Not only "not all developers work for software companies" - the MAJORITY of developers don't work for software companies.
The VAST VAST majority of software is written by in-house (or contracted) IT staff supporting some other sort of business - banking, manufacturing, transportation etc etc etc. The people writing software for direct sale are far and away the minority.
With the possible exception of games, the whole concept of "software for sale" is an abberation that FOSS is (slowly but inexorably) correcting.
the choice of a programming language should be in line with making a project easily maintainable down the line.
ALL languages are equally good and equally bad when it comes to later maintainability. One can write perl that is spectacularly easy to maintain, and one can write Java that is so horribly obfuscated that nobody - even the original author - can recognise it 6 months later.
Maintainibility is something that gets written into the code itself; it is not an attribute of a language.
Open source is a way to get other entities (companies, individuals, whatever) to share the cost of your NON-STRATEGIC IT functions.
I disagree.
Our LDAP replicator program was released to the public under the GPL. It was performing a very strategic function - keeping all the corporate LDAP directories in sync with each other, which was a "if it stops we don't build cars" infrastructure component.
We did that specifically because it was a core part of the infrastructure, and thus we wanted to get as many eyeballs on it as possible to make sure it was as robust as it could possibly be.
It was also VERY specialized, and so we didn't get a whole lot of interest in it - this was no Samba. But even so, we DID get bug reports that were merged back into the production version.
You're applying a technical solution to what is, essentially, a management problem.
It doesn't matter WHAT language is the company lingua franca - if you are not holding regular code reviews (and instead trusting the B&D features of Java to do it for you) you WILL get bitten by maintainibility problems down the road. NO language is so obfuscation-proof as to not require review.
Furthermore, if you fail to do reviews, then you are denying your coders a chance to improve their own skills. There is no better way to learn new tricks and techniques than exposure to someone else's code.
And finally, coders are ego-driven animals. If their code is going to be subject to regular review and (especially) public critique, they will go to much greater lengths to ensure high quality of their code than if the code is safely hidden away where only they can see it.
That's one of the major lessons to come out of Free Software - the more people who examine the code, the better it gets.
If you make code review and code sharing a major part of your corporate culture, you'll wind up with a far better and more motivated group of coders - who, incidently, can probably adapt to whatever language is the order of the day.
The trick to writing maintainable perl code is to optimise for legibility - and rigourously enforce it.
That means cutting back a little bit of some of the idiomatic perl shortcuts, especially the use or implied use of $!. It also means solid commenting.
I used to assume that every single perl program I wrote would be handed off to somebody else to maintain, and that this person would be relatively unfamilliar with perl - a skilled coder to be sure, but not necessarily a perl guru.
Accordingly, whenever I used some particularly elegant perl trick - but something that might not be immediately obvious - I commented the hell out of it, explained how the trick worked, and would even give references to the perl manuals where further reading could be had.
The end result - programs that not only did their function, but acted as perl tutorials for the poor bastards who had to maintain my code.
The side effect was that it made MY maintainence much easier too. If a bug was found in something I hadn't touched in years, optimising for legibility meant I could pick up where I left off without too much trouble.
I found that perl's expressibility made it EASIER to do this than "bondage and discipline" languages like Java. When there's more than one way to do it, you can choose the manner that accomplishes the task in the most human-understandable way, rather than being forced to think like the compiler.
I've noticed over the years that the best perl programmers (and in many cases, the best programmers period) are good writers, or have some sort of literary background. I think this is no accident; perl is a language for conversing with both the computer and with other coders.
That's it's strength, and its weakness. Like any expressive language, phrases write one can that difficult to parse are. But you can also write Shakespere.....
Perl is like English, where Java is like Esperanto.
Enterprise-grade apps and "coolness" may be inapproriate bedfellows. Besides, does any language offer both?
Perl.
No, seriously - properly written perl is both "enterprise grade" and as cool as hell.
Of all the languages I've ever worked in, nothing let me build systems as easily, as robustly, and as QUICKLY as perl did.
Remember the Daimler - Chrysler merger? Perl was the glue that unified the HR systems and LDAP directories. As far as I know, it still does. Our LDAP - LDAP replicator tool (written in Perl) was a damn sight more reliable than the native replicators, plus it would do schema translation, plus it had a smaller footprint.
Somehwere along the way, perl seems to have picked up a bad reputation for being illegible and obscure - and certainly one has the freedom to write the cliched "line noise" programs if one wishes. But perl done right can not only be legible, it can be beautiful.
DG
Re:Don't forget historical signifigance
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Cheating Made Easy
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Interesting opinion, sounds exactly like some useless ancient professor who has read the same lecture at the same point for thirty years.
Ah. That, you see, defines our differences pretty well. Where you se an "ancient usless professor", I see a human being with much more experience than I, who probably has a lot of knowledge and wisdom to impart - assuming, of course, I can get my ego out of the way and allow it to happen.
