Occam's razor (also written as Ockham's razor from William of Ockham, and in Latin lex parsimoniae) is a principle of parsimony, economy, or succinctness used in logic and problem-solving. It states that among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected. In other words, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
What they are doing is using the free cold to cut their costs. But of course that heating will effect the weather in that area, which will affect the ecosystem which will start to spread its effect. There may be widespread and deeply felt consequences down the road, but not for Facebook. Dumping heat is the same sort of externalized cost as say dumping waste chemicals in a stream. The company does not pay, it lets those downstream pay. You could argue that the effect is small but as we know the butterfly effect is real and unpredictable All they really know is that they are going to pay less money for cooling. Be damned with the rest of the world.
I wonder if the polls will tell a different story when further revelations come out from the Guardian. They say there is more to the story.
The second thing I wonder, is why some politicians act the way they do. So much support for the capture and use of secret information. Could it be that the NSA has some dirt on those politicians and they know better than to piss off the NSA. And how high does it go? Lets ask Darrel Issa to start and investigation, when he finishes finding out where exactly Benghazi is.
Start with designing operating systems that are secure and language enviromnments that are secure rather that feature rich marketing shows. Don't put the blame on the programmers that have to work with shoddy designed infrastructure. Change the infrastructure.
Standardization and merger/monopoly are happening in IT and in business.
How many products do you see that do everything. We have a forms package that does work flow and web design, a document program that does workflow and web design, we have a messaging layer that does work flow and web design. Each trying to capture the entire business. We see it with hamburger chains and doughnut sellers going after Startbuck's market. Now we see McDonalds going after Dairy Queens market and big box discount stores going after the Grocery chain market.
Everyone wants to be a one stop shop. Companies are getting there by buying up smaller companies and over and over.
The problem is the actual software developers will have fewer and fewer jobs for real development with few and fewer companies providing software.
Already our company is into buying packages and thinking they can save money by plugging everything together instead of targeted custom development.
The IT people of the future (if this trend continues) will be glorified plumbers. A few developers will make the design decision we will all have to live with.
Unless of course we start to recognize that this may not be the most cost effective way to do things, or that this dumbing down of jobs is bad overall for the society and we might see some anti-trust going on with breaking up of the swelling blobs of companies and packages and a new leaner meaner model emerging.
If you want to be any more than a coder the you need some background in math to understand (and caclulate) the savings of doing alternative ways of coding. This is especially true with recursive algorithms that are not simple recursions.
Also the effect of various data sturctures like trees and hash tables for algorithms. or even the effect of different types of indexes in DB searches or to understand that query optimizations the DB servers is showing you.
Without it you don't have eyes, like a eletronics engineer that does not have a multimeter.
Thats just with the programming part. Then you get into all the things you want to program, like graphics and games (physics and geometry), or statictics for simulatations or the math for economic forcasts. Each has its subset of math that is needed for the job.
But to get back to is. If you want to be a programmer with a big P, then you need the fundementals of math that revolves around data structures and algorithme and Boolean algebra at least. If not then anyone can do your job.
Low level jobs. You mean jobs that are low paying. They are only low paying because the companies set the price. There are far too many companies that are not willing to pay a living wage to people that work for then, while they re-up on their membership to the country club. As things are going now, companies will try to automate everything, until they find that they have fired people to the point that there is no longer anyone to buy their product. They go out of business and scramble to get a low paying job from the remaining dwindling pool of employers.
I think some regulation, taxation and thoughtful planning is in order to save the capitalist system. Right now they think we will let things go back to the industrial revolution days. Probably won't happen.
So following that argument, the crosspollinatted weeds that are roundup resistant are owned by Monsanto and Monsanto is then responsible for any loss of income any farmer gets from those weeds reducing his crop yeild by stealing nutrients or sunlight. Monsanto you are in deep shit now.
Under no circumstanses is that true. The Democrats want to protect Social Security and Medicare, keep education and jobs a priority. The Repubs only want to stall and stall and filabuster and pillage (keep subsidies, Haliburton, oil.. etc)
So fundimentally the parties are different, in real ways that effect real people. Well the Repubs positively effect only a percent or two and the Democrates maybe the remaining 98-99%.
There is a difference. They are both in politics and that is a dirty game but I think the Google information even pre-dates this administration doesn't it?
The Movie industry does not want it known how active they are at sending take down notices. After all the price we all pay for movies goes up as there effort to do this sort of activity goes up. The 'take down tax'.
