Isolator earbuds are great. Mine happen to be the Etymotic ER6; Lest I sound too much like a shill, I'll say I never have compared them directly to any other isolator-style earbuds, and it's quite possible that others out there offer better value.
However they compare, I absolutely love mine -- they're far more effective for reducing distraction in a noisy office than either earplugs (when everything is muffled, muffled noises become distracting) or normal headphones or earbuds (which require me to crank the volume and risk further hearing loss).
And I'm no audiophile, but I really do find music more enjoyable with these -- when I started using them, I found myself discovering new subtleties to quieter passages of songs that I'd been listening to for *years*.
Cox's point is that it's sometimes necessary to give up design or implementation elegance in order to avoid making unexpected changes in the functional properties of the system on which users have come to depend.
Oftentimes the reason for the quick-and-dirty fix is not that people are too lazy or resource-cheap to do the rewrite, but rather that the rewrite can have significant unexpected side effects on the system's behavior, where the quick fix's impact is much more predictable.
Having good judgement in deciding when it's appropriate to do the rewrite and when it's appropriate to make a hackish localized fix is a key skill for an engineer.
Nothing that the television industry can do could make me go back to watching television.
I used to think the same thing; I quit television 5 years ago, when I realized I didn't get nearly enough out of it to warrant the time I spent in fron of it. My roommate had a tube, but I only ever used it for DVDs and video games. Then, less than a year ago, he got a TiVo. I watch TV again, now. Not a ton -- less than an hour on an average day. But I get a lot more pleasure out of it than when I was watching two or three hours a day.
There are good things on television -- your list really isn't complete. It's just that it's not usually worth the effort to watch them if you have to synchronize your personal schedule with that of the broadcasters and when 25% of your viewing time is wasted on commercials. TiVo lets you sit down any time you want and get through a "hour long" show in 45 minutes, and that changes the cost/benefit analysis a lot.
God.. smiling more? Think about what you're turning yourself into by smiling all the time. Plastic. We aren't all idiots that can't see through someone that's just smiling because they read it in a book somewhere.
All the world's a stage. Your attitude is really no less plastic, no less a pose, than the one that Carnegie promotes.
Here's a thought: Maybe if you smile more, you'll have more effective or more enjoyable interactions with others. Couldn't that be something to smile about? Perhaps the effect precedes the cause, in this case.
Really? Then you should never do any exra work. You should never polish up programs.
Not if it takes time away from other work whose value is greater than that added by your polishing. You're looking strictly at the benefit side without acknowleding that there are costs to your extra work.
I was in school ya moron. I was doing an assignment. It was all on my time.
I wasn't responding to the situation you described with your instructor, but rather to your claims about how things happen in the real world, from this quote:
NO it does not work like that in the real world. In the real world if you take the time to put a nice gui on programs people like it (as long as the core requirements are met). In the real world your boss appreciates you going the extra mile.
You may notice that the text quoted above is the exact same text that I quoted in my original response. If you weren't so eager to get pissy and start calling names, you might have been able to figure out that I wasn't referring to your school experience.
There are probably many cases where your boss will appreciate the extra work. That may even be the case the majority of the time. But it's not unambiguously the case that he's always going to appreciate it. Especially not in places that are building a software product, where the extra work you did can't actually go into the product without also requiring extra work from the QA and documentation people, who may already be on a tight schedule.
Which do you value more, someone that shows initiative and can learn complex subject matters on their own, or someone that has to have their hand held and the subject matter read to them?
For most developer positions, I value someone who can speak, write, and otherwise interact clearly on various technical topics. Independent study is pretty poor at teaching this sort of thing. 200-student classes aren't a lot better, but that's not what a decent college is like, most of the time.
I work as a programmer. I'm pretty successful at it. The most useful classes I took in college were Literature classes, where I had to write an essay every couple of weeks.
NO it does not work like that in the real world. In the real world if you take the time to put a nice gui on programs people like it (as long as the core requirements are met). In the real world your boss appreciates you going the extra mile.
Not necessarily. If the GUI isn't very valuable in the given situation, and the time you spent on building it could have been spent building something else that is more valuable, then your boss is likely to be annoyed with you, and with some reason. You as a developer may not be in the best position to set development priorities on your own, and should be cautious about doing so.
