Yes, but the price is almost the only information consumers can base there decision on. That, and the packaging design.
The only way to get more information is to legislate. The food industry would be happy if they could sell processed shit wrapped in a nice box, without bothering with involving fish at all.
Before you argue more about this, write a program that does something really simple, like packing a few arbitrary objects in a box just big enough to fit them, and then come back to this discussion. ( I mean the task must be really simple, because it's something even a small child can do. )
Why would a self driving car ever drive off a cliff? Clearly it would rank available options and pick the lowest cost one.
Yes, in a science fiction fantasy world where True AI is working according to Asimov's laws.
In the actual world, real persons are going to outperform computers in any situation that's "tricky" to analyse, and that will continue to be the case until the cars would be able to pass the Turing test.
The cars can be given better sensors (ir, radar, etc) and faster computers to give the algorithms an advantage, but when it fails, it will fail in a way that a human would think is incomprehensibly stupid.
When the first autonomous car crashes into a kindergarten because it did something stupid, it will be hard to point to the statistics and say that in the big picture, we're saving lives.
There are reasons to why Linux is safer, but they are mostly non-technical.
I think the most important reasons are that the user base is rather small, and the users are more likely to have a clue, making it less interesting as a target for virus makers.
There is absolutely nothing "technical" that prevents a virus or a trojan wiping your files or steal your data. The users are just slightly less prone to execute any file they find on the net, and most virus infected executables are not written for Linux..
And perhaps also that the OS does not ( or did not used to) autostart executables on removable media.
So, you could argue that the tools and servers are a little bit more bulletproof and perhaps thats true, but the sad truth is probably that a linux box would be p0wned in no time at all, if it was used to control a uranium centrifuge...
Database changes are a tricky matter though. Despite testing our upgrades on a copy, we feel its safest to one or two developers on site during software upgrades, in the event that something goes pear shaped.
I also think if developers can be involved in running and monitoring the actual system, you will get better stability, better diagnostics and simpler handling.
(Banking systems, inhouse "enterprisey" applications on unix servers)
Unfortunately, or not, depending on how you see it, that's all it takes to grind code for a living. (Perhaps because it's really hard to measure, and most people hiring can't actually code at all)
It's rather unusual to find someone with great analytical and social skills combined with just the right amount of stubbornness yet responsiveness, curiosity and pragmatism - that makes a really great programmer.
I needed more control over the serial port than the available serial libraries could give, so I rolled my own.
It took me a couple of hours to implement a jna wrapper around linux terminal interface, without any suicidal tendencies, and I ended up with 700 lines of code... It's yours if you wan't it....
Have you ever tried compiling a couple of years old C++ code? Or actually compiled any code at all?
Java's best strength is the platform - the well defined vm-spec and the rock-solid api that is almost totally backwards compatible. The language itself is stringent, which is really nice except in those places that it's causes som verbosity. The jvm:s are quite nice, fast and with good gc.
The biggest problems are the lack of anonymous methods, and it's large userbase that includes a lot of morons, beeing an enterprisy language...
The GUI integration on the client side, sucks though. Even a simple thing as naming runnable jars as jxe is not thought of...
"The total number of non-cash payments in the EU, using all types of instruments [1], increased by 4.4% to 86.4 billion in 2010 compared with the previous year. Card payments accounted for 39% of all transactions, while credit transfers accounted for 28% and direct debits for 25%."
Cheques are not mentioned specifically in the text, but according to the graph on the page, it seems to account to about 5 % of all transactions.
In the table for "Retail transactions" - which includes "bills", it can be found that cheques are mainly used in France. (As well as on Cyprus, and Malta, not exactly large countries.)
The EU is both much more politically complex and is having a much larger population. The banking systems of the individual countries are much older. The 20 oldest banks still in operation is all European. (JP Morgan Chase, or rather the merged Bank of the Manhattan Company founded in 1799, is on place 23). The first central bank (ever) was founded in Sweden in 1668.
So I don't think that Your arguments are valid.
