It's just too damned expensive to have to migrate to a whole new incompatible technology with no upgrade path because some 20-something at Microsoft had a brainwave. (Yes, your old app will still run. Good luck selling that fully developed VB6 application). Extend and improve. Do NOT replace unless there's no other option.. and guess what? THERE'S ALWAYS ANOTHER OPTION!
So, an open standard like HTML5 and Javascript? By all means. Bring it on. Improve both incrementally. Stop wasting everyone's time on pointless flavor of the month technologies like Ruby, PHP, WPF, (as much as I like all of them). Yes, they all have their good points. That's not enough. What's needed to get your work done is universality and compatibility, not the latest thing.
are destined to eat them. IT, Legal, QA, Documentation, Insurance... All of these items are (among other things) risk management and prevention. The *best* outcome from all of them is... nothing happens. A result of nothing isn't showy. It's harder to demonstrate quantitatively. It doesn't appeal to a risk-taking managerial personality. It's easy for a newly minted MBA who's only out for himself to convince others that IT, Legal, QA, Docs, insurance, et. al. is just an unnecessary expense that can be cut. After all, nothing happened before...:)
Coincidentally, the newly minted MBA may get bonused on the cost savings... and be GONE, GONE, GONE next year before the network has 30% downtime, the company is being sued and has no protection in its contracts, the product isn't selling because there was no QA department to find the problems, product documentation is out of date, and there's no insurance to cover damage from the crane that fell on top of the neighboring building.
*Corn* ethanol was always a boondoggle, brought to you by lobbyists and innumerate politicians who were unable to understand or care about the concept of EREOI. Brazil has made *sugar cane* alcohol with a reasonable EREOI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil). While nothing will replace oil, moving as much of the transportation industry to alternatives like sugar cane methanol would give us a bigger cushion against the inevitable loss of oil as a major energy source.
or job security, or a path to management, or equity ownership, or... Welcome to capitalism. It's pay to play. You want USA engineers? Better be ready to pony up some bucks at the very least.
As other posters have pointed out, VB6 and FoxPro would still work.
Which misses the point entirely. So what? Scan Monster to see how many jobs there are coding on vb6 or FoxPro vs. open source Java. Someone who invested in learning FoxPro is screwed. Java, not so much. Yes, developers *can* relearn another db, framework or language. How many times do you want to be do that in your life, and at what monetary cost?
Bottom line? Microsoft has abandoned platforms willy nilly for the past two decades. Instead of quietly extending VB6 to include.net syntax (or vice versa) or quietly extending Winforms to be WPF-like, some bozo decides to throw the whole platform away and start over. I don't know why it's done this way, but it's a friggin' disaster for developers who spend years learning the ins and outs of a framework, language or DB.
So, I welcome HTML5/Javascript. It's open, and some myopic exec or pig-ignorant kid isn't going to be able to change it because he/she had their latest brainwave.
You'd be a damn fool to invest any time in learning any Microsoft technology. Java code from 15 years ago is still working fine, thanks. More importantly, you can still make a living from it. In the end, the Microsoft Arrogance department will only support C++ and then, only because their own software is coded in it.
Technologies may change. Code syntax doesn't have to. You can extend to the new, without destroying the old. The guys-with-a-better-idea never bothered.
And butterflies and unicorns.... Look, you want electricity? Then nuclear in some form is in our future for a long time. Admittedly, older reactors are poorly designed behemoths should be phased out in favor of passive designs and thorium fuel, but this is going to take time. Meanwhile the 160 exajoules of energy that oil provides to civilization each year is starting to decline due to plain old depletion of positive EROEI liquid hydrocarbons (Crap, we've got lots of). This is *not* the time to be thinking of taking out nuclear too. Radiation is dangerous. Starvation is more so.
True. Don't underestimate her drawing power. Americans have twice recently elected obvious fools for president (Reagan, Bush II). Admittedly Palin is worse than either of them, but it's clear that "patriotic stupid" is a potent political force among the voters.
The Romans had their Caligula and a series of clearly incompetent emperors. The Germans elected Hitler. There is plenty of precedent for the ascendancy of incredibly poor rulers.
I mean, it sounds good at first. Make the whole car frame into a battery with supplementary capacitors. Maximize the power to weight ratio. Why not?
Well... battery material isn't necessarily a great structural material. Preventing short circuits in a vibrating frame with moving parts sounds fairly nightmarish. Replacing a worn out battery means replacing your car. And try not to get into an accident, and god help the EMT that tries to pry you out of the accident, especially if it's raining. That's what I can think of right off. I'm sure there are more reasons too.
No, an AI's motivations would NOT be the same. Our motivations are a result of our origins as self-replicators in the organic chemical domain. A survival impulse is built in from the start. No such condition would exist in an artificial intelligence. Food, fear and reproduction, and all the secondary behaviors such as fashion, war or dominance displays; these are characteristics of organic self replicators and would be completely absent. The only time an AI would mirror our motivations will be when we tell them to, in order to further our own organic motivation agendas, of which an AI itself has none.
