact, a lot of support in the US, both popular and among the elite (The Bush family was among those who made deals with Nazi Germany well into the war).
Yes, once the US had decided that being on the side of the Allies was in its best interest, they simply outproduced everyone and crushed them with volume. But history is more complicated than "we are the heroes and did the right thing" - there was a lot of interests to consider, and in an alternate universe, things could've gone another way.
So yes, all the Nazis attacked were on foreign soil. All the Nazis at home were not attacked. They just quietly decided that it was better to put the Swastika into that chest in the attic.
Also, technically speaking, the OP said:
How many times in the past 65 years has that actually helped?
And WW2 was more than 65 years ago, but that's nitpicking.
Economically because a) it prevents the rise of potential competitors and b) these fuckers buy so much of your military hardware to kill each other, it's ridiculous.
Places like Afghanistan have been a mess for as long as I can remember
I believe the "I can remember" part, but don't forget that your life is short. The Internet is choke full of pictures from Afghanistan in the 1960s and many of them you could label "my hometown in the US, 1965", post them on FB and nobody would notice. The country used to be modern and advanced. Then the cold war gaming between the US and USSR ruined it. The fall of Afghanistan can very clearly be attributed to cold war politics and you cannot with a straight face claim that the US had nothing to do with that.
What usually happens in the middle east is
...nothing like what you describe. The US is deeply involved in the Middle East. I'm not saying it's all bad, there are plenty of despots there who need someone to stop them and nobody else is willing to do the dirty work. But the US involvement is driven by US interests, the humanitarian angle is just the PR spin. Best example: Saddam Hussein. As long as he was useful (e.g. fighting against Iran), he was a friend, supplied with weapons, intelligence, money and everything else he needed. He was also lauded as a forward-looking visionairy who managed to run a reasonably secular country in the middle of backwater theocracies, and keep the peace between various sects and factions thanks to strong leadership. Then interests turned and he became a demonic, evil dictator using oppression and mass murder in an iron fist of power, and he urgently needed to be... invaded, defeated and left in power. Because who knows? Maybe one day we'll change our tune again... A decade later you guys decided "nah, let's use the opportunity to finally do away with him." and made up those WMD stories.
The US is anything but innocent in the Middle East. And that half the governments and a large part of the people there are nutjobs, primitives and violent religious extremists is true, but doesn't mean the US is holy. Two things can be true at the same time, you know?
We certainly didn't leave things worse than we found them, even if we didn't do everything right. Generally the middle east is better off because of US intervention.
Almost everyone with any clue about politics disagrees with you on that one. The best we could probably do for the Middle East is to get everyone out, close the whole damn region off, stop selling them weapons, stop buying their oil, let them have their wars for a decade and then ask whoever is left standing if they're ready to re-join the civilized world.
All the meddling certainly did not improve things. It never does.
It has the best form factor. I sincerely dislike those phablet style crap that doesn't know if it wants to grow up and become a tablet or not. My phone's most important attribute is portability. I want to be able to put it into a pocket and not feel that it's there. The SE achieves that, the 6 and its cousins of the same size don't. I know, because I have both (private phone SE, work phone 6).
Other people want other things, that's fine with me. If I were a women and put my phone into a purse, I'd probably not care if it's a few cm larger. I might even like that. But I'm not, I put my phone into my pocket. I care about size.
Well, this is about an US company...so, what you say doesn't apply and doesn't really matter....
Yes, it does apply.
Sure, you don't have the same laws, but the laws are only the implementation. The basic principle - that by giving people an outlet for their grievances your increase peace in the workplace - is the same. You'd just use a different method to implement it. One of those methods would be to support workers to exchange, discuss and organise within the company, using company resources. Because it might end up being more expensive to you if they organise and protest outside the company. And a lot less of your dirty underwear will be washed in public with this approach.
I mean, why should a company essentially pay you to protest them or let you use their facilities and servers to promote things that are against the best interests of the company or it's shareholders (you know, the folks that own the company)?
