And you are 100% wrong. Programming is 100% technical. Working in an IT shop might be 40% technical and 60% people but that just means that you only spend 40% of your time programming.
But here's the catch, someone must write the code in the end. And someone must maintain it. And the code that is written is of varying quality. If someone is simply a better, faster programming, then their code will be cheaper to maintain because it will break less often and scale better (or whatever your metrics are for code quality). I find that a "nice programmer" might be easier to work with, but those Saturday night production outages make me hate that person all the same. And I'm much more likely to fire him at that point because I think that person is unlikely to have to skills to keep the code working.
Finally, I think this entire argument is a bit of a crutch. I've seen people who match Josh's description, but usually the best programmers are just crabby because so much of the work falls to them. Then they get painted with "Josh's brush" and labeled as having bad people skills. When really, they are just tired and overworked. If the people with "people skills" had to deal with even 1/10th the work, they would go on a killing spree within a week.
I don't see why web clients being transient is a problem. The whole point of the MapReduce algorithm is that each worker (the web clients in this case) don't need to know anything about what the other worker is doing, what the system as a whole is doing, nor what it had done with any past job.
Which is why Map-Reduce is only suitable for "easily" distributed problems. Lucky for Google that almost all their computational problems fit into this mold. But in the rest of the world, this just isn't the case. Which is why Map-Reduce is more interesting and trendy than a solid change in how distributed systems are designed.
I'm skeptical of that claim, but I don't know. What I do know for a fact is, they do ship products that use undocumented features of "documented" API's. (i.e. they pass in undocumented values for control parameters that completely change what the function does.) I've seen it first hand.
They were called the Z APIs because all the functions began with the letter Z. There is now a book on them but they were hidden calls available from the kernel and userland DLLs in windows. They are no longer there (the normal APIs now subsume them).
Its not our fault that you don't know anything about the history of this issue. These things are well documented and if you don't know about them, you only make yourself look foolish and uninformed.
Actually English is the language spoken by the most people worldwide. Mandarin is second, but ignored due to the fact it is only spoken in one country. Generally, languages spoken in only one country eventually die with that country. Languages that spread to various different countries tend to survive (if only to spawn a language family).
You are right about the ppl that mod firmware being in the minority. But smart marketing people would say that your are ignoring a critical fact about how ppl choose what to purchase. Ppl that mod firmware are likely to be what marketing folk would call mavens. Experts in a specific product, no matter if that product is shampoo or mp3 players. Basically, the people no-experts are likely to ask about product recommendations. Ever wonder why shampoo has a questions hotline number? Its to identify and woo mavens. And if you don't reach the mavens (or if you make them angry), your product has a much smaller chance of success no matter how much advertising you do.
But they are the 3rd largest minority. There are about 2 1/2 times as many gays in the US as Asians. And about the same number of gays as African-Americans. How would it look if someone tried to pass a law that said Asians or African-Americans couldn't get married? City hall would be in flames in minutes if anyone tried that. Like it or not, gays are not a small minority.
I probably had the highest IQ (pure left brain intelligence) in my HS and was on the football team. I never really saw football players picking on "nerds".
My working theory on this is that our team won all the time (54-4 in 4 years) so we didn't really have frustration to take out on others. In other HSes nearby however, the jocks did pick on the nerds. But their teams sucked. So I believe that this type of behavior is just redirected frustration at losing...
There was once a famous Australian rules football player that came to the NFL to be a punter. He was a great punter. But he would try to cover his own punts despite the advice of everyone around him. In his third game, he was knocked unconscious and quit the team about 5 seconds after being woken up with smelling salts. But whatever you want to believe is fine. Guess pads don't protect you as much as you think.
I have no idea why you're comparing the EV1 to the Insight and Prius. The Insight and Prius are hybrid cars. That is, they have a gasoline engine and a small set of batteries to augment it, as an efficiency measure. The EV1 was a fully electric car, which is an utterly different kind of machine altogether, one which simply was not (and is just barely getting there now) ready for prime time.
Maybe because the GGP said that customers were to blame for the death of the electric car and I (and reality) was disagreeing with him. Good information, but I think all the reasons you listed are ancillary to the issue of after market parts which is the real reason we don't have EVs. GM is a very large company and while losing a billion USD is a lot, if they wanted to dominate the market, they would have pushed on. Instead they wanted to preserve the current business model. Understandable, but like I said above, against the public good.
I ride a bike in SF. Its very dangerous but fun and less hassle than driving (no traffic and no DD required). In the mission in SF, it is hard to find a place to lock your bike on Friday or Saturday nights b/c there are so many bikes on the street. There are a lot of people who do this. Probably more than anywhere else in the US. But it only works inside of SF itself (not the bay area which isn't very dense compared to SF). And SF is very hilly. The rest of the bay area even more so.
