For narrow domain searches like installed software, I simply find a hierarchically organized series of visible prompts to be a faster alternative than a series of tiled blocks that I need to scan. Typing the name of the program to find it, as Unity on Linux does is all well and good, if you remember the name.
Unable to admit mistakes, there will be no start button that brings up an easily navigable menu. There will be a bitmap that brings up the desktop or something equally stupid/lame.
In other news, Microsoft will give developers no clue as to their long term language strategy. Developers, with no interest in investing limited time, money and resources into Microsoft language technology shambles, will go elsewhere. Top managment at Microsoft will continue to be baffled as to why nobody is writing Windows 8 Apps, or Windows anything apps, anymore.
Well, if you live in Europe, I propose this little hypothetical for you. Tomorrow, the USA's contribution to NATO disappears. No more bases. No more soldiers. No more weapons. No more obligations to defend. Suddenly, every country in Europe must pay for their own defense.
So, how long, do you think, your generous social benefits would last under those circumstances? Please provide numbers, and sources. Not hot air.
Though your response intimated that my basic assumptions about resource allocation by governments and industry were wrong, that too is useful insight. I'm not sure it's entirely correct, however.
Both private industry and goverments are littered with failed ideas, and I am skeptical that one really does better or worse than another at picking winners and losers. Private industry, I think, simply has more active public relations machinery.
Capitalist societies seem to act more like a bacteria colonies, successfully reacting to resource availibility and strategies with immediate results while ignoring long-term consequences of their actions. Capitalism, it might be said, doesn't think ahead. That's what governments should be for, although in a democracy with a 4-year cycle, this view is often too limited for useful long-term action on matters like hydrocarbon energy depletion and global warming.
OK, I'm more than willing to admit we don't have a clue about many neurological disease processes. Schizophrenia and Bipolar disorders may be dozens of different specific diseases that happen to present in a similar way. I get that.
But until we *know* what those diseases are, schizophrenia is useful in that it describes a set of symptoms that commonly occur together, that we can treat.
Theoretical models are never "right" or "wrong." These are meaningless terms. They are only more or less useful in that they provide some predictive and/or manipulative power. Period. End of story.
True, I'd been scripting automated testing systems in C++ for 3 years prior to that, but at 40, was forced to learn vb.net and vbscript. Vbscript begat powershell. Vb.net begat C#. And these days, at 55, I just work through whatever syntactic abomination is thrown my way, no matter how fundamentally unnecessary and pointless (I'm lookin' at you, WPF).
LOL. Have you ever *been* to East Texas? The "office building" would have to be a broken down trailer, right next to the fellow who lost all his teeth in his last meth holiday (I have a cabin there).
than actually making products that don't suck. Implication? Corporate leeches and legal parasites have changed the legal environment to favor their existence by purchasing laws via bribes labeled as "campaign contributions." Tell me again how, as an individual ISV or inventor, I could *ever* be successful in the USA's current legal environment?
..when dealing with anything you want to keep secret, and your problem is solved. Internet security has always been and always will be, sheer fantasy for gullible managers.
As always, failure flows from the top, starting with Ballmer, with help from those immediately below him.
As long as Microsoft's internal fights keep shifting strategies, as long as they keep firing competent programmers who didn't happen to get management's notice that year. As long as they continue with the 90's teen nerd arrogance that seems to say, "I know better than you," they will fail, and fail, and fail again.
They need to dump most upper management, change evaluation procedures to eliminate the constant paranoia, and start acting like mature adults creating and selling the products people *want* instead of solving problems that nobody has (e.g. Metro, WPF, etc.) with pointless cutting edge whiz bang.
Flood Syria's government with Dell's. After a month, when the first 99% break, the entire government will be online with two Indian technical support technicians who will both try and get *them* to take apart their own machines even though they purchased the "premium" support package.
The regime will fall within weeks. My compliments to the CIA operative who suggested this.
What we're after is NET energy, which has been declining since the first wells were drilled. Whether we've reached peak quantity of oil doesn't matter so much. It's Net energy/price over time that matters.
The bottom line is that nothing scales to the amount of energy that we get from oil (about 160 exajoules per year) except nuclear, and to sustain that, we'd have to start using thorium.