That extra mile isn't yours to give, unless you built the GUI on your own time.
Our brains are already having trouble keeping up with the world around us. The day we start seeing in the IR and UV parts of the spectrum, that'll be all the more for us to process on a second-by-second basis.
Our nervous systems seem to be quite capable of learning to filter out extra detail when it's not needed.
Do you wear corrective lenses? Do you remember what it was like when you first started wearing them? When I started using correctives (especially contact lenses), I found myself astounded at all the extra detail around me: separate blades of grass instead of a green blur, being able to count the bricks on buildings in the middle-distance. For the first few days, I found it hard to concentrate on anything but this amazingly detailed visual world around me.
But that effect wore off, as I got used to it and my brain learned to ignore all those details when they weren't useful to me. I'd be very surprised if augmented senses were much different -- for the first few days we might suffer overload, but we would adjust.
I'd probably never buy one of these myself, since I'm quite happy with my PowerBook.
But my parents often struggle with various computer related issues, especially spyware and viruses, and as the family geek, I end up doing tech support for them.
I've often thought about pointing them towards a Mac, but I've been hesitant to do so, because of the expense and the risk that they'll find it frustrating if some random piece of software they care about doesn't work.
But at $500, I could easily see myself giving them one of these for Christmas next year, and helping them to migrate to it. The major things they do with their computer are manage digital photos and access the web. This machine should be able to handle those tasks with no problem. Even if I decide to add some memory and throw in a KVM as insurance to let them keep using the old machine, it's still in a reasonable price range for a gift.
This could be a pretty significant break-out product, for Apple.
That whizzing noise you heard was the point flying right over your head. (Your ducking didn't help.)
It's very nice that Wikipedia is free and convenient to use. In that respect it is clearly superior to EB. But in other aspects (once again, accuracy and completeness), it suffers. Those other aspects were the topic of my original post and of the article posted, and going on about business model doesn't do a thing to address the original points being made.
This is hardly a meaningful comparison. EB is a pay service, and that factor alone is going to have a far bigger impact on website traffic than the ones we're discussing (completeness and accuracy of content).
That begs the question: Does the Wikipedia exist to provide reference information for visitors... or does it exist simply for people to edit it, giving writers some sort of vague satisfaction that their contribution has been accepted?
Bingo. The fact that Wikipedia has 300k entries in English sounds impressive, until you realize that this count includes entries on allsortsofSFandpopculturetrivia.
I don't think it's bad that Wikipedia covers all these topics -- after all, it's not like this is a print encyclopedia where physical size constraints mean that you have to be selective about what you include.
But it does mean that you really can't directly compare Wikipedia directly to a traditional encyclopedia. Basically Wikipedia suffers from the same inversion of goals that often makes it difficult for open source products to produce software that is useful to and usable by non-technical end users: It's created by people whose primary motivation is the intrinsic pleasure they take in creating something, not the pleasure (or financial rewards) that come with creating a tool that is useful to end users. And as a result, the needs of the end user take a back seat.
Tell that to the folks who get blacklisted from casinos for "card counting". Card counting does not guarantee sure fire wins, card counting can take the odds away from the house.
Card counting doesn't work if the shoe is reshuffled on every hand. At an online casino where shuffling is free and takes effectively zero time, why wouldn't they reshuffle on every hand?
Given the fact that poker is a game of chance (unlike say chess, in which randomness has no play), a bot can only be as good as the expert that has created it.
That doesn't really follow at all. The role of chance in the game can actually be an advantage for machines, which can compute probabilities more accurately than all than all but the most skilled human players.
More importantly, machines don't have the problem of reacting emotionally to a situatino and letting that overrule their reason. A computer program will never go on tilt.
So it's easy to imagine someone who is an expert at the game but who isn't usually calm enough at the table to actually act on that expertise and play well. The potential for such a person to create a poker bot that played better than the expert himself is quite high.
Mainly I hate them because they keep sending me text message advertisements to get me to use various services like internet access and text messages for which they levy extra charges under my plan.
The ads include a note providing a URL that you can supposedly go to to make the messages stop. I've gone to that page and filled out the form twice. The messages keep coming.
It was pretty bad that they sent me this crap the first time, but if they'd actually stopped sending after I opted out once, I might have stuck with them out of laziness and inertia. No chance of that, now.
