That ship has sailed. The transnational, transgenerational wealthy have decided that their little experiment in democracy hasn't worked out for them. You can expect continuing regression to the mean of governments for the foreseeable future. Explicit slavery in your lifetime is a pretty good bet.
Well, thank goodness I stuck it out and got that BA in psychology.
Seriously, no joke. That's my degree. These days, I design and code automated testing systems for seismic visualization and analysis software and the control systems for my virtual machine cloud that runs that system.
But I do a lot of that in vb.net and vb-form code (plus some healthy dollops of powershell), so that means I'm not a real programmer. Fortunately, nobody knows that so they pay me just as if I used curly braces.:)
Separation of powers happened because the founding fathers understood that no single concentrated power could be trusted. Universal surveillance of all government officials would simply be an extension of this principal.
The founding fathers would approve filming government at ALL levels, from congress to notary. Multiple cameras (in the case of cops, dash-cam and chest-cam), streaming to web, with read-only access and multiple, physically separated backups.
There is no *technical* reason this can't be done, and frankly, it's a good idea. Think how much crap congress and K-Street wouldn't have gotten away with, had this been in place.
1) Get around that annoying "Posse comitatus" thing.
2) You can use them to fight the national guard, should they become unccoperative.
3) You can field them for both local OR national coups against EITHER the Feds or the State authorities (Texas, you wanted to secede? Your chance is coming...).
4) You can ramp up civil forfeiture (i.e. Theft by law enforcement) and take a cut!
They slice! They dice! You can even Julliane freedom fries! Militarized by military surplus cops. Whoo Hoo!
The decision is driven by economics. Don't want to go into huge debt? Need to live at home? Don't want to pay for a quaint archaic infrastructure of unnecessary buildings and offices for professors and administration? You'll go to digi-school!
It may only be half as good, but if it's 1/10th the cost, this is where students will go. Excellent students will excel anywhere, of course. This structure favors autodidacts.
Once again, Microsoft discovers what's obvious anyone else who's been in the business for 25 years or so.
You have to have manual and automated GUI testers. Unit testing is nifty, but that's like testing just the spark plug, or maybe the spark plug and the ignition timing. Not a bad idea, but listen. If you knew about a new car, but knew that nobody had ever actually *driven* the car, much less taken it out on the road on a regular basis, would you buy that car?
For that matter, would you fly in a plane tested that way?
Developers testing their little piece of code isn't ever going to cut it. Neither is unit testing. Thinking it will is just managerial fantasy, or an idea that lets you fire a bunch of testers so the books look better and some manager or bean counter. can get a one time bonus.
Lucky you! I'm sure this will terribly valuable in 20 years time, much like my ability to do code typesetting on a Compugraphic Quadex 5000 using Forth.
Worry about the folks who flew here from Africa who didn't know they were infected, and are even now having hamburgers at the airport.
"Featuritis" in the whole computing ecosystem
on
Getting Back To Coding
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
New languages. New frameworks. New IDEs. New magic procedures...
Some of it is good, surely. Who programs without classes these days? But every time I see someone come up with a magic new net language, framework, etc., I sort of cringe. I mean, do we really need another one? Do we need all the ones we have (I'm lookin' at you, Ruby...).
The elephant in the room here that Microsoft, et. al. seems happy to ignore is that it takes time to learn AND recode this stuff. Time is money. If you're a teen or a student, you have time to mess with the next Ruby, or Dart, or GO, or BrainFuck or...
As a kid, you have no money invested, and plenty of time. There's no risk.
Fast forward 25 years. You still code for a living. You have a house, a wife, kid(s), car(s). You and your spouse are paying for all of this. Suddenly, genius boy at Microsoft invents Powershell! and convinces a few PHBs to roll it out. Suddenly, all your clients want Powershell! Quite frankly, you haven't got the time or interest in learning Powershell!. You wanted.net features added to VBScript and/or Jscript. You wanted backwards compatibility with existing VBscript and Jscript code. You wanted something that added value, not something that subtracted value by forcing you to go back to the drawing board and recode perfectly functional tools to satisfy a corporate IT security requirement from the corporate PHB that says, "Use Powershell!" for which you may, or not be paid, depending on how well your contract was written.
Disclaimer: I like Powershell, but it was the wrong decision.
The problem, quite simply, is this: Change!=Improvement. Change!=Better. Sometimes you get lucky. At other times, not so much.
Can someone explain to me again why this couldn't be modified, scaled up and used as a micro thrust system for satellites and such? And why is a microwave resonant chamber "better?"
As I recall, the protagonist in "The Shadow of The Torturer" wears a costume and cape made of a perfect black material so that all you see when he walks towards you is an irregular shifting black shape of perfect darkness.
