Every degree sets out to cover a syllabus which was set before year 1 begins. It's Rarely updated Mid-year, and never in meaningful ways end of year.
My degree was in Electronics. The course and lecturers have their heads in the last millennium. They didn't teach me thermionic valves, but did teach much redundant crap. They all ran scared when I ran my project at 250Mhz, and had no facilities for building my board.
Lecturers get lazy, and are reluctant to go learning new tech. Most of them wouldn't get a real-world job, because they are out of date in Electronics anyhow.
I Avoid Flu shots annually. No, we don't take them.
My mother-in-law had 2 bad reactions to them, and two other close relations have had serious side effects from flu shots. We're relatively healthy. There's every chance we will be exposed to every flu because of the circles we move in, but we'll survive if we get a flu. I'd rather chance getting the flu than annually expose myself to the vaccine . We never know the side effects of a flu vaccine.
When I was younger with kids, we had a 3 in 1 vaccine for kids shoved at us energetically. We opted for a tried & trusted 2 in 1 for them, despite strenuous opposition from medical folks. I found out later we were in a small group (I have epilepsy) whose kids would suffer serious damage from the vaccine. That information wasn't available to dispensing staff. Many folks blame their children's autism on that 3 in 1 vaccine.
I don't buy the 'few proteins' argument. Do you work for a drugs firm?
I'm charmed to read such vitriol against systemd. I thought people were losing it. My pet hates in Linux atm are: Systemd; Grub2; PulseAudio; RHEL NetworkManager (More properly named GuessworkManager); Bloatware Window Managers KDE & Gnome.
Yeah, Sysvinit is slow, Yeah, Systemd is a POS. Init has stood the test of time, is no slower than windows, and surely can be paralleled more than it is. Systemd has FAILED the test of time.
Slackware also offers init and systemd - you don't need Devuan. I have yet to be convinced Devuan is not going to go the way of so many other forks for lack of developers.
+1 on these comments. It is a fact that people in IT have to get off their butts and work nights if necessary to learn stuff and stay relevant. It is a fact that the company should have reacted to a migration in OS used and trained current staff, or fired them and hired new.
I have a son who earned his degree with lectures in C, and C++ under Windows; He did a project using Chuck, another in some movie-centric media language, taught himself Mac
OS, linux, Python, VB, HTML 4&5, a bit of Perl, Python, objective C, Swift, bash scripting, Swift, CSS, Android, etc. That's what they SHOULD have been doing.
So let them get off their asses now and start learning pronto, or fire them. Red Hat do online courses; CCNA does online courses; OSX, Linux, and BSD all have forums and support for newbies doing stuff. Let them do Linux From Scratch. Give them an old pc or two, let them install distros, set up others in a vm, and get them in at the deep end. Let them patch a bug in some program they never heard of. They will love you for it, or quit.
On the wisdom of the Gates Purchase: Richard Feynman put it fairly well:
"I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy."
And Again:
"In talking about the impact of ideas in one field on ideas in another field, one is always apt to make a fool of oneself."
But heck, it's ONLY $80 million. Not like he'll miss it. But it doesn't show much thought for those who really need a dig out.
:
Another thing you could do is open or spruce up your github account. Backend code could be put there (as backend code) and whatever you do/want to advertise goes up also. Advertising yourself means doing the latest thing. Already I have my doubts about you because
1. You didn't think of this yourself.
2. You want to be on the cutting edge (what's coming in, and I bet the code you have could have been written in the last millenium).
3. "If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas." I gather you've got fleas; you've spent too long in that last job. You want a neat, commented, organised, succint code in an OSS project doing clever things. You need to improve continually, show variety and brains.
As an electronics guy, I can say that the 6502 was the most primitive 8 bit cpu, never clocked above 1 Mhz, was single threaded and was digital (i.e. 1 or 0 output). It never thought, but simply executed given instructions. "Processing" was (and is) converting these digital instructions through digital logic circuits into actions. A 6502 can never have an original thought.
