Public Sector vs Private Sector War!

The private sector pays for both the public sector and tax that those in the public sector pay. The public sector workers think their tax pays for things but it does not, it was given to them by the same hand that takes it off them, it's just wave of the hand.
Regarding those that talk about, "capitalist bastards", with reference to the financial sector, this too is misleading - the system whereby the banks are bailed out is not capitalist at all. A capitalist system would be on whereby the banks would go bankrupt when they screwed up.
Take the USA, the US is really struggling now, with countless trillions in debt. The REASON is that they gave all the manufacturing jobs to the 3rd world (Europe is doing similar). If the US does not manufacture, then it's service industry will soon leave the USA and follow the manufacturing industrial base in developing counries: those service industry jobs too will be outsourced, the entire US working class and middle class will be unemployed. Already, under Obama, the middle class is vanishing and the working class have no jobs. They massage the stats to hide these horrific numbers of course, by not including X and Y and Z in the unemployed figures.

As for the Keynesian argument that the world would go bust if governments stopped spending loads, that's a tautological fallacy that assumes one thing: tax does not go down.
The correct way is to tax people less and to have SMALL government that spends less. That way the economy grows because the money flows more in the private sector (wealth creator) than in the public sector (wealth destroyer). yes the public sector is needed but it is too BIG!

Birds as Operating Systems

Archaeopteryx - UNIX

Parrot - MAC OS

Peacock - OSX

Bird of paradise - iOS

Killer drone - Android

Penguin - Linux (obviously)

Pidgeon - MS DOS

Duck - Win 95

Goose - Win XP

One-legged headless chicken - Vista

Two-legged headless chicken - Win 7

Turkey - Win 8 RT

Dodo - Windows 8

Microsoft are Doomed by Open Source

Jobs for Microsoft skills are losing market share. Microsoft has lost the hearts of developers. It's not surprising as MS killed VB, slaughtered Silverlight and now are moving .NET to legacy in favour of Win 8 "Apps" where MS can cream off their 30% from their own "App store". MS also alienated devs with it's destruction of Borland and its dirty tactics in the browser wars. A war that led to zero innovation for five years until open source saved the day. Devs have cursed IE 5 and 6 and moved to Mozilla and now Google browsers.

Open source is now legit in Enterprises and in fact is, in many cases, best of class. Linux (servers, Android and on desktop but it's losing that battle), Firefox and Chrome, Hadoop, and also the LAMP stack including Apache / nginx / PHP (PHP is the exception - it sucks), Python, Perl and Mysql / PostgreSql / DB2 etc. Also there is Java - which is wrongly criticised on this site, it's open source, as are many Java frameworks and libs, all heavily used in the Enterprise, where Java is a perfect fit. These are serious areas, open source, history will show, has had an enormous disruptive effect on IT.

Microsoft is still a closed-source dinosaur, it attacks open source with patent attacks these days. Devs do not like those dirty tactics. And so MS declines into a patent troll company. Which, even 5 years ago, seemed almost inconceivable to most.

80's movies rock! But....

1980's Action movies rock!  WARNING!!! Eadon rant... it all went pear shaped when hollywood tried to make action stars (with mixed success) out of the likes of effeminate wimps tom cruise, keanu reeves, shia leBouf, Johny Depp (Depp is a good in Burton movies though) the spider man movies guy and that big head out of Iron Man. What a lamentable crock! There are no real stars any more as far as I can tell. No Arnie, Stallone, Swartzenegger, Harrison ford, chuck norris, willis, not even a Dolph Lundgren or Rutger Hauer, Mickey Rourke, christopher lambert or a kurt russel. Jason Stratham is possibly the best star we have now. And don't get me started on these movies with women beating up men with wimpy kicks and punches.... Bah Humbug!

Strange blog about an actress, a chess gm and me, Eadon.
http://james-plasketts-coincidence-diary.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/269-garden-of-eadon.html

Cat Rant

Cats are cold autistic creatures that only care about you being their slave and feeding them. They destroy wildlife worldwide. And they spread toxoplasma. None of that matters, though, as much as the annoyance of women spamming social networks with total drivel about, and stupid pictures of, cats! It's pollution, it's like litter, this ridiculous cat worship. Haven't you got a life?
That rant was cat-hartic ;-)

Java vs World (warning - for geeks only)

For geeks: This post is informal and based on an informal email addressing misconceptions by a system admin. He made the following fallacies.

Fallacy 1) bash scripts are used to start up programs, therefore it is useful for many things.
 -- In reality Java is better at solving most business related problems / patterns.

