I wonder if they will be any better at running data centers than they were at running auto centers.
We used to take our cars to Sears to get the oil changed. Nothing complicated, just an oil change.
I'd say they succeeded in changing the oil about two thirds of the time. But one third of the time, something would go off the rails, and we would go home without the oil change. Eventually, I gave up going there. Some time after that, they closed their auto centers.
I read the book when I was kid. I saw the movie when it came out. Neither is a parody.
Starship Troopers is--first and foremost--a science-fiction novel. Heinlein wrote these things. It was how me made his living.
To the extent that the novel has any deeper themes, it is an exploration of violence, mainly in a military context, although there are a few scenes scattered through the book that present violence in other contexts. In one of his letters, Heinlein wrote something to the effect of "Men are going to fight, so we ought to understand why." Heinlein served in the U.S. Navy, and it seems to me that the novel is strongly informed by his experience there.
The movie is a straightforward Hollywood adaptation of the novel. It seems remarkable to me mainly for the extent to which it does not butcher, repurpose, or hijack the original material.
In the movie, war bulletins, recruitment ads, and government P.R. are all shown as voice-overs while images of web pages appear on a TV monitor. Links, drop-downs, and pop-ups appear on the screen while the announcer encourages viewers to "click here for more information". This is fairly characterized as parody, but it is a parody of the internet, not the military. In particular, it is a parody of the way corporate messaging has moved on-line, rather than the militaristic content of that messaging.
It's called elite panic, and it's extremely dangerous.
The people in the world with real power--kings and princes, billionaires and CEOs--spend their lives worrying that the people that they took power from, and hold power over, are going to rise up and take that power back. That's how elites get power in the first place: by taking it from others. They naturally assume that everyone else is trying to do the same thing. They also spend their lives making sure this doesn't happen.
As long as the elites feel secure, you don't notice this so much, but when they feel threatened--or worse, humiliated--they panic, and go on a rampage. People go to prison. People die.
It used to be that power came from control of croplands. After the industrial revolution, power came from control of mines and factories. This suited the elites. They could enforce their control with armies and police.
Today, significant power comes from control of computers. But you can't control computers with armies and police. You can control the hardware--lock the server rooms, take the computers off-line--but that doesn't get you what you need. What you need is running systems, and that needs programmers and sys admins. All those people walk out the door every night, and unless they come back in the morning, your hardware is pretty much useless. You don't have control of the computers.
This change crept up on the elites while they weren't watching. (CEOs don't pay attention to computers. That's operations, right? That why I hired a COO, right?) So everything just rolls along from year to year and decade to decade, until a Randal Schwartz or a Terry Childs comes along, and the elites realize that they don't have control, and they panic, and then they crucify the object of their panic.
The Forbes article assumes that Childs withheld passwords in a bid for job security, which is absurd. Slackers and grifters don't face down police officers and go to prison on principle. They hand over the passwords and move on to their next scam.
Many of the Slashdot comments argue that withholding passwords is a kind of office theft, like stealing the keys to the safe. That's a fair analogy for explaining what a password is, but not really on point for the issues raised by this case.
The actual conviction was for disruption/denial of computer services, which is overblown, at best. The city of San Fransisco got control of their computers, with only minor inconvenience and substantially no loss of service.
My guess is that Childs suffers from some variety of asperger's, or paranoia, or obsessive-compulsive, or the like. The proximate reason that he is in prison is that this disorder--whatever it is--caused him to stumble into the maw of the legal system.
The ultimate reason that Childs is in prison is that he was the object of panic--the person in view--when one of the elites looked up and realized that they weren't in control of their computer systems. So they crucified him.
Humans are diurnal (dI-UR-nal). It means we sleep when it's dark and wake when it's light. (compare nocturnal)
The primary purpose of DST is to keep our scheduled wake time (as determined by school, work, etc) close to sunrise. Everything else (energy savings! more shopping hours!) is just confusion and wishful thinking.
The controlling factor isn't east-west, it's north-south. The further north you go, the more sunrise time varies with the seasons, and the more an adjustment like DST helps.
