It's easy to bitch about Comic Sans, harder to find a replacement. What have you got that's informal, open, and legible down to six-point?
None of the linked sites has anything to offer beyond whining about Microsoft's monopoly on font choices. I suspect it would be more acceptable if Apple took it, changed a few bits and called it "Different Sans".
I'm curious: what do you think is easy to do in COBOL but not in Java?
Wrong question. The right question is what does COBOL do easily that java does not. The answer is large-scale batch transaction processing with complex data structures and huge datasets.
There's also a good argument to be made that one answer to your actual question is "write code that's provably correct by construction".
Nice story, but it doesn't say anything about COBOL.
I have a similar story about 30 programmers who spent two years writing java code and delivering nothing useful because the requirement called for two different architectures: one best served with a batch system, the other best served with a real-time system. What they need is COBOL and C, but what they know is java and struts. It's been another four years since I ran screaming from the building and they still haven't delivered anything useful.
Inept programmers will screw things up in any language.
They don't say 3000 times cheaper, Herbert. They say:
Depending on the workload, the capacity per dollar of SSDs needs to increase by a factor of 3-3000 for an SSD-based solution to break even with a diskbased solution.
Sometimes it's better to RTFA than to pull comments out of your ass.
I don't think insulin has any role in protein synthesis, but it has a lot to do with weight gain, being that it drives fat storage.
The sources are a constantly updating target, but you can find more than enough to read by googling "insulin caffeine adenosine triglyceride lipogenesis". Make sure you have a few hours and a pad for doodling. The horrors of hyperinsulinemia make Amityville look like a church social.
Millions of dollars have been spent on well-designed, well-controlled studies in attempts to find some harm that coffee does. They have all failed. Humans have been drinking so much coffee for so long that if it did any harm at all, the results would be obvious.
One of the benefits of caffeine is that it interferes with insulin and its role in sweeping the glucose and fats out of your blood stream and hiving them off as triglycerides (we call this "you get fat"). If you suddenly stop caffeine intake, what you experience is a hypoglycemic crash when the backed-up oversupply of insulin cleans the sources of free energy out of your blood stream.
Proponents of Agile development and similar philosophies have not been touting the open source development model, as TFA does. My point is that Agile and open source communities solve different problems.
Switch to the open source model of development where the only things that get implemented are the things the developers are interested in. With all due respect, this would be a return to the bad old days of mainframes when users had to put up with whatever the data processing department built and be happy that they had any automation at all.
One of the dumbest ideas I've seen on my screen in one devil of a long time.
A generation of tech-savvy children is being exposed to religious material that is not age-appropriate, that they cannot fully process, and that they lack the judgment and experience to contextualize.
or
A generation of tech-savvy children is being exposed to neo-liberal propaganda that is not age-appropriate, that they cannot fully process, and that they lack the judgment and experience to contextualize.
or
A generation of tech-savvy children is being exposed to environmentalist hysteria that is not age-appropriate, that they cannot fully process, and that they lack the judgment and experience to contextualize.
The article is crap. Lauren doesn't turn down a Macbook Pro, she doesn't get that far because her budget is $1000 and she wants a 17" screen--both reasonable requirements.
McCracken's position is that if you can't get the Mac you want for $1,000, the solution is to boost your budget to $3,000. Going from that starting point, I would stop reading and go over to PC Mag for proper reviews.
I love the ad. As a sometime marketing guy, I look at this and wish I was that good. The main thing this video has going for it is that it deals with fact (the most Mac you can get for $1,000 is a 13" netbook+) rather than pandering to geek mythology the way the Apple ads did. McCracken had to misrepresent the ad to make a case for the Mac because he couldn't argue with the facts presented.
Of course I'm being a little unfair to Apple in this. The Apple ads were, as is usual for Apple, designed to stroke their existing customers, to make them feel cool and superior and "different", not to convert PC owners. Since the message was "in-house", so to speak, an excess of zeal is forgiveable.
What these folk fail to realize is that "musician" is no longer a profession--it's just an activity. It follows "photographer" and "journalist" down that trail marked by blogs, flickr, youTube and other broadcast media available to anyone with a PC.
In the long run, we're going to have to find a way to pay the best of them to keep producing stuff we want to hear and see, but the big studio, big distributor model won't be part of it. These guys are already dead, they just don't have the good sense to lie down.
