Heh, that might be partially true. However I'd like to see a graph of "breakthroughs" produced each decade. I don't think current decades would fall far behind. And we'd have to agree on the definition of "breakthrough". Maybe its just that current breakthroughs are less visible, less flashy.
However, there are also things called "disruptive technologies". Maybe they are not "breakthroughs" per se, but they do change the way we do things. Internet is one of them. Mobile phones is another. I really like ideas that disrupt established markets and change the way we lead our lives.
I consider cyberpunk to be the most flashy and sexy Sci-Fi to come out after the golden era of space operas. From exploration of outer space it turned inwards. It was about the usage of IT to organize societies and people's lives. I think this area is still open to innovations and breakthroughs. I believe new forms of government can be build utilising IT that are more advanced than democracy/capitalism. New ways of association and collaboration (like open-source development) are already cropping up that would have been unthinkable 50 years ago.
When I look at those pictures it makes me sad and very mad at the same time.
What happened to humanity? We used to dream about bright space future, flying cars, scientific progress and stuff like that. And we had hope to achieve all of this if we put enough effort into it. And now I think we lost that hope.
I don't see people dreaming about anything more than getting a million dollars and doing 2 chicks at the same time...
And you can bash soviets all you wish, but they had one thing right- the education was non-religious and pushed belief in sience most of the time. (Well, there were propaganda bits and belief in communist ideals, but these were easily discarded and did not interfere with science). I think soviet union was the first and only truly non-religious state. And that is something to be admired.
Don't get me wrong. I realize that the technological progress now is faster than it ever was. But you get no rush thinking about it anymore. It is not considered exciting and sexy and bright. It fails to captivate the minds of people. And I think it should be.
Java runs just fine under Linux. I have been using it extensively for last 6 years under Linux and had very little trouble.
And especially now, when Java is GPL, and GCJ is maturing, there will be even less incompatibilities, and ones that arise will be fixed. If not by Sun, then by Linux community.
So I vote for Linux + PostgreSQL + Java. Rock solid application platform, uses real database, can be made lightning fast for web applications and doesn't cost a dime. Comparable in capabilities to any.NET/Windows/MSSQL or Websphere/Solaris/Oracle platforms. There are cases when you need more powerful solutions, but they are few and far between, and for 95% of problems Linux/PostgreSQL/Java is more than enough.
And why should Sun be interested in screwing up Linux java implementation? That would only hurt their business and drive people away from Java. They can offer added value with Solaris and they can offer added value with Sun hardware and they can offer support and make money that way.
I don't think.NET is more reliable than Java. Where did you get the figures for reliability?
.NET does not run on Unix/Linux, and a lot of companies run their servers on Unix/Linux.
.NET does not have a comparable open-source support like jakarta.apache.org for libraries, frameworks, unit testing tools etc..NET versions of popular java libraries/frameworks/tools are sub-par or non-existent or commercial.
.NET ties you to a single vendor that is hostile to its customers. Can you run ASP.NET web applications on other servers than Microsoft IIS?
Java is still improving rapidly.
.NET might be better for Windows GUI programming than Java, but that's it.
As far as I remember, intrenational laws of war forbid using weapons that blind beople.
And this WILL blind people. If used from too far away, it won't be efficient so they'll make it more powerful, then used from close range it will make permanent injuries to the eyes. Similar like tasers aren't supposed to kill people, but they do.
As far as I remember, there was a project in the military to make a similar weapon, using UV laser, but it was scrapped because it was against the international law.
Of course there are precautions that can be used against this weapon, propper googles should do it, but not everyone will have them.
The reason Soviet-Socialist-Planned-Economy (they were NOT communist) countries got ruined by corruption was because that system had no resistance to corruption whatsoever. It was too easy to steal from companies, collective farms, factories, etc because they all belonged to the government, so nobody really cared. Stealing from government was not considered a bad thing by the people.
And the leading caste- Communist Party only wanted good living for themselves, didn't care about much else.
Democracy is also flawed system, but it kind of worked until corporations and corporation controlled media weren't that much powerful. I'm not sure we can say it still works as it supposed to now. It works in some countries, but these are few.
