It really hit home a number of years ago just after the 1Ghz mark was broken and was trickling down to the low-end price range. I was still on a 333mhz laptop and happy. My mother bought a shiny new 1ghz computer with 512mb of RAM and I was shocked! Who needed so much processing power just to chat on the Internet, play solitaire, and read webmail?
I was doing far more with my ancient and conservative machine by comparison.
Some 5 or 6 years later the only thing that has changed is that the software requirements continue to grow and so does that hardware. What I actually use them both for has remained much the same. Aside from 3D applications, graphics processing, and real-time DSP; what benefits do these huge powerful machines really provide to users like my mom or the office secretary or joe account manager?
It's because Gecko has XUL and has an open development model.
Webkit has a nice lean code-base, but gives up flexibility. It's "open sourceness" is somewhat closed on the Apple side -- bugs will disappear into their proprietary tracker and patches will be released without community discussion.
XUL is IMO, the best reason to keep Gecko. I loves my extensions and refuse to use a browser that doesn't implement the features they give me in some way.
Having bought over 20 cartridges, I am definitely jealous of R4 owners.
All these cartridges and their packaging are either going to horde space in my closets for the rest of my life or end up in a garbage dump one day. The R4 solves that problem and makes the device more convenient and valuable. No more shuffling through pockets and no more bulky packaging.
The R4 clearly makes carts unnecessary and shows that DS owners don't want them. A download service akin to Steam would be so much better and retailers could still get a piece with in-store kiosks for those unfortunate souls without wireless Internet access or credit cards.
Follow the demand -- stop suppressing new technology simply because it changes your business.
I find TED nauseous and fake: it peddles "appropriate" technology that only a junior-high-school-dropout housewife would find interesting.
"The little heater with an AA rechargeable battery in it for the fan, that you recharge at the local solar panel" -- for God's sake, do you know how many times the income of the people that are the target of this shit do those solar panels cost ?
How about dropping farm subsidies and giving them a chance to sell their food ?
I agree that there are political barriers that would probably do more for these people than commodity tech items.
It's an economic problem, not a technological one. Yet.
Get rid of subsidies, forgive their debts, and open free trade with them. For countries that need it, open up an exchange program that gives a certain number of students the chance to receive a free education abroad on the condition that they teach when they get back home. Those "poor countries," can take it from there and will probably surprise the world with their ingenuity.
Learning new things is addictive and is never a waste.
Language is particularly useful as it gives your brain cells more interconnections as you use different words, idioms, and concepts for the world around you.
I'm currently learning Japanese for my upcoming trip to Tokyo -- it's a really fun excercise and is keeping me sharp for other mental activities (ie: i'm also reading up on 3d math fundamentals and computer vision stuff and some martial arts texts).
It does however, take a little discipline to maintain since it's unlikely that one would use their non-native tongue in every-day use.
The benefits of a standard toolset are unlikely to realize any real gains even in the long term.
Even standardizing on which VCS to use is really a moot point. Just pick one for the central repository. If the dev is more efficient in mercurial than subversion; there are scripts to convert between the two transparently.
It's the product that matters. Follow the path of least resistance when it comes to productivity. Laziness is a virtue.
Presumably, the only real requirement Google's App Engine requires of applications that run on it is that they speak CGI.
From there, one can choose to use the APIs they provide to their persistence layers and other services -- or not.
Assuming one can abstract out the implementation details of those APIs in their application's framework, then it should be possible to make the application code portable. Extracting the data means you'll have to write a quick script to back it all up -- which one would be doing anyway whether they were storing data in a MySQL database or the file-system.
It seems like heavy lifting to emulate the App Engine SDK on an EC2 container. Neat, but practical? Meh.
At least it shows that App Engine applications aren't "locked-in," in a rather obtuse way.
It sounds like you've got a hammer and look at everything as nails.
You might want to take a trip outside your ivory tower.
Synonyms happen to be a way of abstracting complexity out of the language used so that laypersons can understand, or at least talk about, the concepts and such that we "glorified engineers" use. It's really so the marketing guys have something to sell other than "eigenvalue calculation."
I suppose its beneath you, but average people should be able to have a chance at grasping what we do; even if its not in its most pure and exact form. It doesn't mean that we "engineers," are all ignorant of the actual mathematical terms. It just means we have to adopt language to deal with people who are involved with the product of our endeavors who may not understand what statistical inference means, but can at least grasp the idea by using the term, "machine learning."