Here's a rule of thumb for you: assume that everybody else is smarter than you, and then change that assumption only if a preponderence of fact forces it to change.
What's wrong with doing a report on a Algebra or Chemistry book or for that matter a report on a book you know the teacher owns like A Hero with A Thousand Faces.
Deux questions, deux reponses:
1) Given that the class in question is English Literature (or at the very least, English) there isn't much value in analyzing a science manual, whose only realy judgeable qualities are "does the book communicate the required information?" and "Is the information communicated factually correct?"
2) So what if he owned the book? You were given a list of books you could analyze, you chose to do a book not on the list. Case closed.
Now the interesting questions that arise are: why not do the report on one of the assigned books? What was the purpose of disobeying instructions? And why feel that, when punished for disobeying instructions, that you have been slighted?
But I have always had my own taste
That's right, you are a precious and rare individual. Just like everybody else.
DG
Re:Don't forget historical signifigance
on
Cheating Made Easy
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· Score: 1
why couldn't I have made just one graded report on "Tune to Win" or any other of Carrol Smith's books?
Probably because - as entertaining as they are - Carroll Smith's books are manuals dealing with engineering; specifically, engineering dealing with race cars.
You might as well do an essay on your algebra textbook.
My report of Joesph Campbell's "Hero with a Thousand Faces" was refused because I hadn't asked permission to report on a book not on the list.
Correctly.
Firstly, you had been provided with a list of titles to choose from, and you went off the list without permission. This falls into the category of "does not follow instructions".
Secondly, that particular list was formed either due to signifigance with the subject at hand, or possibly due to the teacher's familiarity with the books on the list. Teachers are not omnicient. If you chose a book with which they were not familliar, then grading your paper correctly would require them reading the book (preferably in advance of the reading of your paper) and probably some works analyzing this as well. In short, you require the teacher to do all the research for a paper before being sufficiently qualified to grade yours.
Given that the teacher's time is being spread across 30 or more students, that hardly seems fair.
Let me tell you from the perspective from a 15 year old it seams like the only reason for a rule like that is that none of the English teachers had read a book since they read the required reading list why they were in high school and did not want to bother to read others.,/i>
And from the perspective of a 15 year old, "Spiderman" is the best movie ever made, the various franchised Star Wars, Star Trek etc paperbacks are great literature, and 'N'Sync is great music.
15 year olds have simply not been exposed to enough quality material to be able to form an INFORMED opinion about what "great" is - and part of the purpose of school is to make that exposure happen - usually over their objections - and maybe you get lucky and some of it sticks.
Of course, it is typical of the average 15 year old to think that they are more intelligent than their teachers. I remember being 15 too. The thing is - I was WAY wrong. The older I get, the more I realize the less I know.
Writers - most writers, anyway - don't live in a vacuum. Everything written has as a subtext all that has been written previously.
Some works in particular were very influential and resonate throughout all the literature that follows.
Consider sitting down to write a book about star-crossed lovers from feuding families - impossible to do without thinking of Romeo and Juliet, and all the subsequent riffs on Romeo & Juliet.
Hell, even Billy Shakespere wasn't immune from this - consider how much of his work is based on historical occurence, mythology, and folk tales.
If you don't read these works, then you won't recognise them when they are quoted, re-interpreted, or otherwise riffed on in later works. It would be like watching the Simpsons or Family Guy without knowing any of the cultural references - most of the stuff there would go right over your head.
The study of literature is in many ways a study of the _history_ of literature. You can't really understand modern works unless you have been exposed to earlier ones.
The funny thing about change is how little people notice it happening - like how if you drop a frog in a pot and crank the temperature up slowly enough, you can boil him and he'll never know.
Let's look at some of you statements:
"Sure we got the internet and cell phones."
Way to trivialize a couple of the most important recent developments there Skippy.
Thanks to the Internet, specifically the WWW and decent search engines, a HUGE amount of human knowledge is now recorded in a manner that is easy and cheap to find. That's not a computer on your desk; it's a "knowledge box" that can answer almost any question you can pose.
In 2014, that'll still exist - except that it'll be bigger, faster, and (one assumes) even simpler to parse/search.
Now add in cell phones, and you've got a device that allows one to communicate with any other person from anywhere in the world, at any time, immediately. PLUS you get access to that same "knowledge box".
If you want an example of cell phones changing the world, you only need look at 9/11:
It used to be that the best strategy for surviving a plane hijacking was to lay low, keep cool, and not draw attention to yourself. Hijackers wanted to use passengers as a lever; specifically, they wanted to use THREATS against those passengers as a lever. It was not in their best interests to actually hurt anyone, and once they started down that road, it was in their best interests to string out their supply of hostages as long as possible. Most hostages got out alive - ergo, keep quiet and let the situation play itself out.
9/11 changed that. The 9/11 hijackers did not care at all about the "hostages" - they were after the plane; specifically, the potential damage from the kinetic energy of the aircraft and the chemical energy of its fuel load. The passengers on the plane were incidental.
