Funnily enough, I've had the opposite experience: people who are younger, in terms of experience or age, are a lot more positive in their opinions and close-minded than older or more experienced people. I don't have a lot of theory around this, except that a more experienced person has had a lot more opportunity to be proven wrong about their preconceptions.
This matches my own personal experience. I can really only compare my "old" self with my "young" self, but I would say that the young me was more confrontational and irritatingly positive (you can use Perl for everything!), and more willing to do a lot of pointless after-hours work and be oncall. He was a lot less reflective and somewhat less rational regarding his decisionmaking. He had little broad perspective and familiarity with a few technologies that looked to him like all there was to know.
The older me is more knowledgeable, certainly, and more familiar with lots of "allied" tasks associated with programming. I'm a lot better at handling people. I'm a lot more willing to experiment or investigate new technologies for something rather than relay what's already in my toolbox.
This might seem paradoxical, but it makes sense to me. An inexperienced person has probably had few revelations like the hg example you give or using a functional programming language on a real project. An experienced person has a good feel for what kinds of tasks are no big deal and what takes a lot of time.
All that said, I dislike very much the idea that programmers are characterizable by their languages, their age or experience or their domain. Frankly I would leave that out of it and just do a straight interview (though you may be interested in analyzing differences after the fact).
The actual evidence we have is that, as a rule, for organisms on Earth, extinction is the norm rather than an exceptional event. The history of life on Earth is one of repeated mass extinctions, and continuous extinctions otherwise.
The idea that humans are "special", that in some way the rules of life on Earth do not apply to them, is attractive, and it probably has some merit. But in order to counter the actual evidence of Earth's history, all you really have is a sort of narrative about what humans are like and would do. It's as related to the real probability of human extinction as verbal arguments about "what you would do in a fight" are to actual combat.
A billion years is a very long time, and it's easy to imagine scenarios which, however unlikely, cause human extinction. A genetic disease which disrupts reproduction, that we all already have and so cannot isolate. The astronomical cataclysms you mention. Heck, our understanding of the structure of matter is pretty basic and dates to within the last 100 years--do you think that perhaps there are possible material instabilities that we don't yet understand that could somehow result in such a cataclysm?
We humans have exterminated many other species. Other forms of life we encounter may return the favor, for their own inscrutable reasons.
It even remains to be seen whether human beings can live in a self-sustaining way on planets that are not inherently habitable. When we have a thriving population on Venus, you can make the argument that something that makes Earth uninhabitable (for example, an atmospheric revolution by novel organisms, as has already happened in the planet's history) won't cause human extinction. But until then, you just can't say. And "I don't know" is a lot different than "I know it can't happen."
I can see two or three minor arguments for using a top-level.com address:
One is a result of your argument--among anyone who has a vague idea that domain names have to be purchased, they may have an understanding that it might be kind of expensive, and therefore it seems more "selective" than something which is obviously just a hierarchy. That is, the internal logic goes like this: "houston.dating.com" is just part of "dating.com", it's not special for houston, but "houstondating.com" is only for houston so there'll be a lot of locals in it.
The second is that people actually just screw up subdomains to a surprising degree. People seeing a sign will remember the words "houston dating dot com"--they never remember dots or hyphens or anything like that. So they go home and type "houston dating.com" or "houstondating.com" in their web browsers and get your site. (In actuality, they often type "www.houstondating.com" as well, regardless if that's correct or not).
There's a lot about the idea that's dumb, but I just want to talk about language standardization, since that's an idea that suckers even smart people.
For a decent programmer, switching languages is not really a problem. On the other hand, there's not a lot of point in having a proliferation of quite similar languages.
You're basically going to always have to write some C, whether you're doing some low-level control or interfacing to an API or whatever. For most business applications, this is a marginal task--that is, it takes place on an application's margins.
You're going to need some kind of scripting language, and you can make it object-oriented if you like--that's not a bad way of organizing some programs and helps keep a handle on the sometimes complex applications "scripts" become. These tasks are also marginal (they're management or stopgap or interfacing or, literally, scripting server-side resources together). I wouldn't choose Perl here, it would be Ruby or Python; but really, any of those are fine.
And then you'll need something for the really important stuff. And this is what kills me. Time after time, productivity studies show that terseness counts a lot for programmer productivity, and for quality (a programmer produces the same number of lines of code per unit time, regardless of language; and makes the same number of mistakes), and can otherwise show that Java is utter garbage for this task, but it's most frequently chosen anyway.
Java's not much better than C for terseness, and it's full of typing misfeatures that have never been shown to increase code quality. On the contrary, Java is such an unmanageable beast you have to use a program to type chunks of your program for you. About the best thing that can be said for it is that the JVMs aren't bad and can sometimes be used to run non-Java languages.
For the important stuff you'd think people would pick a family of languages that have been shown time and again to result in faster, higher-quality development: functional programming languages. But managers and developers alike resist it (unless the developer actually has experience with a functional programming language). Lots of people have speculated why and I'm not going to restate all that here.
I'll put my word in here for Erlang because it comes with so much technology and fills such a need in the non-marginal problem space of so many business applications. But Haskell or PLT Scheme or whatever would be good choices, too.
I recoil at the idea of picking a language because it might be popular with "average" developers. Who sets out to hire a large number of mediocre, interchangeable developers? If you choose Java, that's essentially what you're aiming at: a large number of minimally productive programmers producing reams of code that doesn't do very much.
None of this should override compelling external factors. Sometimes you really need some FORTH because you want to embed an interpreter in something. Sometimes your embedded wiki is in Perl and you're going to extend it with that, your corporate standard of Python be damned. And, yes, sometimes maybe Java is the right answer (though if it is, I haven't come across the question yet).