Fallacy 2) logging is not very useful in Java
 -- I agree it is abused, and it shouldn't be relied upon entirely. But for me logs help a lot, believe me, but to a non java-expert they may not help much).

Fallacy 3) XML hell: XML is bad, therefore java is bad.
 -- Java developers often loathe XML too :-) XML is not Java in any case. XML does have its uses (representing hierarchical data). It is unwieldy to work with and expensive for resources. JSON is solving some problems here.

Fallacy 4) Stuff can be obfuscated, therefore things are only hard to maintain when somehow obfuscated.
 -- In reality unofuscated stuff can be hard to maintain.

Fallacy 5) It takes hundreds of lines of text to say hello world in java
 --

class HelloWorldApp {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello World!"); // Display the string.
    }
}

Fallacy 6) splitting things into lots of parts is harder to maintain
 -- The reverse is true, unless, of course, the developer has got the level of abstraction wrong (the "ravioli" anti-pattern that applies to any language).

Such misconceptions of enterprise coding that are fairly typical of the talented amateur developer. The biggest point to make, the biggest difference between amateurs and professionals, is in understanding "patterns", intuitively or formally. A sys admin will prefer Bash as he knows it well. Bash is good at solving certain patterns, an example you gave was start-up / cron-triggered automation scripts, which essentially solve some kind of "factory" / creational pattern. But even here it can get unweildy when there are significant rules. And when you need non-trivial integration with business-related systems, then shell scripts fail.
It's not only bash scripts, people have been trying to replace Java with all kinds of scripting languages (think dynamically typed languages) forever. (We will ignore C# here, which is Microsoft's IP-burdened clone of Java). People have tried to solve business / enterprise problems using languages like python and more recently with languages like Groovy that runs in the JVM. Such approaches have sometimes become popular in niche areas (Ruby on Rails, though that has lost popularity now - as such systems are not very maintainable). The only place scripting has really been successful is in web-based systems (PHP). But even PHP is evolving to become more like Java and less like PHP ;-)
Engineers stick to Java for several reasons
1) OO - helps with maintenance and patterns
2) Clean syntax, each line of code is unambiguous (unlike C++, C# etc)
3) Great IDE's and libraries and frameworks etc
4) Cross platform works well (as long as you don't do stupid things with paths and similar)
5) It's fast (except it needs a bit more memory and starting a VM can be slower)
6) Strongly typed. The older I get, the more I appreciate typing. It massively cuts down on bugs and makes maintenance much easier.
7) It's universal - great for interoperability.
8) It's the best language to solve enterprise business systems that are mission critical.

What Java is not the best language for: simple start up scripts. Writing other v. simple systems. Quick and dirty/prototyping (unless, perhaps, you're a Java expert ;-). Drivers. Writing system code such as operating systems and working directly with certain operating system resources that require access to (if non-wrapped to date) native API's. Java is not designed for problems where you need fine grained control over performance related to hardware resources. Arguably Java is not brilliant at web code / fat client code, but that's more of an issue with frameworks than Java itself. Also Java does not yet support closures - the reason is that closures would affect performance by way of how the VM processes byte code.

I once saw a quote that said that Java is popular because it helps businesses write spaghetti code in a maintainable way :) There is some truth in that. But (preferably spaghetti free) Java is the best language for solving business/enterprise systems code and cross platform programs.

And Java is now the main language on Android, another plus.

Microsoft posts its first loss this quarter.

The Microsoft dinosaur is staggering! The failure in this quarter shows that MS are vulnerable. They are in poor shape. Here are some of the reasons, there are others.

