Human skeleton can support much more weight than the muscles could ever lift. After all, the athletes with several times more muscle than a normal person can lift several times more than a normal person could, but their skeletons aren't several times more durable.
Actually exercise, weight bearing exercise in particular, will make your bones significantly more dense and therefore stronger. This is why weight bearing exercise is recommended to people getting on in years, and especially women, as it helps reduce the effects of osteoporosis. Of course I've wondered if the extra stress on the joints might somehow induce an early onset of arthritis but that's another question.
Just curious but since you seem to know what you are talking about perhaps you could say something about transplant rejection and eyes (cornea, retina, ?)? I seem to remember reading something many years ago about the eyes having a "magical" ability to suppress rejection of transplanted material in a way that didn't happen with any other part of the body? Or am I just having a really fuzzy memory?
Really? You think they are doing exactly the same thing at the same instant all day long? Wow that must be interesting to see with only one keyboard and two guys. Hmmm, maybe one guy is typing while the other guy is verifying what the first guy is doing. I'm sorry you can't see that they are now doing two tasks, even if they are working together; either you get that or you don't. It seems clear that you don't.
As for your last comments all I can say is it is too bad you are so gratuitous and so literal minded.
Mmmm, no, it wasn't. The topic was words from SF entering into mainstream scientific use. The example, or subtopic, in question was "cyberspace" - see the "cyber" part of it - and where it originated? General mediated reality was something you introduced for you own purposes. Ooops, I see I've used up my quota of troll food so you may have the last word.
It seems to me that John Brunner wrote about a lot of things Gibson gets credited for... man he was right about so many things - I'm waiting for the first reality show with kids walking a plank over a shark tank while their folks watch and count their dough... won't be long now.
One more comment - you talk about the US middle class not being able to get medical care that is free to the poor. Well it's the same here in Canada. If you are on welfare your dentistry is paid for - not on welfare you pay the whole shot. Need glasses - paid for if you're on welfare otherwise you're on your own. The same for eye exams. Drug costs? If you're low income or on welfare they are basically free but if you're lower middle class you're going to be paying up to $2,000 a year for your prescriptions - even if your life expectancy goes down significantly without them. Make any kind of money at all and you're paying for all your prescriptions, up to several thousand dollars a year - and you're paying for them with after tax dollars because the deduction for medical expenses is set so high that you'd have to be needing some awfully expensive drugs to make it over the threshold. Crutches, wheelchairs, etc. - free on welfare otherwise you better hope you have some cash. Treatment for mental illness? If you're poor you get it, if not then you better have some cash lying around.
And when my elderly mother went into hospital you could see they just wrote her off - too old to be worth the investment. Not even proper palliative care until I and a friend of hers started raising a stink.
Mmmmm you know that's a nice thought (about equality in Canadian health care) but it really isn't true. The people who run the health care system in Canada are upper income people. If they want faster/better/unavailable-in-Canada treatment they just travel for an hour and they are in the US where they can buy whatever treatment they want. I know a fairly well off couple and when their kids need care in a hurry they just take a 30 minute drive over the border.
A few years back I investigated and found I could get a Bluecross insurance policy good for a couple of million $ in care anywhere in the world and it would only cost about twice the annual premiums for health care where I live in Canada - and our health care stops at the border. Now two million might not be all that much but it'll get you a fair bit of care and a lot faster than here in Canada.
On top of that it is a very large deception when politicians and advocacy groups say we have single tier health care. In my province if you get injured on the job you are almost certainly covered by workmens compensation (now called WorkSafe) and you move right to the head of the line for treatment. There are a couple of other groups that bypass the waiting lists as well - my recollection is that it was police, or prison guards or military personal - it's been a while so I can't really remember which group(s) it was. And when Bourassa got prostate cancer he was across the border getting treated at, IIRC, Johns Hopkins, something like 48 hours after initial diagnosis. And - this is the really cute part - if you aren't a permanent resident of Canada but need health care while here you can just jump over all the queues and buy whatever service you want.
What I would ask in this case is how they measured the productivity of individual programmers and where in the talent spectrum did these programmers lie?
IOW are the gains of pair programming the same for pairs of programmers selected from the top 5% of ability as for programmers at the median level of ability? My guess would be that it doesn't look so good in the former case.