In this situation, the survival strategy changes. Your best chance for survival as a 9/11 hostage is to do everything you can to wrest control back from the hijackers. There is a high liklihood that individual passengers may be injured or killed, but given that everybody aboard is dead already anyway, you might as well see if you can't make the long shot pay off.
Thanks to cellphones, this change in anti-hijacker strategy propegated so quickly that it nullified one of the attacks WHILE THE PLANE WAS STILL IN THE AIR.
Think about that for a second. 4 hijacker crews boarded planes expecting the passengers to act like sheep - as was the normal and proper survival tactic when faced with a hijacking to that point. One of those crews failed, because the news that 1) their plane had been hijacked and 2) that hijacked planes were being crashed into buildings was communicated via cellphone.
Chew on THAT for a while and tell me "Sure we got the internet and cell phones"
1) Fuel efficiancy at high torque: when a turbine is running in its happy place, it gets very, very good fuel efficiancy. If you have something that needs to put out a lot of force, and it needs to sip fuel, a turbine and a CVT work great. If you have something that can run at the same shaft speed for a long time (like a ship or an aircraft) you can delete the CVT and gear accordingly
2) Multi-fuel capability: a turbine's fuel system is very simple, and the fuel doesn't need to do much more than burn. Assuming it is properly filtered and doesn't have any real strange properties, a turbine can run on almost anything - like recovered vegetable oil. Diesels can do the same thing, just not as well.
When the Abrams was designed, there was a lot of worry about fuel logistics in Europe during WW3, and so most tanks of that era can run on a variety of fuels - in case fuel had to be scrounged.
What turbines DON'T do well is idle - fuel consumption at idle is almost as high as fuel consumption at full power. For a turbine-powered tank in "hurry up and wait" mode (as it usually is - especially in the defensive) this can burn a lot of fuel, as the engine is run to provide power for the radios, turret traverse, on-board computers, crew A/C, the boiler vessel (gotta have coffee) etc.
There was a plan to equip the Abrams with some sort of APU for use when idling, but I don't know if that ever got implemented.
Well, there's expansionist, and then there's EXPANSIONIST.
First, if it's not clear yet, I lived though this stuff kinda personal-like. It was supposed to be partly my job to stop the Slavering Soviet Hordes should they ever come calling. I've got a T-shirt from that era that's a faux rock concert shirt "Soviet World Tour" with the concert dates on tha back listing the dates of various Soviet invasions, etc.
I remember, at the time, being completely convinced that the Soviet Union intended to take over the world. World Dominination was the goal. Cue the cat and the monacle.
But with the Iron Curtain down, and the declassification of both Soviet and NATO documents... I'm no longer so sure about that.
Have you ever read any of the NATO policy and strategy papers? Or any of the reports published by the Regan-era strategy think-tanks? They're horrifying, even when you're on the same side as the author. We kept looking for ways to be able to go to war with the Soviet Union with minimal cost to ourselves. They read like justifications for first-strike - not just CAPABILITY, but actually USING it.
This was the face we were presenting to the Soviets. We say "we're just defending ourselves, we have no agressive intentions" and then we take actions that look agressive. And the Soviets had recent experience with a power that said one thing and did another....
You can see evidence of that in the design of the SS-18. Their silos were hardened to a ground pressure of 6000 PSI. Six THOUSAND. A Yank Minuiteman silo was hardened to 300 PSI.
You don't harden the silo of a first-strike weapon all that hard, because it'll be empty before anybody can hit it. But the Soviets were by God going to make sure that the SS-18 could survive a direct hit.
So I wonder if the invasion of Poland etc weren't acts of defence instead of agression.
Now you'll counter with "it didn't make any damn difference to the Poles!" and I would agree with you. There's certainly no way I can justify the Soviet invasion of Poland. But I can't help but wonder if it wasn't motivated by desire for the safety and security of the Soviet Union, not as (as was portrayed at the time) a stepping stone towards global domination "Today Poland, tomorrow the World!"
And if it really WAS a defensive act... well then, didn't we (the West) provoke that? Don't we bear some of the responsibility?
All history builds on what has gone before, so I'm going to have to start this with a couple of statements that you'll have to accept as "givens" for the moment.
1) The Soviet Union did all the heavy lifting when it came to defeating the Nazis in WW2. That's not to say that the Western allies didn't contribute AT ALL, but the Soviets bore the brunt of it and did the lions share of destroying the German army. Accordingly, the Soviets got VERY good at large-scale land warfare, especially with tanks.
2) Communism had been on the US radar at least since 1917 and probably earlier. Pure-form Communism (the spontanious revolt of the working class against their opressors) had been the greatest fear of any US captain of industry since the first worker uprisings, and Soviet-style Communism was seen (by some) to be the fullest expression of the spirit of worker revolt as threat.
