IFF isn't perfect, of course, as we found out in Desert Storm (where about half our combat deaths were from friendly fire -- and having been a medic over there, I have pretty strong feelings about that) and are currently finding out in Afghanistan, where the problem of a very high-tech air force working in coalition with a very low-tech ground force has led to some really tragic fuckups. The best protection against friendly fire deaths is still rigorous training in how to distinguish friend from foe using the Eyeball Mark I.
Well, yeah, Rama was an info-dump, not a novel. But works like The City and the Stars and Fountains of Paradise (if I'm remembering the titles right -- it's been a while) are masterpieces of style as well as of ideas. And his short stories, which are numerous, tend to be even better than his novels.
As for FW not stacking up well against later variations on the theme... well, I honestly can't think of any works along those lines I've enjoyed as much. I'm fond of David Drake's work, but it's very different in tone from Haldeman's, and he's not the stylist Haldeman is by any means.
No, it's not too trivial. Sounds like a great idea to me. Actually, I could see the use of a number of codebases to help people escape from ASP: one for Perl, one for PHP, one for JSP, etc....
Um... what you may not realize is that The Forever War was the first "Vietnam-era 'fighting-a-pointless-war' thing" to be done in SF, and for that matter one of the first significant Vietnam novels in any genre. Haldeman wrote it just a couple of years after he came home, and his tour of duty was one of the worst I've ever heard of.
As for "lousy execution"... I can understand your criticism of the prose styles of Asimov, Bova, Bear, and Crichton, but if you really think Haldeman and Clarke are "crap at writing," then I have to wonder what writers you consider good stylists. Haldeman, particularly, writes with grace and precision which other writers in all genres would do well to emulate.
One can hope, yes. There's even a screenplay, which IIRC covers both Emerald Eyes and The Long Run, which has the distinct advantage of having been written by the author of the books. I don't know if there are any current plans for production, though. Check out QueenOfAngels.com for the latest DKM info, if you don't know about the site already.
The Army used to have something like the two-track idea built into the enlisted rank structure. There's a relic of it in the modern rank of Specialist (E-4) but once upon a time, there were Spec-4's, Spec-5's, etc. -- I believe it went all the way of to Spec-7, which is the E-7 pay grade, equivalent to Seargeant First Class. So you'd have, for example, a Spec-7 who was in charge of company communications, which meant he was running a shop of five people or so (most of them Specialists of lower grades) while the SFC's were platoon sergeants and the like, which put them in charge of 40+ people, but they got paid the same. The idea was to recognize that technical skill and field leadership were both worthy of decent pay.
They started getting rid of that system some time in the late Seventies or early Eighties, I believe, mainly to clear up any confusion over rank precedence -- e.g., if you've got an emergency and there are no officers around, who takes charge, a Sergeant (E-5) or a Spec-6? The answer was "it depends," and that's the kind of answer with which militaries are very uncomfortable.
However, in my time in (two years Army infantry, eight years Air Force medic) I saw that realistically such a structure still exists. In technical fields such as communications and medicine, especially, there are a lot of high-ranking people (both enlisted and officers) who don't actually have many (or any) people directly under their command -- but they're very good at their jobs, and the service recognizes that and rewards them with promotion. It works out pretty well all in all.
Dogbert's corollary to the Peter Principle: most people in management were never competent at anything to begin with. That satisfies my cynical side, but in the real world, of course, you get a mixture of both -- as well as those more-precious-than-rubies managers who were really good at the grunt work and are good managers as well.
Perhaps a better (but still simplistic) formula is per capita GNP X number of people.
Um... I think I'm just going to let that statement sit out there all by its lonesome, without any additional commentary whatsoever. Nope. Nothing to add to that one at all, folks.
What Spencerian Said. I've been an ADC student member for some time and I think it's worth every penny -- I got a big (one-time) discount on a new Mac, and I get the latest releases of the OS almost as soon as they come out, which easily pays the cost of membership and then some. OTOH, the regular (non-student) membership is pretty expensive, and probably only worth it if you're doing professional Mac development.
