If you screwed your employees or raped the environment or society and walked away with millions or billions in profits, in what way have you failed?
Remember, corporations have no morals. They cannot have morals by definition. Their only goal and measure of success is profit. If did some bad things and hired a PR company afterwards and still profits are up, you haven't failed.
Dongles are quite difficult to crack. You need to access to an actual physical dongle to crack it if protection is done properly, and you cannot download the dongle off the net.
Multiple locations in the code that check for presence of dongle will make it even harder. If you have a serial number or something, validate different digits of the number or use different algorithms in each check so that there are no common patterns in your software. Or better yet, store some critical code or data on the dongle, that way it's completely impossible to use your software without a dongle. Well, until someone extracts that critical code or data from the dongle and patches it into your.exe file, but doing that is not trivial.
Anyway, if a dedicated cracker wants to pirate your software, you won't be able to protect it. If it can be executed on a computer- it can be duplicated. Things like this will only buy you more time and scare away newbie crackers. On the other hand, now you need to deal with extra cost of distributing dongles, and making sure dongle hardware provider has up to date drivers for all platforms you need to support. And that these dongles keep working with next release of Windows/Linux/Mac OS/whatever.
You will notice that nowhere in my post I proposed that we go to USSR style centralized planned economy, nor impose dictatorship. I've lived in USSR, it wasn't much fun.
What I meant to say is that if dictatorship/absolute monarchy is DOS v1.0, Soviet Union style planned economy is Windows 3.1, free market corporate dominated democracy is Windows 95. All of these systems SUCK bad. We need something better.
The only case when democracy and free market work, is when we have plentiful competition, well educated and involved society and good regulation by government that is not selfish and working for the benefit of society. Achieving this might be more realistic, but it is just as much an utopia as achieving communism. And I see the world going into opposite direction- mergers centralize power and lessen competition, more and more governments fall under the feet of multinational corporations and greed. And greed will get you nowhere. Greed might be a good motivator, but combined with Tragedy of Commons, Broken Window Fallacy (PR & marketing) and Cost Externalization a system comprised of multiple greedy entities results in a very suboptimal solution.
I don't know what system will emerge, but never in the history of mankind did we have the ability to distribute and process information at the scale we do now. This must enable emergence of new government systems. For example direct democracy might actually be more feasible. Totalitarian control is more feasible as well.
I think we need to develop some kind of aggregation and error correction of ideas, that will turn multiple fallible men into a system with inbuilt redundancy that will be much less fallible. Something like ECC works in electronics. I don't know how, maybe something like refined and automated Delphi method. I don't have the answers. I just believe the freedom on the internet and in real world must be preserved until smarter people than me find them.
For the budget of Iraq war, we could have had a functional colony on Mars RIGHT NOW. For the price of stimulus package, how high a percentage of our economy would be running on renewable energy?
Free Market is a TERRIBLE way to distribute resources. It optimizes corporate profits and personal greed and rewards quarter thinking. It does not promote advancement of society, but only of small number of people. Free Market does NOT encourage investment in risky long term enterprises. And by doing hard and risky long term projects is how we can advance the humanity. Corporate governorship is all about preserving profits and status quo- they will not invest in disruptive technology and will interfere with others trying to emerge any technology that threatens them. And we need disruptive technologies if we are going to survive next 100 years when we run out of cheap oil and easily accessible freshwater, and agriculture becomes much much more difficult.
I don't know how the world should be governed, but it should definitely not be governed by corporate lobbyism.
ICBMs are expensive. Very expensive. And carrying conventional payload they wouldn't be able to do much damage, as they aren't that accurate.
I do agree that USSR didn't have the capability to invade America, but they certainly had the ability and the will to overrun Western Europe- and arguably they still do. I doubt USA had the capability to invade European part of USSR, but I think invasion of Vladivostok would have been possible.
Our mentality was shaped by the threat of nuclear war, so we don't even consider the war between major powers. Maybe the leaders would have been much more hawkish over the last 70 years without this threat? Given that due to human errors and miscommunication we almost came to "hot" war even with nuclear weapons on several occasions, it's much more likely the war would have broken out without them.