3) More than a few Western generals and intellectuals wanted to keep on going after the defeat of Germany and go after the USSR next. Patton in particular was a very vocal proponant of defeating the USSR NOW (in 1945) while they were weakened, and while the US Army was already there and fully equipped. After all, they were going to have to fight eventually, why not get it over with?
4) There was a certain amount of Soviet resentment over how long it took to get the Western allies into the fight, and I think (given the anti-Soviet statements that kept turning up) a lingering suspicion that the delay was purposeful, with the intent that the USSR should bleed its strength off against Germany so that the West could come in and finish the Soviets off. Certainly Stalin felt that way, at least for a little while.
So then, at the end of WW2 you've got a Soviet Union with a lot of waretime experience, that feels threatened by the West, and which paid a HORRIFIC cost in lives and is VERY much determined to never go through that experience again.
They may or may not have had expansionist goals as well. Certainly at the time we expected them to come pouring through the Fulda Gap at any second. I know *I* certainly expected them to attack first. Now I'm no longer sure.
But anyway, the Soviets know armoured warefare, right? And one of the tenets of fighting an armoured battle is the concept of "defense in depth". You cannot just line up all your soldiers along the border, WW1-style, because the enemy will mass his forces at a single point, punch through, and now he's running amok in your rear while all your soldiers are up on the border.
So instead, you put a screen on the border, and you keep massed maneouver units some distance behind the border. When the screen locates the centre of axis of the attack, you counterattack the main thrust with your own thrust.
But this caused a couple of problems for the West.
First, the Soviet army was VERY much larger and more powerful than the Western armies. Unit for unit, the West was better, but the Soviets made up for the quality gap with quantity in spades. "defense in depth" wasn't going to be enough - the West needed "force multipliers" like chemical weapons and nukes. Accordingly, it was NATO policy to "go nuclear" IMMEDIATELY.
Quick aside: In the late 80s, Canada bough CF18 fighters, which are really lovely aircraft, but it retained a couple of squadrons of CF104 Starfighters as "ground attack" planes. The F18 is a great ground attack plane, while the F104 is about the worst ground attack plane you could possibly imagine. The 104 goes really, really fast in a straight line, and not much else.
Canada is all about "do more with less", but this always struck me as being singularly unwise.
Well it turned out that the REAL mission of these planes was NUCLEAR ground attack. Load up an American nuke bomb, and then go like hell towards whatever massed formation got discovered and nuke it.
Anyway, the combination of "defense in depth" and "nuke first" did not sit too well with the West Germans, because, well, West Germany
Don't forget ricochet range. A projectile that skipped off the ocean (for example) could wind up somewhere much farther downrange than 30 miles.
I've seen plain old ordinary machine gun rounds do some amazing and unexpected things. I expect that scales with velocity.
Interesting point from the article - the author sees this system fitting into existing 5" gun mounts, and sees one gun as being able to deliver equivelent fire as a squadron of F18s. That means destroyers become as powerful as aircraft carriers.
A few years ago, I was getting ready to go off on a military training course where I was going to be doing a lot of running around in the bushes. To help get myself in shape, I started playing paintball in full uniform, helmet, and webbing - the idea was to train myself in conditions as close as I could get to the real thing.
Even though most paintball games were broken up into "teams", your average paintballer was a lone wolf type who did not play well with others.
Well, one day I linked up with a guy from another regiment who was doing the same sort of thing that I was. We started working together as a military fire team - fire and movement, supressive fire, etc - and we absolutely CLEANED HOUSE on the kids.
It served as a double education. For us, it was great to see that fire and movement actually works in practice. For them... well, maybe they didn't learn all that much, because all they ever did was bitch about how "unfair" it was when they got steamrolled. Shit, it's SUPPOSED to be unfair; we're not trying to give the bad guys an even break here.
DISCLAIMER: I was a soldier for 11 years, including a stint running Basic Training courses.
Soldiers - counter, perhaps, to what the video game experience might lead you to beleive - are NOT supposed to be souless killing machines. Quite the contrary, you want your soldiers to be highly moral.
Killing someone is the ultimate violence that you can do to them. Doing so with state sanction is something that needs to be taken VERY seriously. You need a soldier who is capable - when the situation demands it - of killing without hesitation, but you also need them to be able to STOP killing just as quickly.
When you remove the morality from soldiering, you wind up with things like the recent pictures that came out of that prison in Iraq. Amoral soldiers take matters into their own hands, and may wander off into some very dark places.
Furthermore, the days of mass armies composed of highly specialized, single-purpose troops seem to be behind us. Modern soldiers must be able to adapt to roles far beyond just "kill the enemy" - just read up on what goes on in any UN peacekeeping mission.
The more complex the mission becomes, the more complex and adaptable the soldier must become to meet the requirements of the mission.
From the dusty reaches of my own damn memory, NOT Google:
"I'm Mist White Christmas I'm Mister Snow I'm Mister ice crystal I'm Mister 40 below They call me Cold Miser Whatever I touch Turns to ice in my clutch I'm too much!"
