Re:So many stories, so little time...
on
The Zenith Angle
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· Score: 1
Unfortunately, the system eventually breaks down because a mutual admiration society develops and you see the same names again and again on each other's books. It seems to take too long for new blood to show up on the jackets.
How long do you expect it to take? I don't recall seeing Cory's name attatched to any of the blurbs for Distraction or Zeitgeist, for instance; and I'm sure that in five years we'll be seeing someone we haven't heard of yet on the cover of Cory's latest. Seems to me the turnover in names is roughly proportional to the turnover in authors, which seems reasonable enough.
Re:Bogus review, grotesquely overrated author
on
The Zenith Angle
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· Score: 1
My goodness, look at that. I do believe it's the troll who's been trying to harass both me and John Scalzi. If he doesn't knock it off, I'll post his real name here and in my weblog.
Post it! Post it!
Re:Why wouldn't math be known across the universe?
on
The Golden Ratio
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· Score: 1
Our math is actually from the Vedas, and the Arabs got it from them, and then spread it through the Western world. The Vedas are at least several thousand years old.
Calculus might be in the Vedas, but that's not where we get it from; we get it from Newton and Leibnitz. Newton and Leibnitz indirectly got a lot of stuff from India via the Arabs (as part of the European mathematical tradition), it's true, but not calculus -- or they wouldn't have spent so much energy fighting over who invented it first.
Stan Schmidt (the editor of Analog), Gardner Dozois (Asimov's), and Gordon van Gelder (F&SF) have fairly different tastes. If you're into "hard SF" -- something really defined by style as much as by content -- you're going to get more of that from Analog than you are from either of the other two.
I do get the feeling the Locus staff's tastes don't run that way, though; if yours do, you might find a reviews site like Tangent Online more useful -- not that all their reviewers are into Analog-style stuff, but some of them are, and most of the time their reviewers' biases are fairly clear.
There's a short story that occurs after both Deepness and Fire but was written first. Actually, it was the very first Zones of Thought story. It's called "The Blabber," and you can find it published in various Vinge compilations. The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge has it, along with some comments by Vinge on the background.
A side note: according to this interview on Strange Horizons, "The Blabber" will form the basis of the next Zones novel. Vinge has another book or two to write first, though.
Real software is produced with a real process. ... [M]ost of the software industry doesn't even follow a minimal [set] of best practises.
Conclusion: Most software isn't "real."
Re:how much was Ximian worth?
on
Novell Buys Ximian
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· Score: 4, Informative
Ximian probably got somewhere between 3M and 5M USD (given other recent software company sales of similar size).
Unlikely, unless their investors were desperate to get out. According to Ximian's about page, they've received at least US$15M in venture capital funding, probably more. Presumably the investors will be wanting that back.
actually, that may not be true. I did door to door sales*, and the rule of thumb is, the more 'No Soliciting' signs, the more likely you would make a sale.
Makes sense. If you know you're pathologically susceptible to marketing, your best course of action is to try not to be marketed-at in the first place.
What made the authors of patent law believe that this would be practical?
In the early days of patents it would have been pretty easy to find and check every patent in the area you were working on; I'm sure the framers of the Constitution never expected the number of patents to grow geometrically. In the first 40 years of the US' history, only about 10,000 patents (give or take a few) were granted, but over the next 40 years, more like 100,000; and over the 40 years after that about 1 million.
If the trend had kept going we'd be at over 100 million now, but (as all of us on/. know) the Patent Office can't keep up with the applications. Also, patents went out of fashion in mid-century (possibly due to public distrust of monopolies, as well as the depression) and didn't come back in until the US started to deal with real international competition in the 70s.
CEO's and VP's are disposable plug-in modules, and hereditary family ownership of significant blocks of shares grows rare.
Even in Neuromancer | Count Zero | Mona Lisa Overdrive they're rare. Tessier-Ashpool is presented as a bizarre aberration, held together only by their weird cryogenic setup and the family AIs. Traditional corporations like Hosaka, Maas, and Sense|Net are the norm.
I don't think "transnational, less and less attached to physical reality, and... ever more like acerebral beasts" is anything but an accurate description of most of Gibson's corporations.
After hearing about Bruce Sterling I found a copy of Islands in the Net in a used bookstore... I've never been able to bring myself to read another one by him. Anyone with thoughts about his other books?
His short stories are excellent -- check out the collections Globalhead and A Good Old-Fashioned Future.