Piffle. This isn't the movies. An AI has no motivations we don't provide. It doesn't hate us or love us. It doesn't want to die, or survive. All it does is process information. We may be able to give AIs motivations, but these will be mixed, just as they are with any other species.
He'd dedicated the company to developing scalable, human-like artificial intelligence. He'd dominate the computer industry AND get those who need aid by getting answers to all questions for which there are answers.
Magic fairy dust? Oil will be out of the question by then. Too expensive. Natural gas will work - for a while, until everyone starts doing it and the remaining gas fields, which deplete *much* more quickly than oil fields start running out. Coal? That too, will work, for a while, but the situation there is analogous to peak oil. It's not that there isn't a lot of it; it's that what's left is expensive to get, with a much lower energy return than the cheap, close-to-the-surface, low sulfur coal we used to be able to get.
2022 seems like a goodish date. IBGYBG as the saying goes and the public, shivering in their homes during the first cold winter, will start voting sensibly again.
Oh, and before you start in with an innumerate response about how we'll replace it all with wind, solar and faith, I suggest you review some numbers at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil so you sound like less of an idiot.
Ballmer seems to be following the Gates tradition of "massive amounts of technology" combined with a complete, utter, lack of imagination and inability to accurately anticipate technological trends. Hopefully, there's someone who can do the latter that isn't just an "I've discovered smartphones!" kind of guy.
How original! Yes, those dang old people. They sure can be rigid. I mean, they want you to work! Eight hours at a stretch!. I mean, who can do that? And of course, we certainly we never saw this story for generations x and y.... (Ahem).
To put not too fine a point on it, in this hiring environment, an inexperienced Gen-Z had better sit down, shut up, and do what the f*** I tell them to do in the way I tell them to do it or they're out. I have the money. They don't. They work for me. I don't work for them and I have better things to do than to accommodate a bunch of self-indulgent whiners.
If they want to form a start up for themselves, great, because after 10 years of running a business, they're going to think just like me. At that point, they might be worth hiring.
Slashdot Mirror
It's just too damned expensive to have to migrate to a whole new incompatible technology with no upgrade path because some 20-something at Microsoft had a brainwave. (Yes, your old app will still run. Good luck selling that fully developed VB6 application). Extend and improve. Do NOT replace unless there's no other option.. and guess what? THERE'S ALWAYS ANOTHER OPTION!
So, an open standard like HTML5 and Javascript? By all means. Bring it on. Improve both incrementally. Stop wasting everyone's time on pointless flavor of the month technologies like Ruby, PHP, WPF, (as much as I like all of them). Yes, they all have their good points. That's not enough. What's needed to get your work done is universality and compatibility, not the latest thing.
Just because people are so *fussy* about the difference between gold and gold plated tungsten....
are destined to eat them. IT, Legal, QA, Documentation, Insurance... All of these items are (among other things) risk management and prevention. The *best* outcome from all of them is... nothing happens. A result of nothing isn't showy. It's harder to demonstrate quantitatively. It doesn't appeal to a risk-taking managerial personality. It's easy for a newly minted MBA who's only out for himself to convince others that IT, Legal, QA, Docs, insurance, et. al. is just an unnecessary expense that can be cut. After all, nothing happened before... :)
Coincidentally, the newly minted MBA may get bonused on the cost savings... and be GONE, GONE, GONE next year before the network has 30% downtime, the company is being sued and has no protection in its contracts, the product isn't selling because there was no QA department to find the problems, product documentation is out of date, and there's no insurance to cover damage from the crane that fell on top of the neighboring building.
*Corn* ethanol was always a boondoggle, brought to you by lobbyists and innumerate politicians who were unable to understand or care about the concept of EREOI. Brazil has made *sugar cane* alcohol with a reasonable EREOI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil). While nothing will replace oil, moving as much of the transportation industry to alternatives like sugar cane methanol would give us a bigger cushion against the inevitable loss of oil as a major energy source.
...elves, the loch ness monster, the holy grail too, Zeus, the starship "Enterprise" and my youthful enthusiasm too.
with electrical tape. or IR filtering plastic, or sitting out of sight of the IR transmitters....
or job security, or a path to management, or equity ownership, or... Welcome to capitalism. It's pay to play. You want USA engineers? Better be ready to pony up some bucks at the very least.
As other posters have pointed out, VB6 and FoxPro would still work.
Which misses the point entirely. So what? Scan Monster to see how many jobs there are coding on vb6 or FoxPro vs. open source Java. Someone who invested in learning FoxPro is screwed. Java, not so much. Yes, developers *can* relearn another db, framework or language. How many times do you want to be do that in your life, and at what monetary cost?
Bottom line? Microsoft has abandoned platforms willy nilly for the past two decades. Instead of quietly extending VB6 to include .net syntax (or vice versa) or quietly extending Winforms to be WPF-like, some bozo decides to throw the whole platform away and start over. I don't know why it's done this way, but it's a friggin' disaster for developers who spend years learning the ins and outs of a framework, language or DB.