That, plus improved battery technology may keep a few billion or so from starving if we build the plants and infrastructure in time to keep supply chains running. Otherwise, we're in for a little "extinction event" around the turn of the next century.
Yes, thanks for responding, and by the way, you're an idiot and you represent everything currently wrong with the American business education system.
The oil companies don't depend on financing they pay some of the larger dividends found in the large cap space.
Yes, like this I suppose ( http://www.marketwatch.com/story/exxon-sinopec-aramco-complete-4-bln-financing-for-china-jv ). Yes, some oil companies pay dividends - today. Should their stock price tank, tomorrow (assuming you can think that far ahead), those dividends will halt with an almost audible screech. Their "capital," much of which is tied to their stock value, will no longer be available as collateral to finance exploration and they will have to start dipping into cash. This will work. For a while.
Access to credit is not something big oil thinks about as a 'risk'. In the past, they didn't. If they don't now, they're going to be out of business with some rapidity.
Which is not to say they don't use it in these days of near zero sometimes negative real rates; but they don't *need* it and they don't worry about it. The people not worrying about it are nitwit "analysts" at a financial firms who have neither useful feedback nor consequences for failure. Executives at oil companies, and owners of small to medium sized exploration companies are worrying about it a great deal.
The major oil companies are promoting "No peak oil" stories to influence google results. They need to do this to keep asset prices up, soothe investors and keep the financing on which they depend flowing.
"Peak oil" itself is a bit of a straw man. The problem is declining net energy from hydrocarbons. Net energy from shallow easy wells that produced light sweet crude was great. Net energy from deepwater gulf wells producing heavy sour crude or oil sands where the bitumen has to be heated in order to be liquid? Not so great.
So bottom line. The absolute quantity of net energy in the first half of the oil on the plant is much greater than the net energy in the second half. Oil supply is NOT the same as energy supply.
Older engineers, if anything simply want to get real work done.
New technology, for it's own sake, falls into the category of "bullshit."
For example, neither Silverlight nor WPF ever seemed to have added much but stylistic nonsense. You could have extended Winforms, added some properties that were useful to web presentation and gotten a better, more usable result. In contrast, HTML5 and Javascript actually seem useful as far as getting a product or service to customer in a timeframe that matters.
So the former technologies exasperate. The latter do not.
I also think that at you've seen the same concepts renamed and repackaged over and over again, you just get jaded. It's mainframes and dumb terminals! It's servers and internet connected machines! It's the cloud! Yippee, everything old is new again.
FYI, at age 55, I am responsible for the care and feeding of a herd of VMWare 5.1 servers. Virtualization is probably one of the most useful technologies to happen along in a while, and thus, I'm all over it and learning to script in Powershell, despite it's god-awful syntactic structure.
I've been programming professionally since 1994. I'm sure I'll get around to taking a computer course one of these days. My first task with any new job is "Get past the HR moron" followed by "Find someone who actually knows something." If you're lucky, this is a manager. Frequently, however, describing the code abstraction structure in your overall application design often whizzes right over a manager's head.
My suggestion? Keep it simple. Have some apps to show them, or a a web site with your latest web apps. Talk about how it solved a problem. Don't worry about the details until you get to another developer.
So, you're saying that art, music and software have no value, because they can be copied. You therefore, believe that nobody deserves to make money on any copyable item, and that therefore, these industries do not deserve to exist. So, programmers, artists and musicians are mere leeches while folks who manufacture say, Uzis are good and deserving folks because their product can't be digitally copied. They should make money.
Interesting moral argument.
And food should be free. Tell you what, go start a botfly collection and give them unlimited meat to eat and breed in. Let me know how that works out for you.
By the way, buggy whips became obsolete because of a major technological shift in transportation methods. Instead of limited buggy whips, there are limited expensive cars and accessories. The economic structure of providing transportation accessories didn't change, just the type of accessory. Money was still paid. Argument is null.
Software isn't physical. Relavance? Services aren't physical. Should your next massage be free? How about your next doctor visit?
If I walk into your store and steal a soda YOU the owner of the store have nothing to sell.
If you make copies for free, I have nothing to sell.
