Slashdot has managed to get by fine for more than a decade without a similar deletion policy. I would prefer the distinction between troll and serious debater be left up to the reader, and not the admin. I don't want to be a part of any site that can only deal with trolls through heavy handed moderation. I think many here feel the same way. If she's been deleting posts, where is the exact line? Are we even able to see what posts were deleted to see if they deserved deletion? I doubt it. It's this lack of transparency and seeming lack of interest in open discussion that turns me off of any community she may head.
Now, PJ is hardly alone in running her site this way. But I'm a free software supporter with strong ideals and high expectations. Slashdot, for all its flaws, manages to meet these ideals. Groklaw has fallen short.
Last I checked, there were several complaints of post deletions on groklaw, to which her response was she was not really interested in "open" debate. I agree with many of her opinions and analysis of the SCO debacle, but I wouldn't want to be part of any community she's running.
I'm sure she could be valuable as a writer on various IP issues surrounding free software.
OK, so the only high speed providers in your town are Verizon DSL and Comcast cable. Both have made a business decision to block Fox News. Now what do you do? Go back to dial up? Move to another locality?
How does net neutrality interfere with how you wish to use the Internet? Net neutrality "restricts freedom" in the exact same way that abolishing slavery "restricts freedom". In the first case ISPs are limited from restricting your freedom. In the second case replace "ISP" with "slave owner".
Re:A good software company needs good programmers.
on
Joel Test Updated
·
· Score: 1
Well admittedly we must come from very different areas of programming. I've programmed business software for the past ten years and everything I've never really needed artwork for anything. For user interface design, developers just need access to the customers. Putting people between the customers and programmers makes things worse, not better.
I don't believe in developing and marketing products. The idea of developing a product first and then trying to sell it doesn't make much sense to me. The only stuff I code is stuff that has an immediate need to exist.
I'll grant that manual writers and QA can be valuable even when they don't code. I'll also grant that artists can be valuable and necessary, depending on the project. I disagree on workflow designers or user interface designers. Just keep the customers in the loop and between the customers and developers the best solution will develop.
Re:A good software company needs good programmers.
on
Joel Test Updated
·
· Score: 1
You assume by "programmers" I only mean "implementers". "Programming" as I'm using it subsumes all stages of the SDLC. If you need to have separate roles for each of those things you described, then your company probably isn't doing well. A good programmer can tell a customer that what he wants doesn't make any sense, and that there's a perfectly good alternative that will do everything the customer actually wants while being very easy to implement. If you have five people between the customer and those who understand the technical limitations, then nipping issues like this early is going to be difficult.
The same goes for management. You need management that's adept both leadership-wise AND technically. Otherwise the coders won't have any respect for him. A software manager that thinks the low level details are beneath him is a manager that's going to fail. Sure, it's impossible for everyone to know everything. But the manager needs to have the ability to understand technical issues that arise, even if they are very low level.
I don't know the specific histories of Microsoft Bob or Duke Nukem Forever. My impression is that Bob was a product that never should have existed. Anyone with common sense should have realized that, not just a programmer. My understand of DNF is that they kept changing the underlying engine. Perhaps they wanted it to be too perfect for its release, due to the limited life of most video games. I'm more familiar with iterative products that build upon previous releases and don't have the market issues inherent to game programming.
But I do want to mention Diakatana. Romero wanted the game design to be completely independent of the implementation details. That didn't work very well for him.
A good software company needs good programmers.
on
Joel Test Updated
·
· Score: 2
That's it. No tools, methodology, procedures, or what have you will make up for the lack of good programmers. And good programmers will do well no matter what the tools, procedures, methodologies, etc are (barring Kafka-esque hindrances).
So here's my revised list: 1) Is the company full of good programmers?
Of course, acquiring and maintaining good programmers doesn't just happen. New hire interviews need to be technically based, the staff needs adequate compensation, and management should not get in the way of programmers trying to do their job. However, employees don't need to be treated like prima donnas. They just need management that commands respect and respects them likewise.
The Fed's artificial inflation of the dollar is going to bring a lot of jobs back to the US. Most people won't want these jobs, but they'll have to swallow their pride if they want employment.