My contract with them ends next month, at which point I'll be moving on. I'm not sure where, yet. I'd been leaning towards Verizon, but from the sound of this article, they're just as prone to customer disservice as AT&T, so I'll have to keep looking.
Uh, no. The GP poster spoke about the cost of the RAM upgrade to Apple. The price they charge for the upgrade, which is what you quoted, is much higher than the cost. I assure you that they're paying much, much less than $75 more for the 512MB SIMM than they did for the 256MB one. (The retail price difference is about $45, and that almost certainly shrinks further when you remember that Apple isn't paying retail.)
Of course, part of that $75 price is also the extra labor needed to go and change out the SIMM, but that wouldn't be an issue if they'd just provide a reasonable amount of memory in the machine to begin with.
At any rate, the original point, that Apple engages in horrible nickle-and-diming on the RAM in their machines. I like Macs, and love my Powerbook, but when I bought my PB, I got it with the minimum RAM possible and immediately ordered a SIMM to triple the RAM, for less than Apple would have charged me to double it.
This is one of those little things that makes it hard to suggest Macs to my friends and family -- the whole point of the Mac is that "it just works" with a minimum of fuss. But to get the machine to work well, you do have to deal with the fuss of increasing the memory (either through Apple, which is overpriced and means you can't return it) or through an upgrade that you install yourself, which is beyond the abilities of the sort of users I'd like to recommend the Mac to.
"Technical challenge" is a little fuzzily defined here. If biz apps were "simple" or "easy" then it would all come in an off-the-shelf box.
This makes no sense. First, many business apps are at least somewhat off-the-shelf (see SAP for an example). Second, those that aren't off-the-shelf are that way because nobody has figured out a way to meet the varying requirements of a large number of customers with a single product. Technical difficulty has nothing to do with it.
What's exciting to me, personally? Systems programming. Right now I spend most of my day working on a multithreaded server that acts as a proxy for several network protocols. I deal with concurrency issues, reverse engineer protocol implementations from other software companies, build infrastructure components that get shared across multiple protocol implementations.
Before I found my current position, I spent about 3 years writing biz apps in a few different languages, including Java. I'm enjoying my work a lot more, these days.
From an overall perspective, is what I'm doing now more difficult than what I was doing back when I was building business apps? Not really. But back then, the big challenge I faced was figuring out what John Q. PHB wanted from the software he'd hired my company to build.
Nowadays the big challenges I face are much more technical in nature, which are far more interesting to me. And I think that this gives them more prestige in the eyes of the average hacker.
How can you claim to love freedom while simultaneously denouncing something that was decided through a free vote?
You're really reaching to try to conflate democracy and protection of personal freedoms, here. It's true that those things happen to coincide in many countries, but they aren't intrinsically tied to one another.
This is the entire point of the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution: To protect freedom from democracy.
I agree that Yahoo should conform to French laws if doing business in France. But if I were in Yahoo's position I'd be looking real hard at simply pulling out of France entirely; It seems very likely that the increased costs required to obey this law are going to mean that doing business there simply isn't profitable.
I think you've nailed it. While there may be people out there doing interesting work with Java, by far most of the Java coding being done is of the "web or GUI interface on front of a business database" variety.
It's pretty dull stuff, and that dullness has shaped how the language of choice is perceived. While Java jobs may outnumber C/C++ jobs a bit, I'm betting that once you limit the field to jobs that offer real technical challenges (i.e. the hardest part isn't figuring out what the PHBs want) or that otherwise involve doing something really novel with software, Java doesn't look nearly so hot.
6 Billion Humans Breathing create more CO2 in one year than does burning fossil fuel...
The carbon in the CO2 that human respiration 'produces' comes ultimately from plant matter (having possibly taken a detour through animal form). And the plants took that carbon from atmospheric C02, to begin with.
So human and animal respiration doesn't constitute a net increase in atmospheric CO2 -- really we're just putting back some CO2 that some plant had recently taken out.
The same can't be said for CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels. Yes that carbon had been in the atmosphere before some prehistoric plant fixed it way back when. But it's been sequestered from the atmosphere for millions of years, and releasing it now does constitutes a change in the composition of the atmosphere relative to what it's been like for most of human history.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, all you need is a single parallelizable task for a cluster to be worth it.
