I figure "since I'm the one with the problem with how you are talking, I will make my problem go away with a flick of the switch and some tunes." It reduces all kinds of noise problems, not just cell phones: train horns and bells, loud and boorish conversations, crying children.
If the offender is right next to me and overpowers even the headphones' ability to cancel their idiocy out, I can move. And I don't infringe upon anyone else's rights, since no one has the right to make me listen to what they have to say.
I highly recommend them to public transit commuters everywhere.
It may not be 100% enforceable, but it can be applied in appropriate situations.
Let's say you are involved in an accident, and phone records show you sent a text message 3 seconds prior to the collision, or your phone found on the scene is still sitting in the "SMS Compose Message" screen. It's an extra charge the prosecutor can throw at you, add a few hundred more dollars to your fine, or a few months to your sentence.
If a cop sees you messing on the phone before he pulls you over for erratic driving, same thing. The prosecutor can subpoena the cell records.
And a cop can certainly ask: "were you texting? Can I see your phone?" Answering yes is confessing to the crime, and showing him the phone in the SMS app is handing him the evidence he needs. (In a traffic stop situation most people are unaware of the risk of cooperating.)
As a kid in school being taught how to drive, you can therefore be taught that texting while driving will bring extra pain. Statistically it could save a few lives, and I can see why the legislature would call that a win.
I know what you mean, I've been trapped in too many inescapable situations with somebody who couldn't simply ask people to talk quieter instead resorting to passive-aggressive jackassery like jamming a cell phone signal.
This may come as a surprise to you but many people don't actively try to be assholes, nor are they always aware they're inconveniencing someone else with their actions. If something someone is doing bothers you try politely talking to the person to give them a chance to work with you, improve the world a little instead of deliberately being an asshole just because you feel a stranger slighted you.
Fortunately in this case the victim survived, and the assailant was eventually arrested and convicted of attempted murder. My point is that despite our desires to believe in the goodness of everyone in society, there are people who don't belong in society, and yet they still exist in it. Some helpfully identify themselves as anti-social through publicly identifiable clothing choices. But others may be disguised.
how do you feel about the woman further down trying to connect with her kid, or the doctor trying to manage prescriptions, or the 10 quiet business people just trying to check their email. You fucked up their connections as well.
Not to mention anyone else not on the train but still in range of the signal. Running one of those things on a bus or subway is like setting up a big mobile bubble of "fuck you" for everyone in the city.
No, it's like setting up a tiny mobile bubble of "fuck you" to everyone within about fifteen feet. These don't have the power to extend their range beyond the devices that are locally audible to the user, and certainly not beyond the metal walls of a bus or train. I don't own one, but I did read the poster's link and discovered that while they have a published range of 3-15 meters, their effective operational range is only about 3-5 meters, and is further attenuated by shields such as leather jackets.
Also, jamming is indistinguishable to the cell system as any other ordinary, expected RF interference. Even after a carrier is lost, the connection is maintained for up to 30 seconds or so. A train passing by would not remain within effective range long enough to drop more than a word of a conversation. It would not cause a disconnection.
As gratifying as it might be to dickishly and anonymously kill their signal, the grown up thing to do would be to simply ask the person to pipe down. If the GP is so socially backwards that he can't even manage that, I humbly suggest that he does not belong on public transportation.
Interestingly enough, the official government approach to the problem is to lie to the public!
Being trapped for 35 minutes on a commuter train or bus is annoying, but survivable, and you can always hop off at an early stop if the situation is unbearable.
But being trapped on an airplane for five hours while you cross flyover-land and having to listen to "DO YOU KNOW WHO YOU'RE TALKING TO?!? I'M JOHN FUCKING SMITH OF FUCKING JOHN SMITH INCORPORATED!!" * would be enough to seriously risk causing passenger rage incidents. So instead of actually telling anyone to their face that they're too irresponsible to use a cell phone in public, they officially lie to us all and say "cell phones can interfere with navigational systems." They do offer us airphones, but at $7 per minute so as to limit demand. They know John Fucking Smith is too cheap to argue for very long at those rates.
* An actual overheard yelled-over-the-phone quote, with the name changed because I don't remember the guilty fucker's real name.
Why? It's not like you can't get around these things. You want to print up banknotes? Use GIMP instead of Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. As far as I know, GIMP doesn't even have a plug-in to detect the EURion constellation.
What these things do is hopefully stop the casual bad guys. The guy who thinks "I'll just copy my buddy's $20 so I can eat lunch today", or "I'll tip the cute waitress with phony $20 bills, maybe she'll come on to me." If the copier or the software pops up a screen and says "don't do that, it's illegal", why is it disgusting that a crime was averted?
I'd much rather have the software stop someone *before* they pass a phony bill, instead of after. A copy machine spitting out an unpassable smeary-looking $20 means nobody will commit a crime with it. Catching someone AFTER having printed and passed the bills means that the dumbass who thought he pulled a fast one on the waitress gets himself a 5 year sentence for counterfeiting, and I get to spend $50,000 a year keeping his dumb ass in jail.
TFA is all about traitorware. Stopping the bills from being copied isn't the issue. It's the printers with the yellow serial number dots that are the problem. They let you print the phony money, subversive tracts, or leaked cables, but provide a traceable means to identify who did the printing. That's what's disgusting.
Hell with business strategy, here is a great end-user strategy for cutting spam!
If anybody spams you on your social sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever), just send a letter to Google and say "this guy is violating your patents, if you want to keep your patent, you better cease-and-desist them."
