Re:What a ridiculous trend... CORBA to WebServices
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The Rise and Fall of Corba
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· Score: 2, Informative
Seriously, you just don't look at CORBA bindings (for Java at least) and want to have anything to do with it. It's probably not so bad for C++ developers because they are used to a lot of noise and complexity, and they have templates and stuff to 'spray perfume' on CORBA and make it smell... better.
Trust me when I say this: CORBA for C++ is much worse!
I've tried both, and CORBA in java was such a relief from doing it in C++, I almost started thinking CORBA was sane, and only the C++ bindings sucked. Therefore I'm very happy for your perspective and insight.
CORBA might have been a great messaging infrastructure and all, but any corba websites I saw were confusing, over-diagrammed, impenetrably academic documents. Seriously, could you dumb it down a shade? Spare me your medical mumbo jumbo? Hello world apps?
If you'd RTFA, you'd understand that that's exactly why it failed. Corba is badly designed, and overly complex for what it does.
First of all it's a lot of hype. Today, it might sound daft, but when CORBA was envisioned, everybody did not use http and XML for everything. So if you wanted two or more programs to talk to each other, you'd need to invent a new protocol. And people did just that all of the time, with varying success. Of course, there would have been money to be saved, if everybody could agree on a common protocol. But nobody but salespeople could have come up with the idea of making the common protocol using "objects" instead of clients and servers. Almost all CORBA-lingo is equally daft and misleading.
Secondly, it never worked. There's never existed, and probably will never exist, an implementation of CORBA that has all the features in the standard. And at least at the time I used it, every implementation was buggy, forcing some of the top programmers in our organization had to become "CORBA-experts", so that we would be able to use CORBA at all. This was a waste of talent, as this was the guys with 10-30 years of domain-specific knowledge and experience who used their time on CORBA instead.
Thirdly, it was never compatible. Every revision of the Corba standard to date, and every implementation by every vendor, were incompatible. And it's not just a question of search and replace in your code-base. Implementations are incompatible in semantically interesting ways that are relevant and important for application developers. It's called "vendor lock-in".
And fourth, it was overly complex. A simple "Hello World" CORBA-program that merely contacts the naming service and looks up the IOR to get a reference to a remote object, which it calls at least one method on, has to be about 100 lines of code. The verbosity of CORBA in this respect is staggering, especially when you see that it's intended to be an improvement over earlier systems, such as DCE (itself overly complex, but still...).
Ok, our organisation still uses CORBA, and are even quite happy about it (today). But it has cost us a lot of money in the past. On the other hand, todays web-services would be totally inadequate for us, so the only other alternative would be to roll our own again...
Yeah, but now the customer wants to connect two mainboards over the PCI interface, and let the CPU on each mainboard address the memory and peripherals on the other (something that never was in the PCI spec). He also want all his old PCI cards to keep working, and his old operating system to keep running (without change) on each mainboard.
If you try to build this sort of generality into your initial design, your initial design will suck! You can't "anticipate future functionality", any more than you can anticipate any kind of future. 50 years ago, everyone would expect rocket-packs to be a common household item, but few would predict SMS text messaging.
Saturn49 is quite correct. By adding generality that isn't needed, not only will you kill your own productivity. You will kill the productivity of every maintenance programmer that works on your product later! Not only will they have to understand the bizarre logic of changing requirements through n years of development and maintenance. They will also have to understand the even more bizarre convoluted totally un-needed generality built into the initial design, but never utilized!
The Computer Modern fonts (as used in TeX) are perfect! Or, at least, perfect enough that "These fonts are never going to change again". I think the same thing is also true of TeX itself, but I may be wrong.:-P
Well, TeX is certainly approaching "perfect" in the sense that there are no bugs left that isn't a design error. Yet I consider most of the features of TeX to be a design error. Nobody sane would write TeX the way it is written today. It only makes sense when seen in a historical perspective. Sadly, nobody has yet written a "better" TeX yet. At least not one that lives up to it's promise!
As for the look of Computer Modern fonts, it's perfectly within Knuths right to proclaim they're perfect, but personally I've never been very impressed with them. I much prefer Times New Roman, as it is a font that remains readable even after taking a photocopy of a photocopy of a fax of something printed out with a cheap inkjet printer. Computer Modern requires a high-end printer to even be readable. There's a reason it never became popular as a screen font!
The reason buildings don't usually "fail", is because they're mostly just standing there, (I've yet to see a building execute SQL queries or something like that...), and if something moves it's considered a "part" of the building, and is allowed to fail (such as a door).
Software has to be flexible. In a physical address book, there is a maximum of 20 addresses per letter, and no recycling of deleted addresses. Nobody would accept this in software. But assuming it was acceptable to limit software like that, even I could write provably correct software, and even I could prove it correct, without the use of fancy software verification tools.
Furthermore, the real world tends to predictable. An engine is supposed to be given a somewhat predictable load. We don't expect someone to suddenly jerk an iron bar into the camshaft to stop it, and if someone did, few would be surprised that the engine would "fail", and even need repairs afterwards. Yet software is generally always expected to accept any kind of input. Remove that requirement, and I will write "provably correct" software as easy as any civil engineer proves their bridges and buildings won't fall down.
If you come up with a better office package than Microsoft, the way to get rich, is NOT to charge a hefty price, and hope for a few lucrative customers. They way to get rich is to charge a price comparable (or even lower) than Microsoft, and hope most users convert.
Porsche works in the real world, because by using quality parts and expensive manufacturing, it's still possible to make a better car than Hyundai, even though your R&D costs are lower than Hyundais. In software, there are no "quality parts and expensive manufacturing" to make up for faulty R&D. The "parts" are 0's and 1's, and the "manufacturing" is to burn it to a CD. All the costs of making software are R&D. If you want to build a better word-processor, you can't simply replace the spell-checker with one built out of titanium! You actually have to engineer a better spell-checker too!
This is why there will never be Hyundais or Porsches in the software market. Well, actually there are, but it's an artificial solution. The natural development of the mass-software market is in the direction of a monopoly, like Microsoft. Because, eventually a product that is "good enough" will turn up at the right price, and everyone buys it. Once everybody has the same product, interopability with everyone else ensures nobody switches. And by then the monopolist only has to make sure the competition never gets dangerous by buying the competitors or competing unfairly.
Mass-market software is not a "product", it's information, and it doesn't matter at all if you sell/produce 30 or 100 000 000 copies. They still cost $1 per CD to produce/distribute, and the other costs (R&D) are mostly fixed. Apart from the monopoly, there is only room for the really expensive custom-made software, and really cheap (e.g. adware) software that is even more crappy than what the monopoly turns out (so that it's not a threat that the monopoly will have to crush).