Now, look, we all know "any programming language can do anything." And we have all heard the religious arguments about all these things before. But surely, if a company is serious about "standardizing" it must do so on the basis of actual programmer productivity data and not on the basis of wild-ass guesses and the popularity of books? Continue to accept orthodoxy and be prepared to suffer a lack of excellence.
An irritatingly nightmarish experience
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TrueCrypt 6.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
I'm a semi- geek when it comes to Windows, a non-"Power User". But I had a need for this so I thought I would give TrueCrypt a whirl, and had a real nightmarish day and a half.
This being slashdot, I'm only inviting flames about the various things I'm doing wrong. But it does seem to me that TrueCrypt is missing a very obvious feature--encrypt other partitions in the same manner as the boot partition (that is, online and allow them to be mounted transparently) that would have saved me a lot of grief.
See, I have C: and D: partitions, and all the user profile directories are on D:, because that's how our IT department sets things up. Do you see what's coming? Well, I encrypted the system partition without a problem. But now, the D: partition needs to be encrypted, and there's no way to do that without destroying it.
Okay, fine, "back up" and "restore", right? Except that applications, including TrueCrypt and Windows, are pretty highly dependent on the presence of that profile directory, as I learned to my moaning grief. (Yes! TrueCrypt apparently stores which volumes you want "automatically" mounted in your profile directory!)
One new TrueCrypt-encrypted NTFS filesystem later, and I realized there was no way to get the thing mounted before anyone logs in. Or rather, there probably is a way, but it's nothing like editing AUTOEXEC.BAT or something simple. There are registry keys that can be edited but "startup" in Windows-land always seems to refer to "user logs in" and not "boot time."
Additionally, the TrueCrypt command-line did not seem to work as advertised. I'm not a genius but I do carefully read documentation and double-check command-lines before I issue them, and it should not have been possible for TrueCrypt to attempt to remount and repair the system partition as another drive letter, but it did. So I gave up on my dream of having an encrypted C: and D: mounted at boot time, so the user profile directory can be there waiting for the user to log in.
Did I mention how grumpy Windows and everything else gets when the profile directory goes away? Very grumpy indeed. A forest of "registry may be corrupted" error messages greets any attempt to change anything, and so forth. After struggling with these kinds of issues for some time, I really just wiped D: for good and let the system "rebuild" the profile directories on first login. Now I have a bunch of reconfiguration to do and things still aren't right (for example, start menus aren't correct because lots of programs had shortcuts in D:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu).
It really seems to me that this is not that unusual a situation (two partitions need to be mounted to boot the system) that should be accommodated by something like TrueCrypt. I'm disappointed in TrueCrypt, red-bloodedly refreshed in my hatred of Windows and harboring evil thoughts toward my company IT department.
The term I like to use is "phenomenon." Evolution--change over time--is a natural phenomenon. That species change over time, that ancestral characteristics give rise to derived ones and that new species arise, these are things that happen. There's no "theory", "hypothesis" or "conjecture" there.
There can be a theory of evolution--an explanatory framework and system of thinking about causes and effects--but "true" or "false" it doesn't mean that the phenomenon it explains doesn't exist. There is a music theory as well, and good or bad no opinion you have about its explanatory power means that music doesn't exist.
Well, to play Devil's Advocate, the police and Perverted Justice are entirely capable of catching "pedophiles" without Chris Hansen's involvement. He is someone who takes advantage of underage sex for his own self-aggrandizement--do you see the difference?
To be honest, I'm a little squeamish about theses sting operations... essentially you're arresting people prospectively for a crime they have not committed. In some cases the decoy is over the age of consent, anyway, no matter what she may have said online--if she wasn't a decoy and the act had been carried out, no crime would have been committed. And you never know if the crime "would have" been committed, anyway--if the perp would have chickened out; if he was internally judging this to be a game of age play between people capable of consent, and so forth. To make an analogy, driving angrily to your ex-husband's house with a gun in the car is not a crime.
I suspect what ends up happening is that these people are so scared they accept some kind of plea bargain or diversionary treatment and the real punishment is the disruption in their lives by revealing their scumbag-ness to their friends and relatives. So in that sense maybe the Chris Hansen show really is the point and the law enforcement so much window-dressing. I don't know.
Getting paid to deceive child predators and see them arrested doesn't seem sick at all to me.
It's not. That's what the police officers, and (maybe) the PJ decoys do. Chris Hansen creates a public spectacle out of it to titillate prurient interests, that's what's sick.
Referring to religion as mythology is also HATE speech.
I doubt I've read a more desperate or idiotic ploy. Religion and mythology are the same thing. A non-believer such as yourself doesn't believe in the Greek myths and as such you term them "mythology", do you not? You might think your religion is special, and you have a right to, but until you also think Muslims and Buddhists and Zoroastrians and Neopagans are equally special, then how can you profess not to be an unbeliever--of their "mythology"--just as much as I?
Lumping people who don't believe in your particular brand of religion in with people who advocate the lynching of blacks or the extermination of gays (which is real "hate speech") is a ridiculous hyperbole that ensures anything you say need not be taken seriously, and especially skewers the supposed umbrage you take at the "intolerance" of people who disagree with you. It turns you into comic figure rather than a participant in a discussion.
Yeah, reading this I can't support the indictment for violation of terms of service for unauthorized use: though I think it might be technically justified the implications of it are odious.
I do think that the bulk of the punishment should be social in this case... the woman is a scumbag, and should be a pariah. In particular if we could find a way to make life unlivable for her, so that she made the choice to take her own life, I would be happy to participate in it and encourage the activity in any legal way.
