I really like that last paragraph. I haven't fully digested it yet, so can't say if I agree or how strongly if I do, but it definitely tickled my "interesting" circuit.
When some people are very, very rich and some are poor, the poor feel justified in evening out the unfairness through direct action.
I think I would go further and say that some amount of this can work (not be good or bad, but work) within a society. If those who take direct action are unskilled, unintelligent, and unmotivated, then the direct action will be little more than littering - everything else would be too hard.
The problem arises when there are skilled, intelligent, motivated individuals who see their society as unfair. When those people take direct action, very bad things happen. For that possibility in a microcosm, look at the horrific events in Columbine.
I'd rather have the opportunity to work hard and become wealthy
This is one of the main points raised in the article, which is meant to inspire contemplation and discussion, not to provide a set answer. The author notes that income disparity is generally a good thing as long as there is a clear path from rags to riches. He notes, however, that if that path is unclear or nonexistent for those who have the skills and motivation to follow such a path, then there is a greater likelihood of disenfranchisement and subsequent violence.
It is a common assumption that The American Dream is alive and well. If it is, then income inequality is good. If it is not, then increasing income inequality is dangerous.
So the bonus pay for a corporate executive somehow directly correlates with an increased crime rate?
Excellent summary of the linked article. That is precisely the question that the author of the article poses. He also offers a brief analysis of the pros and cons of inequal income distribution, and some research that facilitates pondering the question.
Or were you hoping that there would be some polemic pre-digested answer so you could rant one way or the other? Alas, the article is an invitation to cogitate, not to vent one's spleen.
No. If your shit can be seen simply by logging into SL (which is free to roam around in), it can be posted anywhere. It's like clipping a Slashdotter's post and popping it on a site as a quote.
If that is a statement of what should be, I am inclined to agree. If that is intended as a statement of what is, unfortunately, you are mistaken.
I.M. Pei - a man who would otherwise be worthy of respect for his extraordinary architectural designs - successfully sued a man for distributing photographs of the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. The courts ruled that the building is an artistic work, and that images of it are the property of I.M. Pei (though they conceded that images of the Cleveland skyline which include the Rock Hall are not his property).
New Zealanders interested in fighting this legislation have until the 16th of February 2007 to make submissions to the Select Committee, before the committee makes its recommendations and sends the Bill back for a second reading."
Should read: New Zealanders interested in fighting this legislation have until the 16th of February 2007 to piss into the wind, before the committee rubber stamps the bill and collects their brand new sailboats from NZRIAA/NZMPAA.
So a Homeland Security central command centre starts reporting dozens to hundreds of terrorist strikes on US Territory? So what? Response will be in the hands of local Guard units and law enforcement/emergency responders, not a remote C3S cell. The worst that could happen is that troops are mobilized needlessly - and there's time to see if the purported strikes show up on CNN.
The premise only works in a Cold War, MAD environment, not the modern day "ball of snakes" environment.
I think it works easily in the current era. Terrorism simulator starts producing threat simulations that are based on flawed assumptions. Government officials start asking themselves, "Could this really happen?" They start to confuse "Could this happen?" with "Is this happening?" and "Can we afford to assume this is not happening?" The core premise in WarGames was that the threat could not be disproven before action had to be taken. The same could easily happen with anti-terrorism action.
Think that is unlikely? Let me present a real world example. The US invaded Iraq because of an inability to disprove that they had WMDs (at least from the standpoint of the US public / Congress allowing it to happen - though I think other motivations may have been on the mind of some US officials, but I digress).
Now suppose that instead of Iraq it's North Korea. What happens if we launch a preemptive strike against North Korea without China's approval? Something very bad. Something way beyond frosty economic relations.
So suppose the terrorism simulator is acting as a kind of hurricane simulator - predicting dangerous diplomatic patterns. Now suppose it starts saying, "The most probable course of action is that North Korea will surreptitiously fund Islamic terrorism to get us spread thin, then they will march on Seoul, and simultaneously warn us to get out or they will hit LA with a Taepo Dong 2 missile." If the top defense officials really started to believe that, but could not convince China to get on board, we would be in an extremely delicate position.
Now do you see? Now do you understand why we have to get rid of this particular evil? This simply cannot be allowed to survive, because it is standing in the way of progress.
As long as we continue to have media outlets that are not owned by corporations, we will continue to have reports like this that fail to toe the corporatist line. Were it not for NPR, reports like this, critical of DRM, would be relegated to the backwater of Internet blogs and college-town weeklies. We have failed to completely destroy NPRs credibility as a media outlet despite our constant efforts. We must stamp it out altogether, or face continued non-corporate-approved reporting.
Bah - I'll be the first to say it. My reaction is based on my assumptions based on the Slashdot summary (which weren't even well supported in that context). The article is talking about interface complexity/simplicity. But, I still like simple code.:)
Complexity again. I'm old enough to remember when a steering wheel was just a steering wheel, the rear view mirror just a mirror.
