Honestly, I think you have to live through it to believe it. Not all companies, of course, are like this. But the ones that are get that way because of people like the GP who assume that only the jerks and underperformers get laid off.
I have to admit you got half my point without realizing it. Politics are often a large factor in who gets laid off. The second part of my point was (and to which someone else alluded) that laying off people is no silver bullet. If you don't first understand the nature of your problem, you can't possibly come up with a good solution. Yet time and again we hear management repeat the same old myths, which persist out of ignorance.
Think about it this way: if you're laying off the worst 10% of your workforce, and the worst performers only do ten percent of the best, you're likely to replace them with someone 50% productive, on average. In other words, you've gained a (50 - 10 = 40 %) improvement on 10 percent of your labor force. That's a paltry 4 percent improvement. That's pretty close to the margin of error on most corporate metrics.
In the case where the underperformer is not replaced, you have now simply increased the workload for the remaining workers. Perhaps you can get them to work a little harder - now that they fear their job - or perhaps they'll just get fed up and leave, which will cause even greater problems for the organization as a whole. But while you now save on salary, you have to deal with the fact that your higher performing employees now have greater incentive to leave the company with years of knowledge in their heads. Depending on the industry, you're going to lose six months to perhaps 2 years in ramp up time when business picks up again and you have to hire more people.
In neither case do you get a satisfactory solution for what is essentially a business problem. The case of Ford vs GM in the 80's illustrates the point quite well: both companies were struggling in the early eighties, but handled it differently. GM responded with layoffs; Ford opted for salary cuts with an attractive pension. When Ford's business rebounded shortly afterward, it gave the employees back the revenues in the form of bonuses; GM, OTOH, took several years longer than Ford to recover and didn't really get back on track until the end of the decade.
culling the bottom 10 or 20% of performers in order to improve the overall performance of the company.
If someone isn't doing a satisfactory job, they can be fired.
But no matter how many people you lay off, you'll always have someone in the lower 10 to 20 percentile. That's just the way statistics works.
There are a variety of reasons why culling the bottom performers seldom improves the performance of the company as a whole:
Employees typically retain undocumented product knowledge in their heads. Someone with intimate knowledge of the codebase, who wrote the original code and debugged it, can typically turn defects around ten times faster than someone who was not involved in the original product.
Engineers with the lowest rated performance usually get that rating because they are thorough, methodical and diligent. In other words, they keep the poor code the other engineers write from making it into the shipping version. These are not the kind of people you want to fire.
The best performers typically sacrifice aspects of the job which aren't rated in order to achieve that rating. For example, they might write unmaintainable or difficult-to-understand code; may reinvent the wheel; might write code which is far more complicated than needed. While they meet their rated goals, their long term costs may exceed the benefit.
Problems inevitably crop up that require novel solutions. Having a staff with a diversity of skill sets creates an environment where the best tool is used for the job, rather than having to use a single tool for every job, no matter how poorly suited, because the company laid off all employees with "unneeded" skill sets.
There will always be employees in the lower X% no matter how many people are laid off. Typically, there is a 10 to 1 performance ratio between the best and the worst performers. Instead of simply laying off the lowest performing employees, the question should be, "Why such a large discrepancy?" The answers are often illuminating: A.) Office politics; B.) Personality conflicts; C.) Equipment/resource shortages; D.) Problems with the development process; etc... Ignoring the reasons and simply laying off employees often exacerbates the underlying problem.
I've seen management buy into the "layoff the lowest performers" myth far too often to let it go. It is almost always the harbinger of deeper, structural problems within the company, which if left unaddressed, result in the financial collapse of the company. Laying off people - even the worst performers - almost never results in a more efficient company. If you can't fire them for cause, they're more than likely adding value, even if that value isn't being measured by a performance metric. Take that away, and you take away your ability to do business.
It's an Amtrak train from Chicago to Seattle. It passes south of Glacier Bay National park, and the ride is timed to pass the park during daylight (according to the History channel). After seeing the Extreme Trains (History Channel) episode about the Empire Builder, my wife and I were thinking about taking a vacation to the Pacific Northwest via train. The fare wasn't too bad, and we looked forward to not having to drive.
We'll drive now, thank you.
My wife takes pictures everywhere. At any time. Between her and I, we'll shoot anything. And I don't feel like getting my vacation ruined by Amtrak.
This is (at least) the second time Amtrak has done this. I'm not going to reward unconstitutional behavior with my business, and neither should you.
I'm not sure why anyone would choose 2.4 over 2.6, except for cases of legacy support. There have been numerous security issues and improvements which Linus has decided not to backport into 2.4. The notion that 2.6 is too heavyweight for embedded systems is just bunk - it will run rather well on cpus as slow as 40 MHz.