Then hold them to it. If you notify Google of people violating their patent, and they do nothing and you record the fact, then their patent can be thrown out in court.
I remember taking a vendor training class about 12 years ago. The topic was arcane, and it was very technical, and a lot of the people who were there obviously had signed up for it because it was Southern California in the winter, not because they were interested.
Early on in day 2, I noticed that a few people were playing solitaire instead of listening to the lecture. The instructors were great, but their topic was really, really dry. By the end of day 5, I think half the class had "checked out" or "gone on vacation".
Would bannination of the computers have helped those people? I doubt they were going to get it regardless of what they were doing. Did they drag a few people down who might otherwise have paid attention? Can't say.
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. Edsger W.Dijkstra, 1975
Like you, I first learned BASIC at a tender age; actually a decade before you did. Back then, it was all self-teaching, of course. That's the ease of BASIC, and was also the start of the problem. We had no schoolteachers who knew programming, so they let us work alone on terminals in the back of the math or science rooms. We taught ourselves programming in sequential steps, because that's what we saw, and it's what the language gave us to work with. We never learned to think about or recognize "discrete units of work," unless it was something so big and often repeated that it would save line numbers if it was turned into a GOSUB call. Every variable is a global. No code is named, except by line numbers. The closest thing to a reference was an array index. We didn't have code reviews to learn from each other. And nobody graded our code; if there was any academic look it was only to "ooh and aah" at the results our teachers could never hope to duplicate.
And external learning opportunities were awful. The programs printed in Creative Computing were horrible examples. Even programs that could have been OK to learn from were then scrunched down to save on line numbers and column inches or to fit inside a 16K machine; any elegance they may have had was lost to compression.
Sure, you can accomplish a lot of stuff in BASIC, but everyone reaches a wall where the programs were no longer maintainable. We didn't even recognize why; just that there were many line numbers to juggle, and variables named A, A1, B$, and C7 to keep track of, and never enough extra space between line numbers where we needed them most -- which caused odd little subroutines to sprout from the most awkward of places.
BASIC can be done well with effort and training, but it can be done poorly much easier. When people learn on their own, they don't get feedback or corrections for their bad habits. And BASIC lets you get a lot further on your own than the syntactically thick languages of the C family, or the new concepts required to learn about object oriented programming. You spend more time ingraining bad habits before someone comes along and says "here's a better way to do it."
And then you hit the hard part! You then need to fight the internal pride that says "screw you, I already know how to program well enough, look what I can do in BASIC!" and actually accept learning the better way. Far too many people are so arrogant that they never get over this hurdle, and those are likely the students Dijkstra was condemning with his words "practically impossible".
Part of the problem was the era in which Dijkstra wrote his sentiments. Not enough people outside of academia (especially in industry) were writing quality code; even inside academia there was still a lot of research to be done, concepts waiting to be discovered, and curricula to be written to explain them to students. Another part of the problem was the BASIC language of the time did not encourage or even support concepts we now hold to be common best design principles: modularity, high cohesion, low coupling, etc.
Dijkstra was a visionary who not only understood these concepts back then but framed a lot of what was to come that would improve programming. He recognized this badness the same way we do now, only 35 years earlier. He saw first hand the damage that was caused by self-taught programmers, and saw BASIC as the crutch that enabled them to get too far down that path.
And did you read the points leading his list of uncomfortable truths? Let me repeat the key one here:
The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities.
The problem (MY problem) is that I value a good story above the other elements. (The same can probably be said for anyone who enjoys Dr. Who.)
I found Transformers utterly tedious the first time I endured it. It followed the current "kids movie" trend which is to emulate video game play with cut scene explanations. Introduce heroic kid figure leading his normal life, chase him with five minutes of special effects confusion, dump a convoluted 7 minute expository lump of plot on the audience, break into a 23 minute series of special effects worthy of a video game, repeat twice then roll credits.
That's not a story, it's a formula. Replace heroic kid with Shia LeBoeuf and you've got Transformers or Eagle Eye. Replace heroic kid with Hayden Christiansen and you've got Jumper. I've seen them all already, and they're all the same movie.
Avatar had great CG, and a horrible, flat, and over used story line and plot. Fern Gully was a much better take on that story.
I rewatched FernGully on cable a few months ago. Holy crap, Avatar was a total clone of that film, minus the entertaining Robin Williams bat character.
Greedy human organization cutting down trees in order to exploit and profit from the environment's natural resources? Check. One specific tree is the home to the indigenous life forms, while another is ancient and whose destruction is at the center of the struggle? Check. Male protagonist human transmorphed from organization's peon into form acceptable by threatened indigenous natives? Check. A common-sense survival action by the female lead saves the life of the still-ignorant-of-native-ways male lead? Check. Humans use technology to assist their side in the wanton destruction of the native habitat? Check. Female native protagonist teaches male non-native protagonist her native ways and customs? Check. Interspecies love angle between the male and female lead characters? Check. Female lead character is the daughter and heir apparent of the society's primary maternal spiritual figure? Check. Maternal spiritual leader is sacrificed in the struggle and replaced by the female lead character? Check. Background scenery includes natural rock formations in the shape of magnetic lines of flux? Check. Protagonist learns to use leaves larger than his body for transport? Check. Protagonist learns to tame and use native creatures to gain modes of transportation? Check. Protagonist uses his knowledge of the weak points of the machinery to disable it while it is attempting to destroy the local environment? Check. Evil force anthropomorphizes technology to wage their attack? Check. Indigenous natives use mystical forces to assist their side in defeating technology? Check. Greedy human organization defeated and driven permanently from the native landscape? Check.