The real challenge is designing a system that works with ignorant people, greedy/powerful corporations and stupid/corrupt politicians. I spent quite enough time thinking about it, and came up with nothing. If you have any ideas on the subject, I'd be very interested to hear them. The closest I came up with was educating people, restricting corporations, restricting mass media/marketing, very strict laws on monopolies to preserve free market and special controls on government officials. But this approach would require some very heavy handed government to be implemented.
Read Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson. It deals with some of the issues of nanorevolution. I think it is still too far away to matter for us.
But I always use this example for people who are too pro-copyrights. I say if you had technology duplicate real things cheaply, what would you do? Restrict duplication to keep current social order in place? Or allow it freely and end world powerty in a week? We have information-powerty right now.
I think lifetime copyright for authors + 14 years after their death is more than reasonable. And about companies- well they are immortal, so just 14 years should do it.
And it should depend on industry/medium. Some pop songs or software isn't worth anything after 2 years, and some things last half a century.
There were times in the DOS days when you could go between the fields with up/down arrows. Very effective and user friendly. And enter would enter the data on this field and move to the next one instead of submitting the form. I think Fox-Pro used it, Clipper for DOS used it, Volkov/Norton commander used it. Far commander still uses it. So it was much like using the typewriter:
[data data data] ENTER
[data data data] ENTER
[data for the last field] ENTER- saves record/submits form, asks if you really want to save the data, etc.
Only later with introduction of Windows tab key got used to move between field and we needed godawful unintuitive shift-tab to move back. And Enter key was almost forgotten when entering forms, because if you hit it before entering all the needed data, you get in trouble. And it is the key that was supposed to be hit very often and designed to be easy to reach, unlike the tab key.
And text mode interfaces of the day were quite friendly. For example in Volkov/Norton commander (and some other software) there was a key bar that said what would each of F1..F10 keys do. If you press and hold CTRL, they would change and say what would CTRL+F1..F10 keys do. Same with alt, shift, etc. This was 10x more useful than any toolbars, and now most of Fxx keys are not used unless you work with an application for years and know all the hotkeys by heart.
And don't get me started on advantages of 2 panel file managers vs many windows drag & drop. But that is another topic.
I think it is possible to design and implement an efficient and user friendly interface that would use much more keyboard and much less mouse. It was almost done for crying out loud. But then it was forgotten because along came the shiny stuff. And Linux GUIs suffer from the mouse-clickines just as much as Windows ones, maybe worse.
2 old women with Alzheimer's decide to go to visit the 3rd one. She knows she forgets things, so she goes to the kitchen and writes a note on the fridge:
Things to do:
1. Serve some coffee
2. Talk about life and weather and stuff
3. Watch TV.
When the guests come, she goes to the kitchen reads:
1. Serve some coffee. So she does
After some times, she goes to the kitchen and reads:
1. Serve some coffee. So she does again
Some time and 20 cups of coffee later the two guests decide to leave. Just after they leave the door, one of them says:
"That old witch, she didn't even serve us coffee!".
Another says:
"It's a good thing we didn't even visit her"
What about Transhumanism? Using technology to make us MORE human? More moral? More ethical? Maybe transhumanism would open us the way to new order of society/government, because this fake-brainwashed-democracy/capitalism/polluting-sh ort-term-thinking-corporatocracy shit is starting to show its drawbacks more and more.
Not all Sci-Fi/possible futures is about robots running around wanting to genocide all humanity. Robots/cybernetic enhancements could actually be good for us.
I look back and I wonder what happened. Belief in science and progress is all but gone. What went wrong? We went from society of people with a vision of bright future and grand goals to a society of sheep that sees nothing more than getting a paycheck and buying some latest most-marketed useless shit. Was it the cold war? Was it because advancement of science wasn't rapid enough or didn't offer enough improvement of daily life? Or am I just looking at the past with rose-colored glasses?
There are quite a few games made for win98/95 that I sometimes like to pull out and play. And there are quite a few of thatm that fail to run well inder win2k/XP.
X-Com Interceptor is one of them. There are lots of others too.
Umberto Eko rules. I give Focault's Pendulum for my friends to read as a test of character:) (Another test of character is playing The Dark Heart of UUKRUL:) And if you cannot manage Focault's Pendulum, I highly recommend "The Name of the Rose". Both the book and the movie are wonderful.