Or we could stop being dictated by economy. That's when we start seeing free software/open source., but that's another story!
In that case, a 1331 h4x0r could just use a spy satellite to log on to the laptop without getting traced, and retrieve the records he wanted, without ever having access to fancy lipstick gadgets. I'm not sure what he would need the spy satelite for, but it sounds a lot more advanced than just connecting over teh Intarweb.
Most corporations do not employ the types of security measures that the military does and so they would probably be caught off guard by a commando style raid in the middle of the night. The night watchmen doesn't get paid enough to be killed over a couple of hard drives and all he saw were men in balaclavas before he was knocked over the head with the butt of an mp5 and tied up...you get the idea. This may have been a professional job.
What you just described would not have been a professional job. A professional job would have been one where everything looked like a common burglary. The burglars would steal some laptops and other expensive equipment, the coins from the soda machine, the cell-phone Jones forgot in office 304, and whatever seemed to be of any value.
It would be even better if the laptops somehow turned up later, when some honest person who bought them from ebay noticed the contents of the harddrives and informed the police. Maybe this would even lead to some arrests, and a false belief that the data would not have been copied..
Of course, by then, copies of the harddrives would have been in the hands of the enemy for months.
On the other hand; if you send in your elite soldiers at night to disable or kill the night-guards, and steal exactly two harddrives when there are lots of other valuables lying around, everybody will know exactly what happened.
As a pedagogical example, the notions of "ordered" and "permutation" are simpler to express than the code for most sorting algorithms.
Bzzt, wrong! Quicksort is almost a one-liner. In C, you might get 5 or 6 lines, but it's hardly difficult.
Contrast that with saying in a formal way that the output (Y) of qsort is an ordered permutation of the elements given as input (X).
Assume: Y = quicksort(X), X element-of int-sequence, Y element-of int-sequence, and n = length-of X
then: n = length-of Y for-all i element-of 1..n exists j element-of 1..n such-that X_i = Y_j not (exist j element of 1..n such-that for-all i element-of 1..n X_i =/= Y_j) for-all j element-of 2..n Y_{j-1} <= Y_j
Note the extremely convoluted way of telling that Y was a permutation of X (I'm not even sure it's sufficient). In contrast, telling that Y is sorted was easy. Now you have to prove it.
Personally, I'm pretty much convinced by this example that informal proofs are the best. Let's prove that Y is sorted, and don't bother about proving that Y is a permutation of X, because that is "obvious" by inspection.
You seem to completely ignore the main reason for using a microkernel -- the ability to prove (even mathematically) that the kernel is correct.
Ah, you mean to prove that the microkernel is correct. Which is all fine and dandy. But pretty useless, considering that about the only thing of any value a microkernel does, is managing processes, memory and IPC. Without a gazillion other drivers/processes/whatever, your microkernel is useless, and with a gazillion drivers/processes/whatever (all communicating in a nonobvious distributed manner), your proof is useless.
That is why critical real-time OSes are often based on a microkernel which is only about 4000-8000 lines of code.
Hmm, and here I thought most real-time operating systems were basically a boot-loader, a C library, usually a scheduler, and some way to link the OS with your app. Sure QNX is cool and all, but it's hardly a typical representative of real-time operating systems.
If the same happens in the microkernel system, the kernel will reload the driver, raise an alarm, or in general -- be able to take the system to a predictable predetermined state. Going back to the analogy is it is like having the dictator execute a corrupted staff member and replace him immediately.
If the driver is so flaky that it constantly fails and needs to restart, maybe you should look at the driver for the solution to your problem, instead of building a complicated microkernel just to have a restartable driver. If the driver is stable, then how the fuck are you supposed to know that this restarting magic actually works?
Good thing if the system was only running Doom at the time and not controlling a reactor, or administering a drug.
If it was a hard realtime system (as reactor/drug implies), then you have already lost. Your driver failed, and no matter how flawless the "restarting driver"-magic is, you have already broken you real-time deadline.
These people were not interfering with store operations; in fact, they went out of their way *not* to interfere.
If you believe that arranging it so that lots of people with clothes similar to the shop-employees suddenly appear in a shop at the same time, is "going out of their way *not* to interfere", you have a different definition of "not" then me.
The only people interfering with store operations were the managers overreacting.
Those people are supposed to interfere with store operations, that's why they're there! It's their job!
The best overreactions are the manager protesting her violation of her "civil rights" and the manager surreptitiously attempting to photograph the improv artists.
Sure, they overreacted. But please tell me how they were supposed to know that without the benefit of hindsight. It's not exactly the situation you are most likely to encounter as a manager of a store. And it's a pretty damn frustrating one to be in.
There was absolutely no way the managers could have known the intent of the invaders. Just because they acted friendly at the time, doesn't mean that they would the next moment. Obviously the invaders *were* part of some sort of planned attack, and at the time, there was no way the managers could know their real intent.
Bureacracies are built for mockery because they take themselves so seriously.
I'm sorry. Everyone take themselves seriously. Bureaucracies are no different in this regard.
By the way, I like how you equate "different" with "dangerous." That speaks volumes about your outlook on life.
I have no idea what you are talking about. Please explain what you are referring to, or are you simply trying to put words in my mouth?
"Like most of you, my job and lifestyle revolves around drinking lots and lots of caffeine - usually in the form of soda. I've been trying to cut back on my sugar intake lately, and am interested in what some of you drink that isn't loaded down with the sweet stuff. Diet drinks have little to no flavor, and fruit punches have almost (sometimes more!) sugar than sodas themselves. Is there anything out there that maintains the convenience of a canned drink, but without all the sugar?"
If you need to drink something, God created water for a reason. If you want something a bit more tasty, try milk, milkshake, youghurt, juice, smoothie, or something else that's healthy (if it's with added sugar, it should not be considered "healthy"). They all taste better than coke, and can work as a small meal-replacement too, so why you'd even consider coke, is beyond my understanding.
Now, get some exercise. By all means, reduce your unhealthy (USian-level) sugar intake too, but if you worry about it, chances are it's because you are getting fat. Active people don't get fat by eating sugar. They burn it away, just like anything else they eat. The two most effective exercises for removing fat is using your bike to work, and using your bike back from work.
And instead of all that caffeine, please consider eating a healthy breakfast. It will keep you awake longer. Not that coffee is such a bad idea (in moderation), but your post didn't exactly sound like you did anything in moderation.
Firstly, because it's somewhat surreal, providing people with the experience of reality suddenly warping unexpectedly.
If this is all you want to do, you can certainly do it without having to single out a "victim".
Secondly, because of the reaction of humorless drones and people who overreact, like you.
I'm only humorless as long it's my store you invade, my shirt you spray with ink, or my dog you kill. But I might laugh healthily when your nose is bleeding as a result of your failed attempt at humor.