Anyway, back on topic. I think this article is mainly anti-nuclear scare mongering. I don't see much wrong with transporting nuclear materials and weapons with trucks, as long as appropriate precautions are taken. And it looks like they are being taken. And I really doubt there are enough terrorist with enough training and equipment on US soil to mount a successful attack and steal nuclear materials or weapons and get away with them.
Total war on big scale hasn't happened since WW2. No other war has come anywhere close with the scale of casualties and destruction. How high is the chance that USA and USSR would have fought it out on full scale if not for nuclear weapons? Or else, how high is the chance that USSR would have overran western Europe and USA wouldn't have been able to do much about it.
There has been no major war between world powers, and we have nuclear weapons to thank for that. No matter how much we hate them.
I'm still surprised how people still pay much attention to benchmarks on Anandtech or Toms Hardware. All of these benchmarks are compiled with Intel compiler, and ran on Windows. They are relevant if you are transcoding videos or playing latest games. And if you are doing software development on Linux workstation with an SQL DB, none of this is relevant in any way. Do some tests for your own workload, then make decisions. Check out Phoronix- they at least run canned synthetic benchmarks on Linux.
And anyway, CPUs no longer matter- they are all plenty fast unless you are doing some heavy computation. I'd rather spend some money on more RAM and a fast SSD- this will improve system performance by much much more. Eclipse (Java IDE) responsiveness improved by ~4x when I installed a SSD in my machine. And currently I have a nice Llano laptop- plenty of CPU power in those 4 cores, enough IO with a SSD, and it didn't break my bank. It has a Radeon 6550 GPU, so it will run most games as well.
If I were Tim Cook, I'd move to Tuscany in Italy and retire:)
Thing is, it's not Tim Cook in charge, but the Board, which represents Shareholders. And Shareholders want one thing and one thing only- Return On Investment. So any Apple expenditure that is not contributing to Return On Investment will not happen. Corporation behavior is pretty much the same as unfeeling immoral psychopath focused on a single goal. And that is not going to change, no matter who's in charge.
And which Apple employees are we talking about here? Ones in USA or ones in Foxconn? The ones working for Foxconn are not Apple's concern- they are Foxconn employees. If Apple pays more money to Foxconn, this will end up in the hands of Foxconn executives and shareholders, not employees. I haven't worked for Apple, but I imagine Apple employees in USA are getting competitive salaries, no?
And you cannot move the manufacturing jobs to US even if you wanted to. Unless you move 20% of world's electronics industry and manufacture everything yourself, long supply lines from China will kill you. You'd need decades and trillions of dollars to do that. And why would you do it if it doesn't make you more profitable?
Ok, you are Apple. It's 2005, and you are building a new phone, and you think demand for it will be huge. You know you need it made for market in 2007, i.e. in two years. What do you do?
a) Start building a new factory in USA paying for everything UP FRONT. You'll be lucky if you get planning permissions & foundations for the factory done in 2 years, never mind complete tooling and the people to run it. Besides shipping times for components that are already being made in china are 35 days. So if you find out that chip X needs to be changed to chip Y because of some issue, you'll have to wait for 35 days to get a shipment of chip Y. Shipping components by plane costs 10x more and is unfeasible.
b) Contract it out to Foxconn. They have the factory and the people to run it RIGHT NOW. It's tried. It's tested. It works. If your phone is successful, they'll get more factory space and people on manufacturing it in a matter of days or weeks, not months. Components are shipped by train or truck over a matter of hours or days. You don't have to pay them much until manufacturing starts.
What would you do if you were Steve Jobs?
I'm all for getting as much of manufacturing as possible done by robots. I haven't worked in a car factory, but I imagine robots are LESS flexible than people, so if you want to do a new model 6 months later, you'd find it very hard to reconfigure the factory to produce it. I believe having a robotic factory FLEXIBLE is possible, but right now its probably hard and expensive. And even then for electronic devices, unless all of your suppliers are in USA, it is not going to happen.