If instead I walk into a store, duplicate the soda on the shelf, and walk out - what exactly has the store owner lost?
Any chance of making a profit.
Which of these most closely resembles copying a digital file? Which of these is actual theft?
Would it make you feel better if I called it "profit nullification?" Since someone put time, materials, money and effort into getting the soda on the shelf, or software on the server, any hope of personally benefiting from this is gone.
You know that copying a file isn't theft right? It's not prosecuted as such and yet you call it that.
I call it what it is, not the ephemeral legal definition of the moment.
I'm not saying it's okay to copy everything and anything but your analogy isn't right. Given the option to buy something at a reasonable price, with low friction, more people than not will pay.
Bittorrent still exists, and there's a lot on there. I guess that must be because everyone is so anxious to pay for inexpensive music and that expensive 20-50 dollar shareware that lives on the Crack sites.
Speaking for myself - my purchases of music have gone WAY up since Amazon started selling 99cent DRM free MP3. Likewise my e-book purchasing PLUMMETED when collusion among the publishers occurred. Likewise with movies which for some odd reason seem to be getting more and more expensive now after a period of time where they were more reasonable - I now purchase mostly box sets and used. DRM might even prevent that someday and then what do you think I will do?
You'll steal. You've made it pretty clear.
BTW why is it that if I do a job, say build a house, I get paid just once?
You're being paid for labor, not the house.
How come those people get to live in it and I get no rent for my single event of hard work after the sale?
If you built the whole house yourself, you get a *lot* for it. If you didn't, you were paid for services.
How come an artist is entitled to being paid over and over for their single act of work?
There's no other way to make it economically viable. Artificial restrictions are the only thing that keep artists in business, and minimally at that.
Why is their work somehow more important than a tradesman's?
A tradesman does something that requires less originality and is repeatable. The market bears a lower price for it for this reason. Creative work, by definition, is unique, and may sometimes have greater value. This is not a certainty, however, and I would agree that sometimes, often in fact, that a tradesman is more valuable.
What did artists do before recording and duplication?
They sang for their supper or had wealthy patrons. The restrictions were inherent in the instruments of production (single instruments played in one place, or paintings on a single wall) needed no artificial help.
Perhaps a poor analogy but think about it. Why are entire systems of hardware and ecosystems of OS being warped to support one group's "rights" exactly?
Because OSs are this generation's television, a medium which had inherent restrictions, like being tied to a time slot, with profitable commercials. This is no longer the case.
And maybe even make a small profit? I know this doesn't fit the culture of "free stuff, yippee" that makes up much of Slashdot, but if the behaviors regarding software were extended to physical items, the economy as we know it couldn't function. Every economic exchange involves a restriction of access. Every one. Food. Automobiles. MP3 players. I know that somehow software and digital content is supposed to be magic and different because..... just because.
So hey, cars want to be free. Why don't you just pick up the next one that strikes your fancy and drive off. Then you can order some food in a restaurant and not pay, while listening to the MP3 player you boosted from the store.
I agree, the idea that intelligences capable of FTL travel or communication are unlikely to continue to house themselves in their original organic containters, built accidently by self-replicating molecules which give no thought (literally) to the comfort of the awareness they house.
For some period at least, such intelligences might have enough curiousity to look around the universe. The material part of their telepresence, however, might be about the size of a grain of sand, and at least as noticeble. Communication wouldn't be a priority. Would you talk to an ant? You might inhale a telepresence device, however. Or eat it. You'd never know.
What they can get are H1-Bs, who are like indentured servants. H1-Bs can't change jobs easily. They're cheap. They can be fired on a whim. Insuance can be optional. They're slightly better than purely offshored work because you can communicate with them more easily and have some hope of getting what you asked for, usually.
Employers will *always* choose the slavert/serf option if it's available. This is the kind of unregulated capitalism favored by libertarian nitwits.
Intelligent robots have already exceeded my mental ability? I knew it. First it's noodles, then it's IKEA furniture, then it's the world's thermonuclear weapons. Oh, will we ever learn....?
Slashdot Mirror
Then we not only get a useful machine, we eventually get new science in the bargain. I *like* it!