Interesting. The next question, of course, is "Can you scale it up to replace 160 exajoules of energy currently provided by 30 billion barrels a year of oil ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), or will it remain forever a niche player?"
Because in a world of capitalist systems, that's all that matters. At the moment, I buy 25 miles of transportation for about $3.45 cents.
I'm pretty sure that ammonia doesn't have anything like the energy density of gasoline, and that it costs more per unit of energy. Feel free to show me how wrong I am.
TL;DR: Another horseshit, "we're saved! There's never going to be an energy problem again!" article.
No more shuttle so we could save a trivial amount of tax money. We've shipped our manufacturing to China to make more money for CEOs and upper management who can live anywhere and could give a rat's ass about the USA.
Gee, I wonder where that could all end? Any ideas?
We don't need even ONE more programming language. We need at most one or two programming languages that aren't shit.
IMHO upgrading javascript to a full blown programming language that can run in, or outside of a browser would be sufficient. Contrary to beliefs of idiots who think programming should be difficult, there's no value in making anyone learn an entirely new syntax and language to get some mundane work done. It's a programming language. They all do the same thing.
Bottom line? Expanding a current programming language to do more work makes ECONOMIC sense. Forcing any programmers do something new to satisfy the vision of a 20-something whiz kid or clueless CEO (Cough,...Ballmer, Cough) who has no awareness of the money invested in existing code bases, technologies, or your business model does not.
Since we can't predict anything about its future behavior. Say, I was asking myself yesterday, why there didn't seem to be any other intelligent technological life in the universe. I wonder...
And who makes those judgments? I can go to pubmed.com right now and find quite a few contradictory articles, and more than a few that might charitably be described as "fluffy."
If the goddamned medical community is so concerned about this, they can come up with a web site that's peer reviewed by their selected group of experts and pretends to be the last word on medical data.
No word yet of course, on how the esteemed "medical community" missed the problems with Vioxx, post-menopausal hormones, cobalt hip implants or any of that sily stuff. Because they're like, you know, infalible.
I read Wikipedia, knowing it's inaccurate. I cross reference and look at multiple other sources like a big boy. I read *everything* knowing that there's inaccuracy somewhere. Sounds like it's time for everybody to grow up. There's no great, all-knowing source of information *anywhere.* No group of wise thoughtful, beard stroking authorities who know all and see all.
It's just us, doing the best we can with the crappy information we're given.
Yes to all this. We taught them well, just as the British taught us to be a bunch of self absorbed nationalist miliaristic crazies. The 19th and 20th centuries were quite instructive.
You're a bunch of over-testosteroned, machismo idiots.
Offense definitely intended.
First point. Machines and software exist to serve *people* and for no other reason. To the extent that they do that, they are "good." Anything less is "bad." Simple enough for you?
Second point. Programming is not about "overcoming intellectual challenges." Don't flatter yourselves. Nobody cares how you feel. Programming is either about money or masturbation. If the latter, make it as hard as you like. Go for it. Wheeeee! Look at meeeee! Look how smart I am! Whoo hoo!
But if you're trying to make *money* programming, or actually have to get a task done, you need all the help you can get. If you have a manager or officer breathing down your neck to GET IT DONE so millions aren't lost, or someone doesn't die, you need effective tools.
Bottom line? Get over yourselves. The IDE is there to make accomplishing a task as easy as possible. It serves no other purpose. It should make everything easily known and obvious. Moreover, it should actually HELP YOU solve your problems. Otherwise, it's just another idiotic software failure.
And you had production work to get out *today* then you just paid your stupidity tax. Start looking at Gimp or Corel Draw. You may not like them, but they're there when the "cloud" disappears or the internet is down.
Then your Dad is the exception that proves the rule. I've tried it dozens of times over the years. I think it did work, once. The rest of the time, it was the usual troubleshooting with a healthy dollop of trial and error. Like all Microsoft diagnostics and error messages, it never seems to give you enough *relevant* information to solve the problem yourself, or even "enough *relevant* information."/End rant
George Martin said it, but I feel like screaming this about a dozen times a day. Don't change my words, my punctuation, or my URL. Don't suggest sites I might want to visit, items I might find interesting, or settings more befitting someone my age. Don't give me the ability to change all things *trivial* (e.g. appearance) but nothing that matters. If you're going to help, help me fix real *problems* and not just appearances. ("Ohhh, Microsoft helped me fix my network problem!" - said No one, ever).
Slashdot Mirror
That ship has sailed. The transnational, transgenerational wealthy have decided that their little experiment in democracy hasn't worked out for them. You can expect continuing regression to the mean of governments for the foreseeable future. Explicit slavery in your lifetime is a pretty good bet.
