So, just to hear your opinion: do you think Perl is going to be better off for having a virtual machine?
What do you think Perl 5 runs on now? I don't see any compiled machine code lying around, do you? (With the exception of a couple of modules that inline various compiled things.)
The horses are already out of the barn, and the barn has been burned down. Bit late to wonder if we'd be better off in the barn.
Maybe "standard" nutrition won't tell you to never eat a potato, but what you're doing isn't the Atkins diet.
On the grounds that I've read the book several times for the purpose of critically examing it, yes, yes that is the Atkins diet.
The difference between the Atkins diet and the popular conception of the Atkins diet is staggering. Critics who wonder why those of us on the Atkins diet don't "see the light" and listen to them can find part of the answer in the fact that what they criticize is a parody of the diet. (Thought there is some danger in that some people actually try the parody, thinking that's really it.) The other half of the answer is mostly the failure of "the answer" to be feasible, for a variety of reasons adequately explored in the book.
If you want to know more about the actual diet, check the website online. It basically has the whole book online, in pieces. I don't suggest swallowing it uncritically, but Atkins made a lot of criticisms of the current diet dogma that I find backed by my own experience and which aren't addressed by the Atkins critics, either because they have no real answer, or more likely, they haven't bothered to find out what it is they are criticizing. Speaking at least for myself, that is not a path to convincing me of your rightness.
In a nutshell, if you (the reader in general, not just vondo) think "Eat nothing but meat" is an adequate summation of Atkins, you have no clue about the Atkins diet, only the popular parody. Do the rest of us the favor of shutting up about the diet until you get one, OK? For a lot of you its pretty obvious you're just posturing about not liking something apparently popular in order to look cool. ("Apparently" because it is still not mainstream.)
(Personally, I think the ultimate scientific outcome of the whole thing (and there has been shockingly little science in the field as a whole, just self-reporting surveys and studies that don't provide the whole diet of the participants, both of which are just barely shy of useless scientifically) will be to largely vindicate Atkin's criticisms, but not necessarily every last one of his solutions. In the meantime, I can't wait until Nutritionists get off their collective asses and start doing real science, so I tend towards the Atkins diet which works for me and will stick with it, until someone adequately explains to me why loosing 60 pounds on Atkins is worse then keeping them or gaining more on any other diet; it does not pass my attention that Atkins critics tend to either ignore or deny that significant weight loss occurs... anybody who can't explain how eating more fat can cause weight loss but criticizes Atkins anyhow instantly loses all respect from me. We're living proof of the incorrectness of the very theory such people try to beat us over the head with; why would you expect us to listen?)
I was going to post this; it is the obvious solution and is ultimately the cheapest and most flexible possible solution, at the price of requiring some initial patience.
If this is inadequate then ultimately your body won't ever let you near computers anyhow.
I would like to echo the allergin therapist's comments, though; for something like this it is worth double-checking that you have correctly diagnosed yourself. Self-diagnosis is not impossible but it is challenging to get right because of the impossibility of conducting controlled experiments (and I mean "controlled" in the scientific sense). I've been right, but I've also been wrong for years at a crack, and who knows if I'm as right as I think I am now?
The answer is, keep doing what you have been doing and hope for the best. It is the the fact that we are reduced to "hoping for the best" that is the fundamental reason that no matter how impassionedly someone argues for the current system, it is fundamentally flawed; ever Microsoft is reduced to it. That's not justice.
(Don't do a patent search, all you'll do is triple the damages if you get sued. The system punishes diligence.)
It would be much better to understand and remove the causes for these problems but tackling poverty and lack of education is much more dificult then dropping a few bombs
I understand the cause; a government stifling its people.
How do you propose that we attack these "root causes" without first taking out the government that would have prevented us from doing anything? (Study what has happened to North Korean "aid".)
I think people like you underestimate the Republicans. They are attacking the root causes. They just aren't so disconnected from the real world to think that the mere insertion of money into a fundamnentally corrupt system is going to fix anything. First, the system must be reformed, and that takes, you know, bombs.
I'd love to call myself a liberal; in the classic sense I am one. I find it ironic that the people calling themselves "liberals" aren't; they're just people who view the world through seriously rose-colored glasses and somehow their moral purity magically convinces Saddam to stop being a tyrant and then their moral purity remotely converts Iraq into the wonderland it would be without Bush, with at most the donation of a few dollars and a couple of protest rallies.... conducted in the US, where they can't do any good. I say "magic" because I'm yet to hear a plausible way that "understanding root causes" will effect any change, without exactly the actions we've taken. (Most of them seem to focus on an awful lot of magic on the part of Saddam, and all of his would-be successors.)
That's why I'm going to hold my nose and vote Bush; he isn't doing perfect but his view of the world is a hell of a lot more clear then the Left's is right now, which is really certain that if it were in charge, basically, things would just work out magically; I haven't heard a concrete plan at all.
Your message seems to be lacking a point. It suggests being critical of sources in a vague and general way, but has no specifics about the current story.