This makes little sense. Parallelizability is not a simple yes or no question as you seem to think. Rather, it's a matter of degree; You express parallelizability of a computation as an integer indicating the maximum number of parallel threads of execution it can be split into.
A computation whose dependencies permit you to benefit from running two seperate threads of execution is technically parallelizable, but it's not going to benefit from a cluster unless your "cluster" consists of two machines and you're comparing the cluster to a uniprocessor with the same performance as one node of the "cluster".
Slashdot Mirror
Isolator earbuds are great. Mine happen to be the Etymotic ER6; Lest I sound too much like a shill, I'll say I never have compared them directly to any other isolator-style earbuds, and it's quite possible that others out there offer better value.
However they compare, I absolutely love mine -- they're far more effective for reducing distraction in a noisy office than either earplugs (when everything is muffled, muffled noises become distracting) or normal headphones or earbuds (which require me to crank the volume and risk further hearing loss).
And I'm no audiophile, but I really do find music more enjoyable with these -- when I started using them, I found myself discovering new subtleties to quieter passages of songs that I'd been listening to for *years*.
Cox's point is that it's sometimes necessary to give up design or implementation elegance in order to avoid making unexpected changes in the functional properties of the system on which users have come to depend.
Oftentimes the reason for the quick-and-dirty fix is not that people are too lazy or resource-cheap to do the rewrite, but rather that the rewrite can have significant unexpected side effects on the system's behavior, where the quick fix's impact is much more predictable.
Having good judgement in deciding when it's appropriate to do the rewrite and when it's appropriate to make a hackish localized fix is a key skill for an engineer.
I used to think the same thing; I quit television 5 years ago, when I realized I didn't get nearly enough out of it to warrant the time I spent in fron of it. My roommate had a tube, but I only ever used it for DVDs and video games. Then, less than a year ago, he got a TiVo. I watch TV again, now. Not a ton -- less than an hour on an average day. But I get a lot more pleasure out of it than when I was watching two or three hours a day.
There are good things on television -- your list really isn't complete. It's just that it's not usually worth the effort to watch them if you have to synchronize your personal schedule with that of the broadcasters and when 25% of your viewing time is wasted on commercials. TiVo lets you sit down any time you want and get through a "hour long" show in 45 minutes, and that changes the cost/benefit analysis a lot.
Thanks for the suggestion. Looks like a very worthwhile read.
All the world's a stage. Your attitude is really no less plastic, no less a pose, than the one that Carnegie promotes.
Here's a thought: Maybe if you smile more, you'll have more effective or more enjoyable interactions with others. Couldn't that be something to smile about? Perhaps the effect precedes the cause, in this case.
Not if it takes time away from other work whose value is greater than that added by your polishing. You're looking strictly at the benefit side without acknowleding that there are costs to your extra work.
I was in school ya moron. I was doing an assignment. It was all on my time.
I wasn't responding to the situation you described with your instructor, but rather to your claims about how things happen in the real world, from this quote:
NO it does not work like that in the real world. In the real world if you take the time to put a nice gui on programs people like it (as long as the core requirements are met). In the real world your boss appreciates you going the extra mile.
You may notice that the text quoted above is the exact same text that I quoted in my original response. If you weren't so eager to get pissy and start calling names, you might have been able to figure out that I wasn't referring to your school experience.
There are probably many cases where your boss will appreciate the extra work. That may even be the case the majority of the time. But it's not unambiguously the case that he's always going to appreciate it. Especially not in places that are building a software product, where the extra work you did can't actually go into the product without also requiring extra work from the QA and documentation people, who may already be on a tight schedule.
For most developer positions, I value someone who can speak, write, and otherwise interact clearly on various technical topics. Independent study is pretty poor at teaching this sort of thing. 200-student classes aren't a lot better, but that's not what a decent college is like, most of the time.
I work as a programmer. I'm pretty successful at it. The most useful classes I took in college were Literature classes, where I had to write an essay every couple of weeks.
Not necessarily. If the GUI isn't very valuable in the given situation, and the time you spent on building it could have been spent building something else that is more valuable, then your boss is likely to be annoyed with you, and with some reason. You as a developer may not be in the best position to set development priorities on your own, and should be cautious about doing so.
