of projects is the norm. And no one wants to go into a field with negative job growth and essentially _no_ future. A job where, after working 20 years, at the age of 40 you'll be forced into another career flipping burgers.
Screw that. Go into medicine, law, or crime (become a cop).
The average cop makes only $40k to start, but starts working at age 20 (when they enter the academy), has no college degree, and can retire after 20 years on the job with a far better pension and far better insurance and health benefits than non-police workers. They also get extra jobs outside the usual 35-hour week (yes, that's right, most cops work 35 hours a week and lunch is paid time), paying $40/hour and up so they can earn as much as they want.
Cops are less likely to get hurt on the job than civilians (but they don't want the public to know that, so please don't repeat it publicly). When you're a cop and retire at age 40 to begin drawing a $80k/year pension, you can also get another outside fulltime job doing security analysis, diplomatic escort, or private-eye work. So at the age of 45 many retired cops are making ~1/4 million per year just putting in time. No overtime _ever_ unless you're paid for it.
If this is true, then within two years there will be virtually no CPU/memory availability limit and we'll be bandwidth-limited only (and that isn't much of a problem even now).
Given such an environment, declarative languages (e.g., Prolog and parallel-prolog) provide performance, reduced code complexity, faster time-to-market, and auditability unavailable to procedural languages. And as a bonus the database is part of the language.
We do gaming development and he sounds like an excellent match: plenty of creativity, consistent imaginative input and likely to quickly find his way around roadblocks.
Plus we find it's always easy to tell druggies that we gave them their paycheck already, that the bank says it's been cashed, etc. So we save a bundle using these guys as developers.
In government and industry, ethics committees and appointed investigators are usually flunkies of whomever is in power - they are a mechanism to catch leakers and conscientous employees who seek an "acceptable" way to report ethical or criminal violations within an organization. Anyone who turns in evidence to these entities usually has his/her identity revealed soon thereafter and is drummed out of the organization.
How can we know that the site isn't a honey-trap to capture unwitting leakers et al before they go to the press? (Ans. We can't.)
has no topside for such a product. You may have trouble getting one because all of TSA, government agencies, and every local PD will be buying them up like peanuts. $400-%500 (even double that) is nothing for a PD. Currently in major cities officers are issued:
a laptop computer with police software, and optional wireless link,
a police two-way radio,
a cellphone,
a beeper,
a taser,
a firearm with extra clips,
handcuffs.
The first 4 can be replaced and bettered at lower cost by far by an iPhone.
This is the sort of product that changes the way we work. Imagine you're a cop - here's how the iPhone will make your job easier:
distributed and coordinated searches and chases by groups of officers using maps interface,
officer can coordinate activities with or without central office direction,
officer takes pictures during chase and on scene. Suspect & witness photos, statements and data are sent to central or to TSA databases ASAP for storage and possible matches, stolen vehicle license & descriptions are entered immediately into city-, county-, state-wide and federal databases,
tracking/auditing of officer movement (or at least, of his iphone!-)). Managers love this; officers hate it. Somehow mysteriously malfunctions at critical moments. But still a nice feature 98% of the time,
panic/officer-down alert button - Hit this and every nearby officer goes to caller's last known position,
offense entry and reporting - Offense entry done by officers in the field immediately, with pictures,
Add some special police/aftermarket devices with wireless interfaces and you get
fingerprints on the scene,
ID card scanning,e.g., driver's license,
credit card billing (pay your speeding ticket on the spot),
video of crime, crime scene, chase.
In a desperate situation an officer could set his iPhone up as a monitor and take cover elsewhere, knowing that everything the iPhone sees is being sent back to the central database as evidence. Add some autofocusing and AI to this and you've got R2D2 on your wrist.
RMONK, N.Y., October 4, 2006 IBM today revealed a cross-company effort to make the IBM System z mainframe the worlds most sophisticated business computer - easier to use for a greater number of computer professionals by 2011. The goal of this five-year effort, which will include an investment of approximately $100 million, is to enable technology administrators and computer programmers to more easily program, manage and administer a mainframe system - as well as to increasingly automate the development and deployment of applications for the mainframe environment.
COBOL has fixed-point math. All math operations including rounding follow financially-accepted standards,
COBOL uses fixed-length arrays and strings,
No dynamic memory allocation is allowed,
No dynamic (self-modifying) code is allowed.