Stuffing the whole country into two time zones is a non-fix for a non-problem.
How did you get the code? I keep getting git clone git://g.csail.mit.edu/stack Cloning into 'stack'... fatal: unable to connect to g.csail.mit.edu: g.csail.mit.edu[0: 128.30.44.149]: errno=Connection timed out/code.
I think they need a short, pithy slogan to really push their message home. One that is tried and true; that has worked well in the past. Wait...wait...it's coming to me...ah!
When our kids were around 10 and 12 years old, we started observing a Sabbath. Sundown Saturday to sundown Sunday: no electric lights, radios, TVs, and--especially--no computers. We'd never observed a sabbath for any religions reason, but we decided to try this, partly as an experiment, and partly as an attempt to reclaim our lives from electronic media.
The first time we did it, I expected the kids to go ballistic, but they pretty much rolled with it, and it became a regular part of our household. It did change our rhythms and activities. We would read or play (card, board, dice) games in the evening. People went to sleep earlier.
We kept it up for a year or two. I can't say exactly why we stopped. The kids got older; life intervened.
For me, reading a book is a journey through its pages. Not in some metaphorical sense, but in a very literal, tactile, visual sense. I associate the words in a book with their position on the page, and the pages with their (approximate) position within the thickness of the book. It helps me keep track of what I've read, and place words and passages in context of the overall book.
I never thought about any of this until I started reading eBooks and it wasn't there. An eBook is just one long (long, long, very long) stream of words. Some eBooks paginate the words for display, but that pagination is typically not stable: revisit those words another time and they will likely appear on the screen in a different place. And those pages--such as they are--have no apparent position within any larger structure.
This is OK for a dictionary or a reference manual, where I just look things up. But for any serious work of non-fiction, it's horribly acontextual: the book just turns into word mush.
I haven't tried reading any fiction eBooks, so I don't know if they would fare any better.
I kind of don't get this. I know that accounting can be complex, but underneath it all there has to be transactions. Credits. Debits. Raw data. If the numbers on the screen don't look right, the first thing I want to see is the raw data. They do have the data somewhere, right? Right???
As projects surpass one million lines of code, there’s a direct correlation between size and quality for proprietary projects, and an inverse correlation for open source projects.
The article gives numbers: above 1M LOC, defect density increases for open source projects, and decreases for proprietary projects. Increasing defect density with size is plausible: beyond a certain size, the code base becomes intractable. Decreasing defect density with size is harder to understand: why should the quality fairy only visit specially big proprietary projects?
Perhaps the way those proprietary projects get into the MLOC range in the first place is with huge tracts of boilerplate, duplicated code, or machine-generated code. That would inflate up the denominator in the defects/KLOC ratio. But then that calls the whole defects/KLOC metric into question.
We grant 2 weeks parental leave to any employee who becomes the parent of a child (natural or adopted) and 2 additional weeks to any employee who bears a child.
Women on the committee who had borne children did not think this was excessive.
One of my kids had something like this: not for English, but for physics. The teacher couldn't be bothered to assign and grade proper homework. Instead, he fobbed the kids off onto a web app. - go to the site - get a problem - solve the problem - type in the numerical answer - right answer? go on to the next problem - wrong answer? try again The web app allowed maybe 0.5% margin for rounding error, and you got 5 tries before it failed you on that problem.
It sounds reasonable in the abstract, but in practice it was utterly wretched. All learning is, at some level, an interaction--a conversation--between student and teacher. Even if it is nothing more than a red check mark or a red X on a homework paper, you have communicated some thing to some person and gotten some response. You don't realize how important this is until it is gone.
With nothing but a machine to talk to, it stops being about learning. It is just about satisfying the machine by whatever means necessary. In his rage and frustration my son told me that the easiest way to solve the problems was to copy and paste the problem text in to google. This would reliably return the general formula for solving that problem; plugging in the numbers that the web app had generated for your instance of the problem would then yield the correct answer. By the end of the school year, I was telling him that if he didn't want to deal with the web app, he should use google to get his grade, and if he wanted to learn physics, I would teach it to him.
