I put time and money and effort into making salable sofware products. What Microsoft has told me repeatedly is that I don't matter to them. At all.
What would motivate me, as a developer, to invest 1 more minute in a platform that's almost guaranteed to go the way of VB6, Winforms, Silverlight or XNA? Want to go to the web as your customers are demanding? Recode. Want to upgrade that game? Recode? Want to keep that nifty Silverlight app going. Find another platform and recode. Only C++ developers were extended the fundamental courtesy of running unmanaged old code along with.net. Everyone else is essentially told "tough shit." Worse, half-hearted efforts like the VB6 upgrade or WPF/Winforms hosting aren't developed to actually *work* and so end up wasting even more of your time.
VB6 should have upgraded with one click, or run between tags as unmanaged code. Winforms should either have actually been hostable in WPF, or come with a one click upgrade to an ASP simulacrum of Winform code. VBScript and JScript should have migrated to VBScript.net and JScript.net rather than the syntactic abomination that is Powershell. Those would have been the right decisions, had Microsoft given a shit.
When Microsoft finally realizes that the word "Recode" IS ALWAYS THE WRONG ANSWER when a developer needs to migrate to another platform, they might actually get some interest in their products. Not before.
Common courtesy and consideration of the financial needs of real developers would go a long way. The ISV world is not made of C++ elite. It's made of people who have to get some work done and make a living - who do not, and will never aspire to the at the top of the programming heap. That's your core audience, not the 20-something genius you hire from Kazakhstan. Cater to them and their ilk, and them only and you will fail.
The race to the bottom argument is a logical fallacy. Yes, it's only in that inconvenient real world that it happens. In case you've forgotten, wages in the USA started stagnating in the 70s and the divide between wealthy and poor grows larger each year. Moreover, the real world examples of unregulated capitalism (e.g. Pakistan, Somalia, Mexico, the USA, China) show exactly what happens when the government "gets out of the way." This is solely due to changes in government taxation regulation changes on high income earners and high income corporations, and the demise of checks on finance (i.e. Glass-steagall).
LOL. I get that a lot actually, from engineers and developers. They don't actually SAY that mind you, but when I'm giving my standard "Why we developers suck at human interfaces" lecture, there's a pretty obvious attitude that a perfect machine or program is some kind of art object and that injecting human needs into the picture is just plain annoying and distasteful.
And you're correct about the engineer thing, even though my title says, "Principal Engineer." My Dad was an engineer, with an engineering degree. My degree is in psychology plus thirty years of autodidactism and I am admittedly human-centric until we get AI worthy of the name that claims self-awareness. Then I'll re-evaluate.
1) Old famous philosophers. Meh. More modern philosophers (e.g. Popper, Hofstadter) whose ideas on epistimology are directly related to science. Yes. Worth studying. Engineering is build in science, which is in turn, built on epistemology.
2) Psychology courses related to the psychoanalytic school? Waste of time. Neurophysiology and Evolutionary psychology, in contrast, show you how you do things and why you do things respectively. Machinery only exists to serve people. If you don't understand what people want, and why, you *will* fail.
3) Biology and ecology. Useful for any engineer. Natural systems are studies of genetic algorithms and generated solutions in action at different domains of complexity. You'd be nuts to ignore them.
4) History. A definite yes. Problems (engineering and otherwise) have been solved in *many* different ways over time. Social contexts have drifted drastically. The ancient Romans would be aghast at our political and sexual behaviors. Theirs were *quite* different. Engineering was different too. Consider that their cement was superior to ours.
5) Anthropology, both primate and social. This too, helps explaing why we do what we do, and sort of rubs your nose in the fact that *your* peculiar, local social context, including your understanding of engineering, is just one of many. Something most Americans, engineers or not, fail to realize. Primate anthropology demonstrates that there are many different successful strategies for success in nature. The patriarchal society of Chimps and the matriarchal societies of bonobos couldn't be more different. Both are successful species. You're forced to understand that there are many different solutions for almost every problem.
There's only so much sunlight available for capture that doesn't interfere significantly with either current food production OR local ecologies. Biofuels, while fine for smaller projects simply don't scale up without disastrous consequences. You might run the local farm co-op with them, but not an industrial scale civilization.
The issue is quantity. There's only so much area, materials and sunlight available for capture that doesn't interfere significantly with either current food production OR local ecologies. Biofuels, while fine for smaller projects simply don't scale up without disastrous consequences. You might run the local farm co-op with them, but not an industrial scale civilization.
