I guess that's the explanation for the current craze with hard-to-use UIs (I'm looking at you, Microsoft Win8/10 Office 2013/2016); someone put liberal arts grads (probably artists) in charge of designing the UI, instead of UX experts. Now you can't tell where the controls are, nor can you tell which window has focus, and you have all those cutesy icons on a ribbon instead of text commands. But hey, it's pretty.
In Firefox, set media.autoplay.enabled to false. If you do want a video to play (youtube, say), you may need to click on it (at least once) before the browser gives up and tells you the video is broken. Once it does that, I've had to reload the page in order to get the video player to respond.
But you overlook the biggest improvement American car manufacturers came up with: tail fins! (which btw I see on a lot of websites...not literal tail fins, but the functional equivalents)
For the record, every car I've ever bought was foreign (counting the Chevy LUV, which was really a re-branded Isuzu). The only really bad foreign car was a 1970-something Fiat 128 SL. Nice looking, nice driving when it was working, but less dependable than an American car, if that were possible.
Second time in two days I've had occasion to post my favorite Master Foo story: http://www.catb.org/esr/writin... (the story doesn't say anything about PhDs, but it does talk about elegant)
"the complexity of the tasks that we have to solve": This. I just posted a ways above this about trying to convert spreadsheet data into records, while removing some near-duplicates. Had that been the entire problem, it would have been easy. The complexity came from dirty data. The bigger the data (mine was by no means "big data"), the more certain it is that you'll encounter dirty data, and it's not acceptable for the program to crash (or output misleading results) because of that. So most of the complexity in the programs I write lies in defensive programming.
I do a fair amount of programming in Python. My most recent program was extracting certain fields from TSV files (dumped from spreadsheets) and outputting them if they met certain conditions. If the data had been clean, it would have been a simple program.
The problem was that the data was not clean. I needed to collapse records that contained the same text data, but there were misspellings, use of quote marks in some records and not in others, etc. etc. By the time I got done, I had to convert lat/long to distance (to know whether two similar names might refer to the same place), decide on a cutoff on how far apart two places could be to be considered the same, do spelling normalization of names in both Roman and Arabic scripts (in Arabic, this involved collapsing certain Unicode code points that are often not correctly distinguished by typists), and use Levenshtein distance to further collapse place names. Some of this can be done with library calls, and some requires special coding.
The resulting code was several times longer than it would have been if the problem had been as simple as I thought it was when I started. Which brings up another point: a lot of coding requires domain-specific knowledge (e.g. what Arabic characters should be collapsed--I had to consult with Arabic speakers for that), and it requires knowing when the answer you're getting could be improved (again, I had to pass some questionable results by Arabic speakers, who found mistakes I had made).
You might think that this was an unusual case, that most programming problems are simpler. I can't say whether most problems are, I can only say that virtually all the problems I've worked on have suffered from dirty data, so that most of the work lies in testing for data that breaks assumptions, and deciding how to deal with it (output a warning, silently ignore it, silently fix it where the fix is obvious, edit the data, go back to the drawing board...) Seldom is the problem one of logic (although I found one of those kinds of errors in my program yesterday: 'if A and B then c else d' should have been 'if A then if B then c else e else d', sorry for the lack of indents...).
Oh, and there's the problem of making the program human-understandable, so that it can be modified by someone in the future (including the future me, http://www.catb.org/esr/writin...).
So no, I don't think programming can be easy, at least not for the average problem that can be solved by writing a program.
And unless I'm mistaken (I avoid spreadsheets as much as possible), it's difficult to use real variable names in Excel; most people use Column/Row numbers. Apparently it's possible to use variable names (https://smallbusiness.chron.com/use-variables-excel-55043.html), but I've never seen a spreadsheet that did.
Washing: I presume the problem is trying to get enough soapy(?) water in and out of narrow necked bottles to sufficiently clean them. Easy to do at home, not so easy on an industrial scale.
But then it occurred to me that it shouldn't be hard to slice open the plastic bottles on an industrial scale, using some kind of shredding machine, and then washing would be much faster. (I suppose it still takes a lot of soapy water.) Wouldn't that work?
Sorting is, I admit, a different question, and maybe that's the hard problem. Easy enough to do at home, if "they" would just make the symbols easier to read by people older than 25. Presumably very hard to do at an industrial scale.