For narrow domain searches like installed software, I simply find a hierarchically organized series of visible prompts to be a faster alternative than a series of tiled blocks that I need to scan. Typing the name of the program to find it, as Unity on Linux does is all well and good, if you remember the name.
Unable to admit mistakes, there will be no start button that brings up an easily navigable menu. There will be a bitmap that brings up the desktop or something equally stupid/lame.
In other news, Microsoft will give developers no clue as to their long term language strategy. Developers, with no interest in investing limited time, money and resources into Microsoft language technology shambles, will go elsewhere. Top managment at Microsoft will continue to be baffled as to why nobody is writing Windows 8 Apps, or Windows anything apps, anymore.
Well, if you live in Europe, I propose this little hypothetical for you. Tomorrow, the USA's contribution to NATO disappears. No more bases. No more soldiers. No more weapons. No more obligations to defend. Suddenly, every country in Europe must pay for their own defense.
So, how long, do you think, your generous social benefits would last under those circumstances? Please provide numbers, and sources. Not hot air.
Though your response intimated that my basic assumptions about resource allocation by governments and industry were wrong, that too is useful insight. I'm not sure it's entirely correct, however.
Both private industry and goverments are littered with failed ideas, and I am skeptical that one really does better or worse than another at picking winners and losers. Private industry, I think, simply has more active public relations machinery.
Capitalist societies seem to act more like a bacteria colonies, successfully reacting to resource availibility and strategies with immediate results while ignoring long-term consequences of their actions. Capitalism, it might be said, doesn't think ahead. That's what governments should be for, although in a democracy with a 4-year cycle, this view is often too limited for useful long-term action on matters like hydrocarbon energy depletion and global warming.
OK, I'm more than willing to admit we don't have a clue about many neurological disease processes. Schizophrenia and Bipolar disorders may be dozens of different specific diseases that happen to present in a similar way. I get that.
But until we *know* what those diseases are, schizophrenia is useful in that it describes a set of symptoms that commonly occur together, that we can treat.
Theoretical models are never "right" or "wrong." These are meaningless terms. They are only more or less useful in that they provide some predictive and/or manipulative power. Period. End of story.
True, I'd been scripting automated testing systems in C++ for 3 years prior to that, but at 40, was forced to learn vb.net and vbscript. Vbscript begat powershell. Vb.net begat C#. And these days, at 55, I just work through whatever syntactic abomination is thrown my way, no matter how fundamentally unnecessary and pointless (I'm lookin' at you, WPF).
LOL. Have you ever *been* to East Texas? The "office building" would have to be a broken down trailer, right next to the fellow who lost all his teeth in his last meth holiday (I have a cabin there).
than actually making products that don't suck. Implication? Corporate leeches and legal parasites have changed the legal environment to favor their existence by purchasing laws via bribes labeled as "campaign contributions." Tell me again how, as an individual ISV or inventor, I could *ever* be successful in the USA's current legal environment?
..when dealing with anything you want to keep secret, and your problem is solved. Internet security has always been and always will be, sheer fantasy for gullible managers.
Any questions?
As always, failure flows from the top, starting with Ballmer, with help from those immediately below him.
As long as Microsoft's internal fights keep shifting strategies, as long as they keep firing competent programmers who didn't happen to get management's notice that year. As long as they continue with the 90's teen nerd arrogance that seems to say, "I know better than you," they will fail, and fail, and fail again.
They need to dump most upper management, change evaluation procedures to eliminate the constant paranoia, and start acting like mature adults creating and selling the products people *want* instead of solving problems that nobody has (e.g. Metro, WPF, etc.) with pointless cutting edge whiz bang.
Flood Syria's government with Dell's. After a month, when the first 99% break, the entire government will be online with two Indian technical support technicians who will both try and get *them* to take apart their own machines even though they purchased the "premium" support package.
The regime will fall within weeks. My compliments to the CIA operative who suggested this.
You've got the tools. You've got the know how (sort of). First one to intelligence wins the world, more or less.
So MOVE!
What we're after is NET energy, which has been declining since the first wells were drilled. Whether we've reached peak quantity of oil doesn't matter so much. It's Net energy/price over time that matters.
The bottom line is that nothing scales to the amount of energy that we get from oil (about 160 exajoules per year) except nuclear, and to sustain that, we'd have to start using thorium.