However, the EU bureaucrats and politicians have the benefit of a totally opaque political system which enables them to implement whatever they like, and they usually like to implement grand plans for integration and standardisation.
I'm not in a hurry, if the HFT guy didn't exist, the sell order is probably still around, and I will get my 6 cent... If not, I can wait.
So, The risk without the HFT guy is that my trades will take longer.
On the other hand, HFT -and- fast algo trading increases the risk for a market collapse, if not only for the increased number of trades (too quick for human analysis) and the emergent properties and complexity from the combined actions of the algorithms and people. No bugs are needed.
I think the first faceplant was to totally misjudge Apples ability to turn the iPod into an iPhone. Anyone with a clue could tell that it was going to happen, but that it was packaged so good was probably a surprise for all.
Steve Jobs had a passion for product design, and that passion included the software and UI. Anyone that have uses an old Nokia or any other pre-apple "smart" phone would notice rather soon that there is no passion involved at all. They were (and are) made by people writing "use-cases" and gantt-charts, and the "design" was something that regarded the plastic shell.
There were probably hordes of proud and passionate software developers, but my guess is that there was no creative process, no feedback and no iterations. Just project plans and use case documents.
I have no idea, but I have always figured that how things worked at Apple was that Steve said that he wanted something, a team of developers and ui-designers made version 1, Steve basically said that they could do it better, and eventually at iteration n, Steve was happy.
The funny thing is that you probably don't need Steve; anyone with a mild disposition for design could say "no" a couple of times, and let the developers make awsome stuff, while having fun.
Anyway, having lost their massive market share, Nokia hired the microsoft guy to fix things. And what else can really happen after that?
Unfortunately, Nokias engineers were probably more inclined to focus on Linux and Android phones, if not for nationalistic reasons, but as long as the use-case guys rules, they will not be able to deliver something that does not suck. Letting microsoft piss away millions on gui design for you, may not be a bad choice given their circumstances, but they could equally well have let google piss away the money...
From my perspective in the software industry I think this business as usual at SAP.
When they sell stuff, they put a sticker on with more features than they have, and bump up the price... I figure that when they're buying, they think it's fine to do just the opposite...
I have both a Asus K53 and K73, and I am very satisfied. They sure match the build quality of any of the thinkpad's i've had, and are way much better than the HPs and Fujitsus.
Both K53 and K73sv have a keypad, and the K73sv have a nice brushed aluminum finish and is dead silent most of the time when using a SSD.
(The nvidia card is a hybrid card, but bumblebee works fine)
I think that they were confused about which instruments worked and not. Some of the working air speed indicators (and other speed indicators) weren't visible for the pilot flying, and some were probably not visible at all, but would have been possible to enable. But I think all sensors worked for the final two minutes, so it's hard to explain from a technical perspective...
I think Bonin plainly forgot about that there was no stall protection, and no one else understood what was happening.
But I don't know, imagine staring out in a pitch black window and frequent lightning strikes, heavy turbulence, and the instruments seems to be failing...
I think that the design of some parts of the flight management system is to blame, at least partly; Some minor changes might have changed everything.
When the airplane is in alternate law, a (not too annoying) warning sound could be played when the stick is pulled back fully, in order to remind a possibly confused and panicking pilot that there is no stall protection.
The stall warning ( or angle of attack warning ) should not be disabled due to low airspeed readings, at least not at altitude, to reduce the risk of making the pilots think they are worsening their situation when they are in fact improving it.
Actually, while the the taliban style christians in medieval europe where busy burning scientists and their books for a couple of hundred years, there was a period in the early islamic world that some would describe as a scientific revolution.
Unfortunately, it's hard to tell exactly, since the religious leaders eventually learned from the christians how to control the people, and they started to kill literates and their books there too... Unfortunately, the renaissance, or rather the "age of enlightenment" it gave rise to in France and England, never really spread to the east.
Well, I would like to be able to say that christian fundamentalism is not part of the problem when fighting poverty. Unfortunately, some Christians - the pope for instance- are against birth control, which is an important weapon against poverty and illiteracy, in all sort of ways.
