Irony means writing the opposite of what you intend your reader to understand, so I'm at a loss to understand your post. Are you one of the "Americans that don't get irony" stereotypes? And this obviously isn't wasted money; it's looking into robotics applications.
You've actually understated the (correct) case you are making. The Earth itself is currently habitable by us because bacteria terraformed the Earth - not purposefully, but because their metabolic processes in the early Earth produced oxygen. There is a great deal of knowledge now accumulated about the processes involved. Jay Gould commented once in an article that, in terms of biomass and the effects on the planet, it is still the Age of Bacteria.
Of course, since the crazies posting here think the Earth was sneezed out by the Argleblaster six thousand years ago, there is no arguing with them.
It seems to me that the more scientists learn about the Earth and our place in the Universe, the more the religious fundamentalists disbelieve them. Galileo is bloody lucky he didn't live in Alabama in the 21st century.
My family all seem to be engineers, computer scientists or lawyers. There really isn't that much difference whether you're checking available APIs and algorithms and using them to build software, checking technologies and codes and using them to design a building, or checking law and precedent to build an argument. They all involve abstract thought, concrete outcomes, and an ability to guess in advance how people will screw up, and try to mitigate it. Law pays more, engineering gives you greater variety of work, that's about it.
A lot of the comments here about "other phones" are referring to old models - and in the smartphone world, that's anything over a couple of years old. One would have expected manufacturers to have ironed out all the bugs by now, because the technology has matured. There are basically three sorts of smartphone: no keyboard, fixed keyboard and slider keyboard. They have all been around for years. Apple designs only one kind of phone, so their R&D team have only one base design to worry about. HTC, Samsung, Nokia and so on design far too many kinds of phone (scattergunning the market really is not clever). Because of this, Apple cannot afford to screw up at all on a new model; the supplier can't offer an alternative as a replacement. This whole episode is really more about the pros and cons of different approaches to the market. (Incidentally, I'm largely agreeing with you, but suggesting a reason why it happens.)
The Guardian newspaper in the UK has a kind of, to be polite, half-baked moderation system. Paid moderators delete posts that fall foul of the UK's remarkable libel laws, and the general public can vote comments up (but not down). I understand that this is being reviewed and they recognise that it is inadequate, but the main problem is that it has attracted steadily more right-wing trolls (and, to be fair, some equally stupid left-wing ones) who both post and mark one another up. This is intended by them to give the impression that extreme right-wing views enjoy a great deal of support. It has got very significantly worse since the Daily Murdoch introduced its paywall, so the trolls can't post on it any more for free.
I'm waiting to see how long it will be before a combination of British libel lawyers (a fine body of men against whom nobody would ever say a word in public), and the actual cost of moderating all those posts, forces the Guardian to introduce a paywall. I wouldn't even be surprised if Murdoch's very expensive advisors saw precisely this scenario developing. I suspect that this small newspaper is just a bit ahead of the trend.
Like many people on Slashdot, I have a day job where I'm known to a number of our customers. Sometimes I want to pass out some information that favours one of them but not another (e.g. product comparisons.) The wonder of Google means that I can't even do that on the website of our small-town paper using my real name.
. I don't think you do. Electronic systems can incorporate various levels of redundancy in ways that mechanical systems can't. How many cars have dual push/pull systems on their accelerator cables? And, anyway, how do you connect an accelerator cable to a solenoid-controlled fuel injection system? - which is self-adaptive and far more reliable than any carb or mechanical injection system.
On my car, there are two accelerator position sensors and they have to agree before power gets applied to the wheels. I believe that's standard practice. However, not long after I bought it, the warning light came on and it was at the garage for two weeks. It turned out there was a Mexican standoff. The ECU was reporting a gearbox fault - gear changes were not happening fast enough. The manufacturer insisted on many tests including swapping out virtually the entire electronics before deciding to replace the gearbox. The old one was expedited back to Stuttgart where it was found that there was indeed a mechanical fault. As the electronic technician at the garage said to me "They just didn't want to believe that a gearbox could fail."