Because it works.
I come from a country with strong employee protection laws, including the right to organize inside the company, and even laws regulating how to organise, how to elect representatives to speak for the employees, and rights and protections for those representatives, including extensive use of company facilities and even money to pay for what they need (training, lawyers, etc.)
The result is much more peace within the workplace, because there are accepted ways to bring your grievances to the attention of management. There are ways to force management if they don't comply with the law, without going to an external court and putting all the internal dirt into public.
It may not be perfect, but even most companies agree that it beats being hit by multi-million dollar lawsuits every few years.
The construction of the Great Wall began in the 7th century BC.
So you're basically saying that something that was used as a defensive structure for more than 2500 years is no good because you found one example where a commander surrendered and let the enemy through?
Congratulations, you've discovered a type of argument that Trump would shy away from.
the majority of technical staff at the Amazon datacenters are local hires and not Americans.
I'm sure of that. But when it gets to the guts of some system, there's always the situation that there's only a few people who really understand how it works.
surely in a crisis the EU governments would not let Amazon pull any stunts that are against the EU interest?
But their leverage is much smaller, and it might require force, and you might find that important know-how (i.e. expert tech guys) are outside your jurisdiction.
Actually, the Great Wall is generally thought to have been a smashing success. That's the main reason it was kept in shape and extended for hundreds of years.
While it did not prevent every Mongol attack, it dramatically reduced mobility of nomad forces, while providing trade, logistics and troop movements to the Chinese. It was also never actually defeated. Nobody every conquered the wall, and it was used defensively up until 1933 (!) against the Japanese.
If you understand the wall for what it was intended to be - not a castle but a strategic position - then you also understand that it was highly effective in that role.
Give this a little more thought. Must a government website run on government-owned servers, with traffic routed on government-owned lines? Of course not - governments can and do rent space or time in private data centers. Amazon is one of many private data centers.
Yes, but it is something that deserves critical examination.
The government in my home country keeps a non-profitable coal-mining industry alive through subsidies for strategic reasons - if there ever is a global crisis or war, coal is the only energy source the country has in sufficient quantities.
Haven't we reached the point where government IT is a strategic element and should be independent from foreign corporations? Sure the US is an ally, but in a global crisis, they'll be their own best friends first.
The point is not to go back to a hunter & gatherer lifestyle. Oh, I agree that even a few days without electricity, smartphone and Internet are intensely relaxing. But the point of the article was not "simple lifestyle", but "can you life a normal life without Amazon?"
And that it turns out you can't is quite a story. I didn't know Amazon has become an infrastructure like that.
Does anybody seriously think the Tesla Model 3 will be competitive with anything from Mercedes, Audi and BMW?
Yes. And I say that as a BMW driver.
Despite lots of PR and prototypes, there is yet to appear a viable mass-market electric car from any of them. The i3 is a niche product, it has exactly one use-case: Daily commute to work, if you have a 2nd car for other trips. The i8 is actually a hybrid, not a pure electrical car. Mercedes doesn't have any electrical cars except some concept models. And the Audi e-tron is starting delivery in "early 2019", so the Model 3 might actually beat it to market.
The laggards here desperately need some serious competition that will kick them into action.
Indeed, and C is for wanna-by coders who can't write reliable, secure assembly.
Actually, the idea behind C wasn't to make code more reliable (you can fuck up in C at least as easily as in assembler). The idea was to make programming less tedious.
I still learnt assembler in university. Kids nowadays learn programming with Java, that should be a crime. I've written 1000 lines assembler code that I could do in 50 lines in C. That's what C is for. Then a few more modern languages emerged that could do things C does in 50 lines in 5 - because, for example, automatic memory management, string functions, built-ins. And then it stopped. Everything since then was just trying to make new programming languages do the same thing in the same way with a different syntax.
IMHO there are five languages you need to know, and you know them all: Assembler, C, C++, Lisp and Prolog.