There are lots of things you can do that frustrate other people. Having a crowd dress in the same clothes as shop employees only frustrate shop employees/managers/security is one alternative. But I really fail to see why you think it's so funny.
Yes, you aren't exactly doing something "illegal", but your intention is obviously to make life harder for other people, which in my book counts as "immoral" (at least as long as these "other people" haven't done anything wrong towards you!)
I find the whole episode comparable to someone who have gotten hold of some disappearing ink, spray it on random peoples shirts, and then write a web-page about it where they talk about how angry some people became because of this, even though it was just an innocent gag.
I'm sorry, but if some random person sprayed my shirt with disappearing ink, I would not find it funny. And if some random crowd of people had agreed to enter my store with clothes similar to the uniform of my employees, I wouldn't find it funny either. Now, had the random person in either case, been someone I knew and trusted, I might have reacted otherwise, but this depends a bit more upon the situation. When doing practical jokes, it's a fine line between what's funny and what's just cruel.
Oh, by the way, I killed your dog just to see how you'd react. But don't worry, here's a new one...
You want to know why pure-electric cars are incredibly unlikely to become popular? Answer: it's not possible to get a full battery charge in 2 minutes.
Bullshit. My body needs at least 6 hours sleep every day. Even if I was in a hurry, and used two drivers, I still would prefer to have at least that much time per day available for sleep in a real, comfy, non-moving bed. Insisting on a full battery charge in 2 minutes is completely moronic. How do you live with your cellphone?
Actually, having my car to be recharged every night, seems much preferable to what we currently do: watch the gauge, and enter a gas station whenever it gets low...
The reason electric cars aren't currently popular, is because they do not make economic sense. They cost more, perform worse, and have a less developed infrastructure. The only people who own electric cars today are enthusiasts, idealists, and companies that want to be perceived as environmentally friendly.
So for electric cars to become viable, we either need a technological breakthrough (such as cheaper more efficient batteries), or all of it's competitors to become even worse.
How about a self recycling dam? After the water creates energy going down you push it back up and do it again. Maybe even you can get some engery from moving it up. This is all assuming that you gain more energy than you're losing with this method.
Well, that would work. Except that you also need a heating source that will heat the water vapour to above 200C. You could use solar power for that, but if you already have solar power, solar cells would be more efficient. Heck, if you could consistently heat a large area to above 200C with solar power, it would probably be more efficient to make a steam engine.
Another possible heat source could be a volcano, but I think that if you want to extract power from the heat difference of a volcano and it's surroundings, you'd find more efficient ways to do it, than making small droplets of water climb upwards and then fall down through a turbine.
So who cares who creates the most millions of jobs? The problem isn't in creating jobs. Anyone can easily create more work for everyone else. The problem is in increasing the quality of peoples lives.
The druglords in Columbia probably creates more jobs than Scott McNealy. First off, they hire or contracts farmers, technicians and factory-workers, smugglers, dealers, distributors, soldiers and guerillas, torpedos, hitmen, etc... Indirectly they contribute to create extra work for police forces, customs service, the military, insurance companies, private security companies, hospitals, rehabilitation centres, politicians, diplomats, etc... which in turn creates even more work for other businesses, such as IT, telecommunications, construction, etc... By this logic we should be thankful to those druglords for all the jobs they have created.
There are other metrics that are just as irrelevant, but when it comes to a company CEO, I'd say the most important one is increasing the profits of the shareholders. As a human, there are other metrics, but creating "jobs" isn't one of them. Reducing sickness, disease, poverty, unhappiness, war, crime, etc... are goals I would put much higher. And maybe pushing for more computer networks have done just that, but then I would like to hear that argument.
Is it? I thought Cyc was a knowledge-base and a theorem-prover. The theorem-prover manipulates symbols in the knowledge base.
In comparison, a human only manipulates symbols when doing arithmetic (and even mathematicians admit that arithmetic is something they do when doing proofs, but when approaching a new problem, they try to visualize it or "understand" it).
If cyc is told to find a route between points A and B on a map, it would use it's theorem-prover to manipulate symbols denoting places and roads, without ascribing any meanings to these symbols. The denotation of those symbols only exists as an idea in the human that programmed Cyc to solve these kinds of tasks, or made it's knowledge-database for geography.
If a symbol in Cyc's knowledge database is named "Route 66", it means nothing to Cyc, it could just as well have been named "A5477893". A convenient name is useful only for those humans that manipulate Cycs knowledge-database directly (although sometimes it causes confusion). The important thing for Cyc is the relations this symbol has to other symbols in Cycs knowledge-database.
If on the other hand, a human is told to find a route between points A and B on a map, we would start by visualizing roads close to the straight line between them. Then we would choose a route that seems pretty straight-forward, but avoids unneeded complexity, small roads, etc... Exactly how we do this is still not understood. I guess it could be viewed as some sort of ad-hoc simulation of an imagined travel, something our brain is pretty good at.
Cyc could accomplish the same task, but in a fundamentally different way. There is nothing that indicates that when humans look at the map they translate it into internal symbols that represents roads and intersections, attributing values such as speed and distance to those symbols, performing a search on these symbols, and then translates it back into something that can be visualized on a map.
The kind of historic (and modern) slavery practices which give the word "slavery" its powerful meaning always involve means and extents of control far beyond "do it this way or you're fired."
I tend to agree, but we still have the notion of wage-slave. The ideal workplace (for me) would be one where I could show up whenever I wanted to do some amount of paid-for work untill I had sufficient funds, and then leave untill I needed the income again.
In reality, if I want to have some kind of income, I need not only to work, but also to have a "job", which is different. My employer not only wants me to perform "work", but also to conform in ways beyond that, such as showing up on time, being available on the phone in case of a crisis, taking responsibility, etc... In this way, I have voluntarily become a "slave" of my employer. And even if I quit, I will only become a "slave" of another employer, or of my customers if I decide to become self-employed.
It should also be noted that historic slavery practices have varied considerably. In e.g. ancient Greece and Rome, many slaves were well-regarded. On the other hand, other slaves there lived gruesome lives. What kind of life you would have as a slave was something decided by your owner, not something you could influence yourself (ok, being nice to your owner, and well-educated helped, but you couldn't choose to take education yourself, for example).
Today, most everyone has equal rights to education, etc... but it's still true that children of rich parents have a larger tendency to become rich than children of poor parents (and the opposite).
The only important difference to me is between natural and artificial minds. Whether it runs on a computer or not just affects whether it is simulated or real.