Yes, indeed, you might speed up the conversion *time* but you're still not going to get any more *energy* than what is provided by sunlight and starter chemicals. Period. End of story. Physics wins. Investors lose, unless the end business is in skin care products, where it might be profitable.
Hating everyone is my default state. To be fair, it has very little to do with computers and a lot to do with generalized, willfull ignorance and stupidity (Journalists hold a special, very dark and awful place in my heart), but it wouldn't be any different if I was a CEO, a construction worker, or god forbid, a lawyer.
A "plague" of geese? I was under the impression that multiple geese were known as "flocks." Or was this some sort of biblical reference? Did Egypt suffer some kind of big honking avian illness?
But at least I have some education and can think things through. Did it occur to you that desert ecologies are worth preserving too? To think of them as wastelands suited only for humans is rather impressive arrogance.
Yes, you can use solar power to store the heat in salt. It's spiffy. It's great for local, small scale applications if you have the money. There's not enough desert to make it a practical alternative to current industrial scale power generation. Line losses getting it from point A to point B make it not worth doing on a large scale unless you live near, or in the desert (That said, this would work in the Sahel where power needs are smaller if you could get the money to build the plants in the first place)
Just go talk to an electrical engineer with time. You'll embarrass yourself less.
Look, kid. I'm not trying to discourage this young woman. I *do* get irritated at repetitive, innumerate media stories which appear to be designed to quell a gullible populace rather than inform anyone about just what kind of an energy-deficit shitstorm is coming down in the pike at a much more rapid clip than I expected.
Don't you DARE presume that your limits are future generations' as well. I'm pretty sure the laws of physics won't change in the medium term.:) There are answers, by the way. Thorium nuclear plus increased battery efficiency, or even just better batteries alone have at least a chance of saving our collective bacon long enough to get to sustainable fusion power. There's not much else on the horizon though. Seriously, most of the popsci junk regarding new energy breakthroughs is just that - junk.
to be a significant power sources without either destroying foodcrops or natural ecologicies, or get more than about 5% efficiency - less than a solar panel.
Makes for a cute story though, as do all these biofuel stories. Keeps everyone hopeful, despite the complete silliness.
These root servers root packets to their correct locations....
So duplicates of these packets can be routed to any other location...
And analyzed for interesting material and then either saved or dicarded...
So, no, there's not squat you can do. All internet traffic in the USA, regardless of form or format is theoretically possible to search, analyze and store. There may not be enough capacity to save all of it, but the interesting stuff, I'm sure, is compressed, catalogued and stored.
Can "interest" be evaded? Probably. Encrypting within.pngs and.jpgs might work. Simple agreed upon coding systems in plain text might evade detection. Zipped and encrypted files, I expect, would all be saved for later processing.
Would allusion packed Klingon poetry get through? Navajo? Elvish? Hard to say. You'd probably take up someone's time though. Keyword flooding might work to overload the filters, but it's hard to say how much capacity is involved. Flooding might not work.
Partial separated messages would also probably work if there were no obvious semantic or other identifiable similarity. Tricky as well.
This is just off the top of my head. There are undoubtedly more effective ways to use internet communication in an invisible way, which unfortunately leads me to the conclusion that this effort is going to be fairly effective at catching stupid people and lax people, but not people who are either sufficiently bright, or sufficiently paranoid.
It obviously also doesn't have a lot of predictive power, otherwise two pseudo-Islamic nutjobs in Boston would have been stopped before they bought their first pressure cooker.
Clueless bean counters and/or middle manglers will assume that if it costs less, it must be better.
Until of course, their business trails off, the finger pointing starts, the company re-orgs to bury the bodies, everyone runs for the exits and the bankruptcy lawyers start rising from their graves, searching desperately for brains.... and finding none.
What if *you* ate a diet almost exclusively of charred red meat over a fire whose smoke you inhaled for several hours a day while you cooked?t Not to mention the herbs they threw on the fire and inhaled for entertainment.
And how could we all forget te all but abandoned VBS which started crashing so often that we were forced to move to the syntactic abomination of Powershell (or Powerhell, as we call it in my office).
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I put time and money and effort into making salable sofware products. What Microsoft has told me repeatedly is that I don't matter to them. At all.
What would motivate me, as a developer, to invest 1 more minute in a platform that's almost guaranteed to go the way of VB6, Winforms, Silverlight or XNA? Want to go to the web as your customers are demanding? Recode. Want to upgrade that game? Recode? Want to keep that nifty Silverlight app going. Find another platform and recode. Only C++ developers were extended the fundamental courtesy of running unmanaged old code along with .net. Everyone else is essentially told "tough shit." Worse, half-hearted efforts like the VB6 upgrade or WPF/Winforms hosting aren't developed to actually *work* and so end up wasting even more of your time.