As for the novels, personally I think Heavy Weather and Zeitgeist are brilliant, but I've had trouble convincing other people of this. Schismatrix, which is rather older, is also quite good -- something like what might have happened if Heinlein's juveniles had been written by William S. Burroughs.
(Oh, and if you like Sterling, or even Stephenson, you should also probably check out Charles Stross. You might call his stuff post-Slashdot cyberpunk.)
There's just no way that you can argue that low income people are footing the tax burden of the wealthy.
I'm not. I'm arguing that tax "reforms" in this country have for the past several decades been shifting more and more of the tax burden onto the middle class. If you can demonstrate otherwise, I'd like to see your data.
One, there is no such thing as
social diversity. Cultural yes, but society is
defined as the total set of ethics and ideals.
Funny, I've never seen society defined that
way. But I was using social in the broader
sense, e.g. social science, social
class.
If these are significantly
diverse, you have no society, simply a group of
individuals w/ no common ties, and probably a
desire to end each other as a result of no
recognition of each other in their familial
group.
The key word there is significantly. We've
gotten along reasonably well for several hundred
years with considerable diversity in ethics
and ideals in Western society, and I don't see any
reason to stop now. We don't need ein volk,
ein Reich, we just need
society... A
group of humans broadly distinguished from other
groups by mutual interests, participation in
characteristic relationships, shared institutions,
and a common culture.
I'm not arguing for zero conformity or
unquestioning acceptance here . (I'm fond of Terry
Pratchett's observation, on "respecting ethnic
folkways", that "some people's ethnic folkways
consist of gutting other people like clams".) But
I'm sick and tired of hearing the need for social
cohesion cited as an excuse for perpetuating
social abominations.
Two, the wealthy already have an
enormous tax burden.
Enormous in absolute terms. Not enormous in terms
of what they can afford to pay.
I don't know what the fix for this
is, but a significant amount of money goes to fund
our federal government, an entity which was never
supposed to have all that much power in the first
place.
Fine. Let's see a list of all the federal programs
you want defunded, and how much each of them would
save. I'm sure we'd all rather pay lower taxes, after all. Then let's see if we can get a majority
of voters to agree that those are the right programs to cut.
California public schools spent $9,267.00 per student for the education of its kindergarten through high school. That's a LOT of money per kid (you can send your kid to a top flight private school for about half), and most of it is pissed away by the bureaucracy.
You're not taking into account the fact that private schools' actual costs are generally about twice their tuition. The rest is made up by charitable donations and foundation investments.
We're well on our way to hell in a
handbasket. What would it take to get us the rest
of the way there?
Blame all problems with the educational
system on greedy teachers' unions. Do not provide
sufficient funding for building upkeep and course
materials, let alone enough to attract a wider
range of more highly qualified teachers. Count on
philanthropic parents in rich neighborhoods to
chip in to keep their kids' schools going, and let
schools in poor neighborhoods go to hell.
Allow large corporations to buy unlimited
influence in government. Have any legislation that
affects a particular industry be written by the
lobbyists for that industry's entrenched
players. Assume that anyone currently making a
profit has a God-given right to their business
model, and structure the intellectual property
laws appropriately. Claim marketing expenses as
R&D.
Support a company's right to falsify evidence
in favor of their products and suppress evidence
against them. If the evidence that a company's
products or processes do more harm than good has
finally become too overwhelming for them to cover
up, shoehorn loopholes into unrelated laws to
protect them.
Treat CEOs as celebrities, even when all
they've done is preside over tanking companies and
collect golden parachutes. Confuse blind luck with
well-deserved rewards and ruthlessness with
business sense. Pretend that we live in a society
with equal opportunity, and salute those whose
successes have been handed to them on a silver
platter as though they'd earned them.
Encourage companies to avoid taxes by creating
shell offices in Bahamanian PO boxes. Reward them
with open-ended government contracts with no cost
auditing.
Do your best to keep 50% of your productive
population out of the workplace. Continue to
pretend that a single-income family is viable in
today's economy. Provide no support for working
parents. Discourage women from intellectual,
innovative, or creative pursuits.
Discourage cultural and social diversity as
much as possible. When immigrants absolutely can't
be kept out, do whatever you can to make them, and
their citizen children, feel unwelcome and
unvalued. (Consider bringing back the educational
and religious policies of forced assimilation that
worked so well with Native Americans.) Presume in
the face of all historical evidence that the
children of uneducated immigrants will be unable
to contribute to society. Assume that America has
nothing to learn from the rest of the world, and
do your best to make sure it doesn't.
