Let me just clear up the misconception on this (because I honestly wasn't trying to flame-bait).
I was just treating "cost of capital / deprecation" and "cost of labor" as interchangeable things and suggesting that maybe it's in fact cheaper for "the man" to just pay wages on labor and let the government/society worry about health-care, housing, welfare, etc.
This is apropos the conversation to me, because if you go read books like The Jungle you'll see that egregious stuff went on in the factories too... so in fact, the civil war didn't change much at all about the rights of workers. You can't be whipped any more...; but you can still treat people like crap, flood the ghettos with crack to fill the prisons, manipulate the cost of labor through myriad techniques and drive people into so much debt that "freedom" just becomes the freedom to starve if you don't like it.
That's a weak understanding of the Civil War. And especially ironic, given that by that point the north had switched to a wage-labor format, which is actually cheaper labor (use a person up, throw them out, find the next one).
No, the civil war had a lot more to do with the dynamics of power between urban and agricultural centers. Slavery was just the touchy subject that set it off.
(And in the end, the south actually won... if you look at an electoral map; or the balance of power in the Senate).
I protest your label 'short-sighted' for not supporting space exploration.
I don't want to go to the moon. I don't want to live on mars... those places don't have air. Living there, you'll probably eat food from vats and be a slave to whomever controls life-support.
Now, if we can learn to mine an astroid and put industry into space, so we don't pollute the Earth, then I'm for it. But unmanned exploration is much more economical.
For some reason a lot of people diss Java... but other modern languages simply don't compare when it comes to implementing distributed enterprise apps. This is my bread and butter; so I'm a big fan (the only competition, really... is.NET).
Sun was making some missteps... for instance how badly EJB sucked up to 2.1.
Now we have POJO's implementing enterprise beans in 3.0. We have strong standardized support for security and cryptography (ala JCA/JCE, JSSE, JAAS). JDBC is a snap. We have excellent documentation and books available from J2ME to J2EE....
Between Britney Spears being available again and the Repubs losing House and Senate... I'd say it was a good day.
I disagree. I think software sucks because software engineers don't understand programming
And I disagree. I think software sucks because programmers don't understand psychology.
Programmers don't understand that real users will trade control for simplicity.
If programmers designed cars, there wouldn't be automatic transmissions. There'd probably even be all sorts of gauges displaying like fuel-pressure and things I don't understand about cars...
Of course, the world has gear-heads who think I ought to be able to fix my own car. Because they don't realize that $20 for an oil change is more worth it for me, than getting under the car (I don't even have an appropriate space to work on my car in).
Programmers are like gear-heads. They think their assumptions are universal.. not so..
Wow, I never imaged engineering people for space travel.
But when you put it that way, why would anyone want to go?
Suppose you find another Earth... but your body isn't capable of living and being happy on it.
Or you float around in interstellar blackness for a lifetime? That would get depressing. So you engineer the hybrids never to get depressed so they don't kill themselves. The cynical governments in charge of such efforts might as well engineer people not to think critically while they're at it.
So I always wonder... why do people want to leave Earth? There is no other place than this. What are we trying to accomplish? Really... the only thing anyone can do is live and love... that's done just fine from here.
(And BTW, I'm not a curmudgeon... I just hate Star Trek:)
Perhaps IBM really is a dynosaur, but it acquired 11 companies in 2005. It's eating to stay alive. (It lacks the culture for creative invention, but has power and runs a tight ship).
IBM more or less also considers Microsoft its biggest enemy.
I personally don't understand how Google is a big threat to MS so far...
They win much mindshare in the lucrative free search-engine business, but...
In all seriousness, how can you call China communist when they outlaw labor unions? Though I know obvious points like that shuck people's ability to put things in tidy boxes.... especially about stuff like 'communism' if you have a vested interest in disagreeing with it.
If you have to ask... I'd say most people hating it never had to write a large enterprise-class app with the alternatives.
Slashdotters like to think they're all kernel-hacking programming-geniuses, but we know, on the boundary, that the typically level of skill doesn't measure up to the hubris round here.
Disclaimer.... done apps in PHP, Perl, Python and Java. Java is best. Maybe Ruby on Rails is the best thing since sliced bread, but I don't have the wherewithal to find out. I'll be on the look out for a Websphere/JBoss class app server for it, if it has one...
Though I'm ignorant of Ruby on Rails, that won't stop be from adding my two cents from the peanut gallery (it's a free country, after all...)
Python doesn't have nearly the web-application support going for it that Java has. I've done both.
Mod_python is too primitive, and Webware for Python is still not ready for prime-time.
Java, on the other hand, has butt-kicking development IDE's (WSAD, JBuilder), libraries (J2EE, JDBC, Apache et al) and platforms (Websphere, WebLogic).
And most important... I can understand pretty much any Java code. I know Java shoe-horns you into some paradigms that feel constraining; look at the bright-side: that's what makes it so maintainable.
Python is an elegant language and all, but people can sometimes still get cute with it and write things to do stuff without obvious ramifications.
Webware is a breeze for cranking out a webapp quickly, but it's not close to enterprise ready.