Are you suggesting that we dismiss this merely because it appears on the web? That's not "sophistication", that's just falling prey to the same fallacy, only in reverse! The reality is that the "web" status is a null factor.
Paul Graham's qualifications are freely available online. While you of course can't therefore accept everything he says uncritically, he isn't even a good example of "some guy with a blog saying things". He's been around for decades, doing real work, writing books on complicated subjects, and while I can't know for sure, if I had to lay money, the odds favor him being much more experienced than you. (Which is to say, his comments can have the type of value you seem to desire, not that they must. I personally largely agree with him but there are plenty of people with equal or more experience I do not agree with, some of them very highly respected; as a concrete "for instance" I don't agree with anybody who believes that only static type checking by the compiler can produce quality software. That's a lot of very big names.)
Similarly, this author's qualifications are freely available online. While I'm not sure I'd trust him to evaluate why Java is doing well, or to evaluate it from a technical standpoint, he seems to me to be in a very good position to evaluate how the industry interest in Java is faring, certainly much better than my position. (On the other hand, the incompetent use of a "Google-fight" is disconcerting; again, I'm not advocating blind acceptance or rejection.)
You don't directly say "This can be dismissed because it is on the web", but you sure seem to strongly imply it. Did you not finish your post before you hit "Submit", or are you really advocating falling into the exact same fallacy you think you are warning against?
What are you searching for on Google that leads you to nothing but spam?
Maybe I'm atypical... OK, I know I'm atypical... but I don't have that problem.
I suppose if your typical Google search is for the celebrity de jour you might get spam (and I've noticed the warez sites* and such are pretty spammy, but that's a fairly accurate reflection of their real state in the world!), but for anything of consequence I don't see spam.
*: Which I peruse for NoCD cracks for software I legitimately own. Seriouly. It may be "illegal" but I consider it totally ethical; what are they going to charge me with, anyhow? I have a paid copy and I'm not distributing. CD-checks and laptops on the go do not get along.
Even for highlighting the next menu option? (Honest question, I don't understand the internals, all I know is the result is absolutely unacceptable for the user.)
Can we get one of these in my cable box? I can't believe it is two thousand fucking four and it takes upwards of three seconds for my cable box to register even the simplest of keypresses. I could program a damn Commodore 64 to be more responsive than that.
Comcast wonders why nobody seems to want their video on demand. I'll tell you why: Because even to scan their free stuff, you have to dedicate five minutes of your time, laboriously cursoring here, waiting for the cursor to get there, waiting, waiting, cursoring to the next thing, waiting, waiting, waiting, and hesitantly pushing the "action" button, and waiting, waiting, only to find you had one more cursor action queued up and waiting, waiting for it to take effect, waiting, waiting, waiting for the action to take effect on the wrong screen, pressing "back" too many times in frustration, and finally finding yourself back at the normal TV view, only to start this all again... except, maybe not.
My first-generation TiVo sometimes annoys me (I think the later ones are a lot more responsive), but I still love it. My cable box is utterly unusable. With one of these chips in there it would improve the user experience... well, almost infinitely since right now the user experience is effectively "zero".
And you also can't yell "fire" in a theatre and there is no protection for "fighting words". The right to free speech has a long history of not being absolute but we still consider ourselves as having it, despite the restrictions. Your examples prove nothing that isn't already well known by people who study the issue.
The point was that Bush does very few interviews, and so media are so concerned about losing that privilege that they will self-censor and not allow reuse of interviews that put him in a bad light. Bush doesn't have to say anything, but by only offering interviews with companies that toe the line, he is endorsing their attempts to intimidate using copyright.
Ultimately, you really have to conclude he is as free to only give interviews to those he choses as we all are. I submit it is less about "endorsing" and more about "toeing".
Part of free speech is having the right not to speak, and President or not, Bush still has that right.
You are free to draw whatever conclusions you choose based on his choices.
$200,000 AUD is roughly $140,000 US, which is roughly 2 developer years for a reasonable wage of $50,000 a year + bennies.
If you think you can create a secure, national scale voting system that you'd trust your country's future to in two man-years, I invite you to try. The experience will be educational. You might also gain some insight into why programmers notoriously underestimate how long things will take.
Regardless of whether you create a system in that time frame that you think you can trust, I can guarentee you I won't trust it.
One hint: While you've heard of "Occam" (although you seriously misapply it here), politicians haven't. Take a good, long look at the next ballot sometime, and don't forget multiple languages and assorted other sundry details that will start sucking your time like you wouldn't believe.
You sound like you're still in school. It gets harder in the real world, you know. ++votes isn't gonna cut it...
Also, you mention trying to get every path through the software. I've never aimed to complete any of these, maybe our apps have been different, but I've found that it's just not possible. Too many combinations.
Actually, that was my point, to establish the impossibility up front. Too many people doing "code it all and poke it at the end" write up a test script and think they are covering all the cases, when they don't even come close. You must first remove misconceptions in this arena before you can make progress:-)
I wouldn't advocate the removal of real testers. But they need to be an adjunct to the automated, unit level testing with an architecture that allows deep automated testing, not a replacement. (If they are coders enough to add to the testing suite, so much the better!) Otherwise, those testers are boned. As you write more testing, the system tends to naturally stabalize into powerful, yet discrete, subsystems that often merely get capabilities added to them over time, so tests can often stay good and useful for many, many iterations unchanged.