Everything else is just different syntax for one of them.
I'm an old C and C++ guy. I've ignored all the nonsense that was invented after I went to university, and I still shake my head at Node.js and having been forced to actually use it for a prototype project, not out of ignorance. I write a lot of stuff in PHP these days because it's C-like (plus just the right amount of OO, the only thing I'm missing from C) and because for web-programming there's no good C solution.
Rust is the only new programming language that actually interests me. It's the only thing that appears to be doing things the right way.
You're not the only one excited about nerd news.:-)
I have many ideas, but first I want to hear from you.
Step One: Don't sell out to Microsoft.
There is no step two since you failed step one. Free Software is based on trust. Yes, there's GPL and all, but there is a lot of trust necessary to get a Free Software project running and working. Since the team is not held together by organisational structure, salaries or chain of command, trust is the glue. It's one of the reasons people fork or walk away: When they don't trust each other anymore, for personal reasons or because they believe the others are taking the project in the wrong direction.
Nobody, literally nobody who is not a complete imbecile, trusts Microsoft. With the history that company has, you would have to be brain-dead and insane to do.
Inertia will keep Github around for a long time. Moving is too much effort for many especially small projects, and it is a name with a lot of hyperlinks going in. But I'm not the only one who already moved all the project he cares about away from github and won't be starting new ones there.
You can play bait&switch with consumers. Not so much with developers.
So, for you personally there is actually a step two: Find a new job elsewhere.
Yes, that kind of thing. I fix this fuck on a daily basis and it all goes back to the same two problems: a) nobody thought about security early and b) everyone is stretched too thing and under time and budget pressures.
Hiring two more people for your IT will do more to security than buying the latest snake-oil tech product.
Thanks for that link. I see that's fairly new data. Until recently, older research had demonstrated that the dreaded "reputation" impact is actually negliegable and can typically countered with a moderate expense of PR.
They are worried that their shareholders want them to talk about cybersecurity, rather than recession.
I work in cybersecurity. It's a huge market. That consists of 40% snake-oil, 40% faking compliance to some standard, law or other requirement and 20% of actual security. I'm mostly interested in the 20% and on some days I hate myself for it because I could make so much more money selling bullshit to the gullable or assurance of on-paper compliance to managers.
If they actually took security seriously, they would start doing some actual thinking about it. While the usual yearly reports outline the various dangers and threats, most of the actual events boil down to someone fucking something up, typically because they were short-staffed, on a deadline, with pressure to get it working right now. And while our tech solutions use machine learning to uncover advanced persistent threats with camouflage and polymorph capabilities, the core technology underneath is behind the 1960s level of understanding of security.
I'm a member of a national working group on a "new technology" topic I can't divulge. Nobody even thought about the security aspects of the technology until I brought it up. We still do security as an afterthought. In 2019. And wonder why it's a mess. It's like building a car and in the end, when everything is working well, having the idea that it would be really swell if people could sit on it somewhere.
If CEOs were actually worried about security, they would take a few simple basic steps to ensure that security goes into everything from the start and is a basic requirement. If your software tells my data to someone else, it is just as broken as if it doesn't tell my data to me. But guess how many user stories of the first kind you see compared to the second.
Have some of his works right here on the bookshelf. It's a very interesting mix of foresight and blunder. Some of it I find insightful still today, which is astonishing given the age, and some of it makes no sense without LSD, I guess.
I was doing multi-homed hosting centers in 1999. It didn't exactly need a prophet to see that the Internet was going to be something big. Heck, 99 was smack middle in the dot-com era.
If anything, the interviewer was a complete dofus.
Don't want to smack down Bowie, he's brilliant. But you didn't need a genius in 99 to tell you that the Internet was going to be a thing.
I had a keen interest in AI around 15 or so years ago. Experimented with some early backpropagating neural networks, checked on the progress of the CyC project, read a couple of the influential books on the field. Then I saw it wasn't going anywhere and put my interests in other places.