And Neil Stephenson is quite good too. Best cyberpunk I've read in years.
And Dan Brown? I read Da Vinci Code after I read Eko, and the book SUCKED. Othere than "OMG OMG Jesus had a wife and kids !!!1" there was nothing to it.
NATO is threatening Russia? NATO fighters in Baltic states?
After Russia has occupied Baltic states TWICE, and performed GENOCIDE in there, there should be some darn NATO fighters in there and more.
If you are a people who cannot live in freedom without some strong handed Czar, that would be fine with me. Except most Russian Czars like to go to war, and they screw up their neighbors real bad. Its much harder to go to war with proper democracy. And if you don't go to open war, you meddle with affairs of other countries with KGB.
The sad thing is, USA, the paragon of freedom and democracy, turns out not to be much better. Only they do world domination much better, with profits and Coca-Cola and movies for everyone. And almost everyone loves it.
We need a new form of government real bad. Democracy collapses into consumerism and corporation rule quite quickly, which destroys freedom of thought and free market. So it doesn't work as it is supposed to. And others are worse.
You should watch the movie "Idiocracy". It is written by Mike Judge, who also wrote "Office Space". It is not that good, but it is still fun, and raises a couple of points:)
I second this. MOM was a very fine game. What I would like to see, is a RPG game set in MoM world where all the factions are controlled by computer, and you act as a single hero. You could recruit some army, go explore ruins, sack enemy towns, level up, get new EQ, etc. While the world would realisticaly respond to your actions, i.e. you sack enemy town- it doesn't produce more troops in that area, and after a while your faction sends some settlers over there, etc.
Such game would take a darn good AI though. Oh, and it could be MMORPG too, many heroes fighting for their own factions in a dynamically generated world. Quests and storyline would be very difficult to implement though.
Some of the civilian maps were of such poor quality, that people used to joke that they are there "dlia zabluzdenia protivnika"- to confuse the enemy:)
Besides, I read that map companies sometimes make non-existing dead-end streets in their maps as a way to fingerprint them and to know it's their map if some other company steals and reprints it.
My old home PC mobo (Soltek for a 1 GHz Athlon) was working for ~1 year with bulged caps before I replaced it. It got less and less stable over time, until i got fed up with it. I got a replacement mobo for ~25 USD from a wholesale supplier. It was used, borked, and had caps resoldered in at the supplier, and came with a 1 year warranty. I'm still using that system, it is fast enough for me.
My GF had a similar system, also with bulged caps, also had problems with stability. They also got fixed when mobo and power supply was replaced.
Anyway, it is not too difficult/expensive to replace caps yourself if you have a soldering iron and some free time. I think they should cost 0.5-1 USD each, and for that price you will probably get good ones that won't go bust in a couple of years.
When was the last time motherboard manufacturers used quality Japanese parts instead of bootleg Chinese knockoffs? And Gigabyte is guilty of doing this as much as every other motherboard maker.
Agreed that hard drivers fail more often, but over last 3-4 years, we had to replace/repair a lot motherboards because of busted capacitors. For office work, computers are useful for ~5 years now, and a lot of capacitors do fail during that time. A lot of motherboard manufacturers are using cheaper, lower-spec capacitors these days, and they don't last long.
I agree this civilisation is going the wrong way, but these premises look very suspicious.
About premise fourteen. First, never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity. Nobody teaches people to hate living things, people don't hate living things and spend their life fulfilling their urge to destroy life. They just don't care most of the time, and if they can improve their own lives while not caring about wildlife, they do it. It's all about gread and short sight. Hate doesn't enter into it.
About premise ten. The culture is not driven by death urge, this would not be profitable. This culture is driven by advertisment induced urge to consume tons of useless shit.
About premise six. I don't know what can be done to change this situation. But people crying to "put halt to it" also rarely do. How do you make billions of people to change their lifestyle overnight? Put all of them in prison? Stick guns to their heads and force them to do what you say for the sake of saving earth? How do you gain more power than corporations/individuals who profit from the current way of life? How do you make people join your cause if they are already living in comfort and don't want to get up from their couch?
The problem with earth, is that earth is commons, and tragedy of commons (see the wikipedia) applies to it. It will always be profitable to overuse/overexploit earth for personal gain, and screw the others. Regulation and government intervention can slow this down, but only a little.