So what exactly is a computer? Biotechnology advances so rapidly, that we already have DNA-computing (used to solve an the Hamiltonian Path NP-complete problem in 1994). Is DNA-computers natural or artificial? Obviously, both sides can be argued, and the distinction will continue to blur further, as we get a better understanding of microbiology and nanotechnology.
This solves the upcoming problem over basic human rights too... only natural minds have human rights, whether real or simulated.
Define "solve". What you have described is a viewpoint, not a "solution". In order for the problem to be "solved", you will have to come up with a much better explanation for why it is a "solution". Problems in ethics rarely have "solutions". Philosophers still debate whether it's ok to steal if you are hungry (or whether the notion of "stealing" is valid at all). And the notion of "human rights" is more of a political statement, than a solution of a problem in ethics.
Even the notion of "simulated" can be debated. Most computer programs are "simulated" on multiple levels. The "program" is an abstract idea or specification we have in our heads. It's translated into a programming language, which is translated to assembly language, which is translated to object code, which is linked together into machine code, which is translated into micro-ops, which in turn provides an interface for the underlying capability of the hardware. Not to mention that it all runs under the supervision of the operating system, which itself is a simulation of another abstract idea.
The human brain itself could be equally convoluted. There seems to be little in nature that favours straight-forward solutions. The human immune-system is a good example of an extremely convoluted system that happens to work! And much of the genetic machinery is in a way a simulation of the processes that occur with proteins in the cell.
So if somebody gets brain-scanned into a computer and simulated then they should have all the normal rights that other computer-minds will not have.
Sorry, your conclusions doesn't follow from your premises. You have stated your opinion, but it's nothing more than that!
Furthermore, with technology to scan peoples brains into a computer, we would also have technology to integrate computing hardware into the human brain, either surgically on the real brain, or by interfacing with the simulation of the human brain. The notion between a natural and artificial brain blurs again...
More importantly, it's not a question of whether we give artificial minds human rights. It's a not even a question of whether they will take it, the question is whether they will give it to us. Once (or if) we have a human-level AI, it should be able to improve upon itself, and/or it successors, leading to increasingly powerful AIs, and eventually, the singularity. The AIs will be in power.
Since human rights is a result of a political process between humans, once the power balance shifts from humans to (humans and) AIs, the rules of the game changes too. Personally, I think it would be best to at least try to be nice to our AI overlords, in the hope that they will return the favour later. But who knows...
Of course the fact that we will soon be able to simulate a person's mind in a computer begs the question of whether we are also simulated without our even knowing it -- you know, mandelbrot style. Also, according to Occam's Razor this is the best explanation for quantum physics.
This is so confused I should refuse to comment on it.
Whether we (or even the whole universe) already are computer simulations occuring in a "bigger" universe is an interesting question, but I fail to see what relevance this has to Mandelbrot fractals, Occam's razor, or quantum mechanics. If we are in deed computer simulations, our creators may simulate whatever they want, and there is unlikely to be any way we could detect it, unless they wanted us to.
Speaking as a UI Nazi, I would describe this as a fault of the UI, not the user. If something looks like text, it should behave like text. If you scan a document and try typing in it then it should be OCR'd automatically (probably popping up a box in the meantime saying 'Please wait, converting image to text').
I disagree. The programs you use should not try to out-guess you about what you want to do. Instead it should offer you a clear indication that something is not possible, and a simple way to accomplish what you want.
If users are confused by not being able to edit scanned documents, that's really the users fault. They should be taught and educated in the use of computers first.
There are real technical reasons behind why the text isn't automatically OCR'd, and why computers in real life doesn't behave like computers in Star Trek. By OCRing a text document, you loose information, and introduce new errors. This is not something the computer should do without consulting the user first.
In fact, the strength of having a computer is that it does exactly what the user tells it to do. Having the computer out-guess you just makes it harder to do what you want to do. Computers are not intelligent, and the second they start guessing what you want to do, they will start guessing wrong. Then you need to correct those computer-introduced errors, and the computer out-guesses you again, thinking you meant something else (or the same fault again)!
This is why e.g autocorrect in Word is so annoying. While it might be able to correct a few errors, it also introduces new ones. Now, if I cared a lot about errors in a document, I would run it through a spell-checker, which would find the errors autocorrect finds, without introducing new ones, so in the case where I really need correctness, autocorrect in addition to spellcheck only introduces more errors. And if I don't care about errors in my document, I don't need autocorrect either.
It seems like there are an abundance of books like this. At most of my local grocery stores I can pick up copies of norwegian books with titles like "Bli kjent med [...]" (Get to know [...]) Windows XP/Microsoft Word/Excel/etc. All of the books standing along the weekly magazines, and comparable in price to a pulp novel.
These books seem to cover what people really need in order to use a computer. Of course, there are no books of the kind "Get to know bits and bytes", or even "Get to know PCs"...
It isn't entirely unlikely that the market is somewhat at fault here (favouring books describing well-known products, and favouring books from a common series "Get to know...", "... For Dummies", etc.
But I also think it's a fault of the consumers. The thing is, "stupid" computer users aren't rational. They want a computer, but have no idea what they are going to use it for. Having bought a computer they don't need, they refuse to learn how to use it. And when it all breaks down, they complain about it, instead of sitting down and learning the basics that they should have done in the first place.
The thing is, computers are general-purpose machines that people need to learn how to use, in order to get any benefits at all from them. Even more so, if it's your private computer, you also need to learn some basic maintenance, since there is no IT department to blame. If you are not willing to invest this time into learning the basics, you have no right to complain when things go wrong. Part of the problem is that smart salesmen are always telling the buyers the exact opposite.
If I were to write the kind of book you are describing, the previous paragraph (or something very much like it), would be the blurb on the back-side of the cover. This is not an easy book to write, but it's a useful one.
On the other hand, a book explaining bits and bytes for laymen has been sitting on the shelf in the local community library since 1981. It has been lent out 4 times (one of them was to me).
1. I'm not talking about modern man, used to eating tv dinners. Think for a moment, if your *life*, and the life of your family would depend on your ability to hunt and defend from predators, and that from birth, how good would you get? Scary good, isn't it?
Surely you would get better at it. But not in the same way that Conan the Barbarian would. You'd get wiser! Hunt smarter. Know what to eat! Know what to avoid! Ever looked at one of those programs on TV about aboriginals in Australia, or some forgotten tribe in Africa? I could probably kick one of those guys asses with little effort. But I sure wouldn't survive there!
3. We don't eat deer. We eat rabbit. Lot easyer to catch, cook, eat etc. (And btw, so do wolves).
Ever tried catching a rabbit? They have a tendency to avoid you, and they run a lot faster than you. It's not an easy catch at all!