Airbus is, I believe, no less safe than Boeing. And, if cars with fly by wire steering are eventually allowed in Europe, I expect they will be just as safe as all those farm tractors around the place, and more reliable because an awkward mechanical assembly doesn't have to be fitted into a restricted space.
One of their columnists (George Monbiot, with a degree in biology), wrote an article demanding Jones's resignation before any proper investigation of the leaked emails had taken place. He has subsequently written what I consider to be a very grudging retraction. I myself feel rather strongly that the Guardian has, on this issue, a poor record of balance and has shown a serious lack of understanding of science and scientists, and a failure to explain the background properly to its readers. More worrying still, it appears to be printing what look like advertorials for Apple products without labelling them as such, which also looks somewhat unbalanced. Much as I hate to say it, being a Brit (not really - I'm very willing to admit it) the NYT has a much better record on this.
(And it's Popper, by the way. Have you actually read his books? Obviously not.)
Popper's notion of science is, frankly, obsolete. It was already obsolete when I was reading Philosophy of Science in the 1970s. He envisages a world in which falsifying an hypothesis invalidates a theory. But modern science - and this includes quantum mechanics as well as climatology - depends on statistical analysis and probability theory. You could almost say that when Schroedinger and Heisenberg defined the Uncertainty Principle and the probabilitistic Wave Equation, physics changed in a way that obsoleted Popper and the whole Victorian idea of science.
Jones is replying to people who don't want to take large amounts of data and mine them, but to find single errors and then claim that this invalidates the lot. He was actually right to tell them to get stuffed - but, because we live in a world dominated by PR and spin, this was misused against him. You are demonstrating the effect of this - you clearly have never read Popper, but you're trying to use a sound-bite as an argument.
Necessity is the mother of invention
on
The Creativity Crisis
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It was around 1980 that everything started to "just work". Cars, TV sets and so on became increasingly reliable and standardised. Food came increasingly pre-packed and pre-prepared. People simply do not need to be inventive and curious in order to get things done, in fact, it's often illegal; good luck with modifying a car nowadays. At the very least your insurance will be invalidated. On the rare occasion something goes wrong, scrap and replace or call a specialist.
I've sometimes thought, looking back at my own career in engineering, that my problem solving ability has got in the way of promotion. It's actually easier and more effective to find someone else to fix the problem, or persuade management that the problem doesn't need fixing (kill the product, for instance). And, if you aren't spending a lot of time on the 98% of perspiration that follows the 2% of inspiration, you have time to play golf with the boss and network your next promotion.
I think the rot really set in when the word "consumer" became a generic term for everybody. Umberto Eco made this point once, showing how industrial exhibitions had gone from showcasing technology (buy one of these and you can make whatever you can imagine) to showcasing products (buy one of these and your life as a consumer will be better.)
Schools only reflect society. If teachers are mostly consumers, they won't see the value of (genuine) creativity.
Where have I encountered a landmass with an advanced society in the East and increasingly wild and ill-governed territory to the West in which native peoples were wiped out and had their culture destroyed? Oh yes.
Now to make a serious point. One of the biggest problems of the US today stems from that time in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It's backward religions. Pioneers equipped with nothing but the Bible and no educated teachers went on to invent ridiculous religions - such as Mormonism and the wilder extremes of Southern Baptists - that continue to hold the US back socially and culturally today. (The same thing happened in South Africa, where the Dutch Reformed Church arose from semi-literate Boerdom.) The backward religions, just like fundamentalist Islam and settler-friendly perversions of Judaism, are well funded to gain support via the Internet.
The Chinese actually need to use the Internet to stop the same thing happening there. The Internet can spread a wider view of the world. My guess is that the Chinese government is well aware of the argument I've outlined above, in far greater depth, and their policy is simply based around the traditional Chinese policy of using the media to spread cultural homogeneity, but with an eye to the undeveloped part of China rather than the developed part. This is far from stupid. Freedom of speech is all very well in a pluralistic Western society where you can look out of the window and see that people are lying, but much less effective for isolated agrarian communities with no standards of comparison.
