I thoroughly enjoyed this, though the author did present as fact, many of today's tenuous theories (e.g. animatter, microscopic black hole!). http://qntm.org/destroy
...And I hope that someday That you, you people will all have the chance To read The Helping Friendly Book And experience the wisdom Of the great, the great and knowledgeable Man who wrote The Helping Friendly Book Because he is, the great and knowledgeable He is the one, the only author of The Helping Friendly Book He is the man The great man The only, the special His name is The author of The Helping Friendly Book He is the great The knowledgeable, the one and the only The great, the knowledgeable Person who wrote The Helping Friendly Book His name could only be The one, the only, the only, the special The author of The Helping Friendly Book... -Excerpt from Icculus by Phish There are few mantras that are as universally agreed upon by Software Engineers as Don't Repeat Yourself or DRY. It rings deeply and globally true that any form of code duplication is at best a compromise, at worst, an abominable trap. Writing and maintaining...
What I wish to address is this: "With the rise of virtualization, applications will transform into virtual appliances. Virtual appliances simplify application deployment by delivering the complete software stack—from OS to the application—as a single, integrated unit." -SDTimes Web Seminar Abstract Lest I be seen using VMs and am accused of being hypocritical: Virtualization is great for configuration testing. There is no better way to test against Oracle or Windows 98 without having to install such icky things than a VM. "Virtual Appliances", however, are a different story. Though they may “seem” exciting, and may be a practical solution given today’s technology and today’s problems, I find the trend disturbing. Why? ...Because a) the entire approach is grossly inefficient; and b) this is just another chapter in the long history of industry repetition. Setting aside the inefficiency aspect for a moment, isn’t this form of “run anywhere” virtualization exactly...
Say patent, and one might get a nostalgic tear in their eye as they envision a brave garage inventor, who, protected by his patent, earns what's due him thanks to legal protection against large greedy corporations. Enter reality. Now picture large corporations able to easily crush or control small businesses. Picture large companies being relentlessly attacked for money even though such companies have made every effort to respect other's claims. Picture an environment where anyone wishing to innovate is all but unable to do so because such effort will invariably step on an almost infinite and unknown set of patent "toes". To make things worse, there are those that are pushing for even more liberal patent laws , such as first-to-file, rather than first-to-invent. Something must be done to stop this! Patents are ruining the software industry and causing tremendous indirect damage to our country! Software shouldn't even be patentable. Patent law prohibits the...
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