Maybe it's the statistically well supported paradox that men are overrepresented at the extremes, both negative and positive extremes. And start-ups, for various reasons not limited to risk, are a kind of extreme case of (self) employment.
The idea of ideas as viruses is old. They can infect you, then can breed with other ideas, they spread, etc.
Religion world wide does seem to follow a pattern of more complicated and more energy demanding religions being replaced by religions which require less effort. One god instead of many, and lately that god doesn't even want sacrifices, oh and peace is better then war... most of the time.
Obviously it not that simple, religion can spread through war, some religions make themselves extinct by demanding life long celibacy from everyone. And there's been some studies which found the us vs them pattern common in religious groups can decrease and/or slow the spread of disease.
There's one particular thing about Christianity though. Well OK, a couple of things, one it's kind of a modern less complex flavor of Judaism, no offense meant to any Hebrews reading this.
But the other thing is Christ's rather extreme love your enemies, turn the other cheek message. You have to see that in the context of the Roman empire and Roman culture at the time.
Rome was EXTREMELY pro war, violence and punishment. Think crucifixion, gladiators, pax romana etc. But even more then that, Roman culture saw mercy as a dirty animalistic emotion, to be surprised like all animalsitic and primitive urges should be. Reason was human, emotions, especially mercy were disgusting instincts not to be trusted, but to be fought against, with reason.
In short it was an extreme culture, that must have put some unique psychological pressures on those living there. Think how people in Japan who remember the end of WWII describe how the emperor announcing Japan's surrender felt like a bow breaking and huge pressure being relieved.
Christianity is like the perfect counter culture to the old Roman culture. No wonder it successfully spread throughout the empire. And from Rome to all of Europe, to the new world.
The other parts of the old world, have not turned Christian, and it's not for lack of trying by well funded Christian missionaries, suggesting there really was something unique about Rome and early Christianity.
Modern American Christianity is often quite, shall we say unique, why with the pro Gun, pro war thing.
There's one particular thing about Christianity though.
Well OK, a couple of things, one it's kind of a modern
less complex flavor of Judaism, no offense meant to any
Hebrews reading this.
First, the similarity between the practice of Judaism and Christianity is the product of the last century or so. At the time, the ideas of, e.g., Paul diverged significantly from contemporary Jewish thinking.
Second, if you don't want to offend Jews, don't call them "Hebrews". ;)
Why, not? It's archaic and not strictly a synonym, but why would it be offensive. I understand that those that use it, usually mean offense, but there is no real reason for it.
Thinking of those two things as distinct concepts with clear borders is a mistake. Both religious and ethnic group do not usually have definite boundaries and they are not always seperate from each other. Saying Arabs when you mean Muslim is what you mean is indeed a mistake. Most Muslims are not Arabs, but that proves nothing about how to classify these things.
Hebrews is a different issue. Jewish is actually Judah-ite, from the tribe of Judah. These were (according to the tradition) the surviving tribe of the Israelites or People of Israel. People is actually a bit misleading. In Hebrew it uses the word normally translated as 'Nation'. In modern times, the relationship between Judah & Jewish has been blurred since some groups trace their heritage to other (lost) tribes.
In any case, all of these equally refer to an ethnic group though you could argue that they are not exact synonyms. This is not just about the origin of the words. It is also the religious tradition. Jewish is not a Religion in the sense that Islam or Christianity are. It are not something you chose. It is not something you can stop and it is not something that anybody who is not (ethnically) Jewish is required or encouraged to join. Basically, the "religion" as you would probably call it doesn't distinguish between religion and ethnic group. The members of this ethnic-religious do not usually do so either. That is, many secular, atheist Jews describe themselves as Jewish, and behave in someway that indicates this.
Hebrews & Israelites, People of Israel, are as far a I know, used interchangeably in the old testament. In modern Hebrew all but the most pedantic (and religious) will use Israelites interchangeably with Jews. Secular Jews are unlikely to say Jews. "Hebrews" is not really used in modern Hebrew unless making some sort of biblical reference. In some languages it has a derogatory ring but in some languages describing someone as a Jew/Hebrew/Israelite is derogatory regardless of the word you use.