Slashdot Mirror
Not only "not all developers work for software companies" - the MAJORITY of developers don't work for software companies.
The VAST VAST majority of software is written by in-house (or contracted) IT staff supporting some other sort of business - banking, manufacturing, transportation etc etc etc. The people writing software for direct sale are far and away the minority.
With the possible exception of games, the whole concept of "software for sale" is an abberation that FOSS is (slowly but inexorably) correcting.
DG
ALL languages are equally good and equally bad when it comes to later maintainability. One can write perl that is spectacularly easy to maintain, and one can write Java that is so horribly obfuscated that nobody - even the original author - can recognise it 6 months later.
Maintainibility is something that gets written into the code itself; it is not an attribute of a language.
I disagree.
Our LDAP replicator program was released to the public under the GPL. It was performing a very strategic function - keeping all the corporate LDAP directories in sync with each other, which was a "if it stops we don't build cars" infrastructure component.
We did that specifically because it was a core part of the infrastructure, and thus we wanted to get as many eyeballs on it as possible to make sure it was as robust as it could possibly be.
It was also VERY specialized, and so we didn't get a whole lot of interest in it - this was no Samba. But even so, we DID get bug reports that were merged back into the production version.
DG
You're applying a technical solution to what is, essentially, a management problem.
It doesn't matter WHAT language is the company lingua franca - if you are not holding regular code reviews (and instead trusting the B&D features of Java to do it for you) you WILL get bitten by maintainibility problems down the road. NO language is so obfuscation-proof as to not require review.
Furthermore, if you fail to do reviews, then you are denying your coders a chance to improve their own skills. There is no better way to learn new tricks and techniques than exposure to someone else's code.
And finally, coders are ego-driven animals. If their code is going to be subject to regular review and (especially) public critique, they will go to much greater lengths to ensure high quality of their code than if the code is safely hidden away where only they can see it.
That's one of the major lessons to come out of Free Software - the more people who examine the code, the better it gets.
If you make code review and code sharing a major part of your corporate culture, you'll wind up with a far better and more motivated group of coders - who, incidently, can probably adapt to whatever language is the order of the day.
DG
That should read "especially the use or implied use of $_"
My bad.
DG
The trick to writing maintainable perl code is to optimise for legibility - and rigourously enforce it.
That means cutting back a little bit of some of the idiomatic perl shortcuts, especially the use or implied use of $!. It also means solid commenting.
I used to assume that every single perl program I wrote would be handed off to somebody else to maintain, and that this person would be relatively unfamilliar with perl - a skilled coder to be sure, but not necessarily a perl guru.
Accordingly, whenever I used some particularly elegant perl trick - but something that might not be immediately obvious - I commented the hell out of it, explained how the trick worked, and would even give references to the perl manuals where further reading could be had.
The end result - programs that not only did their function, but acted as perl tutorials for the poor bastards who had to maintain my code.
The side effect was that it made MY maintainence much easier too. If a bug was found in something I hadn't touched in years, optimising for legibility meant I could pick up where I left off without too much trouble.
I found that perl's expressibility made it EASIER to do this than "bondage and discipline" languages like Java. When there's more than one way to do it, you can choose the manner that accomplishes the task in the most human-understandable way, rather than being forced to think like the compiler.
I've noticed over the years that the best perl programmers (and in many cases, the best programmers period) are good writers, or have some sort of literary background. I think this is no accident; perl is a language for conversing with both the computer and with other coders.
That's it's strength, and its weakness. Like any expressive language, phrases write one can that difficult to parse are. But you can also write Shakespere.....
Perl is like English, where Java is like Esperanto.
DG
Perl.
No, seriously - properly written perl is both "enterprise grade" and as cool as hell.
Of all the languages I've ever worked in, nothing let me build systems as easily, as robustly, and as QUICKLY as perl did.
Remember the Daimler - Chrysler merger? Perl was the glue that unified the HR systems and LDAP directories. As far as I know, it still does. Our LDAP - LDAP replicator tool (written in Perl) was a damn sight more reliable than the native replicators, plus it would do schema translation, plus it had a smaller footprint.
Somehwere along the way, perl seems to have picked up a bad reputation for being illegible and obscure - and certainly one has the freedom to write the cliched "line noise" programs if one wishes. But perl done right can not only be legible, it can be beautiful.
DG
Here's a rule of thumb for you: assume that everybody else is smarter than you, and then change that assumption only if a preponderence of fact forces it to change.
Deux questions, deux reponses:
1) Given that the class in question is English Literature (or at the very least, English) there isn't much value in analyzing a science manual, whose only realy judgeable qualities are "does the book communicate the required information?" and "Is the information communicated factually correct?"
2) So what if he owned the book? You were given a list of books you could analyze, you chose to do a book not on the list. Case closed.
Now the interesting questions that arise are: why not do the report on one of the assigned books? What was the purpose of disobeying instructions? And why feel that, when punished for disobeying instructions, that you have been slighted?
