It's a few years old now but a fascinating documentary from the perspective of fear driven by governments is "The Power of Nightmares" which I believe can be watched online free now. 3 parts, well worth watching.
The SR-71 is indeed ~3rd quicker but carried 2 people dressed in space suits whereas Concorde carried 100 in shirt sleeves eating lobster and drinking champagne. I think that counts for something!
I've more or less moved out of programming now but I did it for 30 odd years in the finance industry across various projects. I've used something like 8-10 operating systems and 20+ languages. My code is pretty robust, during dev maybe 1-2 bugs a year were raised against my code and post go live I'm aware of 1 bug that turned out to be me and that was a fairly trivial one. 90% of what I did was donkey work, read a message from IBM MQ, parse it, dump it out to a db, make a few decisions, call a stored proc etc. Mostly C and Unix. It was all commented to hell and back and very clearly structured and I also enjoy documenting, which I do in spades. However, I wouldn't have a clue on writing a compiler, doing any graphical work, etc although I'd know where to look should the need arise. Key point though is, I'm entirely self taught and have zero college. I went from school straight into my first job based on a 30 minute interview and the fact I programmed some 6502 on an Atari 800.
The message being, a lot of programming doesn't need super skilled people, anyone with a bit of common sense, a logical mind, a chunk of curiosity and hopefully a good quality threshold can do it.
Funnily enough, I probably spend 20% of my TV watching on actual broadcast TV. The rest is watching torrented stuff, usually shows I missed when they were on at the time, sort of timeshift++. As such, I'd say this view of TV winning is about as realistic as the music industry saying they have one over on MP3s.
One wonders if there will be any attempt at bringing to justice the various EU and Greek officials involved in getting Greece in to begin with. The books were cooked to make it look like Greece was ready when it most certainly wasn't and now it's all come home to roost, big time.
This sort of garbage just proves how financially inept anyone who thinks BitCoin et al have any sort of long term future is. Sure, it appeals on a nerdy/privacy/stick it to da man level but most of us are in the real world. This is not how it works, this is not how countries work, this is not how global financial processes work.
If this whole charade was deliberate. They've never, ever gone after people for copying CDs for home use even though it was illegal. Then it became legal, got reversed and now they're back where they were PLUS they have a nice new levy.
Fully grown adults don't get any new mainstream music
Well I'm a fully grown adult and I'm discovering more brilliant music than I can keep up with by listening to indie and unsigned podcasts, Internet Radio stations and Bandcamp. My thing is electronic music and love bands like www.ixband.co.uk or soundcloud.com/plike-1
how easy is it to : see world class theatre eat in a great restaurant
As you say, not everyone is the same. I have zero interest in theatre or great restaurants. Skye sounds way more appealing to me. Having to work in London in bad enough, living there would be my worst nightmare,
Indeed. I'd love my son to be interested in coding, given it's what I do. However, despite his teacher saying he's one of the best in his class and has some insightful solutions to the tasks, he has zero interest and finds the whole thing a crashing bore. It's one of his least favorite things. I even tried the angle of it being useful as he is keen on game modding but once he realised it might involve code, he went right off the idea.
As long as one of those 'big updates' put the Windows 7 UI back in place and disposes of all that new Metro or whatever it's called these days junk then I'll be happy.
Never found a feature since Office 97 I had a use for. It was fast, did everything I needed and loaded quickly. I've currently got Office 2013 or somesuch installed because it was dirt cheap via work but I never use it, it's horrible compared to Open Office.
Yep. I was a Classic Traveller player and it seemed GW went from having literally hundreds of different games/game systems to Warhammer and White Dwarf only over a very short period of time. I too stopped going. There was another local shop that covered Tunnels & Trolls, all the mini game systems, Star Fleet Battles etc but even they finally folded last year.
I thought they were already recording and keeping pretty much every byte of the Internet and other comms in the UK anyway.