That extra mile isn't yours to give, unless you built the GUI on your own time.
Our nervous systems seem to be quite capable of learning to filter out extra detail when it's not needed.
Do you wear corrective lenses? Do you remember what it was like when you first started wearing them? When I started using correctives (especially contact lenses), I found myself astounded at all the extra detail around me: separate blades of grass instead of a green blur, being able to count the bricks on buildings in the middle-distance. For the first few days, I found it hard to concentrate on anything but this amazingly detailed visual world around me.
But that effect wore off, as I got used to it and my brain learned to ignore all those details when they weren't useful to me. I'd be very surprised if augmented senses were much different -- for the first few days we might suffer overload, but we would adjust.
I'd probably never buy one of these myself, since I'm quite happy with my PowerBook.
But my parents often struggle with various computer related issues, especially spyware and viruses, and as the family geek, I end up doing tech support for them.
I've often thought about pointing them towards a Mac, but I've been hesitant to do so, because of the expense and the risk that they'll find it frustrating if some random piece of software they care about doesn't work.
But at $500, I could easily see myself giving them one of these for Christmas next year, and helping them to migrate to it. The major things they do with their computer are manage digital photos and access the web. This machine should be able to handle those tasks with no problem. Even if I decide to add some memory and throw in a KVM as insurance to let them keep using the old machine, it's still in a reasonable price range for a gift.
This could be a pretty significant break-out product, for Apple.
That whizzing noise you heard was the point flying right over your head. (Your ducking didn't help.)
It's very nice that Wikipedia is free and convenient to use. In that respect it is clearly superior to EB. But in other aspects (once again, accuracy and completeness), it suffers. Those other aspects were the topic of my original post and of the article posted, and going on about business model doesn't do a thing to address the original points being made.
This is hardly a meaningful comparison. EB is a pay service, and that factor alone is going to have a far bigger impact on website traffic than the ones we're discussing (completeness and accuracy of content).
Bingo. The fact that Wikipedia has 300k entries in English sounds impressive, until you realize that this count includes entries on all sorts of SF and pop culture trivia.
I don't think it's bad that Wikipedia covers all these topics -- after all, it's not like this is a print encyclopedia where physical size constraints mean that you have to be selective about what you include.
But it does mean that you really can't directly compare Wikipedia directly to a traditional encyclopedia. Basically Wikipedia suffers from the same inversion of goals that often makes it difficult for open source products to produce software that is useful to and usable by non-technical end users: It's created by people whose primary motivation is the intrinsic pleasure they take in creating something, not the pleasure (or financial rewards) that come with creating a tool that is useful to end users. And as a result, the needs of the end user take a back seat.
Why reusable? Every kilogram of the craft that is "reused" is a kilogram of payload that it couldn't take up and leave in orbit.
Most of the works of art that were produced before copyright law were also produced before copying of most media was cheap.
I mean, you can't just print out another Sistine Chapel ceiling.
Card counting doesn't work if the shoe is reshuffled on every hand. At an online casino where shuffling is free and takes effectively zero time, why wouldn't they reshuffle on every hand?
That doesn't really follow at all. The role of chance in the game can actually be an advantage for machines, which can compute probabilities more accurately than all than all but the most skilled human players.
More importantly, machines don't have the problem of reacting emotionally to a situatino and letting that overrule their reason. A computer program will never go on tilt.
So it's easy to imagine someone who is an expert at the game but who isn't usually calm enough at the table to actually act on that expertise and play well. The potential for such a person to create a poker bot that played better than the expert himself is quite high.
I can tell you that it isn't AT&T wireless.
Mainly I hate them because they keep sending me text message advertisements to get me to use various services like internet access and text messages for which they levy extra charges under my plan.
The ads include a note providing a URL that you can supposedly go to to make the messages stop. I've gone to that page and filled out the form twice. The messages keep coming.
It was pretty bad that they sent me this crap the first time, but if they'd actually stopped sending after I opted out once, I might have stuck with them out of laziness and inertia. No chance of that, now.
My contract with them ends next month, at which point I'll be moving on. I'm not sure where, yet. I'd been leaning towards Verizon, but from the sound of this article, they're just as prone to customer disservice as AT&T, so I'll have to keep looking.