When you say "turn a profit, but... [aren't] worth watching" how do you quantify that?
As Ebert said, "It may not have legs". By that he means that he doesn't think the story isn't compelling, and it won't be rewatched by the majority of viewers.
I'll probably buy the soundtrack myself, but only because I like Daft Punk. And like graphics, a great soundtrack is not enough to make a good movie, either. A great soundtrack and visuals can't turn a 60 minute "escape from cyberspace" sequence into a great movie.
Because the belief is not a fixed thing, it could easily be changed.
Then you haven't met the same zealots I have. Most fundamentalists I know have been indoctrinated since birth (literally) in their religion and have never had the opportunity to recognize that they have free will in the matter. They've been told repeatedly, and from the very beginning, that it's wrong to even contemplate that choice (Genesis 2:17). They are denied the tools of logic, they are instead taught the concept of faith, and are told "this concept is the most important thing ever, important enough for you to die for." It would be easier for them to grow an additional six inches than it would be for them to give up their beliefs.
Religion isn't a fashion, like some wannabe-gangsta' wearing baggy shorts down to his knees, or getting spiderweb tattoos on his neck. Those people are saying "I want to be identified with cruel people so I will get respect despite my demonstrated mental handicap of being stupid enough to think this is a good idea." Feel free to hate them for what they are saying with their appearance - I don't think it's bigotry at all, as long as you hate all of those idiots equally, without regard to their other birth attributes.
Back to your statement: is it bigotry to dislike someone because they aren't capable of giving up their beliefs? I think it is. I think you have to judge people on an individual basis. Being religious isn't prima facie evidence of stupidity. You can't exactly blame them when they can't reject a lifetime of indoctrination just because you show them a twitch of a voltmeter, a microphotograph of DNA, or a fossilized bone.
It doesn't matter how old you are, or how you felt about the original movie. This one apparently has good graphics with a poor plot. Both reviews quoted in TFA were basically negative on the movie. Ebert thumbed his up to three by liking the visuals, but he said several times in his short piece that the movie is essentially plotless. The following quotes are all from his review:
I'm giving this more attention than the movie does, which is just as well. Isaac Asimov would have attempted some kind of scientific speculation on how this might all be possible, but "Tron" is more action-oriented.
"Tron: Legacy," a sequel made 28 years after the original but with the same actor, is true to the first film: It also can't be understood, but looks great.
It may not have legs, because its appeal is too one-dimensional for an audience much beyond immediate responders. When "2001" was in theaters, there were fans who got stoned and sneaked in during the intermission for the sound-and-light trip. I hesitate to suggest that for "Tron: Legacy," but the plot won't suffer.
None of those are positive statements with respect to the plot.
CG is fine for avoiding expensive trips to filming locations in the remotest corners of the globe, or for rendering places that aren't there. But it's in no way a supplement to a plot. Transformers, 2012, Doom, etc., all proved that flashy visuals can turn a profit, but they can't turn suck into a movie worth watching.
Thanks. My back-of-the-envelope is a lot less optimistic than yours, as I was trotting out worst cases on all counts.
What I really wanted to do was answer the GP as to "why" a company might want to avoid the last-mile expenses of a cubicle farm. I don't think for a moment that it's a good idea, mind you, because I agree that hard-wired installations are always technically superior to wireless in terms of performance.
For grins, follow the LVX link to their "technology introduction" page, where you'll find some great FUD:
On the other hand, it has long been established that light is an extraordinary carrier of digital information. The fastest networks today are equipped with fiber optic cabling and equipment. The next generation of wireless networks will use light as its communication medium because of these superior attributes.
The way they weasel-worded it is as if the technical benefits of fiber optics are magically conferred upon all optical communications media, especially including their scheme.
But my original point was that there is a complex cost equation that goes hand-in-glove with the technical arguments, and that it's not just as simple as "saving you from running cable that last 6 feet". And yes, Fortune 500 companies are stupid enough to put in bad or inferior technical solutions just because they "reduce costs". Trust me on this one.:-)
TFA's point is that if the company is already going to replace fluorescent or incandescent ceiling lamps with LEDs for energy reasons, this company is saying they should consider offsetting the higher cost of the LEDs by adding the extra hardware to outfit them as networking transceivers.
It saves the company from running cable that last average of 100 feet or so from the wiring closet to each desk, multiplied by the number of desks on the floor (in this building there are about 100 desks per floor) multiplied by the number of times cube moves take place (you don't want to know how often this is, but triennial is not far from the truth) multiplied by the cost for an electrician to run a single line of cable. I think the average cost to pull a single run ranges from about $200-$400 on up, depending on the city and state, and that's in a newer building designed to have cable runs to desks. If you consider a older building with no pre-existing trenches in the floor, the costs treble.
And LED light fixtures are more efficient than fluorescent tubes. Electricity costs spent on lighting will be cut in half or more. LEDs have a much longer lifetime than fluorescent tubes, and will cut maintenance visits to replace bulbs by a factor of 10.
The numbers multiply out rapidly. Fixed wiring and fluorescent lighting might cost a company several hundred dollars per employee annually to run and maintain. A Fortune 500 company might have 10,000 employees or more, so that could be tens of millions of dollars a year in savings.