Yes, and you can thank Nancy Reagan and the war on drugs for this shit ( http://lawlibrary.unm.edu/nmlr...)
Zero tolerance, indeed.
...who do this sort of "civil forfeiture." Badge numbers, names, pictures, locations, perhaps home addresses and phones.
I'm sure they won't mind, just as they won't mind a "civil" lawsuit or two aimed in their direction. After all, fair's fair, eh?
Well, thank goodness I stuck it out and got that BA in psychology.
Seriously, no joke. That's my degree. These days, I design and code automated testing systems for seismic visualization and analysis software and the control systems for my virtual machine cloud that runs that system.
But I do a lot of that in vb.net and vb-form code (plus some healthy dollops of powershell), so that means I'm not a real programmer. Fortunately, nobody knows that so they pay me just as if I used curly braces. :)
Separation of powers happened because the founding fathers understood that no single concentrated power could be trusted. Universal surveillance of all government officials would simply be an extension of this principal.
The founding fathers would approve filming government at ALL levels, from congress to notary. Multiple cameras (in the case of cops, dash-cam and chest-cam), streaming to web, with read-only access and multiple, physically separated backups.
There is no *technical* reason this can't be done, and frankly, it's a good idea. Think how much crap congress and K-Street wouldn't have gotten away with, had this been in place.
A militarized police is so handy! You can:
1) Get around that annoying "Posse comitatus" thing.
2) You can use them to fight the national guard, should they become unccoperative.
3) You can field them for both local OR national coups against EITHER the Feds or the State authorities (Texas, you wanted to secede? Your chance is coming...).
4) You can ramp up civil forfeiture (i.e. Theft by law enforcement) and take a cut!
They slice! They dice! You can even Julliane freedom fries! Militarized by military surplus cops. Whoo Hoo!
The decision is driven by economics. Don't want to go into huge debt? Need to live at home? Don't want to pay for a quaint archaic infrastructure of unnecessary buildings and offices for professors and administration? You'll go to digi-school!
It may only be half as good, but if it's 1/10th the cost, this is where students will go. Excellent students will excel anywhere, of course. This structure favors autodidacts.
Once again, Microsoft discovers what's obvious anyone else who's been in the business for 25 years or so.
You have to have manual and automated GUI testers. Unit testing is nifty, but that's like testing just the spark plug, or maybe the spark plug and the ignition timing. Not a bad idea, but listen. If you knew about a new car, but knew that nobody had ever actually *driven* the car, much less taken it out on the road on a regular basis, would you buy that car?
For that matter, would you fly in a plane tested that way?
Developers testing their little piece of code isn't ever going to cut it. Neither is unit testing. Thinking it will is just managerial fantasy, or an idea that lets you fire a bunch of testers so the books look better and some manager or bean counter. can get a one time bonus.
Lucky you! I'm sure this will terribly valuable in 20 years time, much like my ability to do code typesetting on a Compugraphic Quadex 5000 using Forth.
Worry about the folks who flew here from Africa who didn't know they were infected, and are even now having hamburgers at the airport.
New languages. New frameworks. New IDEs. New magic procedures...
Some of it is good, surely. Who programs without classes these days? But every time I see someone come up with a magic new net language, framework, etc., I sort of cringe. I mean, do we really need another one? Do we need all the ones we have (I'm lookin' at you, Ruby...).
The elephant in the room here that Microsoft, et. al. seems happy to ignore is that it takes time to learn AND recode this stuff. Time is money. If you're a teen or a student, you have time to mess with the next Ruby, or Dart, or GO, or BrainFuck or...
As a kid, you have no money invested, and plenty of time. There's no risk.
Fast forward 25 years. You still code for a living. You have a house, a wife, kid(s), car(s). You and your spouse are paying for all of this. Suddenly, genius boy at Microsoft invents Powershell! and convinces a few PHBs to roll it out. Suddenly, all your clients want Powershell! Quite frankly, you haven't got the time or interest in learning Powershell!. You wanted .net features added to VBScript and/or Jscript. You wanted backwards compatibility with existing VBscript and Jscript code. You wanted something that added value, not something that subtracted value by forcing you to go back to the drawing board and recode perfectly functional tools to satisfy a corporate IT security requirement from the corporate PHB that says, "Use Powershell!" for which you may, or not be paid, depending on how well your contract was written.
Disclaimer: I like Powershell, but it was the wrong decision.
The problem, quite simply, is this: Change!=Improvement. Change!=Better. Sometimes you get lucky. At other times, not so much.
Can someone explain to me again why this couldn't be modified, scaled up and used as a micro thrust system for satellites and such? And why is a microwave resonant chamber "better?"