I'm in agreement with most of what you say, but...
Brains do not store any hard-coded information, they just adapt
That's a pretty ambitious statement, and one that strikes me as more dogmatic than scientific. The human brain is the product of millions of years of evolution to fit a specific (Terrestrial) environment -- isn't it reasonable to believe that some of the necessary responses to that environment might be built in?
Tangentially, I'll note that in general, psychologists and anthropologists have for some years now been moving away from the old dogma of "humans don't have any instincts" toward a more balanced acknowledgement that yes, humans do have instincts, but the way we express those instincts is determined by learned behavior.
Most ppl wouldn't touch their fuel injectors in their vehicle, but it is common for someone (even those that don't build their own system) to switch things such as printers, CD-ROMs, CD-RWs, and DVD-ROMs...even adding memory and harddrives.
Um... no it's not. The vast majority of home computer users have never opened up their cases and never will. Businesses may be a little more likely to upgrade, but these days it seems they're more likely to buy new machines and sell the old ones to employees, or donate the old machines to local schools for a tax writeoff, or whatever.
The car analogy is a nearly exact one in this case. People who upgrade their own processor or replace a CD-ROM with a CD-RW at home are the "shadetree mechanics" of the computer world, equivalent to car owners who will put in a new exhaust system to get some extra horsepower. Far more common are those who will take their [cars / computers] into a dealer for [a new set of performance tires / installation of more RAM]. But both groups are vastly outnumbered by those who use the machine until it breaks down or is rendered obsolete, and then buy a new one.
Actually, my problem has always been writing too much, not too little. When I'm writing something with a specified word count, I usually write what I'm going to write, realize it's ~20% too long, and end up going back and trimming it down.
You're right. A program is not like a math exam. It is, however, a great deal like a math paper, much more than it is like an English paper. This is one reason why good computer science curriculums include a heavy math component, including upper-division courses where the emphasis is on expressing solutions to problems well, rather than just solving them. Perhaps the highest praise one mathematician can give another's work is to call it elegant; the same, I believe, applies to programming (which is really, still, a branch of mathematics.) Elegant code is the best measure of productivity -- and note that while elegance and conciseness often go together, they are not the same thing.
If, however, Microsoft are severely penalised, the IT industry is very likely to decline, as there is at the moment a large dependency on Microsoft in the IT industry. And there is no point denying it.
The IT industry is dependent on people's needs for IT. If you need to move information around efficiently, you need IT to do it, and these days every business, from banking to agriculture, needs to do just that. (The dot-bomb showed us that just moving information around isn't enough to have a successful business, but I think hardly anyone would argue seriously against the proposition that it is a prerequisite for success.) Whether you do that information-moving with Microsoft products or with some other kind of software has no real effect on the demand for movement of information.
Therefore, any penalties imposed on Microsoft will not harm the IT industry as a whole. If the demand for MCSE's and other Microsoft-dependent drones declines, it will be matched by a rising demand for people who know other OS's and applications. In the short run, I see no reason to weep over Microsoft lackeys getting fewer jobs while people with broader-based computer science education and experience get more jobs (which would be a welcome reversal of current trends.) In the long run, of course, Microsoft being nuked would increase innovation and quality in IT as a whole, and so be good for everybody. In short, whether you know it or not, all you're doing is repeating M$ FUD when you claim that a severe penalty in this case would have any major negative effect whatsoever.
This one's easily answered. This "article" really isn't an article -- unless I'm seriously missing something, it's an ad for their own cert programs. Since they don't offer Oracle certs, they put them way at the end in the "other" category. This is pure ad copy.
Oh, I would so dearly love to see spammers prosecuted for breach of contract if they can't show in court that their products really do make you lose weight, increase your penis size, get rich quick, etc., etc... Aggressive enforcement in the US and other countries (and I think just about every civilized country has breach-of-contract laws) would probably reduce spam volume to nearly zero in a matter of months.