Maybe I'm betraying the fact that I don't work on the interface side much, or maybe this guy is off target. My understanding of the phrase "as simple as possible and no simpler" in the context of software is that it is usually used in reference to the complexity of the code, not the user interface. Specifically I think of it in reference to making unit tests pass. You write a test that fails, then you write the smallest amount of code that could work, then (assuming the test goes green), you write another test. Kent Beck did a nice demo of this in a lecture I attended where he wrote a bowling scoring system - first we designed it by talking through the design, then he wrote it test-first. The result was vastly simpler than the design diagram.
Or, said differently, I've always seen it as, "If 20 lines of clear brute force will solve the problem well, don't use a genetic algorithm."
What are you using? I use Sennheiser HD580s at my workstation and Creative Labs Zen Aurvanas on the go. Always interested in hearing other people's opinions.
You are confusing terms. "Lossy" and "Lossless" are terms that apply only to compression. They have very specific meanings that has nothing to do with recording accuracy.
That is, I can convert CDDA->FLAC->Apple Lossless->CDDA over and over ad infinitum and still get exactly the same CDDA file. On the other hand, if I were to try this CDDA->MP3->WMA->CDDA, I'd end up with crappier and crappier reproductions.
While I get your point that "lossy" is usually not applied to CDDA, CDDA is, in fact, both lossy and a way of compressing the information available in an acoustic wave. So is vinyl. An acoustic wave has far more information than can be encoded in a vinyl groove (low frequency and low volume information is lost) and more than can be encoded in a CDDA.wav (high frequency information is lost). And to use your example above as a test, CDDA->Acoustic Wave->CDDA will produce a degraded recording. As will Vinyl->Acoustic Wave->Vinyl. (even if the acoustic wave could be captured flawlessly)
The point GP was trying to make is valid, and your post does nothing to address it: There is an inherent amount of loss involved in the recording process. However, that loss is low enough that we humans and our exceedingly imperfect acoustic wave to brain wave decoder are generally incapable of noticing the difference. The GP was then suggesting that one further degradation need not be noticeable if it is sufficiently high fidelity.
The original post mentioned that the poster is an audiophile and therefore rips lossless from CD. That implies that the question is not about the archival quality of repeated transcoding, but about the fidelity of the first transcoding. Hence, GP has raised a valid counterpoint which your (admittedly informative) post is not addressing in the given context. The question is not whether an audiophile should use lossless compression because it is lossless, but whether any of the lossy formats produce sufficient fidelity to match our imperfect biological hearing equipment.
And that - whether high bitrate modern lossy compression is good enough for the first transcoding - is an inherently subjective question. We all have different hearing equipment and, what's worse, it is fairly tightly coupled to the equipment with which we consider debates such as this one. IE: aside from a double blind fidelity test by the person considering various compression schemes, the question cannot be answered objectively - not even for a given single person.
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
Hmmmm... How does that relate to the article. First, consider the closing line: It says that while placing more emphasis on the left will increase productivity, you should consider both sides of the equation. OK, Joel agrees with that.
Now consider this: Responding to change is more important than following a plan. Doesn't that sound like the conclusion in Joel's article?
Agile is precisely what, in this case, Joel is arguing for.
Thanks for the info on #2. But despite everything you said, isn't it possible that our greenhouse emissions are actually preventing an ice age from happening? (Note: I said POSSIBLE. I'm not selling anything.)
Possible? Sure. But who cares what is possible? Do you base your actions on what is possible? It is possible that you are about to be struck by a meteor - duck! It is possible that your car will burst into flames when you next turn the key - best never to drive again.
I base my actions on what is probable. It is possible (or, rather, based on available evidence I should say it is probable) that you don't accept the evidence that supports global warming. That is not of any concern to me. The question was whether an ice age or global warming is worse. The answer is, "Either one would, if swift enough and great enough, cost us a shitload of money to survive and reduce (perhaps only temporarily) the ability of this planet to support human life."
If you want an explanation of why it is sufficiently probable that we should take action, try learning about it. The info is all available on the net - the science and the meta-science. It's not hard to interpret, and once you've looked at it, it is quite convincing. Your disbelief is indicative of your lack of awareness or understanding of the evidence, not of a lack of evidence. There is nothing wrong with that - nobody knows everything - not a problem at all (unless you're professing to others that you have any significant insight into the matter - that could lead others to skip the evidence and believe your misinterpretation - which it seems is what you have done).
As for #1, there is a big difference between trusting someone not to lie about their thermometer readings, and trusting someone's extrapolation of indirect "measurement" of temperature based on tree rings, ice density, etc. Too many variables. All of these indirect calculations have a large margin of error.
A thermometer uses light waves bounced off a metal inside a refractive medium, which are then bounced through a notoriously unreliable biological lens onto equally unreliable sensors, processed by an almost infinitely improbable and extremely erroneous processing network that, by means we have barely begun to observe let alone comprehend, leads to a spastic contraction of muscles which cause a hand gripping a stylus to dance around a page in a pattern that, amazingly, can be interpreted as having meaning (by another series of light wave bounces and shoddy biological mechanisms). Simply considering the complexity and number of variables, it is extraordinarily unlikely that anything has ever been seen, recorded, and reread with even a passing nod at truth.