The brain processes multiple inputs, is analog (not 1 or 0 but level sensitive) and processes multiple threads, some consciously & more subconsciously. A brain uses chemicals and electricity, and outperforms all processors ever made.
The funny thing is - the CPUs have intelligent designers, but evolutionists & atheists would have us believe the brain is the result of a series of accidental mutations.
I know there'll be flames, but I reject this message.
To get approval for a gmo, corporations like Monsanto have to submit 2 reports to the FDA saying the thing is better. Nobody cares if they (as is done) don't publish 5 or 10 unfavourable reports. That passes for "science." It's worth noting that approving GMOs as essentially the same as normal foods was done by an ex-Monsanto head of FDA against the advice of FDA Scientists. What do they know?
The soil degredation evident over 5 - 10 years with monoculture GMO crops is evidence that they're not the panacea they're cracked up to be. Instead of balanced natural soil diversity, repeated ploughing & spraying leaves the soil impoverished, the farmers with the expense of weedkillers, fungicides, pesticides, fertilisers and the food poisoned; the essential microbes & fungi in the soil are wiped out,. & worms greatly diminished. In some places, the workers on the breadline end up poisoned too, but have no choice but to continue.
Are they harmful to humans? Physically, I don't know, but I don't like where some genes inserted in foods are said to come from. Economically, very often. All that Amazon rain forest cleared for GMO Soy & Corn has not brought wealth to the locals, but it degrades by the year.
Agree 100%. I ran a business for 17 years repairing Industrial Electronics. The real repair work on which I survived (on PCBs, instruments or factory machinery) required undivided attention, and then I could usually fix what had eluded many others. It also required a certain carelessness with regard to electric shock:-P. Given that I had the latter, I cannot consider myself unusually brilliant, so I presume 100% concentration gave me the edge that kept things going for so long.
O & M guys in industry write that a phone call to you at your desk costs 20 mins of your time before you get back up to full concentration. Mind you, concentration, & patience are vanishing commodities in today's world.
Yes, but what a pity that Americans have not rejected the thing that's killing them - their food. The 'average' diet is alarming - high fats, calories & sugars, excess protein, chemicals, salt, low fruit, fibre, exercise & complete foods. Government subsidies for corn, for example simply depress the price, so they actually go into the profits of multinationals. No wonder 2/3 Americans are obese and you have health problems.
In Europe, we label GMOs and most families never buy anything containing them. There is trash food, but you can get organic & healthy options.
I had to do a paper in 2014 in Electronics Engineering. I had adapted good lines in the draft:[Brackets show my edits]
Professor Sir Frank Holmes: [Electronic specifications] "are like a bikini; what they reveal is important, what they conceal is vital".
Otto Van Bismark: [Prototypes] "are like sausages; it's better not to see them being made."
Hal Abelson: "If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders." (this is a reversal of Issac Newton's line, and was my case exactly).
All had to go - my grade depended on it. We had a period a week on report writing. People had to hand up draft headings before they knew what they were doing. External examiners were blamed. We had to sound 'like professionals.'
Ypu're a C programmer, but I gather ypu have stagnated somewhat and have a management function. He is still a programmer at the coal face. Let me hazard a guess that you have stopped working days and studying at night.
You need to be a programmer OR a manager. If you're a programmer, get up to date( a huge job) and name 6 languages he could do the task in and learn at least three of them. Then stay up to date. If you're a manager, He is the professional. Do you trust his choice? Empower him.
My son is a Swift (=Apple OS & IOS) programmer. He programs phones, watches, Apple TVs He can program in about 20 languages. He wrote a multitouch project in Chuck. Ever heard of that?
I am a dissenter from Moore's law. There are physical limits and we are near them. There is a physical limit on fab size, charge time, propagation time, signal speed, current and heat. There are also pricing issues: Would you pay $300 extra for faster ram? It could probably be done by using cache. I doubt if users would pay.
If we could fit the entire system on a chip, Then you could speed up. But choice goes out. No choice at all.
In the EU, there's a law requiring parts to be available for items sold for 10 years. That probably excludes software updates.