Don't you get it? Having two people working on one piece of codeis fragmenting the task of one person into two tasks - one per person. And the tasks are now different. Don't let the optics fool you just because there might be one keyboard and it looks like they are working on one task - they aren't. The number of tasks and the number of pieces of code aren't the same thing. As a result the overheads described in MMM come into play.
N programmers working as a team on one piece of code, N programmers having what appears to be N independent pieces of code to work on. N CPUs being brought to bear on a chess problem. They all have the same problem - the same overheads - and they all have the same reason for it taking more than T/N time to complete.
As to your question, yes I have read it. I've also understood it and thought about the real lessons of MMM, not just the facile literal interpretation.
And for the record: a few years ago there was a study published in Communications of the ACM that showed while pair programming is more efficient than a single solitary programmer, it is not as efficient as two programmers with two keyboards. FYI.
It's much older than that - IIRC "The Mythical Man Month" first formalized the idea that N programmers do not produce working code N times as fast as 1 programmer, and that's essentially what is happening with paired programming.
The real problem was discussed long ago in "Programmers and Managers" by Kraft. Two skilled programmers operating independently will indeed produce good code faster than two programmers paired. The problem lies with the idea that there is a large supply of "skilled" programmers. There aren't and most of software development methodology for the last thirty or forty years has been aimed at creating processes by which mediocre programmers can produce reasonable quality code in a reasonable time. Unfortunately nothing will ever change the fact that the productivity range of programmers spans an order of magnitude, possibly two depending on who you listen to.
Want good quality results? Hire 5 good programmers, not 15 mediocre programmers. That means that you'll probably have to pay them pretty good coin and treat them well and that is management's real problem. Management dreams of cheap replaceable labor working on an assembly line. After all assembling cars and developing highly sophisticated software have so much in common!
As for the comments on disturbing concentration - absolutely! Any significant chunk of code is highly complex and detailed. It needs to be kept in the head as a whole, in an organized fashion and in detail. It is nothing short of mind boggling that anyone can imagine that a process that requires being continually interrupted and distracted will aid that task. This is nothing but another doomed attempt to take the bottom 10% of the talent pool and try and squeeze some productivity out of them.
Heh heh, yep a good dog will do it all right. I swear to god my dog can tell a block away which ones are going to fawn over him. I'd sit outside the local coffee house having coffee with him beside me and he'd spot a candidate and just flop over on his back and start wagging his tail (he's about 110lbs) and they'd come over and make a fuss over him. I don't know what he was picking up on but I never saw it fail.
And what is the volume of ice that is resting on land?
None of the surface area figures I've seen for the Antarctic specify how much of the area is actual land and how much is ice over water.
Well with companies I can think of one way to cut down on the problems. If you are in a contractual relationship with a company and it tries to use a loophole to avoid its responsibilities then you get to call an arbitrator to make a binding decision. Could be a court, could be an actual arbitrator, could be something else. But, records are kept of how many times the case goes against the company and how many times for, and the costs of all arbitrations are split according to that constantly updating ratio. For example if the company is wrong 80% of the time then they bear 80% of the costs of the arbitration. It would give them a reason not to be weasels.
This was just of the top of my head so feel free to pick huge gaping holes in it.
My dog can do calculus too. Unfortunately he is afflicted with paranoia so he just lets it hit the floor and gives it good looking over before he decides to put it in his mouth. Then he catches it the second time. LOL.
My previous one was a wolf-hybrid and she could tell if it was something she wanted to put in her mouth while the object was in flight - even with something the size of half a pea and moving fast she would always make the correct choice, 100% percent of the time. That always amazed me. That and that she could do this and still catch the object even if the trajectory took it quite a distance from her original position. I think we grossly underestimate the processing power of these animals. My guess would be that in their own domain, a reasonably smart dog (hey some are dumb as bricks) is the equivalent of a 2-3 year old human.
You know what I find interesting? You raise no objections to the idea of beheading spammers. Instead you go into this long technical argument as to why it won't work.
Any country willing to perform public beheadings of spammers would have the ability to track the money if they really wanted to. Hey let's call Jack Bauer, he'll get the job done.
I'm not so sure the actual reasoning is faulty. The scarcity of proof that it "leads weak minds..." is more troublesome. Then, if the proof is found, the question that is never answered or examined is whether the damage to society at large justifies the reaction. For me, you would have to prove the connection to a near certainty and then demonstrate an extremely large impact resulting from the existence of the material to justify the type of restrictions and sanctions that are being imposed. Personally I fond it amazing the amount of resources expended on policing this sort of thing while little is done for the kids who are being pimped out on the street. Maybe we should go after the unquestionably criminal acts first.