Enact a tax system that encourages the rich to
get richer and the poor to get poorer. Shift as
much of the tax burden as possible onto the middle
class. Make sure that the wealthy have plenty of
ways to exclude their income from taxation, and
that the less wealthy have as little access to
capital as possible. Encourage them to go into
debt, and allow consumer lending companies to set
themselves up for a fall approaching the one the
Japanese banking system's going through.
Take as a given that nothing that works (or
doesn't work) in the rest of the world could
possibly have applicability to America, unless of
course it agrees with your preconceived notion of
the direction America should be going. If anyone
tries to suggest that something the Europeans or
Japanese are doing might be a good idea, accuse
them of being socialist or communist. Where
possible, try to confuse France with the
USSR.
Pretend that a health care system that leaves
tens of millions of citizens uninsured is
"socialized". (Use "socialized" as a dirty word to
describe any system that might actually cover all
Americans.) Skew what medical care there is toward
prolonging the agonies of the terminally
ill. Discourage preventative medicine and expect
all medical problems to be solved with
pharmaceutical "silver bullets".
My list need not end here but I got tired of
typing. And anyway, I even agree with one or two
of Mr. Stein's points. But just as Mr. Stein did I
realized that my list was already the program of
many of our elected officials. (Hmm.)
For a construction project all of these
elements are mapped out well in advance, which is why the
construction industry can work on lower
margins.
This is where so many people get it wrong. Making
software is not analogous to making buildings. Making
software is analogous to designing buildings. (You'll notice that the
Design Patterns movement is based on a technique for
architects, not builders.)
(And, by the way, if you think real-world construction
projects follow a simple waterfall model like that, you
should read
about the Panama Canal.)
XP is the embodyment of the non-engineering
approach to computing that pervades this marketplace. The
idea that you can build it wrong and change
What makes you think that if you design the hell out of
it up front and build strictly to that design you won't
find, six months or a year later when the project's finally
finished, that you'll have built it wrong anyway? Or
worse, what happens when halfway through you realize
that your design was wrong, or your requirements were
inaccurate or inadequate -- and you're locked into a process
that requires a ream of up-front paperwork before you can
change what you're building?
don't design, "code and
check"
Again, coding is a design task. Everything else is just requirements gathering.
have a unit test written by a bad coder to
check his own bad code.
I think you've missed the point of XP's approach to unit
testing. The unit tests aren't written to "check the code"
-- I agree, it's pretty pointless for someone to write a
test that proves that his code does exactly what he coded it
to do. The unit tests are written to describe what the
code is supposed to do -- they're like a design document
that can automatically validate the code that
implements the design.
Also, pair programming -- even when it's not between "two
people of equal ability", so long as they both have
enough ability and they're communicating well -- goes
a long way toward alleviating the problem of having the
watchmen watch themselves.
The few things in XP that are controversial (like pair programming) don't work.
Yes it does. Maybe it didn't work for you, but it's worked fine at the company I'm at, and there are plenty of case studies showing that our experience isn't atypical. Pick up a copy of Pair Programming Illuminated if you don't want to take my word for it. It might also tell you what it is that went wrong when you tried to pair.
In other words, even if you're paying more into the highway system than you're getting out, it's still a better deal than getting NOTHING out.
Not necessarily. Look at it this way: The portion of your federal taxes that would be offset by the highway fund kickback you're not getting is the price you (the state) pay to not have a speed limit. How much is your freedom worth to you?
(And before anyone starts nattering about why their state's taxes should go to pay for my state's highways: If that bothers you, you don't want your own state, you want your own country. You pay for the stuff I want that you don't want, and in return you get the stuff you want that I don't want. That's how democracy works.)
Actually your understanding of whitespace in XML is almost completely incorrect.
Actually it's not, but I'll admit that my "most of the time" was -- I was mixing thinking about attribute values with thinking about element content. Outside attribute values, though, I repeat, I don't understand what the problem is supposed to be. If you've got a Unicode NEL in your UTF-8 encoded XML document, by and large the parser's going to pass it through to to your application. What will happen is that it'll fail to get marked as white space. I'm sure there are people for whom that's hugely relevant, but I bet for the majority of XML applications it's not. If I'm wrong, somebody post a link.
This comment about external parsed entities is much more relevant. I don't use them in any of my XML applications, but I suppose they could get someone in trouble. However, I still don't see how this qualifies as choking.
This is all clearly explained in the standard itself (W3c XML pages).