Samsung don't do it because they don't have to. Imagine a modern developer being tasked to patch these things. He'd be unemployable in 2 years, after living in the past with the old models.
I can imagine many projects where that could happen.
I'm a linux user. IMHO, the kernel is becoming impossible for a user to compile; KDE sucks - it's too $£@&! big; Gnome sucks for the same reason; X sucks in the graphics area. and pppd . . .
The fact is software writers with Aspergers make poor judges of character. Power corrupts. I'm a believer in firing people from OSS. But there should be a process where nobody uses dictatorial headship, but everyone with a right to express themselves voices their opinion and reproves one or the other in a conflict. Trial by peer, I suppose.
Or have we (secretly) hated HW patenting all along, just as bad as SW patenting?
Or is it just the current setup of the patent system that is the problem?
HW patenting isn't as bad. Let me illustrate: The PAL tv colour circuitry had essential patents, many owned by Telefunken. The Japanese competitors could not use these patents in their equipment, so they developed ways around the patents, and, ultimately, better televisions. Unless you're breaking new ground, you can only get a patent to cover direct copies of your device in hardware. One company slavishly copied the day/night car mirror design of another. I worked briefly for the copyists, and their legal advice was that they could copy the circuit exactly. They did. They could not copy the mechanical action, however, and had to avoid using an eccentric to do it.
The problem with software patents is that applications of known techniques to new areas are patentable, whereas in fact they really are 'prior art.'
I have epilepsy. Sorry to be hard, but if you apply the "Worst case analysis" that engineers use, all your wearables / toddlers / gimmicks are trash. Is your toddler going to pull your patient wife off the cooker that's setting her on fire? Stop her bleeding? Decide when to ring for medical help?
Most epileptics know when they have issues coming. If your wife does, have an effective strategy to deal with that. If not, rethink your career. Can you take less money and work from home? Cut some deal with your boss? Take less money and work nearer home?
There is also a little known perscription drug called Epistatus. It never seems to get approval, but is available on perscription. It is absorbed through the cheek, and can be administered while unconscious. There's a youtube video.
I hear a lot of YOUR opinions, but nothing of your wife's opinions. What does she want you to do?
These comments read like a script from Family Guy. For every statement of what is opinion or could be sense, there seem to be two or more putdowns, 2 insults, and a number of mindlessly stupid irrelevancies.
Yes, the Catholic Pope addressed Global Warming giving the Scientific Consensus. Yes, he is remarkably sane for a high ranking Catholic - electing him was an grave error, or else the cardinals felt quite desperate. Yes, he should be kicking out of the Vatican all criminal priests with diplomatic immunity, purging his organization of pedophiles, talking about God's Kingdom and using God's name, divesting the church of it's ill gotten gains and putting them to good use. But it is an obviously false religion. As it influences people less, it rides along with their opinions more.
The truth is - I don't think Catholicism is an organization that can be reformed. Now that I have said that much, watch for the insults, put downs, and mindless irrelevancies.
It;s a good question if any of us will be here. To quote Arthur C. Clarke: "This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one."
Red Hat will still be there; systemd is crap, but people who need to learn it. There is a man page. They got away with worse (selinux, their network script, pppd, etc). They have a steady income stream in Enterprise.
Oracle may not be; Motorola, Ericsson and Blackberry will all fade and shrink, or be bought over.
M$ will be smaller, but still probably there if they manage to do one thing without making a total mess of it. That is a tall order for them.
Xiaomi may kick Samsung's ass but they will both probably survive.
I see a fallout in newspapers, magazines, and reading matter generally as prople go vitrual.
You're on to something here. This is actually one of several things that seem to be wrong in the system. The metrics seem to have been devised by personnel demons ('scuse me, They are HR now:).
1. Science is conservative. The 'higher' you get, the more conservative you have to be.
2. Scientists in many fields do not read enough papers. They don't have the time. They grab abstracts and conclusions and read a section or two. They also might read a paper to contradict it destructively. Look at the evolution/ID debate if you don't believe me.