Usually "agnosticism" means someone who actively believes you cannot know whether God exists or not. Atheism comes in two flavors: strong and weak.
"Strong" and "weak" refer to the comprehensiveness of the propositions encompassed, not to the degree of conviction or its vigor. A weak atheist position is that of a person who is without a belief in God. They don't "actively disbelieve" in God any more than you "actively disbelieve" in the brown chicken in my attic. There is no reason to think such a chicken (or God) exists--you simply lack belief in it, without "denying" the chicken. Or God.
A strong atheist position is the position that no God exists, supported by proof, evidence or belief. Whether this is the sort of thing that can be proved is perhaps open to debate--reasonable people disagree on whether it is a religious belief or not.
In my view, it's pretty slam dunk to see that any time a religious belief has resulted in something testable that could be offered as proof or disproof of God's existence, we have found that that sort of God doesn't exist. I don't know how many times you need to be told by someone that there is a chicken behind this door, no really, only to find when you open it that there is no chicken, before you suspect that there probably aren't any chickens here at all.
The fact is that most people can make what they do sound interesting, it just takes a bit of practice, and trying to imagine what aspects would be interesting to a non-specialist.
I've found that "making a subject interesting", in the sense of making a special effort to figure out what appeals to "an outsider", is unnecessary if the following apply:
You actually care about the subject; that is, you are passionate, not merely opinionated about it.
You are actually knowledgeable about it.
You shouldn't pooh-pooh the "not meeting people at work factor"--in IT, especially, it's often hard for a number of reasons, not just hours, to have a social life "outside" work to replace the one most people develop in the workplace. An engaged programmer can't help thinking about programs, and the--oh, let's call it the "task profile"--of writing a program doesn't really fit neatly into the small chunks of time, delineated at a set begin and end time, that other office jobs do. Of course you can and should develop natural interests in things outside work, but everyone else does that, too, and meets colleagues at work.
I found working in health care to be great for that, though, and you should always remember there are IT jobs at places that aren't strictly technology companies. In my experience they tend to be a lot more interesting, as well.
You simply CANNOT in any sane world replicate the large scale clustering, distributed transaction management, connectors, and resource management capabilities of a good J2EE server. Furthermore you WILL need that kind of thing if you want to build a piece of software that has requirements like ABSOLUTELY no single failure under any circumstances can ever loose a transaction and you process 10k transactions per second with 5 9's reliability 24/7/365.
Yes, you can, and pretty easily, too, using Erlang. The contortions you have to go through in Java to get messaging, queuing, bus-connections, failover, clustering and all that stuff to work is ridiculous. You can spend hours declaring, configuring, creating adapters, installing drivers, extensions, hibernate properties, blah blah blah and you're not only no closer to being done, you get to write your logic in... Java!
Java goons can spend days talking about persistence layers and attribute storage and web service connecters to the enterprise bus. And after weeks of hobbling along and some purchases of middleware and object brokers and JMS this and that (and don't forget the servers to run it) they can start writing a bajillion classes and interfaces for every function. All this to support a messaging system with no more functionality than this:
resource ! {self(), {request, Key}
And no, that's not the abstraction or exposed interface--that's the nitty gritty detail.
Java--the technology, the language, and the culture is a joke. Unfortunately, as you say, it's ever so Serious and Ready for the Enterprise--so it's not a very funny joke. When you actually get your Enterprise Solution delivered (never anything so Un-Serious and Un-Enterprise as a program in Java World), you now get to deal with upgrade and dependency headaches, schema changes and--why is my RPC performing so poorly? Marshalling overhead? How do I fix that? Throw away my objects, throw vectors of strings at it, buy faster CPUs, throw some more Tibco on it, please!
Five 9s? Erlang has been used to build systems with Nine 9s. In your list of desirable features (many of which don't inherently require teams of engineers poring over UML diagrams but in fact are trivial or easier in Erlang). I mean, good God, why should you have to "know exactly what you are going to write first" just to distribute load and share data amongst servers? Why should you need "special training" to write an application that can automatically and statefully fail over from one node to another? Next you're going to tell me the answer to software reliability is just to make sure you don't have any bugs in your application!
In your more or less random list of requirements you forgot online code upgrades (with no sessions dropping, please), task migration and interactive management.
There is nothing wrong with a full up J2EE environment. It simply exists for certain specific purposes.
Paul Graham had it right when he said that Java was popular in corporate environments because it produces a lot of what looks like work. If you want a lot of mediocre people busily coding away--well, not coding; declaring, annotating, configuring, setting build properties and constructing--then Java really is great for that specific purpose.
The Coward above hasn't really thought this through. First off, the conduction he's talking about is of interest on the pan, not the stove--the pot supports on a backpacking stove (the kind that get made out of titanium) are there to do just that: support the pot. Even on real gourmet gas cooktops the flame contacts the pan, not some kind of conduction plate. With titanium, you can make a really light stove because the stove supports and other pieces can be thin but won't bend, like they would with aluminum. It's strength per ounce that is the primary consideration.
Now, cooksets (the pan) also come in titanium, and it's for the same reason. "Spreading the heat out" sounds like a good idea, and it is a good idea in a gourmet kitchen, but it's a secondary consideration to weight, on the trail. Backpackers don't carry enameled cast iron pots or copper-bottomed aluminum pans on a trip, because fancy heat conduction is of minor importance compared to lugging it around. Because aluminum is weak, you need to use more of it in a cookset. Compare, for example, a typical three-piece cookset: stainless weighs in at well over a pound, aluminum at 14 ounces and titanium at half that, 7 ounces.