Goods and commodities will become more expensive, especially oil. Our standard of living will go down, but we'll have jobs. Welcome to the graceful collapse of yet another empire.
Music and literature may be popular, but they are hardly essential. And history's importance mainly comes from informing politics.
Do most people need to know multivariable calculus? No. But one thing most people are missing is an understanding of basic statistics and logic. Statisticians don't help much. Courses need to be more than just memorizing a bunch of statistical formulas. People need to understand why basic statistical reasoning works. If people don't have that basic philosophical understanding of why statistics work, then they'll just forget all about the formulas they were forced to memorize after the course is over.
These types of courses should be essential for all, but they aren't even available until college--and even then they're optional.
No, it's trolling because it'd be like posting a story on a Christian site titled "God is dead". Regardless of whether it's true or not, the story is designed to piss off the primary viewership of the site.
If cargo ships are anything like trains, then most of the energy is spent getting up to speed, and very little is spent maintaining speed. The page you linked says 1660 gallons per hour for the most efficient setting, but the engine may not need to be engaged the entire trip.
Linux and other free software were pioneered by people like RMS and Torvalds. We were never cool. But we've always been about freedom when it comes to computers. Apple is worse than Microsoft when it comes to software freedoms. We have no love of either. But we'd hate to see bad replaced with worse. That's why we regularly criticize Apple's policies.
Well it seems clear that there was nothing "random" about his detention. And it's bad enough that customs can seize anything going through the borders without warrant or cause. But it's even worse when border crossings get used as an excuse for warrantless interrogations.
Generics seem pretty straightforward to me, even the "? extends Whatever" syntax. Maybe you could give some concrete examples as to the problems with generics. The only problem right now is that type erasure makes arrays of generics impossible. Hopefully they'll fix that with the next revision.
Re:Just an improvement on a bad programming techni
on
Knuth Got It Wrong
·
· Score: 1
3 machines with 16GB RAM is much cheaper than 1 machine with 300GB RAM. There's nothing wrong with using swap if you do so wisely.
Re:The smell of slashdot in the morning...
on
Knuth Got It Wrong
·
· Score: 1
I get the impression that there is plenty of research on data structures and tiered memory. If no one had done it before, it'd be an easy thesis. What grad student wouldn't jump at that opportunity. Anyway, a cursory search gives examples like this:
As for pedagogy, you're probably right that more focus needs to be put on the effects of tiered memory on various data structures.
Re:The smell of slashdot in the morning...
on
Knuth Got It Wrong
·
· Score: 1
Well the main complaint is that your work isn't anything new really. You seem to assume that CS has not progressed in 40 years, that no modern researchers are aware of tiered memory.
No one, not a single scientist has put forward a single model that, when using known data and accepted quantities produces a flat or cooler planet with increasing CO2 levels. It has nothing to do with culture. It simply does not exist.
I'm not an expert, but that doesn't mean I or other laypersons will feel obliged to believe whatever a so called expert says. There is too much data out there for anyone to be an expert on everything, yet we must still evaluate what experts say. And that doesn't mean always deferring to experts, even when someone knows much more than you about a subject matter there are ways to evaluate his results without becoming an expert yourself.
When you start making absolute statements, my bullshit detector goes off. Science does not deal with absolutes. Now you couch it with caveats like, "accepted quantities" but that could mean many things, allowing you a no true Scotsman retreat. If there's a model that would contradict your universal statement, then it must not be using "accepted quantities".
In fact, I'm much more skeptical of these models if none exist that can show a cooling effect. Perhaps none show a cooling effect "all things being equal". But as we know from paleoclimatology, there is much more affecting the climate than just us. We can never assume "all things will be equal". It could very well be that AGW is merely delaying an ice age that would have occurred sooner rather than later without us. To say this is not even a possibility with the limited data climate data we have measured, relative to the known age of the Earth, sounds like nothing but hubris.
Now, I'm a skeptic but I'm inclined to believe that AGW is more or less true. I don't believe it will be cataclysmic, however. All that CO2 we're barfing into the atmosphere was once in the atmosphere before it was sequestered by organisms and geological processes.