The industry, actually several industries both electronics manufacturers and media companies, need the new new thing to keep sales up. It is a consumer driven economy after all. And that is why 3D will pushed hard, for as long as it takes.
I think that's a harder case when it comes to large-screen televisions. Do we really expect that people will buy a new TV every few years like they do with iPods, phones, and laptops?
It's going to take something really significant to convince a whole block of TV watchers to upgrade their sets. In the US, it's only happened with the advent of color broadcasting (1960s) and HD/digital broadcasting (2000s).
Yeah, that's what happens when actually have some competence, and thus you know that you know very little AND you also know the crowd here will call your BS on these subject. Oh but politics or other crap like that will fill with comments right quick.
The article is both acceptable and appreciated, but not good.
There are far better, not to mention easier ways to start hacking a compiler quickly than doing it with Flex/Bison/LLVM and in C++. Look at this over engineering:
A compiler should be written as a fluid, jelly-like organism; you will be changing it so much and so often, it's a waste of time to introduce any structure like that to it so early. The only place where you need a heavy design is the intermediate representation; and to this extent, you want the most flexible "design", if you can get away with Lisp-like S-expressions, by all means do it.
You will be annotating the intermediate representation in multiple phases, so don't hesitate to copy deeply instead of mutating it with surgery. Don't bother with an elaborate symbol table design, just use the cheapest/easiest hash-table you can find. Keep your IR human readable or you will be forced to write binary analysis tools before you even settle on an IR format (horrible chicken and egg problem; and that's what you get when you model your IR with a giant C union .. you know, that trick, don't do it!)
For the last 20+ years, Schemers have been losing their voices preaching the trivialization of compiler hacking. Listen to them; Schemers live in a parallel universe to the mainstream compiler community, which still, even if they don't know it, are hard at work improving the first Fortran compiler.
I also like Kragen's Ur-Scheme as a concrete readably-small example of a self-hosted compiler to x86, inspired by the Ghuloum paper you reference. [At http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/sw/urscheme/ ]
Sadly we don't all have these options. The project I'm working on right now, a prototype DSL for writing counters to check data, can't be written in a fancy language like ML, Haskell or hell even Python. They don't want any "weird languages" that someone else will have to maintain once I leave. So C/Lex/Yacc it is.
Prototype it in the language you know best, implement it in the language you're "required" to.
A typical compiler project is at least 6 months away from start to finish. Deliver something in Python in 2 weeks and see if they can resist it; you still have 5.5 months to flesh it out in C if you still have to. I don't for once buy that a software shop will refuse having a working demo immediately, even if it's in APL.
What about Clojure? It's a lisp and can be used the Scheme way. At the same time, it runs in Java virtual machine and therefore can be controlled directly from Java. That is, your legacy code can be written so that it can be maintained by Java programmers (this is to sell it to "them".)
That might work if their concern is deployment of his code. But if their concern is actually maintenance (you know, patches, updates, bug fixes), than I don't see how Clojure, Scala, JPython, etc. would be any more acceptable. The concern is probably having legacy code in a language that nobody else on staff knows how to program in.
Correct: they will not be able to program in clojure. But they should be able to interop java with the classes created in clojure. No REPL environment and all code compiled is a requirement for this kind of legacy work, but it can be done easily. (Or "should" be done easily.)
I'll take a thoughtful essay on architecture and the power of government over the crap OMG look at this crazy Sh!t! and the self help How to lose weight/How to get a date/How to be social. articles which are hitting the front page more and more often.
Don't only Caucasians have blue eyes? And aren't they (full disclosure "we" in my case) also the only ones with the mutated version of the gene which controls how much melanin is deposited in skill, hair and... I think also irises? Asians and Africans both have the normal version of the same gene.
And melanin has many roles, sun protection being just one, the other is as a structural protein. Just compare how black skin ages vs. how a redhead of the same (advanced) age looks.
And why would Caucasians have a mutation which deposits less of such a useful protein? Vitamin D.
