Programming is either about money or masturbation.
Of course, the fact that a good programmer can make six figures is largely due to the fact that there are so few good programmers around -- in the (unlikely) event that awesome IDEs make it so easy to program that most people can do it well, chances are programmers' wages will drop significantly due to increased availability of employees willing to work for cheap.
Call me selfish, but having spent the 10,000+ hours to get good at programming, I have conflicted emotions about deliberately devaluing my skills and earning $10/hour again.
Just like ink cartridges should be a low-margin business? I think you need to reexamine that statement.
The difference between ink cartridges and car batteries is that ink cartridges are not (designed to be) rechargeable -- a very critical difference, since it is the difference between convincing a customer to buy a high-quality product once, and convincing a customer to buy a low-cost disposable product every month for as long as possible. I think you need to re-examine your analogy.
I assure you the seething masses of underemployed city-dwellers are in no position to purchase an electric car.
San Diego has a rather neat solution to this -- they've sprinkled electric cars around the city. You just check your cell phone to see where the nearest one is parked, walk to it (usually less than half a mile), drive it to where you want to go, park it, and walk away.
But programming ability? You'll figure it out after they've been working for you over 6 months.
OTOH, if they've ever written any open-source software, you can simply download the source to said software and have a look through it. Chances are it will be quite similar to the quality of code you'll get from them if you hire them.
Now we have Presidents that let ambassadors get killed and blame it on amateur film makers.
If that's the worst thing the Republicans can dig up on Obama, then he's doing a great job. Compared to the 2,977 civilians dead in 9/11, and the 4,486 more Americans who died during the Great WMD Snipe Hunt in Iraq, the four Americans killed in Benghazi is rounding error.
The Republican obsession with Benghazi says more about the Republican Party that it does about Obama -- a party with a viable policy platform would campaign on that platform, rather than obsessively try to manufacture scandals to score political points. The Clinton/Lewinski scandal worked out so well for them that it's made them lazy.
But maybe by then we can use the IMF to force some broke countries to take that shit from us
I have to say that shipping radioactive waste to South Sudan, Somalia, Syria, etc doesn't strike me as entirely wise... they might find a use for it:^)
Instead use safer languages like Pascal, Eiffel (design by contract), Ada, etc. [...] The problem usually is, few people know these languages and they are not portable from one platform to another.
Agreed regarding both the solution and the problem with the solution.
It's probably reasonable to use [insert-super-secure-machine-verifiable-language-here] to develop libraries that are as security-critical as OpenSSL. However, it's unlikely that such libraries will be widely used if they aren't easily callable from the more popular languages (C/C++/ObjectiveC/etc).
Given that, I wonder how difficult it would be to write a library in (e.g.) Ada, but have the Ada compiler compile the code in such a way that the outputs is a C library file and C header files for the library's public API? That could give us a way to have our cake and eat it, too.
Because it's not possible to impose it on anyone, as they are not yet availabe. The time between them becoming available and someone proposing laws to make them mandatory will likely be measured in milliseconds.
So, in order to make sure the government can't prevent people from buying certain types of gun, gun-rights activists are going to prevent people from buying certain types of gun.
It's a tradeoff, for sure. On the one hand, it's (possibly) less likely to function when you need it to fire.
On the other hand, it's also less likely to end up inadvertently killing you or one of your loved ones at a time when you needed it not to fire.
Pick your poison -- but if I was a gun owner and there were children in the house, I might be tempted to keep one of these around instead of the traditional variety.
(Yes, yes, a good parent will also keep the gun away from the children and warn them not to touch it. But there's nothing like telling children 'don't ever do X' to get them curious about what would happen if they did X)
And most people aren't very good about checking the condition of their batteries.
Since the gun is (mostly) only dangerous when it is picked up, you could probably have the electronics in the gun include an accelerometer, and have the electronics shut themselves off after a few minutes of no-acceleration-detected. Then design an extremely-low-power (or even no-power) mechanism such that the electronics are powered back on as soon as the accelerometer detects movement again -- et voila, a gun whose batteries won't go dead for years (if ever).
Add to that an intermittent beep, or persistent display change, or some other obvious indication when the batteries finally do get low, and I think low batteries wouldn't be a problem in practice.
Getting potential purchasers to have confidence that it really won't be a problem, OTOH⦠that might be harder.
Perhaps it could even be in liquid form. That way you could just pour as much as you wanted into a tank, and it would disappear as you used it.
You're no doubt referring to gasoline, in which case the Chevy Volt (or any other plug-in hybrid) is probably the EV you have in mind.