(I've written web-applications in Perl, too. If I go to hell, they'll probably assign me to support someone else's Perl code... ummmm, using 'dictionaries' to fake structured data types....).
Slashdot Mirror
Let me just clear up the misconception on this (because I honestly wasn't trying to flame-bait).
I was just treating "cost of capital / deprecation" and "cost of labor" as interchangeable things and suggesting that maybe it's in fact cheaper for "the man" to just pay wages on labor and let the government/society worry about health-care, housing, welfare, etc.
This is apropos the conversation to me, because if you go read books like The Jungle you'll see that egregious stuff went on in the factories too... so in fact, the civil war didn't change much at all about the rights of workers. You can't be whipped any more...; but you can still treat people like crap, flood the ghettos with crack to fill the prisons, manipulate the cost of labor through myriad techniques and drive people into so much debt that "freedom" just becomes the freedom to starve if you don't like it.
That's a weak understanding of the Civil War. And especially ironic, given that by that point the north had switched to a wage-labor format, which is actually cheaper labor (use a person up, throw them out, find the next one).
No, the civil war had a lot more to do with the dynamics of power between urban and agricultural centers. Slavery was just the touchy subject that set it off.
(And in the end, the south actually won... if you look at an electoral map; or the balance of power in the Senate).
I protest your label 'short-sighted' for not supporting space exploration.
I don't want to go to the moon. I don't want to live on mars... those places don't have air. Living there, you'll probably eat food from vats and be a slave to whomever controls life-support.
Now, if we can learn to mine an astroid and put industry into space, so we don't pollute the Earth, then I'm for it. But unmanned exploration is much more economical.
Sun was making some missteps... for instance how badly EJB sucked up to 2.1.
Now we have POJO's implementing enterprise beans in 3.0. We have strong standardized support for security and cryptography (ala JCA/JCE, JSSE, JAAS). JDBC is a snap. We have excellent documentation and books available from J2ME to J2EE....
Between Britney Spears being available again and the Repubs losing House and Senate... I'd say it was a good day.
Have you ever read the New Yorker?
And I disagree. I think software sucks because programmers don't understand psychology.
Programmers don't understand that real users will trade control for simplicity.
If programmers designed cars, there wouldn't be automatic transmissions. There'd probably even be all sorts of gauges displaying like fuel-pressure and things I don't understand about cars...
Of course, the world has gear-heads who think I ought to be able to fix my own car. Because they don't realize that $20 for an oil change is more worth it for me, than getting under the car (I don't even have an appropriate space to work on my car in).
Programmers are like gear-heads. They think their assumptions are universal.. not so..
Wow, I never imaged engineering people for space travel.
:)
But when you put it that way, why would anyone want to go?
Suppose you find another Earth... but your body isn't capable of living and being happy on it.
Or you float around in interstellar blackness for a lifetime? That would get depressing. So you engineer the hybrids never to get depressed so they don't kill themselves. The cynical governments in charge of such efforts might as well engineer people not to think critically while they're at it.
So I always wonder... why do people want to leave Earth? There is no other place than this. What are we trying to accomplish? Really... the only thing anyone can do is live and love... that's done just fine from here.
(And BTW, I'm not a curmudgeon... I just hate Star Trek
Perhaps IBM really is a dynosaur, but it acquired 11 companies in 2005. It's eating to stay alive. (It lacks the culture for creative invention, but has power and runs a tight ship).
IBM more or less also considers Microsoft its biggest enemy.
I personally don't understand how Google is a big threat to MS so far...
They win much mindshare in the lucrative free search-engine business, but...
?!
In all seriousness, how can you call China communist when they outlaw labor unions? Though I know obvious points like that shuck people's ability to put things in tidy boxes.... especially about stuff like 'communism' if you have a vested interest in disagreeing with it.
PS: Sister Furong is the hot1
Slashdotters like to think they're all kernel-hacking programming-geniuses, but we know, on the boundary, that the typically level of skill doesn't measure up to the hubris round here.
Disclaimer.... done apps in PHP, Perl, Python and Java. Java is best. Maybe Ruby on Rails is the best thing since sliced bread, but I don't have the wherewithal to find out. I'll be on the look out for a Websphere/JBoss class app server for it, if it has one...
Python doesn't have nearly the web-application support going for it that Java has. I've done both.
Mod_python is too primitive, and Webware for Python is still not ready for prime-time.
Java, on the other hand, has butt-kicking development IDE's (WSAD, JBuilder), libraries (J2EE, JDBC, Apache et al) and platforms (Websphere, WebLogic).
And most important... I can understand pretty much any Java code. I know Java shoe-horns you into some paradigms that feel constraining; look at the bright-side: that's what makes it so maintainable.
Python is an elegant language and all, but people can sometimes still get cute with it and write things to do stuff without obvious ramifications.
Webware is a breeze for cranking out a webapp quickly, but it's not close to enterprise ready.
(I've written web-applications in Perl, too. If I go to hell, they'll probably assign me to support someone else's Perl code... ummmm, using 'dictionaries' to fake structured data types....).