In Canada written descriptions are indeed outlawed. A case was brought to court a few years ago in which a guy had written these stories containing descriptions of things that, if visually represented, would be CP. He then shared them with others. The court ruled that he had the right to write these things down but he didn't have the right to distribute them to others. IOW you can think whatever you want, but don't try to communicate your thoughts or you'll go directly to jail.
The argument that was successfully made, here in Canada, is that the existence of CP tends to legitimize it and leads weak minds to commit heinous acts that they would otherwise never have committed. Therefore society at large is being harmed by the mere existence of CP.
If something done by A is harmful to B, and B hasn't consented to it (which includes being old enough to consent), then maybe there is a case for government involvement. But if there is no demonstrated harm then what the hell business is it of government????
We are about to go through this in Canada where, after years of soap-boxing by a tiny number of ideologically oriented journalists, the government is about to find out if the law against polygamy is constitutional. They are going to prosecute some of the residents of a small town populated by an offshoot of the Mormons.
Not having any ability to show that polygamy itself is actually harmful the offended folk have managed to associate it with sexual assault and other sex crimes. The thing is there are already laws against these other things so why, after many years of observation, haven't the police laid charges under these other laws? Because there is no evidence to support them.
But polygamy offends the press activists who have been campaigning against it so they keep on about child abuse, at the same time ignoring the very real widespread and very obvious child prostitution going on in their own cities. Now they've got federal politicians up in arms about "Canadian values."
So we will have the situation where two people can have a sexual relationship and live together. The two can also have a sexual relationship with a third person - as long as that person doesn't live with them. But let the third person move in so that there is effectively a marriage of 3 (formalized or not) and boom they are breaking the law. How can this make sense to anybody?
Slashdot Mirror
Human skeleton can support much more weight than the muscles could ever lift. After all, the athletes with several times more muscle than a normal person can lift several times more than a normal person could, but their skeletons aren't several times more durable.
Actually exercise, weight bearing exercise in particular, will make your bones significantly more dense and therefore stronger. This is why weight bearing exercise is recommended to people getting on in years, and especially women, as it helps reduce the effects of osteoporosis. Of course I've wondered if the extra stress on the joints might somehow induce an early onset of arthritis but that's another question.
Just curious but since you seem to know what you are talking about perhaps you could say something about transplant rejection and eyes (cornea, retina, ?)? I seem to remember reading something many years ago about the eyes having a "magical" ability to suppress rejection of transplanted material in a way that didn't happen with any other part of the body? Or am I just having a really fuzzy memory?
Isn't that Ensign Toast?
Really? You think they are doing exactly the same thing at the same instant all day long? Wow that must be interesting to see with only one keyboard and two guys. Hmmm, maybe one guy is typing while the other guy is verifying what the first guy is doing. I'm sorry you can't see that they are now doing two tasks, even if they are working together; either you get that or you don't. It seems clear that you don't.
As for your last comments all I can say is it is too bad you are so gratuitous and so literal minded.
Mmmm, no, it wasn't. The topic was words from SF entering into mainstream scientific use. The example, or subtopic, in question was "cyberspace" - see the "cyber" part of it - and where it originated? General mediated reality was something you introduced for you own purposes. Ooops, I see I've used up my quota of troll food so you may have the last word.
Well I think the topic was computer mediated reality. Or did Plato get a computer before the rest of us?
It seems to me that John Brunner wrote about a lot of things Gibson gets credited for... man he was right about so many things - I'm waiting for the first reality show with kids walking a plank over a shark tank while their folks watch and count their dough... won't be long now.
Ahhhh, from "Seetee Ship" and "Seetee Shock"(?)... so long ago... I loved those two books when I was a kid.
One more comment - you talk about the US middle class not being able to get medical care that is free to the poor. Well it's the same here in Canada. If you are on welfare your dentistry is paid for - not on welfare you pay the whole shot. Need glasses - paid for if you're on welfare otherwise you're on your own. The same for eye exams. Drug costs? If you're low income or on welfare they are basically free but if you're lower middle class you're going to be paying up to $2,000 a year for your prescriptions - even if your life expectancy goes down significantly without them. Make any kind of money at all and you're paying for all your prescriptions, up to several thousand dollars a year - and you're paying for them with after tax dollars because the deduction for medical expenses is set so high that you'd have to be needing some awfully expensive drugs to make it over the threshold. Crutches, wheelchairs, etc. - free on welfare otherwise you better hope you have some cash. Treatment for mental illness? If you're poor you get it, if not then you better have some cash lying around.