Some years ago, machine-learning and "deep learning" were suddenly big, big things. Didn't have the time to dive into it. When a little later I did because everyone was still talking about it, I thought they had found a new breakthrough approach. Picture me surprised when I discovered it's basically 20 year old ideas, just on fast computers.
And they still sometimes recognize the weather instead of the tanks (if you get that joke, you are really old).
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a question of belief, but of weighing the evidence.
Unlike millions of other "visionaries" and tinkerers and "inventors", Tesla delivered on most of his visions, even the outragous ones. From everything we know about him and his work, it stands to reason that his unrealised inventions were at least on the level of DaVinci - you know, DaVincis helicopters or tanks would not have worked in the exact way he scribbled them, but he got the basic principles right and with a few adaptations...
There are two simple principles there. One, courtesy of Nassim Taleb: Things that can't go on forever, don't.. It is obvious that the population cannot go to infinity. So it will stop growing sooner or later. The only question is: When? And also: How painful is that going to be for everyone?
The other is that trends typically go on for much longer than predicted. Peak Oil was first predicted for the 1920s. Then the 1960s. Then around 2000. At the moment some estimates say it'll be in the 2030s.
Obviously, one day oil will run out. But from this and many similar estimates we learn that we tend to see gloom and doom arrive too early, typically.
There's no sign that population growth will suddenly decline sharply. So it's going to be at least a few more generations before peak humans.
Why didn't we just KEEP all that oil for ourselves if profit was our motive?
Because that would cause a huge international stink with repercussions that nobody can forsee or control. Having a friend in possession of that oil, who sells it to you then turns around to buy stuff from you for it is actually more profitable than owning it.
but we are not just pirates looking for profit and plunder to take by military force.
Didn't say that. Piracy is a low-profit-margin business. There's been a saying since the financial crises: Small-time criminals rob banks. Big-time criminals own banks.
Face it, if we where, we would basically dominate all the world's natural resources for we have unmatched military power
You learnt in Vietnam how little that means when it's about controlling a country, not just invading it. You need soldiers in the streets to control a country against their citizens will, and you simply don't have enough of those and are not willing enough to sacrifice them in large numbers. That precludes any kind of long-term, large-scale land grab.
Turning enemies into allies through a regime change, however, has largely worked since 1945. Sure, it's not perfect, but it works often enough to keep it as a good strategy.
we are really about stability for the middle east and it's people,
You just said that with a straight face? How you managed?
We hand out the ability for self determination, for respect of basic human rights to others and ask for little in return.
Except loyalty, trade deals and access to strategic positions. Make no mistake, there isn't one military action that the US conducted that wasn't to its own advantage. What I'll grant you is that many of them are also to the advantage of others. Ending the Barbary Coast slave trade is something that deserves respect. But it happened because US ships were affected.
It is unfair and demeaning to the men and women who have shed their blood serving you
I'm not bashing veterans. I'm bashing the politics that sends them to their death in the name of geopolitical power and profit margins.
about how the US has a glorious past punching Nazis in WWII?
Let's not forget that the Nazi part of America filled Madison Square Garden as late as 1939. One of the reasons that the US initially stayed out of the war was fatigue from WW1, but the other was that the Nazis had, in fact, a lot of support in the US, both popular and among the elite (The Bush family was among those who made deals with Nazi Germany well into the war).
Yes, once the US had decided that being on the side of the Allies was in its best interest, they simply outproduced everyone and crushed them with volume. But history is more complicated than "we are the heroes and did the right thing" - there was a lot of interests to consider, and in an alternate universe, things could've gone another way.
So yes, all the Nazis attacked were on foreign soil. All the Nazis at home were not attacked. They just quietly decided that it was better to put the Swastika into that chest in the attic.
Also, technically speaking, the OP said:
How many times in the past 65 years has that actually helped?