Regardless of that - lets fight the warlords, tribal leaders and theocratic elites that are earning power and money from the fact that the people is illiterate and uneducated, like in Afghanistan or east Africa. If it's possible to suppress the warlords, and if you also can put the kids in school, make sure that the parents know how to farm efficiently and have access to contraceptives - then you can build a strong society - in a generation or two, that will be able to handle climate changes, anthropogenic or not.
A weather event that would be catastrophic in east Africa, would most probably be just an economic problem for insurance companies in most parts of US and Europe. I'm saying most parts, since there are pockets of poverty, where natural catastrophes will hit - and have hit - more severely.
There is of course reasons to worry about our carbon footprint, but it's more of a 100-year problem, and there are plenty of problems in the world, many of them interconnected, to worry about first... This is not to say that we should do nothing, but I fail to see the urgency.
The undeniable fact is that it's wars, dictators, poverty, tribalism, illiteracy and low education that is amplifying the impact of weather extremes.
Somehow, we are trying to fix that with a fight against a carbon dioxide chimera.
It's almost like it's a symbolic sacrifice - a token of our will, but it will not stop people from dying in countries far away. We can't use up our natural reserves in this way, but the acute problem is to stop people from dying today.
The long term solution is to fight for democracy, fight for education, and fight against (christian and islamic) fundamentalism.
This will keep our children from dying.
Then, in 20 years, we can start thinking about solar panels, etc...
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but the price is almost the only information consumers can base there decision on. That, and the packaging design.
The only way to get more information is to legislate. The food industry would be happy if they could sell processed shit wrapped in
a nice box, without bothering with involving fish at all.
It's actually "En stor stark och lite chips tack."
(Linux speaks swedish...)
Are you sure you are not confusing reality with something you saw on tv?
Hi.
Before you argue more about this, write a program that does something really simple, like packing a few arbitrary objects in a box just big enough to fit them, and then come back to this discussion. ( I mean the task must be really simple, because it's something even a small child can do. )
See you in a couple of years :-)
Why would a self driving car ever drive off a cliff?
Clearly it would rank available options and pick the lowest cost one.
Yes, in a science fiction fantasy world where True AI is working according to Asimov's laws.
In the actual world, real persons are going to outperform computers in any situation that's "tricky" to analyse,
and that will continue to be the case until the cars would be able to pass the Turing test.
The cars can be given better sensors (ir, radar, etc) and faster computers to give the algorithms an advantage,
but when it fails, it will fail in a way that a human would think is incomprehensibly stupid.
When the first autonomous car crashes into a kindergarten because it did something stupid, it will be hard to point
to the statistics and say that in the big picture, we're saving lives.
There are reasons to why Linux is safer, but they are mostly non-technical.
I think the most important reasons are that the user base is rather small, and the users are more likely to have a clue,
making it less interesting as a target for virus makers.
There is absolutely nothing "technical" that prevents a virus or a trojan wiping your files or steal your data. The users
are just slightly less prone to execute any file they find on the net, and most virus infected executables are not written for Linux..
And perhaps also that the OS does not ( or did not used to) autostart executables on removable media.
So, you could argue that the tools and servers are a little bit more bulletproof and perhaps thats true, but the sad truth is probably that a linux box would
be p0wned in no time at all, if it was used to control a uranium centrifuge...
You Sir, are absolutely correct.
Database changes are a tricky matter though. Despite testing our upgrades on a copy, we feel its safest to
one or two developers on site during software upgrades, in the event that something goes pear shaped.
I also think if developers can be involved in running and monitoring the actual system, you will get
better stability, better diagnostics and simpler handling.
(Banking systems, inhouse "enterprisey" applications on unix servers)
Indeed, anyone can become a mediocre programmer.
Unfortunately, or not, depending on how you see it, that's all it takes to grind code for a living.