And when my elderly mother went into hospital you could see they just wrote her off - too old to be worth the investment. Not even proper palliative care until I and a friend of hers started raising a stink.
Mmmmm you know that's a nice thought (about equality in Canadian health care) but it really isn't true. The people who run the health care system in Canada are upper income people. If they want faster/better/unavailable-in-Canada treatment they just travel for an hour and they are in the US where they can buy whatever treatment they want. I know a fairly well off couple and when their kids need care in a hurry they just take a 30 minute drive over the border.
A few years back I investigated and found I could get a Bluecross insurance policy good for a couple of million $ in care anywhere in the world and it would only cost about twice the annual premiums for health care where I live in Canada - and our health care stops at the border. Now two million might not be all that much but it'll get you a fair bit of care and a lot faster than here in Canada.
On top of that it is a very large deception when politicians and advocacy groups say we have single tier health care. In my province if you get injured on the job you are almost certainly covered by workmens compensation (now called WorkSafe) and you move right to the head of the line for treatment. There are a couple of other groups that bypass the waiting lists as well - my recollection is that it was police, or prison guards or military personal - it's been a while so I can't really remember which group(s) it was. And when Bourassa got prostate cancer he was across the border getting treated at, IIRC, Johns Hopkins, something like 48 hours after initial diagnosis. And - this is the really cute part - if you aren't a permanent resident of Canada but need health care while here you can just jump over all the queues and buy whatever service you want.
What I would ask in this case is how they measured the productivity of individual programmers and where in the talent spectrum did these programmers lie?
IOW are the gains of pair programming the same for pairs of programmers selected from the top 5% of ability as for programmers at the median level of ability? My guess would be that it doesn't look so good in the former case.
Don't you get it? Having two people working on one piece of code is fragmenting the task of one person into two tasks - one per person. And the tasks are now different. Don't let the optics fool you just because there might be one keyboard and it looks like they are working on one task - they aren't. The number of tasks and the number of pieces of code aren't the same thing. As a result the overheads described in MMM come into play.
N programmers working as a team on one piece of code, N programmers having what appears to be N independent pieces of code to work on. N CPUs being brought to bear on a chess problem. They all have the same problem - the same overheads - and they all have the same reason for it taking more than T/N time to complete.
As to your question, yes I have read it. I've also understood it and thought about the real lessons of MMM, not just the facile literal interpretation.
And for the record: a few years ago there was a study published in Communications of the ACM that showed while pair programming is more efficient than a single solitary programmer, it is not as efficient as two programmers with two keyboards. FYI.
It's much older than that - IIRC "The Mythical Man Month" first formalized the idea that N programmers do not produce working code N times as fast as 1 programmer, and that's essentially what is happening with paired programming.
The real problem was discussed long ago in "Programmers and Managers" by Kraft. Two skilled programmers operating independently will indeed produce good code faster than two programmers paired. The problem lies with the idea that there is a large supply of "skilled" programmers. There aren't and most of software development methodology for the last thirty or forty years has been aimed at creating processes by which mediocre programmers can produce reasonable quality code in a reasonable time. Unfortunately nothing will ever change the fact that the productivity range of programmers spans an order of magnitude, possibly two depending on who you listen to.
Want good quality results? Hire 5 good programmers, not 15 mediocre programmers. That means that you'll probably have to pay them pretty good coin and treat them well and that is management's real problem. Management dreams of cheap replaceable labor working on an assembly line. After all assembling cars and developing highly sophisticated software have so much in common!
As for the comments on disturbing concentration - absolutely! Any significant chunk of code is highly complex and detailed. It needs to be kept in the head as a whole, in an organized fashion and in detail. It is nothing short of mind boggling that anyone can imagine that a process that requires being continually interrupted and distracted will aid that task. This is nothing but another doomed attempt to take the bottom 10% of the talent pool and try and squeeze some productivity out of them.
