Re:US foreign policy, not global trade, the issue
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 2
And this is a service to you, how?
Uh, cheap gas?
The reat of your post is gibberish.
Forget it, US has never held moral high ground
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 2
How absurd to hear this continued moral gesturing. The US has never held the moral high ground in the Middle East. American foreign policy has shaped the region for decades, from American support for the Shah, to the Gulf War, to support for Iraq/Iran when it is convenient, to using the Afghans to fight the Soviets, to protecting the corrupt regimes of the sheiks.
Forget about keeping the moral high ground in the Middle East because you never had it. Instead, protect your interests. Make sure you win, not them. Forget about the "good guy" winning because if you lift up the veil you may find the "good guy" is not you, or anyone else.
The only effective weapon against terrorism is to do absolutely nothing.
How absurd. Are you suggesting taking the extra police off of the streets and not introducing any more effective security mesaures at airports? Precautions can protect you. You learn what precautions are useful from experience. You are suggesting that we not learn anything from this experience at all.
US foreign policy, not global trade, the issue
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Global commerce has little to do with this issue. More relevant is US support for Israel and the oil sheiks. The Islamic fundamentalists want the oil sheiks out of the Middle East so they can turn the monarchies (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait), into theocracies (Afghanistan).
I am not condemming US policy - the US was right to support the Israelis, and the oil sheiks have been filling our cars with cheap gas for decades.
Change the rules, be realistic about conflict
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Bush was correct to make the hosts of terrorists as guilty as the terrorists themselves. Just as in criminal law it is illegal to aid a criminal, so it must be with regards to states and terrorists. Hopefully in the future, nations will look at the treatment "host" nations get and give them pause. They may also step up efforts to suppress terrorists internally before they act.
Secondly, we have to be realistic about striking back at terrorists and the nations who host them. This has little to do with right and wrong - the US has meddled in the Middle East for decades, and Islamic regimes are well known for their support of terror policies. There are no innocent parties, so forget about who has morality on their side. Start worrying about protecting your famillies, interests, values, and property. You were never in the "right" so forget about sheltering your petty morality. This is a war. You will have to kill innocent civillians. If you do not, you may die. Those who support Islamic fundamentalist regimes are your enemy, regardless of their direct involvement with terrorist acts.
Americans killed plenty of innocent Germans and Italians and Japanese in WW2 to protect its interests. It was acceptable then, it is acceptable now.
This has nothing to do with right or wrong. This has everything to do with which side you are on. Both sides have justifiable gripes - the US has made its own bed by meddling in the Middle East for decades, but the Islamic nations have gone over the edge and its likely in twenty years we will see an Islamic genocide on a mass scale.
If you advocate or permit attacks against non-military targets, then there is very little difference between you and the terrorists.
Please. Civillians have been targets in every significant conflict in history. This, like most other pitched conflicts, has very little to do with right or wrong but more to do with what side you are on.
If you are a supporter of Islamic fundamentalist regimes and militias, I don't care if you spend your days feeding the poor and teaching children to read - you have thrown your lot in with those who are opposed to my values and the safety of my family and you are a suitable target for whatever insideous weapon we should chose to toss at you.
Is "disturb" a euphimism for "kill?" I would hope not.
Please don't be naive about the role of innocents in conflict. During the revolutionary war, civil war, and all wars since then, innocent civillians have been targetted, exploited, and murdered for military gains. There has never been a conflict where the contrary holds. Grow up and get used to life in a dirty, bloody world.
No one is claiming we should pave the world in response to this attack, but it is cowardice to claim that we should not protect ourselves since there is an outside chance we might somehow disturb someone who isn't directly guilty.
This country is going to have to return to the harsh lessons of previous wars: if you want to make an omellete, you have to break some eggs.
Note that/. is filled with idiotic devil's advocates who feel there is some sort of intellectual accomplishment in sitting on the other side of the fence, regardless of how inane their position is.
Remember that/. is more or less a place to pick arguments, and that is what I saw yesterday on this site. Please tell me how you can watch people jump out of the world trade center in saddened panic and then respond with the devil's advocate position.
Parrot is part of perl6
on
Parrot: For Real
·
· Score: 2, Redundant
I believe this is the low-level "assembly language" of the proposed new perl VM.
Exercise: what would have happened if the Allies dispensed with the Nuremburg trials and just killed the "odious individuals"?
Warning: you are way out of your league. I have studied the transcripts from Nurmeburg and the trial details at great length. Nuremburg was not a criminal trial - it was a series of contrived declarations that were designed to lend legitimacy to what were essentially preordained executions. There was never any intention of granting the presumption of innocence to the Nuremburg defedents, and the case was not tried within a framework where this dispensation was granting as a precursor.