BTW, this is an engineering question, I'm genuinely asking.
I'm no Ag expert, in fact I know very little. But I've spent time in remote areas of southern Mexico, and semi-jungle areas of Ecuador and Colombia. And the kinds of crops that grow well there are often quite different from the crops that grow here. Fruit, yucca, black beans, coffee; I've never seen anyone try to grow wheat, soy etc. there. The only crop I know of that grows well in both places is corn. So I'm not sure how much competition there can be between Guatemalan farmers and American farmers. What US crops have been "dumped" in Guatemala?
There's some truth in what you say, but some of it is not so truthy. My parents' cars back in the 60s were lucky to last 90,000 miles. (At least that's what the odometers said; I suppose they could have been turned back.) Back to the future: my 91 Corolla had enough miles on it when I finally sold it to have gone to the Moon (at perigee), and it was still driveable. My wife's 99 Camry is looking like it will do the same, and most of the other cars I've owned recently are similar (a few got into accidents, and durability and repairability kind of go out the window with that--but they were well past 90k miles by then). In sum, cars are much higher quality, and more durable than they used to be. Not sure how to qualify their repairability, since at least the ones I've had don't seem to require many repairs.
Of course, having enough miles to go to the Moon is nothing compared with Musk's car... And Cuba seems to keep those old cars running.
Longevity of desktop computers is hard to measure. The one that I'm typing this on is sort of like the ship of Theseus. I've replaced the power supply, the hard drive (with an SSD drive--the old hard disk was still working, but the SSD drive gave it an incredible boost in performance), the mother board, a fan, and the box; what's left is the memory and keyboard. Is it the same computer?
Obviously there are exceptions; refrigerators, dish washers, clothes washers and dryers don't seem to last (I replaced a dish washer a couple years ago, rather than replacing the pump). But it's hard to compare the longevity of dish washers, since my parents didn't have one (they had me).
My yacht was broken up in 1993, after the US Navy sold it to the Australian Navy for parts, and they sent it to the breakers in Bangladesh after they'd pulled what they wanted. For my time on the yacht (back in early 70s), I earned one of these: https://www.amazon.com/Navy-To...
Agreed (your first para), although I'm not sure what you meant by "them"; I suppose it's electronics. And it would be nice if the China problem would lead to a recycling solution.
I do a lot of buying from Amazon, and I'm bothered by how much packing stuff I'm recycling. Amazon is good about avoiding styrofoam (they mostly use those bags that get pumped full of air, and which contain very little plastic by weight). The original manufacturers, though, often use styrofoam, perhaps because the bags lose air after awhile. But Amazon has a limited number of cardboard box sizes, and when they ship s.t. odd-shaped, it usually comes in a huge box. I doubt that a law requiring them to take back packing would get passed, but heaven knows there's a lot of cardboard out there.
If you had read the/. summary, you would know: because the ships are going there anyway. Filling them with stuff does slightly increase the amount of fuel they burn, but probably not all that much.
Are you sure that's not just because the English is old (Early Modern, roughly same period as Shakespeare)? I've read both the KJV and other translations all the way through, and while there are certainly places where the KJV is not only older English, but also just strange, as well as places where the translation is not so good (mostly Old Testament, maybe especially Psalms), it's not all that bad if you can deal with the thee's and thou's.
Perhaps at issue here is what it means for a library to be "public." If it has to be a lending library, then I guess you're right. But if the public is allowed access to read books in the library, then maybe this was a public library. (And even now, most public libraries have certain books--typically reference books--that cannot be checked out, but must be read in the library.)
Top 1% of what part of the world? There were certainly parts of the Roman empire where the literacy rate was far higher. The Jewish population, for example, was quite literate. Also, it wasn't until much later (than this public library) that the Church controlled anything, much less access to its scriptures. If access to books was controlled earlier, it's only because books were very valuable; sort of like controlling access to the diamond rings under glass in your local jewellery store.
As for excommunication being a death sentence, I am not sure where you got that idea. Most people who were excommunicated went on to live long lives; the army of the Fourth Crusade was excommunicated by the Pope, and while I'm sure many of them died out there, it was not because they were excommunicated. I've NEVER heard that the Church gave permission to execute those who were excommunicated.