It comes with little surprise to me and is just one of the many reasons why I never went to university or any such institution.
The socratic and aristotlean concepts of college were built on the ideas of collaboration.
Somewhere along the lines, the catholics turned it into a monastic institution: a teacher sits at the front of the class and espouses the word of God. A one-way stream of information. One simply makes notes, writes the test, and goes out into the world to do more of the same.
It's sad that this became the standard for education today. Knowledge isn't gained by learning how to jump through hoops. It's learned in discussion and collaboration. Encouragement and inspiration were never found on the sheet of an exam.
Students inspired enough to start a study group together should be encouraged and led in the right directions by a sympathetic faculty of experienced teachers.
Engineering software for specialized systems means the software is written for a fixed hardware/OS specification.
Writing robust cross-platform code is possible, and the principles used to develop robust software should always be applied where practical; but in the end, there are an enormous number of factors which will reduce that 99.999% uptime. Innumerable hardware configurations and components of ranging quality; operating systems, drivers, and libraries that may or may not be included, corrupt, or unreliable. If you write cross-platform code for desktop applications, you deserve a commendation and medal of honour for writing software that does not crash.
In theory, server or web applications should be exempt from the troubles of desktop software -- the hardware spec hopefully doesn't change much and one would probably be targeting a single OS. However, like many things, there are a lot of factors.
As for telcos and the like -- I wish it was regulated. For the amount of money they suck out of me I get an incredible amount of dropped calls, garbled text messages, and other service problems. It is incredibly infuriating, but I find most modern urban people tend to be rather apathetic. They know it happens, but don't really care -- after all, it's not like anyone can do anything about it.
Okay, so applying the principles of engineering to software development is a good thing -- but what does it mean and where should I start?
I found the article a little hard to follow -- it didn't really lead me anywhere. The author pointed out this esoteric concept of the "bottom-up" approach which Feynmann believed was important; but the author failed to show me how he thought it would apply to software development. I only understood that we should apply it. I never really read in the article what this approach is and how to apply it to my practice of software development.
The article did well to point out the short-comings of software developers who did not take this approach, but it lacked the evidence to explain and support the author's theory.
The links he pointed to were more or less the same. I'm rather spell-bound by this. Am I to believe that the author's intent was to tell us that we should all think of software development as he does? Is that what will turn software development into the utopia thought it should be?
I do not disagree with the premise of the article; I just wish proponents of it were more clear in the practical application of their theory.
Afterall, that's the goal of engineering, is it not?
I don't understand why any tech-savvy early adopter would be dying to lock into a platform. The companies are just as hungry for users to use their platform. I'm guessing it's all to lock in ad-revenue or mind-share or some other sinister corporate plan. It's too bad that the Internet used to be about open-communication. RFC's people! RFC's!! (I'm a big fan of the mention another poster made to the "dusty old RFC" that already solved this problem back in the 80's).
Social networking is dangerous to personal security. It's more about who you know, and sometimes we get involved with scrupulous parties that are not in-favor with the current dominant social circles. How long until creditors, government agencies, and employers exploit social networks online?
If one wishes to maintain a public network and a private one, that's there prerogative and is certainly maintainable. However, imagine a hypothetical situation where someone in that network gets flagged as a bad-apple by some institution. Would it be possible that policies at said institution may flag you as a bad-apple by association?
It's still in beta, but from my experience so far, it's quite fun. You basically roleplay a forum archetype. Massively-single-player-online-game. It's the next big acronym.
Mathematics for the Non-Mathematician is a good book for liberal-arts types. Written be Morris Kline, professor emeritus at NYU; it's a great book that takes one through the development of the mathematical world via a cultural and historical context. I find the extra information helps me retain the knowledge.
Along with knowing why and what you want to know, being aware of how you learn things and honest about it will go a long way.
Math is really awesome, and it's a shame that it is taught so mechanically in elementary school.
Cheers.
vim + subversion + sdiff.. and a whole host of other nifty fsf/oss tools. more code, fewer gui distractions, better source control than plain ftp.
Then again, discount webhosts don't often give users access to their own subversion repos... rsync could probably help there.