There is also the big brother bad guy protecting their profit against the little guy public relations problem. They certainly would like all that take down to happen behind the scenes where no one notices.
That seems to be a sub-dialect problem. If you don't get routed or understood, your probably speaking the wrong dialect. You see that discussing program framework issues between a Java shop and a Windows shop... Many years of teaching taught me that you may need to explain things several different ways before you find a common language to import your communication to their local brain.
Relevance is not absolute but contextual. If you remember as you went through life, first young and simple ideas and tunes and interactions, as you get older, your politics and sensibilites (often) mature and what used to be exciting and 'relevent' becomes, simple and unsophisticated, and newer attempts at cultural expression leave you cold.
How many adults that listen to or enjoy classical music started out listening and enjoying classical music? I think that is a process of maturation and an appreciation of expressions people are capable of.
So it may be a fools errand to try and bring people into the symphony before they are ready to sit quietly and enjoy the experience and have the maturity and respect to allow others to sit quietly and enjoy the experience.
Copyright laws last too long Copyright infringement penalties are too high. The punishment does not fit the crime (what are we doing Sharia law, hand chopped off for stealing?)
Most of what I see of the articles at Stack overflow are about syntax and symantics of how to problems in a specific language. Most of the company sponored documentation is organized differently, by feature and what its parameters are, not generally how to use it in conjunction with other language parts or even what the intent of the use is.
I see the same thing at work with a new task / hours data entry which is a spreadsheet with 100 rows of projects. I had to comment to my boss that this document was tuned for executive use not for data entry. Different needs need different views.
Also there is the sub-dialect problem. If you are comming from Java and having to do the same thing in c# they call the same thing by different terms, and the frameworks are maybe equivalent but stuctured differently, so the Stack overflow query on more common terms and problem specific language gets you a solution much quicker than trying to navagate the traditional document hierarcy. That is not to say you don't need both views, you do. But usually software only gets the one view. The other is built from the deficiencies and idiosincracies of the software.
How many times recently have you tried to call say a cell phone or cable company only to go through the decision tree hierachy that does not give are you an option your need, but you don't find that out until you are 3 or 4 levels down on the tree and you have already invested 10 minutes and then r put in a wait queue for another 20 just to find out you are in the wrong place. That design may save on some human salaries but at the cost of many very pissed off clients.
I think most people would like to talk with a person that can understand what you need and help. We certainly don't have a technology yet that allows a machine to take that place.
There also seems to be the effect if not the intent to limit access to only certain problems or complaints which you can do by design with an automation but not a person. So limited access for complaints is the other problem.
There is a reason we send men to the moon. The value of there observation and ability to adapt and re-task (currently) is far superior to machines. As for unmanned attack aircraft. There is a delay from the remote control site to the plane. That delay both ways says that the ability to pull 15g's to get out of a bad situation probably will present itself too late, or because of the delay you will need that speed of evasion.
Not to mention the de-humanizing effect we have seen already with the video game war where the warrior has no skin in the game. The human equations that should be there as a deterent to war, aren't. That is probably the biggest risk and failing of this direction. Of course those who just want to win and don't care of the cost to the other side, that can engage in riskless carnage, will attract the very people that would naturally be culled out through the process of war. That culling of sociopaths is part of our natural evolution. If you take away their natural predators (man, the other side) then as with all species they will overpopulate and strain and break there ecosystem.
As exampled by Walmart and the Wall family having more wealth that what is it 40% of the rest of the country. Maybe we should broaden the anti-trust laws or modify them so that companies that try and take over hardware stores, grocery stores, clothing stores, sporting stores, appliance stores, building supply stores, automotive supply stores, nurseries.... are trying to monopolize the retail space at the expense of hundreds of thousand mom and pop stores and hundreds of thousand US jobs. The too big problem also is a problem for companies that succeed. Thats why we had anti-trust legistlation. It needs to be updated.
The ideas presented are some of the most thoughtless brainstorming I have ever heard. Brainstorming is good but some filtering should be the next step and certainly before you tell anyone your ideas.
First. Put computer into guns. Like they can't be hacked, turning your gun into your own worst enemy, shooting where you dont want or not shooting when you do.
Have building sensing. As if sensor signals can be suppressed or overridden. Like the Drones snagged by Iran which tricked it into landing inside Iran, intack if the stories are to believed. Or the hacks to turn the traffic lights to your advantage.