With 2.6, you're going to get the latest drivers, and a lot of important new technologies, especially with regard to things like wifi and USB. While I haven't looked at the Linux A/V architecture recently, IIRC, 2.6 brought a better AV framework than 2.4. (But I don't want to start a flamewar wrt to ALSA/OSS/Whatever, so I'll leave it at that).
One of the persistent frustrations of a pro-life voter such as myself is that the Republican Right will spare no expense prosecuting CP laws, and yet, in spite of their supposed pro-life stance, allow abortion to continue unabated, because in the words of our esteemed President, "America is not ready..."
There's an interesting inversion of moral priorities when killing unborn children is considered a right, but the mere depiction of children in sex acts is an offense punishable by (effectively) life in prison.
The problem is - as I see it - that all too many people would not see the fallacy in the aforementioned argument. You've heard the joke before: Patient: "Doctor, it hurts when I swing my arm this way..."; Doctor: "Well then don't swing your arm that way!" So called common sense is seldom logically correct. Even if there's no actual causal connection between high cholesterol and heart disease, people will still avoid cholesterol in their diets because, (Gomer voice)"Well, what if there is?"
Actually, cholesterol makes a good example of bad science. For more than a decade, medical science has been telling us that a high cholesterol diet causes heart disease. Problem is, though, that the relationship is entirely statistical, rather than causal. It could be that cholesterol consumption is entirely incidental to the problem, and the increase in heart disease is simply the result of lower mortality rates prior to middle age. I have yet to hear a causal explanation of how cholesterol in the diet causes heart disease; this is particularly problematic when one considers that cholesterol is used by the brain, and made by the body. Dietary cholesterol may have no discernible impact on heart disease. But yet, we the public are told that "medical science" is sure of it.
If you can't rid those with scientific credentials of bad thinking, how will you educate the masses?
The middle and dark ages were characterized by a reduction of agricultural output brought about by a worldwide cooling period during the middle ages. It had nothing to do with technology. It had nothing to do with the Church.
End Discovery channel knowledge disclaimer.
I'm not quite sure where this meme of the Church suppressing knowledge comes from. You (all of you) do realize that all of the world's intellectual knowledge resided in the hands of nobility prior to the University system, right? Even during the Greco Roman period, knowledge was not nearly as widely disseminated as it is today; only the priests and nobility were educated, and most people could not even read. It was the Church that preserved the writings of the ancient Greeks. There was no widespread knowledge to suppress.
Science education won't cure the trend. In fact, it will make it worse.
While I'd agree that the problems with confirmation bias are real, science is just as problematic. It is based on the same, "after the fact, therefore because of the fact" logical fallacy which plagues cult believers.
You can use a Windows machine to demonstrate the error of the scientific method:
Windows crashed when I tried to print a document.
Windows did not crash when I was not printing a document.
Therefore, printing documents causes Windows to crash.
The aforementioned bug might really be a hardware fault (random memory error, buggy video driver, etc...), which just coincidentally manifested itself while printing a document. As an engineer, I deal with this sort of thing quite frequently - what the user was doing at the time often had nothing to do with the underlying problem; it was merely a coincidence. Often times, the bug is rather frequent, but is only noticed because the user happens to be paying attention at particular times. Therefore, it gets associated with something completely unrelated. Statistically speaking, there's a correlation. But there isn't any causation.
Even granting that science will often repeat experiments, at best, our "scientific" knowledge only proves the statistical likelihood of the result. (And sadly, now that more sciences are relying on statistics, and more heavily on statistics for explanatory purposes, the underlying mechanism is often left undiscovered. Evolution is a prime example of the problem; yes, we can observe it, but most theories stop short of having explanatory power, and all fall short of having predictive power. Contrast this with physics, or chemistry, which can predict the outcome of moving bodies and chemical reactions with great precision).
Interestingly, there were scientific studies done decades ago that found that people who prayed before major surgery had a higher survival rate and better prognosis post-surgery.
Long story short, provably determining what is real and what is merely imagined is far more difficult than merely applying the scientific method. Given the fact that philosophy has grappled with the question for 2 millenia, and not yet found a solution, I don't think we're going to find the answer on/.. And this is why even obvious crackpots manage to gain traction. Fear is a powerful motivator.
The Linux desktop arrived in 1998 with RedHat 6.0. (Yes, this was before all that RHEL stuff...) With that release, the GUI looked better than Windows and the system was usable by the general public. Installing it still required a fair bit of expertise, but even the Windows 95/98 setup program couldn't/wouldn't repartition or reformat your drive for you. A newbie end user with a blank, non-formatted HD couldn't install either Windows or Linux.
Some years later, Mandrake came out. It was so easy to install that my non-technical brother managed to install it on his machine by himself. I didn't like the lack of build tools, but hey, it was Linux and very user friendly.