Plus, why does anyone want to wait 20+ seconds to load their editor? I can get all the features and more in vim and it loads in a second or less. Plus no need to use my mouse.
Then again, I'm a mouse/gui hating keyboard junkie.;)
Time and again it's been proven that one can never "erase" anything or "ban" anything from the Internet. There's no way around that. When will the media and big companies start dealing with that? Another 20 years down the road maybe?
People have already suggested speaking with authority, etc
One up in a similar vein: don't trust the opinions and assumptions of others. Your response is the correct one. As long as your audience doesn't have a false sense of power (ie: project managers that think they understand your job), such a stance will generally garner you a considerable amount of respect from your colleagues.
Of course, it's a risky proposition -- in order for it to be right, you have to be right almost all of the time. Being an opportunistic team player however can deflect any accusations from the occasional slip. Your more sensitive colleagues may also pick up on this sort of behavior and either garner a strong dislike of you or become totally cowed.
There's a good and a bad with everything.
In the end, it's about presence. Make suggestions, even make suggestions that are really just decisions disguised in such a way. It'll make them feel like they know what they're doing and in the end you can take the ego-stroking when they realize how amazing you are to have around.
... cause then Microsloth would be one step closer to wiping out web standards and all the good work Yahoo! has put into the web development community.
Buy your way to the top!
No greater an illusion.
Like buying your search ranking or myspace friends.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/
Is this the only company out there that "gets it?"
I work at an agency where all of the front-end developers still target browsers. They completely miss the point that HTML/CSS is a specification they should be targeting, not the end-render by some crappy browser (*cough*IE*cough*).
I develop all my front-end work to spec and guess what? It's not a herculean task to make a page work in IE. It's a quirky user-agent for sure and some of my sites won't be pixel-perfect across all browsers; but they'll still visually look consistent and more importantly be accessible by all user-agents that support the spec I targeted. It also adds a little bit of future-proofing... user-agents change versions with the times, but can look back in history and support older versions of the spec.
So why force people to using a particular browser? Well... either your company has some affiliation with MS in some way or your developers aren't fully educated web developers.
I never use IE. Ever. I totally feel for those posters who were forced to by circumstance.
When I was in high-school, I was bullied a lot. The main problem I faced was that there were so many people participating in it that they got away unpunished for everything; from vandalizing my vehicle to sending me on a trip to the hospital. A friend of mine was put in a coma and nearly paralyzed. The police themselves said they couldn't do anything about it unless they could get names... and even then, the deliberation involved in actually seeking punishment usually results in inaction.
I learned a lot from that experience, but almost didn't get the chance to. I wouldn't say I have PTSD, but I still wake up from some startling daydreams and nightmares, many many years later.
This cyber-bullying thing however, seems completely silly. I've heard a lot of this mainly coming from school teachers who've noticed nasty things written about them online. What's the difference if it's written on a note in the classroom than in someone's myspace page? The number of people that see how much so and so doesn't like you?
What if celebrities suddenly enforced legislation that prevented you from posting mean things about them? That's the numbers game. Same scenario, bigger audience.
For teenagers, it's important -- but not that important. Everyone figures out at some point or another (hopefully) that the whole game is about caring. The minute they break through your thick skin -- the minute you care -- you lose. So, I don't see how the kids are affected as much as the teachers who may feel insulted and threatened by the boisterous language of teenagers.
We don't need to give ourselves rules to make more criminals out of everyone. There's a limit to the usefulness of such red-tape where due process becomes a barrier to the solution. It just won't serve any productive purpose or get anything done.
What we do need is a more pro-active approach to establish our moral guidelines as a community of people. Parents need to be parents. Teachers need to be able to pass on more than just tests and grades. We as a society must be able to hold ourselves accountable for how we present ourselves. Being a sociopath is slowly becoming a mainstream behaviour. If we're not careful, the next generation could very well be an entire generation of self-interested sociopaths.
They're just too privelaged to be worried about the current consequences. For the kids I knew in high-school who got away with pretty much everything; the consequences of their actions wasn't even on their moral or ethical radar. It was almost taboo to think about consequences. It was a culture who's anthem was literally, "I don't give a f---." They felt empowered to do anything.
We'd like to think that such behaviour is a fringe trait, but it's not anymore and it hasn't been for years.
Slashdot Mirror
I feel much the same way.
