You would think the entity in charge of keeping things running would want them done quickly and accurate.
Large organizations don't have collective will. They consist of huge numbers of people, each with their own agenda. And it doesn't help when the organization reports to elected officials who need to bring home the pork in order to stay in office.
Bad as the current federal bureaucracy is, it actually used to be much worse. Before civil service rules (the same ones that make it so hard to fire people), government jobs were filled by "patronage" meaning that the politicos used them to reward their supporters. Up until the 60s, the chairman of the party that held the White House was always the Postmaster General, the Post Office being the single biggest source of patronage in the U.S. government. The PO was finally so badly run that they reconstituted it as the semi-autonomous Postal Service.
Linux lacks a central vision? How about "clone Unix"? I can't think of a single successful Open Source project that hasn't had a strong central team, willing to tell its contributors, "No, you can't kludge in that feature, it just doesn't fit in with the rest of the project."
As for your biological and economic examples: I never said that emergent behavior didn't happen. Obviously it does. But systems that take thousands or millions of years to evolve, accruing millions of failed experiments on the way, are not comparable to systems that go from conception to implementation in months and that have to promise a decent chance of success to even get off the ground.
Nokia is the best & strongest mobile phone maker in the world.
That would be great if they put some real effort into marketing Maemo phones. But they're not. They only have one phone running this OS, as opposed to dozens of Symbian phones.
I see a familiar pattern. I saw it happen with x64 computers at Sun. The company decides to move into new technology, lots of resources go into developing it, but the old tech has too many diehards in the corporate structure, and they undercut the new tech at every level.
If you don't quit first, then you have to stick with your current job until you find another one. Which in this economy is quite possibly never. So "time to move on" isn't a solution, it's a description of how fucked you are.
Apple's corporate nannyism is indeed a pain, and it's what keeps me away from iPhone. But I can't say I like Android any better. It's the usual disorganized Google product, where every product is viewed as emergent from a lot of independent programmers each doing their own thing. So there's no central vision to the product. You have a total mess of a platform that isn't even a single platform, since every Android hardware implementation is different from every other.
Really, our choices suck. Maemo (or whatever it's called now) will never achieve critical mass. Windows Moblle is, well, Windows. Symbian is showing its age. Blackberry is designed for somebody who texts a lot more than I do.
I'm sort of flirting with getting a WebOS phone, except I don't trust Palm not to screw this product up, the way they've screwed up every other product. Also, a phone plan that supports it properly costs $60/month (3G data rates in the U.S. are totally out of hand), and while I like having the Internet in my pocket, I'm not sure I like it that much.
What I should really do is go back to having a separate phone and PDA, and put up with the hassle of sharing data between them manually. (With a PAYG plan, I'd probably save $50/month.) Except nobody makes a decent PDA any more...
Best answer for two reasons. One, obviously, is that it's the best technical solution. The other is the sheer dumbness of throttling network traffic. What do you suppose will happen when the prodigal bozo's network file access slows to a crawl? He come running to you to "fix" it. And if he finds out that you did it deliberately...
I never would have guessed that English wasn't your first language if you hadn't told me. That's why I made fun of you, I thought you were a native speaker being sloppy. (Very common around here.) The post you were imitating got the expression backwards. This usage of "should" is pretty old, and confusing to the native speaker, never mind someone like you. "I should be so lucky" == "If only I were that lucky."
My personal domain is picknit.com. (I'm a tech writer. What do tech writers do?) All I needed was for somebody to enter "picknit" instead of "picnik" and I'd be in acquisition nirvana.
OK, now you're changing the argument. Certainly if it's that low, our previous discussion is moot.
But is it that low? The story doesn't "show" anything. It's sloppy reporting that quotes a study by something called Global Solar Center. Which turns out to be a business that sells home solar installations. Not exactly an objective source.
I've done a little googling and I've found a lot of self-serving "studies" by entities like GSC, whom I would be very reluctant to trust with my money, and not just because of their bogus figures.
I also found some serious work by people without something to sell: solar power users, electrical engineers, etc. Their estimates of payback range from 10 years to never.