And then Ubuntu took its place. It may sound odd, but Windows is now more difficult to install than Linux. I've never had a Linux user ask me "how do I get the activation number"...
Let's face facts: journalists have been hyping, "This is the year of Linux on the ${DEVICE}" for the past decade.
What has really changed? Nothing. Journalists are just as clueless today as they've always been.
I've been using Linux for the past decade, and I've seen the distros go from "Here's some hints on configuring X, good luck!" to "Do you want fancy GUI effects or not?". It has been a mature, solid platform for about ten years now. It has been adopted primarily by people who make informed decisions about their choice of operating system.
The reason why this will never be "The year of Linux on ${DEVICE}" is simply because Linux is already widely used where appropriate. Sure, the desktop might be a lost cause, but this demographic almost never makes a decision about their operating system. The overwhelming majority of desktop users want something which is:
Compatible with everything else, and
Doesn't need to be installed, and
Comes with anti-virus software, or something like that.
To make Linux popular with the Joe-sixpack crowd, you'd have to turn it into something as brain-dead as Windows. You would have to sacrifice the security of the operating system for the sake of providing a familiar idiom - "I want to execute this code automatically when the page loads..." And you'd have to adopt some brain-dead, fischer-price lookalike interface. Is that really what people want Linux to be?
I don't think so. I don't want Linux to sacrifice its good qualities for the sake of being popular. Right now, I have an OS which is secure, stable, easy to use, free, and I'd like to keep it that way.
Unfortunately, enough people are gullible enough to believe you that I feel compelled to respond...
So really quick, during those thousand years when "all intellectual progress in Europe stood still..."
Europe in general was in a period of declining agricultural output, and not surprisingly, was concerned primarily with feeding themselves first.
It withstood repeated invasions by Muslim conquerors on two fronts.
Not to mention a few bouts with the Plague which killed about 1/3 of Europe.
And in spite of the above, the Catholic Church started the University system.
Prior to the Catholic Church establishing the university system, the only way to become educated was to hire a private tutor. Without it, the common man had no possible means of becoming educated without becoming nobility. Interestingly enough, it was the university system which laid the foundation for the Renaissance.
The problem with any law in which criminality is dependent upon the feelings of the victims is that it allows for arbitrary and capricious prosecution. Unlike most criminal laws, which criminalize specific acts (such as robbery, for example), this law allows any exchange of opinions between two people to be turned into a criminal matter should one person feel slighted.
You might think this is extreme, but when a Canadian printer refused to print a flyer because of his moral objections to the content, he was brought before the human rights commission, and fined. How long before:
Boy likes girl. Girl doesn't like boy.
Boy writes love note on girl's MySpace wall.
Girl, embarrassed, rejects boy in a humiliating manner.
Boy attempts suicide.
Girl charged with a federal felony.
This law is a godsend for any geek who wants to get back at that girl who won't have anything to do with him. Or anyone with a vindictive mindset, for that matter.
The legitimacy of the law is suspect when based upon the mere *feelings* of the victim, rather than the actual actions of the perpetrator, are sufficient to induce criminality.
Of interesting note is that companies experienced in drive design - namely, Sony and Nintendo - designed their drives not to scratch the disk if the unit was moved. And that they've been doing this for more than 20 years.
Rather than rely on time tested and proven designs, Microsoft typically comes up with their own novel, seemingly clever reinvention of the wheel. This is but one case in point - optical disk drives which *DO NOT* scratch disks have been made for more than 20 years, and yet, Microsoft can't get it right. Why? Well, because they have this myopic, naive, we-must-invent-everything-ourselves culture.
So what is the end result? That seemingly clever design doesn't seem so clever when subjected to the rigors of the real world. Just like their software, it was designed for a very small range of operating parameters.
IBM can sell a mainframe with half the CPU power of the average desktop for more than a million dollars?
Because Microsoft doesn't support its product for more than six years. That's why.
If Microsoft actually had a clue about what their enterprise customers really needed, they could have run IBM out of business years ago. Instead, they're too worried about cloud computing... whatever that means.
Oppression is the problem. When someone uses their free speech rights to trample the rights of others (i.e. libel, etc...), the problem is not that they have free speech. The problem is always a matter of the actual harm caused by said speech.
Likewise, when people use their anonymity on the internet to hide their crimes against others, the problem is not a matter of anonymity, but rather, the crime committed in the first place. The value of a society where speech is effectively anonymous far outweighs the loss caused by the occasional criminal who uses it to hide from law enforcement.
Before the internet, and even today, one can send hate mail through the postal service *anonymously*. We didn't shut down the Post Office when the Unabomber used it to send bombs to people, instead, the FBI went looking for the perpetrator.
