I'm always glad to hear about research like this myself, but this
has severe ethics problems. You don't con people to show
how easy it is to con the people. I know that rationalization
is popular with some segment of you "hackers" out there, but
whenever social scientists do this, they end up getting hasled
about it.
That was a case of AOL cooking the books to pump up their apparent networth, and doing a "merger" with old media to cash-in and leave the suckers holding the bag.
Come on Friedmann, key parties aren't new, they've been around since the 70s!
Do you have a cite on that? I've always thought they've got to be
urban legends. I can't figure out how the system would make any
sense. Tossing slips of paper into a jar would work, but keys?
Friedman is the reason I stopped reading the NYT. His articles improve if you add the words "It seems like..." to the beginnig of every sentence, and the words "but if you think about it for 5 seconds, you'll realize that things are much more complicated than that" to the end of every sentence. For example: "It seems like ordinary people can now be micro-entrepreneurs, but if you think about it for 5 seconds, you'll realize that things are much more complicated than that."
That sounds like a good system, but unfortunately I'd have to
read Thomas Friedman to test it, and I'd rather make do with
the endless blog posts making fun of him.
If Thomas Friedman endorses "The Sharing Economy", that's a good
sign that the concept is vapid and useless, if not outright
perniscious.
(How do you deal with David Brooks? Append the phrase "--but
then, I'm a well-known moron."?)
Noscript has an "allow all scripts on this page" feature you can use when you're desperate to use a heavily web 2.0 (I always think "web patooey", but maybe that's just me).
Using a Noscript-enabled browser is useful for letting you know what a webpage is actually doing. If there's dozens of required dependencies I'll often just go somewhere else.
Personally, what *I've* always wanted is a way to turn JS on and off that's more easily accessible. I often want it off, to try to get more consistent behavior (whizzy JS crap is often completely non-standard and confusing), but every now and then I need to flip it on to see if the apparent breakage is because some lazy programmer didn't feel like thinking about how things degrade.
But Mozilla seems determined to alienate users like myself, so this current bonehead move is hardly a surprise.
And yes, many "modern" web sites these days seem to require javascript-- thanks to google who made it ultra-cool and groovy.
As the US nuclear fleet ages and the "nuclear renaissance" ballyhooed over the last decade fades into history, having failed to deliver on its promises, these early retirements will be closely scrutinized...
You know, it could be that the author is somewhat biased...
The entire article is about problems with the design of large
nuclear plants-- hard to repair and expensive to build, it says--
so the obvious conclusion would be to build smaller, more
flexible designs, right? But just to guard against Wrong Think
it closes with this note:
This skeptical approach should apply to the new darling technology of the nuclear industry, small modular reactors.
And:
The public is hearing exactly the same promises about standardization, modularization, learning curve cost reductions, improved safety, and fast construction schedules that were made-and broken-in regard to earlier reactor designs.
I might point out that since in fact, the safety of the nuclear
industry is exlemplary by any reasonable standard -- like
deaths/kilowatt -- maybe one should also be skeptical about these
accusations of broken promises?
"Perpetually Becoming", is a short discussion about
neuroplasticity. Rather than passively accept our consciousness
as a final embodiment of 'who we are', Evans shows that we can
use the natural adaptability of our brains to pro-actively change...
You know, back before adult neurogenesis was established, no
one thought that learning didn't happen. We know that people can
change (to some extent) because we see them change (to
some extent), and while it seems likely that neurogenesis has
something to do with this, if it didn't, we wouldn't assume that
adult learning was impossible.
This result about neuroplasticity is being abused by the new age
self-help gang: they insist on trying to treat science as a
religion. (You'd think they would've learned better by now...)
It's nice to see another monument to short-sightedness being
dismantled.
Actually, what's probably short-sighted is dismantling it at all.
The right way to decommision a nuclear plant is almost certainly
to fill the containment with concrete and lock the gate. Making
them rip it all apart and cart it somewhere else after waiting
only 60 years is pretty silly: it raises the costs without
improving safety much. I think we do this largely for
psychological reasons...
(All this, by the way, makes the
inflammatory headline for this story more than a little nutty:
it could take *decades* to decommission it-- well yeah, they're
allowed to wait 60 years for the hottest of the hot stuff to
cool, why not?)