Of course, there are the offsetting expenses. This licensed and patented blinkenlight technology isn't free. It needs expensive LED lamps to be installed at each light fixture. It will need ethernet runs to each fixture to carry the data, if the power lines can't do it, or if it doesn't use RF. It'll require special light receiver dongles for each PC and laptop. And this new technology won't be bug free. It will have maintenance costs of its own, not to mention a few rounds of upgrades as people realize they screwed up the security protocols when they first invented it (WEP is neither gone nor forgotten.)
So far, 802.11 is much cheaper as the components are off-the-shelf, but the band is crowded and congestion isn't improving over time. This looks like one way to mitigate it, but until they address the low bandwidth I doubt it will take off.
Customers directly reporting to a bug database, as others have mentioned, can be disasterous. However, Joel's flagship software is bug tracking software, and from what I've heard it's very, very good. His bug tracking uses a combination of silent reports from the software, direct customer input, and support service input. Specifically stating bug tracking must be entered directly by the customer is stupid and inflexible, and does not apply to all situations. The point of the software test is to apply to all situations.
He didn't say ALL bug tracking database entries MUST be created and entered exclusively by the customers. He only said that customers must be able to enter bugs into a database; presumably this means without having to convince a phone operator that their script shouldn't end before they record the bug. Think of it as a separate queue of input to your bug database. A human in your QA area would still have to triage them, and assign them to existing defects to get them into the bug tracking system that all of the developers and QA use. The QA person would still to come up with a way to replicate the bug and document that using your company's template for such things. Or the QA person would contact the original customer to follow up and learn how to replicate the bug.
Do you have a roadmap, and you don't make important changes to the short term priorities?
A) That's not the programmers job nor responsibility
No, but the point is that a roadmap should be someone's responsibility. If there is no roadmap at all, you're dealing with a rinky-dink outfit that has no plans for the future, and may not have the foresight required to survive.
And not changing short-term priorities helps keep the developers away from the day-to-day discussions of new or changed features. This lets them effectively focus on their assigned tasks without interruptions.
As I recall (they're up in the cabin now, and unfortunately I'm not) the old maps we have of Lake of the Woods have a magnetic declination rose tilted slightly from the main true-north-facing rose. In the magnetic rose is a note that says something like "1978 values, changing at 7 minutes east per year."
I remember being fascinated at the fact that the drift was predictable enough to publish. But would I trust that I could still take the map out now, multiply the value by 32 and it'd still be accurate? That's well over 3 degrees of shift, so we could be looking at a significant difference.
All in all, the maps are probably still good enough for a motorboat excursion across the lake, but not in fog.
Aviation maps (sectional charts) expire after just a few months. I expect military maps have a similar lifetime. You wouldn't want to execute an attack only to find someone's unexpectedly dug a new drainage ditch through the middle of their fields.
The new maps would have the current values for magnetic declination.
Was that the made-for-SciFi-channel movie featuring Wil Wheaton as one of the scientists? I tuned in about halfway through and hadn't yet absorbed enough plotyons for it to keep my attention, so I never saw the end.
But in terms of science and plausibility, I found the Mongolian Death Worm movie to be much more realistic.
The problem lies in the mentality 'I'm a java programmer, *therefore* I use an IDE with autocompletion'.
Why? Why is this a problem? I don't understand all this resistance to use tools to help people think, help people speed up, help people be more productive.
I learned to code 38 years ago, and trust me, autocompleting IDEs are useful when compared to typing out every letter! Why should I have to remember every signature of every method, or type it in long-hand every time I need it? Why not hit <tab> and let the machine do the fill-in work? The end result will be no different whether I type it or if the machine types it. It'll just get into the machine faster.
And if I'm able to discard my buggy whip and embrace these new-fangled horseless carriages, even at my advanced age, you should have no excuse for not being able to adopt autocompletion as well.
That, and setting the stage for enough people to bitch and moan about further regulation being needed.
It ends up being a positive feedback loop. Create regulation that causes more problems that in turn requires even more regulation to deal with the problems now being created. That's how government works.
But that's how experimentation and existence works in general. Try something. Receive pain in exchange for failure. Modify behavior to avoid pain.
Government just codifies those behavior modifications.
Well I certainly didn't mod you troll, and whoever did is pretty damn stupid. You're raising legitimate questions.
A guideline would be to interpret the output of FKRI as the grade level for which a given book would be appropriate. A guideline would say "an FKRI of 1-3 is appropriate for beginning readers, and an FKRI of 28 is appropriate for doctoral candidates."
But what I see you arguing is "look at these exceptions to the rule, therefore the model is wrong." You offer the example of sentences that violate the rules of grammar, and use them to say that a model isn't accurate. I'm saying that the model doesn't and can't take into account bad input. It was modeled after good input.
If I were to apply the FKRI to the output of a publishing house, I would get numbers that are pretty close to realistic, and are useful, at least most of the time. If I were to apply the FKRI to the output of a million monkeys at typewriters, I would get random, useless information.
And that might ultimately be what you're trying to say: Google's input is closer to that of a million monkeys at keyboards instead of the edited and published works of professional authors, therefore Google's number is never going to be right.
Slashdot Mirror
I use a different technology to solve this problem on the commute. Noise canceling headphones.
I figure "since I'm the one with the problem with how you are talking, I will make my problem go away with a flick of the switch and some tunes." It reduces all kinds of noise problems, not just cell phones: train horns and bells, loud and boorish conversations, crying children.