Ok, English is not my native language so I might have said something I did not mean. I didn't want to say that C++ = good coders, PHP/Java/C#/etc = bad coders. What I wanted to say was:
C++ + good coder = good results
C++ + newbie coder = horrible results
PHP/Java/C#/etc + good coder = good or very good results
PHP/Java/C#/etc + newbie coder = acceptable or barely acceptable results
And it takes much more time/experience to learn to use C++ effectively than it does to use Java/PHP. And time means money. And after you teach your just hired newbie how to code well while paying him salary, he leaves for another company where he gets more pay.
Oh, and I agree with JustNiz that having good programmers is always a good thing. Of course it is, but in reality, you don't always get the team you want. And about not using 3rd party libraries- what do you do? command line stuff? Math/science? You are a lucky man then. While making these might get away without 3rd party libraries, but if you need GUI, compression (like gzip), various file formats (XML), database interfaces, internet protocols like HTTP, web, clustering, anything- you are gonna need some. Oh, and what if you switch jobs? Who owns the copyright on your library of reusable components? You or your current employer?
P.S. I code web apps in java. So don't think I disrespect people who use something other than C++.
Of course surgeons don't use plastic scissors. But how often do you need a surgeon? Most of the time you need a cheap tailor to make you a suit. And that's when scissors come in handy.
C++ can do wonders when used by highly experienced people. But most of the time, it is more cost effective to get entry level coders and use PHP/Java/C#/whatever. You will get a (somewhat) working product cheaper and possibly faster. And time to market and cost is often more important than maintainability/quality.
And don't get me started on 3rd party C++ libraries. You'll need tons of them to move a finger, and you'll spend more time finding/eavluating libraries than coding. This problem is getting worse for other languages too...
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, that might be partially true. However I'd like to see a graph of "breakthroughs" produced each decade. I don't think current decades would fall far behind. And we'd have to agree on the definition of "breakthrough". Maybe its just that current breakthroughs are less visible, less flashy.
However, there are also things called "disruptive technologies". Maybe they are not "breakthroughs" per se, but they do change the way we do things. Internet is one of them. Mobile phones is another. I really like ideas that disrupt established markets and change the way we lead our lives.
I consider cyberpunk to be the most flashy and sexy Sci-Fi to come out after the golden era of space operas. From exploration of outer space it turned inwards. It was about the usage of IT to organize societies and people's lives. I think this area is still open to innovations and breakthroughs. I believe new forms of government can be build utilising IT that are more advanced than democracy/capitalism. New ways of association and collaboration (like open-source development) are already cropping up that would have been unthinkable 50 years ago.
--Coder
When I look at those pictures it makes me sad and very mad at the same time.
What happened to humanity? We used to dream about bright space future, flying cars, scientific progress and stuff like that. And we had hope to achieve all of this if we put enough effort into it. And now I think we lost that hope.
I don't see people dreaming about anything more than getting a million dollars and doing 2 chicks at the same time...
And you can bash soviets all you wish, but they had one thing right- the education was non-religious and pushed belief in sience most of the time. (Well, there were propaganda bits and belief in communist ideals, but these were easily discarded and did not interfere with science). I think soviet union was the first and only truly non-religious state. And that is something to be admired.
Don't get me wrong. I realize that the technological progress now is faster than it ever was. But you get no rush thinking about it anymore. It is not considered exciting and sexy and bright. It fails to captivate the minds of people. And I think it should be.
--Coder
Java runs just fine under Linux. I have been using it extensively for last 6 years under Linux and had very little trouble.
.NET/Windows/MSSQL or Websphere/Solaris/Oracle platforms. There are cases when you need more powerful solutions, but they are few and far between, and for 95% of problems Linux/PostgreSQL/Java is more than enough.
And especially now, when Java is GPL, and GCJ is maturing, there will be even less incompatibilities, and ones that arise will be fixed. If not by Sun, then by Linux community.
So I vote for Linux + PostgreSQL + Java. Rock solid application platform, uses real database, can be made lightning fast for web applications and doesn't cost a dime. Comparable in capabilities to any
And why should Sun be interested in screwing up Linux java implementation? That would only hurt their business and drive people away from Java. They can offer added value with Solaris and they can offer added value with Sun hardware and they can offer support and make money that way.