Metroid Fusion: Yes, but Zero Mission: Remake, albeit one with actual effort.
Zelda: Four Swords: I had been under the impression that this was a remake of A Link to the Past that had multiplayer; I see now I was wrong. (But add A Link to the Past to the remake list...)
Now, please stop reading into what I said. Never said it was bad to do the remakes. I have Doom 2 and it's cool. But they've released like 20 remakes, maybe more if you count each E-Reader game seperately, to like 4 or 5 original games... that's about one original a year. Frankly, all they have to do to make me happy is to take the engine from Yoshi's Island, and make a new game from it. The content coming out of Nintendo is quite complacent.
I can't speak for everyone else, but when I say that Nintendo has gotten complacent with the gameboy, I usually put it this way: Name me the original games that Nintendo has put out for the Gameboy.
Make sure that you are getting Nintendo games, not just "gameboy" games.
The vast, vast majority of the Nintendo releases are: All Super Marios ever made, a number of other Super Nintendo retreads, and the latest, the downright insulting re-release of mostly-crappy Nintendo games at $20 apiece. Puh-leaze... I might have paid $20 for the bunch, but apiece?
(Don't forget the stupid E-Reader, either, with its own bumper crop of overpriced Nintendo games.)
Now, Nintendo has made at least a couple originals, but compared to the flood of shovelware, it doesn't much matter. (And most, if not all, of those originals have to tie into the Gamecube to... do something innovative? expand our gameplay horizons?... no, flip a couple of fucking bits so I can access all that I've actually already bought.) I'm still waiting for a new Super Mario game.
Compare this with Sega, who is on their thirdnew Sonic the Hedgehog game. That is what we want from Nintendo.
I find it ironic that while I own a GBASP and am quite fond of it as a gaming platform, I find myself avoiding the Nintendo offerings like a plague. I don't have a Gamecube, have no intention of getting one, would still be offended at their transparent and shameless attempts to punish my Gameboy ownership without the corporate-approved Gamecube tie-ins, and am offended by the implication that I want to pay full price for games like Super Mario World * that I've already conquered on other platforms.
"Complacency" sums it up. "We've already made games, let the public buy them again." Fuck that, man. Thanks for the hardware, but I'll buy only the good stuff, and to date it isn't really coming from Nintendo.
Actually, that doesn't apply here. If a team is folding because nobody buys tickets, that is the clearest possible proof that we don't want that particular circus.
(Really, that saying has to be understood in a modern context. "Bread and circuses" no longer applies literally because we can afford all of each we could ever want, without intervention. It now really only applies to other types of large giveaways; Western Europe is probably the clearest example of this sort of thing, especially France, and is also the clearest example of the dangers the saying originally warned of.)
a virus could potentially damage millions of computers in a day of spreading.
We already live in that world. Viruses can already in theory toast BIOSes by flashing them with crap, or (equivalently for most people) destroying the OS. This new tech really wouldn't change anything (and BIOS destruction is likely to be "lower hanging fruit" for a while yet).
Lemma One: It is impossible to comprehensively test the entire system manually.
Proof: For any significantly sized system, take a look at all the independen axes it has. For instance: The set of actions the user can take, the types of nouns the user can manipulate, the types of permissions the user can have, the number of environments the user may be in, etc. Even for a really simple program, that is typically at least 5 actions, 20 nouns, (lets estimate a minimal) 3 permission sets (no perm for the data, read only, read & write), and well in excess of 5 different environments (you need only count relevant differences, but this includes missing library A, missing library B, etc.). Even for this simple, simple program, that's 5*20*3*5, which is 1,500 scenarios, and yes, you can never be sure that precisely one of those will fail in a bad way.
Even at one minute a test, that's 25 hours, which is most of a person-week.
Thus, if you tested a enterprise class system for three days, you did little more than scratch the surface. Now, the "light at the end of the tunnel" is that most systems are not used equally across all of their theoretical capabilities, so you may well have gotten 90%+ of the use, but for the system itself, a vanishing fraction of the use cases. Nevertheless, as the system grows, it rapidly becomes harder to test even 90%.
(The most common error here is probably missing an environment change, since almost by definition you tested with only one environment.)
Bear in mind that such testing is still useful, as a final sanity check, but it is not sufficient. (I've seen a couple of comments that say part of the value of such testing is getting usability feedback; that really ought to be a seperate case, both because the tests you ought to design for usability are seperate, and because once someone has fuctionally tested the system they have become spoiled with pre-conceived notions, but that is better than nothing.)
How do you attack this problem? (Bear in mind almost nobody is doing this right today.)
Design for testability, generally via Unit Tests. There are architectures that make such testing easy, and some that make it impossible. It takes experience to know which is which. Generally, nearly everything can be tested, with the possible exception of GUIs, which are actually provide a great example of my "architecture" point.