Why do we believe it? Why do we believe anything is out there? Simple: Reproducibility. Every time I wave my hand, I see my hand wave (provided some bouncing light and that I don't have my eye-shutters shut).
And why do people believe in the results from those ice cores and tree rings? Same answer: Reproducibility. Every time we correlate tree rings with ice cores with the fossil record - we get points of correlation. Some of those correlations reproduce and confirm our findings from the past. Others refute it and make us adjust the assumptions. In science, the really big prizes go to the people who find refuting evidence that stands up to peer review. The magnitude of that refutation generally in science starts large and gets smaller. In climatology is now quite small. There is an answer that is pretty darned accurate, and it is available on the internet.
Your skepticism is evidence of your lack of understanding of the science in question - not a flaw in the science. Again - not a problem. There's lots of things I don't know about. As long as noone gets the flawed assumption that your disbelief is well founded, there's no harm done.
In other words, for contract law purposes, having a team of lawyers on one side and a single lay person on the other is perfectly valid.
Oh, I completely concur that this may be the case. Just about anyone is better qualified than I to hold forth on what the current law and practice is.
All I was talking about is what is good. If one assumes that free market economics is good, and that free market economics works because people can only be trusted to be rationally self-interested, then one must assume that disproportionate representation will lead to abuse. Rational self-interest requires that the person with more power take advantage of the person with less, and that the person with less power accept it.
There was something (maybe recently here on Slashdot) that demonstrated that there is actually a fair bit of retaliation against people in positions of power who abuse it (the $1000 split between person A and person B experiment), so rational self-interest is clearly not the entire story, but it is not nothing.
standard form contracts are the norm with most regular business transactions--it is too expensive to negotiate terms on a case by case basis when you're doing thousands or millions of the same transaction.
A good point. So there is something to be lost either way - from allowing or disallowing standard form contracts. But allowing them unconditionally (without significant and regular analysis of impact on the free market) is a bad idea.
Can anyone out there go through this piece and tell me why it might be wrong?
As has been noted, any report on a complex issue can be picked apart. Any one piece that can be negated does not necessarily imply the entire report is flawed. But here's a glaring problem:
Those two graphs show global average temperature and temperatures in Europe. The implication is that the first chart is questionable because it does not agree with the second chart. Therefore, one must discount the first chart. But that is either exceedingly misinformed or deliberately misleading - the medieval temperature shift in Europe is well known to have been a local shift. It resulted from a change in the Atlantic trade currents. Local shifts like that are interesting for many reasons, but are not a measure of global average temperature. It is the global average temperature that is of interest in analyzing global warming (or cooling).
The distinction can be noted also from the use of the term, "global warming." If it were a question of local temperatures, it would probably be referred to as, "local warming."
In the extremely unlikely event that you are actually interested in learning from the answers to your quesions, following is one reductio-ad-absurdum, one serious answer, and one from-the-hip estimate you may want to check out for yourself.
1) Galileo invented the thermometer in 1593. I don't trust any temperature data for dates prior to 1593.
Heck, if you want to ignore other methods of measuring global temperature, you should go with the mid 1900's or so, when we started to have regular and reliable real-time thermometer readings from a significant portion of the globe. Or even better, why trust other people's readings at all? Why not simply say you won't believe it unless you make the recordings yourself?
2) Isn't global warming better than another ice age?
Depends on your definition of good. My definition has largely to do with the ability of the planet to support the current and projected population of humans (which is tightly coupled with the survival of many other plant and animal species). The little ice age (global) and the medeival period of warming in Europe (local - due to a shift in the Atlantic trade currents) were both relatively mild. A bigger swing either way, particularly if it happens rapidly, could be really bad. Even a relatively mild swing that happened rapidly would mean massive investment in infrastructure updates and/or energy (for agriculture and environment conditioning in buildings, most notably). The other downside of relatively quick swings is the shifting equilibrium, which leads to storms - I think those are bad either way.
I think the best guess is something like: No change is least costly. Slow large change (hotter or colder) is somewhere in competition with rapid small change (hotter or colder). Rapid large change (hotter or colder) is most expensive. That is; the speed and magnitude of the change is more significant than the direction.
Current indications are that we are experiencing a rapid change (hotter) of unpredictable magnitude. If it turns out to be small, it will simply put pressure on global standards of living (some say this is already happening as a result of both inundation and desertification). If it turns out to be medium, it may result in some moderate dyings-off (whether from natural or market-based starvation, natural exposure, or from violent competition for food and arable land). If it turns out to be large, and stays fast, there will probably be some large scale dyings. Not necessarily worse than a cold shift of equal magnitude, but still bad (if you see human population protection as good).
3) You know Al Gore's movie, where they show the glacier photos, before and after? Are the before and after both from the same season? Because the glaciers change size seasonally. Did Al Gore show winter 1980 vs. summer 2005?