OTOH, what would be really useful is for someone to come up with an efficient, economical method for creating gasoline (or something reasonably gasoline-compatible) from electricity and airborne CO2. Scale that up and now every old gas-powered car becomes a renewable-fuel vehicle; no need to replace them all.
you're inherently discouraging threading, which is a huge problem
On the other hand, discouraging threading may be a good thing. It's pretty common on e.g. StackOverflow to see new C++ programmers (usually coming in from Java-land) trying to use threads to solve every problem, and ending up with a race/deadlock-ridden mess that they are unable to stabilize or even understand.
Personally I think threads to programming what morphine is to medicine -- powerful and useful when used correctly, but also extremely dangerous if you don't know exactly what you're doing, and generally not something you want to use on a whim. Perhaps the language should reflect that.
That was a pretty good rant, but if you want a true description of the mind-melting Lovecraftian horror that is programming (from a Microsoft distributed systems engineer, no less), there is no better read than this article.
artificial meats are doomed to forever be a specialty product, like nicotine patches and hairpieces.
Totally true, at least until the point where artificial meats are both cheaper than 'real meat' and are palatable enough that the average McDonald's customer won't reject them -- probably not a very high bar there.
After that point, every fast food chain's claim that their hamburger is "made with Real Angus Beef" will be true, but only in the homeopathic sense.:^)
This just tells me they are putting in hundreds of basically untested code changes, which is what got us into this mess in the first place.
And you don't think those changes are going to all be reviewed, then re-reviewed, then gone over with a dozen fine-toothed combs before anyone actually uses the new code in earnest?
It sounds like the OpenBSD people aren't the ones being stupid here.
The 100-year old firm that audited Enron was worth over nine BILLION dollars at the time. It's now worth a few thousand, because nobody will ever hire them. The market executed them.
A system that makes sure a failure doesn't occur a second time is better than nothing, but it's not as good as a system that makes sure the first failure doesn't happen. (Whether it's "good enough" depends on how acceptable it is to suffer that first failure)
But IF there are effectively infinitely many vulns that can be found for less than the black market value, then fixing one does not decrease the probability that the attacker will find another one.
Right, and IF my grandmother had testicles, she'd be my grandfather.
If there is a way for a finite amount of code to contain an infinite number of bugs, I don't see it. (Netscape Navigator excepted of course;^))
One needs to be able to charge it quickly, perhaps with an upper limit of about 10 minutes or so, sufficiently to go approximately as far as one could expect go on a tank of gas in a typical car of today. [...] this would make recharging a car at such places not significantly more time consuming than filling up a car with gas, and would make owning an electric vehicle vastly more convenient than it currently is.
It would be interesting to see how much time the average gasoline-car owner spends refueling his car (including the time spent driving to and from the gas station, waiting in line, etc) vs the time the average electric-car owner spends waiting for his car to recharge. I wouldn't be surprised if the electric cars are already ahead in this respect, if only because they can "refuel" while their owners are asleep at night.
well, the thing is that hdd's keep getting faster and bigger too. 100 bucks buys you 3TB. for 300 bucks you can get 9TB.
That's true; OTOH for personal use, there's often no benefit to buying more capacity since you won't be using it anyway. For example, my disk usage never reaches the 250GB mark, so for me there is little point in paying for more capacity than that.
Which means my choice is between a dirt-cheap (but slow) 500GB spinning disk, and a not-so-cheap-but-still-affordable (and FAST) 500GB SSD, and since I don't like waiting for my computer to do things, I'll choose the latter.
As both SSDs and hard drives get cheaper, my next 500GB drive of choice will be cheaper yet; the fact that I could buy a cheaper and/or larger spinning drive instead doesn't matter much since then I'd have to use it (zzzz)â¦
Other people will have higher thresholds, of course, but as the technologies mature they'll reach a point where most shoppers will find that any drive's capacity is "sufficient" and then their choice will depend solely on performance and price.
Yep. a "computer" using levers and pulleys to steer a starship.:-)
To be fair, any autopilot mechanism is going to have to physically move something at some point, if it wants to actually affect the behavior of the ship and not just make computations about it.
Asimov's mistake was thinking that these actuators would be the same ones used for manual piloting, rather than a separate set that was hidden somewhere else in the spacecraft.
All of which I'm sure are mostly free from traffic tickets -- just not something you can purchase on a whim. Survived Pearl Harbor? Fuck it, Mr. Have a nice day.
I know gut instinct is what the Slashdot comments section runs on, but what actual, non-anecdotal evidence to we have that police officers give preferential treatment to people with these license-plate holders?
Has any of this actually been studied in a scientific way, and if so, what were the results?
Slashdot Mirror
Programming is either about money or masturbation.
Of course, the fact that a good programmer can make six figures is largely due to the fact that there are so few good programmers around -- in the (unlikely) event that awesome IDEs make it so easy to program that most people can do it well, chances are programmers' wages will drop significantly due to increased availability of employees willing to work for cheap.
Call me selfish, but having spent the 10,000+ hours to get good at programming, I have conflicted emotions about deliberately devaluing my skills and earning $10/hour again.