I can't help but wonder if Ted Kazinksi (sp?) would have become an internet troll rather than the Unabomber, had he been born 20 years later.
From time to time, there are people who suggest that we could catch criminals if we eliminated anonymity. They are lying or just plain naive. The fact is, if you remove anonymity from one medium, criminals will use another. Think about that for a moment. Now, in the era of the internet troll, frustrated individuals take out their passions online, rather than sending bombs through the mail. Which would you rather have?
The sheer number of ways to do things in Perl will make grading assignments considerably challenging.
It doesn't complain when your assignment statement creates a new variable (because of a typo) rather than assigning a value to an existing variable. This would trip up young programmers considerably.
$variable and variable are both legal, yet one gets you the value of the variable, and the other, its address. This, too, would confuse inexperienced programmers.
It is often very helpful for a learning programmer to use a debugger. The debuggers for other languages, such as C/C++, Java, etc... are considerably easier to use than Perl's debugger.
I like Perl, but I can't help but wonder if it won't make everyone but the budding geeks hate computer science. It's syntax full of subtle nuances; is difficult to debug; and allows such awful permutations of symbols that the average person is going to think of a computer as something ridiculously complicated and unapproachable.
Look at the transfer efficiency: they're using a 3.6 kW transmitter to power a mere 775 watt load.
At distances beyond ten meters, even steam engines have better efficiency. When you consider the best efficiency they had was 38%, and most power plants are about 33% efficient, they need a considerable improvement for this to be practical. By way of comparison, the typical cable delivery system is about 90% efficient and doesn't have the somewhat undesirable property of setting nearby electronics on fire.
C and C++ may have comparable running speeds, but there are still large differences in certain areas.
The constructor is the bane of the C++ programmer. A simple assignment statement, which in C can be optimized down to a few assembly instructions, can invoke a *few* functions in C++. Often times the problem is not that a C++ compiler generates less efficient code statement-for-statement, but that the object oriented structure of C++ means that programmers often create dozens or even hundreds of objects unnecessarily. Identical coded loops are probably no different between C++ and C, but the problem is that C++ programmers will not write code in the same manner as their C counterparts. They'll create a class and instantiate an object just to compare strings. They'll allocate-and-copy strings instead of parsing them in place. They won't create generic, standalone, reusable functions; instead, they'll subclass whatever class they think they need and add another method.
C does not have the baggage of design patterns and the corresponding anti-patterns. It is a relatively mature language which makes an inefficient program largely a function of poor algorithm selection. While you personally may write efficient C++, on any substantial project you risk inheriting a framework with brain-dead design and awful implementation from which you cannot escape. It is even worse if your organization uses tools like Rational Rose, which allow architects to create large designs with no thought of the amount of code generated or its impact on system performance.
Getting good performance from a C application is largely a matter of choosing the right algorithm and knowing which compiler switches to use.
Getting good performance from a C++ application requires that both the architect and the programmer are cognizant of how the C++ compiler translates statements into machine code. A novice C++ programmer can create very inefficient code simply because they may not be aware of how the underlying classes are implemented. In fact, C++ encourages ignorance of the details, which only further exacerbates the problem.
C can often be optimized well after the fact, where to get good performance from C++ requires that good architectural decisions be made early on. Trust me, you don't want to be the one replacing every String object with a C-style string just before the ship date because the code doesn't run fast enough.
The differences matter more on the embedded side, of course, but generally speaking, only timing critical applications require C. C++ is probably fast enough on today's desktop, and is virtually required for any type of GUI programming these days. It's not a bad language, but it does allow a novice programmer plenty of rope with which to hang himself.
From a libertarian standpoint, what right does the Government have to tell people what to do with their own body? This debate is as much about the power of government as it is about the morality of drug use.
However, there are some angles to the issue which never seem to be discussed:
It seems that a certain percentage of the population cannot handle "recreational use" of drugs, and instead become addicts. With certain, very addicting drugs such as heroin and the variants of cocaine, you have a situation where addicts negatively affect the public at large because of the crimes they commit to support their habit. With other drugs, you have the problem that the individual's behavior while on the drugs presents a public safety hazard. And yet others are used to incapacitate people (GHB) or otherwise impair their judgement (alcohol, various others...) so that crimes may be committed against them (rape, robbery, etc...). If the role of government is to protect the general welfare of society, shouldn't it address the problems created by the availability of drugs?
There seems to be no differentiation between drugs which are relatively benign - such as marijuana - and the harder drugs such as cocaine and heroin. There are some drugs such as alcohol and tobacco which have known detrimental effects and societal costs (cancer, drunk driving, alcoholism) which remain legal in spite of same, and yet marijuana remains illegal.
