It's possible. Personally, I've always had a soft spot for the idea that Eden in the Bible was really not on Earth at all, but Mars or some other location in the universe. The flaming sword that "guarded" Eden could have been a rocket/spaceship at the end of Eden in the "east", the direction of the morning Sun, possibly signifying that it was headed closer to our sun, to Earth.
That seems to be a stretch you might say, but, similarly, Genesis tells a story of the creation of life which isn't wholly incompatible with our scientific understanding. There were stars, planets, life originating in plants while the earth was covered with clouds, finally the stars, sun and moon appeared through the clouds, then animals in the sea evolved, then birds/dinosaurs, then mammals, and finally a mammal called a human.
Even the rib of Adam could be a simple way of telling about the X chromosome, doubled to make the female (double X chromosomes).
Sure, you could say people made up these Bible stories if you want. However, in my mind it closely aligns with current knowledge of science and evolution that it would seem to indicate that humans in the past had some way of knowing past history they'd never experienced.
Perhaps something, likely an intelligent entity, spread life to Mars as a seed, it thrived, but then Mars became an inhospitable place so it was moved to Earth. Then later it came back to tell the story to a human or perhaps even all humans, and that story was relayed from generation to generation.
That's on the surface, at least. We keep learning how life on our own planet exists places far below sea level, and not just in the ocean. The same could be true for any number of celestial bodies in the known universe.
"At his Colorado Springs laboratory during 1899–1900, by using voltages of the order of 10 megavolts generated by an enormous coil, he was able to light three incandescent lamps at a distance of about one hundred feet."
If you only gathered the same data on a regular basis, then you might have a startup on your hands. The name should somehow incorporate Fear and Loathing. You'd also want metrics for addiction, (in)ability to carry on everyday activities, etc. and graph that to find the sweet spot for best bang for the buck. Possible integration with Siri, Cortana, Google Now, etc. "Siri, I want to get high." "Sure, just see Terry on Market St. He's got some snow at a great price. For your current body weight, you should buy 5 grams to have a good time tonight."
A quote from that: "Those who read about the aliens in an easy-to-read font (16-point Arial pure black) answered correctly 72.8 percent of the time, compared to 86.5 percent of those who reviewed the material in hard-to-read fonts (12-point Comic Sans MS or Bondoni MT in a lighter shade)."
Hopefully the military is supporting this research also. Lots of vets with missing limbs that could use this. Maybe one day a soldier could even go back to active duty after losing a limb if they wanted.
Good post, but I think the "don't collect it", "don't store it", "don't keep it" warnings may fall on deaf ears.
The reality is that businesses:
(1) aren't sure of the value of their data. Perhaps there is a company willing to buy their data and they might need that money someday. Maybe if they had more historic data, reporting would show a clearer trend in some way that would help drive them in the right direction- if they had the resources to analyze all of it.
(2) may not fully understand the laws and regulations they may be bound to that relate to how long they need to keep data.
I think it's not a bad thing to spend the time to understand your legal obligations, clean up your data, and remove what you'd never need or never realistically be able to sell. But many companies don't have that time.
When I first read this I was a little pissed at Apple, but what if brew were to install everything to /brew? It doesn't need to install into /usr/local.
> I think the EE team make sense to be created "on demand" and not as a permanent solution
For the size and intensity of effort going on at Twitter, I respectfully disagree.
Once the team gets large enough, NMP ("Not My Problem" mindset) comes into play, and unless you have the culture from the beginning to always be making the development process better, and acquisitions and new management has never changed that, which is highly unlikely, then having a dedicated person or team to help make other developers jobs easier is a great idea- after the team gets to a certain size. What that size is depends on what is being done, though.
When considered as a whole of the combination of what is possible with the stdlib and all of the best gems available, Ruby can be written clearly and tersely. Those are the two first and most important things that I look for to do general web application development. From that perspective it beats Javascript, Python, Php, Java, C#, Go, Scala, Erlang, Haskell, OCaml, and every other language I've used.