Even thought I missed a major IRA bomb back in the 90s by about 20mins, I can still safely say I'd much rather have my privacy and take my chances on the tiny risk of injury/death by terrorists. Crossing the road or getting in my car is way more riskier. Heck, doing the decorating at home is more risky.
Privacy please. Get out my business.
I'd have thought most people are just getting on with whatever the preferred toolset is at their company and never give this mythical war a second thought.
That's my day. Jumping from crisis to even more urgent crisis and back again over and over. It's expected. If anyone was only able to do one thing at a time, they'd not last long here. Priorities shift, often by the minute. You could be halfway through analysing half a million rows of data diagnosing an issue then dropping that, diving into source code for something else, drop that to have a quick meeting to agree a design point, back to the source code then back to the data, and that's within a 30min window. I'd say I have a lousy memory but I'm still expected to jump about and pick up where I left off.
I'm in my fifties, I've been programming for ~35 years and I've never used a whiteboard. I've sat there whilst others do but it's rarely programming related, usually tuning requirements. If I need to plan something out I use paper. If it's big, I grab a bit of A3 off the printer.
I'm in the UK and I've only ever workd in open plan offices. Never seen a cubicle in my life. We have entire open floors with maybe 500 people per floor. Everyone is on banks of desks, 4 each side facing each other, row after row. Quite often it's all hot desking anyway so very few people customise their space in any way. I did once, briefly but my stuff got pinched (prob cleaners or 'security').
We have breakout rooms for instant meetings but personally I find myself far more productive when I can just wander over and ask someone a question rather than wait for an IM or email to be responded to. Almost no one uses headphones and absolutely no one has audible music. Even having a ringtone is frowned upon, vibrate only.
As I've never been in any other environment (and I'm now in my fifties) I really can't see the issue with concentration, you either tune out the chatter or find a breakout room for the rare times you really need to focus.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a few years old now but a fascinating documentary from the perspective of fear driven by governments is "The Power of Nightmares" which I believe can be watched online free now. 3 parts, well worth watching.
The SR-71 is indeed ~3rd quicker but carried 2 people dressed in space suits whereas Concorde carried 100 in shirt sleeves eating lobster and drinking champagne. I think that counts for something!
Concorde was profitable http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/tech_ops/read.main/70307/
I've more or less moved out of programming now but I did it for 30 odd years in the finance industry across various projects. I've used something like 8-10 operating systems and 20+ languages. My code is pretty robust, during dev maybe 1-2 bugs a year were raised against my code and post go live I'm aware of 1 bug that turned out to be me and that was a fairly trivial one. 90% of what I did was donkey work, read a message from IBM MQ, parse it, dump it out to a db, make a few decisions, call a stored proc etc. Mostly C and Unix. It was all commented to hell and back and very clearly structured and I also enjoy documenting, which I do in spades. However, I wouldn't have a clue on writing a compiler, doing any graphical work, etc although I'd know where to look should the need arise. Key point though is, I'm entirely self taught and have zero college. I went from school straight into my first job based on a 30 minute interview and the fact I programmed some 6502 on an Atari 800. The message being, a lot of programming doesn't need super skilled people, anyone with a bit of common sense, a logical mind, a chunk of curiosity and hopefully a good quality threshold can do it.
They all run Linux servers, big difference. Makes perfect sense there. Desktop, for most people, not so much.
I guess it's time for the obligatory "You must be new here"
Wow, what's happened to this place? Someone says Linux is better than Windows and gets marked flamebait.
Funnily enough, I probably spend 20% of my TV watching on actual broadcast TV. The rest is watching torrented stuff, usually shows I missed when they were on at the time, sort of timeshift++. As such, I'd say this view of TV winning is about as realistic as the music industry saying they have one over on MP3s.
One wonders if there will be any attempt at bringing to justice the various EU and Greek officials involved in getting Greece in to begin with. The books were cooked to make it look like Greece was ready when it most certainly wasn't and now it's all come home to roost, big time.
This sort of garbage just proves how financially inept anyone who thinks BitCoin et al have any sort of long term future is. Sure, it appeals on a nerdy/privacy/stick it to da man level but most of us are in the real world. This is not how it works, this is not how countries work, this is not how global financial processes work.