Why can't you test GUI's? In my experience, it boils down to two major failings shared by nearly all toolkits:
You can not insert an event, such as "pressing the letter X", into the toolkit programmatically, and have it behave exactly as it would if the user did it. (Of the two, this is the more importent.)
You can not drive the GUI programmatically without its event loop running, which is what you really want for testing. (You need to call the event engine as needed to process your inserted events but you want your code to be in control, not the GUI framework.) One notable counterexample here is Tk, which at least in the guise of Python/Tk I've gotten to work for testing without the event loop running, which has been great. (This could be hacked around with some clever threading work, but without the first condition isn't much worth it.)
The GUIs have chosen an architecture that is not conducive to testing; they require their own loop to be running, they don't allow you to drive them programmatically, they are designed for use, not testing. When you find a GUI that has an architecture at least partially conducive to testing, suddenly, lo, you can do some automated tests.
And in my case, I am talking serious testing that concerns things central to the use of my program. I counted 112 distinct programmatic paths that can be taken when the user presses the "down" key in my outliner. I was able to write a relatively concise test to cover all cases. Yes, code I thought was pretty good turned out to fail two specific cases (
Actually, my understanding is that evolution of existing life is fairly well established, it is still a gigantic question mark as to how life initially started; I consider the two questions seperate.
Evolution doesn't suffer from the problems you describe because as a living system, it is not pure random, there is a strong bias towards viable life forms. (Like I said, if you have the time, study the relevant math.) And theoretical objections must give way to observed phenomena if you want to consider your opinion "scientific"; ultimately, no matter how improbable the current world is, here it is.
Initial life does suffer from all of those problems, which is why it continues to be an interesting debate.
(The primary problem with your energy theory is simply that you have no evidence to back it up, no phenomena that require energy beings to explain. Thus, as a scientific theory, it hasn't really gotten to stage one yet. That proves nothing about its truth either way, but it does mean that I'm pretty unconvinced.)
are there really enough fucking stupid slashdot readers that really think arguments like "irreducible complexity" have interesting merit?
Disclosure: I was raised creationist, but after extremely seriously examining the facts now accept evolution. (A lot of that was an intensive study of computer evolution, where a lot of the phenomena I'm about to mention arise in a controlled and simplified environment.) I also still consider myself Christian, to a degree that if I wore it on my sleeve round these parts I would mostly be shunned.
Evolution is a scientific theory, and as such open to continuous questioning. You really shouldn't try to push it down people's throats and claim it is absolute, obvious truth either, which isn't the literal intent of your message but is strongly implied by it.
Irreducable complexity is probably the single best point against evolution I have ever seen. It cuts to the heart of the entire debate. Considered as a scientific theory, I think it probably ought to be taught as a standard part of the history of evolution as the best counter-argument ever brought to bear.
As with any good scientific theory, it could be tested. It failed those tests miserably, on every level. What that means is not that it was a stupid idea, or that people who have not taken time to study the issue and believe it are stupid. It means that we should not accept it as scientifically true, and that people who believe it is scientifically true either need to study more, or invest a lot of time in figuring out how to prove it true... good luck on that last one, by the way. Everyone can't be intimately familiar with all parts of science... and with no disrespect intended to anyone in particular, the mathematical theories about how evolution works that ultimately satisfied me are extremely heavy stuff. (Look up "schema theory" in evolutionary computation, but come with a lot of math in mind. Technically, you don't need anything above standard calculus to understand it but you need a lot of experience reading intensely mathematical works.)
In conclusion (for this part), "irreducability" does have "interesting merit" as a scientific argument, as did the crystal spheres and epicycles, phlostigon, and the "electrons orbiting the nucleous" atom model (Bohr, I think). Nevertheless, it is wrong.
Another of the interesting phenomena of evolution that it is proper to question is why it isn't smooth; why are there "punctuated equilibria"? I couldn't give a short answer (and it isn't 100% understood on a mathematical level yet as I understand it, although that's a very high standard), but I can tell you from experience that you can not create an evolving system that doesn't have them and still learns. If you try to repress them, the efficiency of the system drops like a rock; in the computer world this translates to finding an answer more slowly or not at all, in the real world into fragile ecosystems that repair themselves slowly or not at all.
(To my fellow Christians, and not to anybody else (hold the mocking comments, please), how do I justify this theologically? Ultimately, God is a God of truth; if you have to believe lies to believe in Him, you aren't believing in the God of the Bible I know. (Again, hold your mocking comments, please, heard them.) If overwhelming evidence is in conflict with our interpretation of the Bible, then either our interpretation is wrong, or "Eat and drink, for tommorow we die". (That's a reference to a specific verse, for you non-Christians.))
I still try for the funnies, but I've learned to avoid subtlety. My favorite postings are the ones that languish in obscurity, while the semi-obvious puns get recognized. "Least common denominator" in action.
For the first time I wish I was a subscriber; I remember enough about my favorite ignored post ever to find it, but I can't see my full history and it was months ago.