If the offender is right next to me and overpowers even the headphones' ability to cancel their idiocy out, I can move. And I don't infringe upon anyone else's rights, since no one has the right to make me listen to what they have to say.
I highly recommend them to public transit commuters everywhere.
It may not be 100% enforceable, but it can be applied in appropriate situations.
Let's say you are involved in an accident, and phone records show you sent a text message 3 seconds prior to the collision, or your phone found on the scene is still sitting in the "SMS Compose Message" screen. It's an extra charge the prosecutor can throw at you, add a few hundred more dollars to your fine, or a few months to your sentence.
If a cop sees you messing on the phone before he pulls you over for erratic driving, same thing. The prosecutor can subpoena the cell records.
And a cop can certainly ask: "were you texting? Can I see your phone?" Answering yes is confessing to the crime, and showing him the phone in the SMS app is handing him the evidence he needs. (In a traffic stop situation most people are unaware of the risk of cooperating.)
As a kid in school being taught how to drive, you can therefore be taught that texting while driving will bring extra pain. Statistically it could save a few lives, and I can see why the legislature would call that a win.
I know what you mean, I've been trapped in too many inescapable situations with somebody who couldn't simply ask people to talk quieter instead resorting to passive-aggressive jackassery like jamming a cell phone signal.
This may come as a surprise to you but many people don't actively try to be assholes, nor are they always aware they're inconveniencing someone else with their actions. If something someone is doing bothers you try politely talking to the person to give them a chance to work with you, improve the world a little instead of deliberately being an asshole just because you feel a stranger slighted you.
Many != all.
http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local-beat/Moviegoer-Tells-Woman-to-Stop-Talking-On-Cell-Phone-Gets-Stabbed-in-the-Neck-87144462.html
Fortunately in this case the victim survived, and the assailant was eventually arrested and convicted of attempted murder. My point is that despite our desires to believe in the goodness of everyone in society, there are people who don't belong in society, and yet they still exist in it. Some helpfully identify themselves as anti-social through publicly identifiable clothing choices. But others may be disguised.
how do you feel about the woman further down trying to connect with her kid, or the doctor trying to manage prescriptions, or the 10 quiet business people just trying to check their email. You fucked up their connections as well.
Not to mention anyone else not on the train but still in range of the signal. Running one of those things on a bus or subway is like setting up a big mobile bubble of "fuck you" for everyone in the city.
No, it's like setting up a tiny mobile bubble of "fuck you" to everyone within about fifteen feet. These don't have the power to extend their range beyond the devices that are locally audible to the user, and certainly not beyond the metal walls of a bus or train. I don't own one, but I did read the poster's link and discovered that while they have a published range of 3-15 meters, their effective operational range is only about 3-5 meters, and is further attenuated by shields such as leather jackets.
Also, jamming is indistinguishable to the cell system as any other ordinary, expected RF interference. Even after a carrier is lost, the connection is maintained for up to 30 seconds or so. A train passing by would not remain within effective range long enough to drop more than a word of a conversation. It would not cause a disconnection.
As gratifying as it might be to dickishly and anonymously kill their signal, the grown up thing to do would be to simply ask the person to pipe down. If the GP is so socially backwards that he can't even manage that, I humbly suggest that he does not belong on public transportation.
Interestingly enough, the official government approach to the problem is to lie to the public!
Being trapped for 35 minutes on a commuter train or bus is annoying, but survivable, and you can always hop off at an early stop if the situation is unbearable.
But being trapped on an airplane for five hours while you cross flyover-land and having to listen to "DO YOU KNOW WHO YOU'RE TALKING TO?!? I'M JOHN FUCKING SMITH OF FUCKING JOHN SMITH INCORPORATED!!" * would be enough to seriously risk causing passenger rage incidents. So instead of actually telling anyone to their face that they're too irresponsible to use a cell phone in public, they officially lie to us all and say "cell phones can interfere with navigational systems." They do offer us airphones, but at $7 per minute so as to limit demand. They know John Fucking Smith is too cheap to argue for very long at those rates.
* An actual overheard yelled-over-the-phone quote, with the name changed because I don't remember the guilty fucker's real name.
Why? It's not like you can't get around these things. You want to print up banknotes? Use GIMP instead of Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. As far as I know, GIMP doesn't even have a plug-in to detect the EURion constellation.
What these things do is hopefully stop the casual bad guys. The guy who thinks "I'll just copy my buddy's $20 so I can eat lunch today", or "I'll tip the cute waitress with phony $20 bills, maybe she'll come on to me." If the copier or the software pops up a screen and says "don't do that, it's illegal", why is it disgusting that a crime was averted?
I'd much rather have the software stop someone *before* they pass a phony bill, instead of after. A copy machine spitting out an unpassable smeary-looking $20 means nobody will commit a crime with it. Catching someone AFTER having printed and passed the bills means that the dumbass who thought he pulled a fast one on the waitress gets himself a 5 year sentence for counterfeiting, and I get to spend $50,000 a year keeping his dumb ass in jail.
TFA is all about traitorware. Stopping the bills from being copied isn't the issue. It's the printers with the yellow serial number dots that are the problem. They let you print the phony money, subversive tracts, or leaked cables, but provide a traceable means to identify who did the printing. That's what's disgusting.
Obviously it was a security breach, which is why they called the SANS institute to help figure it out.
Hell with business strategy, here is a great end-user strategy for cutting spam!