And WW2 was more than 65 years ago, but that's nitpicking.
Why would we (the US) bother?
Profit.
Economically because a) it prevents the rise of potential competitors and b) these fuckers buy so much of your military hardware to kill each other, it's ridiculous.
Places like Afghanistan have been a mess for as long as I can remember
I believe the "I can remember" part, but don't forget that your life is short. The Internet is choke full of pictures from Afghanistan in the 1960s and many of them you could label "my hometown in the US, 1965", post them on FB and nobody would notice. The country used to be modern and advanced. Then the cold war gaming between the US and USSR ruined it. The fall of Afghanistan can very clearly be attributed to cold war politics and you cannot with a straight face claim that the US had nothing to do with that.
What usually happens in the middle east is
...nothing like what you describe. The US is deeply involved in the Middle East. I'm not saying it's all bad, there are plenty of despots there who need someone to stop them and nobody else is willing to do the dirty work. But the US involvement is driven by US interests, the humanitarian angle is just the PR spin. Best example: Saddam Hussein. As long as he was useful (e.g. fighting against Iran), he was a friend, supplied with weapons, intelligence, money and everything else he needed. He was also lauded as a forward-looking visionairy who managed to run a reasonably secular country in the middle of backwater theocracies, and keep the peace between various sects and factions thanks to strong leadership. Then interests turned and he became a demonic, evil dictator using oppression and mass murder in an iron fist of power, and he urgently needed to be ... invaded, defeated and left in power. Because who knows? Maybe one day we'll change our tune again... A decade later you guys decided "nah, let's use the opportunity to finally do away with him." and made up those WMD stories.
The US is anything but innocent in the Middle East. And that half the governments and a large part of the people there are nutjobs, primitives and violent religious extremists is true, but doesn't mean the US is holy. Two things can be true at the same time, you know?
We certainly didn't leave things worse than we found them, even if we didn't do everything right. Generally the middle east is better off because of US intervention.
Almost everyone with any clue about politics disagrees with you on that one. The best we could probably do for the Middle East is to get everyone out, close the whole damn region off, stop selling them weapons, stop buying their oil, let them have their wars for a decade and then ask whoever is left standing if they're ready to re-join the civilized world.
All the meddling certainly did not improve things. It never does.
It has the best form factor. I sincerely dislike those phablet style crap that doesn't know if it wants to grow up and become a tablet or not. My phone's most important attribute is portability. I want to be able to put it into a pocket and not feel that it's there. The SE achieves that, the 6 and its cousins of the same size don't. I know, because I have both (private phone SE, work phone 6).
Other people want other things, that's fine with me. If I were a women and put my phone into a purse, I'd probably not care if it's a few cm larger. I might even like that. But I'm not, I put my phone into my pocket. I care about size.
Well, this is about an US company...so, what you say doesn't apply and doesn't really matter....
Yes, it does apply.
Sure, you don't have the same laws, but the laws are only the implementation. The basic principle - that by giving people an outlet for their grievances your increase peace in the workplace - is the same. You'd just use a different method to implement it. One of those methods would be to support workers to exchange, discuss and organise within the company, using company resources. Because it might end up being more expensive to you if they organise and protest outside the company. And a lot less of your dirty underwear will be washed in public with this approach.
I mean, why should a company essentially pay you to protest them or let you use their facilities and servers to promote things that are against the best interests of the company or it's shareholders (you know, the folks that own the company)?
Because it works.
I come from a country with strong employee protection laws, including the right to organize inside the company, and even laws regulating how to organise, how to elect representatives to speak for the employees, and rights and protections for those representatives, including extensive use of company facilities and even money to pay for what they need (training, lawyers, etc.)
The result is much more peace within the workplace, because there are accepted ways to bring your grievances to the attention of management. There are ways to force management if they don't comply with the law, without going to an external court and putting all the internal dirt into public.
It may not be perfect, but even most companies agree that it beats being hit by multi-million dollar lawsuits every few years.