I saw the Al Gore flick, but don't recall if the dates were from similar periods. They did not appear to be seasonal shifts for the most part, however. They looked like "here" versus "gone" for the most part. If that is what the pictures were, it would counter the seasonal argument - glaciers don't disappear seasonally (part of the definition of glacier).
the IRC said there was an 'air of automatically' about the annual signing off of employees on NCR's code of conduct, 'a degree of mechanical, unthinking routine in employees making a commitment to abide by the code.'" So, I think most of us can agree, porn at work == bad, but recognition that Click EULAs/other agreements are not binding is probably good. The question is -- what replaces them?
How about the things that contracts are always supposed to have: consideration and negotiability. When one side has a team of lawyers and the other is intended to blindly accept the agreement, it is not the basis for good contract law. In the US, it's not even supposed to be valid. In the States, a contract is supposed to require consideration (something exchanged for the rights either side is giving up) and negotiability (the ability to discuss and request alteration of specific terms of the contract).
Beyond the fact that EULA's, AUP's, and employment agreements are rarely negotiable, the negotiability idea implies that both sides must have similar levels of legal understanding or representation. US businesses have been pushing the boundaries on this for years for many reasons, not the least of which is that it enables the side with more laywers to abuse the other side. For a simple example, look at the record industry.
While the law may not uphold the idea of similar representation, it should be obvious to any rational being that enforcing contracts formed without similar representation is bad for society. It cannot help but lead to the abuses we see today. In fact, there are many places in the States where certain contracts cannot be entered without both parties having legal representation - for example home sales in Connecticut (and I'm sure many states). While I don't much care for the idea of giving more money to lawyers, any system of civil law must eventually devolve to a state where lawyers are required for all human interaction of any consequence. This is the situation the US (and much of the world) finds itself in today. As such, one side having lawyers and the other not leads to an inherently tilted playing field. Given also that the world's predominate economic system (the free market) requires a level playing field, it should be apparent that disproportionate representation is an inherently bad idea.
And no one has indicated, once, that there was anything suspect about the actual results.
"In Precinct lB of Gahanna, in Franklin County, a computerized voting machine recorded a total of 4,258 votes for Bush and 260 votes for Kerry. In that precinct, however, there are only 800 registered voters, of whom 638 showed up. Once the "glitch" had been identified, the president had to be content with 3,893 fewer votes than the computer had awarded him."
Though, admittedly, that can't really be called "suspect" so much as "horrifying."
Figure out how many people you want and what average salary you want to pay. Then cut the number of people in half and double the average salary. Nothing kills enterprise IT faster than semi-competents trying to cover-up their mistakes. Plan to spend at least twice as long as you think you can afford on interviews and checking references. While interviewing, ask some questions that are too hard - if the candidate can't comfortably admit that they do not know the answer, they won't be able to admit when they make a mistake later on. Never punish the admission of a mistake. Seek candidates who are happy to teach *and* learn from coworkers. If they think they have the answer to everything, they'll get stuck on one answer and deafen themselves to alternatives. Make sure there is always a tasty carrot and a big stick, and apply them justly - good people love meritocracies.
You, an Alaskan, complaining about politicians trying to take your money and give it to someone else is a prime example of the pot calling the kettle black. I can't think of a single state currently that more exemplifies this thanks to this example. Even CA and NY don't have such ridiculous public works projects.
NY and CA? They're not the ones suckling at the Federal teat. The welfare states are the red states. All the states that vote for the tax cut President are the same ones that are putting us in debt. You want to know where the welfare checks go? It's the Bush backers.
Personally, I think government should get out of the marriage promotion business altogether and just concern itself with guardianship laws and contract law.
Communism is where the government makes you do something for the good of everybody. If the government forced *ALL* code to be GPL, that would be communism.
Wrong. That is the straw man that western democracies in the latter half of the 20th century created to represent their enemies that had largely communist (or socialist) economic systems. While those enemies may have engaged in coercion, the coercion is not part of the economic system. Communism is an economic system in which people contribute to a community good and take mutual benefit from it (like local police, local schools, local roads, and local public parks in the US). Governments coercing people to participate in some particular economic system is political science. Communism is economic science. Government coercion is not an integral part of the economic system.
From Wikipedia: "Communism is an ideology that seeks to establish a future classless, stateless social organization, based upon common ownership of the means of production." If there is a better description of GPL source code, I don't know what it is.
episodes of the O'Reilly Factor. Someone with only a vague idea of an issue attacks an expert, and instead of actually debating the issue they launch a tirade of personal attacks and accusations, most of which are based on out-of-context quotes.
I suppose debating the issue would be a nice first step back from the lunasphere they presently occupy, but why not ask for a little more? How about bringing in an expert you disagree with and letting him clearly explain his position, so you can think about it? How about asking for clarification on the most difficult parts, then actually listening to the answer, so you can gain some real understanding of the opposing view? They don't have to change their views, but isn't it nice to learn something instead of simply spouting vitriol?
But, then, that doesn't sell as well as whacking people in the nuts with a golf ball - which is all the newsevangelism programs are doing.
Slashdot Mirror
I really like that last paragraph. I haven't fully digested it yet, so can't say if I agree or how strongly if I do, but it definitely tickled my "interesting" circuit.