--Coder
I don't think .NET is more reliable than Java. Where did you get the figures for reliability?
.NET does not run on Unix/Linux, and a lot of companies run their servers on Unix/Linux.
.NET does not have a comparable open-source support like jakarta.apache.org for libraries, frameworks, unit testing tools etc. .NET versions of popular java libraries/frameworks/tools are sub-par or non-existent or commercial.
.NET ties you to a single vendor that is hostile to its customers. Can you run ASP.NET web applications on other servers than Microsoft IIS?
.NET might be better for Windows GUI programming than Java, but that's it.
Java is still improving rapidly.
Java is not going anywhere anytime soon.
--Coder
As far as I remember, intrenational laws of war forbid using weapons that blind beople.
And this WILL blind people. If used from too far away, it won't be efficient so they'll make it more powerful, then used from close range it will make permanent injuries to the eyes. Similar like tasers aren't supposed to kill people, but they do.
As far as I remember, there was a project in the military to make a similar weapon, using UV laser, but it was scrapped because it was against the international law.
Of course there are precautions that can be used against this weapon, propper googles should do it, but not everyone will have them.
--Coder
The reason Soviet-Socialist-Planned-Economy (they were NOT communist) countries got ruined by corruption was because that system had no resistance to corruption whatsoever. It was too easy to steal from companies, collective farms, factories, etc because they all belonged to the government, so nobody really cared. Stealing from government was not considered a bad thing by the people.
And the leading caste- Communist Party only wanted good living for themselves, didn't care about much else.
Democracy is also flawed system, but it kind of worked until corporations and corporation controlled media weren't that much powerful. I'm not sure we can say it still works as it supposed to now. It works in some countries, but these are few.
The real challenge is designing a system that works with ignorant people, greedy/powerful corporations and stupid/corrupt politicians. I spent quite enough time thinking about it, and came up with nothing. If you have any ideas on the subject, I'd be very interested to hear them. The closest I came up with was educating people, restricting corporations, restricting mass media/marketing, very strict laws on monopolies to preserve free market and special controls on government officials. But this approach would require some very heavy handed government to be implemented.
--Coder
Heh,
Read Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson. It deals with some of the issues of nanorevolution. I think it is still too far away to matter for us.
But I always use this example for people who are too pro-copyrights. I say if you had technology duplicate real things cheaply, what would you do? Restrict duplication to keep current social order in place? Or allow it freely and end world powerty in a week? We have information-powerty right now.
I think lifetime copyright for authors + 14 years after their death is more than reasonable. And about companies- well they are immortal, so just 14 years should do it.
And it should depend on industry/medium. Some pop songs or software isn't worth anything after 2 years, and some things last half a century.
--Coder
There were times in the DOS days when you could go between the fields with up/down arrows. Very effective and user friendly. And enter would enter the data on this field and move to the next one instead of submitting the form. I think Fox-Pro used it, Clipper for DOS used it, Volkov/Norton commander used it. Far commander still uses it. So it was much like using the typewriter:
[data data data] ENTER
[data data data] ENTER
[data for the last field] ENTER- saves record/submits form, asks if you really want to save the data, etc.
Only later with introduction of Windows tab key got used to move between field and we needed godawful unintuitive shift-tab to move back. And Enter key was almost forgotten when entering forms, because if you hit it before entering all the needed data, you get in trouble. And it is the key that was supposed to be hit very often and designed to be easy to reach, unlike the tab key.
And text mode interfaces of the day were quite friendly. For example in Volkov/Norton commander (and some other software) there was a key bar that said what would each of F1..F10 keys do. If you press and hold CTRL, they would change and say what would CTRL+F1..F10 keys do. Same with alt, shift, etc. This was 10x more useful than any toolbars, and now most of Fxx keys are not used unless you work with an application for years and know all the hotkeys by heart.
And don't get me started on advantages of 2 panel file managers vs many windows drag & drop. But that is another topic.
I think it is possible to design and implement an efficient and user friendly interface that would use much more keyboard and much less mouse. It was almost done for crying out loud. But then it was forgotten because along came the shiny stuff. And Linux GUIs suffer from the mouse-clickines just as much as Windows ones, maybe worse.