Obviously, the titanium products are aimed at people for whom weight is a primary consideration, but really, it only takes one backpacking trip to appreciate that that's essentially everyone. A 7-ounce weight savings may not seem like a lot, but repeat that over all your equipment and you might be saving several pounds. At about a $15 price difference for the titanium set over the aluminum set, given the longer lifetime, that can definitely be worth it.
Bill Bryson demonstrated pretty conclusively that the notion of "political correctness" was a made-up strategem by the right; and that nearly all the "examples" of political correctness in language were actually terms created to populate "humorous" lists promulgated by right-wing pundits. "Political correctness" is a complete strawman.
Times change, societal expectations change, and the stuff we deem appropriate for kids changes because of that. Would you show your kids "Bre'er Rabbit" despite the blatant racist overtones? How about the Disney versions of "Dumbo" or "Peter Pan" (which are pretty bad themselves, if you watch them anew)?
I don't remember Song of the South that well, but I loved the music, which I had on audiotape. I would have to watch it myself first. We haven't got to Dumbo yet, but we have watched Peter Pan a few times. My four-year old has no concept of race or of treating people of a race badly, using stereotypes. I trust that as he comes to understand these things he'll also come to understand the historical context that made unacceptable behavior once seem acceptable.
In short, I expect to be able to make my own decisions about what to show my four-year-old. For this I need to be informed, so I'm glad that this "warning" exists, and if I had any desire to show my kid Sesame Street (which I don't really: old or new it's always been a waste of time that can be more entertainingly and creatively spent--I don't know why people lionize the media of their youth so much) I probably would. This "warning" is just stating their intentions--which you can hardly argue with, and inviting parents to decide on which side of "may" they want to land. I don't mind that.
How about Pepe LePew, forcing himself on all those poor female cats who wanted nothing to do with him? Do we really think attempted rape is appropriate entertainment for kids?
It depends what you mean by "contested": the lawsuit which resulted in an electoral result by fiat of the Supreme Court was brought by Bush to stop the actual counting of votes by lawful request.
I think other states don't even have Voter's Pamphlets, or any equivalent. No wonder things are so screwey.
I suspect that they, as they do in California (where I have lived), do have complete voter pamphlet information (candidate statements, arguments about initiatives, initiative texts, etc.), but of course, these arrive independently of the ballot so I suspect far fewer voters actually consult them prior to voting.
One of the potential problems with our system is that it does allow vote buying: in theory, someone could pay you to vote a certain way, and ask to see your ballot before you seal the envelope, or even fill it out for you.
I'm a big fan of the Oregon system, as well. It doesn't "solve" vote buying, but that's not a problem because a voter is a terrible place to buy votes--no election is going to be swayed by people being individually coerced to vote a certain way, without the mass coercion being drawn to the attention of the authorities.
In other states, vote buying doesn't really work, because you have no reasonable way to prove which way you voted, so you could simply lie to the person who offered to pay you; everyone knows this so vote buying doesn't usually happen.
Actually, this is wrong, because you can vote absentee in all those other states and prove your vote in the exact same way.
No, where voting systems are vulnerable to exploitation is the collecting and transmitting of votes to the recorder, and at the recorder, where the votes are counted. In Oregon, there are no precincts with boxes of ballots to mislay or alter--it's a distributed system with a bunch of individual messages in the custody of the USPS: not perfect, but certainly superior to a few cardboard boxes being driven from the high school to the county recorder. It seems pretty clear elections in Oregon are safer than in any other jurisdiction in the United States, besides the other benefits people have mentioned (more knowledgeable voters, higher turnout).
At the recorder, the votes are counted automatically. A well-placed fraud here, just as in any other voting jurisdiction, could change an election result. I'm not sure there's a general solution to this problem besides security and accountability measures. In some jurisdictions in Europe, a panel of representatives from the political parties oversees a hand-count by volunteers, but I doubt this would work in the U.S.: too many counters required, for one--you'd probably need to pay them, and that could get real expensive; and secondly, I don't trust any political party and would be loathe to give them official power in any capacity in the election process.
Maybe Lawsuit Man is right and votes should be counted by hand, whatever the expense; and maybe "public oversight" is sufficient. Personally I'd have to be convinced that that's actually better than automated counting with the possibility of hand recounts.
There is, of course, the additional factor that a PC doesn't just have to be used for games. My PC is also a word processor, an Internet terminal, a DAW, a video editor, and so on. If you own a PC purely for gaming, ok then, but I'm going to guess most people get secondary use out of ti and that does factor in to the price.
The reason why "PC game detractors" focus so much on high-end graphics hardware is that 1) it is what distinguishes the PC gamer's primary gaming device from the general-use computer the console gamer probably already has; and 2) it's one of the principal "advantages" PC gamers claim over consoles.
You make a perfectly reasonable argument that with a few hundred dollars, maybe spread over a few years, I can have "console-equivalent" graphics. Fine. But then, what's the point, when everything else about the PC gaming experience--for me: this is obviously subjective--is worse than with a console? I'm playing games on my "computer monitor" rather than with my big-screen TV, I'm holed up in my office rather than on my couch with my family, I'm clicking on things and typing rather than flying, driving or shooting. That's not to say that those things have to be part of the experience, and I'm not trying to dis those who prefer the context of PC game play, but it's not for me.