But thanks for tossing around more of the pseudo-intellectual bullshit that amounts to a piss-poor devil's advocate argument.
A trial and conviction would be a much more satisfying and peaceful solution.
At what point does a nation become so weak, so dissipated, that it seeks to answer a declaration of war with a criminal trial?
I can assure you that there are thousands of famillies who would be revolted at the concept of granting such odious individuals the presumption of innocence.
Don't know who posted this a while back, or on what topic: but it makes sense when these args come up:
--------------------
You Work in a Fashion Industry
I've spent the last several years trying to explain to colleagues why
they should start using another obscure-but-good language, Eiffel, to no avail.
Here is what I have learned. Note that this is not about the pros and cons of
particular languages or paradigms, its about the way the programming language
industry actually works.
The language industry is dominated by network effects. There are major
costs with using a minority language, and for an individual project these
completely outweigh the benefits, even when the benefits are very large. Hence
it is generally far better to stay with a majority language. The costs of a
minority language include:
Support. Sure, you can get a GPL compiler for most languages, but on a project
you don't want to have your coders digging into the code trying to
fix a bug, you want them writing code. Support is something you outsource.
Performance. Every minority language claims to be faster than C, but often
isn't in practice. Whatever the truth, C and C++ are at least known
quantities. Maybe the minority language will be faster, maybe slower. If its
faster, well gee so what. If its slower then you have a major problem.
Tool support. These days even small projects start by drawing UML diagrams and
then converting these automatically into class templates. CASE
tool vendors don't support minority languages. Ditto for testing and
documentation tools. Little things like tying your compiler to your
configuration control manager might potentially be major headaches. Again, its
more risk that the PM can do without.
Nobody ever got fired for buying C/C++/Java. If you are a PM this is a major
issue. Every language is going to bring some headaches, but if you have chosen
a minority language then these headaches can be turned into an excuse for
project failure, and hence for hanging you out to dry.
Trained staff in a minority language are going to be rare. This does not
necessarily make them more expensive (nobody else wants them), but it
does make recruitment much harder and more uncertain. Alternatively you have to
train all your existing people in the new language. And for Functional
Languages its not just another syntax, its a whole new way of thinking. The
industry went through this with OO languages, and many PMs have vivid memories
of reams of non-OO obfuscated C++ written by a bunch of C hackers who had been
sent on a one week C++ course. Getting your head around a new paradigm can take
months, and this is time that the project just does not have.
So, overall the PMs want to go with popular languages, not for PHM
reasons, but for entirely rational local reasons. But rational local decisions
turn into globally arbitrary decisions, as the entire herd gallops off in a
random direction chosen only because most of the herd thought that most of the
herd were headed that way.
The lesson of this is that if you want to introduce a language, you don't
concentrate on making it a good language, you try to persuade the herd of
programmers, PMs and tool vendors that your language is the Next Big Thing. The
important point here is not how much the language will do for productivity,
quality and cost, it is to create the perception that everyone else thinks that
this language will be the next big thing.
There are two ways to do this. One way is to tackle the whole industry at once.
For an object lesson in how to do this, see Java. For an object lesson
in how not to do it, see Eiffel. Believe me, I know all about this. I have
spent a long time giving presentations extolling the technical virtues of
Eiffel, only to have my audience say "Yes, but in the Real World....". In the
Real World what counts is the network effects. And you know what? My audiences
were right. It has taken me a long time to realise this.
The other more interesting and more promising way to introduce a new
language is to identify a niche market and attack that. Once you have taken
over your niche you can expand to nearby niches and start to build momentum.
Python is doing exactly this in web serving, for example. Web serving is a good
niche because lots of people do it, and productivity and quality generally
count for more than raw performance. Projects also tend to be small, so
experiments are not the Career Limiting Moves they are for large projects.
Education can also be a useful niche if you can afford to take the long view,
which is how Pascal, Basic and Unix got started.
You will get the extensability of introducing your own namespaces, but you can use straight HTML where it is applicable, which will allow you to use pre-built browsing and editing tools.
You really don't want to get involved in building browsing and editing tools for an arbitrary schema, its not worth the time.
The truth of the matter is that intelligence is driven by motivation. A super intelligent system that is conditioned from the start to derive pleasure from obeying humans
Why would this conditioning neccesarily be in place? Its fairly obvious that the first computer to attain self-awareness would be predisposed to search for it.
Basically you are disqualifying the discovery of self-awareness as one of the axioms of your argument.