That, plus improved battery technology may keep a few billion or so from starving if we build the plants and infrastructure in time to keep supply chains running. Otherwise, we're in for a little "extinction event" around the turn of the next century.
Yes, thanks for responding, and by the way, you're an idiot and you represent everything currently wrong with the American business education system.
The oil companies don't depend on financing they pay some of the larger dividends found in the large cap space.
Yes, like this I suppose ( http://www.marketwatch.com/story/exxon-sinopec-aramco-complete-4-bln-financing-for-china-jv ). Yes, some oil companies pay dividends - today. Should their stock price tank, tomorrow (assuming you can think that far ahead), those dividends will halt with an almost audible screech. Their "capital," much of which is tied to their stock value, will no longer be available as collateral to finance exploration and they will have to start dipping into cash. This will work. For a while.
Access to credit is not something big oil thinks about as a 'risk'. In the past, they didn't. If they don't now, they're going to be out of business with some rapidity.
Which is not to say they don't use it in these days of near zero sometimes negative real rates; but they don't *need* it and they don't worry about it.
The people not worrying about it are nitwit "analysts" at a financial firms who have neither useful feedback nor consequences for failure. Executives at oil companies, and owners of small to medium sized exploration companies are worrying about it a great deal.
The major oil companies are promoting "No peak oil" stories to influence google results. They need to do this to keep asset prices up, soothe investors and keep the financing on which they depend flowing.
For a numerate look at exactly what we're facing, start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil
"Peak oil" itself is a bit of a straw man. The problem is declining net energy from hydrocarbons. Net energy from shallow easy wells that produced light sweet crude was great. Net energy from deepwater gulf wells producing heavy sour crude or oil sands where the bitumen has to be heated in order to be liquid? Not so great.
So bottom line. The absolute quantity of net energy in the first half of the oil on the plant is much greater than the net energy in the second half. Oil supply is NOT the same as energy supply.
Older engineers, if anything simply want to get real work done.
New technology, for it's own sake, falls into the category of "bullshit."
For example, neither Silverlight nor WPF ever seemed to have added much but stylistic nonsense. You could have extended Winforms, added some properties that were useful to web presentation and gotten a better, more usable result. In contrast, HTML5 and Javascript actually seem useful as far as getting a product or service to customer in a timeframe that matters.
So the former technologies exasperate. The latter do not.
I also think that at you've seen the same concepts renamed and repackaged over and over again, you just get jaded. It's mainframes and dumb terminals! It's servers and internet connected machines! It's the cloud! Yippee, everything old is new again.
FYI, at age 55, I am responsible for the care and feeding of a herd of VMWare 5.1 servers. Virtualization is probably one of the most useful technologies to happen along in a while, and thus, I'm all over it and learning to script in Powershell, despite it's god-awful syntactic structure.
Damn! I *just* missed that one.
I've been programming professionally since 1994. I'm sure I'll get around to taking a computer course one of these days. My first task with any new job is "Get past the HR moron" followed by "Find someone who actually knows something." If you're lucky, this is a manager. Frequently, however, describing the code abstraction structure in your overall application design often whizzes right over a manager's head.
My suggestion? Keep it simple. Have some apps to show them, or a a web site with your latest web apps. Talk about how it solved a problem. Don't worry about the details until you get to another developer.
So, you're saying that art, music and software have no value, because they can be copied. You therefore, believe that nobody deserves to make money on any copyable item, and that therefore, these industries do not deserve to exist. So, programmers, artists and musicians are mere leeches while folks who manufacture say, Uzis are good and deserving folks because their product can't be digitally copied. They should make money.
Interesting moral argument.
And food should be free. Tell you what, go start a botfly collection and give them unlimited meat to eat and breed in. Let me know how that works out for you.
By the way, buggy whips became obsolete because of a major technological shift in transportation methods. Instead of limited buggy whips, there are limited expensive cars and accessories. The economic structure of providing transportation accessories didn't change, just the type of accessory. Money was still paid. Argument is null.
Software isn't physical.
Relavance? Services aren't physical. Should your next massage be free? How about your next doctor visit?