3. Papers are too long anyhow. Length is equated with depth, but it might more properly be equated with obfuscation.
4. As you said, counting citations is a joke.
Much more relevant might be a system where papers consisted of
1. Background was relegated to an appendix. Maths in another. Statistics to a third (if required). The briefest of introductions
2. Next an experimental discussion which set out only information necessary for the understanding the experiments, and their results.
3. Next a section on implications of experimental results.
4. All tripe about work done to be reserved for the lecturers who are marking student papers.
Each chapter would be a generous summary of the drivel currently making reading papers such a boring job.
Have to agree. This is on the scale of "That old lemur we found could be _the_ missing link in human evolution." Which one of the 1000s of missing links?
Can't blame the guy (who obviously worked hard) for trying to make his work sound interesting. But it's significance is that it may be one of the lower steps in someone else's future ladder.
The Good news is they are getting tough with OEMs. Let them start in China. Companies like Rockchip, a chinese SoC manufacturer, sell their boards into tablets, cubes and all sorts of gimmicks, but never update. I have such a tablet with Android-4.2.2. No update available, and there are shameful holes in security. It has proprietary modules which prevent using CM or other software.
As for the bad news - 20 google apps - well, that's a shameful waste of memory, but I can always delete the shortcuts:-). Perhaps even the packages too.
I disagree with a lot of what's being said.
I have faith in God. But I don't regard anyone involved in WW2 or any war as Christian. Christ is not a pacifist, but he was not involved in THESE wars, which are about keeping leaders in power more often than not.
BTW, has anyone noted the original logical flaws? If science has 'high priests,' it's a religion, or some chancers are putting one over on people big time.
Mark Twain made my point, so I'll just quote him:
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore... in the Old Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long... seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long.
. . . . There is something fascinating about science. One gets such
wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of
fact.
I disagree that time began with the big bang. Maybe time for this universe began, not time in the absolute sense. And at the time I mentioned something was happening which pure materialists may feel uncomfortable with.
Slashdot Mirror
Every degree sets out to cover a syllabus which was set before year 1 begins. It's Rarely updated Mid-year, and never in meaningful ways end of year.
My degree was in Electronics. The course and lecturers have their heads in the last millennium. They didn't teach me thermionic valves, but did teach much redundant crap. They all ran scared when I ran my project at 250Mhz, and had no facilities for building my board.
Lecturers get lazy, and are reluctant to go learning new tech. Most of them wouldn't get a real-world job, because they are out of date in Electronics anyhow.
I Avoid Flu shots annually. No, we don't take them. My mother-in-law had 2 bad reactions to them, and two other close relations have had serious side effects from flu shots. We're relatively healthy. There's every chance we will be exposed to every flu because of the circles we move in, but we'll survive if we get a flu. I'd rather chance getting the flu than annually expose myself to the vaccine . We never know the side effects of a flu vaccine. When I was younger with kids, we had a 3 in 1 vaccine for kids shoved at us energetically. We opted for a tried & trusted 2 in 1 for them, despite strenuous opposition from medical folks. I found out later we were in a small group (I have epilepsy) whose kids would suffer serious damage from the vaccine. That information wasn't available to dispensing staff. Many folks blame their children's autism on that 3 in 1 vaccine. I don't buy the 'few proteins' argument. Do you work for a drugs firm?
I'm charmed to read such vitriol against systemd. I thought people were losing it. My pet hates in Linux atm are: Systemd; Grub2; PulseAudio; RHEL NetworkManager (More properly named GuessworkManager); Bloatware Window Managers KDE & Gnome.
Yeah, Sysvinit is slow, Yeah, Systemd is a POS. Init has stood the test of time, is no slower than windows, and surely can be paralleled more than it is. Systemd has FAILED the test of time. Slackware also offers init and systemd - you don't need Devuan. I have yet to be convinced Devuan is not going to go the way of so many other forks for lack of developers.