Indeed, if your data set is growing fast it is quite possible that the issues you need to address are not around database design but around business model design. We have an application which can get installed on shitty VMs (by Microclods who think that installing things on VMs is somehow way cool...even when it would be cheaper and easier not to) and minimising storage is rather important. We do this by rigorous analysis of when we actually need to store data and when we can use a relatively sparse data set and update it. OK this treads on the toes of normalisation, but it is driven by the business logic rather than the relational model.
To give a small, simple example, consider a sales database. You have customers, you have products, you have invoices, but mainly you have items sold (simplifying.) A relational db designer might, without thinking, use the product object's primary key as a foreign key in the sales item list. That is sparse but omits the consideration that you sell the same product at different prices at different times. So, for speed of reporting, without growing the tables too fast, you would store the invoice number,despatch note number,product object's primary key, the selling price, and the sales tax rate. When you warehouse the data, you add indexes for fast retrieval. But your fastest growing table - items sold - remains very compact because it has only 5 elements, all numeric.
I hope this isn't just a ramble and is of some use, but I've been in your position - in a fast growing company - and you have my sympathies.
Except that Nick Clegg is relatively young, experienced in the ways of Europe, and heads a minority party which is not governed by any corporate interests. He is also in charge of a commission to find and eliminate pointless laws from the Statute Book. The Lib Dems are open to arguments about protecting the interests of small businesses and the individual, and have a good campaigning record on the subject. Therefore, rather than get despondent, lobby your MP now, contribute to the website UK Government Your Freedom website without being a dick.
This post is insightful and informative, and explains why reading books about database design is largely a waste of time. I started in the days when a database join was done by running two magnetic tapes in parallel, and I can really only add two lines to your post:
Log everything for data recovery reasons
Don't log anything so you don't run out of disk space and lose data.
As we get closer to discovering the Higgs, the Universe is adapting to make it more difficult. As a result the coupling between the proton and the Higgs is slowly changing. We don't have to worry about CERN creating black holes; we have to worry about the Universe hiding away all its Higgs from us, so things will become massless.
All I need now is 30 years worth of hundreds of mathematical physicists, and this hypothesis of mine will be just as good as String Theory. But if I'm right, nobody will be around to see it.
Irrationally, I feel safer in a sailplane than in a 747. But then I've been in the landing with the foam on the runway, and I'd rather be in something that's inherently airworthy and non-flam than in something that's a potential bomb.
For entertainment for the kids, I once built a teletype - 5 bit baudot code - interface to an early Commodore computer (kind of homage to the Manchester computer.) It was so noisy that my wife exiled it to the furthest point of our granny annexe, and it was still too loud. The hardest parts were (a)programming the stunts to switch the code converter and (b) the +/-75V translator.
Those were the days when we discovered that our military grade Eprom programmer was actually an embedded PDP-8 and you could run code on it.
For me, it opened up a Chrome process which, according to top, was using 19Mbytes. System Monitor shows no unusual activity and no unexpected network traffic. Nothing interesting happened at all. Am I missing something?
This is exactly the same as with Enigma. What matters is the initial setting, which is a key. If the base setting is always the same, then the decoding of one message works for all. The difficulty is to find a way of distributing the initial key securely, given that it needs to be changed very frequently. Any system which can be compromised if a station is captured becomes useless until all stations have new key sets - difficult for a spy network in wartime, or even a submarine fleet.
Given the Enigma architecture, it was the capture of a German weathership and later a submarine by the Royal Navy that did most for German Enigma decryption.
So called followers of Adam Smith have been reading the old boy a bit since the crash,and realised that he would have disapproved of almost everything they were supporting. The Economist hasn't really admitted that they bet their money on the bob-tailed nag - but they do seem recently to have remembered a bit that AS was opposed to cartels, and supported the free exchange of information.
I was actually summarising the articles I've read on this subject since the story broke. I didn't make the BP comparison, but several articles on the Internet did. Basically, both companies were arrogant in their initial response and slow to react. This seems to be typical behaviour of large corporates. And there was no "equating" of the scale of the problems; you're reading that into it. I merely reported what I had read.