It really hit home a number of years ago just after the 1Ghz mark was broken and was trickling down to the low-end price range. I was still on a 333mhz laptop and happy. My mother bought a shiny new 1ghz computer with 512mb of RAM and I was shocked! Who needed so much processing power just to chat on the Internet, play solitaire, and read webmail?
I was doing far more with my ancient and conservative machine by comparison.
Some 5 or 6 years later the only thing that has changed is that the software requirements continue to grow and so does that hardware. What I actually use them both for has remained much the same. Aside from 3D applications, graphics processing, and real-time DSP; what benefits do these huge powerful machines really provide to users like my mom or the office secretary or joe account manager?
It's because Gecko has XUL and has an open development model.
Webkit has a nice lean code-base, but gives up flexibility. It's "open sourceness" is somewhat closed on the Apple side -- bugs will disappear into their proprietary tracker and patches will be released without community discussion.
XUL is IMO, the best reason to keep Gecko. I loves my extensions and refuse to use a browser that doesn't implement the features they give me in some way.
I totally agree.
Having bought over 20 cartridges, I am definitely jealous of R4 owners.
All these cartridges and their packaging are either going to horde space in my closets for the rest of my life or end up in a garbage dump one day. The R4 solves that problem and makes the device more convenient and valuable. No more shuffling through pockets and no more bulky packaging.
The R4 clearly makes carts unnecessary and shows that DS owners don't want them. A download service akin to Steam would be so much better and retailers could still get a piece with in-store kiosks for those unfortunate souls without wireless Internet access or credit cards.
Follow the demand -- stop suppressing new technology simply because it changes your business.
I find TED nauseous and fake: it peddles "appropriate" technology that only a junior-high-school-dropout housewife would find interesting.
"The little heater with an AA rechargeable battery in it for the fan, that you recharge at the local solar panel" -- for God's sake, do you know how many times the income of the people that are the target of this shit do those solar panels cost ?
How about dropping farm subsidies and giving them a chance to sell their food ?
I agree that there are political barriers that would probably do more for these people than commodity tech items.
It's an economic problem, not a technological one. Yet.
Get rid of subsidies, forgive their debts, and open free trade with them. For countries that need it, open up an exchange program that gives a certain number of students the chance to receive a free education abroad on the condition that they teach when they get back home. Those "poor countries," can take it from there and will probably surprise the world with their ingenuity.
Learning new things is addictive and is never a waste.
Language is particularly useful as it gives your brain cells more interconnections as you use different words, idioms, and concepts for the world around you.
I'm currently learning Japanese for my upcoming trip to Tokyo -- it's a really fun excercise and is keeping me sharp for other mental activities (ie: i'm also reading up on 3d math fundamentals and computer vision stuff and some martial arts texts).
It does however, take a little discipline to maintain since it's unlikely that one would use their non-native tongue in every-day use.
The benefits of a standard toolset are unlikely to realize any real gains even in the long term.
Even standardizing on which VCS to use is really a moot point. Just pick one for the central repository. If the dev is more efficient in mercurial than subversion; there are scripts to convert between the two transparently.
It's the product that matters. Follow the path of least resistance when it comes to productivity. Laziness is a virtue.
Presumably, the only real requirement Google's App Engine requires of applications that run on it is that they speak CGI.
From there, one can choose to use the APIs they provide to their persistence layers and other services -- or not.
Assuming one can abstract out the implementation details of those APIs in their application's framework, then it should be possible to make the application code portable. Extracting the data means you'll have to write a quick script to back it all up -- which one would be doing anyway whether they were storing data in a MySQL database or the file-system.
It seems like heavy lifting to emulate the App Engine SDK on an EC2 container. Neat, but practical? Meh.
At least it shows that App Engine applications aren't "locked-in," in a rather obtuse way.
sigh.
It sounds like you've got a hammer and look at everything as nails.
You might want to take a trip outside your ivory tower.
Synonyms happen to be a way of abstracting complexity out of the language used so that laypersons can understand, or at least talk about, the concepts and such that we "glorified engineers" use. It's really so the marketing guys have something to sell other than "eigenvalue calculation."
I suppose its beneath you, but average people should be able to have a chance at grasping what we do; even if its not in its most pure and exact form. It doesn't mean that we "engineers," are all ignorant of the actual mathematical terms. It just means we have to adopt language to deal with people who are involved with the product of our endeavors who may not understand what statistical inference means, but can at least grasp the idea by using the term, "machine learning."
geez.