Climatologists, if they want to be taken seriously, need to stop at the science. Tell us what the temperature levels and sea levels will look like in a X decades. Sure, but don't speculate on the social or economic implications. The worst predictions I've heard so far aren't particularly dramatic, and don't seem like they'll affect me during my entire life. This is a far cry from the alarmist Ranger Rick articles I read as a kid in the 80's. I was convinced that by now none of the populous coastal cities would be above water anymore.
When the alarm keeps getting sounded without an ensuing alarm-worthy event, people get inured. They stop believing. Against such a background it's difficult to believe the hockey stick type alarmism that's current. Rather, for the layperson, it seems reasonable to expect a moderated temperature increase over many decades. This expectation drives no immediate call to action. It motivates a measured rather than dramatic response. Sure, we should cut back on CO2 emissions where reasonable. But the tradeoff isn't worth it to make any dramatic, socially disruptive changes at this moment. The amount of environmental harm we prevent is not balanced against the social and economic chaos that would ensure.
It would be difficult to get a paper published in a women's studies journal with the thesis that men aren't such bad people after all. Women's studies is clearly part of academia. And while much good comes of academia, various factors can result in programs that are based on pushing an ideology rather than honestly seeking the truth in some area of study.
I'm not saying those in women's studies are wrong. What I'm saying is that certain academic programs which are highly insular against contrarian research. Is "climate research" one of those academic programs? To answer the skeptics, they should show how they are not. It seems unlikely one would take the effort to become proficient in climate studies unless one was enthusiastic about the environment, and protecting it from corporate interests. It's possible, but unlikely. Not quite as unlikely as becoming an expert in women's studies just to argue against its main tenets, but still unlikely.
A bigger problem I think is demonstrating that climate research is a "hard" science. What I see is a program subject to many of the same difficulties facing sociology. There are many variables, and plenty of models, but few good predictions. And there is no way to run a controlled experiment with all the relevant variables. We, and the Earth, are the experiment.
Slashdot Mirror
Running an open discussion site while keeping trolls at bay without deleting posts is not easy. You should try it sometime. I did, and failed.
Slashdot has managed to get by fine for more than a decade without a similar deletion policy. I would prefer the distinction between troll and serious debater be left up to the reader, and not the admin. I don't want to be a part of any site that can only deal with trolls through heavy handed moderation. I think many here feel the same way. If she's been deleting posts, where is the exact line? Are we even able to see what posts were deleted to see if they deserved deletion? I doubt it. It's this lack of transparency and seeming lack of interest in open discussion that turns me off of any community she may head.
Now, PJ is hardly alone in running her site this way. But I'm a free software supporter with strong ideals and high expectations. Slashdot, for all its flaws, manages to meet these ideals. Groklaw has fallen short.
Last I checked, there were several complaints of post deletions on groklaw, to which her response was she was not really interested in "open" debate. I agree with many of her opinions and analysis of the SCO debacle, but I wouldn't want to be part of any community she's running.
I'm sure she could be valuable as a writer on various IP issues surrounding free software.
Yup I googled what you said to and came up with this:
http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/07/response-to-right-wing-personal.html
Doesn't exactly confirm your accusations.
OK, so the only high speed providers in your town are Verizon DSL and Comcast cable. Both have made a business decision to block Fox News. Now what do you do? Go back to dial up? Move to another locality?
How does net neutrality interfere with how you wish to use the Internet? Net neutrality "restricts freedom" in the exact same way that abolishing slavery "restricts freedom". In the first case ISPs are limited from restricting your freedom. In the second case replace "ISP" with "slave owner".
Well admittedly we must come from very different areas of programming. I've programmed business software for the past ten years and everything I've never really needed artwork for anything. For user interface design, developers just need access to the customers. Putting people between the customers and programmers makes things worse, not better.
I don't believe in developing and marketing products. The idea of developing a product first and then trying to sell it doesn't make much sense to me. The only stuff I code is stuff that has an immediate need to exist.
I'll grant that manual writers and QA can be valuable even when they don't code. I'll also grant that artists can be valuable and necessary, depending on the project. I disagree on workflow designers or user interface designers. Just keep the customers in the loop and between the customers and developers the best solution will develop.