People who buy web appliances are people who don't like complicated computers,
I don't see how you can quantify anything about people who buy web appliances - Audrey and eVilla hardly sold at all.
More likely they were just gadget freaks who wanted to play with a new toy. I highly doubt these products ever penetrated to the level of mainstream consumers.
What is the problem? Mozilla is essentially stable and featureful from my perspective as an everyday user. Given that the product is useable today, isn't 1.0 more or less an arbitrary release point? Its not like 1.0 will close off all existing bugs and not open any new ones - every release is an incremental march towards stability with new features adding their own instabilities.
Lets be frank - its not like rushing to a 1.0 release now is going to reclaim substantial market share from IE - the browser wars, at least on Windows, is basically over. We've waited years for Mozilla to get done - they ar emaking great progress in 2001, so lets just call 1.0 when the time is right.
Seriously, what a silly attitude. "well, they're not likely to survive, so they may as well give up" What if everyone subscribed to this theory?
Well, for starter maybe investors would have a little more faith in publically traded companies. I think you misunderstand VA's plight - mathematically it is practically impossible for them to stay in business. Earnings are diving too quickly, and predicted to fall even faster (read VA's own SEC disclosures).
Given the inescapable conclusion about VA's impending demise, it makes more sense to simply sell off the assets of the company now, including securities.
You don't plonk money down for support from a company that isn't going to be there in eighteen months, and in VA's case, this isn't even up for debate anymore - Morningstar has put them down for five more quarters until they are gonzo.
The target market for proprietary SourceForge extensions is tiny. The market for SourceForge at all, even the free version, above and beyond plain CVS is small as it stands.
While its admirable for a company to strike out for new business, its probably time for the VA execs to fess up to the reality of it - the negative momentum on earnings is too much for the stock to bear. Once LNUX inevitably goes under $1, the dilution of the stock will bring the market cap to ridiculously low levels. Once the market cap gets under $80 million, the assets of the company are valued more than its valuation as a publically traded company (I believe VA has $83 million cash and securities).
Why not just sell off the assets and simply redistribute the funds to shareholders? Really, this isn't a slag on the company or its employees - the math is simply against them. Morningstar has given them five more quarters and then they predict it is all over for them.
I can't figure out why companies insist on spending every last dollar when its obvious that it isn't going to happen.
Lets be serious here - given the current crowding in high schools, the emphasis is on crowd control, not learning.
Freaked out by violence, threats, and weapons in the schools, most big city high schools have backed off from the entire enterprise of education and have devolved into holding cells for teens who are increasingly violent in their protests against these institutions.
No one with a Ph.d is going to want to walk into a big city school and listen to the trash talk and threats from the students and the mindless drivel coming from the adminstration. Its a crappy job.
An open note to Cagle and other spec groupies.
on
Human Markup Language
·
· Score: 2
I think the general problem Kurt is that the W3 and OASIS are spending huge amounts of time and energy on mental masturbation projects that meet no real need and have no other target audience outside of technical publishers. Without a doubt this project has got to be one of the greatest feats of mental masturbation the standards folks have pushed yet. I would have sworn it was an April Fool's joke you were cooking up.
Its like some bizarre movie plot where you'll all die if you stop passing standards and specs.
Look at almost every TR on the W3 site other than XML that starts with X, and you'll find technologies that no one asked for and no one cares about, including your own favorite XSL, which maybe takes the cake as most retarded technology ever devised.
Congrats! you committee-crazy folks are killing XML that same way you killed SGML, with ridiculous over-specification and needless standards. You should all work for the government.
Please respond to this here, I would like to know if you understand how ridiculous people think the XML standards groupies have become.
HP has cast itself as the manufacturer of all of the disposables of computing (PCs, printers, cameras, etc.). While it is laudable for them to go after future marketspace, their R&D might be better focused on how to beat Dell at low-cost manufacturing and inventory management, seeing as this is the commodity market they have chosen to compete in.
As it stands, without some serious changes in senior management and a total overhaul of their product line, it is unlikely HP (as we know it) will see 2010....they're on the 3COM/SGI track right now.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, cheap gas?
The reat of your post is gibberish.
Forget about keeping the moral high ground in the Middle East because you never had it. Instead, protect your interests. Make sure you win, not them. Forget about the "good guy" winning because if you lift up the veil you may find the "good guy" is not you, or anyone else.
How absurd. Are you suggesting taking the extra police off of the streets and not introducing any more effective security mesaures at airports? Precautions can protect you. You learn what precautions are useful from experience. You are suggesting that we not learn anything from this experience at all.
I am not condemming US policy - the US was right to support the Israelis, and the oil sheiks have been filling our cars with cheap gas for decades.