One other thing: putting solar panels on your roof typically costs something like $50K. (After the cost is offset with tax credits and incentives.) Now if I had that much money and I wanted to bet it on the belief that solar power would eventually be cheaper than the alternatives, I'd invest it in an company that's working on industrial scale solar power. (Several installations are supposed to go online in the next few years.) Less financial risk, more kilowatts per buck, and there's the little detail that manufacturing all those photovoltaic cells has a pretty nasty carbon footprint all its own.
This new technology might change that. But for now, home solar power does not make financial or ecological sense.
In other words, you don't understand why people don't want to invest large amounts of money on an uncertain payback that's at least two decades away? Gee, me neither.
I should know better to use an analogy on Slashdot. People put all their energies into nitpicking the analogy instead of using the analogy to understand my argument.
Forget about cars. My argument is this: a good random number library has a simple API call that generates a random number between 1 and n, where n is a parameter. Programmers typically ignore this call and use some arithmetic gimmick to convert the basic random 0.0...1.0 real number to an integer. That can easily go wrong, as you'd discover if you'd read my damn link already and stop talking about shop manuals.
It's pretty clear that's what happened in this case. Reading Knuth is not going to help you avoid this kind of mistake. And indeed, the kind of programmer who designs simple web applications like this one is not going to get a lot of benefit from from studying algorithms and data structures.
I didn't mean to suggest that there was a library call that did exactly what he needed. My point was that he did some numerical work he should have left to the API. He probably took a real-value random number generator and rounded the result to an integer. The Josh Bloch page I linked demonstrates how this can go wrong and why you should go slightly higher up the stack.
Same reason you don't know how much to tighten your fanbelt if you don't read the shop manual.Same reason you don't know how much to tighten your fanbelt if you don't read the shop manual.
OK, I've never worked on cars, so correct me if I'm wrong, but the shop manual is the documentation the manufacturer provides for people working on its cars, right? If so, Knuth is definitely not a shop manual, because he makes a point of not talking about specific implementations. If you want to push this analogy a little further (though it won't go much further before it breaks) Knuth is the textbook the guys who designed the engine read. The shop manual is the API programmer's guide.
Has anybody bothered to read the Josh Bloch page I linked? Because he covers this issue much better than I could.
Why would you not know what the library call does? Presumably it's documented. Knuth might help you how the library call works, but more likely you'd refer to Knuth to write your own version of the code. And, as Josh Bloch argues, rewriting tried and tested code is a mistake.
And one of the things one learns early on is to reach for Knuth
Knuth is for computer scientists. Not everybody who writes code meets that definition. A lot of us (and I include myself) don't even qualify as "engineers".
For most programmers, the best way to write good "select random x from 1..n is not to brush up on our algorithmics. That's like fabricating a car part instead of going to the auto supply. (Hey, there's a good reason the car analogy keeps popping up!) You need to rely on standard, well-tested libraries. Josh Bloch even refers to this use case as an example of why you should rely on library code.
My post was a plea for ending the attacks and going back to arguments. You responded with an attack. Whatever your motives, you're still contributing to the TTT psychology.
The domain you just provided belongs to a squatter. Nice that you live near a place with such bargains, but please note that $15 is a pretty standard price for a x5 switch. Switches have gotten so cheap, it's a wonder anybody bothers to manufacture hubs.
Are we talking about the same left? Because a certain U.S President is widely considered pretty leftie, and whatever his faults, I don't seem him resorting to ridicule.
I gather from your post you consider yourself apart from both the right and the left. But you clearly share their preference for being in attack mode. The fact that you attack them for being in attack mode doesn't make it any better.
Slashdot Mirror
You would think the entity in charge of keeping things running would want them done quickly and accurate.
Large organizations don't have collective will. They consist of huge numbers of people, each with their own agenda. And it doesn't help when the organization reports to elected officials who need to bring home the pork in order to stay in office.