Automated essay grading is going to be even worse. There is no point writing prose unless a human is going to read it. When I want to talk to machines, I write code.
Writing songs, that voices never shared... -- Paul Simon
Occasionally, one of my banks or health care orgs calls me on some (legitimate) business. The first thing they do is ask me for my identifying info (SSN, birthdate, etc). See, their security and privacy regs require them to verify my identity. I always refuse, and try to explain the problem to them.
In the early days (going back maybe 5 years), they had no idea what I was talking about, and I could not get them to understand the problem.
Eventually, some of them understood that they had a problem. But their understanding of the problem was that some of their customers wouldn't talk to them, which meant that they couldn't complete the business at hand, which mattered to them (or else they wouldn't have initiated the call in the first place). Their solution? Offer me a call-back number, so that I can call them instead. Because, see, if I initiate the call, then they must be who they say they are, right? Right?
Just once in the last year, I had a bank that really understood the problem. When I balked, they allowed that I could call back in on the customer service number *on my credit card*. So I did. From the reactions of the people who answered, I got the impression that few of their customers do this.
I don't know about the aerodynamics, but the performance part is correct. That little scoop below the engine is the intake for air to cool the engine. The design of that scoop could affect overall performance by something like ~1%. Sounds small, but when everyone is using the same underlying technology, and encounters typically have binary outcomes (you die or he dies), 1% can make the difference.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if they will be any better at running data centers than they were at running auto centers.
We used to take our cars to Sears to get the oil changed.
Nothing complicated, just an oil change.
I'd say they succeeded in changing the oil about two thirds of the time.
But one third of the time, something would go off the rails, and we would go home without the oil change.
Eventually, I gave up going there.
Some time after that, they closed their auto centers.
We know that we basically can only ask for one multi-billion dollar accelerator at a time,
Just sayin'...
I read the book when I was kid.
I saw the movie when it came out.
Neither is a parody.
Starship Troopers is--first and foremost--a science-fiction novel.
Heinlein wrote these things. It was how me made his living.
To the extent that the novel has any deeper themes, it is an exploration of violence, mainly in a military context, although there are a few scenes scattered through the book that present violence in other contexts. In one of his letters, Heinlein wrote something to the effect of "Men are going to fight, so we ought to understand why." Heinlein served in the U.S. Navy, and it seems to me that the novel is strongly informed by his experience there.
The movie is a straightforward Hollywood adaptation of the novel. It seems remarkable to me mainly for the extent to which it does not butcher, repurpose, or hijack the original material.
In the movie, war bulletins, recruitment ads, and government P.R. are all shown as voice-overs while images of web pages appear on a TV monitor. Links, drop-downs, and pop-ups appear on the screen while the announcer encourages viewers to "click here for more information". This is fairly characterized as parody, but it is a parody of the internet, not the military. In particular, it is a parody of the way corporate messaging has moved on-line, rather than the militaristic content of that messaging.
It's called elite panic, and it's extremely dangerous.
The people in the world with real power--kings and princes, billionaires and CEOs--spend their lives worrying that the people that they took power from, and hold power over, are going to rise up and take that power back. That's how elites get power in the first place: by taking it from others. They naturally assume that everyone else is trying to do the same thing. They also spend their lives making sure this doesn't happen.
As long as the elites feel secure, you don't notice this so much, but when they feel threatened--or worse, humiliated--they panic, and go on a rampage. People go to prison. People die.
It used to be that power came from control of croplands. After the industrial revolution, power came from control of mines and factories. This suited the elites. They could enforce their control with armies and police.
Today, significant power comes from control of computers. But you can't control computers with armies and police. You can control the hardware--lock the server rooms, take the computers off-line--but that doesn't get you what you need. What you need is running systems, and that needs programmers and sys admins. All those people walk out the door every night, and unless they come back in the morning, your hardware is pretty much useless. You don't have control of the computers.