Heck, a human can run after a loose chicken for hours without catching it, and chickens are nowhere as agile as a rabbit! The only reason we are able to catch a rabbit is because we are smarter than it! And this is the same reason we are able to hunt most everything else (including bears, wolfes, elephants, snakes, crocodiiles, etc...)
Hint on not beeing afraid of dogs: think who's taller and heavier. Of course if you try to bite them dogs win:) but that's because you're stupid, not because you can't fight dogs effectively (google a bit).
You can't fight dogs effectively. You might be able to scare them away, but you'd loose if they wasn't so easily scared. Dogs have teeth, and they know how to use them. We haven't. If you want to fight a dog and win, you must be unfair. Use a bow or firearms from a safe distance, use a trap, or hunt the dog with a group of several armed people. Otherwise, you are going to get injured. Or use your psychological insight to avoid having the dog see you as a threat (or as meat). The last is obviously the most effective, and is why a single veterinary is able to poison thousands of dogs without being injured himself.
Yes, surprisingly weak, in fact. A gorilla or chimpansee is a *lot* stronger, when compared to body size.
I can't really see a wolf attaking and killing, alone, a grown human male.
Well, that's because wolfs don't attack alone. Like us, they hunt in packs. But if you were to be attacked by a lone wolf sometime, I'd put my money on the wolf, unless you were armed or Conan the Barbarian.
So in most climates we'd be at the top of the food chain, or close.
I agree. And that's most likely because we are intelligent revengeful flock animals. Mess with a human, and you get killed by other humans. And if your species mess with humans repeatedly, you get extinct! But I think the GP was trying to give an explanation for how we achieved that position, not trying to describe the status quo.
Man is man greatest enemy they say? It's true. Wars, competition for resources, competition for a mate, all lead to winners and loosers. If animals were our greatest problem, we'd all have fangs;)
But this is all about history or prehistory. The GP was talking about natural history, which is a bit before that...
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Trust me when I say this: CORBA for C++ is much worse!
I've tried both, and CORBA in java was such a relief from doing it in C++, I almost started thinking CORBA was sane, and only the C++ bindings sucked. Therefore I'm very happy for your perspective and insight.
If you'd RTFA, you'd understand that that's exactly why it failed. Corba is badly designed, and overly complex for what it does.
First of all it's a lot of hype. Today, it might sound daft, but when CORBA was envisioned, everybody did not use http and XML for everything. So if you wanted two or more programs to talk to each other, you'd need to invent a new protocol. And people did just that all of the time, with varying success. Of course, there would have been money to be saved, if everybody could agree on a common protocol. But nobody but salespeople could have come up with the idea of making the common protocol using "objects" instead of clients and servers. Almost all CORBA-lingo is equally daft and misleading.
Secondly, it never worked. There's never existed, and probably will never exist, an implementation of CORBA that has all the features in the standard. And at least at the time I used it, every implementation was buggy, forcing some of the top programmers in our organization had to become "CORBA-experts", so that we would be able to use CORBA at all. This was a waste of talent, as this was the guys with 10-30 years of domain-specific knowledge and experience who used their time on CORBA instead.
Thirdly, it was never compatible. Every revision of the Corba standard to date, and every implementation by every vendor, were incompatible. And it's not just a question of search and replace in your code-base. Implementations are incompatible in semantically interesting ways that are relevant and important for application developers. It's called "vendor lock-in".
And fourth, it was overly complex. A simple "Hello World" CORBA-program that merely contacts the naming service and looks up the IOR to get a reference to a remote object, which it calls at least one method on, has to be about 100 lines of code. The verbosity of CORBA in this respect is staggering, especially when you see that it's intended to be an improvement over earlier systems, such as DCE (itself overly complex, but still...).
Ok, our organisation still uses CORBA, and are even quite happy about it (today). But it has cost us a lot of money in the past. On the other hand, todays web-services would be totally inadequate for us, so the only other alternative would be to roll our own again...
If you try to build this sort of generality into your initial design, your initial design will suck! You can't "anticipate future functionality", any more than you can anticipate any kind of future. 50 years ago, everyone would expect rocket-packs to be a common household item, but few would predict SMS text messaging.
Saturn49 is quite correct. By adding generality that isn't needed, not only will you kill your own productivity. You will kill the productivity of every maintenance programmer that works on your product later! Not only will they have to understand the bizarre logic of changing requirements through n years of development and maintenance. They will also have to understand the even more bizarre convoluted totally un-needed generality built into the initial design, but never utilized!
Well, TeX is certainly approaching "perfect" in the sense that there are no bugs left that isn't a design error. Yet I consider most of the features of TeX to be a design error. Nobody sane would write TeX the way it is written today. It only makes sense when seen in a historical perspective. Sadly, nobody has yet written a "better" TeX yet. At least not one that lives up to it's promise!
As for the look of Computer Modern fonts, it's perfectly within Knuths right to proclaim they're perfect, but personally I've never been very impressed with them. I much prefer Times New Roman, as it is a font that remains readable even after taking a photocopy of a photocopy of a fax of something printed out with a cheap inkjet printer. Computer Modern requires a high-end printer to even be readable. There's a reason it never became popular as a screen font!
KISS - Keep it simple, stupid!
The reason buildings don't usually "fail", is because they're mostly just standing there, (I've yet to see a building execute SQL queries or something like that...), and if something moves it's considered a "part" of the building, and is allowed to fail (such as a door).
Software has to be flexible. In a physical address book, there is a maximum of 20 addresses per letter, and no recycling of deleted addresses. Nobody would accept this in software. But assuming it was acceptable to limit software like that, even I could write provably correct software, and even I could prove it correct, without the use of fancy software verification tools.
Furthermore, the real world tends to predictable. An engine is supposed to be given a somewhat predictable load. We don't expect someone to suddenly jerk an iron bar into the camshaft to stop it, and if someone did, few would be surprised that the engine would "fail", and even need repairs afterwards. Yet software is generally always expected to accept any kind of input. Remove that requirement, and I will write "provably correct" software as easy as any civil engineer proves their bridges and buildings won't fall down.
If you come up with a better office package than Microsoft, the way to get rich, is NOT to charge a hefty price, and hope for a few lucrative customers. They way to get rich is to charge a price comparable (or even lower) than Microsoft, and hope most users convert.
Porsche works in the real world, because by using quality parts and expensive manufacturing, it's still possible to make a better car than Hyundai, even though your R&D costs are lower than Hyundais. In software, there are no "quality parts and expensive manufacturing" to make up for faulty R&D. The "parts" are 0's and 1's, and the "manufacturing" is to burn it to a CD. All the costs of making software are R&D. If you want to build a better word-processor, you can't simply replace the spell-checker with one built out of titanium! You actually have to engineer a better spell-checker too!