The practice of civil forfeiture without corresponding criminal charges is especially troubling, now that it will probably (has?) be applied to other areas of the law, such as copyright infringement.
The morality of drug use is almost never mentioned. What kind of society do we have when a substantial portion of the public is content not to work to change the world for the better, but rather, seeks only to escape it? Is it really healthy for society as a whole to seek a chemical solution to what usually amounts to a problem of relationships? Does anyone still make distinctions between using drugs to cope with a legitimate physical ailment and using them to cope with the normal problems of life? Is it even a problem if someone uses a substance, or becomes dependent on a substance, to feel normal?
Is it immoral to sell someone a substance knowing that it will addict them?
If the libertarian view is correct - that a person's free will is sacrosanct, even to the point where government has no right to intervene - then wouldn't it also be incorrect to impair a person's free will? If such is the case, it would seem that addicting drugs would be rightly illegal, because in their addictive property they interfere with the free will of the user.
Do I as a parent have a right to prevent someone else from giving drugs to my child? If not, why?
Do I have a right to live in a neighborhood free of drugs? If a housing association can regulate the height of your lawn and the color of your house for the sake of making the neighborhood presentable, wouldn't they also have the same right to regulate drug use for the same purpose?
Is feeling good a civil right? Or is the "pursuit of happiness" merely a suggestion? (Perhaps it was the metaphorical "pillow talk" that seduced the early Americans into accepting the Constitution?!)
I think the reason why the opponents of the War on Drugs failed is that they never discussed it in terms that ordinary average Americans could relate. They discussed it in terms of dollars, but federal law enforcement spending is truly minuscule compared to things like social security and defense. They talked about it in terms of prison population, when the average person thought simply, "well, I just won't use drugs and won't go to prison..." Instead, they should have framed the debate in terms of individual rights.
That's what the gay movement did, and look where they are now. It seems that Americans don't want the government to mandate morality, and the gay movement capitalized on that. The reason why the War on Drugs lasted so long was because its opponents never pushed the civil rights aspect of it.
I can't help but wonder how (if?) this is going to affect public key cryptography. RSA security is dependent on the difficulty of factoring large primes, and this seems like it would reduce the time required to solve the problem considerably.
Perhaps someone more versed in mathematics can shed some light on this.
So, we compensate for the fact that a generation of computer programmers never learned to check their mallocs or free their memory by making the OS slower?
No wonder people hate Windows.
The simple fact of the matter is that no matter how much virtual memory you have, it is a finite resource, and you really can run out of it. You simply can't access more than 4 GB of RAM with a 32 bit pointer, and while this seems like a lot, it is not much when doing something memory intensive such as video processing. If your app breaks when this happens, the fault lies with the programmer, not the operating system. If programmers had done their part, and handled out of memory conditions correctly, this problem would have taken care of itself. Instead, people blame Windows for being slow. While Windows may be slow, sloppy programmers haven't made things any better.
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Where did you come up with this nonsense?
Honestly, I think you have to live through it to believe it. Not all companies, of course, are like this. But the ones that are get that way because of people like the GP who assume that only the jerks and underperformers get laid off.
I have to admit you got half my point without realizing it. Politics are often a large factor in who gets laid off. The second part of my point was (and to which someone else alluded) that laying off people is no silver bullet. If you don't first understand the nature of your problem, you can't possibly come up with a good solution. Yet time and again we hear management repeat the same old myths, which persist out of ignorance.
Think about it this way: if you're laying off the worst 10% of your workforce, and the worst performers only do ten percent of the best, you're likely to replace them with someone 50% productive, on average. In other words, you've gained a (50 - 10 = 40 %) improvement on 10 percent of your labor force. That's a paltry 4 percent improvement. That's pretty close to the margin of error on most corporate metrics.
In the case where the underperformer is not replaced, you have now simply increased the workload for the remaining workers. Perhaps you can get them to work a little harder - now that they fear their job - or perhaps they'll just get fed up and leave, which will cause even greater problems for the organization as a whole. But while you now save on salary, you have to deal with the fact that your higher performing employees now have greater incentive to leave the company with years of knowledge in their heads. Depending on the industry, you're going to lose six months to perhaps 2 years in ramp up time when business picks up again and you have to hire more people.
In neither case do you get a satisfactory solution for what is essentially a business problem. The case of Ford vs GM in the 80's illustrates the point quite well: both companies were struggling in the early eighties, but handled it differently. GM responded with layoffs; Ford opted for salary cuts with an attractive pension. When Ford's business rebounded shortly afterward, it gave the employees back the revenues in the form of bonuses; GM, OTOH, took several years longer than Ford to recover and didn't really get back on track until the end of the decade.
culling the bottom 10 or 20% of performers in order to improve the overall performance of the company.
If someone isn't doing a satisfactory job, they can be fired.