+1 on these comments. It is a fact that people in IT have to get off their butts and work nights if necessary to learn stuff and stay relevant. It is a fact that the company should have reacted to a migration in OS used and trained current staff, or fired them and hired new.
I have a son who earned his degree with lectures in C, and C++ under Windows; He did a project using Chuck, another in some movie-centric media language, taught himself Mac OS, linux, Python, VB, HTML 4&5, a bit of Perl, Python, objective C, Swift, bash scripting, Swift, CSS, Android, etc. That's what they SHOULD have been doing. So let them get off their asses now and start learning pronto, or fire them. Red Hat do online courses; CCNA does online courses; OSX, Linux, and BSD all have forums and support for newbies doing stuff. Let them do Linux From Scratch. Give them an old pc or two, let them install distros, set up others in a vm, and get them in at the deep end. Let them patch a bug in some program they never heard of. They will love you for it, or quit.
On the wisdom of the Gates Purchase: Richard Feynman put it fairly well:
"I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy."
And Again:
"In talking about the impact of ideas in one field on ideas in another field, one is always apt to make a fool of oneself."
But heck, it's ONLY $80 million. Not like he'll miss it. But it doesn't show much thought for those who really need a dig out. :
Another thing you could do is open or spruce up your github account. Backend code could be put there (as backend code) and whatever you do/want to advertise goes up also. Advertising yourself means doing the latest thing. Already I have my doubts about you because 1. You didn't think of this yourself. 2. You want to be on the cutting edge (what's coming in, and I bet the code you have could have been written in the last millenium). 3. "If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas." I gather you've got fleas; you've spent too long in that last job. You want a neat, commented, organised, succint code in an OSS project doing clever things. You need to improve continually, show variety and brains.
As an electronics guy, I can say that the 6502 was the most primitive 8 bit cpu, never clocked above 1 Mhz, was single threaded and was digital (i.e. 1 or 0 output). It never thought, but simply executed given instructions. "Processing" was (and is) converting these digital instructions through digital logic circuits into actions. A 6502 can never have an original thought. The brain processes multiple inputs, is analog (not 1 or 0 but level sensitive) and processes multiple threads, some consciously & more subconsciously. A brain uses chemicals and electricity, and outperforms all processors ever made. The funny thing is - the CPUs have intelligent designers, but evolutionists & atheists would have us believe the brain is the result of a series of accidental mutations.
I know there'll be flames, but I reject this message.
To get approval for a gmo, corporations like Monsanto have to submit 2 reports to the FDA saying the thing is better. Nobody cares if they (as is done) don't publish 5 or 10 unfavourable reports. That passes for "science." It's worth noting that approving GMOs as essentially the same as normal foods was done by an ex-Monsanto head of FDA against the advice of FDA Scientists. What do they know?
The soil degredation evident over 5 - 10 years with monoculture GMO crops is evidence that they're not the panacea they're cracked up to be. Instead of balanced natural soil diversity, repeated ploughing & spraying leaves the soil impoverished, the farmers with the expense of weedkillers, fungicides, pesticides, fertilisers and the food poisoned; the essential microbes & fungi in the soil are wiped out,. & worms greatly diminished. In some places, the workers on the breadline end up poisoned too, but have no choice but to continue.
Are they harmful to humans? Physically, I don't know, but I don't like where some genes inserted in foods are said to come from.
Economically, very often. All that Amazon rain forest cleared for GMO Soy & Corn has not brought wealth to the locals, but it degrades by the year.
Agree 100%. I ran a business for 17 years repairing Industrial Electronics. The real repair work on which I survived (on PCBs, instruments or factory machinery) required undivided attention, and then I could usually fix what had eluded many others. It also required a certain carelessness with regard to electric shock :-P.
Given that I had the latter, I cannot consider myself unusually brilliant, so I presume 100% concentration gave me the edge that kept things going for so long.
O & M guys in industry write that a phone call to you at your desk costs 20 mins of your time before you get back up to full concentration. Mind you, concentration, & patience are vanishing commodities in today's world.
