Thank you. I stand corrected and happily so since decent battery technology is probably the one thing that may save our collective bacon. Do you happen to know if this thing is rechargable?
Most of the VB6 projects I've had to recode in the past for clients were written by numerous people at various times, and at varying levels of skill. Moreover, most of *those* people knew they'd be gone in 6 months to the next job or back to India. They didn't care. Welcome to the real world.
As for Winforms, the clients wanted ASP, not WPF. At the time I did the consult with them, they considered.xbap to be a kind of bad joke. I can't claim to disagree much, however feel free to point me to a commercial.xbap web application in the wild, if you can find one.
VB6 migration path to VB.net: Fuck you. Recode. Winforms to Web: Fuck you. Recode. Silverlight to WPF: Fuck you. Recode. WPF to anything:Take a guess. Microsoft Office interface: Fuck you. Retrain. Windows interface: Fuck you. Retrain. Old Windows phone: Fuck you. New Windows phone: Maybe we'll let your app on our store, and by the way. Fuck you.
Why anybody, at this point, would invest *any* time in any windows language or platform is beyone me. Think Android. Think iOS.
I can't tell you how many times I've grabbed my android tablet to get to the web while waiting for my PC to recover from either losing it's mind or getting an update.
A real challenge to the Microsoft hegemony would squeeze out the idiocy and arrogance that currently dominates the company. Forced to pay attention to users and developers, Microsoft would never have created a disaster like windows 8, or the developer-hostile policy of allowing languages and platforms to "dead end."
Heck, someone at Microsoft might actually wake up and figure out that the policies and strategies that benefit Microsoft in the long run are those that benefit users and developers, not the marketing department, or upper management bonuses.
But then why is the US an outlier in equality/mobility? We were, and are an outlier because we started on a continent whose resources had not yet been exploited, and had enough land area which could be used as an outlet for both criminals, entrepeneurs and those in-between. Resource wealth and a measure of geographical freedom allowed a measure of social mobility. Australia has a similar history.
Hydrocarbon energy isn't "technology" any more than Niagra falls is technology. It's an energy source which was ultimately exploited using technology. Unlike Niagra falls with it's relatively fixed energy potential and limited location, the more useful, and portable energy provided by hydrocarbons is limited.
"the masses" started to demand/expect greater levels of access to art, culture, education, leisure, governance, autonomy, freedom. High school "history." The "masses" did not expect anything. As always, they are promised something and given things either to quell outright rebellion or to gain votes if the government is democratic or semi-democratic.
Fortunately, we're not a pre-hydrocarbon culture No, but we will be before this century is out. Not that there won't be oil, coal and natural gas in the ground, but there won't be enough energy-positive oil, coal, or natural gas to supply enough cheap transportation fuel to sustain the world's, interdependent "just-in-time" supply chains at anything like their current level.
FYI, I don't "insist" on slavery. I notice its existence, its longevity as an institution, its shrinkage and the implications. That's all.
Could we provide a more egalitarian society on less? Sure. Theoretically. If you look at humanity historically, however, it just doesn't seem to happen. My view is emperical, not theoretical.
...bucking the trend of human nature to seek higher ideals of equality and freedom once technological development allows the satisfaction of lower needs.
I wish this were true, but it's not, or the USA wouldn't be trending so far in the other direction. Moreover, cultures which had relatively long term stability and prosperity (e.g. Rome, Ancient Egypt, the Mayans), were not exactly shining examples of "seeking higher ideals of equality and freedom." The price of prosperity in all these cultures was slavery.
And here's where your argument fails. It wasn't human nature or technological development, per se, that allowed greater equality. It was the exploitation of hydrocarbon energy. Starting with coal and steam power in the 1700s and 1800s, followed by natural gas and oil, machines were suddenly able to provide labor previously provided by slaves. In essence, cheap engines made expensive, less powerful slaves much less cost-effective. Humans weren't freed by idealism, despite the post facto explanations of religious movements and pandering politicians. They were freed by cheap energy.
The details vary. Sometimes wars were fought, or not, but no ancient pre-hydrocarbon civilization voluntarily freed their slaves. As always, human idealism explanations are tacked on as an afterthought after real life cirumstances force a change.