As a minor aside, the linked OpenLogic survey is useless. They only polled the people who joined their webinar--people already involved enough to be interested in a comparison of FOSS servers. That's one heck of a selection bias.
Thousands of users and multiple data centers is not the time to ask major stakeholders to leave their comfort zone. "Major vendor FUD" is not the issue, assuming it exists at all. When I have a major investment at stake, I don't need a saleman to tell me where the risks are. The single biggest problem with FOSS is that there is no one to share the risks with.
The time to introduce FOSS is with small non-critical projects. It's about boiling frogs. It's also about demonstrating that community support works without the threat of cancelled contracts and lawsuits. That takes a while.
It also takes some guile. It's a bit like the early days of the PC. At that time the typical IS Manager's attitude to the PC was "over my dead body." So we sold to the end user departments using their office equipment budgets (word processors, fax, telephone, copier) and flew under the IS radar. In one large Canadian federal government department, we had over 1500 PC's and 5 networks interlinked with an X.25 WAN before the ADM/IS noticed (it was the X.25 that got us. WAN came out of his budget). By that time there was nothing he could do. The trick is to introduce it a little bit at a time until it reaches critical mass.
I don't know much about linux file systems, but now I know more than I want to. What idiot writes pointers to data that's not there yet?
The last non-trivial file system I worked on was on the Sigma 7, circa 1969, and its update sequence carefully avoided doing that; it's not like this is a new discovery. It's a basic engineering principle: "Make before Break."
And these guys have the effrontery to call themselves "software engineers."
On the other hand, they're working for free, so gift-horse and all that.
Odd. In my lexicon, a data warehouse is a read-only copy of the production database that's been denormalized to streamline queries. Why would anyone design one to slow down queries?
Slashdot Mirror
It's easy to bitch about Comic Sans, harder to find a replacement. What have you got that's informal, open, and legible down to six-point?
None of the linked sites has anything to offer beyond whining about Microsoft's monopoly on font choices. I suspect it would be more acceptable if Apple took it, changed a few bits and called it "Different Sans".
I thought "interweb" and "intertubes" had replaced "infobahn" as the mark of a teenynerd trying to sound kewl.
I'm curious: what do you think is easy to do in COBOL but not in Java?
Wrong question. The right question is what does COBOL do easily that java does not. The answer is large-scale batch transaction processing with complex data structures and huge datasets.
There's also a good argument to be made that one answer to your actual question is "write code that's provably correct by construction".
So you want to repeal the right to petition the government?
Language designers have learned a great deal in the last 40 years and most of it has found its way into modern versions of COBOL.
Nice story, but it doesn't say anything about COBOL.
I have a similar story about 30 programmers who spent two years writing java code and delivering nothing useful because the requirement called for two different architectures: one best served with a batch system, the other best served with a real-time system. What they need is COBOL and C, but what they know is java and struts. It's been another four years since I ran screaming from the building and they still haven't delivered anything useful.
Inept programmers will screw things up in any language.
Because some of the best flamebait is the truth.
They don't say 3000 times cheaper, Herbert. They say:
Depending on the workload, the capacity per dollar of SSDs needs to increase by a factor of 3-3000 for an SSD-based solution to break even with a diskbased solution.
Sometimes it's better to RTFA than to pull comments out of your ass.
Actually, it does make some sense as a side effect.
You may get something useful out of this report: http://www.nutritionandmetabolism.com/content/1/1/2
I don't think insulin has any role in protein synthesis, but it has a lot to do with weight gain, being that it drives fat storage.
The sources are a constantly updating target, but you can find more than enough to read by googling "insulin caffeine adenosine triglyceride lipogenesis". Make sure you have a few hours and a pad for doodling. The horrors of hyperinsulinemia make Amityville look like a church social.
Millions of dollars have been spent on well-designed, well-controlled studies in attempts to find some harm that coffee does. They have all failed. Humans have been drinking so much coffee for so long that if it did any harm at all, the results would be obvious.
One of the benefits of caffeine is that it interferes with insulin and its role in sweeping the glucose and fats out of your blood stream and hiving them off as triglycerides (we call this "you get fat"). If you suddenly stop caffeine intake, what you experience is a hypoglycemic crash when the backed-up oversupply of insulin cleans the sources of free energy out of your blood stream.
