I too used a vic-20 first and was later exposed to a Lisa at work. Oddly, I couldn't make heads or tales of the Lisa. I was already too brainwashed by codelike interfaces.
>The web was where the productivity turned out to be. . LOL. You've *got* to be kidding. Look, every business I see, including ours, runs on PCs running Windows/Office locally. Go *find* an exception to that rule. You'll be looking a long time. . Nobody is moving en masse, to "the cloud" and I honestly have yet to see the business that's migrated significant amounts of it's business operations to the web. Frankly, you'd be nuts to do so if you value the security of your data. . The internet turned a better kind of television, with the added feature of being a two-way communication street, and *that* is how productivity increased. Thousands of people have been convinced to fill out their own forms and credit card information, obviating the need for clerical help. Otherwise intelligent people now donate their programming skill for free to software that ultimately will only profit corporations but not the developers which reduces corporate development costs and thereby increases productivity. It's allowed businesses to peddle their wares online without a physical storefront, reducing real estate maintenance and fees. . This was the low hanging fruit, now well picked. Future productivity increases will have to wait for better AI and some significant robotics.
To what degree of variation? How many pairs have to change before the genetic program is *not* human? Where would Neanderthals fit in? Or chimps? Or something in-between like my cousin Harry?
is the extra "zero" in the price tag. Seriously, this thing costs as much as a netbook. A year or two down the road and netbook tablets appear. At that point the Kindle has to be *significantly* cheaper or go extinct. The writing's already on that particular wall.
If we leak the source code, maybe we can take their economy down too. Less competition. Heck, let's give it to the BRICs. We can have a level playing field of algorithmically generated idiocy.
Freud/psychoanalysis *failed* big time - a fact noticed way back in the 70s when I was getting my psych degree. Psychoactive chemicals *work* even if they do so imperfectly. Moreover, "99%" of psychopathologies are NOT nurture. Depression, Bipolar disorder and Schizophrenia have a huge genetic component, as do personality disorders like Histrionic or borderline personality disorder, et. al. The adaptive explanation is a straw man. MANY behaviors are adaptive, in a given environment. That doesn't mean that they're desirable in *any* environment. Mental illness, as always, is a social, not an absolute definition. The chemicals you define as "garbage" are simply tools to deal with society as it *is* in a current context. Are some of these harmful? You bet! Just like alcohol, opium, Amanita Muscaria, and St. John's Wort can be harmful, to certain people, in certain amounts, in certain situations.
Microsoft's tech "support" costs are truly one of the largest hidden costs of ownership. Assuming you can get a human on the phone at Microsoft, you're frequently directed to the wrong person, the wrong automated telephone system with inappropriate choices, the wrong department, the wrong planet... Spent 3 hours this weekend trying to get my temporary Vista Enterprise software (temporary 30 day solution) downgraded to Home Premium, which I legitimately own without having to reinstall everything. I was trying to be honest. After 3 hours, I just gave up, got online and hacked the registry to turn off notifications. 3 hours, 4 tech "support" personnel in India, 5 different, useless phone systems and.....nothing. Microsoft's eventual demise will be their own fault, plain and simple. Windows used to make my life easier. Those days are long gone.
And it is. It's run by an evangelical theo-conservative crazy. The fact is, any news organization owned by a large corporation is basically fake. You get the corporate view. Fox "news" and "CNN" are just mouthpieces for this. Both are politically themed amusement for the rubes. For real news, let a thousand relatively uncensored blogs bloom.
I remember back when Yahoo's management were still equipped with spines and allowed users to comment on news stories, that the number of duplicate and near duplicate theo- and neocon posts grew like topsy, particularly around election time (circa 2002, 2004). Somebody was obviously paying for this, given the spam-like volume. I suspect this is a not so subtle propaganda suppression technique.
>What is a god-class and why don't we write them?
Sorry. I have no idea what this is. I guess that after 15 years of programming, I'm just too dumb.
>A complete lack of any kind of grasp of even basic design patterns.
While the book, "Design Patterns" was sort of interesting, I'm afraid I'm finding the practical implications few and far between, and of almost zero importance in the production of commercial software, on schedule and within budget.
Frankly sir, I think that if anyone is guilty of academic mental self-pleasuring (not that there's anything wrong with that...) in the domain of computer science, it's you.
But it's close. Of course, closed tickets are something a manager can measure. Needless to say, it measures nothing meaningful.