Secondly, we have to be realistic about striking back at terrorists and the nations who host them. This has little to do with right and wrong - the US has meddled in the Middle East for decades, and Islamic regimes are well known for their support of terror policies. There are no innocent parties, so forget about who has morality on their side. Start worrying about protecting your famillies, interests, values, and property. You were never in the "right" so forget about sheltering your petty morality. This is a war. You will have to kill innocent civillians. If you do not, you may die. Those who support Islamic fundamentalist regimes are your enemy, regardless of their direct involvement with terrorist acts.
Americans killed plenty of innocent Germans and Italians and Japanese in WW2 to protect its interests. It was acceptable then, it is acceptable now.
This has nothing to do with right or wrong. This has everything to do with which side you are on. Both sides have justifiable gripes - the US has made its own bed by meddling in the Middle East for decades, but the Islamic nations have gone over the edge and its likely in twenty years we will see an Islamic genocide on a mass scale.
Please. Civillians have been targets in every significant conflict in history. This, like most other pitched conflicts, has very little to do with right or wrong but more to do with what side you are on.
If you are a supporter of Islamic fundamentalist regimes and militias, I don't care if you spend your days feeding the poor and teaching children to read - you have thrown your lot in with those who are opposed to my values and the safety of my family and you are a suitable target for whatever insideous weapon we should chose to toss at you.
Please don't be naive about the role of innocents in conflict. During the revolutionary war, civil war, and all wars since then, innocent civillians have been targetted, exploited, and murdered for military gains. There has never been a conflict where the contrary holds. Grow up and get used to life in a dirty, bloody world.
This country is going to have to return to the harsh lessons of previous wars: if you want to make an omellete, you have to break some eggs.
Remember that /. is more or less a place to pick arguments, and that is what I saw yesterday on this site. Please tell me how you can watch people jump out of the world trade center in saddened panic and then respond with the devil's advocate position.
I believe this is the low-level "assembly language" of the proposed new perl VM.
Warning: you are way out of your league. I have studied the transcripts from Nurmeburg and the trial details at great length. Nuremburg was not a criminal trial - it was a series of contrived declarations that were designed to lend legitimacy to what were essentially preordained executions. There was never any intention of granting the presumption of innocence to the Nuremburg defedents, and the case was not tried within a framework where this dispensation was granting as a precursor.
But thanks for tossing around more of the pseudo-intellectual bullshit that amounts to a piss-poor devil's advocate argument.
At what point does a nation become so weak, so dissipated, that it seeks to answer a declaration of war with a criminal trial?
I can assure you that there are thousands of famillies who would be revolted at the concept of granting such odious individuals the presumption of innocence.
Don't know who posted this a while back, or on what topic: but it makes sense when these args come up:
--------------------
You Work in a Fashion Industry
I've spent the last several years trying to explain to colleagues why
they should start using another obscure-but-good language, Eiffel, to no avail.
Here is what I have learned. Note that this is not about the pros and cons of
particular languages or paradigms, its about the way the programming language
industry actually works.
The language industry is dominated by network effects. There are major
costs with using a minority language, and for an individual project these
completely outweigh the benefits, even when the benefits are very large. Hence
it is generally far better to stay with a majority language. The costs of a
minority language include:
Support. Sure, you can get a GPL compiler for most languages, but on a project
you don't want to have your coders digging into the code trying to
fix a bug, you want them writing code. Support is something you outsource.
Performance. Every minority language claims to be faster than C, but often
isn't in practice. Whatever the truth, C and C++ are at least known
quantities. Maybe the minority language will be faster, maybe slower. If its
faster, well gee so what. If its slower then you have a major problem.
Tool support. These days even small projects start by drawing UML diagrams and
then converting these automatically into class templates. CASE
tool vendors don't support minority languages. Ditto for testing and
documentation tools. Little things like tying your compiler to your
configuration control manager might potentially be major headaches. Again, its
more risk that the PM can do without.
Nobody ever got fired for buying C/C++/Java. If you are a PM this is a major
issue. Every language is going to bring some headaches, but if you have chosen
a minority language then these headaches can be turned into an excuse for
project failure, and hence for hanging you out to dry.
Trained staff in a minority language are going to be rare. This does not
necessarily make them more expensive (nobody else wants them), but it
does make recruitment much harder and more uncertain. Alternatively you have to
train all your existing people in the new language. And for Functional
Languages its not just another syntax, its a whole new way of thinking. The
industry went through this with OO languages, and many PMs have vivid memories
of reams of non-OO obfuscated C++ written by a bunch of C hackers who had been
sent on a one week C++ course. Getting your head around a new paradigm can take
months, and this is time that the project just does not have.