If anybody spams you on your social sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever), just send a letter to Google and say "this guy is violating your patents, if you want to keep your patent, you better cease-and-desist them."
Then hold them to it. If you notify Google of people violating their patent, and they do nothing and you record the fact, then their patent can be thrown out in court.
I remember taking a vendor training class about 12 years ago. The topic was arcane, and it was very technical, and a lot of the people who were there obviously had signed up for it because it was Southern California in the winter, not because they were interested.
Early on in day 2, I noticed that a few people were playing solitaire instead of listening to the lecture. The instructors were great, but their topic was really, really dry. By the end of day 5, I think half the class had "checked out" or "gone on vacation".
Would bannination of the computers have helped those people? I doubt they were going to get it regardless of what they were doing. Did they drag a few people down who might otherwise have paid attention? Can't say.
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
Edsger W.Dijkstra, 1975
Like you, I first learned BASIC at a tender age; actually a decade before you did. Back then, it was all self-teaching, of course. That's the ease of BASIC, and was also the start of the problem. We had no schoolteachers who knew programming, so they let us work alone on terminals in the back of the math or science rooms. We taught ourselves programming in sequential steps, because that's what we saw, and it's what the language gave us to work with. We never learned to think about or recognize "discrete units of work," unless it was something so big and often repeated that it would save line numbers if it was turned into a GOSUB call. Every variable is a global. No code is named, except by line numbers. The closest thing to a reference was an array index. We didn't have code reviews to learn from each other. And nobody graded our code; if there was any academic look it was only to "ooh and aah" at the results our teachers could never hope to duplicate.
And external learning opportunities were awful. The programs printed in Creative Computing were horrible examples. Even programs that could have been OK to learn from were then scrunched down to save on line numbers and column inches or to fit inside a 16K machine; any elegance they may have had was lost to compression.
Sure, you can accomplish a lot of stuff in BASIC, but everyone reaches a wall where the programs were no longer maintainable. We didn't even recognize why; just that there were many line numbers to juggle, and variables named A, A1, B$, and C7 to keep track of, and never enough extra space between line numbers where we needed them most -- which caused odd little subroutines to sprout from the most awkward of places.
BASIC can be done well with effort and training, but it can be done poorly much easier. When people learn on their own, they don't get feedback or corrections for their bad habits. And BASIC lets you get a lot further on your own than the syntactically thick languages of the C family, or the new concepts required to learn about object oriented programming. You spend more time ingraining bad habits before someone comes along and says "here's a better way to do it."
And then you hit the hard part! You then need to fight the internal pride that says "screw you, I already know how to program well enough, look what I can do in BASIC!" and actually accept learning the better way. Far too many people are so arrogant that they never get over this hurdle, and those are likely the students Dijkstra was condemning with his words "practically impossible".
Part of the problem was the era in which Dijkstra wrote his sentiments. Not enough people outside of academia (especially in industry) were writing quality code; even inside academia there was still a lot of research to be done, concepts waiting to be discovered, and curricula to be written to explain them to students. Another part of the problem was the BASIC language of the time did not encourage or even support concepts we now hold to be common best design principles: modularity, high cohesion, low coupling, etc.
Dijkstra was a visionary who not only understood these concepts back then but framed a lot of what was to come that would improve programming. He recognized this badness the same way we do now, only 35 years earlier. He saw first hand the damage that was caused by self-taught programmers, and saw BASIC as the crutch that enabled them to get too far down that path.
And did you read the points leading his list of uncomfortable truths? Let me repeat the key one here:
The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities.
I think you proved my point eloquently.
10 print "hello"
20 goto 10
This is why we can't have nice things.
The problem (MY problem) is that I value a good story above the other elements. (The same can probably be said for anyone who enjoys Dr. Who.)
I found Transformers utterly tedious the first time I endured it. It followed the current "kids movie" trend which is to emulate video game play with cut scene explanations. Introduce heroic kid figure leading his normal life, chase him with five minutes of special effects confusion, dump a convoluted 7 minute expository lump of plot on the audience, break into a 23 minute series of special effects worthy of a video game, repeat twice then roll credits.
That's not a story, it's a formula. Replace heroic kid with Shia LeBoeuf and you've got Transformers or Eagle Eye. Replace heroic kid with Hayden Christiansen and you've got Jumper. I've seen them all already, and they're all the same movie.
It needs a real story to hold my attention.
Avatar had great CG, and a horrible, flat, and over used story line and plot. Fern Gully was a much better take on that story.
I rewatched FernGully on cable a few months ago. Holy crap, Avatar was a total clone of that film, minus the entertaining Robin Williams bat character.
Greedy human organization cutting down trees in order to exploit and profit from the environment's natural resources? Check.
One specific tree is the home to the indigenous life forms, while another is ancient and whose destruction is at the center of the struggle? Check.
Male protagonist human transmorphed from organization's peon into form acceptable by threatened indigenous natives? Check.
A common-sense survival action by the female lead saves the life of the still-ignorant-of-native-ways male lead? Check.
Humans use technology to assist their side in the wanton destruction of the native habitat? Check.
Female native protagonist teaches male non-native protagonist her native ways and customs? Check.
Interspecies love angle between the male and female lead characters? Check.
Female lead character is the daughter and heir apparent of the society's primary maternal spiritual figure? Check.
Maternal spiritual leader is sacrificed in the struggle and replaced by the female lead character? Check.
Background scenery includes natural rock formations in the shape of magnetic lines of flux? Check.