When some people are very, very rich and some are poor, the poor feel justified in evening out the unfairness through direct action.
I think I would go further and say that some amount of this can work (not be good or bad, but work) within a society. If those who take direct action are unskilled, unintelligent, and unmotivated, then the direct action will be little more than littering - everything else would be too hard.
The problem arises when there are skilled, intelligent, motivated individuals who see their society as unfair. When those people take direct action, very bad things happen. For that possibility in a microcosm, look at the horrific events in Columbine.
I'd rather have the opportunity to work hard and become wealthy
This is one of the main points raised in the article, which is meant to inspire contemplation and discussion, not to provide a set answer. The author notes that income disparity is generally a good thing as long as there is a clear path from rags to riches. He notes, however, that if that path is unclear or nonexistent for those who have the skills and motivation to follow such a path, then there is a greater likelihood of disenfranchisement and subsequent violence.
It is a common assumption that The American Dream is alive and well. If it is, then income inequality is good. If it is not, then increasing income inequality is dangerous.
So the bonus pay for a corporate executive somehow directly correlates with an increased crime rate?
Excellent summary of the linked article. That is precisely the question that the author of the article poses. He also offers a brief analysis of the pros and cons of inequal income distribution, and some research that facilitates pondering the question.
Or were you hoping that there would be some polemic pre-digested answer so you could rant one way or the other? Alas, the article is an invitation to cogitate, not to vent one's spleen.
No. If your shit can be seen simply by logging into SL (which is free to roam around in), it can be posted anywhere. It's like clipping a Slashdotter's post and popping it on a site as a quote.
If that is a statement of what should be, I am inclined to agree. If that is intended as a statement of what is, unfortunately, you are mistaken.
I.M. Pei - a man who would otherwise be worthy of respect for his extraordinary architectural designs - successfully sued a man for distributing photographs of the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. The courts ruled that the building is an artistic work, and that images of it are the property of I.M. Pei (though they conceded that images of the Cleveland skyline which include the Rock Hall are not his property).
New Zealanders interested in fighting this legislation have until the 16th of February 2007 to make submissions to the Select Committee, before the committee makes its recommendations and sends the Bill back for a second reading."
Should read:
New Zealanders interested in fighting this legislation have until the 16th of February 2007 to piss into the wind, before the committee rubber stamps the bill and collects their brand new sailboats from NZRIAA/NZMPAA.
So a Homeland Security central command centre starts reporting dozens to hundreds of terrorist strikes on US Territory? So what? Response will be in the hands of local Guard units and law enforcement/emergency responders, not a remote C3S cell. The worst that could happen is that troops are mobilized needlessly - and there's time to see if the purported strikes show up on CNN.
The premise only works in a Cold War, MAD environment, not the modern day "ball of snakes" environment.
I think it works easily in the current era. Terrorism simulator starts producing threat simulations that are based on flawed assumptions. Government officials start asking themselves, "Could this really happen?" They start to confuse "Could this happen?" with "Is this happening?" and "Can we afford to assume this is not happening?" The core premise in WarGames was that the threat could not be disproven before action had to be taken. The same could easily happen with anti-terrorism action.
Think that is unlikely? Let me present a real world example. The US invaded Iraq because of an inability to disprove that they had WMDs (at least from the standpoint of the US public / Congress allowing it to happen - though I think other motivations may have been on the mind of some US officials, but I digress).
Now suppose that instead of Iraq it's North Korea. What happens if we launch a preemptive strike against North Korea without China's approval? Something very bad. Something way beyond frosty economic relations.
So suppose the terrorism simulator is acting as a kind of hurricane simulator - predicting dangerous diplomatic patterns. Now suppose it starts saying, "The most probable course of action is that North Korea will surreptitiously fund Islamic terrorism to get us spread thin, then they will march on Seoul, and simultaneously warn us to get out or they will hit LA with a Taepo Dong 2 missile." If the top defense officials really started to believe that, but could not convince China to get on board, we would be in an extremely delicate position.
Now do you see? Now do you understand why we have to get rid of this particular evil? This simply cannot be allowed to survive, because it is standing in the way of progress.
As long as we continue to have media outlets that are not owned by corporations, we will continue to have reports like this that fail to toe the corporatist line. Were it not for NPR, reports like this, critical of DRM, would be relegated to the backwater of Internet blogs and college-town weeklies. We have failed to completely destroy NPRs credibility as a media outlet despite our constant efforts. We must stamp it out altogether, or face continued non-corporate-approved reporting.
Bah - I'll be the first to say it. My reaction is based on my assumptions based on the Slashdot summary (which weren't even well supported in that context). The article is talking about interface complexity/simplicity. But, I still like simple code. :)
Complexity again. I'm old enough to remember when a steering wheel was just a steering wheel, the rear view mirror just a mirror.
Maybe I'm betraying the fact that I don't work on the interface side much, or maybe this guy is off target. My understanding of the phrase "as simple as possible and no simpler" in the context of software is that it is usually used in reference to the complexity of the code, not the user interface. Specifically I think of it in reference to making unit tests pass. You write a test that fails, then you write the smallest amount of code that could work, then (assuming the test goes green), you write another test. Kent Beck did a nice demo of this in a lecture I attended where he wrote a bowling scoring system - first we designed it by talking through the design, then he wrote it test-first. The result was vastly simpler than the design diagram.