That's right, you are a precious and rare individual. Just like everybody else.
DGProbably because - as entertaining as they are - Carroll Smith's books are manuals dealing with engineering; specifically, engineering dealing with race cars.
You might as well do an essay on your algebra textbook.
Correctly.
Firstly, you had been provided with a list of titles to choose from, and you went off the list without permission. This falls into the category of "does not follow instructions".
Secondly, that particular list was formed either due to signifigance with the subject at hand, or possibly due to the teacher's familiarity with the books on the list. Teachers are not omnicient. If you chose a book with which they were not familliar, then grading your paper correctly would require them reading the book (preferably in advance of the reading of your paper) and probably some works analyzing this as well. In short, you require the teacher to do all the research for a paper before being sufficiently qualified to grade yours.
Given that the teacher's time is being spread across 30 or more students, that hardly seems fair.
And from the perspective of a 15 year old, "Spiderman" is the best movie ever made, the various franchised Star Wars, Star Trek etc paperbacks are great literature, and 'N'Sync is great music.
15 year olds have simply not been exposed to enough quality material to be able to form an INFORMED opinion about what "great" is - and part of the purpose of school is to make that exposure happen - usually over their objections - and maybe you get lucky and some of it sticks.
Of course, it is typical of the average 15 year old to think that they are more intelligent than their teachers. I remember being 15 too. The thing is - I was WAY wrong. The older I get, the more I realize the less I know.
A good teacher should be imparting that wisdom.
DGWriters - most writers, anyway - don't live in a vacuum. Everything written has as a subtext all that has been written previously.
Some works in particular were very influential and resonate throughout all the literature that follows.
Consider sitting down to write a book about star-crossed lovers from feuding families - impossible to do without thinking of Romeo and Juliet, and all the subsequent riffs on Romeo & Juliet.
Hell, even Billy Shakespere wasn't immune from this - consider how much of his work is based on historical occurence, mythology, and folk tales.
If you don't read these works, then you won't recognise them when they are quoted, re-interpreted, or otherwise riffed on in later works. It would be like watching the Simpsons or Family Guy without knowing any of the cultural references - most of the stuff there would go right over your head.
The study of literature is in many ways a study of the _history_ of literature. You can't really understand modern works unless you have been exposed to earlier ones.
DG
The funny thing about change is how little people notice it happening - like how if you drop a frog in a pot and crank the temperature up slowly enough, you can boil him and he'll never know.
Let's look at some of you statements:
"Sure we got the internet and cell phones."
Way to trivialize a couple of the most important recent developments there Skippy.
Thanks to the Internet, specifically the WWW and decent search engines, a HUGE amount of human knowledge is now recorded in a manner that is easy and cheap to find. That's not a computer on your desk; it's a "knowledge box" that can answer almost any question you can pose.
In 2014, that'll still exist - except that it'll be bigger, faster, and (one assumes) even simpler to parse/search.
Now add in cell phones, and you've got a device that allows one to communicate with any other person from anywhere in the world, at any time, immediately. PLUS you get access to that same "knowledge box".
If you want an example of cell phones changing the world, you only need look at 9/11:
It used to be that the best strategy for surviving a plane hijacking was to lay low, keep cool, and not draw attention to yourself. Hijackers wanted to use passengers as a lever; specifically, they wanted to use THREATS against those passengers as a lever. It was not in their best interests to actually hurt anyone, and once they started down that road, it was in their best interests to string out their supply of hostages as long as possible. Most hostages got out alive - ergo, keep quiet and let the situation play itself out.
9/11 changed that. The 9/11 hijackers did not care at all about the "hostages" - they were after the plane; specifically, the potential damage from the kinetic energy of the aircraft and the chemical energy of its fuel load. The passengers on the plane were incidental.
In this situation, the survival strategy changes. Your best chance for survival as a 9/11 hostage is to do everything you can to wrest control back from the hijackers. There is a high liklihood that individual passengers may be injured or killed, but given that everybody aboard is dead already anyway, you might as well see if you can't make the long shot pay off.
Thanks to cellphones, this change in anti-hijacker strategy propegated so quickly that it nullified one of the attacks WHILE THE PLANE WAS STILL IN THE AIR.
Think about that for a second. 4 hijacker crews boarded planes expecting the passengers to act like sheep - as was the normal and proper survival tactic when faced with a hijacking to that point. One of those crews failed, because the news that 1) their plane had been hijacked and 2) that hijacked planes were being crashed into buildings was communicated via cellphone.
Chew on THAT for a while and tell me "Sure we got the internet and cell phones"
DG
Thank you. That worked.
DG
Nope. Doesn't work.
The drop-down in "search using" only has Netscape Search in it, and seemingly has no way to customize in new search engines.
DG
Anybody know how to get the "Search" sidebar tab to use Google?
Apperently 7.2 only knows about Netscape's engine.
DG
That "sausage length" ain't virtual Sonny.