Protagonist learns to use leaves larger than his body for transport? Check.
Protagonist learns to tame and use native creatures to gain modes of transportation? Check.
Protagonist uses his knowledge of the weak points of the machinery to disable it while it is attempting to destroy the local environment? Check.
Evil force anthropomorphizes technology to wage their attack? Check.
Indigenous natives use mystical forces to assist their side in defeating technology? Check.
Greedy human organization defeated and driven permanently from the native landscape? Check.
Seriously, they were the same movie!
When you say "turn a profit, but ... [aren't] worth watching" how do you quantify that?
As Ebert said, "It may not have legs". By that he means that he doesn't think the story isn't compelling, and it won't be rewatched by the majority of viewers.
I'll probably buy the soundtrack myself, but only because I like Daft Punk. And like graphics, a great soundtrack is not enough to make a good movie, either. A great soundtrack and visuals can't turn a 60 minute "escape from cyberspace" sequence into a great movie.
Because the belief is not a fixed thing, it could easily be changed.
Then you haven't met the same zealots I have. Most fundamentalists I know have been indoctrinated since birth (literally) in their religion and have never had the opportunity to recognize that they have free will in the matter. They've been told repeatedly, and from the very beginning, that it's wrong to even contemplate that choice (Genesis 2:17). They are denied the tools of logic, they are instead taught the concept of faith, and are told "this concept is the most important thing ever, important enough for you to die for." It would be easier for them to grow an additional six inches than it would be for them to give up their beliefs.
Religion isn't a fashion, like some wannabe-gangsta' wearing baggy shorts down to his knees, or getting spiderweb tattoos on his neck. Those people are saying "I want to be identified with cruel people so I will get respect despite my demonstrated mental handicap of being stupid enough to think this is a good idea." Feel free to hate them for what they are saying with their appearance - I don't think it's bigotry at all, as long as you hate all of those idiots equally, without regard to their other birth attributes.
Back to your statement: is it bigotry to dislike someone because they aren't capable of giving up their beliefs? I think it is. I think you have to judge people on an individual basis. Being religious isn't prima facie evidence of stupidity. You can't exactly blame them when they can't reject a lifetime of indoctrination just because you show them a twitch of a voltmeter, a microphotograph of DNA, or a fossilized bone.
It doesn't matter how old you are, or how you felt about the original movie. This one apparently has good graphics with a poor plot. Both reviews quoted in TFA were basically negative on the movie. Ebert thumbed his up to three by liking the visuals, but he said several times in his short piece that the movie is essentially plotless. The following quotes are all from his review:
I'm giving this more attention than the movie does, which is just as well. Isaac Asimov would have attempted some kind of scientific speculation on how this might all be possible, but "Tron" is more action-oriented.
"Tron: Legacy," a sequel made 28 years after the original but with the same actor, is true to the first film: It also can't be understood, but looks great.
It may not have legs, because its appeal is too one-dimensional for an audience much beyond immediate responders. When "2001" was in theaters, there were fans who got stoned and sneaked in during the intermission for the sound-and-light trip. I hesitate to suggest that for "Tron: Legacy," but the plot won't suffer.
None of those are positive statements with respect to the plot.
CG is fine for avoiding expensive trips to filming locations in the remotest corners of the globe, or for rendering places that aren't there. But it's in no way a supplement to a plot. Transformers, 2012, Doom, etc., all proved that flashy visuals can turn a profit, but they can't turn suck into a movie worth watching.
Thanks. My back-of-the-envelope is a lot less optimistic than yours, as I was trotting out worst cases on all counts.
What I really wanted to do was answer the GP as to "why" a company might want to avoid the last-mile expenses of a cubicle farm. I don't think for a moment that it's a good idea, mind you, because I agree that hard-wired installations are always technically superior to wireless in terms of performance.
For grins, follow the LVX link to their "technology introduction" page, where you'll find some great FUD:
On the other hand, it has long been established that light is an extraordinary carrier of digital information. The fastest networks today are equipped with fiber optic cabling and equipment. The next generation of wireless networks will use light as its communication medium because of these superior attributes.
The way they weasel-worded it is as if the technical benefits of fiber optics are magically conferred upon all optical communications media, especially including their scheme.
But my original point was that there is a complex cost equation that goes hand-in-glove with the technical arguments, and that it's not just as simple as "saving you from running cable that last 6 feet". And yes, Fortune 500 companies are stupid enough to put in bad or inferior technical solutions just because they "reduce costs". Trust me on this one. :-)
TFA's point is that if the company is already going to replace fluorescent or incandescent ceiling lamps with LEDs for energy reasons, this company is saying they should consider offsetting the higher cost of the LEDs by adding the extra hardware to outfit them as networking transceivers.
Saving you from running cable that last 6 feet?
It saves the company from running cable that last average of 100 feet or so from the wiring closet to each desk, multiplied by the number of desks on the floor (in this building there are about 100 desks per floor) multiplied by the number of times cube moves take place (you don't want to know how often this is, but triennial is not far from the truth) multiplied by the cost for an electrician to run a single line of cable. I think the average cost to pull a single run ranges from about $200-$400 on up, depending on the city and state, and that's in a newer building designed to have cable runs to desks. If you consider a older building with no pre-existing trenches in the floor, the costs treble.
And LED light fixtures are more efficient than fluorescent tubes. Electricity costs spent on lighting will be cut in half or more. LEDs have a much longer lifetime than fluorescent tubes, and will cut maintenance visits to replace bulbs by a factor of 10.