If I did move my PC out to the couch, get myself a wireless keyboard and mouse (hard to see how this would be that comfortable without a desk to put them on, though) and maybe other controllers, where would I be? I'd get to play driver setup games, software installation shuffles, the DLL hell gauntlet and so forth; and after I'd completed those levels, where would I end up? With access to a bunch of games I'd not be playing as intended (with graphics turned down, sitting further away from a lower-resolution screen than designed) and which, as far as I can tell, I don't want to play (FPS and RTS don't appeal).
This is all a matter of degree (of course there are non-RTS/non-FPS games for PCs); subjectivity (I don't expect someone else's experience or sense of fun to match mine) and it's a false dichotomy anyway (I'll bet many if not most gamers have some console play and some PC play). But I wouldn't be surprised when people talk about the high cost of high-end graphics hardware when in my mind (and in the minds, probably, of most "console gamers") it's the primary selling point.
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Funnily enough, I've had the opposite experience: people who are younger, in terms of experience or age, are a lot more positive in their opinions and close-minded than older or more experienced people. I don't have a lot of theory around this, except that a more experienced person has had a lot more opportunity to be proven wrong about their preconceptions.
This matches my own personal experience. I can really only compare my "old" self with my "young" self, but I would say that the young me was more confrontational and irritatingly positive (you can use Perl for everything!), and more willing to do a lot of pointless after-hours work and be oncall. He was a lot less reflective and somewhat less rational regarding his decisionmaking. He had little broad perspective and familiarity with a few technologies that looked to him like all there was to know.
The older me is more knowledgeable, certainly, and more familiar with lots of "allied" tasks associated with programming. I'm a lot better at handling people. I'm a lot more willing to experiment or investigate new technologies for something rather than relay what's already in my toolbox.
This might seem paradoxical, but it makes sense to me. An inexperienced person has probably had few revelations like the hg example you give or using a functional programming language on a real project. An experienced person has a good feel for what kinds of tasks are no big deal and what takes a lot of time.
All that said, I dislike very much the idea that programmers are characterizable by their languages, their age or experience or their domain. Frankly I would leave that out of it and just do a straight interview (though you may be interested in analyzing differences after the fact).
The actual evidence we have is that, as a rule, for organisms on Earth, extinction is the norm rather than an exceptional event. The history of life on Earth is one of repeated mass extinctions, and continuous extinctions otherwise.
The idea that humans are "special", that in some way the rules of life on Earth do not apply to them, is attractive, and it probably has some merit. But in order to counter the actual evidence of Earth's history, all you really have is a sort of narrative about what humans are like and would do. It's as related to the real probability of human extinction as verbal arguments about "what you would do in a fight" are to actual combat.
A billion years is a very long time, and it's easy to imagine scenarios which, however unlikely, cause human extinction. A genetic disease which disrupts reproduction, that we all already have and so cannot isolate. The astronomical cataclysms you mention. Heck, our understanding of the structure of matter is pretty basic and dates to within the last 100 years--do you think that perhaps there are possible material instabilities that we don't yet understand that could somehow result in such a cataclysm?
We humans have exterminated many other species. Other forms of life we encounter may return the favor, for their own inscrutable reasons.
It even remains to be seen whether human beings can live in a self-sustaining way on planets that are not inherently habitable. When we have a thriving population on Venus, you can make the argument that something that makes Earth uninhabitable (for example, an atmospheric revolution by novel organisms, as has already happened in the planet's history) won't cause human extinction. But until then, you just can't say. And "I don't know" is a lot different than "I know it can't happen."
Use the HTML entity for Gödel?
I usually reach right back in the google results in the hope of getting one with the freshest expiration date.
I can see two or three minor arguments for using a top-level .com address:
One is a result of your argument--among anyone who has a vague idea that domain names have to be purchased, they may have an understanding that it might be kind of expensive, and therefore it seems more "selective" than something which is obviously just a hierarchy. That is, the internal logic goes like this: "houston.dating.com" is just part of "dating.com", it's not special for houston, but "houstondating.com" is only for houston so there'll be a lot of locals in it.
The second is that people actually just screw up subdomains to a surprising degree. People seeing a sign will remember the words "houston dating dot com"--they never remember dots or hyphens or anything like that. So they go home and type "houston dating.com" or "houstondating.com" in their web browsers and get your site. (In actuality, they often type "www.houstondating.com" as well, regardless if that's correct or not).
There's a lot about the idea that's dumb, but I just want to talk about language standardization, since that's an idea that suckers even smart people.
For a decent programmer, switching languages is not really a problem. On the other hand, there's not a lot of point in having a proliferation of quite similar languages.
You're basically going to always have to write some C, whether you're doing some low-level control or interfacing to an API or whatever. For most business applications, this is a marginal task--that is, it takes place on an application's margins.
You're going to need some kind of scripting language, and you can make it object-oriented if you like--that's not a bad way of organizing some programs and helps keep a handle on the sometimes complex applications "scripts" become. These tasks are also marginal (they're management or stopgap or interfacing or, literally, scripting server-side resources together). I wouldn't choose Perl here, it would be Ruby or Python; but really, any of those are fine.
And then you'll need something for the really important stuff. And this is what kills me. Time after time, productivity studies show that terseness counts a lot for programmer productivity, and for quality (a programmer produces the same number of lines of code per unit time, regardless of language; and makes the same number of mistakes), and can otherwise show that Java is utter garbage for this task, but it's most frequently chosen anyway.
Java's not much better than C for terseness, and it's full of typing misfeatures that have never been shown to increase code quality. On the contrary, Java is such an unmanageable beast you have to use a program to type chunks of your program for you. About the best thing that can be said for it is that the JVMs aren't bad and can sometimes be used to run non-Java languages.