DG
I live in Windsor and commute to Detroit.
First time I ever crossed the birder, the US Customs agent asked me if I had any firearms.
When I answered "No" he said "Good God man! Here, take mine!"
DG
Two other things turbines have over pistons:
1) Fuel efficiancy at high torque: when a turbine is running in its happy place, it gets very, very good fuel efficiancy. If you have something that needs to put out a lot of force, and it needs to sip fuel, a turbine and a CVT work great. If you have something that can run at the same shaft speed for a long time (like a ship or an aircraft) you can delete the CVT and gear accordingly
2) Multi-fuel capability: a turbine's fuel system is very simple, and the fuel doesn't need to do much more than burn. Assuming it is properly filtered and doesn't have any real strange properties, a turbine can run on almost anything - like recovered vegetable oil. Diesels can do the same thing, just not as well.
When the Abrams was designed, there was a lot of worry about fuel logistics in Europe during WW3, and so most tanks of that era can run on a variety of fuels - in case fuel had to be scrounged.
What turbines DON'T do well is idle - fuel consumption at idle is almost as high as fuel consumption at full power. For a turbine-powered tank in "hurry up and wait" mode (as it usually is - especially in the defensive) this can burn a lot of fuel, as the engine is run to provide power for the radios, turret traverse, on-board computers, crew A/C, the boiler vessel (gotta have coffee) etc.
There was a plan to equip the Abrams with some sort of APU for use when idling, but I don't know if that ever got implemented.
DG
Well, there's expansionist, and then there's EXPANSIONIST.
First, if it's not clear yet, I lived though this stuff kinda personal-like. It was supposed to be partly my job to stop the Slavering Soviet Hordes should they ever come calling. I've got a T-shirt from that era that's a faux rock concert shirt "Soviet World Tour" with the concert dates on tha back listing the dates of various Soviet invasions, etc.
I remember, at the time, being completely convinced that the Soviet Union intended to take over the world. World Dominination was the goal. Cue the cat and the monacle.
But with the Iron Curtain down, and the declassification of both Soviet and NATO documents... I'm no longer so sure about that.
Have you ever read any of the NATO policy and strategy papers? Or any of the reports published by the Regan-era strategy think-tanks? They're horrifying, even when you're on the same side as the author. We kept looking for ways to be able to go to war with the Soviet Union with minimal cost to ourselves. They read like justifications for first-strike - not just CAPABILITY, but actually USING it.
This was the face we were presenting to the Soviets. We say "we're just defending ourselves, we have no agressive intentions" and then we take actions that look agressive. And the Soviets had recent experience with a power that said one thing and did another....
You can see evidence of that in the design of the SS-18. Their silos were hardened to a ground pressure of 6000 PSI. Six THOUSAND. A Yank Minuiteman silo was hardened to 300 PSI.
You don't harden the silo of a first-strike weapon all that hard, because it'll be empty before anybody can hit it. But the Soviets were by God going to make sure that the SS-18 could survive a direct hit.
So I wonder if the invasion of Poland etc weren't acts of defence instead of agression.
Now you'll counter with "it didn't make any damn difference to the Poles!" and I would agree with you. There's certainly no way I can justify the Soviet invasion of Poland. But I can't help but wonder if it wasn't motivated by desire for the safety and security of the Soviet Union, not as (as was portrayed at the time) a stepping stone towards global domination "Today Poland, tomorrow the World!"
And if it really WAS a defensive act... well then, didn't we (the West) provoke that? Don't we bear some of the responsibility?
DG
+1 Bon mot?
DG
All history builds on what has gone before, so I'm going to have to start this with a couple of statements that you'll have to accept as "givens" for the moment.
1) The Soviet Union did all the heavy lifting when it came to defeating the Nazis in WW2. That's not to say that the Western allies didn't contribute AT ALL, but the Soviets bore the brunt of it and did the lions share of destroying the German army. Accordingly, the Soviets got VERY good at large-scale land warfare, especially with tanks.
2) Communism had been on the US radar at least since 1917 and probably earlier. Pure-form Communism (the spontanious revolt of the working class against their opressors) had been the greatest fear of any US captain of industry since the first worker uprisings, and Soviet-style Communism was seen (by some) to be the fullest expression of the spirit of worker revolt as threat.
3) More than a few Western generals and intellectuals wanted to keep on going after the defeat of Germany and go after the USSR next. Patton in particular was a very vocal proponant of defeating the USSR NOW (in 1945) while they were weakened, and while the US Army was already there and fully equipped. After all, they were going to have to fight eventually, why not get it over with?
4) There was a certain amount of Soviet resentment over how long it took to get the Western allies into the fight, and I think (given the anti-Soviet statements that kept turning up) a lingering suspicion that the delay was purposeful, with the intent that the USSR should bleed its strength off against Germany so that the West could come in and finish the Soviets off. Certainly Stalin felt that way, at least for a little while.