I'll make it simple for you. 10 years ago car companies realized that EVs don't need as many after market parts as IC cars do. So ever since then, they have acted to prevent EVs from coming to market. Not evil but against the public good. You are blaming the consumers (who did want to buy the cars) instead of the car companies (who didn't want to sell them). Quit being intentionally dense.
Now why would a used Prius sell for more than the new one? Because you can't find a new one to buy. They are always on back order. Really? No demand? Stick to engineering...
Except you were not talking about energy conversion or engineering. You were talking about consumer demand. And you were wrong about those topics. People were willing to buy EVs. The car companies not not willing to sell them. If you want more proof, look at the prius. They sold very very well and the same type of people were lining up in 1999 to buy EVs. There is clearly demand, it is just that no large car company is willing to sell to that demand because they are worried about losing after market profits. But thanks for shilling anyway...
Really? Cause they had to pry the last EVs from the cold dead hands of their owners. Every salesperson who sold them had a larger waiting list than GM could manufacture. I bet that they discovered that EVs didn't need many replacement parts which is why all car companies are trying to avoid making EVs. There is a documentary about the EVs in the late 90's http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0489037/ that you should watch. In fact, nothing in your post is factual correct about the situation exception for maybe the range problem.
The DA in SF is a political hack who could only get 30% of the vote in the last election despite the fact that she was running unopposed. She is a political lacky of Willy Brown and I doubt she even knows how to turn on a computer. The PHB in this case was also a political hack but I know less about him. I do know that he viewed this job as a springboard to higher levels of the SF administration and had no previous experience in IT.
Just so you know, China's economy will have to grow at its current rate for the next 97 years to catch up to the US at the current growth rate (which is currently terrible).
Except on HP-UX where null was -1. -1 in twos complement would be 0xFFFFFFFF so it is a glorified noop on HP-UX. Ah, the joys of C programming on *NIX...
Public systems like this should be auditable just like accounts and trusts held for the public. I think votes are at least as valuable as dollars. But then again, we lost $8 billion in Iraq and don't know where it went. So maybe I shouldn't be surprised.
But somehow I just can't justify not using an OpenSource package for voting because the commercial solutions simply haven't done the job. The auditing aspect alone should require and OpenSource solution due to the need to track the behavior of the system. BTW, India seems to be able to make this work, but somehow we can't. Sigh...
I make about 3x that working as a Java developer for an investment firm. And I can make even more as a contract dev. But that is in SF where the cost of living is very high. 60K in a rural area is probably a better salary adjusted for cost of living than I make. But 60K in the bay area is very tight and means you will either live in a dangerous area, live very cheaply, or live far away (long commute). Your choice. But if you think a programmer's salary isn't very high then either you aren't very good at programming or you have a very different idea of "making a good living" from most people. Try living on a construction worker's salary (or a junior QA person's salary) in the bay area and you might change your opinion.
I previous worked for a company where I developed something very similar to this 'Continuous Support System'. But it was targeted at Exchange (MS, boo hiss, I know, I dislike them too).
Anyway, it was a very interesting and difficult problem. One of the biggest rubs was the level of assurance you had to provide. In otherwords, can you let the system make changes on its own or should it just recommend changes? If the system mis-diagnoses even one problem, it might break more stuff than it fixes. Most monitoring tools have big problems with 'false positives'. Add to that that the system can't necessary 'undo' all changes. Our solution was to allow the administrator to run the system in a variety of modes so they could choose if the system applied the fix automatically, with approval, or just suggested how to fix the problem.
As for how the system actually works, it basically takes a middle approach between ML (machine learning) and KR (knowledge representation). Basically, either you can hard code all the types of problems you have in a KR language, or setup some big neural net (or other ML algorithm) and let the system 'learn' problems. We split the difference and added some domain knowledge. Certain types of 'features' (parts of a diagnose such as the disk is slow) were diagnosed by ML algorithms, but ultimately KR rules written by Exchange experts actually diagnosed the problems and suggested repairs. A very time consuming, but more reliable solution (but less cool).
It was too late for the Norse in Greenland once they ate their last cow
Actually, it was too late after they killed either their last cow or bull, whichever came first. Some might consider it a small point; we call those people virgins.
Irony is afoot. Speech Recognition (not speach) is speech to text. Speech Synthesis is text to speech which is what I think you mean. The misspelling I can chalk up to irony, but the fact that you misused the term 'speech recognition' on/. of all places is too funny. And you did it in the subject; thanx 4 making my day...
With solid state memory, won't you never have to reboot the OS? Will I still have to reboot Windows every so often even though the machine is capable of instant on/off? This feature of the hardware will put serious reliability requirements on all OSes. MS will have to finally fix the damn blue screen or its lack of reliability will be a serious henderence.