Bad as the current federal bureaucracy is, it actually used to be much worse. Before civil service rules (the same ones that make it so hard to fire people), government jobs were filled by "patronage" meaning that the politicos used them to reward their supporters. Up until the 60s, the chairman of the party that held the White House was always the Postmaster General, the Post Office being the single biggest source of patronage in the U.S. government. The PO was finally so badly run that they reconstituted it as the semi-autonomous Postal Service.
Linux lacks a central vision? How about "clone Unix"? I can't think of a single successful Open Source project that hasn't had a strong central team, willing to tell its contributors, "No, you can't kludge in that feature, it just doesn't fit in with the rest of the project."
As for your biological and economic examples: I never said that emergent behavior didn't happen. Obviously it does. But systems that take thousands or millions of years to evolve, accruing millions of failed experiments on the way, are not comparable to systems that go from conception to implementation in months and that have to promise a decent chance of success to even get off the ground.
Uh, did you notice what I said about not wanting an iPhone? An iPod touch is just an iPhone without the cell radio.
Nokia is the best & strongest mobile phone maker in the world.
That would be great if they put some real effort into marketing Maemo phones. But they're not. They only have one phone running this OS, as opposed to dozens of Symbian phones.
I see a familiar pattern. I saw it happen with x64 computers at Sun. The company decides to move into new technology, lots of resources go into developing it, but the old tech has too many diehards in the corporate structure, and they undercut the new tech at every level.
If you don't quit first, then you have to stick with your current job until you find another one. Which in this economy is quite possibly never. So "time to move on" isn't a solution, it's a description of how fucked you are.
Very mature.
Apple's corporate nannyism is indeed a pain, and it's what keeps me away from iPhone. But I can't say I like Android any better. It's the usual disorganized Google product, where every product is viewed as emergent from a lot of independent programmers each doing their own thing. So there's no central vision to the product. You have a total mess of a platform that isn't even a single platform, since every Android hardware implementation is different from every other.
Really, our choices suck. Maemo (or whatever it's called now) will never achieve critical mass. Windows Moblle is, well, Windows. Symbian is showing its age. Blackberry is designed for somebody who texts a lot more than I do.
I'm sort of flirting with getting a WebOS phone, except I don't trust Palm not to screw this product up, the way they've screwed up every other product. Also, a phone plan that supports it properly costs $60/month (3G data rates in the U.S. are totally out of hand), and while I like having the Internet in my pocket, I'm not sure I like it that much.
What I should really do is go back to having a separate phone and PDA, and put up with the hassle of sharing data between them manually. (With a PAYG plan, I'd probably save $50/month.) Except nobody makes a decent PDA any more...
Best answer for two reasons. One, obviously, is that it's the best technical solution. The other is the sheer dumbness of throttling network traffic. What do you suppose will happen when the prodigal bozo's network file access slows to a crawl? He come running to you to "fix" it. And if he finds out that you did it deliberately...
Right, because it's so easy to find a new job lately.
I never would have guessed that English wasn't your first language if you hadn't told me. That's why I made fun of you, I thought you were a native speaker being sloppy. (Very common around here.) The post you were imitating got the expression backwards. This usage of "should" is pretty old, and confusing to the native speaker, never mind someone like you. "I should be so lucky" == "If only I were that lucky."
F1!
I need somebody!
F1!
Not just anybody!
F1!
You know I need someone!
F1!
My personal domain is picknit.com. (I'm a tech writer. What do tech writers do?) All I needed was for somebody to enter "picknit" instead of "picnik" and I'd be in acquisition nirvana.
I just can't catch a break.
There, you proved that I didn't read the article carefully. I screwed up, I admit it.
Now, isn't making me say that a lot more satisfying than just yelling "Oh, go read Knuth"?
OK, now you're changing the argument. Certainly if it's that low, our previous discussion is moot.
But is it that low? The story doesn't "show" anything. It's sloppy reporting that quotes a study by something called Global Solar Center. Which turns out to be a business that sells home solar installations. Not exactly an objective source.
I've done a little googling and I've found a lot of self-serving "studies" by entities like GSC, whom I would be very reluctant to trust with my money, and not just because of their bogus figures.