Just like ink cartridges should be a low-margin business? I think you need to reexamine that statement.
The difference between ink cartridges and car batteries is that ink cartridges are not (designed to be) rechargeable -- a very critical difference, since it is the difference between convincing a customer to buy a high-quality product once, and convincing a customer to buy a low-cost disposable product every month for as long as possible. I think you need to re-examine your analogy.
I assure you the seething masses of underemployed city-dwellers are in no position to purchase an electric car.
San Diego has a rather neat solution to this -- they've sprinkled electric cars around the city. You just check your cell phone to see where the nearest one is parked, walk to it (usually less than half a mile), drive it to where you want to go, park it, and walk away.
But programming ability? You'll figure it out after they've been working for you over 6 months.
OTOH, if they've ever written any open-source software, you can simply download the source to said software and have a look through it. Chances are it will be quite similar to the quality of code you'll get from them if you hire them.
Now we have Presidents that let ambassadors get killed and blame it on amateur film makers.
If that's the worst thing the Republicans can dig up on Obama, then he's doing a great job. Compared to the 2,977 civilians dead in 9/11, and the 4,486 more Americans who died during the Great WMD Snipe Hunt in Iraq, the four Americans killed in Benghazi is rounding error.
The Republican obsession with Benghazi says more about the Republican Party that it does about Obama -- a party with a viable policy platform would campaign on that platform, rather than obsessively try to manufacture scandals to score political points. The Clinton/Lewinski scandal worked out so well for them that it's made them lazy.
But maybe by then we can use the IMF to force some broke countries to take that shit from us
I have to say that shipping radioactive waste to South Sudan, Somalia, Syria, etc doesn't strike me as entirely wise... they might find a use for it :^)
Great, so you start your post with a comic strip. Is that the level of discourse I am going to have with you? Not interested.
Because everybody knows that if you take a valid idea and illustrate it with stick figures, it becomes invalid, right?
You might as well stick your fingers in your ears and yell "lalalala I can't hear you".
Instead use safer languages like Pascal, Eiffel (design by contract), Ada, etc. [...] The problem usually is, few people know these languages and they are not portable from one platform to another.
Agreed regarding both the solution and the problem with the solution.
It's probably reasonable to use [insert-super-secure-machine-verifiable-language-here] to develop libraries that are as security-critical as OpenSSL. However, it's unlikely that such libraries will be widely used if they aren't easily callable from the more popular languages (C/C++/ObjectiveC/etc).
Given that, I wonder how difficult it would be to write a library in (e.g.) Ada, but have the Ada compiler compile the code in such a way that the outputs is a C library file and C header files for the library's public API? That could give us a way to have our cake and eat it, too.
And I don't waste my time shuffling data around constantly due to lack of space on my SSD
Nor should you, when that is something that the computer can do automatically for you.
Currently any competition in currency is illegal.
Alternative currencies are legal, as long as they are paper money and not coins (and don't resemble US dollars).
Because it's not possible to impose it on anyone, as they are not yet availabe. The time between them becoming available and someone proposing laws to make them mandatory will likely be measured in milliseconds.
So, in order to make sure the government can't prevent people from buying certain types of gun, gun-rights activists are going to prevent people from buying certain types of gun.
Heh.
It's a tradeoff, for sure. On the one hand, it's (possibly) less likely to function when you need it to fire.
On the other hand, it's also less likely to end up inadvertently killing you or one of your loved ones at a time when you needed it not to fire.
Pick your poison -- but if I was a gun owner and there were children in the house, I might be tempted to keep one of these around instead of the traditional variety.
(Yes, yes, a good parent will also keep the gun away from the children and warn them not to touch it. But there's nothing like telling children 'don't ever do X' to get them curious about what would happen if they did X)
And most people aren't very good about checking the condition of their batteries.
Since the gun is (mostly) only dangerous when it is picked up, you could probably have the electronics in the gun include an accelerometer, and have the electronics shut themselves off after a few minutes of no-acceleration-detected. Then design an extremely-low-power (or even no-power) mechanism such that the electronics are powered back on as soon as the accelerometer detects movement again -- et voila, a gun whose batteries won't go dead for years (if ever).
Add to that an intermittent beep, or persistent display change, or some other obvious indication when the batteries finally do get low, and I think low batteries wouldn't be a problem in practice.
Getting potential purchasers to have confidence that it really won't be a problem, OTOH⦠that might be harder.
Perhaps it could even be in liquid form. That way you could just pour as much as you wanted into a tank, and it would disappear as you used it.
You're no doubt referring to gasoline, in which case the Chevy Volt (or any other plug-in hybrid) is probably the EV you have in mind.