The atomic era of investing heavily in a technology
that burdens human beings with the most poisonous substances on
earth for literally thousands of years needs to be put to rest
and this is how we do it.
It sure would be nice if we could put this meme to rest, but
I'm not holding my breath. (1) radioactive stuff exists already.
(2) we gather it up, concentrate it, and stick in a reactor where
we generate power by making it less radioactive. (3) We then have
the option of deciding what to do with the residue. We can
reprocess it, bury it, whatever-- you don't have this option for
the waste from the other major competing power sources out
there.
By the way, heard about global warming? Wouldn't it be
interesting if the 70s anti-nuclear activists were forced to
admit they made a wrong call and may have helped doom the planet?
But like I said, I'm not holding my breath.
This is a ridiculous public relations gaff on Israeli's part,
they've choosen to highlight the moment in history when they
launched a war of agression and became a rogue state.
It's unlikely that this slashdot post was intended as
support for Israel, it's far more likely they were
providing a forum for people like you-and-I to point out the
obvious (or what should've been obvious, if the US media hadn't
been asleep for decades).
Obvious point to learn from Fukushima: the emergency pumps need
to be up above the flood line. One would hope that's easy enough
to understand and fix, and one would hope they don't drag out the
necessary changes for too long.
There's admittedly a harder problem to solve pointed at by
Fukushima: how do you prevent "regulatory capture"? What can you
do to make sure that watchdog agencies really watch? Needless to
say this is a problem with every regulatory agency-- it's
hard to see how we can deal without them, but overtime they tend
to become neutralized and gradually become ineffective.
(I have trouble fathoming what you're getting at with this
jazz about disposal of polluted cleaning water... nuclear
accidents do indeed suck, because you get stuck releasing a
certain amount of radioactives, and there's a chance they'll
increase cancer rates, and you should do what you can to avoid
all this, but if you want to pick something to stress out about
I suggest you think a little more about coal burning. Those guys
spew poison all the time as a matter of course, not just when
there's been an accident.)
I know what you mean, and you can say similar things about Three
Mile Island-- once the operators learn that, no, you really
shouldn't over-ride those alerts, the problem goes away... and
indeed there's an identical reactor at the same site that's been
running fine ever since then.
But the design in use at Chernobyl was genuinely stupid
by western standards-- I mean, no containment building! Come on,
it's just a bunch of thick reinforced concrete, it's not exactly
high tech.
There's no safety reason to slow down the restarting of well maintained nuclear reactors
That's where you would be wrong.
Possibly he might be, but you haven't proven the case. Rolling
out new safety checks sounds good, but it's hardly impossible to
do that while a reactor is in operation. Even if there's a need
for new equipment, you could shut down and install it later.
Seriously, the anti-nuclear side in these debates always seems to
feed and feed off of hysteria, in much the same way the national
security state gets a boost from terrorist attacks.
People love certain types of change. They love cool new features.
I fear you're missing the actual driver. People love getting
into the same crap that everyone else is getting into, and it
barely matters what it is. The "cool new features" are just
fig-leafs they use to justify being trendy crowd followers.
I have two favorite examples: I grew up during what now appears to be a fad for
"high fidelity" audio equipment, and people competed for large
speakers, loud amps, and "clean" sound. After a number of odd
flips and flops, everyone switched to competing to see how many
mp3s you could squeeze into a gadget (and never mind what they
actually sound like). Many households no longer have anything
like a half-way decent sound system at all, and hanging around
the house you probably
listen to music on whatever speakers came with your TV (if you
don't get by with whatever came with your laptop).
So: what happened to "HiFi"? Did everyone get into HiFi because
of what it could do, or just because it was The Latest?
Second example is more recent, which means it'll get a lot of
pushback from slashdot quibblers: digital cameras. Remember
when everyone wanted more and more megapixels? And then they all
switched to crappy cellphone cameras, didn't they? So did they
care about image quality, or could it be that was just The
Latest?
(Responses I expect: "But I have a MegazillaPixoid for
some purposes, and the cellphone camera for others."
But the MegazillaPixoid has been sitting at home gathering dust
for a year, and you aren't even thinking about upgrading it.)