All mobile phones have tradeoffs in antenna design in order to look pretty, because people don't like visible external aerials. Apple have come up with what should be a very good design but compromised it by not coating the metal in a dielectric layer. Apple have created bad publicity for themselves by coming up with a BP-like response to the complaints, but this won't affect their sales because Apple buyers don't take any notice of negative publicity for Apple products.
All that is needed is a risk assessment that is proportional in scope and expertise to the risk involved. (I have had H&S responsibility in more than one company.) The risk in this case is small compared to everyday risks run by 13 year olds. The only reason that schools overreact is their fear of parents who are looking for an opportunity to sue. Unlike the US, these parents almost always lose, and the ones that win get very little in damages. The word is slowly getting round: these cases are heard by junior judges in the UK, and British judges are not as venial as US juries,
The improvement over MicroB is that it works better for actually buying things on-line. The "save as PDF" option for receipts is a very useful feature. What's needed now is a print driver; discussions I've looked at suggest that this won't come before MeeGo, as there is little point in Nokia developing a CUPS-friendly print solution for an OS that it plans to obsolete.
I like to tell people (when not telling them to get off my lawn) that my first job working with computing involved technologies that did not exist when I was at University. This wasn't completely true as I graduated in 1972 and the Intel 4004 came out in 1971, but the 8008 didn't come out till 1972, and I still call that the first "proper" microprocessor (as distinct from calculator chip). The mechanical engineers in our company called what we did either "maths" or "electronic engineering", and never liked to ask how the "maths" got into the "circuit boards" in case their eyes glazed over.
Slashdot Mirror
Irony means writing the opposite of what you intend your reader to understand, so I'm at a loss to understand your post. Are you one of the "Americans that don't get irony" stereotypes? And this obviously isn't wasted money; it's looking into robotics applications.
Of course, since the crazies posting here think the Earth was sneezed out by the Argleblaster six thousand years ago, there is no arguing with them.
It seems to me that the more scientists learn about the Earth and our place in the Universe, the more the religious fundamentalists disbelieve them. Galileo is bloody lucky he didn't live in Alabama in the 21st century.
My family all seem to be engineers, computer scientists or lawyers. There really isn't that much difference whether you're checking available APIs and algorithms and using them to build software, checking technologies and codes and using them to design a building, or checking law and precedent to build an argument. They all involve abstract thought, concrete outcomes, and an ability to guess in advance how people will screw up, and try to mitigate it. Law pays more, engineering gives you greater variety of work, that's about it.
A lot of the comments here about "other phones" are referring to old models - and in the smartphone world, that's anything over a couple of years old. One would have expected manufacturers to have ironed out all the bugs by now, because the technology has matured. There are basically three sorts of smartphone: no keyboard, fixed keyboard and slider keyboard. They have all been around for years. Apple designs only one kind of phone, so their R&D team have only one base design to worry about. HTC, Samsung, Nokia and so on design far too many kinds of phone (scattergunning the market really is not clever). Because of this, Apple cannot afford to screw up at all on a new model; the supplier can't offer an alternative as a replacement. This whole episode is really more about the pros and cons of different approaches to the market. (Incidentally, I'm largely agreeing with you, but suggesting a reason why it happens.)
I'm waiting to see how long it will be before a combination of British libel lawyers (a fine body of men against whom nobody would ever say a word in public), and the actual cost of moderating all those posts, forces the Guardian to introduce a paywall. I wouldn't even be surprised if Murdoch's very expensive advisors saw precisely this scenario developing. I suspect that this small newspaper is just a bit ahead of the trend.
Like many people on Slashdot, I have a day job where I'm known to a number of our customers. Sometimes I want to pass out some information that favours one of them but not another (e.g. product comparisons.) The wonder of Google means that I can't even do that on the website of our small-town paper using my real name.
. I don't think you do. Electronic systems can incorporate various levels of redundancy in ways that mechanical systems can't. How many cars have dual push/pull systems on their accelerator cables? And, anyway, how do you connect an accelerator cable to a solenoid-controlled fuel injection system? - which is self-adaptive and far more reliable than any carb or mechanical injection system.