OTOH, what would be really useful is for someone to come up with an efficient, economical method for creating gasoline (or something reasonably gasoline-compatible) from electricity and airborne CO2. Scale that up and now every old gas-powered car becomes a renewable-fuel vehicle; no need to replace them all.
you're inherently discouraging threading, which is a huge problem
On the other hand, discouraging threading may be a good thing. It's pretty common on e.g. StackOverflow to see new C++ programmers (usually coming in from Java-land) trying to use threads to solve every problem, and ending up with a race/deadlock-ridden mess that they are unable to stabilize or even understand.
Personally I think threads to programming what morphine is to medicine -- powerful and useful when used correctly, but also extremely dangerous if you don't know exactly what you're doing, and generally not something you want to use on a whim. Perhaps the language should reflect that.
That was a pretty good rant, but if you want a true description of the mind-melting Lovecraftian horror that is programming (from a Microsoft distributed systems engineer, no less), there is no better read than this article.
what about the exotic elements that find their way into panels and wind turbine magnets? Are they infinite?
To the extent they can be recycled and re-used, yes. They aren't going anywhere.
Don't they require mining and processing too?
Some, but a negligible amount compared to materials that we simply burn up and dump into the atmosphere, 24/7/365.
artificial meats are doomed to forever be a specialty product, like nicotine patches and hairpieces.
Totally true, at least until the point where artificial meats are both cheaper than 'real meat' and are palatable enough that the average McDonald's customer won't reject them -- probably not a very high bar there.
After that point, every fast food chain's claim that their hamburger is "made with Real Angus Beef" will be true, but only in the homeopathic sense. :^)
This just tells me they are putting in hundreds of basically untested code changes, which is what got us into this mess in the first place.
And you don't think those changes are going to all be reviewed, then re-reviewed, then gone over with a dozen fine-toothed combs before anyone actually uses the new code in earnest?
It sounds like the OpenBSD people aren't the ones being stupid here.
The 100-year old firm that audited Enron was worth over nine BILLION dollars at the time. It's now worth a few thousand, because nobody will ever hire them. The market executed them.
A system that makes sure a failure doesn't occur a second time is better than nothing, but it's not as good as a system that makes sure the first failure doesn't happen. (Whether it's "good enough" depends on how acceptable it is to suffer that first failure)
But IF there are effectively infinitely many vulns that can be found for less than the black market value, then fixing one does not decrease the probability that the attacker will find another one.
Right, and IF my grandmother had testicles, she'd be my grandfather.
If there is a way for a finite amount of code to contain an infinite number of bugs, I don't see it. (Netscape Navigator excepted of course ;^))
One needs to be able to charge it quickly, perhaps with an upper limit of about 10 minutes or so, sufficiently to go approximately as far as one could expect go on a tank of gas in a typical car of today. [...] this would make recharging a car at such places not significantly more time consuming than filling up a car with gas, and would make owning an electric vehicle vastly more convenient than it currently is.
It would be interesting to see how much time the average gasoline-car owner spends refueling his car (including the time spent driving to and from the gas station, waiting in line, etc) vs the time the average electric-car owner spends waiting for his car to recharge. I wouldn't be surprised if the electric cars are already ahead in this respect, if only because they can "refuel" while their owners are asleep at night.
well, the thing is that hdd's keep getting faster and bigger too. 100 bucks buys you 3TB. for 300 bucks you can get 9TB.
That's true; OTOH for personal use, there's often no benefit to buying more capacity since you won't be using it anyway. For example, my disk usage never reaches the 250GB mark, so for me there is little point in paying for more capacity than that.
Which means my choice is between a dirt-cheap (but slow) 500GB spinning disk, and a not-so-cheap-but-still-affordable (and FAST) 500GB SSD, and since I don't like waiting for my computer to do things, I'll choose the latter.
As both SSDs and hard drives get cheaper, my next 500GB drive of choice will be cheaper yet; the fact that I could buy a cheaper and/or larger spinning drive instead doesn't matter much since then I'd have to use it (zzzz)â¦
Other people will have higher thresholds, of course, but as the technologies mature they'll reach a point where most shoppers will find that any drive's capacity is "sufficient" and then their choice will depend solely on performance and price.
Yep. a "computer" using levers and pulleys to steer a starship. :-)
To be fair, any autopilot mechanism is going to have to physically move something at some point, if it wants to actually affect the behavior of the ship and not just make computations about it.
Asimov's mistake was thinking that these actuators would be the same ones used for manual piloting, rather than a separate set that was hidden somewhere else in the spacecraft.
All of which I'm sure are mostly free from traffic tickets -- just not something you can purchase on a whim. Survived Pearl Harbor? Fuck it, Mr. Have a nice day.
I know gut instinct is what the Slashdot comments section runs on, but what actual, non-anecdotal evidence to we have that police officers give preferential treatment to people with these license-plate holders?
Has any of this actually been studied in a scientific way, and if so, what were the results?