There were several articles about why Apple doesn't build its hardware in US any more- I'm too tired to google them for you right now. It's not so much about wages, but more about scalability of production, flexibility and supply lines. It was completely impossible to set up manufacturing quickly and do last minute changes scale it up rapidly the way Foxconn did anywhere in US- sometimes at human cost. One of the reasons was that Foxconn had workers living in barracks to be woken up and shuffled into the factories when needed. And they had A LOT of workers, including qualified engineers available. Another reason is that almost all of the suppliers of components are in China already, so supply lines for parts are much shorter.
The article even mentioned Obama personally asking Steve Jobs what it would take to get manufacturing back to US, and the answer was it was no longer possible.
Um, I mean, when was the time you COULD trust congress to do what's right? That hasn't been the case for as long as I remember, and probably before I was born as well. Congress simply DOES NOT WORK since corporations can lobby, and mass media can brainwash.
And this isn't just a problem with US congress. All democratic countries are going to hell fast, and have been since corporations & lobbying & mass media. Greed wins.
If you don't like Google Chrome calling home all the time- there is a binary distribution of open-source Google Chromium for windows with all that callback crap removed. It's called "SRWare Iron". Well, supposedly removed- since it's binary I cannot verify that. But you can compile chromium from source yourself if you really want to.
Seriously, unless you are doing something weird, reasonably OK written java app would run under any platform. There might be some small issues, but cross-platform apps with Java are much much much easier to write than cross-platform apps with anything else.
Make it either full blown EJB/JavaEE, or something lightweight, it's up to you. Depending on how many features you need, the learning curve might be a bit steep, but you get:
* Loads of features. Distributed caching, distributed transactions, webservices, messaging, clustering, high availability, OR mapping, database support, security, AJAX interactive webapps, you name it.
* Choice of free/open source servers and frameworks.
* High performance if you don't do something brain damaged.
* LOTS of open source frameworks and libraries to do pretty much anything.
* Cross platform.
* Mature and proven- used in 1000s of applications all over the world.
It's not without its drawbacks. It's not that easy to learn or to get things right. Although learning to work in enterprise Java is still quicker and better than writing your own half-backed implementations of some features provided as standard in JavaEE that are not readily available elsewhere. Hosting might not be as cheap as PHP. Getting application actually written might take a bit longer than PHP or Ruby. Getting everything set up migth be a bit tedious as well. Sometimes there are several libraries or frameworks or servers doing the same thing and chosing right one is tricky. IDEs (eclipse/netbeans) are slow-ish and sometimes buggy. Java serverside APPs take a while to start up- so compile/deploy/build cycle isn't as quick as with other languages/frameworks.
That's a question i have been asking myself as well.
It depends on who would have been in charge and how well managed the county would have been without Stalin. Without his purges, the military would have been much more competent- he killed off the best commanders. The military commanders under Stalin suffered massive casualties while learning on the job during first two years after German invasion. Regarding collectivization- that REDUCED the food output- soviet union had food shortages until its very dissolution. Czars managed to feed the cities without collectivization and Holodomor. Using slave labour in gulags (for mining and logging) in Siberia also killed off so many inmates that I doubt it was really that profitable- better living conditions would have been only marginally more expensive and would have probably given better productivity through higher morale and lesser mortality.
So in hindsight Soviet Union could have been much better managed between the wars. But hindsight is easy. Real question is if other people of the period who could have been in charge instead of Staling would have managed it better, and would they have been insightful or aggressive enough to build up enough military to win against Germany.
I agree that humans can be superior solution to automated cars right now, given two conditions:
* Humans are well trained.
* Humans are paying attention and actually trying to do the work properly.
Given that often enough one of those conditions won't be satisfied, automated cars will be feasible and will be better than humans on average.
Humans can be great with challenging tasks requiring creativity, or solving unexpected problems. Machines are great at doing boring repetitive stuff. Maybe driving isn't boring (depends on how long is your commute), but it is certainly repetitive. Hence it can be automated. Or are you going to argue that humans beat machines doing repetitive stuff, let's say working at assembly line?
I consider myself a keen driver. I do enjoy driving- for hours sometimes. However, now I moved to a big city that has underground/buses/trains and I commute using public transport. This allows me to do other stuff like reading on my way to work. I can let my mind wander and not be concentrating on the road. And I'd rather spend my commuting time doing other things than driving.