Yes, but what a pity that Americans have not rejected the thing that's killing them - their food. The 'average' diet is alarming - high fats, calories & sugars, excess protein, chemicals, salt, low fruit, fibre, exercise & complete foods. Government subsidies for corn, for example simply depress the price, so they actually go into the profits of multinationals. No wonder 2/3 Americans are obese and you have health problems. In Europe, we label GMOs and most families never buy anything containing them. There is trash food, but you can get organic & healthy options.
I had to do a paper in 2014 in Electronics Engineering. I had adapted good lines in the draft:[Brackets show my edits]
Professor Sir Frank Holmes: [Electronic specifications] "are like a bikini; what they reveal is important, what they conceal is vital".
Otto Van Bismark: [Prototypes] "are like sausages; it's better not to see them being made."
Hal Abelson: "If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders." (this is a reversal of Issac Newton's line, and was my case exactly).
All had to go - my grade depended on it. We had a period a week on report writing. People had to hand up draft headings before they knew what they were doing. External examiners were blamed. We had to sound 'like professionals.'
Ypu're a C programmer, but I gather ypu have stagnated somewhat and have a management function. He is still a programmer at the coal face. Let me hazard a guess that you have stopped working days and studying at night.
You need to be a programmer OR a manager. If you're a programmer, get up to date( a huge job) and name 6 languages he could do the task in and learn at least three of them. Then stay up to date. If you're a manager, He is the professional. Do you trust his choice? Empower him.
My son is a Swift (=Apple OS & IOS) programmer. He programs phones, watches, Apple TVs He can program in about 20 languages. He wrote a multitouch project in Chuck. Ever heard of that?
I am a dissenter from Moore's law. There are physical limits and we are near them. There is a physical limit on fab size, charge time, propagation time, signal speed, current and heat. There are also pricing issues: Would you pay $300 extra for faster ram? It could probably be done by using cache. I doubt if users would pay.
If we could fit the entire system on a chip, Then you could speed up. But choice goes out. No choice at all.
In the EU, there's a law requiring parts to be available for items sold for 10 years. That probably excludes software updates. Samsung don't do it because they don't have to. Imagine a modern developer being tasked to patch these things. He'd be unemployable in 2 years, after living in the past with the old models.
I can imagine many projects where that could happen. I'm a linux user. IMHO, the kernel is becoming impossible for a user to compile; KDE sucks - it's too $£@&! big; Gnome sucks for the same reason; X sucks in the graphics area. and pppd . . . The fact is software writers with Aspergers make poor judges of character. Power corrupts. I'm a believer in firing people from OSS. But there should be a process where nobody uses dictatorial headship, but everyone with a right to express themselves voices their opinion and reproves one or the other in a conflict. Trial by peer, I suppose.
Or have we (secretly) hated HW patenting all along, just as bad as SW patenting? Or is it just the current setup of the patent system that is the problem?
HW patenting isn't as bad. Let me illustrate: The PAL tv colour circuitry had essential patents, many owned by Telefunken. The Japanese competitors could not use these patents in their equipment, so they developed ways around the patents, and, ultimately, better televisions. Unless you're breaking new ground, you can only get a patent to cover direct copies of your device in hardware. One company slavishly copied the day/night car mirror design of another. I worked briefly for the copyists, and their legal advice was that they could copy the circuit exactly. They did. They could not copy the mechanical action, however, and had to avoid using an eccentric to do it. The problem with software patents is that applications of known techniques to new areas are patentable, whereas in fact they really are 'prior art.'
I have epilepsy. Sorry to be hard, but if you apply the "Worst case analysis" that engineers use, all your wearables / toddlers / gimmicks are trash. Is your toddler going to pull your patient wife off the cooker that's setting her on fire? Stop her bleeding? Decide when to ring for medical help?
Most epileptics know when they have issues coming. If your wife does, have an effective strategy to deal with that. If not, rethink your career. Can you take less money and work from home? Cut some deal with your boss? Take less money and work nearer home?