If I walk into your store and steal a soda YOU the owner of the store have nothing to sell.
If you make copies for free, I have nothing to sell.
If instead I walk into a store, duplicate the soda on the shelf, and walk out - what exactly has the store owner lost?
Any chance of making a profit.
Which of these most closely resembles copying a digital file? Which of these is actual theft?
Would it make you feel better if I called it "profit nullification?" Since someone put time, materials, money and effort into getting the soda on the shelf, or software on the server, any hope of personally benefiting from this is gone.
You know that copying a file isn't theft right? It's not prosecuted as such and yet you call it that.
I call it what it is, not the ephemeral legal definition of the moment.
I'm not saying it's okay to copy everything and anything but your analogy isn't right. Given the option to buy something at a reasonable price, with low friction, more people than not will pay.
Bittorrent still exists, and there's a lot on there. I guess that must be because everyone is so anxious to pay for inexpensive music and that expensive 20-50 dollar shareware that lives on the Crack sites.
Speaking for myself - my purchases of music have gone WAY up since Amazon started selling 99cent DRM free MP3. Likewise my e-book purchasing PLUMMETED when collusion among the publishers occurred. Likewise with movies which for some odd reason seem to be getting more and more expensive now after a period of time where they were more reasonable - I now purchase mostly box sets and used. DRM might even prevent that someday and then what do you think I will do?
You'll steal. You've made it pretty clear.
BTW why is it that if I do a job, say build a house, I get paid just once?
You're being paid for labor, not the house.
How come those people get to live in it and I get no rent for my single event of hard work after the sale?
If you built the whole house yourself, you get a *lot* for it. If you didn't, you were paid for services.
How come an artist is entitled to being paid over and over for their single act of work?
There's no other way to make it economically viable. Artificial restrictions are the only thing that keep artists in business, and minimally at that.
Why is their work somehow more important than a tradesman's?
A tradesman does something that requires less originality and is repeatable. The market bears a lower price for it for this reason. Creative work, by definition, is unique, and may sometimes have greater value. This is not a certainty, however, and I would agree that sometimes, often in fact, that a tradesman is more valuable.
What did artists do before recording and duplication?
They sang for their supper or had wealthy patrons. The restrictions were inherent in the instruments of production (single instruments played in one place, or paintings on a single wall) needed no artificial help.
Perhaps a poor analogy but think about it. Why are entire systems of hardware and ecosystems of OS being warped to support one group's "rights" exactly?
Because OSs are this generation's television, a medium which had inherent restrictions, like being tied to a time slot, with profitable commercials. This is no longer the case.
And maybe even make a small profit? I know this doesn't fit the culture of "free stuff, yippee" that makes up much of Slashdot, but if the behaviors regarding software were extended to physical items, the economy as we know it couldn't function. Every economic exchange involves a restriction of access. Every one. Food. Automobiles. MP3 players. I know that somehow software and digital content is supposed to be magic and different because..... just because.
So hey, cars want to be free. Why don't you just pick up the next one that strikes your fancy and drive off. Then you can order some food in a restaurant and not pay, while listening to the MP3 player you boosted from the store.
I agree, the idea that intelligences capable of FTL travel or communication are unlikely to continue to house themselves in their original organic containters, built accidently by self-replicating molecules which give no thought (literally) to the comfort of the awareness they house.
For some period at least, such intelligences might have enough curiousity to look around the universe. The material part of their telepresence, however, might be about the size of a grain of sand, and at least as noticeble. Communication wouldn't be a priority. Would you talk to an ant? You might inhale a telepresence device, however. Or eat it. You'd never know.
What they can get are H1-Bs, who are like indentured servants. H1-Bs can't change jobs easily. They're cheap. They can be fired on a whim. Insuance can be optional. They're slightly better than purely offshored work because you can communicate with them more easily and have some hope of getting what you asked for, usually.
Employers will *always* choose the slavert/serf option if it's available. This is the kind of unregulated capitalism favored by libertarian nitwits.
Regulations happened for a reason. Work it out.
Intelligent robots have already exceeded my mental ability? I knew it. First it's noodles, then it's IKEA furniture, then it's the world's thermonuclear weapons. Oh, will we ever learn....?