Well, anyway. What I mentioned in my story submission, and what's most fascinating to me about this, is what it might mean for the future. This is the way the Shuttle was originally supposed to be built, remember: a fully reusable booster stage, basically a really big plane, that would carry the orbiter up ~50 miles, at which point the orbiter's engines would kick in and take it the rest of the way, with the booster flying back to Earth and loaded up for the next launch. It was classic penny-wise, pound-foolish budget cuts that saddled us with the current hybrid mess.
So this could act as proof-of-concept for such a thing -- if they can build it cheaply enough for the tourist trade, they can build a bigger, orbital model to do the sorts of things the Shuttle does now at a much lower cost. Also, a bigger version of the current sub-orbital craft, if turned out assembly-line style, might achieve the economies of scale necessary for commercial travel. London to Tokyo in a couple of hours...
It's just a Web site review, no more and no less. Lighten up. Somehow I suspect that if the exact same port had been written by someone other than Jon Katz, you would have nothing to say. All you Katz-haters out there: if you don't like the guy's stories, don't read them.
I doubt a 40-meter meteor would burn much, relative to its size, on the way down.
I hate to say it, but an impact from one of these "small" rocks might be a good thing. Get a nuke-size detonation (I'm guessing a 40-meter rock would be a Hiroshima-equivalent?), preferably but not necessarily in an unpopulated area, and the world's governments might wake the fuck up to how serious the danger is, and the fact that an active space program that doesn't have to plan its launches months in advance is our best defense.
DU rounds go through tank armor better than any previous type of armor-piercing round. I'm not sure of the physics behind it (my gut tells me that momentum, m * v, is at least as important as kinetic energy,.5 * m * v^2, in getting through armor) but empirically, the best way to build an armor-piercing round is with a very hard (e.g. tungsten carbide) penetrator tip and something very dense (e.g. depleted uranium) behind it. Being a medic, I got enough up-close-and-personal views of vehicles (and buildings, some of them quite solidly built) that had been hit with DU rounds during Desert Storm to be quite sure that DU isn't just a sales gimmick. Fortunately I haven't had any kidney or other health problems.
Um, how many farmers do you know? When I was working at a rural ER in North Dakota, we saw an unbelievable number of injuries caused by farmers getting anew peice of equipment, looking at it and saying, "Well, it pretty much looks like the old one," taking off all the safety equipment, and going straight to work... IIRC, farming is now the most dangerous occupation in the US, riskier than mining, construction, or other traditionally high-risk jobs like working at the post office.;)
I don't understand why it wouldn't; if they can make a chemical bomb that penetrates that much stuff and functions, I'm sure a fission device could. The physics of the impact would be the same, but the required explosive payload would be smaller for the fission device.
Because modern conventional explosives are incredibly sturdy: you can bang on them with hammers, light them on fire, etc. and they won't go off, but even after major abuse, they'll still detonate reliably if the right stimulus is applied. In contrast, nukes are delicate, tricky beasts: abuse them too much before detonation and you won't get a yield, or worse, you'll get a low yield and incredible amounts of fallout. Basically, nukes are mechanical devices; conventional bombs are solid-state.
This is a nit, but I've got to pick it: Clinton was impeached. "Impeachment" is what happens when the House votes articles of impeachment (which they did) and brings someone to trial before the Senate (which they also did.) What didn't happen in Clinton's case (nor in the case of Andrew Johnson, the only other President ever to go through the full impeachment process) was conviction -- i.e., a guilty vote by the Senate, followed by removal from office of the guilty party. Clinton, like Johnson, was narrowly found not guilty.
The case of Nixon is a little more complex, since, IIRC, the House did vote articles of impeachment, but he resigned before he could be brought to trial before the Senate. I'm not sure if you could say he was impeached or not.
The difference is that private companies that shoot themselves in the foot to that extent are the exception while for government agencies (and monopolies) it's the rule.