Lets say you have building sensing through some suppression signal. What would be the default behaviour. If you did not get the signal then allow firing, or not allow firing. Well probably the signal would allow firing (the default). Maybe a little aluminum foil on the antenna would trick the gun into allowing firing.
Biometrics, only prevents someone else from picking up you gun and using it. Doesn't help if its your gun that you want to clear out a school with.
Maybe some combination of all those things would be good. It would make the cost of a gun prohibitive and we would have fewer guns which translates to fewer gun deaths.
The problem is loosing your child. China's one child policy has left much of the country with families with one child (little emperors) that know that they can just leave there parents which for a Chinese family is a horrible idea, unthinkable, especially a son. So you have children that know they have presure that threat to disown their parents as extreme leverage. So the "Just kick him out" is truly a scary , not to be considered because of the consequences action. No wonder the father took indirect steps to make his son want to stop game playing. The Chinese do things indirectly and communication is an art in a way that we don't fully understand. So assuming the same value system, and behaviours we would take in the West have any resonance in the East.
There are differences in the brain wiring between males and females generally as shown by numerous studies. The way they approach problem solving and focus. Add to that the existing evovled male and female sub-cultures and you are looking at very different value systems and skill sets. Which implies that they will perform differently in the same tasks. It may be the that way education has evolved favors the skill sets and approaches that females are better at, including reward systems, types of tasks assigned, and expectations.
It may also be that the job market seems to be rewarding college degrees less and mayb the male culture, not seen the garanteed payback is not as motivated to continue, where the female culture is seeing the long term value of education for quality of life, child rearing, and the communal, network time that is college.
Its not sexist to recognize differences. The differences are not good or bad, just differences.
When you bring science into it, I have heard that at least in one case, the round-up corn which is GMO and resistant to round-up the weed killer, is easier to keep weed free, but the crop havested has higher concentrations of round-up in it which is not healthy. So GMO may not be all bad but not all GMO crops are good from a health standpoint.
Slashdot Mirror
Occam's razor (also written as Ockham's razor from William of Ockham, and in Latin lex parsimoniae) is a principle of parsimony, economy, or succinctness used in logic and problem-solving. It states that among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected. In other words, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
Apply recursively to the created solution.
What they are doing is using the free cold to cut their costs. But of course that heating will effect the weather in that area, which will affect the ecosystem which will start to spread its effect. There may be widespread and deeply felt consequences down the road, but not for Facebook. Dumping heat is the same sort of externalized cost as say dumping waste chemicals in a stream. The company does not pay, it lets those downstream pay. You could argue that the effect is small but as we know the butterfly effect is real and unpredictable All they really know is that they are going to pay less money for cooling. Be damned with the rest of the world.
I wonder if the polls will tell a different story when further revelations come out from the Guardian. They say there is more to the story.
The second thing I wonder, is why some politicians act the way they do. So much support for the capture and use of secret information. Could it be that the NSA has some dirt on those politicians and they know better than to piss off the NSA. And how high does it go? Lets ask Darrel Issa to start and investigation, when he finishes finding out where exactly Benghazi is.
I was so disheartened when they closed their doors in 2011. Jay Leno bought one of their prototypes it seems looking at his car collection.
Start with designing operating systems that are secure and language enviromnments that are secure rather that feature rich marketing shows. Don't put the blame on the programmers that have to work with shoddy designed infrastructure. Change the infrastructure.
Standardization and merger/monopoly are happening in IT and in business.
How many products do you see that do everything. We have a forms package that does work flow and web design, a document program that does workflow and web design, we have a messaging layer that does work flow and web design. Each trying to capture the entire business. We see it with hamburger chains and doughnut sellers going after Startbuck's market. Now we see McDonalds going after Dairy Queens market and big box discount stores going after the Grocery chain market.
Everyone wants to be a one stop shop. Companies are getting there by buying up smaller companies and over and over.
The problem is the actual software developers will have fewer and fewer jobs for real development with few and fewer companies providing software.
Already our company is into buying packages and thinking they can save money by plugging everything together instead of targeted custom development.
The IT people of the future (if this trend continues) will be glorified plumbers. A few developers will make the design decision we will all have to live with.
Unless of course we start to recognize that this may not be the most cost effective way to do things, or that this dumbing down of jobs is bad overall for the society and we might see some anti-trust going on with breaking up of the swelling blobs of companies and packages and a new leaner meaner model emerging.
Who knows?