Sorry to bust your bubble. Believe me, the world is going to look a lot different after you're out of college a few decades.
Sadly, you're fighting human nature here. F'rinstance, say you're a successful white guy with a Masters or PhD, a salary in the low six figures and have always lived in an upper middle class milleau. Are you going to marry your Mexican maid, who barely speaks English and never finished high school? It does happen, but not often, no matter how inherently brilliant, or wonderful a person the maid or the white guy might be. Neither of you fit into each other's lives or families. Most people take an easier road.
Twitter is a threat. To repressive government and corporate oppressors everywhere. Other kinds of social media too. And that internet thing. Big threat. Also, telephones, computers, pens, pencils, paper and talking.
But oh yes. Quite right. That social communication thing. Very dangerous.... to government and corporate dictators.
I emphatically agree, but probably not in the way you meant. One of my prime windows annoyances is that when I hit the close button on a window, NOTHING happens.
So, dear Microsoft. Let me give you a little advice. When I say "Stop" anything, it should STOP. Not "when all the processes are safely closed." Not "when all the files are written to disk." Not "when it's given the correct priority in queue."
NOW. STOP NOW!
Clean up that shit in the background on your own time. I have work to do and I'M THE HUMAN who *paid* for this thing. The computer is nothing. Nothing at all. It's a toaster. A toy. I turn it on. I turn it off. When I say "jump," the only thing I want to hear from that machine is "Yes Sir! How high Sir! RIGHT AWAY SIR!
WTF is wrong with the Microsoft staff? Difficulty finding own rear end with flashlight and a map? Nose in front of face just too darned elusive?
I honest-to-god read some tripe from a Microsoftie that said (and I paraphrase), "We hear that people want the start button back and we're trying to understand what they mean by that."
Oh. God.
We had a menu system that worked for years. It's used by Apple, Linux, et. al. to good effect. It provided useful, meaningful, heirarchical prompts to make up for the weaknesses in human memory. It did not need change or improvement. Indeed, it would be hard to see how you would improve on it from a human factors standpoint.
So, start button without the menu. I can only stand back in astonishment and repeat WTF!
Not because it's a bad language. It may be great. The fact is that nobody... I mean *nobody* needs one more obscure little language whose wondrous new features would just be another add-in library in C++. This is a mental masturbation tool for the Mom's basement crowd. Nothing more.
My skepticism is limited to Rossi, whose behavior is that of a classic con man. As for LENR, who knows? Nobody had come up with anything consistent after 20 years. I'm skeptical, but as with so many issues surrounding energy (e.g. peak oil), I would be more than delighted to be proven wrong.
Firmness in your stated hiring practice will allow both the employee and employer satisfaction to rise, encouraging tight teamwork and clear improvement in fullfillment issues as well as business to business relationships.
Anything can be pushed to the limits of what we know, and on occasion, things work, but not for the reasons you think it did. This is sufficiently close to the cutting edge that it may be operating correctly, but that we only think we understand why.
F'rinstance, for years, we thought about electricity as a liquid. Voltage equaled pressure. Amps equaled volume. The math worked. Nature wiggled it's eyebrows suggestively.
BUT, electricity is NOT a liquid. It works the way it does for completely different reasons. It just took a while for us to figure that out. Yet, even before we understood this, we build practical machinery.
But doesn't this suggest that arrays of narrow domain analog computers of this type might be constructed in such a way as to produce a *really* fast general purpose supercomputer? For example, sorting routines are built into most software frameworks. Could we not hybridize a system wherein np hard problems are called from the framework that transfers the sort to an quantum adiabatic solver and returns an answer?
Slashdot Mirror
But I don't have a lock on this view.
Thank you. I stand corrected and happily so since decent battery technology is probably the one thing that may save our collective bacon. Do you happen to know if this thing is rechargable?
Most of the VB6 projects I've had to recode in the past for clients were written by numerous people at various times, and at varying levels of skill. Moreover, most of *those* people knew they'd be gone in 6 months to the next job or back to India. They didn't care. Welcome to the real world.