This change crept up on the elites while they weren't watching. (CEOs don't pay attention to computers. That's operations, right? That why I hired a COO, right?) So everything just rolls along from year to year and decade to decade, until a Randal Schwartz or a Terry Childs comes along, and the elites realize that they don't have control, and they panic, and then they crucify the object of their panic.
The Forbes article assumes that Childs withheld passwords in a bid for job security, which is absurd. Slackers and grifters don't face down police officers and go to prison on principle. They hand over the passwords and move on to their next scam.
Many of the Slashdot comments argue that withholding passwords is a kind of office theft, like stealing the keys to the safe. That's a fair analogy for explaining what a password is, but not really on point for the issues raised by this case.
The actual conviction was for disruption/denial of computer services, which is overblown, at best. The city of San Fransisco got control of their computers, with only minor inconvenience and substantially no loss of service.
My guess is that Childs suffers from some variety of asperger's, or paranoia, or obsessive-compulsive, or the like. The proximate reason that he is in prison is that this disorder--whatever it is--caused him to stumble into the maw of the legal system.
The ultimate reason that Childs is in prison is that he was the object of panic--the person in view--when one of the elites looked up and realized that they weren't in control of their computer systems. So they crucified him.
I avoid retailers who put video ads in my face while I'm queued.
Humans are diurnal (dI-UR-nal).
It means we sleep when it's dark and wake when it's light. (compare nocturnal)
The primary purpose of DST is to keep our scheduled wake time (as determined by school, work, etc) close to sunrise.
Everything else (energy savings! more shopping hours!) is just confusion and wishful thinking.
The controlling factor isn't east-west, it's north-south.
The further north you go, the more sunrise time varies with the seasons, and the more an adjustment like DST helps.
Stuffing the whole country into two time zones is a non-fix for a non-problem.
See also
How congress broke Daylight Savings Time
http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/letters/dst.html
How did you get the code?
/code.
I keep getting
git clone git://g.csail.mit.edu/stack
Cloning into 'stack'...
fatal: unable to connect to g.csail.mit.edu:
g.csail.mit.edu[0: 128.30.44.149]: errno=Connection timed out
Time is an illusion; lunchtime, doubly so.
--Ford Prefect
The head and tail of the list
9. Designing a solution
1. Naming things
are pretty much two sides of the same coin.
If you have a design, you will know what call things.
If you have names for everything, you will be able to build a design from there.
And these *are* the hardest things on the list.
Perl Data Language
The power of Perl + the speed of C
I think they need a short, pithy slogan to really push their message home.
One that is tried and true; that has worked well in the past.
Wait...wait...it's coming to me...ah!
Just say no.
When our kids were around 10 and 12 years old, we started observing a Sabbath.
Sundown Saturday to sundown Sunday: no electric lights, radios, TVs, and--especially--no computers.
We'd never observed a sabbath for any religions reason, but we decided to try this,
partly as an experiment, and partly as an attempt to reclaim our lives from electronic media.
The first time we did it, I expected the kids to go ballistic, but they pretty much rolled with it, and it became a regular part of our household.
It did change our rhythms and activities.
We would read or play (card, board, dice) games in the evening.
People went to sleep earlier.
We kept it up for a year or two.
I can't say exactly why we stopped.
The kids got older; life intervened.
For me, reading a book is a journey through its pages.
Not in some metaphorical sense, but in a very literal, tactile, visual sense.
I associate the words in a book with their position on the page,
and the pages with their (approximate) position within the thickness of the book.
It helps me keep track of what I've read, and place words and passages in context of the overall book.
I never thought about any of this until I started reading eBooks and it wasn't there.
An eBook is just one long (long, long, very long) stream of words.
Some eBooks paginate the words for display, but that pagination is typically not stable:
revisit those words another time and they will likely appear on the screen in a different place.
And those pages--such as they are--have no apparent position within any larger structure.
This is OK for a dictionary or a reference manual, where I just look things up.
But for any serious work of non-fiction, it's horribly acontextual: the book just turns into word mush.
I haven't tried reading any fiction eBooks, so I don't know if they would fare any better.
I kind of don't get this.
I know that accounting can be complex, but underneath it all there has to be transactions.