Or, said differently, I've always seen it as, "If 20 lines of clear brute force will solve the problem well, don't use a genetic algorithm."
even with quite good head phones.
What are you using? I use Sennheiser HD580s at my workstation and Creative Labs Zen Aurvanas on the go. Always interested in hearing other people's opinions.
This is also an excellent resource.
You are confusing terms. "Lossy" and "Lossless" are terms that apply only to compression. They have very specific meanings that has nothing to do with recording accuracy.
.wav (high frequency information is lost). And to use your example above as a test, CDDA->Acoustic Wave->CDDA will produce a degraded recording. As will Vinyl->Acoustic Wave->Vinyl. (even if the acoustic wave could be captured flawlessly)
That is, I can convert CDDA->FLAC->Apple Lossless->CDDA over and over ad infinitum and still get exactly the same CDDA file. On the other hand, if I were to try this CDDA->MP3->WMA->CDDA, I'd end up with crappier and crappier reproductions.
While I get your point that "lossy" is usually not applied to CDDA, CDDA is, in fact, both lossy and a way of compressing the information available in an acoustic wave. So is vinyl. An acoustic wave has far more information than can be encoded in a vinyl groove (low frequency and low volume information is lost) and more than can be encoded in a CDDA
The point GP was trying to make is valid, and your post does nothing to address it: There is an inherent amount of loss involved in the recording process. However, that loss is low enough that we humans and our exceedingly imperfect acoustic wave to brain wave decoder are generally incapable of noticing the difference. The GP was then suggesting that one further degradation need not be noticeable if it is sufficiently high fidelity.
The original post mentioned that the poster is an audiophile and therefore rips lossless from CD. That implies that the question is not about the archival quality of repeated transcoding, but about the fidelity of the first transcoding. Hence, GP has raised a valid counterpoint which your (admittedly informative) post is not addressing in the given context. The question is not whether an audiophile should use lossless compression because it is lossless, but whether any of the lossy formats produce sufficient fidelity to match our imperfect biological hearing equipment.
And that - whether high bitrate modern lossy compression is good enough for the first transcoding - is an inherently subjective question. We all have different hearing equipment and, what's worse, it is fairly tightly coupled to the equipment with which we consider debates such as this one. IE: aside from a double blind fidelity test by the person considering various compression schemes, the question cannot be answered objectively - not even for a given single person.
Following is the Agile Manifesto:
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
Hmmmm... How does that relate to the article. First, consider the closing line: It says that while placing more emphasis on the left will increase productivity, you should consider both sides of the equation. OK, Joel agrees with that.
Now consider this: Responding to change is more important than following a plan. Doesn't that sound like the conclusion in Joel's article?
Agile is precisely what, in this case, Joel is arguing for.
Thanks for the info on #2.
But despite everything you said, isn't it possible that our greenhouse emissions are actually preventing an ice age from happening? (Note: I said POSSIBLE. I'm not selling anything.)
Possible? Sure. But who cares what is possible? Do you base your actions on what is possible? It is possible that you are about to be struck by a meteor - duck! It is possible that your car will burst into flames when you next turn the key - best never to drive again.
I base my actions on what is probable. It is possible (or, rather, based on available evidence I should say it is probable) that you don't accept the evidence that supports global warming. That is not of any concern to me. The question was whether an ice age or global warming is worse. The answer is, "Either one would, if swift enough and great enough, cost us a shitload of money to survive and reduce (perhaps only temporarily) the ability of this planet to support human life."
If you want an explanation of why it is sufficiently probable that we should take action, try learning about it. The info is all available on the net - the science and the meta-science. It's not hard to interpret, and once you've looked at it, it is quite convincing. Your disbelief is indicative of your lack of awareness or understanding of the evidence, not of a lack of evidence. There is nothing wrong with that - nobody knows everything - not a problem at all (unless you're professing to others that you have any significant insight into the matter - that could lead others to skip the evidence and believe your misinterpretation - which it seems is what you have done).
As for #1, there is a big difference between trusting someone not to lie about their thermometer readings, and trusting someone's extrapolation of indirect "measurement" of temperature based on tree rings, ice density, etc.
Too many variables.
All of these indirect calculations have a large margin of error.
A thermometer uses light waves bounced off a metal inside a refractive medium, which are then bounced through a notoriously unreliable biological lens onto equally unreliable sensors, processed by an almost infinitely improbable and extremely erroneous processing network that, by means we have barely begun to observe let alone comprehend, leads to a spastic contraction of muscles which cause a hand gripping a stylus to dance around a page in a pattern that, amazingly, can be interpreted as having meaning (by another series of light wave bounces and shoddy biological mechanisms). Simply considering the complexity and number of variables, it is extraordinarily unlikely that anything has ever been seen, recorded, and reread with even a passing nod at truth.