As for Winforms, the clients wanted ASP, not WPF. At the time I did the consult with them, they considered .xbap to be a kind of bad joke. I can't claim to disagree much, however feel free to point me to a commercial .xbap web application in the wild, if you can find one.
VB6 migration path to VB.net: Fuck you. Recode.
Winforms to Web: Fuck you. Recode.
Silverlight to WPF: Fuck you. Recode.
WPF to anything:Take a guess.
Microsoft Office interface: Fuck you. Retrain.
Windows interface: Fuck you. Retrain.
Old Windows phone: Fuck you.
New Windows phone: Maybe we'll let your app on our store, and by the way. Fuck you.
Why anybody, at this point, would invest *any* time in any windows language or platform is beyone me. Think Android. Think iOS.
I can't tell you how many times I've grabbed my android tablet to get to the web while waiting for my PC to recover from either losing it's mind or getting an update.
So, you're saying that we now have a battery that's got 1/50th of the energy density of an equivalent volume of petroleum.
Progress. Of a sort. I guess.
A real challenge to the Microsoft hegemony would squeeze out the idiocy and arrogance that currently dominates the company. Forced to pay attention to users and developers, Microsoft would never have created a disaster like windows 8, or the developer-hostile policy of allowing languages and platforms to "dead end."
Heck, someone at Microsoft might actually wake up and figure out that the policies and strategies that benefit Microsoft in the long run are those that benefit users and developers, not the marketing department, or upper management bonuses.
I joke. I joke. Of course this will never happen.
Microsoft should hire Infoword's writers as design consultants. Inforworld's staff doesn't have the luxury of being out of touch with users.
But then why is the US an outlier in equality/mobility?
We were, and are an outlier because we started on a continent whose resources had not yet been exploited, and had enough land area which could be used as an outlet for both criminals, entrepeneurs and those in-between. Resource wealth and a measure of geographical freedom allowed a measure of social mobility. Australia has a similar history.
Hydrocarbon energy isn't "technology" any more than Niagra falls is technology. It's an energy source which was ultimately exploited using technology. Unlike Niagra falls with it's relatively fixed energy potential and limited location, the more useful, and portable energy provided by hydrocarbons is limited.
"the masses" started to demand/expect greater levels of access to art, culture, education, leisure, governance, autonomy, freedom.
High school "history." The "masses" did not expect anything. As always, they are promised something and given things either to quell outright rebellion or to gain votes if the government is democratic or semi-democratic.
Fortunately, we're not a pre-hydrocarbon culture
No, but we will be before this century is out. Not that there won't be oil, coal and natural gas in the ground, but there won't be enough energy-positive oil, coal, or natural gas to supply enough cheap transportation fuel to sustain the world's, interdependent "just-in-time" supply chains at anything like their current level.
FYI, I don't "insist" on slavery. I notice its existence, its longevity as an institution, its shrinkage and the implications. That's all.
Could we provide a more egalitarian society on less? Sure. Theoretically. If you look at humanity historically, however, it just doesn't seem to happen. My view is emperical, not theoretical.
...bucking the trend of human nature to seek higher ideals of equality and freedom once technological development allows the satisfaction of lower needs.
I wish this were true, but it's not, or the USA wouldn't be trending so far in the other direction. Moreover, cultures which had relatively long term stability and prosperity (e.g. Rome, Ancient Egypt, the Mayans), were not exactly shining examples of "seeking higher ideals of equality and freedom." The price of prosperity in all these cultures was slavery.
And here's where your argument fails. It wasn't human nature or technological development, per se, that allowed greater equality. It was the exploitation of hydrocarbon energy. Starting with coal and steam power in the 1700s and 1800s, followed by natural gas and oil, machines were suddenly able to provide labor previously provided by slaves. In essence, cheap engines made expensive, less powerful slaves much less cost-effective. Humans weren't freed by idealism, despite the post facto explanations of religious movements and pandering politicians. They were freed by cheap energy.
The details vary. Sometimes wars were fought, or not, but no ancient pre-hydrocarbon civilization voluntarily freed their slaves. As always, human idealism explanations are tacked on as an afterthought after real life cirumstances force a change.