There is also a little known perscription drug called Epistatus. It never seems to get approval, but is available on perscription. It is absorbed through the cheek, and can be administered while unconscious. There's a youtube video.
I hear a lot of YOUR opinions, but nothing of your wife's opinions. What does she want you to do?
These comments read like a script from Family Guy. For every statement of what is opinion or could be sense, there seem to be two or more putdowns, 2 insults, and a number of mindlessly stupid irrelevancies.
Yes, the Catholic Pope addressed Global Warming giving the Scientific Consensus. Yes, he is remarkably sane for a high ranking Catholic - electing him was an grave error, or else the cardinals felt quite desperate. Yes, he should be kicking out of the Vatican all criminal priests with diplomatic immunity, purging his organization of pedophiles, talking about God's Kingdom and using God's name, divesting the church of it's ill gotten gains and putting them to good use. But it is an obviously false religion. As it influences people less, it rides along with their opinions more.
The truth is - I don't think Catholicism is an organization that can be reformed. Now that I have said that much, watch for the insults, put downs, and mindless irrelevancies.
It;s a good question if any of us will be here. To quote Arthur C. Clarke: "This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one."
Red Hat will still be there; systemd is crap, but people who need to learn it. There is a man page. They got away with worse (selinux, their network script, pppd, etc). They have a steady income stream in Enterprise.
Oracle may not be; Motorola, Ericsson and Blackberry will all fade and shrink, or be bought over.
M$ will be smaller, but still probably there if they manage to do one thing without making a total mess of it. That is a tall order for them. Xiaomi may kick Samsung's ass but they will both probably survive. I see a fallout in newspapers, magazines, and reading matter generally as prople go vitrual.
You're on to something here. This is actually one of several things that seem to be wrong in the system. The metrics seem to have been devised by personnel demons ('scuse me, They are HR now :).
1. Science is conservative. The 'higher' you get, the more conservative you have to be.
2. Scientists in many fields do not read enough papers. They don't have the time. They grab abstracts and conclusions and read a section or two. They also might read a paper to contradict it destructively. Look at the evolution/ID debate if you don't believe me.
3. Papers are too long anyhow. Length is equated with depth, but it might more properly be equated with obfuscation.
4. As you said, counting citations is a joke.
Much more relevant might be a system where papers consisted of
1. Background was relegated to an appendix. Maths in another. Statistics to a third (if required). The briefest of introductions
2. Next an experimental discussion which set out only information necessary for the understanding the experiments, and their results.
3. Next a section on implications of experimental results.
4. All tripe about work done to be reserved for the lecturers who are marking student papers.
Each chapter would be a generous summary of the drivel currently making reading papers such a boring job.
Have to agree. This is on the scale of "That old lemur we found could be _the_ missing link in human evolution." Which one of the 1000s of missing links?
Can't blame the guy (who obviously worked hard) for trying to make his work sound interesting. But it's significance is that it may be one of the lower steps in someone else's future ladder.
The Good news is they are getting tough with OEMs. Let them start in China. Companies like Rockchip, a chinese SoC manufacturer, sell their boards into tablets, cubes and all sorts of gimmicks, but never update. I have such a tablet with Android-4.2.2. No update available, and there are shameful holes in security. It has proprietary modules which prevent using CM or other software. As for the bad news - 20 google apps - well, that's a shameful waste of memory, but I can always delete the shortcuts :-). Perhaps even the packages too.
I disagree with a lot of what's being said. I have faith in God. But I don't regard anyone involved in WW2 or any war as Christian. Christ is not a pacifist, but he was not involved in THESE wars, which are about keeping leaders in power more often than not. BTW, has anyone noted the original logical flaws? If science has 'high priests,' it's a religion, or some chancers are putting one over on people big time.
Mark Twain made my point, so I'll just quote him: In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore ... in the Old Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long ... seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long.
. . . . There is something fascinating about science. One gets such
wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of
fact.
I disagree that time began with the big bang. Maybe time for this universe began, not time in the absolute sense. And at the time I mentioned something was happening which pure materialists may feel uncomfortable with.