Slashdot Mirror
So, just to hear your opinion: do you think Perl is going to be better off for having a virtual machine?
What do you think Perl 5 runs on now? I don't see any compiled machine code lying around, do you? (With the exception of a couple of modules that inline various compiled things.)
The horses are already out of the barn, and the barn has been burned down. Bit late to wonder if we'd be better off in the barn.
Maybe "standard" nutrition won't tell you to never eat a potato, but what you're doing isn't the Atkins diet.
On the grounds that I've read the book several times for the purpose of critically examing it, yes, yes that is the Atkins diet.
The difference between the Atkins diet and the popular conception of the Atkins diet is staggering. Critics who wonder why those of us on the Atkins diet don't "see the light" and listen to them can find part of the answer in the fact that what they criticize is a parody of the diet. (Thought there is some danger in that some people actually try the parody, thinking that's really it.) The other half of the answer is mostly the failure of "the answer" to be feasible, for a variety of reasons adequately explored in the book.
If you want to know more about the actual diet, check the website online. It basically has the whole book online, in pieces. I don't suggest swallowing it uncritically, but Atkins made a lot of criticisms of the current diet dogma that I find backed by my own experience and which aren't addressed by the Atkins critics, either because they have no real answer, or more likely, they haven't bothered to find out what it is they are criticizing. Speaking at least for myself, that is not a path to convincing me of your rightness.
In a nutshell, if you (the reader in general, not just vondo) think "Eat nothing but meat" is an adequate summation of Atkins, you have no clue about the Atkins diet, only the popular parody. Do the rest of us the favor of shutting up about the diet until you get one, OK? For a lot of you its pretty obvious you're just posturing about not liking something apparently popular in order to look cool. ("Apparently" because it is still not mainstream.)
(Personally, I think the ultimate scientific outcome of the whole thing (and there has been shockingly little science in the field as a whole, just self-reporting surveys and studies that don't provide the whole diet of the participants, both of which are just barely shy of useless scientifically) will be to largely vindicate Atkin's criticisms, but not necessarily every last one of his solutions. In the meantime, I can't wait until Nutritionists get off their collective asses and start doing real science, so I tend towards the Atkins diet which works for me and will stick with it, until someone adequately explains to me why loosing 60 pounds on Atkins is worse then keeping them or gaining more on any other diet; it does not pass my attention that Atkins critics tend to either ignore or deny that significant weight loss occurs... anybody who can't explain how eating more fat can cause weight loss but criticizes Atkins anyhow instantly loses all respect from me. We're living proof of the incorrectness of the very theory such people try to beat us over the head with; why would you expect us to listen?)
I was going to post this; it is the obvious solution and is ultimately the cheapest and most flexible possible solution, at the price of requiring some initial patience.
If this is inadequate then ultimately your body won't ever let you near computers anyhow.
I would like to echo the allergin therapist's comments, though; for something like this it is worth double-checking that you have correctly diagnosed yourself. Self-diagnosis is not impossible but it is challenging to get right because of the impossibility of conducting controlled experiments (and I mean "controlled" in the scientific sense). I've been right, but I've also been wrong for years at a crack, and who knows if I'm as right as I think I am now?
Your hypothetical is already reality.
The answer is, keep doing what you have been doing and hope for the best. It is the the fact that we are reduced to "hoping for the best" that is the fundamental reason that no matter how impassionedly someone argues for the current system, it is fundamentally flawed; ever Microsoft is reduced to it. That's not justice.
(Don't do a patent search, all you'll do is triple the damages if you get sued. The system punishes diligence.)
It would be much better to understand and remove the causes for these problems but tackling poverty and lack of education is much more dificult then dropping a few bombs
I understand the cause; a government stifling its people.
How do you propose that we attack these "root causes" without first taking out the government that would have prevented us from doing anything? (Study what has happened to North Korean "aid".)
I think people like you underestimate the Republicans. They are attacking the root causes. They just aren't so disconnected from the real world to think that the mere insertion of money into a fundamnentally corrupt system is going to fix anything. First, the system must be reformed, and that takes, you know, bombs.
I'd love to call myself a liberal; in the classic sense I am one. I find it ironic that the people calling themselves "liberals" aren't; they're just people who view the world through seriously rose-colored glasses and somehow their moral purity magically convinces Saddam to stop being a tyrant and then their moral purity remotely converts Iraq into the wonderland it would be without Bush, with at most the donation of a few dollars and a couple of protest rallies.... conducted in the US, where they can't do any good. I say "magic" because I'm yet to hear a plausible way that "understanding root causes" will effect any change, without exactly the actions we've taken. (Most of them seem to focus on an awful lot of magic on the part of Saddam, and all of his would-be successors.)
That's why I'm going to hold my nose and vote Bush; he isn't doing perfect but his view of the world is a hell of a lot more clear then the Left's is right now, which is really certain that if it were in charge, basically, things would just work out magically; I haven't heard a concrete plan at all.
Your message seems to be lacking a point. It suggests being critical of sources in a vague and general way, but has no specifics about the current story.