--Coder
I have a better one.
2 old women with Alzheimer's decide to go to visit the 3rd one. She knows she forgets things, so she goes to the kitchen and writes a note on the fridge:
Things to do:
1. Serve some coffee
2. Talk about life and weather and stuff
3. Watch TV.
When the guests come, she goes to the kitchen reads:
1. Serve some coffee. So she does
After some times, she goes to the kitchen and reads:
1. Serve some coffee. So she does again
Some time and 20 cups of coffee later the two guests decide to leave. Just after they leave the door, one of them says:
"That old witch, she didn't even serve us coffee!".
Another says:
"It's a good thing we didn't even visit her"
--Coder
Have you seen it? Go watch it, even if you don't especially like anime :)
:)
Then come back and tell me what you think
--Coder
What about Transhumanism? Using technology to make us MORE human? More moral? More ethical? Maybe transhumanism would open us the way to new order of society/government, because this fake-brainwashed-democracy/capitalism/polluting-sh ort-term-thinking-corporatocracy shit is starting to show its drawbacks more and more.
Not all Sci-Fi/possible futures is about robots running around wanting to genocide all humanity. Robots/cybernetic enhancements could actually be good for us.
I look back and I wonder what happened. Belief in science and progress is all but gone. What went wrong? We went from society of people with a vision of bright future and grand goals to a society of sheep that sees nothing more than getting a paycheck and buying some latest most-marketed useless shit. Was it the cold war? Was it because advancement of science wasn't rapid enough or didn't offer enough improvement of daily life? Or am I just looking at the past with rose-colored glasses?
--Coder
There are quite a few games made for win98/95 that I sometimes like to pull out and play. And there are quite a few of thatm that fail to run well inder win2k/XP.
X-Com Interceptor is one of them. There are lots of others too.
--Coder
Umberto Eko rules. I give Focault's Pendulum for my friends to read as a test of character :) (Another test of character is playing The Dark Heart of UUKRUL :) And if you cannot manage Focault's Pendulum, I highly recommend "The Name of the Rose". Both the book and the movie are wonderful.
And Neil Stephenson is quite good too. Best cyberpunk I've read in years.
And Dan Brown? I read Da Vinci Code after I read Eko, and the book SUCKED. Othere than "OMG OMG Jesus had a wife and kids !!!1" there was nothing to it.
--Coder
NATO is threatening Russia? NATO fighters in Baltic states?
After Russia has occupied Baltic states TWICE, and performed GENOCIDE in there, there should be some darn NATO fighters in there and more.
If you are a people who cannot live in freedom without some strong handed Czar, that would be fine with me. Except most Russian Czars like to go to war, and they screw up their neighbors real bad. Its much harder to go to war with proper democracy. And if you don't go to open war, you meddle with affairs of other countries with KGB.
The sad thing is, USA, the paragon of freedom and democracy, turns out not to be much better. Only they do world domination much better, with profits and Coca-Cola and movies for everyone. And almost everyone loves it.
We need a new form of government real bad. Democracy collapses into consumerism and corporation rule quite quickly, which destroys freedom of thought and free market. So it doesn't work as it is supposed to. And others are worse.
--Coder
The funny thing is, this was done once, in ancient Greece, the birthplace in democracy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism
I wish they would implement this in modern democracy too...
--Coder
You should watch the movie "Idiocracy". It is written by Mike Judge, who also wrote "Office Space". It is not that good, but it is still fun, and raises a couple of points :)
IMDB Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
--Coder
I second this. MOM was a very fine game. What I would like to see, is a RPG game set in MoM world where all the factions are controlled by computer, and you act as a single hero. You could recruit some army, go explore ruins, sack enemy towns, level up, get new EQ, etc. While the world would realisticaly respond to your actions, i.e. you sack enemy town- it doesn't produce more troops in that area, and after a while your faction sends some settlers over there, etc.
Such game would take a darn good AI though. Oh, and it could be MMORPG too, many heroes fighting for their own factions in a dynamically generated world. Quests and storyline would be very difficult to implement though.
--Coder
Some of the civilian maps were of such poor quality, that people used to joke that they are there "dlia zabluzdenia protivnika"- to confuse the enemy :)
Besides, I read that map companies sometimes make non-existing dead-end streets in their maps as a way to fingerprint them and to know it's their map if some other company steals and reprints it.