Where things get interesting though, is even once you know all
this, once you learn to recognize yet another deranged fad, you
still need to keep half an eye on the fad, because economies of
scale and competitve pressures are driving the evolution of some
technology that might actually have some utility to something you
really do care about -- e.g. in my case I suspect I've got
multi-core ARM processor servers in my future, even though I
couldn't care less about those smart phones everyone is stupified
by.
"Is not a Dyson Sphere also grandiose hype?" I can't tell if you know what a Dyson sphere is. The idea is that civilizations may tend to evolve to the point where they need to capture all the output from their sun-- and presumably they would do this with layers of orbiting collectors, not literally a solid "sphere". This would imply that SETI efforts should look for radiation shifted down into the infrared. (Dyson credits Olaf Stapledon with the original notion, by the way.)
If you're looking for visions of the future, you might look at Dyson's books, e.g. "Infinite In All Directions". His imagination leans in the direction of things like colonizing the Oort cloud with genetically modified plants.
Nope: you don't understand DLL hell at all. The real problem
Windows had was there was no way for an app to know it was going
to have the right version of a library without actually shipping
a copy of it with itself. So every time you installed an app,
you could potentially change versions of any of your DLLs. What
versions you ended up with were path dependent: if you installed
apps in one order, everything might work, if you did it in a
different order, half of your stuff might be broken.
Library version management is handled pretty well by dpkg/apt and
(as far as I know) it's competitors, like yum.
There is still a problem with linux in that it can be
difficult to install multiple versions of the same thing and
switch between them, and that's actually a pretty common need. In
the Debian world the work around has been for major versions to
leak into the package names, so, for example, you can install
postgres8 and postgres9 and run them on the same system
fairly eaisly. Of course, this doesn't help so much if you'd
like to compare version 8.5 and 8.6...
Is it possible - maybe not likely, just possible - that the submitter is in the right?
No it isn't. Or not a possibility worth considering. Take a
look at the original question and actually read it: the OP has
nothing. He's whining about style and elegance, but the
one thing he touches on that might be a real maintenance problem
is inconsistent naming, but without more info it's hard to tell
if that's for real.
Software is a collaborative process, none of us really know
anything about the right way of doing it, and that means when
you're starting work in a new group you've got to find out
something about the culture of the people you're working with and
try to blend in with it. You may be able to gradually change
that culture if you've got a good case, but the OP is just
egotripping about how he knows the Right Way to do everything.
If the senior programmer is changing things back to the way
they were, we're talking about the equivalent of tab wars.
And if you're going to make changes to a group's practices the
way to start is talking to them about it You don't try to
slip in changes in the hopes they'll be impressed with your
brilliance after the fact.
Software development == collaborative process --> communicating with human beings.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm always glad to hear about research like this myself, but this has severe ethics problems. You don't con people to show how easy it is to con the people. I know that rationalization is popular with some segment of you "hackers" out there, but whenever social scientists do this, they end up getting hasled about it.
Oh right, they just don't want to admit that they're scared of invading Russia
And it's funny that Snowden's girlfriend didn't cure his idealism. Must've been something wrong with her.
AOL/Time-Warner?
That was a case of AOL cooking the books to pump up their apparent networth, and doing a "merger" with old media to cash-in and leave the suckers holding the bag.
You need a better example.
Do you have a cite on that? I've always thought they've got to be urban legends. I can't figure out how the system would make any sense. Tossing slips of paper into a jar would work, but keys?
KEYPART
coldsalmon wrote:
That sounds like a good system, but unfortunately I'd have to read Thomas Friedman to test it, and I'd rather make do with the endless blog posts making fun of him.
If Thomas Friedman endorses "The Sharing Economy", that's a good sign that the concept is vapid and useless, if not outright perniscious.
(How do you deal with David Brooks? Append the phrase "--but then, I'm a well-known moron."?)
Because arbitrarily ignoring even a small percentage of the target audience is unprofessional when it's not really that hard to accommodate them.
Real geeks wear titanium hats.
And they don't try to win arguments by making up statistics.
Right, I forgot: real geeks don't make up statistics.
"I'm pretty geeky and like to tinker with things" && "I cannot remember the last time I disabled Javascript" => and I am now calling "bullshit".
Everybody wants to claim they're a geek, these days.
Noscript has an "allow all scripts on this page" feature you can use when you're desperate to use a heavily web 2.0 (I always think "web patooey", but maybe that's just me).