(Perhaps because it's really hard to measure, and most people hiring can't actually code at all)
It's rather unusual to find someone with great analytical and social skills combined with just
the right amount of stubbornness yet responsiveness, curiosity and pragmatism - that makes a really great programmer.
I needed more control over the serial port than the available serial libraries could give, so I rolled my own.
It took me a couple of hours to implement a jna wrapper around linux terminal interface, without any suicidal tendencies, and I
ended up with 700 lines of code... It's yours if you wan't it....
JNA is quite nice, actually.
Wait, what?
Have you ever tried compiling a couple of years old C++ code? Or actually compiled any code at all?
Java's best strength is the platform - the well defined vm-spec and the rock-solid api that is almost totally backwards compatible.
The language itself is stringent, which is really nice except in those places that it's causes som verbosity.
The jvm:s are quite nice, fast and with good gc.
The biggest problems are the lack of anonymous methods, and it's large userbase that includes a lot of morons, beeing an enterprisy language...
The GUI integration on the client side, sucks though. Even a simple thing as naming runnable jars as jxe is not thought of...
I don't know if it's intelligence that's needed to code C++.
The required credentials rather seems to be a great patience.
It's seriously the best thing I ever bought.
A minor issue is that I had to fill the inside of the shell with asphalt sound dampener... :-) But the keys are just excellent.
OK.
Some statistics from the European Union, a union of 27 states with ~500,000,000 people.
Quoting from the European Central Bank's statistics from 2010.
"The total number of non-cash payments in the EU, using all types of instruments [1], increased by 4.4% to 86.4 billion in 2010 compared with the previous year. Card payments accounted for 39% of all transactions, while credit transfers accounted for 28% and direct debits for 25%."
Cheques are not mentioned specifically in the text, but according to the graph on the page, it seems to account to about 5 % of all transactions.
In the table for "Retail transactions" - which includes "bills", it can be found that cheques are mainly used in France. (As well as on Cyprus, and Malta, not exactly large countries.)
The EU is both much more politically complex and is having a much larger population.
The banking systems of the individual countries are much older. The 20 oldest banks still in operation is all European. (JP Morgan Chase, or rather the merged Bank of the Manhattan Company founded in 1799, is on place 23). The first central bank (ever) was founded in Sweden in 1668.
So I don't think that Your arguments are valid.
However, the EU bureaucrats and politicians have the benefit of a totally opaque political system which enables them to implement whatever they like, and they usually like to implement grand plans for integration and standardisation.
I'm not in a hurry, if the HFT guy didn't exist, the sell order is probably still around, and I will get my 6 cent... If not, I can wait.
So, The risk without the HFT guy is that my trades will take longer.
On the other hand, HFT -and- fast algo trading increases the risk for a market collapse, if not only for the increased number of trades (too quick for human analysis) and the emergent properties and complexity from the combined actions of the algorithms and people. No bugs are needed.
I think hidden orders, and matching once every 15 minutes is even better...
(where are my mod points when i need them)
I think the first faceplant was to totally misjudge Apples ability to turn the iPod into an iPhone.
Anyone with a clue could tell that it was going to happen, but that it was packaged so good was probably a surprise for all.
Steve Jobs had a passion for product design, and that passion included the software and UI.
Anyone that have uses an old Nokia or any other pre-apple "smart" phone would notice rather soon
that there is no passion involved at all. They were (and are) made by people writing "use-cases" and
gantt-charts, and the "design" was something that regarded the plastic shell.
There were probably hordes of proud and passionate software developers, but my guess is that there was
no creative process, no feedback and no iterations. Just project plans and use case documents.
I have no idea, but I have always figured that how things worked at Apple was that Steve said that he wanted something,
a team of developers and ui-designers made version 1, Steve basically said that they could do it better, and eventually at iteration n, Steve was happy.
The funny thing is that you probably don't need Steve; anyone with a mild disposition for design could say "no" a couple of times, and
let the developers make awsome stuff, while having fun.
Anyway, having lost their massive market share, Nokia hired the microsoft guy to fix things. And what else can really happen after that?