For the important stuff you'd think people would pick a family of languages that have been shown time and again to result in faster, higher-quality development: functional programming languages. But managers and developers alike resist it (unless the developer actually has experience with a functional programming language). Lots of people have speculated why and I'm not going to restate all that here.
I'll put my word in here for Erlang because it comes with so much technology and fills such a need in the non-marginal problem space of so many business applications. But Haskell or PLT Scheme or whatever would be good choices, too.
I recoil at the idea of picking a language because it might be popular with "average" developers. Who sets out to hire a large number of mediocre, interchangeable developers? If you choose Java, that's essentially what you're aiming at: a large number of minimally productive programmers producing reams of code that doesn't do very much.
None of this should override compelling external factors. Sometimes you really need some FORTH because you want to embed an interpreter in something. Sometimes your embedded wiki is in Perl and you're going to extend it with that, your corporate standard of Python be damned. And, yes, sometimes maybe Java is the right answer (though if it is, I haven't come across the question yet).
Now, look, we all know "any programming language can do anything." And we have all heard the religious arguments about all these things before. But surely, if a company is serious about "standardizing" it must do so on the basis of actual programmer productivity data and not on the basis of wild-ass guesses and the popularity of books? Continue to accept orthodoxy and be prepared to suffer a lack of excellence.
I'm a semi- geek when it comes to Windows, a non-"Power User". But I had a need for this so I thought I would give TrueCrypt a whirl, and had a real nightmarish day and a half.
This being slashdot, I'm only inviting flames about the various things I'm doing wrong. But it does seem to me that TrueCrypt is missing a very obvious feature--encrypt other partitions in the same manner as the boot partition (that is, online and allow them to be mounted transparently) that would have saved me a lot of grief.
See, I have C: and D: partitions, and all the user profile directories are on D:, because that's how our IT department sets things up. Do you see what's coming? Well, I encrypted the system partition without a problem. But now, the D: partition needs to be encrypted, and there's no way to do that without destroying it.
Okay, fine, "back up" and "restore", right? Except that applications, including TrueCrypt and Windows, are pretty highly dependent on the presence of that profile directory, as I learned to my moaning grief. (Yes! TrueCrypt apparently stores which volumes you want "automatically" mounted in your profile directory!)
One new TrueCrypt-encrypted NTFS filesystem later, and I realized there was no way to get the thing mounted before anyone logs in. Or rather, there probably is a way, but it's nothing like editing AUTOEXEC.BAT or something simple. There are registry keys that can be edited but "startup" in Windows-land always seems to refer to "user logs in" and not "boot time."
Additionally, the TrueCrypt command-line did not seem to work as advertised. I'm not a genius but I do carefully read documentation and double-check command-lines before I issue them, and it should not have been possible for TrueCrypt to attempt to remount and repair the system partition as another drive letter, but it did. So I gave up on my dream of having an encrypted C: and D: mounted at boot time, so the user profile directory can be there waiting for the user to log in.
Did I mention how grumpy Windows and everything else gets when the profile directory goes away? Very grumpy indeed. A forest of "registry may be corrupted" error messages greets any attempt to change anything, and so forth. After struggling with these kinds of issues for some time, I really just wiped D: for good and let the system "rebuild" the profile directories on first login. Now I have a bunch of reconfiguration to do and things still aren't right (for example, start menus aren't correct because lots of programs had shortcuts in D:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu).
It really seems to me that this is not that unusual a situation (two partitions need to be mounted to boot the system) that should be accommodated by something like TrueCrypt. I'm disappointed in TrueCrypt, red-bloodedly refreshed in my hatred of Windows and harboring evil thoughts toward my company IT department.
The term I like to use is "phenomenon." Evolution--change over time--is a natural phenomenon. That species change over time, that ancestral characteristics give rise to derived ones and that new species arise, these are things that happen. There's no "theory", "hypothesis" or "conjecture" there.
There can be a theory of evolution--an explanatory framework and system of thinking about causes and effects--but "true" or "false" it doesn't mean that the phenomenon it explains doesn't exist. There is a music theory as well, and good or bad no opinion you have about its explanatory power means that music doesn't exist.
Well, to play Devil's Advocate, the police and Perverted Justice are entirely capable of catching "pedophiles" without Chris Hansen's involvement. He is someone who takes advantage of underage sex for his own self-aggrandizement--do you see the difference?
To be honest, I'm a little squeamish about theses sting operations... essentially you're arresting people prospectively for a crime they have not committed. In some cases the decoy is over the age of consent, anyway, no matter what she may have said online--if she wasn't a decoy and the act had been carried out, no crime would have been committed. And you never know if the crime "would have" been committed, anyway--if the perp would have chickened out; if he was internally judging this to be a game of age play between people capable of consent, and so forth. To make an analogy, driving angrily to your ex-husband's house with a gun in the car is not a crime.
I suspect what ends up happening is that these people are so scared they accept some kind of plea bargain or diversionary treatment and the real punishment is the disruption in their lives by revealing their scumbag-ness to their friends and relatives. So in that sense maybe the Chris Hansen show really is the point and the law enforcement so much window-dressing. I don't know.
It's not. That's what the police officers, and (maybe) the PJ decoys do. Chris Hansen creates a public spectacle out of it to titillate prurient interests, that's what's sick.
I doubt I've read a more desperate or idiotic ploy. Religion and mythology are the same thing. A non-believer such as yourself doesn't believe in the Greek myths and as such you term them "mythology", do you not? You might think your religion is special, and you have a right to, but until you also think Muslims and Buddhists and Zoroastrians and Neopagans are equally special, then how can you profess not to be an unbeliever--of their "mythology"--just as much as I?