Using a Noscript-enabled browser is useful for letting you know what a webpage is actually doing. If there's dozens of required dependencies I'll often just go somewhere else.
Personally, what *I've* always wanted is a way to turn JS on and off that's more easily accessible. I often want it off, to try to get more consistent behavior (whizzy JS crap is often completely non-standard and confusing), but every now and then I need to flip it on to see if the apparent breakage is because some lazy programmer didn't feel like thinking about how things degrade.
But Mozilla seems determined to alienate users like myself, so this current bonehead move is hardly a surprise.
And yes, many "modern" web sites these days seem to require javascript-- thanks to google who made it ultra-cool and groovy.
You know, it could be that the author is somewhat biased... The entire article is about problems with the design of large nuclear plants-- hard to repair and expensive to build, it says-- so the obvious conclusion would be to build smaller, more flexible designs, right? But just to guard against Wrong Think it closes with this note:
And:
I might point out that since in fact, the safety of the nuclear industry is exlemplary by any reasonable standard -- like deaths/kilowatt -- maybe one should also be skeptical about these accusations of broken promises?
You know, back before adult neurogenesis was established, no one thought that learning didn't happen. We know that people can change (to some extent) because we see them change (to some extent), and while it seems likely that neurogenesis has something to do with this, if it didn't, we wouldn't assume that adult learning was impossible.
This result about neuroplasticity is being abused by the new age self-help gang: they insist on trying to treat science as a religion. (You'd think they would've learned better by now...)
But this can't be right. I heard there's a continent the size of Atlantis made of plastic floating out in the Pacific Gyre.
(Plastic dinosaurs live there. With beanie babies riding them.)
Actually, what's probably short-sighted is dismantling it at all. The right way to decommision a nuclear plant is almost certainly to fill the containment with concrete and lock the gate. Making them rip it all apart and cart it somewhere else after waiting only 60 years is pretty silly: it raises the costs without improving safety much. I think we do this largely for psychological reasons...
(All this, by the way, makes the inflammatory headline for this story more than a little nutty: it could take *decades* to decommission it-- well yeah, they're allowed to wait 60 years for the hottest of the hot stuff to cool, why not?)
It sure would be nice if we could put this meme to rest, but I'm not holding my breath. (1) radioactive stuff exists already. (2) we gather it up, concentrate it, and stick in a reactor where we generate power by making it less radioactive. (3) We then have the option of deciding what to do with the residue. We can reprocess it, bury it, whatever-- you don't have this option for the waste from the other major competing power sources out there.
By the way, heard about global warming? Wouldn't it be interesting if the 70s anti-nuclear activists were forced to admit they made a wrong call and may have helped doom the planet? But like I said, I'm not holding my breath.
But obviously you can't believe this, because they came to the wrong answer. They must've been bought. (First post? No, not likely.)
True. You need some independant measure, like say, industry-wide stats showing a low rate of death-per-kilowatt compared to competing power sources.
If only such stats were readily available, then we might be able to make an informed judgement about nuclear power.
Obvious point to learn from Fukushima: the emergency pumps need to be up above the flood line. One would hope that's easy enough to understand and fix, and one would hope they don't drag out the necessary changes for too long.
There's admittedly a harder problem to solve pointed at by Fukushima: how do you prevent "regulatory capture"? What can you do to make sure that watchdog agencies really watch? Needless to say this is a problem with every regulatory agency-- it's hard to see how we can deal without them, but overtime they tend to become neutralized and gradually become ineffective.
(I have trouble fathoming what you're getting at with this jazz about disposal of polluted cleaning water... nuclear accidents do indeed suck, because you get stuck releasing a certain amount of radioactives, and there's a chance they'll increase cancer rates, and you should do what you can to avoid all this, but if you want to pick something to stress out about I suggest you think a little more about coal burning. Those guys spew poison all the time as a matter of course, not just when there's been an accident.)
I know what you mean, and you can say similar things about Three Mile Island-- once the operators learn that, no, you really shouldn't over-ride those alerts, the problem goes away... and indeed there's an identical reactor at the same site that's been running fine ever since then.
But the design in use at Chernobyl was genuinely stupid by western standards-- I mean, no containment building! Come on, it's just a bunch of thick reinforced concrete, it's not exactly high tech.
