Microsoft either abandons or "dead-ends" languages and platforms with gay abandon. Google drops popular and useful things like google reader because it just didn't monetize quickly enough for some bean counter. Facebook follows in their footsteps by doing the same thing.
We developers are less than fleas to large corporations. Your only defense is to hitch your star to open source languages and platforms. Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and their ilk simply don't give a shit about their development communities. At all.
Israel has nukes. While their development was internal to Isreael, it was allowed by Europe and the USA.
If Israel has to nuke an Arab country to keep them from distrupting your precious oil supply, nobody will nuke the USA. Retaliation, nuclear, chemical or otherwise, will fall on Israel. In exchange for the USA's continued support, Israel takes that risk.
So they get perks. Unofficial, unknown, unspoken perks for keeping the uneasy peace in the Middle East and the oil flowing. One of these is information - and yes, some in the tech field are getting screwed by this arrangment.
As an entertaining aside, you can bet that when Arab oil is no longer a significant factor in the world energy picture, Israel will be left to twist in the wind while the region tears itself apart. When that happens, expect a flood of Israeli immigrants.
Well, try Yahoo! The comics page has gone from "intermittently updated" to "virtually unusable." The mail apps now make it almost impossible to delete email in any other way but one at a time. Good usable interfaces are being carefully and methodically destroyed.
Is there some committee at Microsoft and Yahoo that goes around finding anything that's simple, obvious and workable and making sure that it's made unusable as quickly as possible? How does this work? Have ex-congressman moved to the software industry?
It's either about money, or pushing a religious worldview that supports a particular political party, which favors those with money. Any actual benefit to education is either coincidental, accidental, or both.
Re:And thus the obvious is explained in detail...
on
The STEM Crisis Is a Myth
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Horseshit. Capitalism is a tool, not a religion. Socialism too. Idiots make religions of economic systems, which is sort of like worshiping your computer (No offense to long time Mac users). Both systems have strengths and weaknesses. Anyone who works in IT and has had their rational decisions overridden by ignorant high-level managers knows that capitalism fails at certain scales. Central planning works no better when done by someone who sits on the board of GE and viacom than it did when it was done by someone at the Politboro.
Heterogeneous small scale capitalism, where corporate size was controlled through taxation worked well in the 50s, 60s and 70s before the congress was sufficiently purchased in order to change the laws (Anti-trust, glass-steagal) that prevented our currentl slide into the logical end of unfettered capitalism (e.g. Mexico, Kazakhstan, Russia).
And thus the obvious is explained in detail...
on
The STEM Crisis Is a Myth
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
while nobody sees this as yet another failure of capitalism to magically optimize everything for everyone like some kind of wonder fairy. Look, it's a system with winners and losers. Like the lottery, there are a lot more losers than winners.
Oh, and newsflash. The winners would like workers who are as close to slavery as they can get without an overt revolution which might get expensive. Twas ever thus.
That's been clear for a long time. Their language "strategy" is a ridiculous shamble. They dead-end platforms (e.g. Winforms, VB6, silverlight and soon, WPF), change code interfaces willy-nilly (e.g. Powershell instead of a VBScript.net or Jscript.net).
Frankly, I doubt that the top manaegment of Microsoft wants to fuck with software at all anymore. I think there's not enough money in programming language or programmers. I think they want to be a services and devices company. Period.
Bottom line? Don't make me learn new interface stuff. I hate it. If it takes a non-zero amount of time for me to think about it, it's not a value, add; it's a value-subtract.
FYI, this goes for ALL software AND programming languages. Adding a few things incrementally to use new features is fine. Changing interfaces or behaviors wholesale isn't.
This should fall into the "common sense" category - something the software industry isn't exactly famous for being able to perceive or implement.
Disclaimer: I write software for a living. Please don't hate me.
Apple does some things really well. Everyone finds their interface easy, right down to text selection behavior. Do that to the extent the law allows.
People like iPhones and their features. Copy to the extent the law allows.
After you've got these *basics* down, concentrate on innovating something that's really cool, not just different. Focus on better AI. Focus on a better google glass (Microsoft contact lenses?). Focus on neural and speech I/O. Focus on autonomous mobile servant gadgets that work. Focus on better 3d printers.
And remember, even Microsoft can use Linux to build things. Pick a flavor of Linux and brand it as Microsoft's. The Zorin distro isn't bad and the work's already done for you. Start there.
It's a very ambiguous situation. Older people, it would appear, are made of sterner stuff than I. They want to live, despite the pain, even at that age. I didn't understand why my father wanted to live into his 80s, his suffering was so great in that last decade. Yet, he resisted dying to the last day.
The typical slow degenerative death of great companies in the USA is almost always caused by bean counters seeking "efficiency." To MBAs and accountants, if can't be seen as a number on a spreadsheet, it doesn't exist. What's behind the numbers is just magic that can be safely ignored.