Proponents of Agile development and similar philosophies have not been touting the open source development model, as TFA does. My point is that Agile and open source communities solve different problems.
Open source development is not Agile. One of the critical activities in Agile development is paying some attention to the users.
Switch to the open source model of development where the only things that get implemented are the things the developers are interested in. With all due respect, this would be a return to the bad old days of mainframes when users had to put up with whatever the data processing department built and be happy that they had any automation at all.
One of the dumbest ideas I've seen on my screen in one devil of a long time.
Paraphrasing Cheryl B. Preston:
A generation of tech-savvy children is being exposed to religious material that is not age-appropriate, that they cannot fully process, and that they lack the judgment and experience to contextualize.
or
A generation of tech-savvy children is being exposed to neo-liberal propaganda that is not age-appropriate, that they cannot fully process, and that they lack the judgment and experience to contextualize.
or
A generation of tech-savvy children is being exposed to environmentalist hysteria that is not age-appropriate, that they cannot fully process, and that they lack the judgment and experience to contextualize.
And on and on and on...
The article is crap. Lauren doesn't turn down a Macbook Pro, she doesn't get that far because her budget is $1000 and she wants a 17" screen--both reasonable requirements.
McCracken's position is that if you can't get the Mac you want for $1,000, the solution is to boost your budget to $3,000. Going from that starting point, I would stop reading and go over to PC Mag for proper reviews.
I love the ad. As a sometime marketing guy, I look at this and wish I was that good. The main thing this video has going for it is that it deals with fact (the most Mac you can get for $1,000 is a 13" netbook+) rather than pandering to geek mythology the way the Apple ads did. McCracken had to misrepresent the ad to make a case for the Mac because he couldn't argue with the facts presented.
Of course I'm being a little unfair to Apple in this. The Apple ads were, as is usual for Apple, designed to stroke their existing customers, to make them feel cool and superior and "different", not to convert PC owners. Since the message was "in-house", so to speak, an excess of zeal is forgiveable.
What these folk fail to realize is that "musician" is no longer a profession--it's just an activity. It follows "photographer" and "journalist" down that trail marked by blogs, flickr, youTube and other broadcast media available to anyone with a PC.
In the long run, we're going to have to find a way to pay the best of them to keep producing stuff we want to hear and see, but the big studio, big distributor model won't be part of it. These guys are already dead, they just don't have the good sense to lie down.
Come back when you understand what "risk" means.
Visualize me shaking my head and rolling my eyes.
As a minor aside, the linked OpenLogic survey is useless. They only polled the people who joined their webinar--people already involved enough to be interested in a comparison of FOSS servers. That's one heck of a selection bias.
Thousands of users and multiple data centers is not the time to ask major stakeholders to leave their comfort zone. "Major vendor FUD" is not the issue, assuming it exists at all. When I have a major investment at stake, I don't need a saleman to tell me where the risks are. The single biggest problem with FOSS is that there is no one to share the risks with.
The time to introduce FOSS is with small non-critical projects. It's about boiling frogs. It's also about demonstrating that community support works without the threat of cancelled contracts and lawsuits. That takes a while.
It also takes some guile. It's a bit like the early days of the PC. At that time the typical IS Manager's attitude to the PC was "over my dead body." So we sold to the end user departments using their office equipment budgets (word processors, fax, telephone, copier) and flew under the IS radar. In one large Canadian federal government department, we had over 1500 PC's and 5 networks interlinked with an X.25 WAN before the ADM/IS noticed (it was the X.25 that got us. WAN came out of his budget). By that time there was nothing he could do. The trick is to introduce it a little bit at a time until it reaches critical mass.
Chuckle
I don't know much about linux file systems, but now I know more than I want to. What idiot writes pointers to data that's not there yet?
The last non-trivial file system I worked on was on the Sigma 7, circa 1969, and its update sequence carefully avoided doing that; it's not like this is a new discovery. It's a basic engineering principle: "Make before Break."
And these guys have the effrontery to call themselves "software engineers."
On the other hand, they're working for free, so gift-horse and all that.
Odd. In my lexicon, a data warehouse is a read-only copy of the production database that's been denormalized to streamline queries. Why would anyone design one to slow down queries?
Prepare to be impressed. We've been able to hide the Windows task bar since Win'98.
You'll have to list the problems with virtual desktops because they work perfectly on my Win XP system.