Why do we believe it? Why do we believe anything is out there? Simple: Reproducibility. Every time I wave my hand, I see my hand wave (provided some bouncing light and that I don't have my eye-shutters shut).
And why do people believe in the results from those ice cores and tree rings? Same answer: Reproducibility. Every time we correlate tree rings with ice cores with the fossil record - we get points of correlation. Some of those correlations reproduce and confirm our findings from the past. Others refute it and make us adjust the assumptions. In science, the really big prizes go to the people who find refuting evidence that stands up to peer review. The magnitude of that refutation generally in science starts large and gets smaller. In climatology is now quite small. There is an answer that is pretty darned accurate, and it is available on the internet.
Your skepticism is evidence of your lack of understanding of the science in question - not a flaw in the science. Again - not a problem. There's lots of things I don't know about. As long as noone gets the flawed assumption that your disbelief is well founded, there's no harm done.
There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none.
Perhaps, though the consensus on Wikipedia, with lots of references, seems to be that the 1421 Hypothesis is not well supported by available evidence.
In other words, for contract law purposes, having a team of lawyers on one side and a single lay person on the other is perfectly valid.
Oh, I completely concur that this may be the case. Just about anyone is better qualified than I to hold forth on what the current law and practice is.
All I was talking about is what is good. If one assumes that free market economics is good, and that free market economics works because people can only be trusted to be rationally self-interested, then one must assume that disproportionate representation will lead to abuse. Rational self-interest requires that the person with more power take advantage of the person with less, and that the person with less power accept it.
There was something (maybe recently here on Slashdot) that demonstrated that there is actually a fair bit of retaliation against people in positions of power who abuse it (the $1000 split between person A and person B experiment), so rational self-interest is clearly not the entire story, but it is not nothing.
standard form contracts are the norm with most regular business transactions--it is too expensive to negotiate terms on a case by case basis when you're doing thousands or millions of the same transaction.
A good point. So there is something to be lost either way - from allowing or disallowing standard form contracts. But allowing them unconditionally (without significant and regular analysis of impact on the free market) is a bad idea.
Can anyone out there go through this piece and tell me why it might be wrong?
As has been noted, any report on a complex issue can be picked apart. Any one piece that can be negated does not necessarily imply the entire report is flawed. But here's a glaring problem:
Global versus Local Temperatures
Those two graphs show global average temperature and temperatures in Europe. The implication is that the first chart is questionable because it does not agree with the second chart. Therefore, one must discount the first chart. But that is either exceedingly misinformed or deliberately misleading - the medieval temperature shift in Europe is well known to have been a local shift. It resulted from a change in the Atlantic trade currents. Local shifts like that are interesting for many reasons, but are not a measure of global average temperature. It is the global average temperature that is of interest in analyzing global warming (or cooling).
The distinction can be noted also from the use of the term, "global warming." If it were a question of local temperatures, it would probably be referred to as, "local warming."
In the extremely unlikely event that you are actually interested in learning from the answers to your quesions, following is one reductio-ad-absurdum, one serious answer, and one from-the-hip estimate you may want to check out for yourself.
1) Galileo invented the thermometer in 1593.
I don't trust any temperature data for dates prior to 1593.
Heck, if you want to ignore other methods of measuring global temperature, you should go with the mid 1900's or so, when we started to have regular and reliable real-time thermometer readings from a significant portion of the globe. Or even better, why trust other people's readings at all? Why not simply say you won't believe it unless you make the recordings yourself?
2) Isn't global warming better than another ice age?
Depends on your definition of good. My definition has largely to do with the ability of the planet to support the current and projected population of humans (which is tightly coupled with the survival of many other plant and animal species). The little ice age (global) and the medeival period of warming in Europe (local - due to a shift in the Atlantic trade currents) were both relatively mild. A bigger swing either way, particularly if it happens rapidly, could be really bad. Even a relatively mild swing that happened rapidly would mean massive investment in infrastructure updates and/or energy (for agriculture and environment conditioning in buildings, most notably). The other downside of relatively quick swings is the shifting equilibrium, which leads to storms - I think those are bad either way.
I think the best guess is something like: No change is least costly. Slow large change (hotter or colder) is somewhere in competition with rapid small change (hotter or colder). Rapid large change (hotter or colder) is most expensive. That is; the speed and magnitude of the change is more significant than the direction.
Current indications are that we are experiencing a rapid change (hotter) of unpredictable magnitude. If it turns out to be small, it will simply put pressure on global standards of living (some say this is already happening as a result of both inundation and desertification). If it turns out to be medium, it may result in some moderate dyings-off (whether from natural or market-based starvation, natural exposure, or from violent competition for food and arable land). If it turns out to be large, and stays fast, there will probably be some large scale dyings. Not necessarily worse than a cold shift of equal magnitude, but still bad (if you see human population protection as good).
3) You know Al Gore's movie, where they show the glacier photos, before and after?
Are the before and after both from the same season?
Because the glaciers change size seasonally.
Did Al Gore show winter 1980 vs. summer 2005?
