It is not too different from drug addiction. People playing hours at a time, while their real life slips away. They could be learning a language, or an instrument, or a working toward a degree, or reading books that broaden their knowledge and horizons, but instead they are glued to a virtual world that leaves them with nothing except for memories of non-real experiences. It is not too different from masturbating all day.
Yes, as does the Federal government. It is even worse at the Federal level, because there is more at stake. At least with 50 states, some of them will work well. One can compare, and one can even move if things are a mess. But moving out of the US is a much more difficult change.
Government is always corrupt - always. It is a matter of degree.
One of the main problems is that the ISPs are too large. The Federal government should break them up. Also, local communities and states should set up their own local fiber. Some have. That illustrates my point: some communities are less corrupt and can do it. When talking about government, having only half be corrupt is a win.
No, just saying that the minority should not have the will of the majority imposed on it. The minority can always organize and make decisions for themselves, as long as their basic rights and freedoms are protected. The US is a republic and a federation for a reason. It was not designed as a popular democracy. It is a federation of states - "Federal" government. That means that each state is its own autonomous "state" ("state" means "nation").
The European Union is set up like that. It is a federation of independent nations. People often point to European examples of good governance. It works well because each member of the European Union has its own health care, its own system, customized for its own population and culture.
The US is too big and diverse for a single government imposing its will on every corner of the country.
Hi - you should. It is a terrible situation. The Federal government has allowed these telcos to combine into these monolithic near monopolies, which lobby to block community broadband. Local communities should be the entities that should run fiber to the home, just like they run water and sewer lines - via a local utility company.
They have voting power over their local issues, which is as it should be. If the majority were to decide on every issue, then every minority would be at risk of losing its rights. Imagine if there was a proposed law that people who work in IT should give 30% of their income to everyone else: the majority of the population - who do not work in IT - would surely vote for it! This is why the majority should not make the rules: it is why we have a senate with two senators from each state, and it is why we have the electoral college - to prevent the "tyranny of the majority" and give each state some authority to have a say about what rules are imposed on it by the other more populous states.
Yes, you are right. It is the battle between moneyed interests and the public interest. My feeling is that that battle plays out at the Federal level as well. I am a believer in a publicly utility for the last mile. But the place to wage that war is not in the Federal government - it is in the local community. Don't you think? Do you want the Federal government meddling in your local utilities, e.g., your water and electricity?
I don't want to pay for fiber to rural homes. If someone wants to live in the mountains, let them or their local community pay for their infrastructure.
I had read the original article. They did not actually reverse time. What they did was cause events that normally only go one way in time to go the other way: e.g., breaking an egg - one can't cause an egg to re-assemble. Well, they did, so to speak. But it did so in the forward time direction.
Guess the programmers don't know about compartmentalization, and the ops people don't know about intrusion detection. http://www.transition2agile.co...
I am intrigued by Rust, but have not had a chance to use it. It attempts to solve the object alias problem, but without resorting to a functional paradigm. Swift tries to deal with the problem as well, but the language is too picky.
I prefer typesafe languages. I have found that with a typesafe language, I can refactor code and not introduce errors in the process.
I find the Java ecosystem to be enormously powerful - the well documented libraries, the many tools, and the backward compatibility. Backward compatibility is really important: one does not want to have to spend all one's time updating everything all the time because APIs have changed, yet one does want to use the latest components, to address vulnerabilities, etc. The Ruby community and Go community do not seem to appreciate the value of backward compatibility, thinking that if they version their APIs they are good to go - it is a nuisance.
Java is too verbose. I also wish that Java allowed you to create objects on the stack. However, I like that one can always tell what type a variable is by finding its declaration. I have spent wasted hours reverse engineering other people's Python and Ruby, in a quest to figure out the type of some object being returned by a method. I have spent wasted hours trying to figure out the source in which something in a Ruby program was declared, looking in required file after file and sometimes doing whole file system searches.
I am a DevOps consultant and visit lots of places, and Java is the number one language for back end services. It is almost universal. Other languages are used for specialized things, such as Python for machine learning, because the ML community has embraced Python. For front end, Javascript is the most popular, but that will likely change as alternatives grow in popularity (e.g., Kotlin).
Also, Amazon has announced support for Java, as has IBM/Red Hat, so we are not dependent on Oracle.
The JVM ecosystem is enormously successful and robust. Languages like Scala and many others rely on it - not just Java.
I am not advocating for Java - just stating the reality that I see in my work. I don't much like any of the languages that are in use today.
But it has horrendous maintainability characteristics. So many hours I have spent reverse engineering someone else's Python just to determine what kind of object a method returned in different situations.
Python is important today because machine learning folks use it - but that's because they don't know any better - they are scientists and tend to work on very small teams and are not concerned with software engineering best practices. If you want to build something that is part of a much larger whole, and that gets shared across teams over time, use a typesafe language - you will save some heart attacks.
Slashdot Mirror
It is not too different from drug addiction. People playing hours at a time, while their real life slips away. They could be learning a language, or an instrument, or a working toward a degree, or reading books that broaden their knowledge and horizons, but instead they are glued to a virtual world that leaves them with nothing except for memories of non-real experiences. It is not too different from masturbating all day.
The petitioners wanted Google to create a "bubble" that only had a certain pre-ordained point of view.
Although drowning NYC - I have mixed feelings about that ;-)
In most communities, electric service is provided through a local utility company that is regulated because it is a monopoly.
You might consider satellite Internet, although I don't think it works well for phone calls or for video streaming.
The ethos of "coding" is one of the reasons why IT is such a mess: https://www.theatlantic.com/te...