The numbers multiply out rapidly. Fixed wiring and fluorescent lighting might cost a company several hundred dollars per employee annually to run and maintain. A Fortune 500 company might have 10,000 employees or more, so that could be tens of millions of dollars a year in savings.
Of course, there are the offsetting expenses. This licensed and patented blinkenlight technology isn't free. It needs expensive LED lamps to be installed at each light fixture. It will need ethernet runs to each fixture to carry the data, if the power lines can't do it, or if it doesn't use RF. It'll require special light receiver dongles for each PC and laptop. And this new technology won't be bug free. It will have maintenance costs of its own, not to mention a few rounds of upgrades as people realize they screwed up the security protocols when they first invented it (WEP is neither gone nor forgotten.)
So far, 802.11 is much cheaper as the components are off-the-shelf, but the band is crowded and congestion isn't improving over time. This looks like one way to mitigate it, but until they address the low bandwidth I doubt it will take off.
Customers directly reporting to a bug database, as others have mentioned, can be disasterous. However, Joel's flagship software is bug tracking software, and from what I've heard it's very, very good. His bug tracking uses a combination of silent reports from the software, direct customer input, and support service input. Specifically stating bug tracking must be entered directly by the customer is stupid and inflexible, and does not apply to all situations. The point of the software test is to apply to all situations.
He didn't say ALL bug tracking database entries MUST be created and entered exclusively by the customers. He only said that customers must be able to enter bugs into a database; presumably this means without having to convince a phone operator that their script shouldn't end before they record the bug. Think of it as a separate queue of input to your bug database. A human in your QA area would still have to triage them, and assign them to existing defects to get them into the bug tracking system that all of the developers and QA use. The QA person would still to come up with a way to replicate the bug and document that using your company's template for such things. Or the QA person would contact the original customer to follow up and learn how to replicate the bug.
Do you have a roadmap, and you don't make important changes to the short term priorities?
A) That's not the programmers job nor responsibility
No, but the point is that a roadmap should be someone's responsibility. If there is no roadmap at all, you're dealing with a rinky-dink outfit that has no plans for the future, and may not have the foresight required to survive.
And not changing short-term priorities helps keep the developers away from the day-to-day discussions of new or changed features. This lets them effectively focus on their assigned tasks without interruptions.
As I recall (they're up in the cabin now, and unfortunately I'm not) the old maps we have of Lake of the Woods have a magnetic declination rose tilted slightly from the main true-north-facing rose. In the magnetic rose is a note that says something like "1978 values, changing at 7 minutes east per year."
I remember being fascinated at the fact that the drift was predictable enough to publish. But would I trust that I could still take the map out now, multiply the value by 32 and it'd still be accurate? That's well over 3 degrees of shift, so we could be looking at a significant difference.
All in all, the maps are probably still good enough for a motorboat excursion across the lake, but not in fog.
Aviation maps (sectional charts) expire after just a few months. I expect military maps have a similar lifetime. You wouldn't want to execute an attack only to find someone's unexpectedly dug a new drainage ditch through the middle of their fields.
The new maps would have the current values for magnetic declination.
Was that the made-for-SciFi-channel movie featuring Wil Wheaton as one of the scientists? I tuned in about halfway through and hadn't yet absorbed enough plotyons for it to keep my attention, so I never saw the end.
But in terms of science and plausibility, I found the Mongolian Death Worm movie to be much more realistic.
The problem lies in the mentality 'I'm a java programmer, *therefore* I use an IDE with autocompletion'.
Why? Why is this a problem? I don't understand all this resistance to use tools to help people think, help people speed up, help people be more productive.
I learned to code 38 years ago, and trust me, autocompleting IDEs are useful when compared to typing out every letter! Why should I have to remember every signature of every method, or type it in long-hand every time I need it? Why not hit <tab> and let the machine do the fill-in work? The end result will be no different whether I type it or if the machine types it. It'll just get into the machine faster.
And if I'm able to discard my buggy whip and embrace these new-fangled horseless carriages, even at my advanced age, you should have no excuse for not being able to adopt autocompletion as well.
That, and setting the stage for enough people to bitch and moan about further regulation being needed.
It ends up being a positive feedback loop. Create regulation that causes more problems that in turn requires even more regulation to deal with the problems now being created. That's how government works.
But that's how experimentation and existence works in general. Try something. Receive pain in exchange for failure. Modify behavior to avoid pain.
Government just codifies those behavior modifications.
Well I certainly didn't mod you troll, and whoever did is pretty damn stupid. You're raising legitimate questions.
A guideline would be to interpret the output of FKRI as the grade level for which a given book would be appropriate. A guideline would say "an FKRI of 1-3 is appropriate for beginning readers, and an FKRI of 28 is appropriate for doctoral candidates."
But what I see you arguing is "look at these exceptions to the rule, therefore the model is wrong." You offer the example of sentences that violate the rules of grammar, and use them to say that a model isn't accurate. I'm saying that the model doesn't and can't take into account bad input. It was modeled after good input.
If I were to apply the FKRI to the output of a publishing house, I would get numbers that are pretty close to realistic, and are useful, at least most of the time. If I were to apply the FKRI to the output of a million monkeys at typewriters, I would get random, useless information.
And that might ultimately be what you're trying to say: Google's input is closer to that of a million monkeys at keyboards instead of the edited and published works of professional authors, therefore Google's number is never going to be right.