So then, at the end of WW2 you've got a Soviet Union with a lot of waretime experience, that feels threatened by the West, and which paid a HORRIFIC cost in lives and is VERY much determined to never go through that experience again.
They may or may not have had expansionist goals as well. Certainly at the time we expected them to come pouring through the Fulda Gap at any second. I know *I* certainly expected them to attack first. Now I'm no longer sure.
But anyway, the Soviets know armoured warefare, right? And one of the tenets of fighting an armoured battle is the concept of "defense in depth". You cannot just line up all your soldiers along the border, WW1-style, because the enemy will mass his forces at a single point, punch through, and now he's running amok in your rear while all your soldiers are up on the border.
So instead, you put a screen on the border, and you keep massed maneouver units some distance behind the border. When the screen locates the centre of axis of the attack, you counterattack the main thrust with your own thrust.
But this caused a couple of problems for the West.
First, the Soviet army was VERY much larger and more powerful than the Western armies. Unit for unit, the West was better, but the Soviets made up for the quality gap with quantity in spades. "defense in depth" wasn't going to be enough - the West needed "force multipliers" like chemical weapons and nukes. Accordingly, it was NATO policy to "go nuclear" IMMEDIATELY.
Quick aside: In the late 80s, Canada bough CF18 fighters, which are really lovely aircraft, but it retained a couple of squadrons of CF104 Starfighters as "ground attack" planes. The F18 is a great ground attack plane, while the F104 is about the worst ground attack plane you could possibly imagine. The 104 goes really, really fast in a straight line, and not much else.
Canada is all about "do more with less", but this always struck me as being singularly unwise.
Well it turned out that the REAL mission of these planes was NUCLEAR ground attack. Load up an American nuke bomb, and then go like hell towards whatever massed formation got discovered and nuke it.
Anyway, the combination of "defense in depth" and "nuke first" did not sit too well with the West Germans, because, well, West Germany
Don't forget ricochet range. A projectile that skipped off the ocean (for example) could wind up somewhere much farther downrange than 30 miles.
I've seen plain old ordinary machine gun rounds do some amazing and unexpected things. I expect that scales with velocity.
Interesting point from the article - the author sees this system fitting into existing 5" gun mounts, and sees one gun as being able to deliver equivelent fire as a squadron of F18s. That means destroyers become as powerful as aircraft carriers.
How about that - the return of the battleship.
DG
F1 uses electronically-controlled differentials, which also has its own map. At least one of the rotary controls is a diff map selector.
;)
Another one is probably a TC agressiveness control.
And on Michael's wheel, one is a knob limiting the maximum engine RPM on Rueban's car.
DG
Even us poor little bastards use it.
See http://farnorthracing.com for more info. I've got some data from the car on the site.
DG
I have a paintball story for you.
A few years ago, I was getting ready to go off on a military training course where I was going to be doing a lot of running around in the bushes. To help get myself in shape, I started playing paintball in full uniform, helmet, and webbing - the idea was to train myself in conditions as close as I could get to the real thing.
Even though most paintball games were broken up into "teams", your average paintballer was a lone wolf type who did not play well with others.
Well, one day I linked up with a guy from another regiment who was doing the same sort of thing that I was. We started working together as a military fire team - fire and movement, supressive fire, etc - and we absolutely CLEANED HOUSE on the kids.
It served as a double education. For us, it was great to see that fire and movement actually works in practice. For them... well, maybe they didn't learn all that much, because all they ever did was bitch about how "unfair" it was when they got steamrolled. Shit, it's SUPPOSED to be unfair; we're not trying to give the bad guys an even break here.
Bottom line is that in combat, teamwork is LIFE.
DG
DISCLAIMER: I was a soldier for 11 years, including a stint running Basic Training courses.
Soldiers - counter, perhaps, to what the video game experience might lead you to beleive - are NOT supposed to be souless killing machines. Quite the contrary, you want your soldiers to be highly moral.
Killing someone is the ultimate violence that you can do to them. Doing so with state sanction is something that needs to be taken VERY seriously. You need a soldier who is capable - when the situation demands it - of killing without hesitation, but you also need them to be able to STOP killing just as quickly.
When you remove the morality from soldiering, you wind up with things like the recent pictures that came out of that prison in Iraq. Amoral soldiers take matters into their own hands, and may wander off into some very dark places.
Furthermore, the days of mass armies composed of highly specialized, single-purpose troops seem to be behind us. Modern soldiers must be able to adapt to roles far beyond just "kill the enemy" - just read up on what goes on in any UN peacekeeping mission.
The more complex the mission becomes, the more complex and adaptable the soldier must become to meet the requirements of the mission.
DG
From the dusty reaches of my own damn memory, NOT Google:
"I'm Mist White Christmas
I'm Mister Snow
I'm Mister ice crystal
I'm Mister 40 below
They call me Cold Miser
Whatever I touch
Turns to ice in my clutch
I'm too much!"
What else has TV burned into my brain?
DG