Dude, you can't just say "it's clearly explained" and point to an enormous mountain of documents. Why didn't you point to the relevant part of the spec?
Slashdot Mirror
Stan Schmidt (the editor of Analog), Gardner Dozois (Asimov's), and Gordon van Gelder (F&SF) have fairly different tastes. If you're into "hard SF" -- something really defined by style as much as by content -- you're going to get more of that from Analog than you are from either of the other two.
I do get the feeling the Locus staff's tastes don't run that way, though; if yours do, you might find a reviews site like Tangent Online more useful -- not that all their reviewers are into Analog-style stuff, but some of them are, and most of the time their reviewers' biases are fairly clear.
The wings and tail are supposed to be all composite. The fuselage is still going to have a lot of aluminum in it.
Makes sense. If you know you're pathologically susceptible to marketing, your best course of action is to try not to be marketed-at in the first place.
If the trend had kept going we'd be at over 100 million now, but (as all of us on /. know) the Patent Office can't keep up with the applications. Also, patents went out of fashion in mid-century (possibly due to public distrust of monopolies, as well as the depression) and didn't come back in until the US started to deal with real international competition in the 70s.
The fact you didn't get it doesn't make it weak.
I don't think "transnational, less and less attached to physical reality, and... ever more like acerebral beasts" is anything but an accurate description of most of Gibson's corporations.
As for the novels, personally I think Heavy Weather and Zeitgeist are brilliant, but I've had trouble convincing other people of this. Schismatrix, which is rather older, is also quite good -- something like what might have happened if Heinlein's juveniles had been written by William S. Burroughs.
If your wondering whether you'd like Sterling, probably the easiest thing to do is check out some of his nonfiction online.
(Oh, and if you like Sterling, or even Stephenson, you should also probably check out Charles Stross. You might call his stuff post-Slashdot cyberpunk.)
"Whose" tax burden it is is another question.
I'm not arguing for zero conformity or unquestioning acceptance here . (I'm fond of Terry Pratchett's observation, on "respecting ethnic folkways", that "some people's ethnic folkways consist of gutting other people like clams".) But I'm sick and tired of hearing the need for social cohesion cited as an excuse for perpetuating social abominations.
Enormous in absolute terms. Not enormous in terms of what they can afford to pay. Fine. Let's see a list of all the federal programs you want defunded, and how much each of them would save. I'm sure we'd all rather pay lower taxes, after all. Then let's see if we can get a majority of voters to agree that those are the right programs to cut.You're not taking into account the fact that private schools' actual costs are generally about twice their tuition. The rest is made up by charitable donations and foundation investments.
My list need not end here but I got tired of typing. And anyway, I even agree with one or two of Mr. Stein's points. But just as Mr. Stein did I realized that my list was already the program of many of our elected officials. (Hmm.)
This is where so many people get it wrong. Making software is not analogous to making buildings. Making software is analogous to designing buildings. (You'll notice that the Design Patterns movement is based on a technique for architects, not builders.)
(And, by the way, if you think real-world construction projects follow a simple waterfall model like that, you should read about the Panama Canal.)
What makes you think that if you design the hell out of it up front and build strictly to that design you won't find, six months or a year later when the project's finally finished, that you'll have built it wrong anyway? Or worse, what happens when halfway through you realize that your design was wrong, or your requirements were inaccurate or inadequate -- and you're locked into a process that requires a ream of up-front paperwork before you can change what you're building?
Again, coding is a design task. Everything else is just requirements gathering.
I think you've missed the point of XP's approach to unit testing. The unit tests aren't written to "check the code" -- I agree, it's pretty pointless for someone to write a test that proves that his code does exactly what he coded it to do. The unit tests are written to describe what the code is supposed to do -- they're like a design document that can automatically validate the code that implements the design.
Also, pair programming -- even when it's not between "two people of equal ability", so long as they both have enough ability and they're communicating well -- goes a long way toward alleviating the problem of having the watchmen watch themselves.
Don't knock XP if you haven't tried it.
(And before anyone starts nattering about why their state's taxes should go to pay for my state's highways: If that bothers you, you don't want your own state, you want your own country. You pay for the stuff I want that you don't want, and in return you get the stuff you want that I don't want. That's how democracy works.)
This comment about external parsed entities is much more relevant. I don't use them in any of my XML applications, but I suppose they could get someone in trouble. However, I still don't see how this qualifies as choking.
Dude, you can't just say "it's clearly explained" and point to an enormous mountain of documents. Why didn't you point to the relevant part of the spec?