Lumping people who don't believe in your particular brand of religion in with people who advocate the lynching of blacks or the extermination of gays (which is real "hate speech") is a ridiculous hyperbole that ensures anything you say need not be taken seriously, and especially skewers the supposed umbrage you take at the "intolerance" of people who disagree with you. It turns you into comic figure rather than a participant in a discussion.
Yeah, reading this I can't support the indictment for violation of terms of service for unauthorized use: though I think it might be technically justified the implications of it are odious.
I do think that the bulk of the punishment should be social in this case... the woman is a scumbag, and should be a pariah. In particular if we could find a way to make life unlivable for her, so that she made the choice to take her own life, I would be happy to participate in it and encourage the activity in any legal way.
Look, I didn't spend all those years playing Dungeons and Dragons and not learn a little something about courage.
Usually "agnosticism" means someone who actively believes you cannot know whether God exists or not. Atheism comes in two flavors: strong and weak.
"Strong" and "weak" refer to the comprehensiveness of the propositions encompassed, not to the degree of conviction or its vigor. A weak atheist position is that of a person who is without a belief in God. They don't "actively disbelieve" in God any more than you "actively disbelieve" in the brown chicken in my attic. There is no reason to think such a chicken (or God) exists--you simply lack belief in it, without "denying" the chicken. Or God.
A strong atheist position is the position that no God exists, supported by proof, evidence or belief. Whether this is the sort of thing that can be proved is perhaps open to debate--reasonable people disagree on whether it is a religious belief or not.
In my view, it's pretty slam dunk to see that any time a religious belief has resulted in something testable that could be offered as proof or disproof of God's existence, we have found that that sort of God doesn't exist. I don't know how many times you need to be told by someone that there is a chicken behind this door, no really, only to find when you open it that there is no chicken, before you suspect that there probably aren't any chickens here at all.
I've found that "making a subject interesting", in the sense of making a special effort to figure out what appeals to "an outsider", is unnecessary if the following apply:
You shouldn't pooh-pooh the "not meeting people at work factor"--in IT, especially, it's often hard for a number of reasons, not just hours, to have a social life "outside" work to replace the one most people develop in the workplace. An engaged programmer can't help thinking about programs, and the--oh, let's call it the "task profile"--of writing a program doesn't really fit neatly into the small chunks of time, delineated at a set begin and end time, that other office jobs do. Of course you can and should develop natural interests in things outside work, but everyone else does that, too, and meets colleagues at work.
I found working in health care to be great for that, though, and you should always remember there are IT jobs at places that aren't strictly technology companies. In my experience they tend to be a lot more interesting, as well.
Yes, you can, and pretty easily, too, using Erlang. The contortions you have to go through in Java to get messaging, queuing, bus-connections, failover, clustering and all that stuff to work is ridiculous. You can spend hours declaring, configuring, creating adapters, installing drivers, extensions, hibernate properties, blah blah blah and you're not only no closer to being done, you get to write your logic in... Java!
Java goons can spend days talking about persistence layers and attribute storage and web service connecters to the enterprise bus. And after weeks of hobbling along and some purchases of middleware and object brokers and JMS this and that (and don't forget the servers to run it) they can start writing a bajillion classes and interfaces for every function. All this to support a messaging system with no more functionality than this:
resource ! {self(), {request, Key}And no, that's not the abstraction or exposed interface--that's the nitty gritty detail.
Java--the technology, the language, and the culture is a joke. Unfortunately, as you say, it's ever so Serious and Ready for the Enterprise--so it's not a very funny joke. When you actually get your Enterprise Solution delivered (never anything so Un-Serious and Un-Enterprise as a program in Java World), you now get to deal with upgrade and dependency headaches, schema changes and--why is my RPC performing so poorly? Marshalling overhead? How do I fix that? Throw away my objects, throw vectors of strings at it, buy faster CPUs, throw some more Tibco on it, please!
Five 9s? Erlang has been used to build systems with Nine 9s. In your list of desirable features (many of which don't inherently require teams of engineers poring over UML diagrams but in fact are trivial or easier in Erlang). I mean, good God, why should you have to "know exactly what you are going to write first" just to distribute load and share data amongst servers? Why should you need "special training" to write an application that can automatically and statefully fail over from one node to another? Next you're going to tell me the answer to software reliability is just to make sure you don't have any bugs in your application!
In your more or less random list of requirements you forgot online code upgrades (with no sessions dropping, please), task migration and interactive management.
Paul Graham had it right when he said that Java was popular in corporate environments because it produces a lot of what looks like work. If you want a lot of mediocre people busily coding away--well, not coding; declaring, annotating, configuring, setting build properties and constructing--then Java really is great for that specific purpose.
The Coward above hasn't really thought this through. First off, the conduction he's talking about is of interest on the pan, not the stove--the pot supports on a backpacking stove (the kind that get made out of titanium) are there to do just that: support the pot. Even on real gourmet gas cooktops the flame contacts the pan, not some kind of conduction plate. With titanium, you can make a really light stove because the stove supports and other pieces can be thin but won't bend, like they would with aluminum. It's strength per ounce that is the primary consideration.
Now, cooksets (the pan) also come in titanium, and it's for the same reason. "Spreading the heat out" sounds like a good idea, and it is a good idea in a gourmet kitchen, but it's a secondary consideration to weight, on the trail. Backpackers don't carry enameled cast iron pots or copper-bottomed aluminum pans on a trip, because fancy heat conduction is of minor importance compared to lugging it around. Because aluminum is weak, you need to use more of it in a cookset. Compare, for example, a typical three-piece cookset: stainless weighs in at well over a pound, aluminum at 14 ounces and titanium at half that, 7 ounces.