Credits.
Debits.
Raw data.
If the numbers on the screen don't look right, the first thing I want to see is the raw data.
They do have the data somewhere, right?
Right???
Snowden was a character in Catch-22.
He came to a bad end.
You can't make this stuff up.
FTA:
The article gives numbers: above 1M LOC, defect density increases for open source projects, and decreases for proprietary projects.
Increasing defect density with size is plausible: beyond a certain size, the code base becomes intractable.
Decreasing defect density with size is harder to understand: why should the quality fairy only visit specially big proprietary projects?
Perhaps the way those proprietary projects get into the MLOC range in the first place is with huge tracts of boilerplate, duplicated code, or machine-generated code.
That would inflate up the denominator in the defects/KLOC ratio.
But then that calls the whole defects/KLOC metric into question.
I was on the personnel committee at our church.
We grant 2 weeks parental leave to any employee who becomes the parent of a child (natural or adopted)
and 2 additional weeks to any employee who bears a child.
Women on the committee who had borne children did not think this was excessive.
Flying to Orbit, with an update for SpaceShipOne
http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/stories/orbit.html
One of my kids had something like this: not for English, but for physics.
The teacher couldn't be bothered to assign and grade proper homework.
Instead, he fobbed the kids off onto a web app.
- go to the site
- get a problem
- solve the problem
- type in the numerical answer
- right answer? go on to the next problem
- wrong answer? try again
The web app allowed maybe 0.5% margin for rounding error, and you got 5 tries before it failed you on that problem.
It sounds reasonable in the abstract, but in practice it was utterly wretched.
All learning is, at some level, an interaction--a conversation--between student and teacher.
Even if it is nothing more than a red check mark or a red X on a homework paper,
you have communicated some thing to some person and gotten some response.
You don't realize how important this is until it is gone.
With nothing but a machine to talk to, it stops being about learning.
It is just about satisfying the machine by whatever means necessary.
In his rage and frustration my son told me that the easiest way to solve the problems was to copy and paste the problem text in to google.
This would reliably return the general formula for solving that problem;
plugging in the numbers that the web app had generated for your instance of the problem would then yield the correct answer.
By the end of the school year, I was telling him that if he didn't want to deal with the web app, he should use google to get his grade,
and if he wanted to learn physics, I would teach it to him.
Automated essay grading is going to be even worse.
There is no point writing prose unless a human is going to read it.
When I want to talk to machines, I write code.
Writing songs, that voices never shared...
-- Paul Simon
How congress broke daylight savings time
A letter to my congressional representatives
http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/letters/dst.html
Writing a browser: $10M
Writing an OS: $100M
EU bundling fine: $732
Desktop monopoly: priceless
Occasionally, one of my banks or health care orgs calls me on some (legitimate) business.
The first thing they do is ask me for my identifying info (SSN, birthdate, etc).
See, their security and privacy regs require them to verify my identity.
I always refuse, and try to explain the problem to them.
In the early days (going back maybe 5 years),
they had no idea what I was talking about,
and I could not get them to understand the problem.
Eventually, some of them understood that they had a problem.
But their understanding of the problem was that some of their customers wouldn't talk to them,
which meant that they couldn't complete the business at hand,
which mattered to them (or else they wouldn't have initiated the call in the first place).
Their solution?
Offer me a call-back number, so that I can call them instead.
Because, see, if I initiate the call, then they must be who they say they are, right? Right?
Just once in the last year, I had a bank that really understood the problem.
When I balked, they allowed that I could call back in on the customer service number *on my credit card*.
So I did.
From the reactions of the people who answered,
I got the impression that few of their customers do this.
Lisp
http://xkcd.com/224/
You think their English prose is bad,
just wait until you see (and have to debug, and maintain) their code.
I don't know about the aerodynamics, but the performance part is correct.
That little scoop below the engine is the intake for air to cool the engine.
The design of that scoop could affect overall performance by something like ~1%.
Sounds small, but when everyone is using the same underlying technology,
and encounters typically have binary outcomes (you die or he dies),
1% can make the difference.