You assume by "programmers" I only mean "implementers". "Programming" as I'm using it subsumes all stages of the SDLC. If you need to have separate roles for each of those things you described, then your company probably isn't doing well. A good programmer can tell a customer that what he wants doesn't make any sense, and that there's a perfectly good alternative that will do everything the customer actually wants while being very easy to implement. If you have five people between the customer and those who understand the technical limitations, then nipping issues like this early is going to be difficult.
The same goes for management. You need management that's adept both leadership-wise AND technically. Otherwise the coders won't have any respect for him. A software manager that thinks the low level details are beneath him is a manager that's going to fail. Sure, it's impossible for everyone to know everything. But the manager needs to have the ability to understand technical issues that arise, even if they are very low level.
I don't know the specific histories of Microsoft Bob or Duke Nukem Forever. My impression is that Bob was a product that never should have existed. Anyone with common sense should have realized that, not just a programmer. My understand of DNF is that they kept changing the underlying engine. Perhaps they wanted it to be too perfect for its release, due to the limited life of most video games. I'm more familiar with iterative products that build upon previous releases and don't have the market issues inherent to game programming.
But I do want to mention Diakatana. Romero wanted the game design to be completely independent of the implementation details. That didn't work very well for him.
That's it. No tools, methodology, procedures, or what have you will make up for the lack of good programmers. And good programmers will do well no matter what the tools, procedures, methodologies, etc are (barring Kafka-esque hindrances).
So here's my revised list:
1) Is the company full of good programmers?
Of course, acquiring and maintaining good programmers doesn't just happen. New hire interviews need to be technically based, the staff needs adequate compensation, and management should not get in the way of programmers trying to do their job. However, employees don't need to be treated like prima donnas. They just need management that commands respect and respects them likewise.
Closures in Java will make it cleaner to write anonymous classes. That's about it.
The Fed's artificial inflation of the dollar is going to bring a lot of jobs back to the US. Most people won't want these jobs, but they'll have to swallow their pride if they want employment.
Goods and commodities will become more expensive, especially oil. Our standard of living will go down, but we'll have jobs. Welcome to the graceful collapse of yet another empire.
Music and literature may be popular, but they are hardly essential. And history's importance mainly comes from informing politics.
Do most people need to know multivariable calculus? No. But one thing most people are missing is an understanding of basic statistics and logic. Statisticians don't help much. Courses need to be more than just memorizing a bunch of statistical formulas. People need to understand why basic statistical reasoning works. If people don't have that basic philosophical understanding of why statistics work, then they'll just forget all about the formulas they were forced to memorize after the course is over.
These types of courses should be essential for all, but they aren't even available until college--and even then they're optional.
No, it's trolling because it'd be like posting a story on a Christian site titled "God is dead". Regardless of whether it's true or not, the story is designed to piss off the primary viewership of the site.
If cargo ships are anything like trains, then most of the energy is spent getting up to speed, and very little is spent maintaining speed. The page you linked says 1660 gallons per hour for the most efficient setting, but the engine may not need to be engaged the entire trip.
Zeroing a terabyte drive takes hours. Assume a generous 100MB/s write speed. That's 6GB/m. A terabyte would take 166 minutes, or about 2.75 hours.
Linux and other free software were pioneered by people like RMS and Torvalds. We were never cool. But we've always been about freedom when it comes to computers. Apple is worse than Microsoft when it comes to software freedoms. We have no love of either. But we'd hate to see bad replaced with worse. That's why we regularly criticize Apple's policies.
A year would be good if that's the amount of time he serves.
He's already served over 2 years.
Well it seems clear that there was nothing "random" about his detention. And it's bad enough that customs can seize anything going through the borders without warrant or cause. But it's even worse when border crossings get used as an excuse for warrantless interrogations.
If people really wanted those types of optimizations, they'd be wiling to pay for them. But they cost too much in time and money.
Generics seem pretty straightforward to me, even the "? extends Whatever" syntax. Maybe you could give some concrete examples as to the problems with generics. The only problem right now is that type erasure makes arrays of generics impossible. Hopefully they'll fix that with the next revision.