I'm not saying Ruby is the best language ever. It has its flaws. In a few places in the stdlib, it doesn't make sense. There are languages, with maybe Smalltalk and Lisp at the top of the list, that beat Ruby from a simplicity and purity standpoint. But, Ruby is just great to use. I love reading it and love using it. It took a few years in the beginning of love and hate, but if I was stuck on a deserted island and had one programming language, Ruby would be it for me.
If it weren't for the Ruby core group being so exclusive and bitter towards others getting involved to make it even better, and if it weren't for the Rails core team just having too much to do and being unable to execute on support, documentation, performance, clarity, simplicity, and important features all at the same time, then maybe it would be the world's number one language and Rails would be the number one web framework.
Instead Javascript had emerged years ago as the language of choice in the browser, had plenty of attention spent on making it execute quickly, etc. though it was an uglier language than Ruby, and because of that attention, it is today's number one language for the web. But, I still like Ruby.
I'm a long-time Rails developer and unfortunately this release doesn't excite me, though I appreciate all the hard work by the core team/continued support from 37signals. The reason is this:
The intent of Rails is to make writing web applications easier, but that writing web applications actually got much more difficult for me as a Rails developer when Angular and Ember and then later React got popular. I love Ruby, but I respect the fact that the Javascript-client-side-heavy/"single-page" part of the app is where the magic is for at least a few years now- really several years.
Other than Rails helpers in the 2006-2008 timeframe being a big deal, Rails' has not ever really helped out a whole lot on the JS side, and you wouldn't expect it to. The asset pipeline is wonderful, and coffeescript support with in it is ok I guess, even though I don't use it. But, writing JS client-side is not any easier. To be a full-stack developer in today's world I have to accept the fact that Ruby, as much as I love it and would rather develop in it all day and night, is just not taking over in every facet of development. There is no Rubyscript on the client side taking over the world. There is ES6/Typescript- that is the future.
A substantial number of Ruby masters are jumping over to the Phoenix/Elixir bandwagon. I look at it, and want to like it, but I just haven't gotten into it yet. I know it is fast, but it just isn't as readable yet for me. And it won't solve the problem that the client still needs to be written primarily in Javascript.
And the answer is not Node either, because every serious Javascript developer I've talked to says, "Node is still not ready."
I just feel let down. I want to get excited about Rails again, but give me a path. I don't really like Ember a whole lot, because the community is just not where it is with Angular and React. Someone please take your favorite frameworks and show me how my life is supposed to get better by using them. Show me how it is fun. Bring back the magic, because right now it all just seems like more and more of a PITA as attention deficit has fully set in within the web application development community and there is no clear way ahead for the next few years.
> Note also that this "budding free society" was responsible for horrible atrocities against the native population until fairly recent times.
Doesn't excuse it, but I can't think of a first world country that hasn't committed atrocities to native people or forced people into slavery. In many ways, the world is much better today than it was before.
I know I'm in the minority but our street has had house parties fairly frequently over the past years since we've lived here. Here's our story:
When we first moved in, we went to each home in the area and invited them to come over and meet their neighbors that weekend. It was a cold weekend and all of those that came had coffee and hot chocolate in the garage and spoke for a little while.
From then on, other neighbors and ourselves would periodically make extra cookies or other food and just take it over to a neighbor's house. When the weather is nice, people would just walk around the neighborhood and stop by to talk to others that happened to be outside. We put a fridge in the garage and offered people a soda, beer, or glass of wine when they stopped by, and over time others would gather and talk.
Eventually people started to have dinner parties. Cocktails were served, chips, appetizers, etc. Ours is not an affluent neighborhood, but those that could afford it did all they could.
Over the years, it has slowed down a little. There have been some weird friends that messed up relationships, and other mistakes with people drinking too much, etc. But, there have also been solid friendships that came out of it, and people still get together.
It doesn't happen everywhere, for sure. We consider ourselves blessed to have such good friends and neighbors. But, I think that if you do similar things, you could have a chance at the same type of experience.