Are you suggesting that we dismiss this merely because it appears on the web? That's not "sophistication", that's just falling prey to the same fallacy, only in reverse! The reality is that the "web" status is a null factor.
Paul Graham's qualifications are freely available online. While you of course can't therefore accept everything he says uncritically, he isn't even a good example of "some guy with a blog saying things". He's been around for decades, doing real work, writing books on complicated subjects, and while I can't know for sure, if I had to lay money, the odds favor him being much more experienced than you. (Which is to say, his comments can have the type of value you seem to desire, not that they must. I personally largely agree with him but there are plenty of people with equal or more experience I do not agree with, some of them very highly respected; as a concrete "for instance" I don't agree with anybody who believes that only static type checking by the compiler can produce quality software. That's a lot of very big names.)
Similarly, this author's qualifications are freely available online. While I'm not sure I'd trust him to evaluate why Java is doing well, or to evaluate it from a technical standpoint, he seems to me to be in a very good position to evaluate how the industry interest in Java is faring, certainly much better than my position. (On the other hand, the incompetent use of a "Google-fight" is disconcerting; again, I'm not advocating blind acceptance or rejection.)
You don't directly say "This can be dismissed because it is on the web", but you sure seem to strongly imply it. Did you not finish your post before you hit "Submit", or are you really advocating falling into the exact same fallacy you think you are warning against?
What are you searching for on Google that leads you to nothing but spam?
Maybe I'm atypical... OK, I know I'm atypical... but I don't have that problem.
I suppose if your typical Google search is for the celebrity de jour you might get spam (and I've noticed the warez sites* and such are pretty spammy, but that's a fairly accurate reflection of their real state in the world!), but for anything of consequence I don't see spam.
*: Which I peruse for NoCD cracks for software I legitimately own. Seriouly. It may be "illegal" but I consider it totally ethical; what are they going to charge me with, anyhow? I have a paid copy and I'm not distributing. CD-checks and laptops on the go do not get along.
Think of me when you're having the best sex of your life!
True; with those instructions, "only" would definately be "best".
Even for highlighting the next menu option? (Honest question, I don't understand the internals, all I know is the result is absolutely unacceptable for the user.)
You seem to have forgotten the link; could you provide it, please?
Can we get one of these in my cable box? I can't believe it is two thousand fucking four and it takes upwards of three seconds for my cable box to register even the simplest of keypresses. I could program a damn Commodore 64 to be more responsive than that.
Comcast wonders why nobody seems to want their video on demand. I'll tell you why: Because even to scan their free stuff, you have to dedicate five minutes of your time, laboriously cursoring here, waiting for the cursor to get there, waiting, waiting, cursoring to the next thing, waiting, waiting, waiting, and hesitantly pushing the "action" button, and waiting, waiting, only to find you had one more cursor action queued up and waiting, waiting for it to take effect, waiting, waiting, waiting for the action to take effect on the wrong screen, pressing "back" too many times in frustration, and finally finding yourself back at the normal TV view, only to start this all again... except, maybe not.
My first-generation TiVo sometimes annoys me (I think the later ones are a lot more responsive), but I still love it. My cable box is utterly unusable. With one of these chips in there it would improve the user experience... well, almost infinitely since right now the user experience is effectively "zero".
And you also can't yell "fire" in a theatre and there is no protection for "fighting words". The right to free speech has a long history of not being absolute but we still consider ourselves as having it, despite the restrictions. Your examples prove nothing that isn't already well known by people who study the issue.
The point was that Bush does very few interviews, and so media are so concerned about losing that privilege that they will self-censor and not allow reuse of interviews that put him in a bad light. Bush doesn't have to say anything, but by only offering interviews with companies that toe the line, he is endorsing their attempts to intimidate using copyright.
Ultimately, you really have to conclude he is as free to only give interviews to those he choses as we all are. I submit it is less about "endorsing" and more about "toeing".
Part of free speech is having the right not to speak, and President or not, Bush still has that right.
You are free to draw whatever conclusions you choose based on his choices.
$200,000 AUD is roughly $140,000 US, which is roughly 2 developer years for a reasonable wage of $50,000 a year + bennies.
If you think you can create a secure, national scale voting system that you'd trust your country's future to in two man-years, I invite you to try. The experience will be educational. You might also gain some insight into why programmers notoriously underestimate how long things will take.
Regardless of whether you create a system in that time frame that you think you can trust, I can guarentee you I won't trust it.
One hint: While you've heard of "Occam" (although you seriously misapply it here), politicians haven't. Take a good, long look at the next ballot sometime, and don't forget multiple languages and assorted other sundry details that will start sucking your time like you wouldn't believe.
You sound like you're still in school. It gets harder in the real world, you know. ++votes isn't gonna cut it...
Also, you mention trying to get every path through the software. I've never aimed to complete any of these, maybe our apps have been different, but I've found that it's just not possible. Too many combinations.