Possibly he might be, but you haven't proven the case. Rolling out new safety checks sounds good, but it's hardly impossible to do that while a reactor is in operation. Even if there's a need for new equipment, you could shut down and install it later.
Seriously, the anti-nuclear side in these debates always seems to feed and feed off of hysteria, in much the same way the national security state gets a boost from terrorist attacks.
So then, people never replace their phones unless they break? Those things are flimsier than I thought.
I fear you're missing the actual driver. People love getting into the same crap that everyone else is getting into, and it barely matters what it is. The "cool new features" are just fig-leafs they use to justify being trendy crowd followers.
I have two favorite examples: I grew up during what now appears to be a fad for "high fidelity" audio equipment, and people competed for large speakers, loud amps, and "clean" sound. After a number of odd flips and flops, everyone switched to competing to see how many mp3s you could squeeze into a gadget (and never mind what they actually sound like). Many households no longer have anything like a half-way decent sound system at all, and hanging around the house you probably listen to music on whatever speakers came with your TV (if you don't get by with whatever came with your laptop). So: what happened to "HiFi"? Did everyone get into HiFi because of what it could do, or just because it was The Latest?
Second example is more recent, which means it'll get a lot of pushback from slashdot quibblers: digital cameras. Remember when everyone wanted more and more megapixels? And then they all switched to crappy cellphone cameras, didn't they? So did they care about image quality, or could it be that was just The Latest?
(Responses I expect: "But I have a MegazillaPixoid for some purposes, and the cellphone camera for others." But the MegazillaPixoid has been sitting at home gathering dust for a year, and you aren't even thinking about upgrading it.)
Where things get interesting though, is even once you know all this, once you learn to recognize yet another deranged fad, you still need to keep half an eye on the fad, because economies of scale and competitve pressures are driving the evolution of some technology that might actually have some utility to something you really do care about -- e.g. in my case I suspect I've got multi-core ARM processor servers in my future, even though I couldn't care less about those smart phones everyone is stupified by.
"Is not a Dyson Sphere also grandiose hype?" I can't tell if you know what a Dyson sphere is. The idea is that civilizations may tend to evolve to the point where they need to capture all the output from their sun-- and presumably they would do this with layers of orbiting collectors, not literally a solid "sphere". This would imply that SETI efforts should look for radiation shifted down into the infrared. (Dyson credits Olaf Stapledon with the original notion, by the way.)
If you're looking for visions of the future, you might look at Dyson's books, e.g. "Infinite In All Directions". His imagination leans in the direction of things like colonizing the Oort cloud with genetically modified plants.
Nope: you don't understand DLL hell at all. The real problem Windows had was there was no way for an app to know it was going to have the right version of a library without actually shipping a copy of it with itself. So every time you installed an app, you could potentially change versions of any of your DLLs. What versions you ended up with were path dependent: if you installed apps in one order, everything might work, if you did it in a different order, half of your stuff might be broken.
Library version management is handled pretty well by dpkg/apt and (as far as I know) it's competitors, like yum.
There is still a problem with linux in that it can be difficult to install multiple versions of the same thing and switch between them, and that's actually a pretty common need. In the Debian world the work around has been for major versions to leak into the package names, so, for example, you can install postgres8 and postgres9 and run them on the same system fairly eaisly. Of course, this doesn't help so much if you'd like to compare version 8.5 and 8.6...
No it isn't. Or not a possibility worth considering. Take a look at the original question and actually read it: the OP has nothing. He's whining about style and elegance, but the one thing he touches on that might be a real maintenance problem is inconsistent naming, but without more info it's hard to tell if that's for real.
Software is a collaborative process, none of us really know anything about the right way of doing it, and that means when you're starting work in a new group you've got to find out something about the culture of the people you're working with and try to blend in with it. You may be able to gradually change that culture if you've got a good case, but the OP is just egotripping about how he knows the Right Way to do everything. If the senior programmer is changing things back to the way they were, we're talking about the equivalent of tab wars.
And if you're going to make changes to a group's practices the way to start is talking to them about it You don't try to slip in changes in the hopes they'll be impressed with your brilliance after the fact.
Software development == collaborative process --> communicating with human beings.