The last three items make COBOL memory- and CPU-efficient. The programmer is limited in his options, but these restrictions also gracefully limit coding complexity. Portability is simplified with this restricted feature set.
A side-effect: COBOL is an ideal language for WWW applications because of the above restrictions/features. COBOL is the original WYSIWYG language.
There's no alternative. We must hit North Korea with a surprise nuclear attack. Many nukes will be required to take out all chemical and biological facilities and sterilise them.
It will be a short and simple war, unlike Iraq. We won't send a single person into combat. But 100-200 nuclear MIRVs will be sent on the first strike.
The longer we wait the more dangerous NK becomes. They have probably already moved CBW to U.S. and European cities.
Why is Microsoft alienating users now just as it earlier angered millions of former Microsoft developers?
Microsoft alienated
3 million+ Visual Basic developers with the release of VB.NET, a language totally incompatible with VB6 and earlier versions,
2 million+ ASP developers when they abandoned VBScript and released ASP.NET,
all JScript developers when they released ASP.NET, whose ECMAScript compiler is a complete rewrite of JScript, mandating a complete retest of all scripts. This is not aided by the fact that the ASP.NET server-side objects are significant revisions of those in ASP.
A December 2006 report shows all Microsoft developer products taking a beating. Non-Microsoft development tools such as Java have won. Five years after the introduction of ASP.NET, the older ASP technology remains more popular on the WWW.
Why is Microsoft repeatedly shooting itself in the gut? Is there method to this madness? Is this apparently self-inflicted damage an illusion and is Microsoft aiming for a higher goal that I cannot see?
The average driver's reaction time on the freeway is between 2 seconds and infinity (they don't react at all). Presence of a cell phone or an active conversant in the front seat with a teenage driver increases reaction time.
I can't count the number of times I've seen cars fly into another vehicle at full speed fully 5 to 20 seconds after the first vehicle was stopped, with unimpaired visibility, clear weather and no excuse. This is the infinite reaction time scenario.
In one instance there was an accident in an intersection and a woman driver (who had plenty of time to stop) approached the intersection at about 35 mph and, when she saw the accident, threw her hands up in the air and opened her mouth in astonishment. She had plenty of time to stop, but she didn't brake, she didn't swerve, she did nothing but plow full-speed into the accident scene. Luckily no one was hurt.
This is the typical driver. And I'm not talking about old drivers, who usually drive slowly and carefully, but young and middle-aged drivers who aren't paying attention to what's in front of them.
ears, et al will increase. I've been wearing my latex nose in public for 4 years now and always keep my hair tucked under my tinfoil-lined cap. And my John Wayne imitation is getting better and better.
I wish to thank the OP for the timely nature of his post. I had finally begun to forget the nonsense of "Buckaroo Bonzai" when this article caught my eye.
I can tell you that nothing we have ever done at Fog Creek has increased our revenue more than releasing a new version with more features. Nothing. The flow to our bottom line from new versions with new features is absolutely undeniable. It's like gravity. When we tried Google ads, when we implemented various affiliate schemes, or when an article about FogBugz appears in the press, we could barely see the effect on the bottom line. When a new version comes out with new features, we see a sudden, undeniable, substantial, and permanent increase in revenue.
That's because, provided your earlier version worked at all then users don't have to pay anything until you release a new version! So f***ing obvious, Joel!
WTF do corporations do when viruses and worms are whizzing past on their internal networks and there's no fix available? Do they blindly continue working with Word?
I talked to a friend whose corporate computer was infested by spyware that planted porno on his system. He paid the blackmail for the antispyware to remove it. A month later he de-installed the antispyware and guess what - the porno returned.
[Microsoft has] retained the likes of Simon Payton-Jones and Erik Meijer to work in their research department. In fact, LINQ may just be the best thing to ever happen to functional programming because now that Microsoft is doing it...
Meijer's apparently abandoned research and is devoted to getting LINQ out. He's been posting notices about Microsoft conferences over on Lambda the Ultimate mostly spamming for his employer Microsoft on what was once a computer languages research site. Note also Meijer's last post at ICFP 2006 wherein he notes his paper was rejected by the International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP 2006).
As for Microsoft helping functional programming becoming mainstream: you need to put your crack pipe down. The only functional programming environment in Microsoft's future is the one that's in it's past: Excel spreadsheets. Your other Microsoft research hero Simon Peyton-Jones has been busy enhancing Excel.