Slashdot Mirror
But here's the catch, someone must write the code in the end. And someone must maintain it. And the code that is written is of varying quality. If someone is simply a better, faster programming, then their code will be cheaper to maintain because it will break less often and scale better (or whatever your metrics are for code quality). I find that a "nice programmer" might be easier to work with, but those Saturday night production outages make me hate that person all the same. And I'm much more likely to fire him at that point because I think that person is unlikely to have to skills to keep the code working.
Finally, I think this entire argument is a bit of a crutch. I've seen people who match Josh's description, but usually the best programmers are just crabby because so much of the work falls to them. Then they get painted with "Josh's brush" and labeled as having bad people skills. When really, they are just tired and overworked. If the people with "people skills" had to deal with even 1/10th the work, they would go on a killing spree within a week.
I don't see why web clients being transient is a problem. The whole point of the MapReduce algorithm is that each worker (the web clients in this case) don't need to know anything about what the other worker is doing, what the system as a whole is doing, nor what it had done with any past job.
Which is why Map-Reduce is only suitable for "easily" distributed problems. Lucky for Google that almost all their computational problems fit into this mold. But in the rest of the world, this just isn't the case. Which is why Map-Reduce is more interesting and trendy than a solid change in how distributed systems are designed.
I'm skeptical of that claim, but I don't know. What I do know for a fact is, they do ship products that use undocumented features of "documented" API's. (i.e. they pass in undocumented values for control parameters that completely change what the function does.) I've seen it first hand.
They were called the Z APIs because all the functions began with the letter Z. There is now a book on them but they were hidden calls available from the kernel and userland DLLs in windows. They are no longer there (the normal APIs now subsume them).
Its not our fault that you don't know anything about the history of this issue. These things are well documented and if you don't know about them, you only make yourself look foolish and uninformed.
Actually, there are more French words in English than German works...just saying...
Actually English is the language spoken by the most people worldwide. Mandarin is second, but ignored due to the fact it is only spoken in one country. Generally, languages spoken in only one country eventually die with that country. Languages that spread to various different countries tend to survive (if only to spawn a language family).
You are right about the ppl that mod firmware being in the minority. But smart marketing people would say that your are ignoring a critical fact about how ppl choose what to purchase. Ppl that mod firmware are likely to be what marketing folk would call mavens. Experts in a specific product, no matter if that product is shampoo or mp3 players. Basically, the people no-experts are likely to ask about product recommendations. Ever wonder why shampoo has a questions hotline number? Its to identify and woo mavens. And if you don't reach the mavens (or if you make them angry), your product has a much smaller chance of success no matter how much advertising you do.
That's very clever, maybe you should tell the anti-prop 8 people about that argument.
But they are the 3rd largest minority. There are about 2 1/2 times as many gays in the US as Asians. And about the same number of gays as African-Americans. How would it look if someone tried to pass a law that said Asians or African-Americans couldn't get married? City hall would be in flames in minutes if anyone tried that. Like it or not, gays are not a small minority.
I probably had the highest IQ (pure left brain intelligence) in my HS and was on the football team. I never really saw football players picking on "nerds".
My working theory on this is that our team won all the time (54-4 in 4 years) so we didn't really have frustration to take out on others. In other HSes nearby however, the jocks did pick on the nerds. But their teams sucked. So I believe that this type of behavior is just redirected frustration at losing...
There was once a famous Australian rules football player that came to the NFL to be a punter. He was a great punter. But he would try to cover his own punts despite the advice of everyone around him. In his third game, he was knocked unconscious and quit the team about 5 seconds after being woken up with smelling salts. But whatever you want to believe is fine. Guess pads don't protect you as much as you think.
I have no idea why you're comparing the EV1 to the Insight and Prius. The Insight and Prius are hybrid cars. That is, they have a gasoline engine and a small set of batteries to augment it, as an efficiency measure. The EV1 was a fully electric car, which is an utterly different kind of machine altogether, one which simply was not (and is just barely getting there now) ready for prime time.
Maybe because the GGP said that customers were to blame for the death of the electric car and I (and reality) was disagreeing with him. Good information, but I think all the reasons you listed are ancillary to the issue of after market parts which is the real reason we don't have EVs. GM is a very large company and while losing a billion USD is a lot, if they wanted to dominate the market, they would have pushed on. Instead they wanted to preserve the current business model. Understandable, but like I said above, against the public good.
I ride a bike in SF. Its very dangerous but fun and less hassle than driving (no traffic and no DD required). In the mission in SF, it is hard to find a place to lock your bike on Friday or Saturday nights b/c there are so many bikes on the street. There are a lot of people who do this. Probably more than anywhere else in the US. But it only works inside of SF itself (not the bay area which isn't very dense compared to SF). And SF is very hilly. The rest of the bay area even more so.