On my car, there are two accelerator position sensors and they have to agree before power gets applied to the wheels. I believe that's standard practice. However, not long after I bought it, the warning light came on and it was at the garage for two weeks. It turned out there was a Mexican standoff. The ECU was reporting a gearbox fault - gear changes were not happening fast enough. The manufacturer insisted on many tests including swapping out virtually the entire electronics before deciding to replace the gearbox. The old one was expedited back to Stuttgart where it was found that there was indeed a mechanical fault. As the electronic technician at the garage said to me "They just didn't want to believe that a gearbox could fail."
Airbus is, I believe, no less safe than Boeing. And, if cars with fly by wire steering are eventually allowed in Europe, I expect they will be just as safe as all those farm tractors around the place, and more reliable because an awkward mechanical assembly doesn't have to be fitted into a restricted space.
One of their columnists (George Monbiot, with a degree in biology), wrote an article demanding Jones's resignation before any proper investigation of the leaked emails had taken place. He has subsequently written what I consider to be a very grudging retraction. I myself feel rather strongly that the Guardian has, on this issue, a poor record of balance and has shown a serious lack of understanding of science and scientists, and a failure to explain the background properly to its readers. More worrying still, it appears to be printing what look like advertorials for Apple products without labelling them as such, which also looks somewhat unbalanced. Much as I hate to say it, being a Brit (not really - I'm very willing to admit it) the NYT has a much better record on this.
Popper's notion of science is, frankly, obsolete. It was already obsolete when I was reading Philosophy of Science in the 1970s. He envisages a world in which falsifying an hypothesis invalidates a theory. But modern science - and this includes quantum mechanics as well as climatology - depends on statistical analysis and probability theory. You could almost say that when Schroedinger and Heisenberg defined the Uncertainty Principle and the probabilitistic Wave Equation, physics changed in a way that obsoleted Popper and the whole Victorian idea of science.
Jones is replying to people who don't want to take large amounts of data and mine them, but to find single errors and then claim that this invalidates the lot. He was actually right to tell them to get stuffed - but, because we live in a world dominated by PR and spin, this was misused against him. You are demonstrating the effect of this - you clearly have never read Popper, but you're trying to use a sound-bite as an argument.
I've sometimes thought, looking back at my own career in engineering, that my problem solving ability has got in the way of promotion. It's actually easier and more effective to find someone else to fix the problem, or persuade management that the problem doesn't need fixing (kill the product, for instance). And, if you aren't spending a lot of time on the 98% of perspiration that follows the 2% of inspiration, you have time to play golf with the boss and network your next promotion.
I think the rot really set in when the word "consumer" became a generic term for everybody. Umberto Eco made this point once, showing how industrial exhibitions had gone from showcasing technology (buy one of these and you can make whatever you can imagine) to showcasing products (buy one of these and your life as a consumer will be better.)
Schools only reflect society. If teachers are mostly consumers, they won't see the value of (genuine) creativity.
Now to make a serious point. One of the biggest problems of the US today stems from that time in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It's backward religions. Pioneers equipped with nothing but the Bible and no educated teachers went on to invent ridiculous religions - such as Mormonism and the wilder extremes of Southern Baptists - that continue to hold the US back socially and culturally today. (The same thing happened in South Africa, where the Dutch Reformed Church arose from semi-literate Boerdom.) The backward religions, just like fundamentalist Islam and settler-friendly perversions of Judaism, are well funded to gain support via the Internet.
The Chinese actually need to use the Internet to stop the same thing happening there. The Internet can spread a wider view of the world. My guess is that the Chinese government is well aware of the argument I've outlined above, in far greater depth, and their policy is simply based around the traditional Chinese policy of using the media to spread cultural homogeneity, but with an eye to the undeveloped part of China rather than the developed part. This is far from stupid. Freedom of speech is all very well in a pluralistic Western society where you can look out of the window and see that people are lying, but much less effective for isolated agrarian communities with no standards of comparison.