This is why there will never be Hyundais or Porsches in the software market. Well, actually there are, but it's an artificial solution. The natural development of the mass-software market is in the direction of a monopoly, like Microsoft. Because, eventually a product that is "good enough" will turn up at the right price, and everyone buys it. Once everybody has the same product, interopability with everyone else ensures nobody switches. And by then the monopolist only has to make sure the competition never gets dangerous by buying the competitors or competing unfairly.
Mass-market software is not a "product", it's information, and it doesn't matter at all if you sell/produce 30 or 100 000 000 copies. They still cost $1 per CD to produce/distribute, and the other costs (R&D) are mostly fixed. Apart from the monopoly, there is only room for the really expensive custom-made software, and really cheap (e.g. adware) software that is even more crappy than what the monopoly turns out (so that it's not a threat that the monopoly will have to crush).
Or we could stop being dictated by economy. That's when we start seeing free software/open source., but that's another story!
In that case, a 1331 h4x0r could just use a spy satellite to log on to the laptop without getting traced, and retrieve the records he wanted, without ever having access to fancy lipstick gadgets. I'm not sure what he would need the spy satelite for, but it sounds a lot more advanced than just connecting over teh Intarweb.
What you just described would not have been a professional job. A professional job would have been one where everything looked like a common burglary. The burglars would steal some laptops and other expensive equipment, the coins from the soda machine, the cell-phone Jones forgot in office 304, and whatever seemed to be of any value.
It would be even better if the laptops somehow turned up later, when some honest person who bought them from ebay noticed the contents of the harddrives and informed the police. Maybe this would even lead to some arrests, and a false belief that the data would not have been copied..
Of course, by then, copies of the harddrives would have been in the hands of the enemy for months.
On the other hand; if you send in your elite soldiers at night to disable or kill the night-guards, and steal exactly two harddrives when there are lots of other valuables lying around, everybody will know exactly what happened.
Bzzt, wrong! Quicksort is almost a one-liner. In C, you might get 5 or 6 lines, but it's hardly difficult.
Contrast that with saying in a formal way that the output (Y) of qsort is an ordered permutation of the elements given as input (X).
Assume:
Y = quicksort(X),
X element-of int-sequence,
Y element-of int-sequence, and
n = length-of X
then:
n = length-of Y
for-all i element-of 1..n exists j element-of 1..n such-that X_i = Y_j
not (exist j element of 1..n such-that for-all i element-of 1..n X_i =/= Y_j)
for-all j element-of 2..n Y_{j-1} <= Y_j
Note the extremely convoluted way of telling that Y was a permutation of X (I'm not even sure it's sufficient). In contrast, telling that Y is sorted was easy. Now you have to prove it.
Personally, I'm pretty much convinced by this example that informal proofs are the best. Let's prove that Y is sorted, and don't bother about proving that Y is a permutation of X, because that is "obvious" by inspection.
Ah, you mean to prove that the microkernel is correct. Which is all fine and dandy. But pretty useless, considering that about the only thing of any value a microkernel does, is managing processes, memory and IPC. Without a gazillion other drivers/processes/whatever, your microkernel is useless, and with a gazillion drivers/processes/whatever (all communicating in a nonobvious distributed manner), your proof is useless.
That is why critical real-time OSes are often based on a microkernel which is only about 4000-8000 lines of code.
Hmm, and here I thought most real-time operating systems were basically a boot-loader, a C library, usually a scheduler, and some way to link the OS with your app. Sure QNX is cool and all, but it's hardly a typical representative of real-time operating systems.
If the same happens in the microkernel system, the kernel will reload the driver, raise an alarm, or in general -- be able to take the system to a predictable predetermined state. Going back to the analogy is it is like having the dictator execute a corrupted staff member and replace him immediately.
If the driver is so flaky that it constantly fails and needs to restart, maybe you should look at the driver for the solution to your problem, instead of building a complicated microkernel just to have a restartable driver. If the driver is stable, then how the fuck are you supposed to know that this restarting magic actually works?
Good thing if the system was only running Doom at the time and not controlling a reactor, or administering a drug.
If it was a hard realtime system (as reactor/drug implies), then you have already lost. Your driver failed, and no matter how flawless the "restarting driver"-magic is, you have already broken you real-time deadline.
If you believe that arranging it so that lots of people with clothes similar to the shop-employees suddenly appear in a shop at the same time, is "going out of their way *not* to interfere", you have a different definition of "not" then me.
The only people interfering with store operations were the managers overreacting.
Those people are supposed to interfere with store operations, that's why they're there! It's their job!
The best overreactions are the manager protesting her violation of her "civil rights" and the manager surreptitiously attempting to photograph the improv artists.
Sure, they overreacted. But please tell me how they were supposed to know that without the benefit of hindsight. It's not exactly the situation you are most likely to encounter as a manager of a store. And it's a pretty damn frustrating one to be in.
There was absolutely no way the managers could have known the intent of the invaders. Just because they acted friendly at the time, doesn't mean that they would the next moment. Obviously the invaders *were* part of some sort of planned attack, and at the time, there was no way the managers could know their real intent.
Bureacracies are built for mockery because they take themselves so seriously.
I'm sorry. Everyone take themselves seriously. Bureaucracies are no different in this regard.
By the way, I like how you equate "different" with "dangerous." That speaks volumes about your outlook on life.
I have no idea what you are talking about. Please explain what you are referring to, or are you simply trying to put words in my mouth?
If you need to drink something, God created water for a reason. If you want something a bit more tasty, try milk, milkshake, youghurt, juice, smoothie, or something else that's healthy (if it's with added sugar, it should not be considered "healthy"). They all taste better than coke, and can work as a small meal-replacement too, so why you'd even consider coke, is beyond my understanding.
Now, get some exercise. By all means, reduce your unhealthy (USian-level) sugar intake too, but if you worry about it, chances are it's because you are getting fat. Active people don't get fat by eating sugar. They burn it away, just like anything else they eat. The two most effective exercises for removing fat is using your bike to work, and using your bike back from work.
And instead of all that caffeine, please consider eating a healthy breakfast. It will keep you awake longer. Not that coffee is such a bad idea (in moderation), but your post didn't exactly sound like you did anything in moderation.
If this is all you want to do, you can certainly do it without having to single out a "victim".
I'm only humorless as long it's my store you invade, my shirt you spray with ink, or my dog you kill. But I might laugh healthily when your nose is bleeding as a result of your failed attempt at humor.
Yes, you aren't exactly doing something "illegal", but your intention is obviously to make life harder for other people, which in my book counts as "immoral" (at least as long as these "other people" haven't done anything wrong towards you!)
I find the whole episode comparable to someone who have gotten hold of some disappearing ink, spray it on random peoples shirts, and then write a web-page about it where they talk about how angry some people became because of this, even though it was just an innocent gag.