As I recall, the protagonist in "The Shadow of The Torturer" wears a costume and cape made of a perfect black material so that all you see when he walks towards you is an irregular shifting black shape of perfect darkness.
With an axe, and eyes.
It was a good book. The rest of the series? Eh.
If they're corporations, they can be sued out of existence. Let the fun begin!
Interesting. The next question, of course, is "Can you scale it up to replace 160 exajoules of energy currently provided by 30 billion barrels a year of oil ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), or will it remain forever a niche player?"
Because in a world of capitalist systems, that's all that matters. At the moment, I buy 25 miles of transportation for about $3.45 cents.
I'm pretty sure that ammonia doesn't have anything like the energy density of gasoline, and that it costs more per unit of energy. Feel free to show me how wrong I am.
TL;DR: Another horseshit, "we're saved! There's never going to be an energy problem again!" article.
No more shuttle so we could save a trivial amount of tax money. We've shipped our manufacturing to China to make more money for CEOs and upper management who can live anywhere and could give a rat's ass about the USA.
Gee, I wonder where that could all end? Any ideas?
We don't need even ONE more programming language. We need at most one or two programming languages that aren't shit.
IMHO upgrading javascript to a full blown programming language that can run in, or outside of a browser would be sufficient. Contrary to beliefs of idiots who think programming should be difficult, there's no value in making anyone learn an entirely new syntax and language to get some mundane work done. It's a programming language. They all do the same thing.
Bottom line? Expanding a current programming language to do more work makes ECONOMIC sense. Forcing any programmers do something new to satisfy the vision of a 20-something whiz kid or clueless CEO (Cough,...Ballmer, Cough) who has no awareness of the money invested in existing code bases, technologies, or your business model does not.
Since we can't predict anything about its future behavior. Say, I was asking myself yesterday, why there didn't seem to be any other intelligent technological life in the universe. I wonder...
And who makes those judgments? I can go to pubmed.com right now and find quite a few contradictory articles, and more than a few that might charitably be described as "fluffy."
If the goddamned medical community is so concerned about this, they can come up with a web site that's peer reviewed by their selected group of experts and pretends to be the last word on medical data.
No word yet of course, on how the esteemed "medical community" missed the problems with Vioxx, post-menopausal hormones, cobalt hip implants or any of that sily stuff. Because they're like, you know, infalible.
I read Wikipedia, knowing it's inaccurate. I cross reference and look at multiple other sources like a big boy. I read *everything* knowing that there's inaccuracy somewhere. Sounds like it's time for everybody to grow up. There's no great, all-knowing source of information *anywhere.* No group of wise thoughtful, beard stroking authorities who know all and see all.
It's just us, doing the best we can with the crappy information we're given.
Yes to all this. We taught them well, just as the British taught us to be a bunch of self absorbed nationalist miliaristic crazies. The 19th and 20th centuries were quite instructive.
You're a bunch of over-testosteroned, machismo idiots.
Offense definitely intended.
First point. Machines and software exist to serve *people* and for no other reason. To the extent that they do that, they are "good." Anything less is "bad." Simple enough for you?
Second point. Programming is not about "overcoming intellectual challenges." Don't flatter yourselves. Nobody cares how you feel. Programming is either about money or masturbation. If the latter, make it as hard as you like. Go for it. Wheeeee! Look at meeeee! Look how smart I am! Whoo hoo!
But if you're trying to make *money* programming, or actually have to get a task done, you need all the help you can get. If you have a manager or officer breathing down your neck to GET IT DONE so millions aren't lost, or someone doesn't die, you need effective tools.
Bottom line? Get over yourselves. The IDE is there to make accomplishing a task as easy as possible. It serves no other purpose. It should make everything easily known and obvious. Moreover, it should actually HELP YOU solve your problems. Otherwise, it's just another idiotic software failure.
And you had production work to get out *today* then you just paid your stupidity tax. Start looking at Gimp or Corel Draw. You may not like them, but they're there when the "cloud" disappears or the internet is down.
Then your Dad is the exception that proves the rule. I've tried it dozens of times over the years. I think it did work, once. The rest of the time, it was the usual troubleshooting with a healthy dollop of trial and error. Like all Microsoft diagnostics and error messages, it never seems to give you enough *relevant* information to solve the problem yourself, or even "enough *relevant* information." /End rant
George Martin said it, but I feel like screaming this about a dozen times a day. Don't change my words, my punctuation, or my URL. Don't suggest sites I might want to visit, items I might find interesting, or settings more befitting someone my age. Don't give me the ability to change all things *trivial* (e.g. appearance) but nothing that matters. If you're going to help, help me fix real *problems* and not just appearances. ("Ohhh, Microsoft helped me fix my network problem!" - said No one, ever).
In short, BUZZ OFF (And get off my lawn).