And whose ass did those numbers get pulled from?
If this whole charade was deliberate. They've never, ever gone after people for copying CDs for home use even though it was illegal. Then it became legal, got reversed and now they're back where they were PLUS they have a nice new levy.
Well I'm a fully grown adult and I'm discovering more brilliant music than I can keep up with by listening to indie and unsigned podcasts, Internet Radio stations and Bandcamp. My thing is electronic music and love bands like www.ixband.co.uk or soundcloud.com/plike-1
As you say, not everyone is the same. I have zero interest in theatre or great restaurants. Skye sounds way more appealing to me. Having to work in London in bad enough, living there would be my worst nightmare,
Indeed. I'd love my son to be interested in coding, given it's what I do. However, despite his teacher saying he's one of the best in his class and has some insightful solutions to the tasks, he has zero interest and finds the whole thing a crashing bore. It's one of his least favorite things. I even tried the angle of it being useful as he is keen on game modding but once he realised it might involve code, he went right off the idea.
As long as one of those 'big updates' put the Windows 7 UI back in place and disposes of all that new Metro or whatever it's called these days junk then I'll be happy.
Never found a feature since Office 97 I had a use for. It was fast, did everything I needed and loaded quickly. I've currently got Office 2013 or somesuch installed because it was dirt cheap via work but I never use it, it's horrible compared to Open Office.
Most of their history was out. The Adventure one may have been the first game Easter Egg but it certainly wasn't the first by any stretch.
Yep. I was a Classic Traveller player and it seemed GW went from having literally hundreds of different games/game systems to Warhammer and White Dwarf only over a very short period of time. I too stopped going. There was another local shop that covered Tunnels & Trolls, all the mini game systems, Star Fleet Battles etc but even they finally folded last year.
I thought they were already recording and keeping pretty much every byte of the Internet and other comms in the UK anyway. Even thought I missed a major IRA bomb back in the 90s by about 20mins, I can still safely say I'd much rather have my privacy and take my chances on the tiny risk of injury/death by terrorists. Crossing the road or getting in my car is way more riskier. Heck, doing the decorating at home is more risky. Privacy please. Get out my business.
I'd have thought most people are just getting on with whatever the preferred toolset is at their company and never give this mythical war a second thought.
This is the UK Government, they want everyone to be monitored 24/7 and everything they do recorded and kept safe 'just in case'.
That's my day. Jumping from crisis to even more urgent crisis and back again over and over. It's expected. If anyone was only able to do one thing at a time, they'd not last long here. Priorities shift, often by the minute. You could be halfway through analysing half a million rows of data diagnosing an issue then dropping that, diving into source code for something else, drop that to have a quick meeting to agree a design point, back to the source code then back to the data, and that's within a 30min window. I'd say I have a lousy memory but I'm still expected to jump about and pick up where I left off.
I'm in my fifties, I've been programming for ~35 years and I've never used a whiteboard. I've sat there whilst others do but it's rarely programming related, usually tuning requirements. If I need to plan something out I use paper. If it's big, I grab a bit of A3 off the printer.
I'm in the UK and I've only ever workd in open plan offices. Never seen a cubicle in my life. We have entire open floors with maybe 500 people per floor. Everyone is on banks of desks, 4 each side facing each other, row after row. Quite often it's all hot desking anyway so very few people customise their space in any way. I did once, briefly but my stuff got pinched (prob cleaners or 'security'). We have breakout rooms for instant meetings but personally I find myself far more productive when I can just wander over and ask someone a question rather than wait for an IM or email to be responded to. Almost no one uses headphones and absolutely no one has audible music. Even having a ringtone is frowned upon, vibrate only. As I've never been in any other environment (and I'm now in my fifties) I really can't see the issue with concentration, you either tune out the chatter or find a breakout room for the rare times you really need to focus.
Chances are the fake films are better than the one you thought you were getting.