I'm sorry, but if some random person sprayed my shirt with disappearing ink, I would not find it funny. And if some random crowd of people had agreed to enter my store with clothes similar to the uniform of my employees, I wouldn't find it funny either. Now, had the random person in either case, been someone I knew and trusted, I might have reacted otherwise, but this depends a bit more upon the situation. When doing practical jokes, it's a fine line between what's funny and what's just cruel.
Oh, by the way, I killed your dog just to see how you'd react. But don't worry, here's a new one...
Bullshit. My body needs at least 6 hours sleep every day. Even if I was in a hurry, and used two drivers, I still would prefer to have at least that much time per day available for sleep in a real, comfy, non-moving bed. Insisting on a full battery charge in 2 minutes is completely moronic. How do you live with your cellphone?
Actually, having my car to be recharged every night, seems much preferable to what we currently do: watch the gauge, and enter a gas station whenever it gets low...
The reason electric cars aren't currently popular, is because they do not make economic sense. They cost more, perform worse, and have a less developed infrastructure. The only people who own electric cars today are enthusiasts, idealists, and companies that want to be perceived as environmentally friendly.
So for electric cars to become viable, we either need a technological breakthrough (such as cheaper more efficient batteries), or all of it's competitors to become even worse.
Well, that would work. Except that you also need a heating source that will heat the water vapour to above 200C. You could use solar power for that, but if you already have solar power, solar cells would be more efficient. Heck, if you could consistently heat a large area to above 200C with solar power, it would probably be more efficient to make a steam engine.
Another possible heat source could be a volcano, but I think that if you want to extract power from the heat difference of a volcano and it's surroundings, you'd find more efficient ways to do it, than making small droplets of water climb upwards and then fall down through a turbine.
The druglords in Columbia probably creates more jobs than Scott McNealy. First off, they hire or contracts farmers, technicians and factory-workers, smugglers, dealers, distributors, soldiers and guerillas, torpedos, hitmen, etc... Indirectly they contribute to create extra work for police forces, customs service, the military, insurance companies, private security companies, hospitals, rehabilitation centres, politicians, diplomats, etc... which in turn creates even more work for other businesses, such as IT, telecommunications, construction, etc... By this logic we should be thankful to those druglords for all the jobs they have created.
There are other metrics that are just as irrelevant, but when it comes to a company CEO, I'd say the most important one is increasing the profits of the shareholders. As a human, there are other metrics, but creating "jobs" isn't one of them. Reducing sickness, disease, poverty, unhappiness, war, crime, etc... are goals I would put much higher. And maybe pushing for more computer networks have done just that, but then I would like to hear that argument.
sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 6881:6889 \
--src-range 192.168.3.6-192-168.3.91 -j DROP
sudo iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp --sport 6881:6889 \
--dst-range 192.168.3.6-192.168.3.91 -j DROP
Make a perl script to read the IP addresses out of your ipfilter.dat (or something similar)
Is it? I thought Cyc was a knowledge-base and a theorem-prover. The theorem-prover manipulates symbols in the knowledge base.
In comparison, a human only manipulates symbols when doing arithmetic (and even mathematicians admit that arithmetic is something they do when doing proofs, but when approaching a new problem, they try to visualize it or "understand" it).
If cyc is told to find a route between points A and B on a map, it would use it's theorem-prover to manipulate symbols denoting places and roads, without ascribing any meanings to these symbols. The denotation of those symbols only exists as an idea in the human that programmed Cyc to solve these kinds of tasks, or made it's knowledge-database for geography.
If a symbol in Cyc's knowledge database is named "Route 66", it means nothing to Cyc, it could just as well have been named "A5477893". A convenient name is useful only for those humans that manipulate Cycs knowledge-database directly (although sometimes it causes confusion). The important thing for Cyc is the relations this symbol has to other symbols in Cycs knowledge-database.
If on the other hand, a human is told to find a route between points A and B on a map, we would start by visualizing roads close to the straight line between them. Then we would choose a route that seems pretty straight-forward, but avoids unneeded complexity, small roads, etc... Exactly how we do this is still not understood. I guess it could be viewed as some sort of ad-hoc simulation of an imagined travel, something our brain is pretty good at.
Cyc could accomplish the same task, but in a fundamentally different way. There is nothing that indicates that when humans look at the map they translate it into internal symbols that represents roads and intersections, attributing values such as speed and distance to those symbols, performing a search on these symbols, and then translates it back into something that can be visualized on a map.
I tend to agree, but we still have the notion of wage-slave. The ideal workplace (for me) would be one where I could show up whenever I wanted to do some amount of paid-for work untill I had sufficient funds, and then leave untill I needed the income again.
In reality, if I want to have some kind of income, I need not only to work, but also to have a "job", which is different. My employer not only wants me to perform "work", but also to conform in ways beyond that, such as showing up on time, being available on the phone in case of a crisis, taking responsibility, etc... In this way, I have voluntarily become a "slave" of my employer. And even if I quit, I will only become a "slave" of another employer, or of my customers if I decide to become self-employed.
It should also be noted that historic slavery practices have varied considerably. In e.g. ancient Greece and Rome, many slaves were well-regarded. On the other hand, other slaves there lived gruesome lives. What kind of life you would have as a slave was something decided by your owner, not something you could influence yourself (ok, being nice to your owner, and well-educated helped, but you couldn't choose to take education yourself, for example).
Today, most everyone has equal rights to education, etc... but it's still true that children of rich parents have a larger tendency to become rich than children of poor parents (and the opposite).
So what exactly is a computer? Biotechnology advances so rapidly, that we already have DNA-computing (used to solve an the Hamiltonian Path NP-complete problem in 1994). Is DNA-computers natural or artificial? Obviously, both sides can be argued, and the distinction will continue to blur further, as we get a better understanding of microbiology and nanotechnology.
This solves the upcoming problem over basic human rights too... only natural minds have human rights, whether real or simulated.
Define "solve". What you have described is a viewpoint, not a "solution". In order for the problem to be "solved", you will have to come up with a much better explanation for why it is a "solution". Problems in ethics rarely have "solutions". Philosophers still debate whether it's ok to steal if you are hungry (or whether the notion of "stealing" is valid at all). And the notion of "human rights" is more of a political statement, than a solution of a problem in ethics.
Even the notion of "simulated" can be debated. Most computer programs are "simulated" on multiple levels. The "program" is an abstract idea or specification we have in our heads. It's translated into a programming language, which is translated to assembly language, which is translated to object code, which is linked together into machine code, which is translated into micro-ops, which in turn provides an interface for the underlying capability of the hardware. Not to mention that it all runs under the supervision of the operating system, which itself is a simulation of another abstract idea.