But no matter how many people you lay off, you'll always have someone in the lower 10 to 20 percentile. That's just the way statistics works.
There are a variety of reasons why culling the bottom performers seldom improves the performance of the company as a whole:
I've seen management buy into the "layoff the lowest performers" myth far too often to let it go. It is almost always the harbinger of deeper, structural problems within the company, which if left unaddressed, result in the financial collapse of the company. Laying off people - even the worst performers - almost never results in a more efficient company. If you can't fire them for cause, they're more than likely adding value, even if that value isn't being measured by a performance metric. Take that away, and you take away your ability to do business.
It's an Amtrak train from Chicago to Seattle. It passes south of Glacier Bay National park, and the ride is timed to pass the park during daylight (according to the History channel). After seeing the Extreme Trains (History Channel) episode about the Empire Builder, my wife and I were thinking about taking a vacation to the Pacific Northwest via train. The fare wasn't too bad, and we looked forward to not having to drive.
We'll drive now, thank you.
My wife takes pictures everywhere. At any time. Between her and I, we'll shoot anything. And I don't feel like getting my vacation ruined by Amtrak.
This is (at least) the second time Amtrak has done this. I'm not going to reward unconstitutional behavior with my business, and neither should you.
I'm not sure why anyone would choose 2.4 over 2.6, except for cases of legacy support. There have been numerous security issues and improvements which Linus has decided not to backport into 2.4. The notion that 2.6 is too heavyweight for embedded systems is just bunk - it will run rather well on cpus as slow as 40 MHz.
With 2.6, you're going to get the latest drivers, and a lot of important new technologies, especially with regard to things like wifi and USB. While I haven't looked at the Linux A/V architecture recently, IIRC, 2.6 brought a better AV framework than 2.4. (But I don't want to start a flamewar wrt to ALSA/OSS/Whatever, so I'll leave it at that).
One of the persistent frustrations of a pro-life voter such as myself is that the Republican Right will spare no expense prosecuting CP laws, and yet, in spite of their supposed pro-life stance, allow abortion to continue unabated, because in the words of our esteemed President, "America is not ready..."
There's an interesting inversion of moral priorities when killing unborn children is considered a right, but the mere depiction of children in sex acts is an offense punishable by (effectively) life in prison.
I can't help but wonder if a "gay gene" were discovered, if parents would use this to "correct" the sexual orientation of their children.
I want someone who is actually capable of doing the job. Tenacity is good for stories, but strength is necessary for survival.
Could it be the reason my ship is in trouble is because an otherwise nominal challenge has become a major crisis for someone who gamed the system?
The problem is - as I see it - that all too many people would not see the fallacy in the aforementioned argument. You've heard the joke before: Patient: "Doctor, it hurts when I swing my arm this way..."; Doctor: "Well then don't swing your arm that way!" So called common sense is seldom logically correct. Even if there's no actual causal connection between high cholesterol and heart disease, people will still avoid cholesterol in their diets because, (Gomer voice)"Well, what if there is?"
Actually, cholesterol makes a good example of bad science. For more than a decade, medical science has been telling us that a high cholesterol diet causes heart disease. Problem is, though, that the relationship is entirely statistical, rather than causal. It could be that cholesterol consumption is entirely incidental to the problem, and the increase in heart disease is simply the result of lower mortality rates prior to middle age. I have yet to hear a causal explanation of how cholesterol in the diet causes heart disease; this is particularly problematic when one considers that cholesterol is used by the brain, and made by the body. Dietary cholesterol may have no discernible impact on heart disease. But yet, we the public are told that "medical science" is sure of it.
If you can't rid those with scientific credentials of bad thinking, how will you educate the masses?
Okay, disclaimer: Discovery channel knowledge here.
The middle and dark ages were characterized by a reduction of agricultural output brought about by a worldwide cooling period during the middle ages. It had nothing to do with technology. It had nothing to do with the Church.
End Discovery channel knowledge disclaimer.
I'm not quite sure where this meme of the Church suppressing knowledge comes from. You (all of you) do realize that all of the world's intellectual knowledge resided in the hands of nobility prior to the University system, right? Even during the Greco Roman period, knowledge was not nearly as widely disseminated as it is today; only the priests and nobility were educated, and most people could not even read. It was the Church that preserved the writings of the ancient Greeks. There was no widespread knowledge to suppress.
Science education won't cure the trend. In fact, it will make it worse.
While I'd agree that the problems with confirmation bias are real, science is just as problematic. It is based on the same, "after the fact, therefore because of the fact" logical fallacy which plagues cult believers.