I'm sorry, that's dogma, not fact. The fact is that when it comes to privatization of things that are properly government responsibilities (transportation, education, defense, law enforcement) foot-shooting is the rule, not the exception, and has been ever since Rome started hiring mercenaries because they would "do the same job at a lower cost" compared to the once-great Roman army. The cult of privatization ignores history in its attempt to divert our tax dollars into the pockets of corrupt fast-talkers who do a shitty job and pay themselves many times what any government bureaucrat makes.
Slashdot Mirror
IFF isn't perfect, of course, as we found out in Desert Storm (where about half our combat deaths were from friendly fire -- and having been a medic over there, I have pretty strong feelings about that) and are currently finding out in Afghanistan, where the problem of a very high-tech air force working in coalition with a very low-tech ground force has led to some really tragic fuckups. The best protection against friendly fire deaths is still rigorous training in how to distinguish friend from foe using the Eyeball Mark I.
Well, yeah, Rama was an info-dump, not a novel. But works like The City and the Stars and Fountains of Paradise (if I'm remembering the titles right -- it's been a while) are masterpieces of style as well as of ideas. And his short stories, which are numerous, tend to be even better than his novels.
... well, I honestly can't think of any works along those lines I've enjoyed as much. I'm fond of David Drake's work, but it's very different in tone from Haldeman's, and he's not the stylist Haldeman is by any means.
As for FW not stacking up well against later variations on the theme
No, it's not too trivial. Sounds like a great idea to me. Actually, I could see the use of a number of codebases to help people escape from ASP: one for Perl, one for PHP, one for JSP, etc. ...
Um ... what you may not realize is that The Forever War was the first "Vietnam-era 'fighting-a-pointless-war' thing" to be done in SF, and for that matter one of the first significant Vietnam novels in any genre. Haldeman wrote it just a couple of years after he came home, and his tour of duty was one of the worst I've ever heard of.
... I can understand your criticism of the prose styles of Asimov, Bova, Bear, and Crichton, but if you really think Haldeman and Clarke are "crap at writing," then I have to wonder what writers you consider good stylists. Haldeman, particularly, writes with grace and precision which other writers in all genres would do well to emulate.
As for "lousy execution"
One can hope, yes. There's even a screenplay, which IIRC covers both Emerald Eyes and The Long Run, which has the distinct advantage of having been written by the author of the books. I don't know if there are any current plans for production, though. Check out QueenOfAngels.com for the latest DKM info, if you don't know about the site already.
The Army used to have something like the two-track idea built into the enlisted rank structure. There's a relic of it in the modern rank of Specialist (E-4) but once upon a time, there were Spec-4's, Spec-5's, etc. -- I believe it went all the way of to Spec-7, which is the E-7 pay grade, equivalent to Seargeant First Class. So you'd have, for example, a Spec-7 who was in charge of company communications, which meant he was running a shop of five people or so (most of them Specialists of lower grades) while the SFC's were platoon sergeants and the like, which put them in charge of 40+ people, but they got paid the same. The idea was to recognize that technical skill and field leadership were both worthy of decent pay.
They started getting rid of that system some time in the late Seventies or early Eighties, I believe, mainly to clear up any confusion over rank precedence -- e.g., if you've got an emergency and there are no officers around, who takes charge, a Sergeant (E-5) or a Spec-6? The answer was "it depends," and that's the kind of answer with which militaries are very uncomfortable.
However, in my time in (two years Army infantry, eight years Air Force medic) I saw that realistically such a structure still exists. In technical fields such as communications and medicine, especially, there are a lot of high-ranking people (both enlisted and officers) who don't actually have many (or any) people directly under their command -- but they're very good at their jobs, and the service recognizes that and rewards them with promotion. It works out pretty well all in all.
Dogbert's corollary to the Peter Principle: most people in management were never competent at anything to begin with. That satisfies my cynical side, but in the real world, of course, you get a mixture of both -- as well as those more-precious-than-rubies managers who were really good at the grunt work and are good managers as well.
Um ... I think I'm just going to let that statement sit out there all by its lonesome, without any additional commentary whatsoever. Nope. Nothing to add to that one at all, folks.