Unfortunately, Nokias engineers were probably more inclined to focus on Linux and Android phones, if not for nationalistic reasons, but
as long as the use-case guys rules, they will not be able to deliver something that does not suck. Letting microsoft piss away millions on
gui design for you, may not be a bad choice given their circumstances, but they could equally well have let google piss away the money...
From my perspective in the software industry I think this business as usual at SAP.
When they sell stuff, they put a sticker on with more features than they have, and bump up the price...
I figure that when they're buying, they think it's fine to do just the opposite...
I have both a Asus K53 and K73, and I am very satisfied. They sure match the build quality of any of the thinkpad's i've had, and are way much better than the HPs and Fujitsus.
Both K53 and K73sv have a keypad, and the K73sv have a nice brushed aluminum finish and is dead silent most of the time when using a SSD.
(The nvidia card is a hybrid card, but bumblebee works fine)
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Asus-K73SV-TY032V-Notebook.54381.0.html
Probably not, as Bill Gates nicked the syntax from DEC. :-)
I think that they were confused about which instruments worked and not. Some of the working air speed indicators (and other speed indicators) weren't visible for the pilot flying, and some were probably not visible at all, but would have been possible to enable. But I think all sensors worked for the final two minutes, so it's hard to explain from a technical perspective...
I think Bonin plainly forgot about that there was no stall protection, and no one else understood what was happening.
But I don't know, imagine staring out in a pitch black window and frequent lightning strikes, heavy turbulence, and the instruments seems to be failing...
I think that the design of some parts of the flight management system is to blame, at least partly; Some minor changes might have changed everything.
When the airplane is in alternate law, a (not too annoying) warning sound could be played when the stick is pulled back fully, in order to remind a possibly confused and panicking pilot that there is no stall protection.
The stall warning ( or angle of attack warning ) should not be disabled due to low airspeed readings, at least not at altitude, to reduce the risk of making the pilots think they are worsening their situation when they are in fact improving it.
Actually, while the the taliban style christians in medieval europe where busy burning scientists and their books for a couple of hundred years, there was a period in the early islamic world that some would describe as a scientific revolution.
Unfortunately, it's hard to tell exactly, since the religious leaders eventually learned from the christians how to control the people, and they started to kill literates and their books there too... Unfortunately, the renaissance, or rather the "age of enlightenment" it gave rise to in France and England, never really spread to the east.
Well, I would like to be able to say that christian fundamentalism is not part of the problem when fighting poverty.
Unfortunately, some Christians - the pope for instance- are against birth control, which is an important weapon against poverty and illiteracy, in all sort of ways.
Regardless of that - lets fight the warlords, tribal leaders and theocratic elites that are earning power and money from the fact that the people is illiterate and uneducated, like in Afghanistan or east Africa. If it's possible to suppress the warlords, and if you also can put the kids in school, make sure that the parents know how to farm efficiently and have access to contraceptives - then you can build a strong society - in a generation or two, that will be able to handle climate changes, anthropogenic or not.
A weather event that would be catastrophic in east Africa, would most probably be just an economic problem for insurance companies in most parts of US and Europe. I'm saying most parts, since there are pockets of poverty, where natural catastrophes will hit - and have hit - more severely.
There is of course reasons to worry about our carbon footprint, but it's more of a 100-year problem, and there are plenty of problems in the world, many of them interconnected, to worry about first... This is not to say that we should do nothing, but I fail to see the urgency.
Perhaps.
The undeniable fact is that it's wars, dictators, poverty, tribalism, illiteracy and low education that is amplifying the impact of weather extremes.
Somehow, we are trying to fix that with a fight against a carbon dioxide chimera.
It's almost like it's a symbolic sacrifice - a token of our will, but it will not stop people from dying in countries far away.
We can't use up our natural reserves in this way, but the acute problem is to stop people from dying today.
The long term solution is to fight for democracy, fight for education, and fight against (christian and islamic) fundamentalism.
This will keep our children from dying.
Then, in 20 years, we can start thinking about solar panels, etc...