I've said it before: Homeopaths actually can be useful, if they are well educated (medically) and do take their time speaking to a patient. I've met doctors I wouldn't trust making a relyable anamnesis and I know homeopaths whos diagnose I would trust. At least more than some of those doctors.
The medicine of course is bunk, but here in Germany it's partially justified by some as a cheap means to get to placebos.
London is Berlin plus extra dirt, pricepoint and noise, minus the vibe. At least in Berlin you get the all-out hippster flair, although gentrification has pushed that out of the door quite a bit already. However, Berlin is spread out so far and has so many green areas it's hard for it to gain the solid all-through gentrification and establishment in top-tier living costs that London or Paris have. Which is a very good thing IMHO.
Bottom line:
I'd probably choose Berlin over London. But then again, it also depends largely on the people you're with and the job you have. With the right people around you and the right things to do, such a drab town as Düsseldorf can be fun aswell.
MS didn't kill Java - Oracle did.
And on a sidenote:
You might want to consider abandoning Windows as a plattform.
If you're looking for something stable with a brand and a future, perhaps you should try the Google ecosystem. With either web or android. I see Windows on the downslope. It only takes a critical mass to see Exchange as a dated groupware model and moving to Google and to see a subscription to office software for the bizar contraption it is and moving that to Googles free version aswell. Once that happens, Google will have taken over the planet for the foreseeable future and MS will be lapping up its dribbles it leaves behind.
.Net, from day one, was a vehicle for clueless middle-managers to justify sitting around blabbering web-economy bullshit and spending ginormous amounts of money for their consulting buddys to scoop up because they have a few devs at hand that are willing to play along and develop under-performing, non-future-safe, overpriced superfluos crappy MS-lockin middleware and shoddy MS SharePain intranets.
I said it when
*Everyone* with more than 2 braincells saw this and still sees this. If they'd've FOSSed
MonoDevelop/Xamarin Studio FOSS Edition is the key point here.
I have to admit, I resent MS just as much as the next guy and I consider C# a half-assed cross between readability of C, speed of Java and portability of Visial Basic and unlike some MS fans do not consider the PL the second coming of Christ.
You can get from zero C# experience to an own feasible GUI app in a matter of hours.
Something I can't say of other great toolkits, such as Qt.
In a nutshell, MonoDevelop is the only reason I would actually even consider C# as a PL for a project.
And now with major components of the
My 2 cents.
Dystopia? We are living it and don't even see it.
The problem is powerful tools in stupid hands. Or greedy hands - greedy being a subset of stupid.
If we'd take a measured approach to tech advancement - which might even mean an accelerated approach - we'd all be living in a utopia already.
The US has no or only very little means of wealth distribution, which is why life can suck so hard over there. But even a bum doesn't have to starve in the US and child labour and epidemics are basically history there too - so I'd say all in all that we're headed in the right direction in that dept.
Indias legal excecutive is basically "Judge Dredd" in real-life. Courts are so behind, murder investigations and convictions can take up to 25 years before even starting. The police solve this on their own to maintain order by staging "encounters" for people who've killed more than once. They basically find you, arrest you for something petty they can pin on you and then shoot you for resisting/trying to flee.
With such factually absolute powers for the police, they're bound to turn corrupt.
I'd say it's no surprise that in such a system an exposure of police corruption get's you killed mafia style.
A better PL, a Swift Book for free, a working pipeline with free (beer) tools ready to roll from day one and no-bullshit support for all the things the predecessor (Obj-C) supported.
That's all it takes to bring a new PL front and center for more than 1 week.
Apple knows how to build user experiences and that includes developers on their machines.
Now if only every software technology would take care of things the way Apple does and not promise things their toolkit can't hold for longer than a download and a first tryout.
Just saying.
We use our systems for mission critcal stuff. That means they need to be setup and maintained well. Which in turn means, a good system setup is as valuable as the system itself.
We know how to maintain systems and how to keep them bloatware free. And they're ahead of the curve by 2-3 years compared to mainstream anyway.