1) Desktop sales are flat at best
2) Mobile platforms are popular but MS are not a player
3) Zune and then WinPho7 shows that the market rejects Metro, yet the company is betting the farm on Metro on its forthcoming mobile devices
4) Win8 is putting Metro on Desktops, which will earn MS more scorn and ridicule than Vista
5) It's Surface vapourware announcement is irritating its partners.
6) MS partnered with Sendo, Danger and Nokia and has destroyed those companies (Nokia dying fast). Other partners will trust MS even less than usual.
7) Linux desktop is free, and it's good (much better than Metro). Linux was ridiculed by MS but it has eaten their lunch on servers, and now on mobiles (Android has a Linux kernel). Linux desktop could happen faster than MS thinks if corporations see no future in Windows, which is expensive, and only needs employers to use cloud apps or native Linux apps (which are generally free).
8) Open source software is rising fast. Clouds are mostly made from open source systems. Open source frees corporations from licence management and the risk of being sued (rightly or by mistake)
9) MS has an awful lot of enemies, many of whom are insanely powerful in their areas. Apple, Google, Oracle, Sony, Samsung, Nintendo, Amazon, IBM, Redhat, Canonical, the Open Source community
10) MS is failing at search. Bing costs them a loss of 2 billion dollars a year and even with that investment is not able to dislodge google, whose search engine is profitable.
11) MS is failing at the Cloud. Open source has won that battle (and vendors that use open source, such as Amazon).
12) MS Office has competition from Google Docs in the cloud and from Libre Office, which is now improving fast having forked from Open Office to get away from Oracle.
13) Microsoft has no vision other than to copy its competitors. Where it does innovate, it produces artefacts that are either unusuable or in poor taste (ribbon, metro)
14) Microsoft's browser has gone from 95% share to less than 40% share and is still in freefall.
15) Microsoft has lost the goodwill of developers.
16) Microsoft is turning into a patent troll, and is attacking Android and Linux organisations, acting exactly like the mafia. This garners MS ill will.
17) Microsoft is not seen as sexy, it is seen as a boring spreadsheet company.
18) Steve Balmer and Bill Gates, the least visionary leaders of tech.
19) Microsoft Office 13 previews - fugly!
20) If/when MS start to lose revenue from Office, their chief cash cow, they're doomed, all else will fall like dominoes.
Microsoft have a lot of money and will buy their way out of various problems, but money can run out rather quickly, even scores of billions ;-)

Tech integration Man and Nature

Geek post again, so skip stuff that makes no sense :)

To Integrate or not to integrate?

For Apple, MS and Oracle they only integrate hardware and software when they are desparate to enter a new market. Once they take over that market they make it as un-interoperable as they can. Other companies, like IBM, get rich by integrating stuff. FaceBook does not want to integrate, but everything wants to integrate with it. OpenOffice/Libre Office is more the reverse, but wants, and does, both. Hurrah for Open Standards, like ODF.

Nature has been playing these games for billennia. In the primordial soup, cells shared DNA directly -horizontally - DNA floated in the oceans and Cells grabbed what they needed, and dumped DNA back.

Suddenly life went to non-interoperable mode - for example, multi-cellular life does not directly (horizontally) share genes, only vertically, via sex, with horizontal gene transfer happening slowly through biological viruses.

Open source is about horizontal gene (code) transfer, closed source is more about  vertical gene (code) transfer. The analogy cannot go too far, though, as with code we have sentient designers, where as with life we have unconscious evolution (which can also happen with software via Genetic Algorithms). In parallel, much open and closed source code is evolving darwinistically also, due to market and popularity selection forces.

The greatest level of integration ever achieved was at the start of life, when all cells integrated via the floating genes to make them into a super-organism. It were as if all software could swap chunks of its own code via the Internet.

Map Reduce Geek Paradise
Some very geeky and whimsical and frivolous stuff about Map Reduce, a sexy algorithm that is the new black in the tech world.
Firstly, beyond doubt map reduce has its place, is genuinely excellent when used appropriately and it has been around almost since Ada Lovelace in various guises, it's a useful pattern. But now it has become a buzzword, everyone suddenly has to have map reduce! Architects are compelled to draw designs with "Map Reduce" proudly written on them in bold font.

Hey, I is a real 'tect, I can has map reduce!

Here is a hypothetical conversation in an office betwixt a non-technical project manager and a software proposer and designer called an architect.
Manager -> let's analyse something.
Architect -> you can has map reduce.
Manager->(thinks WTF) (then thinks, I heard someone else say that. Must be good). er, yes, quite. why is this, er map reduce moving us forward?
Architect->Well, you see, you don't need to normalise all your shit and make a database and you can analyse stuff you don't know you've got in ways you don't know how to magically get answers to questions you do not ask, with results you do not want. But because you don't need a database, you can analyse terrabytes of cookies data in a hour with just a few lines of code!
>millions of pounds given to cloud companies later<
Manager, so what's the answer?
Architect, What's the question?
Manager, I don't know.
Architect, I know! Why don't we use Map Reduce to find the question. All we need is....
>millions more pounds spend on clouds later<
etc.