:-)
Actually, that was my point, to establish the impossibility up front. Too many people doing "code it all and poke it at the end" write up a test script and think they are covering all the cases, when they don't even come close. You must first remove misconceptions in this arena before you can make progress
I wouldn't advocate the removal of real testers. But they need to be an adjunct to the automated, unit level testing with an architecture that allows deep automated testing, not a replacement. (If they are coders enough to add to the testing suite, so much the better!) Otherwise, those testers are boned. As you write more testing, the system tends to naturally stabalize into powerful, yet discrete, subsystems that often merely get capabilities added to them over time, so tests can often stay good and useful for many, many iterations unchanged.
Pokemon: Hey, I didn't say no originals... but note they still do that crap with "Connect to the opposite color to have all the fun."
Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Yes.
the Golden Sun series: No, that is by Camelot Co, Ltd. (Own the first one, not my style but a solid game.)
Advance Wars: Intelligent Systems, not nintendo. (Own the first one, haven't beat it yet. Would probably have gotten the second by now.)
Fire Emblem: Also Intelligent Systems.
Metroid Fusion: Yes, but Zero Mission: Remake, albeit one with actual effort.
Zelda: Four Swords: I had been under the impression that this was a remake of A Link to the Past that had multiplayer; I see now I was wrong. (But add A Link to the Past to the remake list...)
Now, please stop reading into what I said. Never said it was bad to do the remakes. I have Doom 2 and it's cool. But they've released like 20 remakes, maybe more if you count each E-Reader game seperately, to like 4 or 5 original games... that's about one original a year. Frankly, all they have to do to make me happy is to take the engine from Yoshi's Island, and make a new game from it. The content coming out of Nintendo is quite complacent.
I can't speak for everyone else, but when I say that Nintendo has gotten complacent with the gameboy, I usually put it this way: Name me the original games that Nintendo has put out for the Gameboy.
Make sure that you are getting Nintendo games, not just "gameboy" games.
The vast, vast majority of the Nintendo releases are: All Super Marios ever made, a number of other Super Nintendo retreads, and the latest, the downright insulting re-release of mostly-crappy Nintendo games at $20 apiece. Puh-leaze... I might have paid $20 for the bunch, but apiece?
(Don't forget the stupid E-Reader, either, with its own bumper crop of overpriced Nintendo games.)
Now, Nintendo has made at least a couple originals, but compared to the flood of shovelware, it doesn't much matter. (And most, if not all, of those originals have to tie into the Gamecube to... do something innovative? expand our gameplay horizons?... no, flip a couple of fucking bits so I can access all that I've actually already bought.) I'm still waiting for a new Super Mario game.
Compare this with Sega, who is on their third new Sonic the Hedgehog game. That is what we want from Nintendo.
I find it ironic that while I own a GBASP and am quite fond of it as a gaming platform, I find myself avoiding the Nintendo offerings like a plague. I don't have a Gamecube, have no intention of getting one, would still be offended at their transparent and shameless attempts to punish my Gameboy ownership without the corporate-approved Gamecube tie-ins, and am offended by the implication that I want to pay full price for games like Super Mario World * that I've already conquered on other platforms.
"Complacency" sums it up. "We've already made games, let the public buy them again." Fuck that, man. Thanks for the hardware, but I'll buy only the good stuff, and to date it isn't really coming from Nintendo.
Can you say "bread and circuses"?
Actually, that doesn't apply here. If a team is folding because nobody buys tickets, that is the clearest possible proof that we don't want that particular circus.
(Really, that saying has to be understood in a modern context. "Bread and circuses" no longer applies literally because we can afford all of each we could ever want, without intervention. It now really only applies to other types of large giveaways; Western Europe is probably the clearest example of this sort of thing, especially France, and is also the clearest example of the dangers the saying originally warned of.)
a virus could potentially damage millions of computers in a day of spreading.
We already live in that world. Viruses can already in theory toast BIOSes by flashing them with crap, or (equivalently for most people) destroying the OS. This new tech really wouldn't change anything (and BIOS destruction is likely to be "lower hanging fruit" for a while yet).
To sum up the AC's rather good post, science is not in the business of facts.
Your post descends into religious zealotry of a different, but no less real, kind.
Proof: For any significantly sized system, take a look at all the independen axes it has. For instance: The set of actions the user can take, the types of nouns the user can manipulate, the types of permissions the user can have, the number of environments the user may be in, etc. Even for a really simple program, that is typically at least 5 actions, 20 nouns, (lets estimate a minimal) 3 permission sets (no perm for the data, read only, read & write), and well in excess of 5 different environments (you need only count relevant differences, but this includes missing library A, missing library B, etc.). Even for this simple, simple program, that's 5*20*3*5, which is 1,500 scenarios, and yes, you can never be sure that precisely one of those will fail in a bad way.
Even at one minute a test, that's 25 hours, which is most of a person-week.
Thus, if you tested a enterprise class system for three days, you did little more than scratch the surface. Now, the "light at the end of the tunnel" is that most systems are not used equally across all of their theoretical capabilities, so you may well have gotten 90%+ of the use, but for the system itself, a vanishing fraction of the use cases. Nevertheless, as the system grows, it rapidly becomes harder to test even 90%.
(The most common error here is probably missing an environment change, since almost by definition you tested with only one environment.)