I also found some serious work by people without something to sell: solar power users, electrical engineers, etc. Their estimates of payback range from 10 years to never.
One other thing: putting solar panels on your roof typically costs something like $50K. (After the cost is offset with tax credits and incentives.) Now if I had that much money and I wanted to bet it on the belief that solar power would eventually be cheaper than the alternatives, I'd invest it in an company that's working on industrial scale solar power. (Several installations are supposed to go online in the next few years.) Less financial risk, more kilowatts per buck, and there's the little detail that manufacturing all those photovoltaic cells has a pretty nasty carbon footprint all its own.
This new technology might change that. But for now, home solar power does not make financial or ecological sense.
In other words, you don't understand why people don't want to invest large amounts of money on an uncertain payback that's at least two decades away? Gee, me neither.
In other words, if I was as smart as you, I'd understand why I'm wrong, even though you're not smart enough to explain why I'm wrong.
The lowering of cost would actually be the most important impact. Current solar panels would cost too much no matter how efficient they were.
I should know better to use an analogy on Slashdot. People put all their energies into nitpicking the analogy instead of using the analogy to understand my argument.
Forget about cars. My argument is this: a good random number library has a simple API call that generates a random number between 1 and n, where n is a parameter. Programmers typically ignore this call and use some arithmetic gimmick to convert the basic random 0.0...1.0 real number to an integer. That can easily go wrong, as you'd discover if you'd read my damn link already and stop talking about shop manuals.
It's pretty clear that's what happened in this case. Reading Knuth is not going to help you avoid this kind of mistake. And indeed, the kind of programmer who designs simple web applications like this one is not going to get a lot of benefit from from studying algorithms and data structures.
I didn't mean to suggest that there was a library call that did exactly what he needed. My point was that he did some numerical work he should have left to the API. He probably took a real-value random number generator and rounded the result to an integer. The Josh Bloch page I linked demonstrates how this can go wrong and why you should go slightly higher up the stack.
Same reason you don't know how much to tighten your fanbelt if you don't read the shop manual.Same reason you don't know how much to tighten your fanbelt if you don't read the shop manual.
OK, I've never worked on cars, so correct me if I'm wrong, but the shop manual is the documentation the manufacturer provides for people working on its cars, right? If so, Knuth is definitely not a shop manual, because he makes a point of not talking about specific implementations. If you want to push this analogy a little further (though it won't go much further before it breaks) Knuth is the textbook the guys who designed the engine read. The shop manual is the API programmer's guide.
Has anybody bothered to read the Josh Bloch page I linked? Because he covers this issue much better than I could.
Why would you not know what the library call does? Presumably it's documented. Knuth might help you how the library call works, but more likely you'd refer to Knuth to write your own version of the code. And, as Josh Bloch argues, rewriting tried and tested code is a mistake.
And one of the things one learns early on is to reach for Knuth
Knuth is for computer scientists. Not everybody who writes code meets that definition. A lot of us (and I include myself) don't even qualify as "engineers".
For most programmers, the best way to write good "select random x from 1..n is not to brush up on our algorithmics. That's like fabricating a car part instead of going to the auto supply. (Hey, there's a good reason the car analogy keeps popping up!) You need to rely on standard, well-tested libraries. Josh Bloch even refers to this use case as an example of why you should rely on library code.
My post was a plea for ending the attacks and going back to arguments. You responded with an attack. Whatever your motives, you're still contributing to the TTT psychology.
The domain you just provided belongs to a squatter. Nice that you live near a place with such bargains, but please note that $15 is a pretty standard price for a x5 switch. Switches have gotten so cheap, it's a wonder anybody bothers to manufacture hubs.
You want one problem to go away until we've dealt with the other? Sorry, these things don't wait their turns.
Are we talking about the same left? Because a certain U.S President is widely considered pretty leftie, and whatever his faults, I don't seem him resorting to ridicule.
I gather from your post you consider yourself apart from both the right and the left. But you clearly share their preference for being in attack mode. The fact that you attack them for being in attack mode doesn't make it any better.