The human brain itself could be equally convoluted. There seems to be little in nature that favours straight-forward solutions. The human immune-system is a good example of an extremely convoluted system that happens to work! And much of the genetic machinery is in a way a simulation of the processes that occur with proteins in the cell.
So if somebody gets brain-scanned into a computer and simulated then they should have all the normal rights that other computer-minds will not have.
Sorry, your conclusions doesn't follow from your premises. You have stated your opinion, but it's nothing more than that!
Furthermore, with technology to scan peoples brains into a computer, we would also have technology to integrate computing hardware into the human brain, either surgically on the real brain, or by interfacing with the simulation of the human brain. The notion between a natural and artificial brain blurs again...
More importantly, it's not a question of whether we give artificial minds human rights. It's a not even a question of whether they will take it, the question is whether they will give it to us. Once (or if) we have a human-level AI, it should be able to improve upon itself, and/or it successors, leading to increasingly powerful AIs, and eventually, the singularity. The AIs will be in power.
Since human rights is a result of a political process between humans, once the power balance shifts from humans to (humans and) AIs, the rules of the game changes too. Personally, I think it would be best to at least try to be nice to our AI overlords, in the hope that they will return the favour later. But who knows...
Of course the fact that we will soon be able to simulate a person's mind in a computer begs the question of whether we are also simulated without our even knowing it -- you know, mandelbrot style. Also, according to Occam's Razor this is the best explanation for quantum physics.
This is so confused I should refuse to comment on it.
Whether we (or even the whole universe) already are computer simulations occuring in a "bigger" universe is an interesting question, but I fail to see what relevance this has to Mandelbrot fractals, Occam's razor, or quantum mechanics. If we are in deed computer simulations, our creators may simulate whatever they want, and there is unlikely to be any way we could detect it, unless they wanted us to.
I disagree. The programs you use should not try to out-guess you about what you want to do. Instead it should offer you a clear indication that something is not possible, and a simple way to accomplish what you want.
If users are confused by not being able to edit scanned documents, that's really the users fault. They should be taught and educated in the use of computers first.
There are real technical reasons behind why the text isn't automatically OCR'd, and why computers in real life doesn't behave like computers in Star Trek. By OCRing a text document, you loose information, and introduce new errors. This is not something the computer should do without consulting the user first.
In fact, the strength of having a computer is that it does exactly what the user tells it to do. Having the computer out-guess you just makes it harder to do what you want to do. Computers are not intelligent, and the second they start guessing what you want to do, they will start guessing wrong. Then you need to correct those computer-introduced errors, and the computer out-guesses you again, thinking you meant something else (or the same fault again)!
This is why e.g autocorrect in Word is so annoying. While it might be able to correct a few errors, it also introduces new ones. Now, if I cared a lot about errors in a document, I would run it through a spell-checker, which would find the errors autocorrect finds, without introducing new ones, so in the case where I really need correctness, autocorrect in addition to spellcheck only introduces more errors. And if I don't care about errors in my document, I don't need autocorrect either.
These books seem to cover what people really need in order to use a computer. Of course, there are no books of the kind "Get to know bits and bytes", or even "Get to know PCs"...
It isn't entirely unlikely that the market is somewhat at fault here (favouring books describing well-known products, and favouring books from a common series "Get to know...", "... For Dummies", etc.
But I also think it's a fault of the consumers. The thing is, "stupid" computer users aren't rational. They want a computer, but have no idea what they are going to use it for. Having bought a computer they don't need, they refuse to learn how to use it. And when it all breaks down, they complain about it, instead of sitting down and learning the basics that they should have done in the first place.
The thing is, computers are general-purpose machines that people need to learn how to use, in order to get any benefits at all from them. Even more so, if it's your private computer, you also need to learn some basic maintenance, since there is no IT department to blame. If you are not willing to invest this time into learning the basics, you have no right to complain when things go wrong. Part of the problem is that smart salesmen are always telling the buyers the exact opposite.
If I were to write the kind of book you are describing, the previous paragraph (or something very much like it), would be the blurb on the back-side of the cover. This is not an easy book to write, but it's a useful one.
On the other hand, a book explaining bits and bytes for laymen has been sitting on the shelf in the local community library since 1981. It has been lent out 4 times (one of them was to me).
Surely you would get better at it. But not in the same way that Conan the Barbarian would. You'd get wiser! Hunt smarter. Know what to eat! Know what to avoid! Ever looked at one of those programs on TV about aboriginals in Australia, or some forgotten tribe in Africa? I could probably kick one of those guys asses with little effort. But I sure wouldn't survive there!
3. We don't eat deer. We eat rabbit. Lot easyer to catch, cook, eat etc. (And btw, so do wolves).
Ever tried catching a rabbit? They have a tendency to avoid you, and they run a lot faster than you. It's not an easy catch at all!
Heck, a human can run after a loose chicken for hours without catching it, and chickens are nowhere as agile as a rabbit! The only reason we are able to catch a rabbit is because we are smarter than it! And this is the same reason we are able to hunt most everything else (including bears, wolfes, elephants, snakes, crocodiiles, etc...)
Hint on not beeing afraid of dogs: think who's taller and heavier. Of course if you try to bite them dogs win :) but that's because you're stupid, not because you can't fight dogs effectively (google a bit).
You can't fight dogs effectively. You might be able to scare them away, but you'd loose if they wasn't so easily scared. Dogs have teeth, and they know how to use them. We haven't. If you want to fight a dog and win, you must be unfair. Use a bow or firearms from a safe distance, use a trap, or hunt the dog with a group of several armed people. Otherwise, you are going to get injured. Or use your psychological insight to avoid having the dog see you as a threat (or as meat). The last is obviously the most effective, and is why a single veterinary is able to poison thousands of dogs without being injured himself.
Yes, surprisingly weak, in fact. A gorilla or chimpansee is a *lot* stronger, when compared to body size.
I can't really see a wolf attaking and killing, alone, a grown human male.
Well, that's because wolfs don't attack alone. Like us, they hunt in packs. But if you were to be attacked by a lone wolf sometime, I'd put my money on the wolf, unless you were armed or Conan the Barbarian.
So in most climates we'd be at the top of the food chain, or close.
I agree. And that's most likely because we are intelligent revengeful flock animals. Mess with a human, and you get killed by other humans. And if your species mess with humans repeatedly, you get extinct! But I think the GP was trying to give an explanation for how we achieved that position, not trying to describe the status quo.
Man is man greatest enemy they say? It's true. Wars, competition for resources, competition for a mate, all lead to winners and loosers. If animals were our greatest problem, we'd all have fangs ;)
But this is all about history or prehistory. The GP was talking about natural history, which is a bit before that...