Analysis of Algorithms. Optimization of logic
If you want to be any more than a coder the you need some background in math to understand (and caclulate) the savings of doing alternative ways of coding. This is especially true with recursive algorithms that are not simple recursions.
Also the effect of various data sturctures like trees and hash tables for algorithms. or even the effect of different types of indexes in DB searches or to understand that query optimizations the DB servers is showing you.
Without it you don't have eyes, like a eletronics engineer that does not have a multimeter.
Thats just with the programming part. Then you get into all the things you want to program, like graphics and games (physics and geometry), or statictics for simulatations or the math for economic forcasts. Each has its subset of math that is needed for the job.
But to get back to is. If you want to be a programmer with a big P, then you need the fundementals of math that revolves around data structures and algorithme and Boolean algebra at least. If not then anyone can do your job.
Low level jobs. You mean jobs that are low paying. They are only low paying because the companies set the price. There are far too many companies that are not willing to pay a living wage to people that work for then, while they re-up on their membership to the country club. As things are going now, companies will try to automate everything, until they find that they have fired people to the point that there is no longer anyone to buy their product. They go out of business and scramble to get a low paying job from the remaining dwindling pool of employers.
I think some regulation, taxation and thoughtful planning is in order to save the capitalist system. Right now they think we will let things go back to the industrial revolution days. Probably won't happen.
Micro code my friend.
The trouble is that some politians are more equal than others.
For instance some of the right wing crazies will apply to get Fedral campaign funds and be funded with as many dollars as the major parties.
Maybe a portionament needs to be done on measured support from voters, oh wait that will lock in entrenched idiots.
There has to be something in between to weed out the crazies early so we don't waste time and our money.
So following that argument, the crosspollinatted weeds that are roundup resistant are owned by Monsanto and Monsanto is then responsible for any loss of income any farmer gets from those weeds reducing his crop yeild by stealing nutrients or sunlight. Monsanto you are in deep shit now.
Under no circumstanses is that true. The Democrats want to protect Social Security and Medicare, keep education and jobs a priority. The Repubs only want to stall and stall and filabuster and pillage (keep subsidies, Haliburton, oil .. etc)
So fundimentally the parties are different, in real ways that effect real people. Well the Repubs positively effect only a percent or two and the Democrates maybe the remaining 98-99%.
There is a difference. They are both in politics and that is a dirty game but I think the Google information even pre-dates this administration doesn't it?
The Movie industry does not want it known how active they are at sending take down notices. After all the price we all pay for movies goes up as there effort to do this sort of activity goes up. The 'take down tax'.
There is also the big brother bad guy protecting their profit against the little guy public relations problem. They certainly would like all that take down to happen behind the scenes where no one notices.
They are trying to do some damage control.
That seems to be a sub-dialect problem. If you don't get routed or understood, your probably speaking the wrong dialect. You see that discussing program framework issues between a Java shop and a Windows shop ... Many years of teaching taught me that you may need to explain things several different ways before you find a common language to import your communication to their local brain.
Good thinking
Relevance is not absolute but contextual. If you remember as you went through life, first young and simple ideas and tunes and interactions, as you get older, your politics and sensibilites (often) mature and what used to be exciting and 'relevent' becomes, simple and unsophisticated, and newer attempts at cultural expression leave you cold.
How many adults that listen to or enjoy classical music started out listening and enjoying classical music? I think that is a process of maturation and an appreciation of expressions people are capable of.
So it may be a fools errand to try and bring people into the symphony before they are ready to sit quietly and enjoy the experience and have the maturity and respect to allow others to sit quietly and enjoy the experience.
Copyright laws last too long
Copyright infringement penalties are too high. The punishment does not fit the crime (what are we doing Sharia law, hand chopped off for stealing?)
Most of what I see of the articles at Stack overflow are about syntax and symantics of how to problems in a specific language. Most of the company sponored documentation is organized differently, by feature and what its parameters are, not generally how to use it in conjunction with other language parts or even what the intent of the use is.
I see the same thing at work with a new task / hours data entry which is a spreadsheet with 100 rows of projects. I had to comment to my boss that this document was tuned for executive use not for data entry. Different needs need different views.
Also there is the sub-dialect problem. If you are comming from Java and having to do the same thing in c# they call the same thing by different terms, and the frameworks are maybe equivalent but stuctured differently, so the Stack overflow query on more common terms and problem specific language gets you a solution much quicker than trying to navagate the traditional document hierarcy. That is not to say you don't need both views, you do. But usually software only gets the one view. The other is built from the deficiencies and idiosincracies of the software.