What Spencerian Said. I've been an ADC student member for some time and I think it's worth every penny -- I got a big (one-time) discount on a new Mac, and I get the latest releases of the OS almost as soon as they come out, which easily pays the cost of membership and then some. OTOH, the regular (non-student) membership is pretty expensive, and probably only worth it if you're doing professional Mac development.
I'm in agreement with most of what you say, but ...
That's a pretty ambitious statement, and one that strikes me as more dogmatic than scientific. The human brain is the product of millions of years of evolution to fit a specific (Terrestrial) environment -- isn't it reasonable to believe that some of the necessary responses to that environment might be built in?
Tangentially, I'll note that in general, psychologists and anthropologists have for some years now been moving away from the old dogma of "humans don't have any instincts" toward a more balanced acknowledgement that yes, humans do have instincts, but the way we express those instincts is determined by learned behavior.
Um ... no it's not. The vast majority of home computer users have never opened up their cases and never will. Businesses may be a little more likely to upgrade, but these days it seems they're more likely to buy new machines and sell the old ones to employees, or donate the old machines to local schools for a tax writeoff, or whatever.
The car analogy is a nearly exact one in this case. People who upgrade their own processor or replace a CD-ROM with a CD-RW at home are the "shadetree mechanics" of the computer world, equivalent to car owners who will put in a new exhaust system to get some extra horsepower. Far more common are those who will take their [cars / computers] into a dealer for [a new set of performance tires / installation of more RAM]. But both groups are vastly outnumbered by those who use the machine until it breaks down or is rendered obsolete, and then buy a new one.
:)
Actually, my problem has always been writing too much, not too little. When I'm writing something with a specified word count, I usually write what I'm going to write, realize it's ~20% too long, and end up going back and trimming it down.
You're right. A program is not like a math exam. It is, however, a great deal like a math paper, much more than it is like an English paper. This is one reason why good computer science curriculums include a heavy math component, including upper-division courses where the emphasis is on expressing solutions to problems well, rather than just solving them. Perhaps the highest praise one mathematician can give another's work is to call it elegant; the same, I believe, applies to programming (which is really, still, a branch of mathematics.) Elegant code is the best measure of productivity -- and note that while elegance and conciseness often go together, they are not the same thing.
The IT industry is dependent on people's needs for IT. If you need to move information around efficiently, you need IT to do it, and these days every business, from banking to agriculture, needs to do just that. (The dot-bomb showed us that just moving information around isn't enough to have a successful business, but I think hardly anyone would argue seriously against the proposition that it is a prerequisite for success.) Whether you do that information-moving with Microsoft products or with some other kind of software has no real effect on the demand for movement of information.
Therefore, any penalties imposed on Microsoft will not harm the IT industry as a whole. If the demand for MCSE's and other Microsoft-dependent drones declines, it will be matched by a rising demand for people who know other OS's and applications. In the short run, I see no reason to weep over Microsoft lackeys getting fewer jobs while people with broader-based computer science education and experience get more jobs (which would be a welcome reversal of current trends.) In the long run, of course, Microsoft being nuked would increase innovation and quality in IT as a whole, and so be good for everybody. In short, whether you know it or not, all you're doing is repeating M$ FUD when you claim that a severe penalty in this case would have any major negative effect whatsoever.
This one's easily answered. This "article" really isn't an article -- unless I'm seriously missing something, it's an ad for their own cert programs. Since they don't offer Oracle certs, they put them way at the end in the "other" category. This is pure ad copy.
Oh, I would so dearly love to see spammers prosecuted for breach of contract if they can't show in court that their products really do make you lose weight, increase your penis size, get rich quick, etc., etc ... Aggressive enforcement in the US and other countries (and I think just about every civilized country has breach-of-contract laws) would probably reduce spam volume to nearly zero in a matter of months.
[sigh]* 2002-03-14 23:15:39 Russian tourist mini-shuttle (articles,space) (rejected)[/sigh]
...