--Coder
Well, to be fair Stalin was a brutal bastard who killed millions of his own people and enslaved more, but he did win the war, and he did transform Russia from a 3rd world country to an influential and powerful empire with huge military. So in a way it was possible to justify it all by saying all those people were sacrificed in the name of glory for the mother Russia. Even though same changes probably would had happened without Stalin, and with less gruesome deaths.
Now what "glorious" did the Kim Jong Il do, I don't know. Unlike his dad he didn't fight a war. His economic policies sucked. The power and influence of his country sucks. There just was no glory in any of it.
I do understand the wish to shorten time-to-market as much as possible. I do agree with the concept. Problem with this way of thing however is that missing 20% is never done. Technical debts keep piling up and they are never really repaid. Or worse, someone starts a Version 2 rewrite disaster, which takes 5x more time and resources and ends up a worse project.
That's why I'd agree to rushing Version 1 release. But after that is out, spend at least 20% of the resources on refactoring/tidying up old rubbish, 80% on new features. Adjust percentages accordingly depending to how much breakage and hackiness and cruft is there in the code with time. THIS part never happens.
If you look at enterprise world (which is what they analyzed) you'll see that either Java or C# are most widely used. Which means most new/inexperienced/crap developers get to work on these projects in Java and C#. Which again means most mistakes & hacks & silliness. All the speciality stuff using exotic languages gets better people. And cobol applications in use today are either really mature and good quality or discarded years ago.
There are very few good team leads and architects who actually stand their ground and demand both quality from developers and resources to do quality work from their managers... And there are probably fewer managers who understand that quality needs time & resources...
Hm, you could argue that ANYTHING leads to wars sooner or later, as most countries get involved into war during their history. However, given that there was no major war for 100 years in XIXth century (1815-1915, see Congress of Vienna, Concert of Europe and a guy called Metternich) I'd say balance of power gets reasonably good results at preventing wars. XXth century already gave us 2 world wars and a multitude of regional ones. Some people argue that loss of balance of power after World War I and Treaty of Versailles (which did NOT restore balance of power) is what lead directly into World War II. OTOH since the start of cold war, major wars were prevented so far, so MAD also kinda works. But as others pointed out, MAD only works if the players are rational and have a sense of self-preservation. If you give everyone nuclear bombs, MAD will lead to war. And cold war based on MAD is kinda over now. Now we have Pax Americana, and this has led USA into 2 new wars within 10 years for no other reason than to gain some profit and decrease civil freedoms, so that's not much of a "Pax".
I don't know. Maybe it's just me living in a relatively safe England, but I don't feel like wars have much impact on the world these days. Commerce and finance and trade and corporations matter more than governments and their petty wars.
This fact is often forgotten. But the estimates at the time were running at ~2 million soldiers and ~10 million civilians dead in case of conventional invasion of Japan. And of course, Russians would probably have been there in time to "help" with invasion and occupation and raping and pillaging and they would have turned the occupied areas into puppet communist regimes as in europe.
So nuclear bombs were bad, but not nearly as bad as conventional war would have been. OTOH there are people claiming peace could have been achieved at that point without conventional or nuclear war (by granting the emperor immunity), but given that even after nuclear bombs there nearly was a coup to continue the war, this is doubtful.
As far as I remember, some benchmark software (I think Passmark family) is compiled with ICC. If not benchmarks themselves, then a lot of windows system libraries that are used by benchmarks are compiled by ICC. I haven't verified this myself, as I'm not that interested in synthetic benchmarks most review sites use. I should get my hands on some of benchmarking tools and verify what compiler was used to build them- compilers usually leave some strings in executable files.
Slashdot Mirror
If you screwed your employees or raped the environment or society and walked away with millions or billions in profits, in what way have you failed?
Remember, corporations have no morals. They cannot have morals by definition. Their only goal and measure of success is profit. If did some bad things and hired a PR company afterwards and still profits are up, you haven't failed.
--Coder
Dongles are quite difficult to crack. You need to access to an actual physical dongle to crack it if protection is done properly, and you cannot download the dongle off the net.
.exe file, but doing that is not trivial.
/whatever.