The construction of the Great Wall began in the 7th century BC.
So you're basically saying that something that was used as a defensive structure for more than 2500 years is no good because you found one example where a commander surrendered and let the enemy through?
Congratulations, you've discovered a type of argument that Trump would shy away from.
the majority of technical staff at the Amazon datacenters are local hires and not Americans.
I'm sure of that. But when it gets to the guts of some system, there's always the situation that there's only a few people who really understand how it works.
If you mean the battle of Shanhai Pass, there was no siege battle at the wall. But of course you knew that.
surely in a crisis the EU governments would not let Amazon pull any stunts that are against the EU interest?
But their leverage is much smaller, and it might require force, and you might find that important know-how (i.e. expert tech guys) are outside your jurisdiction.
Actually, the Great Wall is generally thought to have been a smashing success. That's the main reason it was kept in shape and extended for hundreds of years.
While it did not prevent every Mongol attack, it dramatically reduced mobility of nomad forces, while providing trade, logistics and troop movements to the Chinese. It was also never actually defeated. Nobody every conquered the wall, and it was used defensively up until 1933 (!) against the Japanese.
If you understand the wall for what it was intended to be - not a castle but a strategic position - then you also understand that it was highly effective in that role.
Give this a little more thought. Must a government website run on government-owned servers, with traffic routed on government-owned lines? Of course not - governments can and do rent space or time in private data centers. Amazon is one of many private data centers.
Yes, but it is something that deserves critical examination.
The government in my home country keeps a non-profitable coal-mining industry alive through subsidies for strategic reasons - if there ever is a global crisis or war, coal is the only energy source the country has in sufficient quantities.
Haven't we reached the point where government IT is a strategic element and should be independent from foreign corporations? Sure the US is an ally, but in a global crisis, they'll be their own best friends first.
The point is not to go back to a hunter & gatherer lifestyle. Oh, I agree that even a few days without electricity, smartphone and Internet are intensely relaxing. But the point of the article was not "simple lifestyle", but "can you life a normal life without Amazon?"
And that it turns out you can't is quite a story. I didn't know Amazon has become an infrastructure like that.
Does anybody seriously think the Tesla Model 3 will be competitive with anything from Mercedes, Audi and BMW?
Yes. And I say that as a BMW driver.
Despite lots of PR and prototypes, there is yet to appear a viable mass-market electric car from any of them. The i3 is a niche product, it has exactly one use-case: Daily commute to work, if you have a 2nd car for other trips. The i8 is actually a hybrid, not a pure electrical car. Mercedes doesn't have any electrical cars except some concept models. And the Audi e-tron is starting delivery in "early 2019", so the Model 3 might actually beat it to market.
The laggards here desperately need some serious competition that will kick them into action.
Indeed, and C is for wanna-by coders who can't write reliable, secure assembly.
Actually, the idea behind C wasn't to make code more reliable (you can fuck up in C at least as easily as in assembler). The idea was to make programming less tedious.
I still learnt assembler in university. Kids nowadays learn programming with Java, that should be a crime. I've written 1000 lines assembler code that I could do in 50 lines in C. That's what C is for. Then a few more modern languages emerged that could do things C does in 50 lines in 5 - because, for example, automatic memory management, string functions, built-ins. And then it stopped. Everything since then was just trying to make new programming languages do the same thing in the same way with a different syntax.
IMHO there are five languages you need to know, and you know them all: Assembler, C, C++, Lisp and Prolog.
Everything else is just different syntax for one of them.
Me, me, me!
I'm an old C and C++ guy. I've ignored all the nonsense that was invented after I went to university, and I still shake my head at Node.js and having been forced to actually use it for a prototype project, not out of ignorance. I write a lot of stuff in PHP these days because it's C-like (plus just the right amount of OO, the only thing I'm missing from C) and because for web-programming there's no good C solution.