Bear in mind that such testing is still useful, as a final sanity check, but it is not sufficient. (I've seen a couple of comments that say part of the value of such testing is getting usability feedback; that really ought to be a seperate case, both because the tests you ought to design for usability are seperate, and because once someone has fuctionally tested the system they have become spoiled with pre-conceived notions, but that is better than nothing.)
How do you attack this problem? (Bear in mind almost nobody is doing this right today.)
Why can't you test GUI's? In my experience, it boils down to two major failings shared by nearly all toolkits:
The GUIs have chosen an architecture that is not conducive to testing; they require their own loop to be running, they don't allow you to drive them programmatically, they are designed for use, not testing. When you find a GUI that has an architecture at least partially conducive to testing, suddenly, lo, you can do some automated tests.
And in my case, I am talking serious testing that concerns things central to the use of my program. I counted 112 distinct programmatic paths that can be taken when the user presses the "down" key in my outliner. I was able to write a relatively concise test to cover all cases. Yes, code I thought was pretty good turned out to fail two specific cases (
Actually, my understanding is that evolution of existing life is fairly well established, it is still a gigantic question mark as to how life initially started; I consider the two questions seperate.
Evolution doesn't suffer from the problems you describe because as a living system, it is not pure random, there is a strong bias towards viable life forms. (Like I said, if you have the time, study the relevant math.) And theoretical objections must give way to observed phenomena if you want to consider your opinion "scientific"; ultimately, no matter how improbable the current world is, here it is.
Initial life does suffer from all of those problems, which is why it continues to be an interesting debate.
(The primary problem with your energy theory is simply that you have no evidence to back it up, no phenomena that require energy beings to explain. Thus, as a scientific theory, it hasn't really gotten to stage one yet. That proves nothing about its truth either way, but it does mean that I'm pretty unconvinced.)
are there really enough fucking stupid slashdot readers that really think arguments like "irreducible complexity" have interesting merit?
Disclosure: I was raised creationist, but after extremely seriously examining the facts now accept evolution. (A lot of that was an intensive study of computer evolution, where a lot of the phenomena I'm about to mention arise in a controlled and simplified environment.) I also still consider myself Christian, to a degree that if I wore it on my sleeve round these parts I would mostly be shunned.
Evolution is a scientific theory, and as such open to continuous questioning. You really shouldn't try to push it down people's throats and claim it is absolute, obvious truth either, which isn't the literal intent of your message but is strongly implied by it.
Irreducable complexity is probably the single best point against evolution I have ever seen. It cuts to the heart of the entire debate. Considered as a scientific theory, I think it probably ought to be taught as a standard part of the history of evolution as the best counter-argument ever brought to bear.
As with any good scientific theory, it could be tested. It failed those tests miserably, on every level. What that means is not that it was a stupid idea, or that people who have not taken time to study the issue and believe it are stupid. It means that we should not accept it as scientifically true, and that people who believe it is scientifically true either need to study more, or invest a lot of time in figuring out how to prove it true... good luck on that last one, by the way. Everyone can't be intimately familiar with all parts of science... and with no disrespect intended to anyone in particular, the mathematical theories about how evolution works that ultimately satisfied me are extremely heavy stuff. (Look up "schema theory" in evolutionary computation, but come with a lot of math in mind. Technically, you don't need anything above standard calculus to understand it but you need a lot of experience reading intensely mathematical works.)
In conclusion (for this part), "irreducability" does have "interesting merit" as a scientific argument, as did the crystal spheres and epicycles, phlostigon, and the "electrons orbiting the nucleous" atom model (Bohr, I think). Nevertheless, it is wrong.
Another of the interesting phenomena of evolution that it is proper to question is why it isn't smooth; why are there "punctuated equilibria"? I couldn't give a short answer (and it isn't 100% understood on a mathematical level yet as I understand it, although that's a very high standard), but I can tell you from experience that you can not create an evolving system that doesn't have them and still learns. If you try to repress them, the efficiency of the system drops like a rock; in the computer world this translates to finding an answer more slowly or not at all, in the real world into fragile ecosystems that repair themselves slowly or not at all.
(To my fellow Christians, and not to anybody else (hold the mocking comments, please), how do I justify this theologically? Ultimately, God is a God of truth; if you have to believe lies to believe in Him, you aren't believing in the God of the Bible I know. (Again, hold your mocking comments, please, heard them.) If overwhelming evidence is in conflict with our interpretation of the Bible, then either our interpretation is wrong, or "Eat and drink, for tommorow we die". (That's a reference to a specific verse, for you non-Christians.))
I still try for the funnies, but I've learned to avoid subtlety. My favorite postings are the ones that languish in obscurity, while the semi-obvious puns get recognized. "Least common denominator" in action.
For the first time I wish I was a subscriber; I remember enough about my favorite ignored post ever to find it, but I can't see my full history and it was months ago.
I know.
:-)
I'm trying to semi-humourously point out the real problem is cost-cutting.
Now that we've beaten these jokes into the ground, how about this crazy weather, eh?