3 machines with 16GB RAM is much cheaper than 1 machine with 300GB RAM. There's nothing wrong with using swap if you do so wisely.
I get the impression that there is plenty of research on data structures and tiered memory. If no one had done it before, it'd be an easy thesis. What grad student wouldn't jump at that opportunity. Anyway, a cursory search gives examples like this:
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~jignesh/quickstep/publ/cci.pdf
As for pedagogy, you're probably right that more focus needs to be put on the effects of tiered memory on various data structures.
Well the main complaint is that your work isn't anything new really. You seem to assume that CS has not progressed in 40 years, that no modern researchers are aware of tiered memory.
No one, not a single scientist has put forward a single model that, when using known data and accepted quantities produces a flat or cooler planet with increasing CO2 levels. It has nothing to do with culture. It simply does not exist.
I'm not an expert, but that doesn't mean I or other laypersons will feel obliged to believe whatever a so called expert says. There is too much data out there for anyone to be an expert on everything, yet we must still evaluate what experts say. And that doesn't mean always deferring to experts, even when someone knows much more than you about a subject matter there are ways to evaluate his results without becoming an expert yourself.
When you start making absolute statements, my bullshit detector goes off. Science does not deal with absolutes. Now you couch it with caveats like, "accepted quantities" but that could mean many things, allowing you a no true Scotsman retreat. If there's a model that would contradict your universal statement, then it must not be using "accepted quantities".
In fact, I'm much more skeptical of these models if none exist that can show a cooling effect. Perhaps none show a cooling effect "all things being equal". But as we know from paleoclimatology, there is much more affecting the climate than just us. We can never assume "all things will be equal". It could very well be that AGW is merely delaying an ice age that would have occurred sooner rather than later without us. To say this is not even a possibility with the limited data climate data we have measured, relative to the known age of the Earth, sounds like nothing but hubris.
Now, I'm a skeptic but I'm inclined to believe that AGW is more or less true. I don't believe it will be cataclysmic, however. All that CO2 we're barfing into the atmosphere was once in the atmosphere before it was sequestered by organisms and geological processes.
Climatologists, if they want to be taken seriously, need to stop at the science. Tell us what the temperature levels and sea levels will look like in a X decades. Sure, but don't speculate on the social or economic implications. The worst predictions I've heard so far aren't particularly dramatic, and don't seem like they'll affect me during my entire life. This is a far cry from the alarmist Ranger Rick articles I read as a kid in the 80's. I was convinced that by now none of the populous coastal cities would be above water anymore.
When the alarm keeps getting sounded without an ensuing alarm-worthy event, people get inured. They stop believing. Against such a background it's difficult to believe the hockey stick type alarmism that's current. Rather, for the layperson, it seems reasonable to expect a moderated temperature increase over many decades. This expectation drives no immediate call to action. It motivates a measured rather than dramatic response. Sure, we should cut back on CO2 emissions where reasonable. But the tradeoff isn't worth it to make any dramatic, socially disruptive changes at this moment. The amount of environmental harm we prevent is not balanced against the social and economic chaos that would ensure.
It would be difficult to get a paper published in a women's studies journal with the thesis that men aren't such bad people after all. Women's studies is clearly part of academia. And while much good comes of academia, various factors can result in programs that are based on pushing an ideology rather than honestly seeking the truth in some area of study.
I'm not saying those in women's studies are wrong. What I'm saying is that certain academic programs which are highly insular against contrarian research. Is "climate research" one of those academic programs? To answer the skeptics, they should show how they are not. It seems unlikely one would take the effort to become proficient in climate studies unless one was enthusiastic about the environment, and protecting it from corporate interests. It's possible, but unlikely. Not quite as unlikely as becoming an expert in women's studies just to argue against its main tenets, but still unlikely.
A bigger problem I think is demonstrating that climate research is a "hard" science. What I see is a program subject to many of the same difficulties facing sociology. There are many variables, and plenty of models, but few good predictions. And there is no way to run a controlled experiment with all the relevant variables. We, and the Earth, are the experiment.