Multiple locations in the code that check for presence of dongle will make it even harder. If you have a serial number or something, validate different digits of the number or use different algorithms in each check so that there are no common patterns in your software. Or better yet, store some critical code or data on the dongle, that way it's completely impossible to use your software without a dongle. Well, until someone extracts that critical code or data from the dongle and patches it into your
Anyway, if a dedicated cracker wants to pirate your software, you won't be able to protect it. If it can be executed on a computer- it can be duplicated. Things like this will only buy you more time and scare away newbie crackers. On the other hand, now you need to deal with extra cost of distributing dongles, and making sure dongle hardware provider has up to date drivers for all platforms you need to support. And that these dongles keep working with next release of Windows/Linux/Mac OS
--Coder
You will notice that nowhere in my post I proposed that we go to USSR style centralized planned economy, nor impose dictatorship. I've lived in USSR, it wasn't much fun.
What I meant to say is that if dictatorship/absolute monarchy is DOS v1.0, Soviet Union style planned economy is Windows 3.1, free market corporate dominated democracy is Windows 95. All of these systems SUCK bad. We need something better.
The only case when democracy and free market work, is when we have plentiful competition, well educated and involved society and good regulation by government that is not selfish and working for the benefit of society. Achieving this might be more realistic, but it is just as much an utopia as achieving communism. And I see the world going into opposite direction- mergers centralize power and lessen competition, more and more governments fall under the feet of multinational corporations and greed. And greed will get you nowhere. Greed might be a good motivator, but combined with Tragedy of Commons, Broken Window Fallacy (PR & marketing) and Cost Externalization a system comprised of multiple greedy entities results in a very suboptimal solution.
I don't know what system will emerge, but never in the history of mankind did we have the ability to distribute and process information at the scale we do now. This must enable emergence of new government systems. For example direct democracy might actually be more feasible. Totalitarian control is more feasible as well.
I think we need to develop some kind of aggregation and error correction of ideas, that will turn multiple fallible men into a system with inbuilt redundancy that will be much less fallible. Something like ECC works in electronics. I don't know how, maybe something like refined and automated Delphi method. I don't have the answers. I just believe the freedom on the internet and in real world must be preserved until smarter people than me find them.
--Coder
For the budget of Iraq war, we could have had a functional colony on Mars RIGHT NOW. For the price of stimulus package, how high a percentage of our economy would be running on renewable energy?
Free Market is a TERRIBLE way to distribute resources. It optimizes corporate profits and personal greed and rewards quarter thinking. It does not promote advancement of society, but only of small number of people. Free Market does NOT encourage investment in risky long term enterprises. And by doing hard and risky long term projects is how we can advance the humanity. Corporate governorship is all about preserving profits and status quo- they will not invest in disruptive technology and will interfere with others trying to emerge any technology that threatens them. And we need disruptive technologies if we are going to survive next 100 years when we run out of cheap oil and easily accessible freshwater, and agriculture becomes much much more difficult.
I don't know how the world should be governed, but it should definitely not be governed by corporate lobbyism.
--Coder
ICBMs are expensive. Very expensive. And carrying conventional payload they wouldn't be able to do much damage, as they aren't that accurate.
I do agree that USSR didn't have the capability to invade America, but they certainly had the ability and the will to overrun Western Europe- and arguably they still do. I doubt USA had the capability to invade European part of USSR, but I think invasion of Vladivostok would have been possible.
Our mentality was shaped by the threat of nuclear war, so we don't even consider the war between major powers. Maybe the leaders would have been much more hawkish over the last 70 years without this threat? Given that due to human errors and miscommunication we almost came to "hot" war even with nuclear weapons on several occasions, it's much more likely the war would have broken out without them.
Anyway, back on topic. I think this article is mainly anti-nuclear scare mongering. I don't see much wrong with transporting nuclear materials and weapons with trucks, as long as appropriate precautions are taken. And it looks like they are being taken. And I really doubt there are enough terrorist with enough training and equipment on US soil to mount a successful attack and steal nuclear materials or weapons and get away with them.