--Coder
I'll second that, I'd pay 50$ to see this movie too :)
--Coder
Sorry for late reply,
My old home PC mobo (Soltek for a 1 GHz Athlon) was working for ~1 year with bulged caps before I replaced it. It got less and less stable over time, until i got fed up with it. I got a replacement mobo for ~25 USD from a wholesale supplier. It was used, borked, and had caps resoldered in at the supplier, and came with a 1 year warranty. I'm still using that system, it is fast enough for me.
My GF had a similar system, also with bulged caps, also had problems with stability. They also got fixed when mobo and power supply was replaced.
Anyway, it is not too difficult/expensive to replace caps yourself if you have a soldering iron and some free time. I think they should cost 0.5-1 USD each, and for that price you will probably get good ones that won't go bust in a couple of years.
--Coder
When was the last time motherboard manufacturers used quality Japanese parts instead of bootleg Chinese knockoffs? And Gigabyte is guilty of doing this as much as every other motherboard maker.
--Coder
Agreed that hard drivers fail more often, but over last 3-4 years, we had to replace/repair a lot motherboards because of busted capacitors. For office work, computers are useful for ~5 years now, and a lot of capacitors do fail during that time. A lot of motherboard manufacturers are using cheaper, lower-spec capacitors these days, and they don't last long.
--Coder
I agree this civilisation is going the wrong way, but these premises look very suspicious.
About premise fourteen. First, never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity. Nobody teaches people to hate living things, people don't hate living things and spend their life fulfilling their urge to destroy life. They just don't care most of the time, and if they can improve their own lives while not caring about wildlife, they do it. It's all about gread and short sight. Hate doesn't enter into it.
About premise ten. The culture is not driven by death urge, this would not be profitable. This culture is driven by advertisment induced urge to consume tons of useless shit.
About premise six. I don't know what can be done to change this situation. But people crying to "put halt to it" also rarely do. How do you make billions of people to change their lifestyle overnight? Put all of them in prison? Stick guns to their heads and force them to do what you say for the sake of saving earth? How do you gain more power than corporations/individuals who profit from the current way of life? How do you make people join your cause if they are already living in comfort and don't want to get up from their couch?
The problem with earth, is that earth is commons, and tragedy of commons (see the wikipedia) applies to it. It will always be profitable to overuse/overexploit earth for personal gain, and screw the others. Regulation and government intervention can slow this down, but only a little.
--Coder
Ok, English is not my native language so I might have said something I did not mean. I didn't want to say that C++ = good coders, PHP/Java/C#/etc = bad coders. What I wanted to say was:
C++ + good coder = good results
C++ + newbie coder = horrible results
PHP/Java/C#/etc + good coder = good or very good results
PHP/Java/C#/etc + newbie coder = acceptable or barely acceptable results
And it takes much more time/experience to learn to use C++ effectively than it does to use Java/PHP. And time means money. And after you teach your just hired newbie how to code well while paying him salary, he leaves for another company where he gets more pay.
Oh, and I agree with JustNiz that having good programmers is always a good thing. Of course it is, but in reality, you don't always get the team you want. And about not using 3rd party libraries- what do you do? command line stuff? Math/science? You are a lucky man then. While making these might get away without 3rd party libraries, but if you need GUI, compression (like gzip), various file formats (XML), database interfaces, internet protocols like HTTP, web, clustering, anything- you are gonna need some. Oh, and what if you switch jobs? Who owns the copyright on your library of reusable components? You or your current employer?
P.S. I code web apps in java. So don't think I disrespect people who use something other than C++.
--Coder
Of course surgeons don't use plastic scissors. But how often do you need a surgeon? Most of the time you need a cheap tailor to make you a suit. And that's when scissors come in handy.
C++ can do wonders when used by highly experienced people. But most of the time, it is more cost effective to get entry level coders and use PHP/Java/C#/whatever. You will get a (somewhat) working product cheaper and possibly faster. And time to market and cost is often more important than maintainability/quality.
And don't get me started on 3rd party C++ libraries. You'll need tons of them to move a finger, and you'll spend more time finding/eavluating libraries than coding. This problem is getting worse for other languages too...
--Coder