Until the rot is too far gone and the ship sinks, but the rats can always find another ship. Hi ho!
While I'm not sure how much energy is represented by the ocean temperature differentials in question (As efficient per square meter as a solar panel?), I'm pretty sure maintenance costs will be prohibitive. The ocean is famous for chewing up what we throw at it. Anything made of metal is probably a significant maintenance cost. Not sure it's possible to do a cement structure of sufficient size, in mid ocean, in deep water.
Sorry about your reading difficulties. If you can maintain attention, perhaps I can clarify.
The point was that large public construction projects happen in expansionary periods when empires is growing, resources are plentiful and economies are relatively free of both public and private debt as a proportion of actual GDP. If you think this is the USA now, perhaps you should get out more, particularly into the rural parts of the country where there is no modern day gold rush for limited, expensive, low-energy-return oil or natural gas.
In fact, there are certain public works projects which would benefit the USA greatly (e.g. conventional, but electrified rail, universal distributed nationwide wireless internet, ubiquitous low-head hydropower, thorium-based nuclear plants, a manhattan project for batteries with decent energy density, and so on.) Unlike China, we do things the purely capitalist way, in a timeframe that never quite gets beyond next quarter's bonus, which makes these projects extraordinarily unlikely.
The fact that something looks cool, like the hyperloop, doesn't make it a good idea. It's too expensive in terms of money and energy, with too little practical return.
2) Maintenance costs over time, particularly if there are economic upheavals in the USA's or the world's economies.
3) Energy costs over time. While petroleum may not be what this thing uses for fuel, I guarantee you it's what gets' the thing built, and maintained for the forseeable future. FYI, petroleum fuels, even as they temporarily dip in price with the economy, are on a long term upward trend, spiking wildly when oil price feedback hits.
4) The possibility that may not have a single, continent-spanning nation state spanning North America within the next few decades.
Cool engineering idea, but this isn't the 1950's. We didn't just win a war and have industrial overcapacity looking for something to do. We are no longer sitting on an ocean of cheap, high net energy oil (Natural gas, while nice to have, isn't really going to cut it as a substitute. Sorry), and frankly we don't have the political or national will to do this sort of thing anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
are going to be very disappointed.
Microsoft either abandons or "dead-ends" languages and platforms with gay abandon. Google drops popular and useful things like google reader because it just didn't monetize quickly enough for some bean counter. Facebook follows in their footsteps by doing the same thing.
We developers are less than fleas to large corporations. Your only defense is to hitch your star to open source languages and platforms. Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and their ilk simply don't give a shit about their development communities. At all.
Israel has nukes. While their development was internal to Isreael, it was allowed by Europe and the USA.
If Israel has to nuke an Arab country to keep them from distrupting your precious oil supply, nobody will nuke the USA. Retaliation, nuclear, chemical or otherwise, will fall on Israel. In exchange for the USA's continued support, Israel takes that risk.
So they get perks. Unofficial, unknown, unspoken perks for keeping the uneasy peace in the Middle East and the oil flowing. One of these is information - and yes, some in the tech field are getting screwed by this arrangment.
As an entertaining aside, you can bet that when Arab oil is no longer a significant factor in the world energy picture, Israel will be left to twist in the wind while the region tears itself apart. When that happens, expect a flood of Israeli immigrants.
Cheers!
Back in my day, we used a ragged piece of orange duct tape and a portable mechanical 320 GB seagate for our tablet storage and we liked it.
Well, try Yahoo! The comics page has gone from "intermittently updated" to "virtually unusable." The mail apps now make it almost impossible to delete email in any other way but one at a time. Good usable interfaces are being carefully and methodically destroyed.
Is there some committee at Microsoft and Yahoo that goes around finding anything that's simple, obvious and workable and making sure that it's made unusable as quickly as possible? How does this work? Have ex-congressman moved to the software industry?
The Chinese exploited a brain-dead obvious attack vector. Nobody checked. Nobody looked. Nobody cared. The empire rots from within.
It's either about money, or pushing a religious worldview that supports a particular political party, which favors those with money. Any actual benefit to education is either coincidental, accidental, or both.
Horseshit. Capitalism is a tool, not a religion. Socialism too. Idiots make religions of economic systems, which is sort of like worshiping your computer (No offense to long time Mac users). Both systems have strengths and weaknesses. Anyone who works in IT and has had their rational decisions overridden by ignorant high-level managers knows that capitalism fails at certain scales. Central planning works no better when done by someone who sits on the board of GE and viacom than it did when it was done by someone at the Politboro.
Heterogeneous small scale capitalism, where corporate size was controlled through taxation worked well in the 50s, 60s and 70s before the congress was sufficiently purchased in order to change the laws (Anti-trust, glass-steagal) that prevented our currentl slide into the logical end of unfettered capitalism (e.g. Mexico, Kazakhstan, Russia).
while nobody sees this as yet another failure of capitalism to magically optimize everything for everyone like some kind of wonder fairy. Look, it's a system with winners and losers. Like the lottery, there are a lot more losers than winners.