--Coder
Total war on big scale hasn't happened since WW2. No other war has come anywhere close with the scale of casualties and destruction. How high is the chance that USA and USSR would have fought it out on full scale if not for nuclear weapons? Or else, how high is the chance that USSR would have overran western Europe and USA wouldn't have been able to do much about it.
There has been no major war between world powers, and we have nuclear weapons to thank for that. No matter how much we hate them.
--Coder
I'm still surprised how people still pay much attention to benchmarks on Anandtech or Toms Hardware. All of these benchmarks are compiled with Intel compiler, and ran on Windows. They are relevant if you are transcoding videos or playing latest games. And if you are doing software development on Linux workstation with an SQL DB, none of this is relevant in any way. Do some tests for your own workload, then make decisions. Check out Phoronix- they at least run canned synthetic benchmarks on Linux.
And anyway, CPUs no longer matter- they are all plenty fast unless you are doing some heavy computation. I'd rather spend some money on more RAM and a fast SSD- this will improve system performance by much much more. Eclipse (Java IDE) responsiveness improved by ~4x when I installed a SSD in my machine. And currently I have a nice Llano laptop- plenty of CPU power in those 4 cores, enough IO with a SSD, and it didn't break my bank. It has a Radeon 6550 GPU, so it will run most games as well.
--Coder
Let's just wait until they block microsoft.com due to some related screwup.
Exploit:JS/Idiots.ASS detected
If I were Tim Cook, I'd move to Tuscany in Italy and retire :)
Thing is, it's not Tim Cook in charge, but the Board, which represents Shareholders. And Shareholders want one thing and one thing only- Return On Investment. So any Apple expenditure that is not contributing to Return On Investment will not happen. Corporation behavior is pretty much the same as unfeeling immoral psychopath focused on a single goal. And that is not going to change, no matter who's in charge.
And which Apple employees are we talking about here? Ones in USA or ones in Foxconn? The ones working for Foxconn are not Apple's concern- they are Foxconn employees. If Apple pays more money to Foxconn, this will end up in the hands of Foxconn executives and shareholders, not employees. I haven't worked for Apple, but I imagine Apple employees in USA are getting competitive salaries, no?
And you cannot move the manufacturing jobs to US even if you wanted to. Unless you move 20% of world's electronics industry and manufacture everything yourself, long supply lines from China will kill you. You'd need decades and trillions of dollars to do that. And why would you do it if it doesn't make you more profitable?
--Coder
Ok, you are Apple. It's 2005, and you are building a new phone, and you think demand for it will be huge. You know you need it made for market in 2007, i.e. in two years. What do you do?
a) Start building a new factory in USA paying for everything UP FRONT. You'll be lucky if you get planning permissions & foundations for the factory done in 2 years, never mind complete tooling and the people to run it. Besides shipping times for components that are already being made in china are 35 days. So if you find out that chip X needs to be changed to chip Y because of some issue, you'll have to wait for 35 days to get a shipment of chip Y. Shipping components by plane costs 10x more and is unfeasible.
b) Contract it out to Foxconn. They have the factory and the people to run it RIGHT NOW. It's tried. It's tested. It works. If your phone is successful, they'll get more factory space and people on manufacturing it in a matter of days or weeks, not months. Components are shipped by train or truck over a matter of hours or days. You don't have to pay them much until manufacturing starts.
What would you do if you were Steve Jobs?
I'm all for getting as much of manufacturing as possible done by robots. I haven't worked in a car factory, but I imagine robots are LESS flexible than people, so if you want to do a new model 6 months later, you'd find it very hard to reconfigure the factory to produce it. I believe having a robotic factory FLEXIBLE is possible, but right now its probably hard and expensive. And even then for electronic devices, unless all of your suppliers are in USA, it is not going to happen.
--Coder
It's not the one I read (I think I read either New york times or Forbes), but content is 90% similar:
http://www.catholic.org/technology/story.php?id=44500
There are several others
http://open.salon.com/blog/steve_klingaman/2012/01/25/lets_not_kid_ourselves_about_manufacturing_jobs
http://gizmodo.com/5878209/why-apple-doesnt-make-the-iphone-in-america
--Coder
There were several articles about why Apple doesn't build its hardware in US any more- I'm too tired to google them for you right now. It's not so much about wages, but more about scalability of production, flexibility and supply lines. It was completely impossible to set up manufacturing quickly and do last minute changes scale it up rapidly the way Foxconn did anywhere in US- sometimes at human cost. One of the reasons was that Foxconn had workers living in barracks to be woken up and shuffled into the factories when needed. And they had A LOT of workers, including qualified engineers available. Another reason is that almost all of the suppliers of components are in China already, so supply lines for parts are much shorter.