So, in the end, it's no suprise systems are in operation for a few years.
Did they have an actual engineer check the statics, weight durability, corosion and weather/temperature resistance/durability?
Or did they just have that artist draw different cute pictures of Rivendell-Style bridges and pick the prettiest/easyest to print?
I'd rather ask before I break my neck and drown crossing one of these. Just saying.
Aside of that: Neat project. This is where things are headed. I like the outlook of this.
A military project with multi-nation politics. Need I say more?
My cousing worked with airbus as an engineer, prepping the A380 for release, after the cableing debacle. No single responsible project lead with competence and a mandate, subcontractors 6 levels deep with the suits drawing out money at every level, nationalistic policing, etc.. A burocratic nightmare barely imaginable by the human mind.
Think Berlin Airport but with a bunch of EU nations thrown into the mix involving complex new machinery and avantgarde technology. Yeah, right.
Why garbage? Here's why:
1. Standards change all the time. What's the default value for that global? Depends upon the version. What? That global didn't exist when you wrote your code, so you can't check its current value to see if it affects you? Go fuck yourself.
No one cares. Nobody uses global anything since 4.x.
2. Libraries and APIs are added, replaces, and sundowned at will. Want to do an http redirect in the current version? Go fuck yourself!
No one cares. I can find all changes with 20 seconds on php.net, one of the best PL documentations every. The differences and deprecations and changes are listed per version. And they're a good laugh during a boring coding and debugging day. Especially those parameters and function names.
3. Error handling. Look it up. Or, rather, the designers need to do that and then implement something sane, and do it consistently.
Yeah, right. Like you - or anybody else - uses error handling consitently, no matter the PL. *I* only use it when I don't know what to expect from the adjacent API. And then I usually leave the catch loop empty, except for some printed output or something.
We all know this: IT setups vital to work but so unprofessional words fail to describe it.
I would smack around the people responsible so hard, they would have their head still spinning when the IT setup has been completely redone.
I consider it bizar that taxpayers money and national security is put to risk by idiots running the parliaments IT.
This is material for some legal repercussions by the President of the Bundestag IMHO.
He should shaft the MPs so hard they never dare to do something like this again.
My 2 cents.
Lenovo Yoga 2 10" Android + 64GB SD Card
This is the computer I by far use most in my private time. Right now, riding on the train, in fact. I've just about stopped "lugging" my macbook air about. I don't use the MB Air anymore right now - moved all my E-Mail this. 18 hours of battery time, tons of movies and serials (watching agents of shield right now), 60+ books, especially those with 1000 pages or more, 6GB of music, awesome Games (The Wold among us f.e.). It's a state of the art mobile computer, one generation short of total convergence.
Moto G2
My fresh dirt-cheap high end cellphone. Definitely a computer, definitely my second most used one.
Lenovo W510
Refurbished and pimped out with 18 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD and Ubuntu 14 LTS - for serious web work and fiddling with FOSS. I'm pondering leaving the Apple Golden Cage (TM) - but am not quite sure yet. There are some pretty awesome software tools available for OS X, especially in the webdev dept.
Lenovo T400
Refurbished and bought as a cheap, small and quiet utility (web) server to fiddle with and run deployment and scripts on. Xubuntu 14 LTS.
2011 MacBook Air
Neat and trusty. Great device. The Yoga kicks it's ass in portability and battery time though.
2007 Mac Mini
Second-gen Intel Mac Mini. Very nice computer, still doing its work. But I only use it as a media center right now. It still runs Snow Leopard
Xbox 360, last gen with Xbone Enclosure. Dirt cheap console, dirt cheap AAA games. I pondered getting a console for almost 10 years and picked this one up as the Xbone was out a few months. Very good deal.
At work:
27" iMac, refurbished. 24GB RAM
All in all I'd say I have to many computers and probably will consolidate the amount at my next hardware redo which happens every 4-5 years or so.
"No matter where you go, there you are..." -- Buckaroo Banzai