For example, I tell a customer to reboot. Close the ticket. That takes little time and closed the ticket fast. In fact, I can improve my metrics by telling that same person to do this ever 4 hours for several years. OR, I can get up, go to their desk, and solve the problem permanently. It takes longer, making my metrics look bad, but in reality-land (a land far, far away from management land), that person is doing productive work longer and more efficiently because the interruption and downtime have been removed.
This is the logical outcome of outsourcing technology. In the USA, we have given our expertise away. After energy shortages, I would have to assess this as THE security risk for us. We won the first Iraq war on our technology. We will lose the next one on our technology, wielded by others.
And of course it was all done to make profits look good for the next quarter so some managerial technopeasant could get their bonus. Indirectly, we were sold out by Wall Street MBAs and a business culture that thinks money is *magic*, and damn the consequences.
Please explain the difference. Both are code interfaces that allow you to give instructions to a machine. One has a set of pre-built functions for math. The other uses libraries. Are you saying that I don't program because I don't manipulate memory directly or use "void virtual functions?" What's the story here?
A more interesting questions is "Why are other programming languages so hard? And is the difficulty justified by the additional power?" Bonus question: Is it *necessary* that a language (cough, cough, C++) be an ergonomic disaster to be powerful?
Really. And no bodies either. They're all probably flashing through time or running around in the jungle at midnight while it's raining.
Or heck, maybe the timeline changed after the nuke went off and it never happened, which means we don't exist because our timeline collapsed. Of course that didn't happ
The wisdom of crowds, which works quite well when each individual does their own research and reaches their own judgments, is easily subverted. All that's required is that individuals cease to do their own research and use their own judgment, and start echoing the opinions of others (social networks), or their judgments receive a blunt force bias in the form of advertisements (television, newspapers). This reduces the non-duplicate information content of the crowd.
The result? You have a population concerned about marijuana laws (admittedly stupid) more than hydrocarbon depletion, overpopulation and potential economic collapse. The web, rather than making the wisdom of crowds ubiquitous, has made the stupidity of crowds inevitable.
Slashdot Mirror
I too used a vic-20 first and was later exposed to a Lisa at work. Oddly, I couldn't make heads or tales of the Lisa. I was already too brainwashed by codelike interfaces.
You were lucky to get that, mine had only one bit and it could only hold zero in it!
And it didn't amount to much, let me tell you!
>The web was where the productivity turned out to be.
.
LOL. You've *got* to be kidding. Look, every business I see, including ours, runs on PCs running Windows/Office locally. Go *find* an exception to that rule. You'll be looking a long time.
.
Nobody is moving en masse, to "the cloud" and I honestly have yet to see the business that's migrated significant amounts of it's business operations to the web. Frankly, you'd be nuts to do so if you value the security of your data.
.
The internet turned a better kind of television, with the added feature of being a two-way communication street, and *that* is how productivity increased. Thousands of people have been convinced to fill out their own forms and credit card information, obviating the need for clerical help. Otherwise intelligent people now donate their programming skill for free to software that ultimately will only profit corporations but not the developers which reduces corporate development costs and thereby increases productivity. It's allowed businesses to peddle their wares online without a physical storefront, reducing real estate maintenance and fees.
.
This was the low hanging fruit, now well picked. Future productivity increases will have to wait for better AI and some significant robotics.
To what degree of variation? How many pairs have to change before the genetic program is *not* human? Where would Neanderthals fit in? Or chimps? Or something in-between like my cousin Harry?
.
Inquiring minds want to know!
is the extra "zero" in the price tag. Seriously, this thing costs as much as a netbook. A year or two down the road and netbook tablets appear. At that point the Kindle has to be *significantly* cheaper or go extinct. The writing's already on that particular wall.
If we leak the source code, maybe we can take their economy down too. Less competition. Heck, let's give it to the BRICs. We can have a level playing field of algorithmically generated idiocy.
Freud/psychoanalysis *failed* big time - a fact noticed way back in the 70s when I was getting my psych degree. Psychoactive chemicals *work* even if they do so imperfectly. Moreover, "99%" of psychopathologies are NOT nurture. Depression, Bipolar disorder and Schizophrenia have a huge genetic component, as do personality disorders like Histrionic or borderline personality disorder, et. al. The adaptive explanation is a straw man. MANY behaviors are adaptive, in a given environment. That doesn't mean that they're desirable in *any* environment. Mental illness, as always, is a social, not an absolute definition. The chemicals you define as "garbage" are simply tools to deal with society as it *is* in a current context. Are some of these harmful? You bet! Just like alcohol, opium, Amanita Muscaria, and St. John's Wort can be harmful, to certain people, in certain amounts, in certain situations.