Prime Primes

This is probably not an original thought, almost certainly it isn't. But it's a nice idea. List prime numbers (numbers that are divisible only by 1 and themselves):
2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23

Now index them as
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Now only chose primes with a prime index, so you get "prime primes':
3, 5, 11, 17,

Now index those
1, 2, 3, 4,

Repeat and you get
5, 11

If you do this for all the infinitude of prime numbers, can you repeat forever? So that no matter how often you index them, you still get an infinite list? My answer is, yes, no matter how often you filter by indexing and choosing only prime indices, you go on forever! It kind of follows from Cantor's proof of the infinity of the natural numbers being the same, no matter how often you divide them by 2 etc. As you have a never ending supply of prime numbers, you can never whittle them down by using another infinite list, which the list of prime indices is, - infinite. The set of the subset of primes is always the same size as the set of the whole.
Infinity. Hurrah!
It would be cool to write a little computer program to do this. But obviously working with a finite subset of primes ;-)

Update - it occurs to me that you can have a hard core version of this by using the prime primes to pick out the next generation of primes.
Update 2 - I was going to call my above sequence of primes super-primes, and googled that term, to discover, that voila! Super primes are actually what I independently "discovered" here. Hurrah!
 

This is a rather exciting application for the Culica game, teaching!
Teach With Culica
There is a teacher's pack for teaching probability so far, with more to packs to come. Please get involved!
- James

Battle of the sexen

"Are women discriminated against?" a philosophical debate on Google+. I am not saying that this feminist is incorrect, it is terrible for anyone to suffer chronic pain, and such a thing is a tragic failure. But it raises the question, does equality carry a price, that being treated equally may not equate to being treated better?

Feminist - "Sad to say, but women are totally discriminated against when it comes to chronic illness and the pain we endure! A man can get a splinter in his butt and get morphine, but a woman is accused of hysteria, exhibiting 'drug-seeking behaviors', told to 'lower your stress level', all kinds of things that men never hear if she needs more than an aspirin or ibuprofen. This is sooo wrong, on sooo many levels! If MEN care about women, and don't like seeing us in pain, then they need to step up and help, instead of ignoring us and our pain. Please. Thanks, Sir richard, for the question. There are MANY ways that women all over are discriminated against, and true equality is as big a lie as GMO foods are GOOD for us."
Yesterday 1:32 PM

Me - "in the old days, when men were gentlemen and women were ladies, ladies were cared for. Then women demanded to be treated equal. And now you are. And you are no longer cared for. Well, if you want equality you can't have it both ways, you can't be equal and yet expect men to look after you too!"

In terms of breast cancer vs prostate cancer, far more is spent per death on the former. Do the feminists complain about that as being a discrimination against men? I can't remember seeing an article with feminists campaigning about discrimination against men. And, men tend not to complain when it happens.

Anyway, this post is not to be taken seriously, it's just an idle post.

A geeky stream of consciousness follows, on the technological direction of enterprise software, that powers companies and corporations. Do not take these words too seriously, they are somewhat tongue-in-cheek and there is exaggeration, sensationalism and over-simplification, it's just a bit of fun.
When business systems grow in complexity you get new stuff. What's continually happening is that there is loads more data than ever before and more CPU cycles and cores to process it than ever before. And the old rules stop applying, So in some special cases of reporting (where "Big Data" is involved) even processes such as Software Coding to User Acceptance testing to Deploy to Production are no longer apt, which is almost unthinkable. You're having to develop against live data, a nightmare scenario.
The extra CPU and memory means that you have VMs all over the place, it's madness and this is changing how systems are developed. To put it flippantly, you don't give a tester an exe file any more, you give them a VM, and entire operating system :-)
All this is new, and it doesn't really have an analogue to before.
Yes, all runs on silicon and beneath it all, Linux is ticking away, but we have new levels of abstraction and we are seeing emergent behaviour where new structures are coming out of nowhere. Amazon, a book seller, is beating Microsoft at selling computing power and doing what Microsoft tried and failed to do, succeed with a rental computing model. MS are playing catch-up.
We have engineers talking about platforms as a service, and all that did not exist before. Yes you can map it, and say, well, it's not really new, it's like this, or its like that, but all this stuff doesn't really map any more, it's just going in new directions. It's a bit like the days of the Internet changed everything, and relatedly, "Web Services", like SOAP, where you could have all these different systems talking to each other in a standard way. All these new tools appeared to help build systems with these powers.
The web services hype was immense, but when people realised how clunky they are, the hype died, but the web services tick along in various systems in a more modest fashion than envisaged. The one thing that is constant is the need to write "business logic", the stuff that is the engine of how to do business.
When you can have an entire system zipped up as a file, including an OS, that's new. When you have terabytes of data, data so huge and so much flowing in real time. that's new. You cannot index that data fast enough, so a relational database is not the answer. All this is mind blowingly novel. Faster computers do not solve all our problems, (like, hey we now run our accounts so fast we can save money). No, they cause problems - (what can we do with these new powers?) - and complexity goes up and up and up.