In sum, if you are correct that "Only an under educated person today would not be aware of how society worked 1.800-1.900 years ago", then I'm afraid you've placed yourself among the under-educated.
Yes, those would have been impediments to people in western Europe, although the Latin Bible existed precisely to make it easier for people in the western Roman empire (where some form of Latin was either the main language , or a language which educated people knew) to read. There were other translations elsewhere; early on, it was translated into Syriac (indeed, so early that some claimed at least the Gospels had been written in Syriac, then translated into Greek). Other early translations included Ge'ez ("Ethiopic"), Gothic (Germanic), Slavonic (Slavic), and (partially) into Arabic, all before AD 1000.
BTW, why do you consider the KJV the worst of the early European translations?
My first "large" (meaning > 80x25 characters) computer screen used black and grey on white. That was in 1985. (SparcStation, not Mac) So here we are, a little > 30 years later, and we're sending you Back...to the Past!
(To be honest, you said grey on white, not black and grey on white. And you're right; on the old email design, there was a boldish/blackish font and a greyish font, and I think they were used to distinguish whether you'd read a particular message or not. Beats me how you're supposed to know that in the new design.)
Somebody over on Ars explained this: it's so you can use your GMail app as a flashlight. After all, it's not like you'll want to write your emails on this.
Yeah, I'm wondering how that happened too. My guess is that the malware was designed to be incorporated into some software update. The update would of course have been scanned, but somehow got under the radar. It may be that the update (if that's how it came across) was uploaded to the air-gapped system as source code, and that the malware itself was also source code, and undetectable in that form to the scanner.
The other thing that's difficult (for me) to understand is how the malware was controlled once it was on the air-gapped system. It must have been autonomous (like Stuxnet, I guess), although various malware instances could have cooperated inside the air-gapped system. But reporting results back out would have been difficult, I would think. Unless it sent some kind of signal across the power lines?
Slashdot Mirror
I guess that's the explanation for the current craze with hard-to-use UIs (I'm looking at you, Microsoft Win8/10 Office 2013/2016); someone put liberal arts grads (probably artists) in charge of designing the UI, instead of UX experts. Now you can't tell where the controls are, nor can you tell which window has focus, and you have all those cutesy icons on a ribbon instead of text commands. But hey, it's pretty.
In Firefox, set media.autoplay.enabled to false. If you do want a video to play (youtube, say), you may need to click on it (at least once) before the browser gives up and tells you the video is broken. Once it does that, I've had to reload the page in order to get the video player to respond.
But you overlook the biggest improvement American car manufacturers came up with: tail fins! (which btw I see on a lot of websites...not literal tail fins, but the functional equivalents)
For the record, every car I've ever bought was foreign (counting the Chevy LUV, which was really a re-branded Isuzu). The only really bad foreign car was a 1970-something Fiat 128 SL. Nice looking, nice driving when it was working, but less dependable than an American car, if that were possible.
Second time in two days I've had occasion to post my favorite Master Foo story:
http://www.catb.org/esr/writin...
(the story doesn't say anything about PhDs, but it does talk about elegant)
"the complexity of the tasks that we have to solve": This. I just posted a ways above this about trying to convert spreadsheet data into records, while removing some near-duplicates. Had that been the entire problem, it would have been easy. The complexity came from dirty data. The bigger the data (mine was by no means "big data"), the more certain it is that you'll encounter dirty data, and it's not acceptable for the program to crash (or output misleading results) because of that. So most of the complexity in the programs I write lies in defensive programming.
I do a fair amount of programming in Python. My most recent program was extracting certain fields from TSV files (dumped from spreadsheets) and outputting them if they met certain conditions. If the data had been clean, it would have been a simple program.
The problem was that the data was not clean. I needed to collapse records that contained the same text data, but there were misspellings, use of quote marks in some records and not in others, etc. etc. By the time I got done, I had to convert lat/long to distance (to know whether two similar names might refer to the same place), decide on a cutoff on how far apart two places could be to be considered the same, do spelling normalization of names in both Roman and Arabic scripts (in Arabic, this involved collapsing certain Unicode code points that are often not correctly distinguished by typists), and use Levenshtein distance to further collapse place names. Some of this can be done with library calls, and some requires special coding.