Obviously, the titanium products are aimed at people for whom weight is a primary consideration, but really, it only takes one backpacking trip to appreciate that that's essentially everyone. A 7-ounce weight savings may not seem like a lot, but repeat that over all your equipment and you might be saving several pounds. At about a $15 price difference for the titanium set over the aluminum set, given the longer lifetime, that can definitely be worth it.
This is a really perceptive comment, thanks.
Recently I saw (on youtube, I think), a Law and Order parody an Sesame Street. What the hell parents are showing their preschoolers Law and Order?
Bill Bryson demonstrated pretty conclusively that the notion of "political correctness" was a made-up strategem by the right; and that nearly all the "examples" of political correctness in language were actually terms created to populate "humorous" lists promulgated by right-wing pundits. "Political correctness" is a complete strawman.
I don't remember Song of the South that well, but I loved the music, which I had on audiotape. I would have to watch it myself first. We haven't got to Dumbo yet, but we have watched Peter Pan a few times. My four-year old has no concept of race or of treating people of a race badly, using stereotypes. I trust that as he comes to understand these things he'll also come to understand the historical context that made unacceptable behavior once seem acceptable.
In short, I expect to be able to make my own decisions about what to show my four-year-old. For this I need to be informed, so I'm glad that this "warning" exists, and if I had any desire to show my kid Sesame Street (which I don't really: old or new it's always been a waste of time that can be more entertainingly and creatively spent--I don't know why people lionize the media of their youth so much) I probably would. This "warning" is just stating their intentions--which you can hardly argue with, and inviting parents to decide on which side of "may" they want to land. I don't mind that.
That's just...ridiculous hyperbole.
This is true--Sesame Street never showed anything like that. Sid and Marty Krofft, though, made it a staple of all their shows.
It depends what you mean by "contested": the lawsuit which resulted in an electoral result by fiat of the Supreme Court was brought by Bush to stop the actual counting of votes by lawful request.
They aren't necessarily hand-counted, my understanding is the ballots themselves are counted by optical scanner.
I suspect that they, as they do in California (where I have lived), do have complete voter pamphlet information (candidate statements, arguments about initiatives, initiative texts, etc.), but of course, these arrive independently of the ballot so I suspect far fewer voters actually consult them prior to voting.
I'm a big fan of the Oregon system, as well. It doesn't "solve" vote buying, but that's not a problem because a voter is a terrible place to buy votes--no election is going to be swayed by people being individually coerced to vote a certain way, without the mass coercion being drawn to the attention of the authorities.
Actually, this is wrong, because you can vote absentee in all those other states and prove your vote in the exact same way.
No, where voting systems are vulnerable to exploitation is the collecting and transmitting of votes to the recorder, and at the recorder, where the votes are counted. In Oregon, there are no precincts with boxes of ballots to mislay or alter--it's a distributed system with a bunch of individual messages in the custody of the USPS: not perfect, but certainly superior to a few cardboard boxes being driven from the high school to the county recorder. It seems pretty clear elections in Oregon are safer than in any other jurisdiction in the United States, besides the other benefits people have mentioned (more knowledgeable voters, higher turnout).
At the recorder, the votes are counted automatically. A well-placed fraud here, just as in any other voting jurisdiction, could change an election result. I'm not sure there's a general solution to this problem besides security and accountability measures. In some jurisdictions in Europe, a panel of representatives from the political parties oversees a hand-count by volunteers, but I doubt this would work in the U.S.: too many counters required, for one--you'd probably need to pay them, and that could get real expensive; and secondly, I don't trust any political party and would be loathe to give them official power in any capacity in the election process.
Maybe Lawsuit Man is right and votes should be counted by hand, whatever the expense; and maybe "public oversight" is sufficient. Personally I'd have to be convinced that that's actually better than automated counting with the possibility of hand recounts.
The reason why "PC game detractors" focus so much on high-end graphics hardware is that 1) it is what distinguishes the PC gamer's primary gaming device from the general-use computer the console gamer probably already has; and 2) it's one of the principal "advantages" PC gamers claim over consoles.
You make a perfectly reasonable argument that with a few hundred dollars, maybe spread over a few years, I can have "console-equivalent" graphics. Fine. But then, what's the point, when everything else about the PC gaming experience--for me: this is obviously subjective--is worse than with a console? I'm playing games on my "computer monitor" rather than with my big-screen TV, I'm holed up in my office rather than on my couch with my family, I'm clicking on things and typing rather than flying, driving or shooting. That's not to say that those things have to be part of the experience, and I'm not trying to dis those who prefer the context of PC game play, but it's not for me.
If I did move my PC out to the couch, get myself a wireless keyboard and mouse (hard to see how this would be that comfortable without a desk to put them on, though) and maybe other controllers, where would I be? I'd get to play driver setup games, software installation shuffles, the DLL hell gauntlet and so forth; and after I'd completed those levels, where would I end up? With access to a bunch of games I'd not be playing as intended (with graphics turned down, sitting further away from a lower-resolution screen than designed) and which, as far as I can tell, I don't want to play (FPS and RTS don't appeal).
This is all a matter of degree (of course there are non-RTS/non-FPS games for PCs); subjectivity (I don't expect someone else's experience or sense of fun to match mine) and it's a false dichotomy anyway (I'll bet many if not most gamers have some console play and some PC play). But I wouldn't be surprised when people talk about the high cost of high-end graphics hardware when in my mind (and in the minds, probably, of most "console gamers") it's the primary selling point.