So, overall the PMs want to go with popular languages, not for PHM
reasons, but for entirely rational local reasons. But rational local decisions
turn into globally arbitrary decisions, as the entire herd gallops off in a
random direction chosen only because most of the herd thought that most of the
herd were headed that way.
The lesson of this is that if you want to introduce a language, you don't
concentrate on making it a good language, you try to persuade the herd of
programmers, PMs and tool vendors that your language is the Next Big Thing. The
important point here is not how much the language will do for productivity,
quality and cost, it is to create the perception that everyone else thinks that
this language will be the next big thing.
There are two ways to do this. One way is to tackle the whole industry at once.
For an object lesson in how to do this, see Java. For an object lesson
in how not to do it, see Eiffel. Believe me, I know all about this. I have
spent a long time giving presentations extolling the technical virtues of
Eiffel, only to have my audience say "Yes, but in the Real World....". In the
Real World what counts is the network effects. And you know what? My audiences
were right. It has taken me a long time to realise this.
The other more interesting and more promising way to introduce a new
language is to identify a niche market and attack that. Once you have taken
over your niche you can expand to nearby niches and start to build momentum.
Python is doing exactly this in web serving, for example. Web serving is a good
niche because lots of people do it, and productivity and quality generally
count for more than raw performance. Projects also tend to be small, so
experiments are not the Career Limiting Moves they are for large projects.
Education can also be a useful niche if you can afford to take the long view,
which is how Pascal, Basic and Unix got started.
You are correct. The NRO has a huge budget and are almost unknown to the American public.
You really don't want to get involved in building browsing and editing tools for an arbitrary schema, its not worth the time.
Why would this conditioning neccesarily be in place? Its fairly obvious that the first computer to attain self-awareness would be predisposed to search for it.
Basically you are disqualifying the discovery of self-awareness as one of the axioms of your argument.
I don't see how you can quantify anything about people who buy web appliances - Audrey and eVilla hardly sold at all.
More likely they were just gadget freaks who wanted to play with a new toy. I highly doubt these products ever penetrated to the level of mainstream consumers.
Lets be frank - its not like rushing to a 1.0 release now is going to reclaim substantial market share from IE - the browser wars, at least on Windows, is basically over. We've waited years for Mozilla to get done - they ar emaking great progress in 2001, so lets just call 1.0 when the time is right.
Well, for starter maybe investors would have a little more faith in publically traded companies. I think you misunderstand VA's plight - mathematically it is practically impossible for them to stay in business. Earnings are diving too quickly, and predicted to fall even faster (read VA's own SEC disclosures).
Given the inescapable conclusion about VA's impending demise, it makes more sense to simply sell off the assets of the company now, including securities.
You don't plonk money down for support from a company that isn't going to be there in eighteen months, and in VA's case, this isn't even up for debate anymore - Morningstar has put them down for five more quarters until they are gonzo.
While its admirable for a company to strike out for new business, its probably time for the VA execs to fess up to the reality of it - the negative momentum on earnings is too much for the stock to bear. Once LNUX inevitably goes under $1, the dilution of the stock will bring the market cap to ridiculously low levels. Once the market cap gets under $80 million, the assets of the company are valued more than its valuation as a publically traded company (I believe VA has $83 million cash and securities).
Why not just sell off the assets and simply redistribute the funds to shareholders? Really, this isn't a slag on the company or its employees - the math is simply against them. Morningstar has given them five more quarters and then they predict it is all over for them.
I can't figure out why companies insist on spending every last dollar when its obvious that it isn't going to happen.
Freaked out by violence, threats, and weapons in the schools, most big city high schools have backed off from the entire enterprise of education and have devolved into holding cells for teens who are increasingly violent in their protests against these institutions.
No one with a Ph.d is going to want to walk into a big city school and listen to the trash talk and threats from the students and the mindless drivel coming from the adminstration. Its a crappy job.
Its like some bizarre movie plot where you'll all die if you stop passing standards and specs.
Look at almost every TR on the W3 site other than XML that starts with X, and you'll find technologies that no one asked for and no one cares about, including your own favorite XSL, which maybe takes the cake as most retarded technology ever devised.
Congrats! you committee-crazy folks are killing XML that same way you killed SGML, with ridiculous over-specification and needless standards. You should all work for the government.
Please respond to this here, I would like to know if you understand how ridiculous people think the XML standards groupies have become.
As it stands, without some serious changes in senior management and a total overhaul of their product line, it is unlikely HP (as we know it) will see 2010....they're on the 3COM/SGI track right now.