The resulting code was several times longer than it would have been if the problem had been as simple as I thought it was when I started. Which brings up another point: a lot of coding requires domain-specific knowledge (e.g. what Arabic characters should be collapsed--I had to consult with Arabic speakers for that), and it requires knowing when the answer you're getting could be improved (again, I had to pass some questionable results by Arabic speakers, who found mistakes I had made).
You might think that this was an unusual case, that most programming problems are simpler. I can't say whether most problems are, I can only say that virtually all the problems I've worked on have suffered from dirty data, so that most of the work lies in testing for data that breaks assumptions, and deciding how to deal with it (output a warning, silently ignore it, silently fix it where the fix is obvious, edit the data, go back to the drawing board...) Seldom is the problem one of logic (although I found one of those kinds of errors in my program yesterday: 'if A and B then c else d' should have been 'if A then if B then c else e else d', sorry for the lack of indents...).
Oh, and there's the problem of making the program human-understandable, so that it can be modified by someone in the future (including the future me, http://www.catb.org/esr/writin...).
So no, I don't think programming can be easy, at least not for the average problem that can be solved by writing a program.
And unless I'm mistaken (I avoid spreadsheets as much as possible), it's difficult to use real variable names in Excel; most people use Column/Row numbers. Apparently it's possible to use variable names (https://smallbusiness.chron.com/use-variables-excel-55043.html), but I've never seen a spreadsheet that did.
Like here @44: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
3000 degrees, I'm sure. Much better than the trash compactors on the Death Star.
And marked with labels large enough that I (age 68) don't have to get out my magnifying glass to read them.
Washing: I presume the problem is trying to get enough soapy(?) water in and out of narrow necked bottles to sufficiently clean them. Easy to do at home, not so easy on an industrial scale.
But then it occurred to me that it shouldn't be hard to slice open the plastic bottles on an industrial scale, using some kind of shredding machine, and then washing would be much faster. (I suppose it still takes a lot of soapy water.) Wouldn't that work?
Sorting is, I admit, a different question, and maybe that's the hard problem. Easy enough to do at home, if "they" would just make the symbols easier to read by people older than 25. Presumably very hard to do at an industrial scale.
BTW, this is an engineering question, I'm genuinely asking.
I'm no Ag expert, in fact I know very little. But I've spent time in remote areas of southern Mexico, and semi-jungle areas of Ecuador and Colombia. And the kinds of crops that grow well there are often quite different from the crops that grow here. Fruit, yucca, black beans, coffee; I've never seen anyone try to grow wheat, soy etc. there. The only crop I know of that grows well in both places is corn. So I'm not sure how much competition there can be between Guatemalan farmers and American farmers. What US crops have been "dumped" in Guatemala?
There's some truth in what you say, but some of it is not so truthy. My parents' cars back in the 60s were lucky to last 90,000 miles. (At least that's what the odometers said; I suppose they could have been turned back.) Back to the future: my 91 Corolla had enough miles on it when I finally sold it to have gone to the Moon (at perigee), and it was still driveable. My wife's 99 Camry is looking like it will do the same, and most of the other cars I've owned recently are similar (a few got into accidents, and durability and repairability kind of go out the window with that--but they were well past 90k miles by then). In sum, cars are much higher quality, and more durable than they used to be. Not sure how to qualify their repairability, since at least the ones I've had don't seem to require many repairs.
Of course, having enough miles to go to the Moon is nothing compared with Musk's car... And Cuba seems to keep those old cars running.
Longevity of desktop computers is hard to measure. The one that I'm typing this on is sort of like the ship of Theseus. I've replaced the power supply, the hard drive (with an SSD drive--the old hard disk was still working, but the SSD drive gave it an incredible boost in performance), the mother board, a fan, and the box; what's left is the memory and keyboard. Is it the same computer?
Obviously there are exceptions; refrigerators, dish washers, clothes washers and dryers don't seem to last (I replaced a dish washer a couple years ago, rather than replacing the pump). But it's hard to compare the longevity of dish washers, since my parents didn't have one (they had me).
My yacht was broken up in 1993, after the US Navy sold it to the Australian Navy for parts, and they sent it to the breakers in Bangladesh after they'd pulled what they wanted. For my time on the yacht (back in early 70s), I earned one of these: https://www.amazon.com/Navy-To...