Well, anyway. What I mentioned in my story submission, and what's most fascinating to me about this, is what it might mean for the future. This is the way the Shuttle was originally supposed to be built, remember: a fully reusable booster stage, basically a really big plane, that would carry the orbiter up ~50 miles, at which point the orbiter's engines would kick in and take it the rest of the way, with the booster flying back to Earth and loaded up for the next launch. It was classic penny-wise, pound-foolish budget cuts that saddled us with the current hybrid mess.
So this could act as proof-of-concept for such a thing -- if they can build it cheaply enough for the tourist trade, they can build a bigger, orbital model to do the sorts of things the Shuttle does now at a much lower cost. Also, a bigger version of the current sub-orbital craft, if turned out assembly-line style, might achieve the economies of scale necessary for commercial travel. London to Tokyo in a couple of hours
Oops. "Post," not "port," above. My bad.
It's just a Web site review, no more and no less. Lighten up. Somehow I suspect that if the exact same port had been written by someone other than Jon Katz, you would have nothing to say. All you Katz-haters out there: if you don't like the guy's stories, don't read them.
I doubt a 40-meter meteor would burn much, relative to its size, on the way down.
I hate to say it, but an impact from one of these "small" rocks might be a good thing. Get a nuke-size detonation (I'm guessing a 40-meter rock would be a Hiroshima-equivalent?), preferably but not necessarily in an unpopulated area, and the world's governments might wake the fuck up to how serious the danger is, and the fact that an active space program that doesn't have to plan its launches months in advance is our best defense.
DU rounds go through tank armor better than any previous type of armor-piercing round. I'm not sure of the physics behind it (my gut tells me that momentum, m * v, is at least as important as kinetic energy, .5 * m * v^2, in getting through armor) but empirically, the best way to build an armor-piercing round is with a very hard (e.g. tungsten carbide) penetrator tip and something very dense (e.g. depleted uranium) behind it. Being a medic, I got enough up-close-and-personal views of vehicles (and buildings, some of them quite solidly built) that had been hit with DU rounds during Desert Storm to be quite sure that DU isn't just a sales gimmick. Fortunately I haven't had any kidney or other health problems.
Um, how many farmers do you know? When I was working at a rural ER in North Dakota, we saw an unbelievable number of injuries caused by farmers getting anew peice of equipment, looking at it and saying, "Well, it pretty much looks like the old one," taking off all the safety equipment, and going straight to work ... IIRC, farming is now the most dangerous occupation in the US, riskier than mining, construction, or other traditionally high-risk jobs like working at the post office. ;)
Because modern conventional explosives are incredibly sturdy: you can bang on them with hammers, light them on fire, etc. and they won't go off, but even after major abuse, they'll still detonate reliably if the right stimulus is applied. In contrast, nukes are delicate, tricky beasts: abuse them too much before detonation and you won't get a yield, or worse, you'll get a low yield and incredible amounts of fallout. Basically, nukes are mechanical devices; conventional bombs are solid-state.
This is a nit, but I've got to pick it: Clinton was impeached. "Impeachment" is what happens when the House votes articles of impeachment (which they did) and brings someone to trial before the Senate (which they also did.) What didn't happen in Clinton's case (nor in the case of Andrew Johnson, the only other President ever to go through the full impeachment process) was conviction -- i.e., a guilty vote by the Senate, followed by removal from office of the guilty party. Clinton, like Johnson, was narrowly found not guilty.
The case of Nixon is a little more complex, since, IIRC, the House did vote articles of impeachment, but he resigned before he could be brought to trial before the Senate. I'm not sure if you could say he was impeached or not.
I'm sorry, that's dogma, not fact. The fact is that when it comes to privatization of things that are properly government responsibilities (transportation, education, defense, law enforcement) foot-shooting is the rule, not the exception, and has been ever since Rome started hiring mercenaries because they would "do the same job at a lower cost" compared to the once-great Roman army. The cult of privatization ignores history in its attempt to divert our tax dollars into the pockets of corrupt fast-talkers who do a shitty job and pay themselves many times what any government bureaucrat makes.