But at least they pay you.
Well, there is if you don't mind having your brain ground up and assayed in a test tube, but you're probably fussy about that sort of thing.
In that case, go f**k yourself. Twice.
I suppose telling you to go f*ck yourself would be a romantic suggestion and not an insult?
Microsoft's tech "support" costs are truly one of the largest hidden costs of ownership. Assuming you can get a human on the phone at Microsoft, you're frequently directed to the wrong person, the wrong automated telephone system with inappropriate choices, the wrong department, the wrong planet... Spent 3 hours this weekend trying to get my temporary Vista Enterprise software (temporary 30 day solution) downgraded to Home Premium, which I legitimately own without having to reinstall everything. I was trying to be honest. After 3 hours, I just gave up, got online and hacked the registry to turn off notifications. 3 hours, 4 tech "support" personnel in India, 5 different, useless phone systems and .....nothing. Microsoft's eventual demise will be their own fault, plain and simple. Windows used to make my life easier. Those days are long gone.
Like Dan Rather?
But the biases cancel out. I'm aware that fact checking doesn't always happen. It doesn't on network news either. Remember Dan Rather?
And it is. It's run by an evangelical theo-conservative crazy. The fact is, any news organization owned by a large corporation is basically fake. You get the corporate view. Fox "news" and "CNN" are just mouthpieces for this. Both are politically themed amusement for the rubes. For real news, let a thousand relatively uncensored blogs bloom.
I remember back when Yahoo's management were still equipped with spines and allowed users to comment on news stories, that the number of duplicate and near duplicate theo- and neocon posts grew like topsy, particularly around election time (circa 2002, 2004). Somebody was obviously paying for this, given the spam-like volume. I suspect this is a not so subtle propaganda suppression technique.
>What is a god-class and why don't we write them? Sorry. I have no idea what this is. I guess that after 15 years of programming, I'm just too dumb. >A complete lack of any kind of grasp of even basic design patterns. While the book, "Design Patterns" was sort of interesting, I'm afraid I'm finding the practical implications few and far between, and of almost zero importance in the production of commercial software, on schedule and within budget. Frankly sir, I think that if anyone is guilty of academic mental self-pleasuring (not that there's anything wrong with that...) in the domain of computer science, it's you.
But it's close. Of course, closed tickets are something a manager can measure. Needless to say, it measures nothing meaningful. For example, I tell a customer to reboot. Close the ticket. That takes little time and closed the ticket fast. In fact, I can improve my metrics by telling that same person to do this ever 4 hours for several years. OR, I can get up, go to their desk, and solve the problem permanently. It takes longer, making my metrics look bad, but in reality-land (a land far, far away from management land), that person is doing productive work longer and more efficiently because the interruption and downtime have been removed.
This is the logical outcome of outsourcing technology. In the USA, we have given our expertise away. After energy shortages, I would have to assess this as THE security risk for us. We won the first Iraq war on our technology. We will lose the next one on our technology, wielded by others. And of course it was all done to make profits look good for the next quarter so some managerial technopeasant could get their bonus. Indirectly, we were sold out by Wall Street MBAs and a business culture that thinks money is *magic*, and damn the consequences.
Please explain the difference. Both are code interfaces that allow you to give instructions to a machine. One has a set of pre-built functions for math. The other uses libraries. Are you saying that I don't program because I don't manipulate memory directly or use "void virtual functions?" What's the story here?
A more interesting questions is "Why are other programming languages so hard? And is the difficulty justified by the additional power?" Bonus question: Is it *necessary* that a language (cough, cough, C++) be an ergonomic disaster to be powerful?
Dang Scotsmen! They should have had a Brit pushing the button.
Well, maybe not *your* car.
Really. And no bodies either. They're all probably flashing through time or running around in the jungle at midnight while it's raining. Or heck, maybe the timeline changed after the nuke went off and it never happened, which means we don't exist because our timeline collapsed. Of course that didn't happ
The wisdom of crowds, which works quite well when each individual does their own research and reaches their own judgments, is easily subverted. All that's required is that individuals cease to do their own research and use their own judgment, and start echoing the opinions of others (social networks), or their judgments receive a blunt force bias in the form of advertisements (television, newspapers). This reduces the non-duplicate information content of the crowd. The result? You have a population concerned about marijuana laws (admittedly stupid) more than hydrocarbon depletion, overpopulation and potential economic collapse. The web, rather than making the wisdom of crowds ubiquitous, has made the stupidity of crowds inevitable.