In the long term bandwidth will be (practically) infinite and whether processing is done on the server or the client will become irrelevant except that server-based processing will always be more secure and controllable.
AJAX is a temporary tool to enhance client-server interactivity until almost everyone has a high-speed Internet connection. Once that occurs such hacks as AJAX will disappear.
And good riddance! Because of it's arcane nature, security problems and greater development cost, I look forward to the day when AJAX fades.
High-energy physics has reached a point where the cost-effectiveness of larger particle accelerators is questionable. And building a particle accelerator that could test string theory is both technically and economically impossible today.
As for string theory, Lindley doesn't take sides in the book. He merely explains the evolution of high-energy physics and astrophysics and points out how theory in both fields has become less and less based on experimental and observational data and more and more based on simplifying theoretical assumptions.
Slashdot Mirror
of projects is the norm. And no one wants to go into a field with negative job growth and essentially _no_ future. A job where, after working 20 years, at the age of 40 you'll be forced into another career flipping burgers.
Screw that. Go into medicine, law, or crime (become a cop).
The average cop makes only $40k to start, but starts working at age 20 (when they enter the academy), has no college degree, and can retire after 20 years on the job with a far better pension and far better insurance and health benefits than non-police workers. They also get extra jobs outside the usual 35-hour week (yes, that's right, most cops work 35 hours a week and lunch is paid time), paying $40/hour and up so they can earn as much as they want.
Cops are less likely to get hurt on the job than civilians (but they don't want the public to know that, so please don't repeat it publicly). When you're a cop and retire at age 40 to begin drawing a $80k/year pension, you can also get another outside fulltime job doing security analysis, diplomatic escort, or private-eye work. So at the age of 45 many retired cops are making ~1/4 million per year just putting in time. No overtime _ever_ unless you're paid for it.
that they ascend into the clouds, never to be seen again, before they can be promoted.
This is a good thing, most IT personnel agree
If this is true, then within two years there will be virtually no CPU/memory availability limit and we'll be bandwidth-limited only (and that isn't much of a problem even now).
Given such an environment, declarative languages (e.g., Prolog and parallel-prolog) provide performance, reduced code complexity, faster time-to-market, and auditability unavailable to procedural languages. And as a bonus the database is part of the language.
Could you e-mail his resume, please?
We do gaming development and he sounds like an excellent match: plenty of creativity, consistent imaginative input and likely to quickly find his way around roadblocks.
Plus we find it's always easy to tell druggies that we gave them their paycheck already, that the bank says it's been cashed, etc. So we save a bundle using these guys as developers.
In government and industry, ethics committees and appointed investigators are usually flunkies of whomever is in power - they are a mechanism to catch leakers and conscientous employees who seek an "acceptable" way to report ethical or criminal violations within an organization. Anyone who turns in evidence to these entities usually has his/her identity revealed soon thereafter and is drummed out of the organization.
How can we know that the site isn't a honey-trap to capture unwitting leakers et al before they go to the press? (Ans. We can't.)
- a laptop computer with police software, and optional wireless link,
- a police two-way radio,
- a cellphone,
- a beeper,
- a taser,
- a firearm with extra clips,
- handcuffs.
The first 4 can be replaced and bettered at lower cost by far by an iPhone.This is the sort of product that changes the way we work. Imagine you're a cop - here's how the iPhone will make your job easier:
In a desperate situation an officer could set his iPhone up as a monitor and take cover elsewhere, knowing that everything the iPhone sees is being sent back to the central database as evidence. Add some autofocusing and AI to this and you've got R2D2 on your wrist.
"For the life of me, I can't figure a reason that somebody would do this. Coins change hands quickly and RFID has a pretty limited range."
Saves following them around looking for a chance to knock 'em off!-))
I _did_ find IBM Announces Five Year March to Mainframe Simplification, which is quite different:
The last three items make COBOL memory- and CPU-efficient. The programmer is limited in his options, but these restrictions also gracefully limit coding complexity. Portability is simplified with this restricted feature set.
A side-effect: COBOL is an ideal language for WWW applications because of the above restrictions/features. COBOL is the original WYSIWYG language.
There's no alternative. We must hit North Korea with a surprise nuclear attack. Many nukes will be required to take out all chemical and biological facilities and sterilise them.