Agreed (your first para), although I'm not sure what you meant by "them"; I suppose it's electronics. And it would be nice if the China problem would lead to a recycling solution.
I do a lot of buying from Amazon, and I'm bothered by how much packing stuff I'm recycling. Amazon is good about avoiding styrofoam (they mostly use those bags that get pumped full of air, and which contain very little plastic by weight). The original manufacturers, though, often use styrofoam, perhaps because the bags lose air after awhile. But Amazon has a limited number of cardboard box sizes, and when they ship s.t. odd-shaped, it usually comes in a huge box. I doubt that a law requiring them to take back packing would get passed, but heaven knows there's a lot of cardboard out there.
If you had read the /. summary, you would know: because the ships are going there anyway. Filling them with stuff does slightly increase the amount of fuel they burn, but probably not all that much.
Are you sure that's not just because the English is old (Early Modern, roughly same period as Shakespeare)? I've read both the KJV and other translations all the way through, and while there are certainly places where the KJV is not only older English, but also just strange, as well as places where the translation is not so good (mostly Old Testament, maybe especially Psalms), it's not all that bad if you can deal with the thee's and thou's.
But that must be where the modern name Cologne came from, right?
Perhaps at issue here is what it means for a library to be "public." If it has to be a lending library, then I guess you're right. But if the public is allowed access to read books in the library, then maybe this was a public library. (And even now, most public libraries have certain books--typically reference books--that cannot be checked out, but must be read in the library.)
Top 1% of what part of the world? There were certainly parts of the Roman empire where the literacy rate was far higher. The Jewish population, for example, was quite literate. Also, it wasn't until much later (than this public library) that the Church controlled anything, much less access to its scriptures. If access to books was controlled earlier, it's only because books were very valuable; sort of like controlling access to the diamond rings under glass in your local jewellery store.
As for excommunication being a death sentence, I am not sure where you got that idea. Most people who were excommunicated went on to live long lives; the army of the Fourth Crusade was excommunicated by the Pope, and while I'm sure many of them died out there, it was not because they were excommunicated. I've NEVER heard that the Church gave permission to execute those who were excommunicated.
In sum, if you are correct that "Only an under educated person today would not be aware of how society worked 1.800-1.900 years ago", then I'm afraid you've placed yourself among the under-educated.
"...they did not have the time or capacity to save everything": That's because they didn't have one of these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
(or better, one of these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...)
Yes, those would have been impediments to people in western Europe, although the Latin Bible existed precisely to make it easier for people in the western Roman empire (where some form of Latin was either the main language , or a language which educated people knew) to read. There were other translations elsewhere; early on, it was translated into Syriac (indeed, so early that some claimed at least the Gospels had been written in Syriac, then translated into Greek). Other early translations included Ge'ez ("Ethiopic"), Gothic (Germanic), Slavonic (Slavic), and (partially) into Arabic, all before AD 1000.
BTW, why do you consider the KJV the worst of the early European translations?
My first "large" (meaning > 80x25 characters) computer screen used black and grey on white. That was in 1985. (SparcStation, not Mac) So here we are, a little > 30 years later, and we're sending you Back...to the Past!
(To be honest, you said grey on white, not black and grey on white. And you're right; on the old email design, there was a boldish/blackish font and a greyish font, and I think they were used to distinguish whether you'd read a particular message or not. Beats me how you're supposed to know that in the new design.)
Tail fins on cars is a good example of this: http://historygarage.com/futur...
Somebody over on Ars explained this: it's so you can use your GMail app as a flashlight. After all, it's not like you'll want to write your emails on this.
Yeah, I'm wondering how that happened too. My guess is that the malware was designed to be incorporated into some software update. The update would of course have been scanned, but somehow got under the radar. It may be that the update (if that's how it came across) was uploaded to the air-gapped system as source code, and that the malware itself was also source code, and undetectable in that form to the scanner.
The other thing that's difficult (for me) to understand is how the malware was controlled once it was on the air-gapped system. It must have been autonomous (like Stuxnet, I guess), although various malware instances could have cooperated inside the air-gapped system. But reporting results back out would have been difficult, I would think. Unless it sent some kind of signal across the power lines?
All this is speculation on my part, I'm afraid.