Oh, and newsflash. The winners would like workers who are as close to slavery as they can get without an overt revolution which might get expensive. Twas ever thus.
That's been clear for a long time. Their language "strategy" is a ridiculous shamble. They dead-end platforms (e.g. Winforms, VB6, silverlight and soon, WPF), change code interfaces willy-nilly (e.g. Powershell instead of a VBScript.net or Jscript.net).
Frankly, I doubt that the top manaegment of Microsoft wants to fuck with software at all anymore. I think there's not enough money in programming language or programmers. I think they want to be a services and devices company. Period.
It's aboot time!
Teledildonics.
Bottom line? Don't make me learn new interface stuff. I hate it. If it takes a non-zero amount of time for me to think about it, it's not a value, add; it's a value-subtract.
FYI, this goes for ALL software AND programming languages. Adding a few things incrementally to use new features is fine. Changing interfaces or behaviors wholesale isn't.
This should fall into the "common sense" category - something the software industry isn't exactly famous for being able to perceive or implement.
Disclaimer: I write software for a living. Please don't hate me.
Apple does some things really well. Everyone finds their interface easy, right down to text selection behavior. Do that to the extent the law allows.
People like iPhones and their features. Copy to the extent the law allows.
After you've got these *basics* down, concentrate on innovating something that's really cool, not just different. Focus on better AI. Focus on a better google glass (Microsoft contact lenses?). Focus on neural and speech I/O. Focus on autonomous mobile servant gadgets that work. Focus on better 3d printers.
And remember, even Microsoft can use Linux to build things. Pick a flavor of Linux and brand it as Microsoft's. The Zorin distro isn't bad and the work's already done for you. Start there.
They could have just stopped at "Unacceptable."
It's a very ambiguous situation. Older people, it would appear, are made of sterner stuff than I. They want to live, despite the pain, even at that age. I didn't understand why my father wanted to live into his 80s, his suffering was so great in that last decade. Yet, he resisted dying to the last day.
When you have a close relative (or yourself) dying of incurable. unusually painful bone cancer, you may shift your views a tetch.
Why we can't do this more simply with gyroscopes and an electrodynamic tether?
The typical slow degenerative death of great companies in the USA is almost always caused by bean counters seeking "efficiency." To MBAs and accountants, if can't be seen as a number on a spreadsheet, it doesn't exist. What's behind the numbers is just magic that can be safely ignored.
Until the rot is too far gone and the ship sinks, but the rats can always find another ship. Hi ho!
While I'm not sure how much energy is represented by the ocean temperature differentials in question (As efficient per square meter as a solar panel?), I'm pretty sure maintenance costs will be prohibitive. The ocean is famous for chewing up what we throw at it. Anything made of metal is probably a significant maintenance cost. Not sure it's possible to do a cement structure of sufficient size, in mid ocean, in deep water.
Sorry about your reading difficulties. If you can maintain attention, perhaps I can clarify.
The point was that large public construction projects happen in expansionary periods when empires is growing, resources are plentiful and economies are relatively free of both public and private debt as a proportion of actual GDP. If you think this is the USA now, perhaps you should get out more, particularly into the rural parts of the country where there is no modern day gold rush for limited, expensive, low-energy-return oil or natural gas.
In fact, there are certain public works projects which would benefit the USA greatly (e.g. conventional, but electrified rail, universal distributed nationwide wireless internet, ubiquitous low-head hydropower, thorium-based nuclear plants, a manhattan project for batteries with decent energy density, and so on.) Unlike China, we do things the purely capitalist way, in a timeframe that never quite gets beyond next quarter's bonus, which makes these projects extraordinarily unlikely.
The fact that something looks cool, like the hyperloop, doesn't make it a good idea. It's too expensive in terms of money and energy, with too little practical return.
And do they think it's mere coincidence that the current president of Russia used to be the head of the KGB?
1) Initial cost
2) Maintenance costs over time, particularly if there are economic upheavals in the USA's or the world's economies.
3) Energy costs over time. While petroleum may not be what this thing uses for fuel, I guarantee you it's what gets' the thing built, and maintained for the forseeable future. FYI, petroleum fuels, even as they temporarily dip in price with the economy, are on a long term upward trend, spiking wildly when oil price feedback hits.
4) The possibility that may not have a single, continent-spanning nation state spanning North America within the next few decades.
Cool engineering idea, but this isn't the 1950's. We didn't just win a war and have industrial overcapacity looking for something to do. We are no longer sitting on an ocean of cheap, high net energy oil (Natural gas, while nice to have, isn't really going to cut it as a substitute. Sorry), and frankly we don't have the political or national will to do this sort of thing anymore.
Because obviously there are not other browsers out there and you can't turn the blocking features off... No, wait.
Because Ellison is so credible.