So, I welcome HTML5/Javascript. It's open, and some myopic exec or pig-ignorant kid isn't going to be able to change it because he/she had their latest brainwave.
You'd be a damn fool to invest any time in learning any Microsoft technology. Java code from 15 years ago is still working fine, thanks. More importantly, you can still make a living from it. In the end, the Microsoft Arrogance department will only support C++ and then, only because their own software is coded in it.
Technologies may change. Code syntax doesn't have to. You can extend to the new, without destroying the old. The guys-with-a-better-idea never bothered.
And butterflies and unicorns.... Look, you want electricity? Then nuclear in some form is in our future for a long time. Admittedly, older reactors are poorly designed behemoths should be phased out in favor of passive designs and thorium fuel, but this is going to take time. Meanwhile the 160 exajoules of energy that oil provides to civilization each year is starting to decline due to plain old depletion of positive EROEI liquid hydrocarbons (Crap, we've got lots of). This is *not* the time to be thinking of taking out nuclear too. Radiation is dangerous. Starvation is more so.
I can read the minds of earthworms. Surely, I can make a few bucks off that.
VW and Porshe vs. the deaths of 6 million Jews. Uh, personally, I think I could have done without VW and Porsche.
True. Don't underestimate her drawing power. Americans have twice recently elected obvious fools for president (Reagan, Bush II). Admittedly Palin is worse than either of them, but it's clear that "patriotic stupid" is a potent political force among the voters.
The Romans had their Caligula and a series of clearly incompetent emperors. The Germans elected Hitler. There is plenty of precedent for the ascendancy of incredibly poor rulers.
I'm not sharing the bathroom with the cows anymore.
I mean, it sounds good at first. Make the whole car frame into a battery with supplementary capacitors. Maximize the power to weight ratio. Why not?
Well... battery material isn't necessarily a great structural material. Preventing short circuits in a vibrating frame with moving parts sounds fairly nightmarish. Replacing a worn out battery means replacing your car. And try not to get into an accident, and god help the EMT that tries to pry you out of the accident, especially if it's raining. That's what I can think of right off. I'm sure there are more reasons too.
Called a brain. While little used by journalists or politicians, dolphins have found them quite useful.
No, an AI's motivations would NOT be the same. Our motivations are a result of our origins as self-replicators in the organic chemical domain. A survival impulse is built in from the start. No such condition would exist in an artificial intelligence. Food, fear and reproduction, and all the secondary behaviors such as fashion, war or dominance displays; these are characteristics of organic self replicators and would be completely absent. The only time an AI would mirror our motivations will be when we tell them to, in order to further our own organic motivation agendas, of which an AI itself has none.
Piffle. This isn't the movies. An AI has no motivations we don't provide. It doesn't hate us or love us. It doesn't want to die, or survive. All it does is process information. We may be able to give AIs motivations, but these will be mixed, just as they are with any other species.
He'd dedicated the company to developing scalable, human-like artificial intelligence. He'd dominate the computer industry AND get those who need aid by getting answers to all questions for which there are answers.
Magic fairy dust? Oil will be out of the question by then. Too expensive. Natural gas will work - for a while, until everyone starts doing it and the remaining gas fields, which deplete *much* more quickly than oil fields start running out. Coal? That too, will work, for a while, but the situation there is analogous to peak oil. It's not that there isn't a lot of it; it's that what's left is expensive to get, with a much lower energy return than the cheap, close-to-the-surface, low sulfur coal we used to be able to get.
2022 seems like a goodish date. IBGYBG as the saying goes and the public, shivering in their homes during the first cold winter, will start voting sensibly again.
Oh, and before you start in with an innumerate response about how we'll replace it all with wind, solar and faith, I suggest you review some numbers at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil so you sound like less of an idiot.
Have you seen the excess of mass at McDonalds? And don't get me started on "Kentucky Fried Chicken!"
The only question is location...
Ballmer seems to be following the Gates tradition of "massive amounts of technology" combined with a complete, utter, lack of imagination and inability to accurately anticipate technological trends. Hopefully, there's someone who can do the latter that isn't just an "I've discovered smartphones!" kind of guy.
I got in early.
You should probably find another doctor or dentist.
How original! Yes, those dang old people. They sure can be rigid. I mean, they want you to work! Eight hours at a stretch!. I mean, who can do that? And of course, we certainly we never saw this story for generations x and y.... (Ahem).
To put not too fine a point on it, in this hiring environment, an inexperienced Gen-Z had better sit down, shut up, and do what the f*** I tell them to do in the way I tell them to do it or they're out. I have the money. They don't. They work for me. I don't work for them and I have better things to do than to accommodate a bunch of self-indulgent whiners.
If they want to form a start up for themselves, great, because after 10 years of running a business, they're going to think just like me. At that point, they might be worth hiring.