How many times recently have you tried to call say a cell phone or cable company only to go through the decision tree hierachy that does not give are you an option your need, but you don't find that out until you are 3 or 4 levels down on the tree and you have already invested 10 minutes and then r put in a wait queue for another 20 just to find out you are in the wrong place. That design may save on some human salaries but at the cost of many very pissed off clients.
I think most people would like to talk with a person that can understand what you need and help. We certainly don't have a technology yet that allows a machine to take that place.
There also seems to be the effect if not the intent to limit access to only certain problems or complaints which you can do by design with an automation but not a person. So limited access for complaints is the other problem.
There is a reason we send men to the moon. The value of there observation and ability to adapt and re-task (currently) is far superior to machines. As for unmanned attack aircraft. There is a delay from the remote control site to the plane. That delay both ways says that the ability to pull 15g's to get out of a bad situation probably will present itself too late, or because of the delay you will need that speed of evasion.
Not to mention the de-humanizing effect we have seen already with the video game war where the warrior has no skin in the game. The human equations that should be there as a deterent to war, aren't. That is probably the biggest risk and failing of this direction. Of course those who just want to win and don't care of the cost to the other side, that can engage in riskless carnage, will attract the very people that would naturally be culled out through the process of war. That culling of sociopaths is part of our natural evolution. If you take away their natural predators (man, the other side) then as with all species they will overpopulate and strain and break there ecosystem.
As exampled by Walmart and the Wall family having more wealth that what is it 40% of the rest of the country. Maybe we should broaden the anti-trust laws or modify them so that companies that try and take over hardware stores, grocery stores, clothing stores, sporting stores, appliance stores, building supply stores, automotive supply stores, nurseries .... are trying to monopolize the retail space at the expense of hundreds of thousand mom and pop stores and hundreds of thousand US jobs. The too big problem also is a problem for companies that succeed. Thats why we had anti-trust legistlation. It needs to be updated.
The ideas presented are some of the most thoughtless brainstorming I have ever heard. Brainstorming is good but some filtering should be the next step and certainly before you tell anyone your ideas.
First. Put computer into guns. Like they can't be hacked, turning your gun into your own worst enemy, shooting where you dont want or not shooting when you do.
Have building sensing. As if sensor signals can be suppressed or overridden. Like the Drones snagged by Iran which tricked it into landing inside Iran, intack if the stories are to believed. Or the hacks to turn the traffic lights to your advantage.
Lets say you have building sensing through some suppression signal. What would be the default behaviour. If you did not get the signal then allow firing, or not allow firing. Well probably the signal would allow firing (the default). Maybe a little aluminum foil on the antenna would trick the gun into allowing firing.
Biometrics, only prevents someone else from picking up you gun and using it. Doesn't help if its your gun that you want to clear out a school with.
Maybe some combination of all those things would be good. It would make the cost of a gun prohibitive and we would have fewer guns which translates to fewer gun deaths.
The problem is loosing your child. China's one child policy has left much of the country with families with one child (little emperors) that know that they can just leave there parents which for a Chinese family is a horrible idea, unthinkable, especially a son. So you have children that know they have presure that threat to disown their parents as extreme leverage. So the "Just kick him out" is truly a scary , not to be considered because of the consequences action. No wonder the father took indirect steps to make his son want to stop game playing. The Chinese do things indirectly and communication is an art in a way that we don't fully understand. So assuming the same value system, and behaviours we would take in the West have any resonance in the East.
There are differences in the brain wiring between males and females generally as shown by numerous studies. The way they approach problem solving and focus. Add to that the existing evovled male and female sub-cultures and you are looking at very different value systems and skill sets. Which implies that they will perform differently in the same tasks. It may be the that way education has evolved favors the skill sets and approaches that females are better at, including reward systems, types of tasks assigned, and expectations.
It may also be that the job market seems to be rewarding college degrees less and mayb the male culture, not seen the garanteed payback is not as motivated to continue, where the female culture is seeing the long term value of education for quality of life, child rearing, and the communal, network time that is college.
Its not sexist to recognize differences. The differences are not good or bad, just differences.
When you bring science into it, I have heard that at least in one case, the round-up corn which is GMO and resistant to round-up the weed killer, is easier to keep weed free, but the crop havested has higher concentrations of round-up in it which is not healthy. So GMO may not be all bad but not all GMO crops are good from a health standpoint.