VB6 should have upgraded with one click, or run between tags as unmanaged code. Winforms should either have actually been hostable in WPF, or come with a one click upgrade to an ASP simulacrum of Winform code. VBScript and JScript should have migrated to VBScript.net and JScript.net rather than the syntactic abomination that is Powershell. Those would have been the right decisions, had Microsoft given a shit.
When Microsoft finally realizes that the word "Recode" IS ALWAYS THE WRONG ANSWER when a developer needs to migrate to another platform, they might actually get some interest in their products. Not before.
Common courtesy and consideration of the financial needs of real developers would go a long way. The ISV world is not made of C++ elite. It's made of people who have to get some work done and make a living - who do not, and will never aspire to the at the top of the programming heap. That's your core audience, not the 20-something genius you hire from Kazakhstan. Cater to them and their ilk, and them only and you will fail.
Like you're doing now.
The race to the bottom argument is a logical fallacy.
Yes, it's only in that inconvenient real world that it happens. In case you've forgotten, wages in the USA started stagnating in the 70s and the divide between wealthy and poor grows larger each year. Moreover, the real world examples of unregulated capitalism (e.g. Pakistan, Somalia, Mexico, the USA, China) show exactly what happens when the government "gets out of the way." This is solely due to changes in government taxation regulation changes on high income earners and high income corporations, and the demise of checks on finance (i.e. Glass-steagall).
The resulting outrage will be highly amusing. Even more so when other agencies like the CIA find *they're* being monitored.
LOL. I get that a lot actually, from engineers and developers. They don't actually SAY that mind you, but when I'm giving my standard "Why we developers suck at human interfaces" lecture, there's a pretty obvious attitude that a perfect machine or program is some kind of art object and that injecting human needs into the picture is just plain annoying and distasteful.
And you're correct about the engineer thing, even though my title says, "Principal Engineer." My Dad was an engineer, with an engineering degree. My degree is in psychology plus thirty years of autodidactism and I am admittedly human-centric until we get AI worthy of the name that claims self-awareness. Then I'll re-evaluate.
1) Old famous philosophers. Meh. More modern philosophers (e.g. Popper, Hofstadter) whose ideas on epistimology are directly related to science. Yes. Worth studying. Engineering is build in science, which is in turn, built on epistemology.
2) Psychology courses related to the psychoanalytic school? Waste of time. Neurophysiology and Evolutionary psychology, in contrast, show you how you do things and why you do things respectively. Machinery only exists to serve people. If you don't understand what people want, and why, you *will* fail.
3) Biology and ecology. Useful for any engineer. Natural systems are studies of genetic algorithms and generated solutions in action at different domains of complexity. You'd be nuts to ignore them.
4) History. A definite yes. Problems (engineering and otherwise) have been solved in *many* different ways over time. Social contexts have drifted drastically. The ancient Romans would be aghast at our political and sexual behaviors. Theirs were *quite* different. Engineering was different too. Consider that their cement was superior to ours.
5) Anthropology, both primate and social. This too, helps explaing why we do what we do, and sort of rubs your nose in the fact that *your* peculiar, local social context, including your understanding of engineering, is just one of many. Something most Americans, engineers or not, fail to realize. Primate anthropology demonstrates that there are many different successful strategies for success in nature. The patriarchal society of Chimps and the matriarchal societies of bonobos couldn't be more different. Both are successful species. You're forced to understand that there are many different solutions for almost every problem.
There's only so much sunlight available for capture that doesn't interfere significantly with either current food production OR local ecologies. Biofuels, while fine for smaller projects simply don't scale up without disastrous consequences. You might run the local farm co-op with them, but not an industrial scale civilization.
The issue is quantity. There's only so much area, materials and sunlight available for capture that doesn't interfere significantly with either current food production OR local ecologies. Biofuels, while fine for smaller projects simply don't scale up without disastrous consequences. You might run the local farm co-op with them, but not an industrial scale civilization.
Yes, indeed, you might speed up the conversion *time* but you're still not going to get any more *energy* than what is provided by sunlight and starter chemicals. Period. End of story. Physics wins. Investors lose, unless the end business is in skin care products, where it might be profitable.
Tough tits, toots.
Advertisers are of course, free to create their own extra-spiffy browsers, just chock full of advertising.