I saw the Al Gore flick, but don't recall if the dates were from similar periods. They did not appear to be seasonal shifts for the most part, however. They looked like "here" versus "gone" for the most part. If that is what the pictures were, it would counter the seasonal argument - glaciers don't disappear seasonally (part of the definition of glacier).
the IRC said there was an 'air of automatically' about the annual signing off of employees on NCR's code of conduct, 'a degree of mechanical, unthinking routine in employees making a commitment to abide by the code.'"
So, I think most of us can agree, porn at work == bad, but recognition that Click EULAs/other agreements are not binding is probably good. The question is -- what replaces them?
How about the things that contracts are always supposed to have: consideration and negotiability. When one side has a team of lawyers and the other is intended to blindly accept the agreement, it is not the basis for good contract law. In the US, it's not even supposed to be valid. In the States, a contract is supposed to require consideration (something exchanged for the rights either side is giving up) and negotiability (the ability to discuss and request alteration of specific terms of the contract).
Beyond the fact that EULA's, AUP's, and employment agreements are rarely negotiable, the negotiability idea implies that both sides must have similar levels of legal understanding or representation. US businesses have been pushing the boundaries on this for years for many reasons, not the least of which is that it enables the side with more laywers to abuse the other side. For a simple example, look at the record industry.
While the law may not uphold the idea of similar representation, it should be obvious to any rational being that enforcing contracts formed without similar representation is bad for society. It cannot help but lead to the abuses we see today. In fact, there are many places in the States where certain contracts cannot be entered without both parties having legal representation - for example home sales in Connecticut (and I'm sure many states). While I don't much care for the idea of giving more money to lawyers, any system of civil law must eventually devolve to a state where lawyers are required for all human interaction of any consequence. This is the situation the US (and much of the world) finds itself in today. As such, one side having lawyers and the other not leads to an inherently tilted playing field. Given also that the world's predominate economic system (the free market) requires a level playing field, it should be apparent that disproportionate representation is an inherently bad idea.
How was that for rambling?
And no one has indicated, once, that there was anything suspect about the actual results.
"In Precinct lB of Gahanna, in Franklin County, a computerized voting machine recorded a total of 4,258 votes for Bush and 260 votes for Kerry. In that precinct, however, there are only 800 registered voters, of whom 638 showed up. Once the "glitch" had been identified, the president had to be content with 3,893 fewer votes than the computer had awarded him."
Though, admittedly, that can't really be called "suspect" so much as "horrifying."
Figure out how many people you want and what average salary you want to pay. Then cut the number of people in half and double the average salary. Nothing kills enterprise IT faster than semi-competents trying to cover-up their mistakes. Plan to spend at least twice as long as you think you can afford on interviews and checking references. While interviewing, ask some questions that are too hard - if the candidate can't comfortably admit that they do not know the answer, they won't be able to admit when they make a mistake later on. Never punish the admission of a mistake. Seek candidates who are happy to teach *and* learn from coworkers. If they think they have the answer to everything, they'll get stuck on one answer and deafen themselves to alternatives. Make sure there is always a tasty carrot and a big stick, and apply them justly - good people love meritocracies.
You, an Alaskan, complaining about politicians trying to take your money and give it to someone else is a prime example of the pot calling the kettle black. I can't think of a single state currently that more exemplifies this thanks to this example. Even CA and NY don't have such ridiculous public works projects.
NY and CA? They're not the ones suckling at the Federal teat. The welfare states are the red states. All the states that vote for the tax cut President are the same ones that are putting us in debt. You want to know where the welfare checks go? It's the Bush backers.
Federal Taxes Paid vs. Spending Received by State
Personally, I think government should get out of the marriage promotion business altogether and just concern itself with guardianship laws and contract law.
Hear Hear!
Communism is where the government makes you do something for the good of everybody. If the government forced *ALL* code to be GPL, that would be communism.
Wrong. That is the straw man that western democracies in the latter half of the 20th century created to represent their enemies that had largely communist (or socialist) economic systems. While those enemies may have engaged in coercion, the coercion is not part of the economic system. Communism is an economic system in which people contribute to a community good and take mutual benefit from it (like local police, local schools, local roads, and local public parks in the US). Governments coercing people to participate in some particular economic system is political science. Communism is economic science. Government coercion is not an integral part of the economic system.
From Wikipedia:
"Communism is an ideology that seeks to establish a future classless, stateless social organization, based upon common ownership of the means of production."
If there is a better description of GPL source code, I don't know what it is.
episodes of the O'Reilly Factor. Someone with only a vague idea of an issue attacks an expert, and instead of actually debating the issue they launch a tirade of personal attacks and accusations, most of which are based on out-of-context quotes.
I suppose debating the issue would be a nice first step back from the lunasphere they presently occupy, but why not ask for a little more? How about bringing in an expert you disagree with and letting him clearly explain his position, so you can think about it? How about asking for clarification on the most difficult parts, then actually listening to the answer, so you can gain some real understanding of the opposing view? They don't have to change their views, but isn't it nice to learn something instead of simply spouting vitriol?
But, then, that doesn't sell as well as whacking people in the nuts with a golf ball - which is all the newsevangelism programs are doing.