It is produced when UV light hits the skin. In northern climates with less sun, and skin being covered or you die of exposure, often even when the sun is up, people get a lot less vitamin D.
Inuit get more due to their diet, and modern man also gets much more again because of diet. And yet most people living in the north even today lack vitamin D.
Also, I thought all of the above is common knowledge which makes me question the whole article.
Also, this is neat:
A 2002 study found the prevalence of blue eye color among Caucasians in the United States to be 33.8 percent for those born from 1936 through 1951 compared with 57.4 percent for those born from 1899 through 1905.[10] Blue eyes have become increasingly rare among American children with only 1 out of every 6 – 16.6 percent which is 49.8 million out of 300 million (22.4% of white Americans) of the total United States population having blue eyes.[33][34] The plunge in the past few decades has taken place at a remarkable rate. A century ago, 80 percent of people married within their ethnic group. Blue eyes, a genetically recessive trait, were routinely passed down, especially among people of Scottish, English, Irish, Welsh, Western and Northern Slavic, and Northern European ancestry.[33][34][35] In the 1930s, eugenicists[citation needed] used the disappearance of blue eyes as a rallying cry to support immigration restrictions. They went so far as to map the parts of the country with the highest and lowest percentage of blue-eyed people.[citation needed]
From your wikipedia link: Blue eyes contain low amounts of melanin...
Blue eyes are most common in Northern Europe and Central Europe and to a lesser degree in Southern Europe,North America and southern Central Asia; Afghanistan is a notable example.[30] They're also found in parts of North Africa,[31] West Asia, and South Asia[32], in particular the northern areas of India and Pakistan. It can rarely occur as far south as Sri Lanka. However blue eyes are not found within the population of East Asia, due to the major pre-dominance of the brown eye gene in the area.
Central Asians, people from the Caucasus, Afghans, Pakistanis, and even Indians darker then many an African are considered Caucasian. They are Caucasians. And North Africa is full of Caucasians, hell even German tribes, Goths if I recall correctly, settled there during Roman times.
So only Caucasians have Blue eyes. Again because of a gene mutation which control how much melanin is deposited in hair, skin, and irises.
Someone with a lot of melanin could have blue eyes, but they wouldn't appear blue do the the melanin. That's why blue eyes contain low amounts of melanin.
And low amounts of melanin are related to vitamin D, which is related to living in northern climates.
3 weeks unpaid time off, if my recollection is correct. And then they go spend that kind of cash on an acquisition, I doubt it will create a lot of good will inside the company.
I know a few companies which have cut benefits to their employees while at the same time acquiring other companies and it makes perfect sense.
1) It's a buyers market because a lot of companies are looking for an out even at reduced valuation.
2) Employees are similarly not going anywhere in a climate like this so you can cut benefits for the time being because everyone is cutting benefits.
Look at the acquisitions as a long term investment whereas the reduced benefits are a band-aid.
you're assuming that the companies won't reassess when the situation recovers. that's why I specifically said 'band-aid' as in a temporary measure.
and when the benefit reductions are in lieu of lay-offs, morale shouldn't be affected. people should be far-sighted enough to realize that everyone has to scale back.
if the companies don't readjust later then it goes without saying (or so I thought...) that they will lose employees.
the bottom line is that there is good sense in it.
"when the benefit reductions are in lieu of lay-offs, morale shouldn't be affected" -- in isolation, i agree. I think good will is easily lost and hard to re-earn, and spending a ton of cache while asking people to cut back is pretty harsh in my book.
"if the companies don't readjust later" .. i don't think people forget so soon. Also, the most effective people still have options in the downturn and are the ones you really can't afford to lose.
Mergers are really hard to get right, and you need buy-in from on high all the way down through the effected organization.
The bottom line is that you need to account for the ill will internally when you are considering making a decision like this. It may very well be the optimal choice for increasing short-term shareholder value, which is a publicly traded company's number 1 priority.
Now, if Adobe also announced that they'd pay doubletime for vacation for employees that took the unpaid time off and stuck it out, that'd be a Good Thing.