Hating everyone is my default state. To be fair, it has very little to do with computers and a lot to do with generalized, willfull ignorance and stupidity (Journalists hold a special, very dark and awful place in my heart), but it wouldn't be any different if I was a CEO, a construction worker, or god forbid, a lawyer.
Hmm. They sound suspiciously like my neighbor's children.
A "plague" of geese? I was under the impression that multiple geese were known as "flocks." Or was this some sort of biblical reference? Did Egypt suffer some kind of big honking avian illness?
Most of what was discussed seems to be training third world children to be the $5/hour engineers of the future.
But at least I have some education and can think things through. Did it occur to you that desert ecologies are worth preserving too? To think of them as wastelands suited only for humans is rather impressive arrogance.
Yes, you can use solar power to store the heat in salt. It's spiffy. It's great for local, small scale applications if you have the money. There's not enough desert to make it a practical alternative to current industrial scale power generation. Line losses getting it from point A to point B make it not worth doing on a large scale unless you live near, or in the desert (That said, this would work in the Sahel where power needs are smaller if you could get the money to build the plants in the first place)
Just go talk to an electrical engineer with time. You'll embarrass yourself less.
Look, kid. I'm not trying to discourage this young woman. I *do* get irritated at repetitive, innumerate media stories which appear to be designed to quell a gullible populace rather than inform anyone about just what kind of an energy-deficit shitstorm is coming down in the pike at a much more rapid clip than I expected.
Don't you DARE presume that your limits are future generations' as well. :) There are answers, by the way. Thorium nuclear plus increased battery efficiency, or even just better batteries alone have at least a chance of saving our collective bacon long enough to get to sustainable fusion power. There's not much else on the horizon though. Seriously, most of the popsci junk regarding new energy breakthroughs is just that - junk.
I'm pretty sure the laws of physics won't change in the medium term.
to be a significant power sources without either destroying foodcrops or natural ecologicies, or get more than about 5% efficiency - less than a solar panel.
Makes for a cute story though, as do all these biofuel stories. Keeps everyone hopeful, despite the complete silliness.
Oh good lord people, Super main is a COMIC BOOK CHARACTER. You want literature? Read Dostoyevsky.
with a proven history of biting children. Quite annoying, that bunch.
This means the collected data witlessly? OK, I can work with that.
Gay? Have you *seen* pictures of his girlfriend? I think not.
These root servers root packets to their correct locations....
So duplicates of these packets can be routed to any other location...
And analyzed for interesting material and then either saved or dicarded...
So, no, there's not squat you can do. All internet traffic in the USA, regardless of form or format is theoretically possible to search, analyze and store. There may not be enough capacity to save all of it, but the interesting stuff, I'm sure, is compressed, catalogued and stored.
Can "interest" be evaded? Probably. Encrypting within .pngs and .jpgs might work. Simple agreed upon coding systems in plain text might evade detection. Zipped and encrypted files, I expect, would all be saved for later processing.
Would allusion packed Klingon poetry get through? Navajo? Elvish? Hard to say. You'd probably take up someone's time though. Keyword flooding might work to overload the filters, but it's hard to say how much capacity is involved. Flooding might not work.
Partial separated messages would also probably work if there were no obvious semantic or other identifiable similarity. Tricky as well.
This is just off the top of my head. There are undoubtedly more effective ways to use internet communication in an invisible way, which unfortunately leads me to the conclusion that this effort is going to be fairly effective at catching stupid people and lax people, but not people who are either sufficiently bright, or sufficiently paranoid.
It obviously also doesn't have a lot of predictive power, otherwise two pseudo-Islamic nutjobs in Boston would have been stopped before they bought their first pressure cooker.
Clueless bean counters and/or middle manglers will assume that if it costs less, it must be better.
Until of course, their business trails off, the finger pointing starts, the company re-orgs to bury the bodies, everyone runs for the exits and the bankruptcy lawyers start rising from their graves, searching desperately for brains.... and finding none.
Expect to rent most of your software just like you pay for Netflix. Rents might be low, but you'll pay.
And expect surveillance as a service too. Interestingly, everyone used to think I was a conspiracy nut when when I told them this.
I hate being right.
What if *you* ate a diet almost exclusively of charred red meat over a fire whose smoke you inhaled for several hours a day while you cooked?t
Not to mention the herbs they threw on the fire and inhaled for entertainment.
And how could we all forget te all but abandoned VBS which started crashing so often that we were forced to move to the syntactic abomination of Powershell (or Powerhell, as we call it in my office).