Is what I call this. Allow me to explain. The job of a good designer is to increase it, so that users might have either more freedom or less responsibility with no ill effects. It's very hard, and fairly rare that this happens, though there are many attempts. Most are failures in some sense.
I'll use the old burgler alarm problem. Normally, you have some sensor output. It takes on values in one distribution when there is an intruder present, and another distribution when there isn't one. Normally, these probability distributions have some overlap. So one sets a decision threshold such that the cost of a missed detect times the probability of a missed detect equals the cost of a false alarm times the probability of a false alarm. This almost always results in lowest total system costs, and once you get that equality going, it's the best you can do -- you've hit the max dynamic range in this system. (yes, I know I'm misusing that word a little)
The only thing you can to to improve this, is have a better sensor that gives distributions that have less (or no) overlap. That's what I call increasing the dynamic range of a system in this context. There are a lot of ways that work -- in the above case, you might add another type of sensor, and do decisions based on joint probabilities, or signal process the original sensor better -- any of a number of things.
In the case of computer software, there are numerous examples of trying to increase the dynamic range that I consider utter failures. On example is adding a garbage collector to a language to "free" the coder from having to do good design, or even really understand what he's coding. As a result, his program goes off on "demented errands of its own" at random, making it more or less impossible to do things with real time deadlines and reliably meet them -- all we did there was move the threshold, we didn't really improve dynamic range.
Drag drop gui programming with objects comes to mind as another thing of this sort. Yes, you can now leverage code you don't understand, making it possible for monkeys to code. The trouble with that of course is that you enable monkeys to code, and get code written by well, monkeys. While it can be done right, and I know a few devs who do, the main apps that crash on my windows box are all.NET monkey code stuff that you get stuck with when you buy a mass spectrometer, an arbitrary waveform generator, stuff like that (and I'm a linux guy, so I run those windows in virtual box so my whole world doesn't crash when that pure crap does).
The upshot is that true dynamic range improvement is really hard to do. Remember Microsoft's "information at your fingertips" and that new file system Vista was supposed to have that'd find all your photos and organize them for you? Remember the slashdot thread about how interesting that would be when mom looked in here photos and saw your pron? Seemed like a neat idea at the time! But that was so dumb even they figured out it would be a bad idea -- their heart was in the right place, trying to make it easier, but the unintended consequences not so nice; -- and sometimes those are second order (see monkey coding).
True innovation has as a defining characteristic that it improves dynamic range -- the freedom vs responsibility tradeoff. Most things called innovation don't satisfy this, but I'd rather consider that a misuse of language -- like the hacker misuse (without distinguishing it from cracker).
An obvious example that gets the word innovation misused more than most is that handy device many carry around these days -- which is called innovative, even though Dick Tracy cartoons had it at the time of my birth, and all the "innovation" was simply refinement, and most not done by the popular fruit themed company at all, but by chip manufacturers and FOSS coders to tell the truth. We knew back in the '70s that computers were going to get portable and even be able to handle multimedia in our shop -- this isn't innovation, it's mere refinement.
Now, get off my lawn. If it were actually innovative, I'd buy one.
Since I often have to use paypal (some ebay vendors give no other choice for example) this is just what I do. Actually, I do it reversed. I created a separate checking account just for ebay, and only put money in it as needed, more or less the exact amount for the transaction, and only a little slush to keep the bank happy. Of course, you have to make sure your bank really understands this and doesn't add stupid "features" like "overdraft protection" when paypal comes to rob you, that will siphon money out of some other account at the bank and charge you for the "privilege" of not protecting you from paypal. I buy more than I sell, so this is lots less work. I just xfer the money from another account via online banking, then do the paypal thing. Good grief, never let those thieves have real access to real money!
And later, when I worked in the NMIC, part of the WMCCS (war room). We had a teletype that printed out stuff from the military secure satellite system (DSCS) and a Sargent who sat there, read it, and typed it into another teletype.
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At the time, I thought it pretty dumb. Turns out I was dumb I guess. No big surprise there, I was young then too.
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Here's the deal now -- the military has bought into the COTS stuff all the way. They get the internet "free" in essence, avoiding having to build out a similar network that goes everywhere -- prohibitive expense to say the least. In fact, organizations from power companies and refineries to grocery stores that used to use dedicated leased lines got suckered into the same deal. And now, we have a problem...and it's not widely recognized as it should be. As recently as a year or so ago, even Bruce Schneier didn't know this and thought cyber-threats unlikely against such types of systems. Oops -- when cheap is offered and seems to work well (leased lines from a monopoly aren't so cheap, ya know) -- people flock to it. And here we are.
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On the other hand, most computer security is a joke, because we don't say, fine microsoft for bugs that actually do cost a lot of people a lot of time and money. As Bruce points out, if there's no consequences to the people who make defective things, why would they ever stop doing it?