It will be a short and simple war, unlike Iraq. We won't send a single person into combat. But 100-200 nuclear MIRVs will be sent on the first strike.
The longer we wait the more dangerous NK becomes. They have probably already moved CBW to U.S. and European cities.
Time to strike.
Microsoft alienated
A December 2006 report shows all Microsoft developer products taking a beating. Non-Microsoft development tools such as Java have won. Five years after the introduction of ASP.NET, the older ASP technology remains more popular on the WWW.
Why is Microsoft repeatedly shooting itself in the gut? Is there method to this madness? Is this apparently self-inflicted damage an illusion and is Microsoft aiming for a higher goal that I cannot see?
I look forward to greeting our new robotic overlords, ...
Uh, ohh, I guess they're already our overlords.!8-((
than you claim (2/5 sec. = 0.4 sec).
The average driver's reaction time on the freeway is between 2 seconds and infinity (they don't react at all). Presence of a cell phone or an active conversant in the front seat with a teenage driver increases reaction time.
I can't count the number of times I've seen cars fly into another vehicle at full speed fully 5 to 20 seconds after the first vehicle was stopped, with unimpaired visibility, clear weather and no excuse. This is the infinite reaction time scenario.
In one instance there was an accident in an intersection and a woman driver (who had plenty of time to stop) approached the intersection at about 35 mph and, when she saw the accident, threw her hands up in the air and opened her mouth in astonishment. She had plenty of time to stop, but she didn't brake, she didn't swerve, she did nothing but plow full-speed into the accident scene. Luckily no one was hurt.
This is the typical driver. And I'm not talking about old drivers, who usually drive slowly and carefully, but young and middle-aged drivers who aren't paying attention to what's in front of them.
ears, et al will increase. I've been wearing my latex nose in public for 4 years now and always keep my hair tucked under my tinfoil-lined cap. And my John Wayne imitation is getting better and better.
I wish to thank the OP for the timely nature of his post. I had finally begun to forget the nonsense of "Buckaroo Bonzai" when this article caught my eye.
Once again a Web 2.0 Javascript framework that doesn't gracefully fail for those who disable JavaScript.
IMO this is nice-looking but a non-starter.
That's because, provided your earlier version worked at all then users don't have to pay anything until you release a new version! So f***ing obvious, Joel!
I am so pleased.
WTF do corporations do when viruses and worms are whizzing past on their internal networks and there's no fix available? Do they blindly continue working with Word?
I talked to a friend whose corporate computer was infested by spyware that planted porno on his system. He paid the blackmail for the antispyware to remove it. A month later he de-installed the antispyware and guess what - the porno returned.
Works in North Korea!8-))
Correction:
Once they are hired by Microsoft innovation seems to evaporate. So does any contribution to former academic communities.
Meijer's apparently abandoned research and is devoted to getting LINQ out. He's been posting notices about Microsoft conferences over on Lambda the Ultimate mostly spamming for his employer Microsoft on what was once a computer languages research site. Note also Meijer's last post at ICFP 2006 wherein he notes his paper was rejected by the International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP 2006).
As for Microsoft helping functional programming becoming mainstream: you need to put your crack pipe down. The only functional programming environment in Microsoft's future is the one that's in it's past: Excel spreadsheets. Your other Microsoft research hero Simon Peyton-Jones has been busy enhancing Excel.
"Lo, how the mighty have fallen."
Then what do you think of HTML?
then AJAX would not exist.
In the long term bandwidth will be (practically) infinite and whether processing is done on the server or the client will become irrelevant except that server-based processing will always be more secure and controllable.
AJAX is a temporary tool to enhance client-server interactivity until almost everyone has a high-speed Internet connection. Once that occurs such hacks as AJAX will disappear.
And good riddance! Because of it's arcane nature, security problems and greater development cost, I look forward to the day when AJAX fades.
The parent makes a point that should be stressed.
High-energy physics has reached a point where the cost-effectiveness of larger particle accelerators is questionable. And building a particle accelerator that could test string theory is both technically and economically impossible today.
Astrophysicist David Lindley wrote The End of Physics: The Myth of a Unified Theory, a book that explains the current state of affairs in high-energy physics and astrophysics.
As for string theory, Lindley doesn't take sides in the book. He merely explains the evolution of high-energy physics and astrophysics and points out how theory in both fields has become less and less based on experimental and observational data and more and more based on simplifying theoretical assumptions.