Uh, no. The GP poster spoke about the cost of the RAM upgrade to Apple. The price they charge for the upgrade, which is what you quoted, is much higher than the cost. I assure you that they're paying much, much less than $75 more for the 512MB SIMM than they did for the 256MB one. (The retail price difference is about $45, and that almost certainly shrinks further when you remember that Apple isn't paying retail.)
Of course, part of that $75 price is also the extra labor needed to go and change out the SIMM, but that wouldn't be an issue if they'd just provide a reasonable amount of memory in the machine to begin with.
At any rate, the original point, that Apple engages in horrible nickle-and-diming on the RAM in their machines. I like Macs, and love my Powerbook, but when I bought my PB, I got it with the minimum RAM possible and immediately ordered a SIMM to triple the RAM, for less than Apple would have charged me to double it.
This is one of those little things that makes it hard to suggest Macs to my friends and family -- the whole point of the Mac is that "it just works" with a minimum of fuss. But to get the machine to work well, you do have to deal with the fuss of increasing the memory (either through Apple, which is overpriced and means you can't return it) or through an upgrade that you install yourself, which is beyond the abilities of the sort of users I'd like to recommend the Mac to.
This makes no sense. First, many business apps are at least somewhat off-the-shelf (see SAP for an example). Second, those that aren't off-the-shelf are that way because nobody has figured out a way to meet the varying requirements of a large number of customers with a single product. Technical difficulty has nothing to do with it.
What's exciting to me, personally? Systems programming. Right now I spend most of my day working on a multithreaded server that acts as a proxy for several network protocols. I deal with concurrency issues, reverse engineer protocol implementations from other software companies, build infrastructure components that get shared across multiple protocol implementations.
Before I found my current position, I spent about 3 years writing biz apps in a few different languages, including Java. I'm enjoying my work a lot more, these days.
From an overall perspective, is what I'm doing now more difficult than what I was doing back when I was building business apps? Not really. But back then, the big challenge I faced was figuring out what John Q. PHB wanted from the software he'd hired my company to build.
Nowadays the big challenges I face are much more technical in nature, which are far more interesting to me. And I think that this gives them more prestige in the eyes of the average hacker.
Would you react the same way if a French citizen was judging (and condemning) the DMCA or some other US law that you find execrable?
You're really reaching to try to conflate democracy and protection of personal freedoms, here. It's true that those things happen to coincide in many countries, but they aren't intrinsically tied to one another.
This is the entire point of the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution: To protect freedom from democracy.
I agree that Yahoo should conform to French laws if doing business in France. But if I were in Yahoo's position I'd be looking real hard at simply pulling out of France entirely; It seems very likely that the increased costs required to obey this law are going to mean that doing business there simply isn't profitable.
I think you've nailed it. While there may be people out there doing interesting work with Java, by far most of the Java coding being done is of the "web or GUI interface on front of a business database" variety.
It's pretty dull stuff, and that dullness has shaped how the language of choice is perceived. While Java jobs may outnumber C/C++ jobs a bit, I'm betting that once you limit the field to jobs that offer real technical challenges (i.e. the hardest part isn't figuring out what the PHBs want) or that otherwise involve doing something really novel with software, Java doesn't look nearly so hot.
The carbon in the CO2 that human respiration 'produces' comes ultimately from plant matter (having possibly taken a detour through animal form). And the plants took that carbon from atmospheric C02, to begin with.
So human and animal respiration doesn't constitute a net increase in atmospheric CO2 -- really we're just putting back some CO2 that some plant had recently taken out.
The same can't be said for CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels. Yes that carbon had been in the atmosphere before some prehistoric plant fixed it way back when. But it's been sequestered from the atmosphere for millions of years, and releasing it now does constitutes a change in the composition of the atmosphere relative to what it's been like for most of human history.
This makes little sense. Parallelizability is not a simple yes or no question as you seem to think. Rather, it's a matter of degree; You express parallelizability of a computation as an integer indicating the maximum number of parallel threads of execution it can be split into.
A computation whose dependencies permit you to benefit from running two seperate threads of execution is technically parallelizable, but it's not going to benefit from a cluster unless your "cluster" consists of two machines and you're comparing the cluster to a uniprocessor with the same performance as one node of the "cluster".