To give a small, simple example, consider a sales database. You have customers, you have products, you have invoices, but mainly you have items sold (simplifying.) A relational db designer might, without thinking, use the product object's primary key as a foreign key in the sales item list. That is sparse but omits the consideration that you sell the same product at different prices at different times. So, for speed of reporting, without growing the tables too fast, you would store the invoice number,despatch note number,product object's primary key, the selling price, and the sales tax rate. When you warehouse the data, you add indexes for fast retrieval. But your fastest growing table - items sold - remains very compact because it has only 5 elements, all numeric.
I hope this isn't just a ramble and is of some use, but I've been in your position - in a fast growing company - and you have my sympathies.
Except that Nick Clegg is relatively young, experienced in the ways of Europe, and heads a minority party which is not governed by any corporate interests. He is also in charge of a commission to find and eliminate pointless laws from the Statute Book. The Lib Dems are open to arguments about protecting the interests of small businesses and the individual, and have a good campaigning record on the subject. Therefore, rather than get despondent, lobby your MP now, contribute to the website UK Government Your Freedom website without being a dick.
Don't log anything so you don't run out of disk space and lose data.
All I need now is 30 years worth of hundreds of mathematical physicists, and this hypothesis of mine will be just as good as String Theory. But if I'm right, nobody will be around to see it.
Irrationally, I feel safer in a sailplane than in a 747. But then I've been in the landing with the foam on the runway, and I'd rather be in something that's inherently airworthy and non-flam than in something that's a potential bomb.
Those were the days when we discovered that our military grade Eprom programmer was actually an embedded PDP-8 and you could run code on it.
For me, it opened up a Chrome process which, according to top, was using 19Mbytes. System Monitor shows no unusual activity and no unexpected network traffic. Nothing interesting happened at all. Am I missing something?
Given the Enigma architecture, it was the capture of a German weathership and later a submarine by the Royal Navy that did most for German Enigma decryption.
So called followers of Adam Smith have been reading the old boy a bit since the crash,and realised that he would have disapproved of almost everything they were supporting. The Economist hasn't really admitted that they bet their money on the bob-tailed nag - but they do seem recently to have remembered a bit that AS was opposed to cartels, and supported the free exchange of information.
I was actually summarising the articles I've read on this subject since the story broke. I didn't make the BP comparison, but several articles on the Internet did. Basically, both companies were arrogant in their initial response and slow to react. This seems to be typical behaviour of large corporates. And there was no "equating" of the scale of the problems; you're reading that into it. I merely reported what I had read.
All mobile phones have tradeoffs in antenna design in order to look pretty, because people don't like visible external aerials. Apple have come up with what should be a very good design but compromised it by not coating the metal in a dielectric layer. Apple have created bad publicity for themselves by coming up with a BP-like response to the complaints, but this won't affect their sales because Apple buyers don't take any notice of negative publicity for Apple products.
All that is needed is a risk assessment that is proportional in scope and expertise to the risk involved. (I have had H&S responsibility in more than one company.) The risk in this case is small compared to everyday risks run by 13 year olds. The only reason that schools overreact is their fear of parents who are looking for an opportunity to sue. Unlike the US, these parents almost always lose, and the ones that win get very little in damages. The word is slowly getting round: these cases are heard by junior judges in the UK, and British judges are not as venial as US juries,
The improvement over MicroB is that it works better for actually buying things on-line. The "save as PDF" option for receipts is a very useful feature. What's needed now is a print driver; discussions I've looked at suggest that this won't come before MeeGo, as there is little point in Nokia developing a CUPS-friendly print solution for an OS that it plans to obsolete.
I like to tell people (when not telling them to get off my lawn) that my first job working with computing involved technologies that did not exist when I was at University. This wasn't completely true as I graduated in 1972 and the Intel 4004 came out in 1971, but the 8008 didn't come out till 1972, and I still call that the first "proper" microprocessor (as distinct from calculator chip). The mechanical engineers in our company called what we did either "maths" or "electronic engineering", and never liked to ask how the "maths" got into the "circuit boards" in case their eyes glazed over.