Yes, as does the Federal government. It is even worse at the Federal level, because there is more at stake. At least with 50 states, some of them will work well. One can compare, and one can even move if things are a mess. But moving out of the US is a much more difficult change.
Government is always corrupt - always. It is a matter of degree.
One of the main problems is that the ISPs are too large. The Federal government should break them up. Also, local communities and states should set up their own local fiber. Some have. That illustrates my point: some communities are less corrupt and can do it. When talking about government, having only half be corrupt is a win.
No, just saying that the minority should not have the will of the majority imposed on it. The minority can always organize and make decisions for themselves, as long as their basic rights and freedoms are protected. The US is a republic and a federation for a reason. It was not designed as a popular democracy. It is a federation of states - "Federal" government. That means that each state is its own autonomous "state" ("state" means "nation").
The European Union is set up like that. It is a federation of independent nations. People often point to European examples of good governance. It works well because each member of the European Union has its own health care, its own system, customized for its own population and culture.
The US is too big and diverse for a single government imposing its will on every corner of the country.
Yes. Perhaps things are so far awry, it might be the only way...
Yes. That's the core problem. Local communities should be running fiber to the home.
Hi - you should. It is a terrible situation. The Federal government has allowed these telcos to combine into these monolithic near monopolies, which lobby to block community broadband. Local communities should be the entities that should run fiber to the home, just like they run water and sewer lines - via a local utility company.
They have voting power over their local issues, which is as it should be. If the majority were to decide on every issue, then every minority would be at risk of losing its rights. Imagine if there was a proposed law that people who work in IT should give 30% of their income to everyone else: the majority of the population - who do not work in IT - would surely vote for it! This is why the majority should not make the rules: it is why we have a senate with two senators from each state, and it is why we have the electoral college - to prevent the "tyranny of the majority" and give each state some authority to have a say about what rules are imposed on it by the other more populous states.
Yes, you are right. It is the battle between moneyed interests and the public interest. My feeling is that that battle plays out at the Federal level as well. I am a believer in a publicly utility for the last mile. But the place to wage that war is not in the Federal government - it is in the local community. Don't you think? Do you want the Federal government meddling in your local utilities, e.g., your water and electricity?
I don't want to pay for fiber to rural homes. If someone wants to live in the mountains, let them or their local community pay for their infrastructure.
I had read the original article. They did not actually reverse time. What they did was cause events that normally only go one way in time to go the other way: e.g., breaking an egg - one can't cause an egg to re-assemble. Well, they did, so to speak. But it did so in the forward time direction.
Yeah, they needed Clint Eastwood to shoot the bad and the ugly!
Guess the programmers don't know about compartmentalization, and the ops people don't know about intrusion detection. http://www.transition2agile.co...
I am intrigued by Rust, but have not had a chance to use it. It attempts to solve the object alias problem, but without resorting to a functional paradigm. Swift tries to deal with the problem as well, but the language is too picky.
I prefer typesafe languages. I have found that with a typesafe language, I can refactor code and not introduce errors in the process.
I find the Java ecosystem to be enormously powerful - the well documented libraries, the many tools, and the backward compatibility. Backward compatibility is really important: one does not want to have to spend all one's time updating everything all the time because APIs have changed, yet one does want to use the latest components, to address vulnerabilities, etc. The Ruby community and Go community do not seem to appreciate the value of backward compatibility, thinking that if they version their APIs they are good to go - it is a nuisance.
Java is too verbose. I also wish that Java allowed you to create objects on the stack. However, I like that one can always tell what type a variable is by finding its declaration. I have spent wasted hours reverse engineering other people's Python and Ruby, in a quest to figure out the type of some object being returned by a method. I have spent wasted hours trying to figure out the source in which something in a Ruby program was declared, looking in required file after file and sometimes doing whole file system searches.
What is your favorite language?
- and a really idiotic one.
I am a DevOps consultant and visit lots of places, and Java is the number one language for back end services. It is almost universal. Other languages are used for specialized things, such as Python for machine learning, because the ML community has embraced Python. For front end, Javascript is the most popular, but that will likely change as alternatives grow in popularity (e.g., Kotlin).
Also, Amazon has announced support for Java, as has IBM/Red Hat, so we are not dependent on Oracle.
The JVM ecosystem is enormously successful and robust. Languages like Scala and many others rely on it - not just Java.
I am not advocating for Java - just stating the reality that I see in my work. I don't much like any of the languages that are in use today.
My own article on this has a more extensive list of what is wrong in IT, and why all the technology is so non-robust and untrustworthy.
Let's see, when he published his book The Road Ahead in 1994, he barely mentioned the Internet.
And pretty much every "innovation" from Microsoft under his leadership was stolen or purchased from someone else.
Not to mention the great technologies that they crushed out of existence (e.g., the Go corporation's PenPoint OS.
If only the "government" would pay me to do whatever I want, instead of what is economically useful to others!!!
They are enjoying their profits in the real world.
And then I'd use the next few payments to afford to take two weeks off and go on an additional vacation!
Until we figure out how to write secure apps and apps that don't crash or need continual updates, ambient computing is a dystopia.
But it has horrendous maintainability characteristics. So many hours I have spent reverse engineering someone else's Python just to determine what kind of object a method returned in different situations.
Python is important today because machine learning folks use it - but that's because they don't know any better - they are scientists and tend to work on very small teams and are not concerned with software engineering best practices. If you want to build something that is part of a much larger whole, and that gets shared across teams over time, use a typesafe language - you will save some heart attacks.