The article even mentioned Obama personally asking Steve Jobs what it would take to get manufacturing back to US, and the answer was it was no longer possible.
--Coder
Um, I mean, when was the time you COULD trust congress to do what's right? That hasn't been the case for as long as I remember, and probably before I was born as well. Congress simply DOES NOT WORK since corporations can lobby, and mass media can brainwash.
And this isn't just a problem with US congress. All democratic countries are going to hell fast, and have been since corporations & lobbying & mass media. Greed wins.
--Coder
I assume you are from UK? Which is "your" ISP? Which ISPs in UK are offering IPv6? I know AAISP does, but are there any others?
BTW, interesting info about Google- I didn't know they did that.
--Coder
If you don't like Google Chrome calling home all the time- there is a binary distribution of open-source Google Chromium for windows with all that callback crap removed. It's called "SRWare Iron". Well, supposedly removed- since it's binary I cannot verify that. But you can compile chromium from source yourself if you really want to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRWare_Iron
--Coder
Seriously, unless you are doing something weird, reasonably OK written java app would run under any platform. There might be some small issues, but cross-platform apps with Java are much much much easier to write than cross-platform apps with anything else.
--Coder
Make it either full blown EJB/JavaEE, or something lightweight, it's up to you. Depending on how many features you need, the learning curve might be a bit steep, but you get:
* Loads of features. Distributed caching, distributed transactions, webservices, messaging, clustering, high availability, OR mapping, database support, security, AJAX interactive webapps, you name it.
* Choice of free/open source servers and frameworks.
* High performance if you don't do something brain damaged.
* LOTS of open source frameworks and libraries to do pretty much anything.
* Cross platform.
* Mature and proven- used in 1000s of applications all over the world.
It's not without its drawbacks. It's not that easy to learn or to get things right. Although learning to work in enterprise Java is still quicker and better than writing your own half-backed implementations of some features provided as standard in JavaEE that are not readily available elsewhere. Hosting might not be as cheap as PHP. Getting application actually written might take a bit longer than PHP or Ruby. Getting everything set up migth be a bit tedious as well. Sometimes there are several libraries or frameworks or servers doing the same thing and chosing right one is tricky. IDEs (eclipse/netbeans) are slow-ish and sometimes buggy. Java serverside APPs take a while to start up- so compile/deploy/build cycle isn't as quick as with other languages/frameworks.
--Coder
That's a question i have been asking myself as well.
It depends on who would have been in charge and how well managed the county would have been without Stalin. Without his purges, the military would have been much more competent- he killed off the best commanders. The military commanders under Stalin suffered massive casualties while learning on the job during first two years after German invasion. Regarding collectivization- that REDUCED the food output- soviet union had food shortages until its very dissolution. Czars managed to feed the cities without collectivization and Holodomor. Using slave labour in gulags (for mining and logging) in Siberia also killed off so many inmates that I doubt it was really that profitable- better living conditions would have been only marginally more expensive and would have probably given better productivity through higher morale and lesser mortality.
So in hindsight Soviet Union could have been much better managed between the wars. But hindsight is easy. Real question is if other people of the period who could have been in charge instead of Staling would have managed it better, and would they have been insightful or aggressive enough to build up enough military to win against Germany.