From 1788-1792, it started out tough with thousands of professional criminals ill-fitted for the skills required. 1/4 of the 2nd fleet lost their lives. The rest survived near starvation. However, between 1810-1821, it transitioned from a penal colony to a budding free society.
I can't think of many successes like that in our history where so many career criminals were reformed so quickly, the sacrifices of lives not withstanding.
"The reason is a mixture of widespread ignorance about floating-point arithmetic and the desire to get maximum performance."
Hopefully developers don't misinterpret this to mean that it is idiotic or overly obsessive about performance to use floating point types in calculations. That's not true.
As an example, I once decided to use double-precision floating-point in calculations that would accumulate enough accuracy error that I had to do approximate equality conditions throughout the parts of the code that determined these solutions. This not involve monetary amounts, and we needed solutions in a few seconds, not 20-30 seconds. Each step in the solution built on the former, so I could not break it up any more to solve in parallel than it already was. Throwing faster hardware at it wasn't an option available at the time. I still think I did the right thing, and it's still an integral part of production. Just going with the standard "just use BigDecimal because it's accurate" approach would have been a mistake.
You're worried if they will take care of you. Worry more about the fit. What seems like a large retainer now could be golden handcuffs and a bad attitude a year in, or maybe the benefits are great but the job itself and team are awesome.
To determine fit:
* Try to watch them work in their current job for at least a day or two. Not meetings, not just talking with their top guy, but sit with the average person you might work with, talk with them, and understand what is going on.
* Get a thorough understanding of the process you would have to use everyday in your job. You probably will have to do things differently. The way they do things is what you can expect a year or two in.
* This isn't relevant for acquihiring but if you were to have a product or service that would be integrated, estimate the maximum time you would be doing integration work and not actually able to work on your product. Set your expectation to that and hopefully you won't be let down later when you have no time to work on or support your own product.
In the end, if you aren't excited about working for their company, don't work for them. The money isn't worth your sanity or soul.
* "How are projects managed in The Apache Software Foundation? ... Apache Projects work because people like you participate constructively within them!"
* "How do I get user support for an ASF project? Everyone active in ASF projects is here as a volunteer, nobody is paid to provide support here. ... Remember that Apache committers are generally working as volunteers on Apache mailing lists."
Projects survive on volunteerism. Apache doesn't support the projects themselves.
However, that does not mean they are fully unobligated.
"7. Step down considerately. Members of every project come and go. When somebody leaves or disengages from the project they should tell people they are leaving and take the proper steps to ensure that others can pick up where they left off. In doing so, they should remain respectful of those who continue to participate in the project and should not misrepresent the project's goals or achievements. Likewise, community members should respect any individual's choice to leave the project."
Based on that there could be grounds to have them stop hosting Open Office or any other project if it has become a liability because their committers have disengaged. If you want to get involved, write the president https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Gardler and tell him about this at: [email protected]
However, what it means to be disengaged is up for debate. You might also suggest that Apache reconsider the expectations they set of project owners.
That seems to be a stretch you might say, but, similarly, Genesis tells a story of the creation of life which isn't wholly incompatible with our scientific understanding. There were stars, planets, life originating in plants while the earth was covered with clouds, finally the stars, sun and moon appeared through the clouds, then animals in the sea evolved, then birds/dinosaurs, then mammals, and finally a mammal called a human.
Even the rib of Adam could be a simple way of telling about the X chromosome, doubled to make the female (double X chromosomes).
Sure, you could say people made up these Bible stories if you want. However, in my mind it closely aligns with current knowledge of science and evolution that it would seem to indicate that humans in the past had some way of knowing past history they'd never experienced.
Perhaps something, likely an intelligent entity, spread life to Mars as a seed, it thrived, but then Mars became an inhospitable place so it was moved to Earth. Then later it came back to tell the story to a human or perhaps even all humans, and that story was relayed from generation to generation.