You can use a Windows machine to demonstrate the error of the scientific method:
The aforementioned bug might really be a hardware fault (random memory error, buggy video driver, etc...), which just coincidentally manifested itself while printing a document. As an engineer, I deal with this sort of thing quite frequently - what the user was doing at the time often had nothing to do with the underlying problem; it was merely a coincidence. Often times, the bug is rather frequent, but is only noticed because the user happens to be paying attention at particular times. Therefore, it gets associated with something completely unrelated. Statistically speaking, there's a correlation. But there isn't any causation.
Even granting that science will often repeat experiments, at best, our "scientific" knowledge only proves the statistical likelihood of the result. (And sadly, now that more sciences are relying on statistics, and more heavily on statistics for explanatory purposes, the underlying mechanism is often left undiscovered. Evolution is a prime example of the problem; yes, we can observe it, but most theories stop short of having explanatory power, and all fall short of having predictive power. Contrast this with physics, or chemistry, which can predict the outcome of moving bodies and chemical reactions with great precision).
Interestingly, there were scientific studies done decades ago that found that people who prayed before major surgery had a higher survival rate and better prognosis post-surgery.
Long story short, provably determining what is real and what is merely imagined is far more difficult than merely applying the scientific method. Given the fact that philosophy has grappled with the question for 2 millenia, and not yet found a solution, I don't think we're going to find the answer on /.. And this is why even obvious crackpots manage to gain traction. Fear is a powerful motivator.
The Linux desktop arrived in 1998 with RedHat 6.0. (Yes, this was before all that RHEL stuff...) With that release, the GUI looked better than Windows and the system was usable by the general public. Installing it still required a fair bit of expertise, but even the Windows 95/98 setup program couldn't/wouldn't repartition or reformat your drive for you. A newbie end user with a blank, non-formatted HD couldn't install either Windows or Linux.
Some years later, Mandrake came out. It was so easy to install that my non-technical brother managed to install it on his machine by himself. I didn't like the lack of build tools, but hey, it was Linux and very user friendly.
And then Ubuntu took its place. It may sound odd, but Windows is now more difficult to install than Linux. I've never had a Linux user ask me "how do I get the activation number"...
Let's face facts: journalists have been hyping, "This is the year of Linux on the ${DEVICE}" for the past decade.
What has really changed? Nothing. Journalists are just as clueless today as they've always been.
I've been using Linux for the past decade, and I've seen the distros go from "Here's some hints on configuring X, good luck!" to "Do you want fancy GUI effects or not?". It has been a mature, solid platform for about ten years now. It has been adopted primarily by people who make informed decisions about their choice of operating system.
The reason why this will never be "The year of Linux on ${DEVICE}" is simply because Linux is already widely used where appropriate. Sure, the desktop might be a lost cause, but this demographic almost never makes a decision about their operating system. The overwhelming majority of desktop users want something which is:
To make Linux popular with the Joe-sixpack crowd, you'd have to turn it into something as brain-dead as Windows. You would have to sacrifice the security of the operating system for the sake of providing a familiar idiom - "I want to execute this code automatically when the page loads..." And you'd have to adopt some brain-dead, fischer-price lookalike interface. Is that really what people want Linux to be?
I don't think so. I don't want Linux to sacrifice its good qualities for the sake of being popular. Right now, I have an OS which is secure, stable, easy to use, free, and I'd like to keep it that way.
Unfortunately, enough people are gullible enough to believe you that I feel compelled to respond...
So really quick, during those thousand years when "all intellectual progress in Europe stood still..."
Prior to the Catholic Church establishing the university system, the only way to become educated was to hire a private tutor. Without it, the common man had no possible means of becoming educated without becoming nobility. Interestingly enough, it was the university system which laid the foundation for the Renaissance.
The problem with any law in which criminality is dependent upon the feelings of the victims is that it allows for arbitrary and capricious prosecution. Unlike most criminal laws, which criminalize specific acts (such as robbery, for example), this law allows any exchange of opinions between two people to be turned into a criminal matter should one person feel slighted.
You might think this is extreme, but when a Canadian printer refused to print a flyer because of his moral objections to the content, he was brought before the human rights commission, and fined. How long before:
This law is a godsend for any geek who wants to get back at that girl who won't have anything to do with him. Or anyone with a vindictive mindset, for that matter.
The legitimacy of the law is suspect when based upon the mere *feelings* of the victim, rather than the actual actions of the perpetrator, are sufficient to induce criminality.
Of interesting note is that companies experienced in drive design - namely, Sony and Nintendo - designed their drives not to scratch the disk if the unit was moved. And that they've been doing this for more than 20 years.
Rather than rely on time tested and proven designs, Microsoft typically comes up with their own novel, seemingly clever reinvention of the wheel. This is but one case in point - optical disk drives which *DO NOT* scratch disks have been made for more than 20 years, and yet, Microsoft can't get it right. Why? Well, because they have this myopic, naive, we-must-invent-everything-ourselves culture.