Sorry to bust your bubble. Believe me, the world is going to look a lot different after you're out of college a few decades.
Sadly, you're fighting human nature here. F'rinstance, say you're a successful white guy with a Masters or PhD, a salary in the low six figures and have always lived in an upper middle class milleau. Are you going to marry your Mexican maid, who barely speaks English and never finished high school? It does happen, but not often, no matter how inherently brilliant, or wonderful a person the maid or the white guy might be. Neither of you fit into each other's lives or families. Most people take an easier road.
Twitter is a threat. To repressive government and corporate oppressors everywhere. Other kinds of social media too. And that internet thing. Big threat. Also, telephones, computers, pens, pencils, paper and talking.
But oh yes. Quite right. That social communication thing. Very dangerous.... to government and corporate dictators.
I emphatically agree, but probably not in the way you meant. One of my prime windows annoyances is that when I hit the close button on a window, NOTHING happens.
So, dear Microsoft. Let me give you a little advice. When I say "Stop" anything, it should STOP. Not "when all the processes are safely closed." Not "when all the files are written to disk." Not "when it's given the correct priority in queue."
NOW. STOP NOW!
Clean up that shit in the background on your own time. I have work to do and I'M THE HUMAN who *paid* for this thing. The computer is nothing. Nothing at all. It's a toaster. A toy. I turn it on. I turn it off. When I say "jump," the only thing I want to hear from that machine is "Yes Sir! How high Sir! RIGHT AWAY SIR!
Get the picture?
If the aliens were using iron picks to build the pyramids, they must have kind of lame as space faring civilizations go. Just sayin.
WTF is wrong with the Microsoft staff? Difficulty finding own rear end with flashlight and a map? Nose in front of face just too darned elusive?
I honest-to-god read some tripe from a Microsoftie that said (and I paraphrase), "We hear that people want the start button back and we're trying to understand what they mean by that."
Oh. God.
We had a menu system that worked for years. It's used by Apple, Linux, et. al. to good effect. It provided useful, meaningful, heirarchical prompts to make up for the weaknesses in human memory. It did not need change or improvement. Indeed, it would be hard to see how you would improve on it from a human factors standpoint.
So, start button without the menu. I can only stand back in astonishment and repeat WTF!
Not because it's a bad language. It may be great. The fact is that nobody... I mean *nobody* needs one more obscure little language whose wondrous new features would just be another add-in library in C++. This is a mental masturbation tool for the Mom's basement crowd. Nothing more.
Have you considered a career in congress?
But neither of your IQs are as deep, shapely or green as mine.
And another one gone and another one gone...
Another one bites the dust!
Hey! I'm gonna get you too!
Another one bites the dust!
My skepticism is limited to Rossi, whose behavior is that of a classic con man. As for LENR, who knows? Nobody had come up with anything consistent after 20 years. I'm skeptical, but as with so many issues surrounding energy (e.g. peak oil), I would be more than delighted to be proven wrong.
I stand corrected, however, the principals regarding both suckers and bafflement remain sound.
There's far more than one sucker born every minute.
Firmness in your stated hiring practice will allow both the employee and employer satisfaction to rise, encouraging tight teamwork and clear improvement in fullfillment issues as well as business to business relationships.
Anything can be pushed to the limits of what we know, and on occasion, things work, but not for the reasons you think it did. This is sufficiently close to the cutting edge that it may be operating correctly, but that we only think we understand why.
F'rinstance, for years, we thought about electricity as a liquid. Voltage equaled pressure. Amps equaled volume. The math worked. Nature wiggled it's eyebrows suggestively.
BUT, electricity is NOT a liquid. It works the way it does for completely different reasons. It just took a while for us to figure that out. Yet, even before we understood this, we build practical machinery.
But doesn't this suggest that arrays of narrow domain analog computers of this type might be constructed in such a way as to produce a *really* fast general purpose supercomputer? For example, sorting routines are built into most software frameworks. Could we not hybridize a system wherein np hard problems are called from the framework that transfers the sort to an quantum adiabatic solver and returns an answer?