I'll make it simple for you. 10 years ago car companies realized that EVs don't need as many after market parts as IC cars do. So ever since then, they have acted to prevent EVs from coming to market. Not evil but against the public good. You are blaming the consumers (who did want to buy the cars) instead of the car companies (who didn't want to sell them). Quit being intentionally dense.
For comparison: a used Prius goes for ~24K USD http://www.internetautoguide.com/usedcars/11-int/toyota/prius/index.html
a new prius goes for ~22K USD http://www.toyota.com/prius-hybrid/
Now why would a used Prius sell for more than the new one? Because you can't find a new one to buy. They are always on back order. Really? No demand? Stick to engineering...
Except you were not talking about energy conversion or engineering. You were talking about consumer demand. And you were wrong about those topics. People were willing to buy EVs. The car companies not not willing to sell them. If you want more proof, look at the prius. They sold very very well and the same type of people were lining up in 1999 to buy EVs. There is clearly demand, it is just that no large car company is willing to sell to that demand because they are worried about losing after market profits. But thanks for shilling anyway...
Really? Cause they had to pry the last EVs from the cold dead hands of their owners. Every salesperson who sold them had a larger waiting list than GM could manufacture. I bet that they discovered that EVs didn't need many replacement parts which is why all car companies are trying to avoid making EVs. There is a documentary about the EVs in the late 90's http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0489037/ that you should watch. In fact, nothing in your post is factual correct about the situation exception for maybe the range problem.
The DA in SF is a political hack who could only get 30% of the vote in the last election despite the fact that she was running unopposed. She is a political lacky of Willy Brown and I doubt she even knows how to turn on a computer. The PHB in this case was also a political hack but I know less about him. I do know that he viewed this job as a springboard to higher levels of the SF administration and had no previous experience in IT.
Just so you know, China's economy will have to grow at its current rate for the next 97 years to catch up to the US at the current growth rate (which is currently terrible).
Except on HP-UX where null was -1. -1 in twos complement would be 0xFFFFFFFF so it is a glorified noop on HP-UX. Ah, the joys of C programming on *NIX...
That's funny because I'm using Adobe Acrobat for Linux right now...must of have dreaming...
But somehow I just can't justify not using an OpenSource package for voting because the commercial solutions simply haven't done the job. The auditing aspect alone should require and OpenSource solution due to the need to track the behavior of the system. BTW, India seems to be able to make this work, but somehow we can't. Sigh...
I make about 3x that working as a Java developer for an investment firm. And I can make even more as a contract dev. But that is in SF where the cost of living is very high. 60K in a rural area is probably a better salary adjusted for cost of living than I make. But 60K in the bay area is very tight and means you will either live in a dangerous area, live very cheaply, or live far away (long commute). Your choice. But if you think a programmer's salary isn't very high then either you aren't very good at programming or you have a very different idea of "making a good living" from most people. Try living on a construction worker's salary (or a junior QA person's salary) in the bay area and you might change your opinion.
Anyway, it was a very interesting and difficult problem. One of the biggest rubs was the level of assurance you had to provide. In otherwords, can you let the system make changes on its own or should it just recommend changes? If the system mis-diagnoses even one problem, it might break more stuff than it fixes. Most monitoring tools have big problems with 'false positives'. Add to that that the system can't necessary 'undo' all changes. Our solution was to allow the administrator to run the system in a variety of modes so they could choose if the system applied the fix automatically, with approval, or just suggested how to fix the problem.
As for how the system actually works, it basically takes a middle approach between ML (machine learning) and KR (knowledge representation). Basically, either you can hard code all the types of problems you have in a KR language, or setup some big neural net (or other ML algorithm) and let the system 'learn' problems. We split the difference and added some domain knowledge. Certain types of 'features' (parts of a diagnose such as the disk is slow) were diagnosed by ML algorithms, but ultimately KR rules written by Exchange experts actually diagnosed the problems and suggested repairs. A very time consuming, but more reliable solution (but less cool).
Actually, it was too late after they killed either their last cow or bull, whichever came first. Some might consider it a small point; we call those people virgins.
Laugh, its funny...
Irony is afoot. Speech Recognition (not speach) is speech to text. Speech Synthesis is text to speech which is what I think you mean. The misspelling I can chalk up to irony, but the fact that you misused the term 'speech recognition' on /. of all places is too funny. And you did it in the subject; thanx 4 making my day...
With solid state memory, won't you never have to reboot the OS? Will I still have to reboot Windows every so often even though the machine is capable of instant on/off? This feature of the hardware will put serious reliability requirements on all OSes. MS will have to finally fix the damn blue screen or its lack of reliability will be a serious henderence.