It comes with little surprise to me and is just one of the many reasons why I never went to university or any such institution.
The socratic and aristotlean concepts of college were built on the ideas of collaboration.
Somewhere along the lines, the catholics turned it into a monastic institution: a teacher sits at the front of the class and espouses the word of God. A one-way stream of information. One simply makes notes, writes the test, and goes out into the world to do more of the same.
It's sad that this became the standard for education today. Knowledge isn't gained by learning how to jump through hoops. It's learned in discussion and collaboration. Encouragement and inspiration were never found on the sheet of an exam.
Students inspired enough to start a study group together should be encouraged and led in the right directions by a sympathetic faculty of experienced teachers.
Agreed -- there are other factors as well:
Engineering software for specialized systems means the software is written for a fixed hardware/OS specification.
Writing robust cross-platform code is possible, and the principles used to develop robust software should always be applied where practical; but in the end, there are an enormous number of factors which will reduce that 99.999% uptime. Innumerable hardware configurations and components of ranging quality; operating systems, drivers, and libraries that may or may not be included, corrupt, or unreliable. If you write cross-platform code for desktop applications, you deserve a commendation and medal of honour for writing software that does not crash.
In theory, server or web applications should be exempt from the troubles of desktop software -- the hardware spec hopefully doesn't change much and one would probably be targeting a single OS. However, like many things, there are a lot of factors.
As for telcos and the like -- I wish it was regulated. For the amount of money they suck out of me I get an incredible amount of dropped calls, garbled text messages, and other service problems. It is incredibly infuriating, but I find most modern urban people tend to be rather apathetic. They know it happens, but don't really care -- after all, it's not like anyone can do anything about it.
Okay, so applying the principles of engineering to software development is a good thing -- but what does it mean and where should I start?
I found the article a little hard to follow -- it didn't really lead me anywhere. The author pointed out this esoteric concept of the "bottom-up" approach which Feynmann believed was important; but the author failed to show me how he thought it would apply to software development. I only understood that we should apply it. I never really read in the article what this approach is and how to apply it to my practice of software development.
The article did well to point out the short-comings of software developers who did not take this approach, but it lacked the evidence to explain and support the author's theory.
The links he pointed to were more or less the same. I'm rather spell-bound by this. Am I to believe that the author's intent was to tell us that we should all think of software development as he does? Is that what will turn software development into the utopia thought it should be?
I do not disagree with the premise of the article; I just wish proponents of it were more clear in the practical application of their theory.
Afterall, that's the goal of engineering, is it not?
I don't understand why any tech-savvy early adopter would be dying to lock into a platform. The companies are just as hungry for users to use their platform. I'm guessing it's all to lock in ad-revenue or mind-share or some other sinister corporate plan. It's too bad that the Internet used to be about open-communication. RFC's people! RFC's!! (I'm a big fan of the mention another poster made to the "dusty old RFC" that already solved this problem back in the 80's).
Social networking is dangerous to personal security. It's more about who you know, and sometimes we get involved with scrupulous parties that are not in-favor with the current dominant social circles. How long until creditors, government agencies, and employers exploit social networks online?
If one wishes to maintain a public network and a private one, that's there prerogative and is certainly maintainable. However, imagine a hypothetical situation where someone in that network gets flagged as a bad-apple by some institution. Would it be possible that policies at said institution may flag you as a bad-apple by association?
It's still in beta, but from my experience so far, it's quite fun. You basically roleplay a forum archetype. Massively-single-player-online-game. It's the next big acronym.
Mathematics for the Non-Mathematician is a good book for liberal-arts types. Written be Morris Kline, professor emeritus at NYU; it's a great book that takes one through the development of the mathematical world via a cultural and historical context. I find the extra information helps me retain the knowledge. Along with knowing why and what you want to know, being aware of how you learn things and honest about it will go a long way. Math is really awesome, and it's a shame that it is taught so mechanically in elementary school. Cheers.
vim + subversion + sdiff.. and a whole host of other nifty fsf/oss tools. more code, fewer gui distractions, better source control than plain ftp.
;)
Then again, discount webhosts don't often give users access to their own subversion repos... rsync could probably help there.
