My boss and I routinely look at new tools and technology with an eye to solving our company's problems and build cool new stuff. Our goal is not to embrace flavour-of-the-month technology. It's to identify better solutions to old problems, or find good solutions to new problems. Tools have to work, or they serve no purpose. Everything else follows from there.
We do most of our development in C on Linux, but have incorporated virtualization and cloud computing, new technologies that
provide better solutions to old problems. The jury is still
out on other goodies. I like python, while my boss prefers perl. I like Django, while he prefers PHP. He's the boss, so I write lots of perl and PHP...
...laura
It's on the wall, for all to see. Inscrutable display, mysterious controls, the works. When the weather changes it tends to lag a day. So the first warm day we cook with the heat on. The first cold day we freeze with the heat off.
I prefer opening the door out on to the balcony. Fresh air is so much nicer than anything the HVAC can do.
At home I leave my bedroom window open - even if only a crack - all year.
...laura
My fave is still the original Star Wars. It was fresh, it was new, yes, it was hokey, but it worked. Check your sophistication at the door and enjoy the ride!
I find the prequel movies unwatchable.
Some things never change: when The Empire Strikes Back was imminent, they re-released Star Wars in the theatres to get some buzz going. It was accompanied by a short, a trip to the Moon, assembled from NASA footage. Some younger members of the audience expressed loud displeasure at the "fake" movie. They didn't read the credits where it said "Filmed on location by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration".
...laura
I did my first year Computer Science in Algol W with punched cards.
The system required a blue "ticket card" to do anything other than list your card deck. We were issued a supply of ticket cards, and could (and did) buy more at the campus bookstore. We punched our cards ourselves. We were very careful to write everything out, to walk through our programs to make sure the program was syntactically correct and might have a chance of doing what it was supposed to do before spending a ticket card to find out what the compiler thought of it. We had immediate turnaround, which meant you could go through ticket cards that much faster.
I now program mainly in C on Linux boxes. The programs I create are orders of magnitude more complicated than what I created then. My interactive productivity is much higher too. I'm not sure I'd even attempt much of what I do now if I didn't have much more powerful computing and debugging facilities available.
...laura
I am reminded of a TOS episode where two warring planets had made their war so clean and clinical that they had no real reason to stop it. Until Captain Kirk came in and showed them what war really was, something horrifying, to be avoided. Even if it meant talking peace with your enemy.
Capital punishment is such an atrocity. Maybe if it was shown to be that atrocity, there would be less support for it. Public hanging, firing squad, maybe even dust off the electric chair. Show that it's gross and disgusting, and that civilized people have better ways to keep their societies working.
...laura
Well, we'll have to differ then. The free market is an ideal, but a self-executing free market is a rarity. No regulation (or no government) is a nice jingle but there will always be something. (Is anyone saying more regulation/govenrment for its own sake? No, but they can be nasty side effects.) It's the law itself. Even the criminal law is a form of regulation—especially unlikely to be banned—and yes amending, sometimes repealing, it can improve it. That said, I do sympathize with the libertarian perspective (versus dogma) and think the government can be seen as just another
"Robber baron" just sounds cool. I don't think we have classic monopolies like oil and steel, but less the landscape is pretty messed up, and getting worse so with the repeal of Glass-Steagal and so on..... Just my 2 against $2 trillion.
And I suppose big business loves non-regulation, with the opportunities of monopoly. So win-win?
I'll agree that regulation risks just shifting wealth from one corporate interest to another. Also, that regulaiton introduces its own barriers to competition. But to condemn regulation per se is mindless. We got enough of the robber barons ages ago.
Now, back to my question.... which way will things tilt, and how much will the public interest matter.
Well said. I would be even more specific and say you don't want the carriers to discriminate or, god forbid, they'll redefine common carriers.
Pretty damn well. You can't believe the difference things like lifting the bar to pre-existing conditions makes to families like ours. That they could have better job with this behemoth project, I don't doubt. That they would have done a better job if the other half Congress hadn't been obstuctionist jerks, I don't doubt either. Growing pains, not fault with the basic concept.
To drift back on topic: ditto for net neutrality. Sometimes we do better without the market carved into big corporate fiefdoms and fake competition.
It seems to me the lobbying forces on the part of the content providers, Netflix et al., would be pretty formidable—unless they think the price is worth it to suppress upstart competition. Which is it?
My current ADSL serves me well. I can stream all the usual video services (YouTube, Netflix, Acorn, etc.) in decent (near-HD) quality. The only time I could use more bandwidth is when I want to download something big, like an OS upgrade.
With that said, I'm sure if I had gigabit internet I'd find something to do with it.
...laura
Please drop this idiotic phrase.
Besides, total lunar eclipses aren't red at all, at least, none I've ever seen. They're a neat copper colour.
...laura
...and the world is all the better for it!
...laura
"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."