Rust is the only new programming language that actually interests me. It's the only thing that appears to be doing things the right way.
You're not the only one excited about nerd news. :-)
I have many ideas, but first I want to hear from you.
Step One: Don't sell out to Microsoft.
There is no step two since you failed step one. Free Software is based on trust. Yes, there's GPL and all, but there is a lot of trust necessary to get a Free Software project running and working. Since the team is not held together by organisational structure, salaries or chain of command, trust is the glue. It's one of the reasons people fork or walk away: When they don't trust each other anymore, for personal reasons or because they believe the others are taking the project in the wrong direction.
Nobody, literally nobody who is not a complete imbecile, trusts Microsoft. With the history that company has, you would have to be brain-dead and insane to do.
Inertia will keep Github around for a long time. Moving is too much effort for many especially small projects, and it is a name with a lot of hyperlinks going in. But I'm not the only one who already moved all the project he cares about away from github and won't be starting new ones there.
You can play bait&switch with consumers. Not so much with developers.
So, for you personally there is actually a step two: Find a new job elsewhere.
Yes, that kind of thing. I fix this fuck on a daily basis and it all goes back to the same two problems: a) nobody thought about security early and b) everyone is stretched too thing and under time and budget pressures.
Hiring two more people for your IT will do more to security than buying the latest snake-oil tech product.
Thanks for that link. I see that's fairly new data. Until recently, older research had demonstrated that the dreaded "reputation" impact is actually negliegable and can typically countered with a moderate expense of PR.
It's good to see newer data to the opposite.
They are worried that their shareholders want them to talk about cybersecurity, rather than recession.
I work in cybersecurity. It's a huge market. That consists of 40% snake-oil, 40% faking compliance to some standard, law or other requirement and 20% of actual security. I'm mostly interested in the 20% and on some days I hate myself for it because I could make so much more money selling bullshit to the gullable or assurance of on-paper compliance to managers.
If they actually took security seriously, they would start doing some actual thinking about it. While the usual yearly reports outline the various dangers and threats, most of the actual events boil down to someone fucking something up, typically because they were short-staffed, on a deadline, with pressure to get it working right now. And while our tech solutions use machine learning to uncover advanced persistent threats with camouflage and polymorph capabilities, the core technology underneath is behind the 1960s level of understanding of security.
I'm a member of a national working group on a "new technology" topic I can't divulge. Nobody even thought about the security aspects of the technology until I brought it up. We still do security as an afterthought. In 2019. And wonder why it's a mess. It's like building a car and in the end, when everything is working well, having the idea that it would be really swell if people could sit on it somewhere.
If CEOs were actually worried about security, they would take a few simple basic steps to ensure that security goes into everything from the start and is a basic requirement. If your software tells my data to someone else, it is just as broken as if it doesn't tell my data to me. But guess how many user stories of the first kind you see compared to the second.
Have some of his works right here on the bookshelf. It's a very interesting mix of foresight and blunder. Some of it I find insightful still today, which is astonishing given the age, and some of it makes no sense without LSD, I guess.
I was doing multi-homed hosting centers in 1999. It didn't exactly need a prophet to see that the Internet was going to be something big. Heck, 99 was smack middle in the dot-com era.
If anything, the interviewer was a complete dofus.
Don't want to smack down Bowie, he's brilliant. But you didn't need a genius in 99 to tell you that the Internet was going to be a thing.
I had a keen interest in AI around 15 or so years ago. Experimented with some early backpropagating neural networks, checked on the progress of the CyC project, read a couple of the influential books on the field. Then I saw it wasn't going anywhere and put my interests in other places.
Some years ago, machine-learning and "deep learning" were suddenly big, big things. Didn't have the time to dive into it. When a little later I did because everyone was still talking about it, I thought they had found a new breakthrough approach. Picture me surprised when I discovered it's basically 20 year old ideas, just on fast computers.
And they still sometimes recognize the weather instead of the tanks (if you get that joke, you are really old).