Plus, why does anyone want to wait 20+ seconds to load their editor? I can get all the features and more in vim and it loads in a second or less. Plus no need to use my mouse.
Then again, I'm a mouse/gui hating keyboard junkie.
(or emacs, nano, etc)
Wow.
It's not inevitable; it's already old news.
Time and again it's been proven that one can never "erase" anything or "ban" anything from the Internet. There's no way around that. When will the media and big companies start dealing with that? Another 20 years down the road maybe?
People have already suggested speaking with authority, etc One up in a similar vein: don't trust the opinions and assumptions of others. Your response is the correct one. As long as your audience doesn't have a false sense of power (ie: project managers that think they understand your job), such a stance will generally garner you a considerable amount of respect from your colleagues. Of course, it's a risky proposition -- in order for it to be right, you have to be right almost all of the time. Being an opportunistic team player however can deflect any accusations from the occasional slip. Your more sensitive colleagues may also pick up on this sort of behavior and either garner a strong dislike of you or become totally cowed. There's a good and a bad with everything. In the end, it's about presence. Make suggestions, even make suggestions that are really just decisions disguised in such a way. It'll make them feel like they know what they're doing and in the end you can take the ego-stroking when they realize how amazing you are to have around.
... cause then Microsloth would be one step closer to wiping out web standards and all the good work Yahoo! has put into the web development community.
Buy your way to the top!
No greater an illusion.
Like buying your search ranking or myspace friends.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/ Is this the only company out there that "gets it?" I work at an agency where all of the front-end developers still target browsers. They completely miss the point that HTML/CSS is a specification they should be targeting, not the end-render by some crappy browser (*cough*IE*cough*). I develop all my front-end work to spec and guess what? It's not a herculean task to make a page work in IE. It's a quirky user-agent for sure and some of my sites won't be pixel-perfect across all browsers; but they'll still visually look consistent and more importantly be accessible by all user-agents that support the spec I targeted. It also adds a little bit of future-proofing... user-agents change versions with the times, but can look back in history and support older versions of the spec. So why force people to using a particular browser? Well... either your company has some affiliation with MS in some way or your developers aren't fully educated web developers. I never use IE. Ever. I totally feel for those posters who were forced to by circumstance.
When I was in high-school, I was bullied a lot. The main problem I faced was that there were so many people participating in it that they got away unpunished for everything; from vandalizing my vehicle to sending me on a trip to the hospital. A friend of mine was put in a coma and nearly paralyzed. The police themselves said they couldn't do anything about it unless they could get names... and even then, the deliberation involved in actually seeking punishment usually results in inaction. I learned a lot from that experience, but almost didn't get the chance to. I wouldn't say I have PTSD, but I still wake up from some startling daydreams and nightmares, many many years later. This cyber-bullying thing however, seems completely silly. I've heard a lot of this mainly coming from school teachers who've noticed nasty things written about them online. What's the difference if it's written on a note in the classroom than in someone's myspace page? The number of people that see how much so and so doesn't like you? What if celebrities suddenly enforced legislation that prevented you from posting mean things about them? That's the numbers game. Same scenario, bigger audience. For teenagers, it's important -- but not that important. Everyone figures out at some point or another (hopefully) that the whole game is about caring. The minute they break through your thick skin -- the minute you care -- you lose. So, I don't see how the kids are affected as much as the teachers who may feel insulted and threatened by the boisterous language of teenagers. We don't need to give ourselves rules to make more criminals out of everyone. There's a limit to the usefulness of such red-tape where due process becomes a barrier to the solution. It just won't serve any productive purpose or get anything done. What we do need is a more pro-active approach to establish our moral guidelines as a community of people. Parents need to be parents. Teachers need to be able to pass on more than just tests and grades. We as a society must be able to hold ourselves accountable for how we present ourselves. Being a sociopath is slowly becoming a mainstream behaviour. If we're not careful, the next generation could very well be an entire generation of self-interested sociopaths. They're just too privelaged to be worried about the current consequences. For the kids I knew in high-school who got away with pretty much everything; the consequences of their actions wasn't even on their moral or ethical radar. It was almost taboo to think about consequences. It was a culture who's anthem was literally, "I don't give a f---." They felt empowered to do anything. We'd like to think that such behaviour is a fringe trait, but it's not anymore and it hasn't been for years.