--Coder
I agree that humans can be superior solution to automated cars right now, given two conditions: * Humans are well trained. * Humans are paying attention and actually trying to do the work properly. Given that often enough one of those conditions won't be satisfied, automated cars will be feasible and will be better than humans on average. Humans can be great with challenging tasks requiring creativity, or solving unexpected problems. Machines are great at doing boring repetitive stuff. Maybe driving isn't boring (depends on how long is your commute), but it is certainly repetitive. Hence it can be automated. Or are you going to argue that humans beat machines doing repetitive stuff, let's say working at assembly line? I consider myself a keen driver. I do enjoy driving- for hours sometimes. However, now I moved to a big city that has underground/buses/trains and I commute using public transport. This allows me to do other stuff like reading on my way to work. I can let my mind wander and not be concentrating on the road. And I'd rather spend my commuting time doing other things than driving. --Coder
Well, to be fair Stalin was a brutal bastard who killed millions of his own people and enslaved more, but he did win the war, and he did transform Russia from a 3rd world country to an influential and powerful empire with huge military. So in a way it was possible to justify it all by saying all those people were sacrificed in the name of glory for the mother Russia. Even though same changes probably would had happened without Stalin, and with less gruesome deaths.
Now what "glorious" did the Kim Jong Il do, I don't know. Unlike his dad he didn't fight a war. His economic policies sucked. The power and influence of his country sucks. There just was no glory in any of it.
--Coder
I do understand the wish to shorten time-to-market as much as possible. I do agree with the concept. Problem with this way of thing however is that missing 20% is never done. Technical debts keep piling up and they are never really repaid. Or worse, someone starts a Version 2 rewrite disaster, which takes 5x more time and resources and ends up a worse project.
That's why I'd agree to rushing Version 1 release. But after that is out, spend at least 20% of the resources on refactoring/tidying up old rubbish, 80% on new features. Adjust percentages accordingly depending to how much breakage and hackiness and cruft is there in the code with time. THIS part never happens.
And a complete rewrite is rarely a good idea.
--Coder
If you look at enterprise world (which is what they analyzed) you'll see that either Java or C# are most widely used. Which means most new/inexperienced/crap developers get to work on these projects in Java and C#. Which again means most mistakes & hacks & silliness. All the speciality stuff using exotic languages gets better people. And cobol applications in use today are either really mature and good quality or discarded years ago.
There are very few good team leads and architects who actually stand their ground and demand both quality from developers and resources to do quality work from their managers... And there are probably fewer managers who understand that quality needs time & resources...
--Coder
Hm, you could argue that ANYTHING leads to wars sooner or later, as most countries get involved into war during their history. However, given that there was no major war for 100 years in XIXth century (1815-1915, see Congress of Vienna, Concert of Europe and a guy called Metternich) I'd say balance of power gets reasonably good results at preventing wars. XXth century already gave us 2 world wars and a multitude of regional ones. Some people argue that loss of balance of power after World War I and Treaty of Versailles (which did NOT restore balance of power) is what lead directly into World War II. OTOH since the start of cold war, major wars were prevented so far, so MAD also kinda works. But as others pointed out, MAD only works if the players are rational and have a sense of self-preservation. If you give everyone nuclear bombs, MAD will lead to war. And cold war based on MAD is kinda over now. Now we have Pax Americana, and this has led USA into 2 new wars within 10 years for no other reason than to gain some profit and decrease civil freedoms, so that's not much of a "Pax".
I don't know. Maybe it's just me living in a relatively safe England, but I don't feel like wars have much impact on the world these days. Commerce and finance and trade and corporations matter more than governments and their petty wars.
--Coder
This fact is often forgotten. But the estimates at the time were running at ~2 million soldiers and ~10 million civilians dead in case of conventional invasion of Japan. And of course, Russians would probably have been there in time to "help" with invasion and occupation and raping and pillaging and they would have turned the occupied areas into puppet communist regimes as in europe.
So nuclear bombs were bad, but not nearly as bad as conventional war would have been. OTOH there are people claiming peace could have been achieved at that point without conventional or nuclear war (by granting the emperor immunity), but given that even after nuclear bombs there nearly was a coup to continue the war, this is doubtful.
--Coder
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_C%2B%2B_Compiler#Criticism
As far as I remember, some benchmark software (I think Passmark family) is compiled with ICC. If not benchmarks themselves, then a lot of windows system libraries that are used by benchmarks are compiled by ICC. I haven't verified this myself, as I'm not that interested in synthetic benchmarks most review sites use. I should get my hands on some of benchmarking tools and verify what compiler was used to build them- compilers usually leave some strings in executable files.
--Coder