Heh heh, yep a good dog will do it all right. I swear to god my dog can tell a block away which ones are going to fawn over him. I'd sit outside the local coffee house having coffee with him beside me and he'd spot a candidate and just flop over on his back and start wagging his tail (he's about 110lbs) and they'd come over and make a fuss over him. I don't know what he was picking up on but I never saw it fail.
And what is the volume of ice that is resting on land? None of the surface area figures I've seen for the Antarctic specify how much of the area is actual land and how much is ice over water.
Well with companies I can think of one way to cut down on the problems. If you are in a contractual relationship with a company and it tries to use a loophole to avoid its responsibilities then you get to call an arbitrator to make a binding decision. Could be a court, could be an actual arbitrator, could be something else. But, records are kept of how many times the case goes against the company and how many times for, and the costs of all arbitrations are split according to that constantly updating ratio. For example if the company is wrong 80% of the time then they bear 80% of the costs of the arbitration. It would give them a reason not to be weasels.
This was just of the top of my head so feel free to pick huge gaping holes in it.
My dog can do calculus too. Unfortunately he is afflicted with paranoia so he just lets it hit the floor and gives it good looking over before he decides to put it in his mouth. Then he catches it the second time. LOL.
My previous one was a wolf-hybrid and she could tell if it was something she wanted to put in her mouth while the object was in flight - even with something the size of half a pea and moving fast she would always make the correct choice, 100% percent of the time. That always amazed me. That and that she could do this and still catch the object even if the trajectory took it quite a distance from her original position. I think we grossly underestimate the processing power of these animals. My guess would be that in their own domain, a reasonably smart dog (hey some are dumb as bricks) is the equivalent of a 2-3 year old human.
Sigh. I should have known. Please go back to my original posting and append the following to it:
;)
Just a suggestion but you might want to develop a sense of humor.
You know what I find interesting? You raise no objections to the idea of beheading spammers. Instead you go into this long technical argument as to why it won't work.
Any country willing to perform public beheadings of spammers would have the ability to track the money if they really wanted to. Hey let's call Jack Bauer, he'll get the job done.
Catching them wouldn't be hard - follow the money.
Or just kill the spammers. After the first few public beheadings the spam will start to drop. Really.
I'm not so sure the actual reasoning is faulty. The scarcity of proof that it "leads weak minds..." is more troublesome. Then, if the proof is found, the question that is never answered or examined is whether the damage to society at large justifies the reaction. For me, you would have to prove the connection to a near certainty and then demonstrate an extremely large impact resulting from the existence of the material to justify the type of restrictions and sanctions that are being imposed. Personally I fond it amazing the amount of resources expended on policing this sort of thing while little is done for the kids who are being pimped out on the street. Maybe we should go after the unquestionably criminal acts first.
In Canada written descriptions are indeed outlawed. A case was brought to court a few years ago in which a guy had written these stories containing descriptions of things that, if visually represented, would be CP. He then shared them with others. The court ruled that he had the right to write these things down but he didn't have the right to distribute them to others. IOW you can think whatever you want, but don't try to communicate your thoughts or you'll go directly to jail.
The argument that was successfully made, here in Canada, is that the existence of CP tends to legitimize it and leads weak minds to commit heinous acts that they would otherwise never have committed. Therefore society at large is being harmed by the mere existence of CP.
Exactly.
If something done by A is harmful to B, and B hasn't consented to it (which includes being old enough to consent), then maybe there is a case for government involvement. But if there is no demonstrated harm then what the hell business is it of government????
We are about to go through this in Canada where, after years of soap-boxing by a tiny number of ideologically oriented journalists, the government is about to find out if the law against polygamy is constitutional. They are going to prosecute some of the residents of a small town populated by an offshoot of the Mormons.
Not having any ability to show that polygamy itself is actually harmful the offended folk have managed to associate it with sexual assault and other sex crimes. The thing is there are already laws against these other things so why, after many years of observation, haven't the police laid charges under these other laws? Because there is no evidence to support them.
But polygamy offends the press activists who have been campaigning against it so they keep on about child abuse, at the same time ignoring the very real widespread and very obvious child prostitution going on in their own cities. Now they've got federal politicians up in arms about "Canadian values." So we will have the situation where two people can have a sexual relationship and live together. The two can also have a sexual relationship with a third person - as long as that person doesn't live with them. But let the third person move in so that there is effectively a marriage of 3 (formalized or not) and boom they are breaking the law. How can this make sense to anybody?