So what is the end result? That seemingly clever design doesn't seem so clever when subjected to the rigors of the real world. Just like their software, it was designed for a very small range of operating parameters.
In a case like this is for us ALL to send him a letter thanking him for what he's done.
Then the FBI will have millions of contacts to investigate. And you know what? They might just get the picture.
IBM can sell a mainframe with half the CPU power of the average desktop for more than a million dollars?
Because Microsoft doesn't support its product for more than six years. That's why.
If Microsoft actually had a clue about what their enterprise customers really needed, they could have run IBM out of business years ago. Instead, they're too worried about cloud computing... whatever that means.
Freedom is never the problem. It is the solution.
Oppression is the problem. When someone uses their free speech rights to trample the rights of others (i.e. libel, etc...), the problem is not that they have free speech. The problem is always a matter of the actual harm caused by said speech.
Likewise, when people use their anonymity on the internet to hide their crimes against others, the problem is not a matter of anonymity, but rather, the crime committed in the first place. The value of a society where speech is effectively anonymous far outweighs the loss caused by the occasional criminal who uses it to hide from law enforcement.
Before the internet, and even today, one can send hate mail through the postal service *anonymously*. We didn't shut down the Post Office when the Unabomber used it to send bombs to people, instead, the FBI went looking for the perpetrator.
I can't help but wonder if Ted Kazinksi (sp?) would have become an internet troll rather than the Unabomber, had he been born 20 years later.
From time to time, there are people who suggest that we could catch criminals if we eliminated anonymity. They are lying or just plain naive. The fact is, if you remove anonymity from one medium, criminals will use another. Think about that for a moment. Now, in the era of the internet troll, frustrated individuals take out their passions online, rather than sending bombs through the mail. Which would you rather have?
Perl isn't for the beginner:
I like Perl, but I can't help but wonder if it won't make everyone but the budding geeks hate computer science. It's syntax full of subtle nuances; is difficult to debug; and allows such awful permutations of symbols that the average person is going to think of a computer as something ridiculously complicated and unapproachable.
A machine which automatically makes coffee, which powers the programmers who write the code for a machine which automatically makes coffee...
Look at the transfer efficiency: they're using a 3.6 kW transmitter to power a mere 775 watt load.
At distances beyond ten meters, even steam engines have better efficiency. When you consider the best efficiency they had was 38%, and most power plants are about 33% efficient, they need a considerable improvement for this to be practical. By way of comparison, the typical cable delivery system is about 90% efficient and doesn't have the somewhat undesirable property of setting nearby electronics on fire.
C and C++ may have comparable running speeds, but there are still large differences in certain areas.
The differences matter more on the embedded side, of course, but generally speaking, only timing critical applications require C. C++ is probably fast enough on today's desktop, and is virtually required for any type of GUI programming these days. It's not a bad language, but it does allow a novice programmer plenty of rope with which to hang himself.
If someone takes you seriously, there will be a federal prosecutor looking for you. Just ask Lori Drew.
To discuss the war on drugs.
From a libertarian standpoint, what right does the Government have to tell people what to do with their own body? This debate is as much about the power of government as it is about the morality of drug use.
However, there are some angles to the issue which never seem to be discussed:
I think the reason why the opponents of the War on Drugs failed is that they never discussed it in terms that ordinary average Americans could relate. They discussed it in terms of dollars, but federal law enforcement spending is truly minuscule compared to things like social security and defense. They talked about it in terms of prison population, when the average person thought simply, "well, I just won't use drugs and won't go to prison..." Instead, they should have framed the debate in terms of individual rights.
That's what the gay movement did, and look where they are now. It seems that Americans don't want the government to mandate morality, and the gay movement capitalized on that. The reason why the War on Drugs lasted so long was because its opponents never pushed the civil rights aspect of it.
I can't help but wonder how (if?) this is going to affect public key cryptography. RSA security is dependent on the difficulty of factoring large primes, and this seems like it would reduce the time required to solve the problem considerably.
Perhaps someone more versed in mathematics can shed some light on this.
So, we compensate for the fact that a generation of computer programmers never learned to check their mallocs or free their memory by making the OS slower?
No wonder people hate Windows.
The simple fact of the matter is that no matter how much virtual memory you have, it is a finite resource, and you really can run out of it. You simply can't access more than 4 GB of RAM with a 32 bit pointer, and while this seems like a lot, it is not much when doing something memory intensive such as video processing. If your app breaks when this happens, the fault lies with the programmer, not the operating system. If programmers had done their part, and handled out of memory conditions correctly, this problem would have taken care of itself. Instead, people blame Windows for being slow. While Windows may be slow, sloppy programmers haven't made things any better.