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It wasn't all that long ago when just getting two computers to talk at all was a real hard thing. I worked for DEC way back in the day, and just getting a serial connection to a big IBM in the same building was a major issue, taking specialized hardware on both ends -- DEC was ASCII, IBM EBCDIC , and that was the very least of it -- control signals, protocols and so on. So when it became easy, no one really built security in -- it was so hard to do on purpose, the idea that some outsider would try it was a ludicrous joke (and then, it was all real wires and leased lines too). Who would try to break a perfectly good computer? MS fell afoul of this too -- in the rush to get anything to just work at all, forget any extra work on making it "safe" in any sense of the word -- that would just generate error messages, and cut sales.
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Thing is (and I'm just quoting Bruce again) - you can't easily add security from the outside, post design. That's the hard on the outside, soft and chewy on the inside model currently in use by MS products (and in the Far Side alligator joke). No, you pretty much have to design it in. Again, prohibitively expensive -- and now you have to write all new apps to run in the new enviornment too. Much of MS's stuff that does remote procedures (OLE, ActiveX, COM, DCOM) for just one example -- total security hole, and most of their apps won't run without it. Linux is a little better off, of course, but still -- accident waiting to happen if a real adversary is attacking with country-class resources.
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At least Unix (pre linux) got used in a bunch of college machines, where people with too much time on their hands and a lot of motivation to get grades changed or free tuition has been so hacked most of the easy stuff (later designs used in linux too) has been fixed....but still....
Think of the following. Some guys in a battle are hunkered down and shooting at you, say through a hole in a wall. This thing flies over there and shows you where they are -- or whether they are displacing to another place -- so you know where and whether to shoot. Don't even need one minute for that. If they're running away, you now know which way if you want to chase them -- they've gotten out of cover. And so on.
This can be a pretty life saving thing for the good guys, and devastating to the other side -- who's going to shoot at a bird? Sure, they'll figure it out, but that's not an easy target, and shooting also tells you where the bad guy is pretty close.
You're going about it backwards there. Sure, more young people watch fox, it's more exciting and for people with short attention spans. As a kinda-conservative, and BTW well educated and yes, older, I listen to NPR because it's simply more interesting, even though I have to hold my nose sometimes when their bias gets too huge.
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I tend to agree with the parent, looking back on my own life, and I was raised in a very right wing way.
I saw things in black and white then, and didn't consider things like what it would cost, unintended consequences and so on. Some of that turned out pretty left wing (the left wing isn't liberal, they're as central power as it gets, a left wing fascist is still a fascist). None of it was strictly liberal, except I wanted more sex and more drugs, of course.
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As I get older and richer, I tend to be more conservative -- not right wing or republican, and it's more or less for the reasons the parent mentions. Now that I've worked a whole life to keep a tiny fraction of the value I've produced, by golly, I'd like to hang on to some, and I think my judgment is to the point where it's proven well enough to utterly reject some left wing wacko saying "I know what's best for you" as Gore said. Or for that matter, a right wing one. I want both to simply leave me alone doggonit -- I've got it handled, so go fool with those who don't.
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I don't see things so much in black and white as I used to, I can foretell unintended consequences better, and the more hard core about some things people are the more I suspect them of creating controversy merely to benefit from it themselves. And I find that yes, most of the conservative people I know are the older ones (but they aren't all right wing).
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This destruction of the language we've allowed the pols and MSM to do is a big part of the problem, IMO.
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Conservative used to mean things like "look before you leap", "spend less than you make", and "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"
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Liberal used to mean something more like "let people decide what's best for them", "let things work themselves out" and at the begginning of it, "care about others" which is sort of a shared value.
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Now, conservative means "no gay marriage" at a time when any kind of family is better than none.
And "make all those people act like I think I should act, even though I don't", and "no abortion ever".
And "lets go kick some ass and force democracy on those who don't have a clue that it shouldn't be 'winner takes all'.
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And liberal means "force everyone to pay for everyone else on the dole" "force everyone to pay for other's health issues, even if they are self generated problems" and of course "we know what's best for you".
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While I'd like to give the credit, I've been:
An engineer
A rock and roll star
A race driver
A homeless bum
A homesteader
A stock trader
A physicist
A business owner
And a few more. So which me (just one person) are they talking about?
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I just wish all those turkeys would quit with the runination of my language and get off my lawn. Voting doesn't work. When you vote one set of bums out, the new ones claim a mandate. No, we just voted your sorry butt in as the only other false "choice" -- and you're next, turkeys. Just leave us alone, we'll all figure out "whats best for us" without a bunch of government, non-value producing parasites feeding at the trough we are forced to keep full off our labor.
If you're a nerd who also trades, I'd be looking to get long term short this one, or maybe more guts to do it.
Once you become dependent on them, they simply grab all the value to themselves, and leave you a smoking hulk, the old embrace, extend, extinguish thing in whatever guise. I'll be looking for a pop to get short on soon.
More than one reason. The footgun is in full auto mode. Announcing some not yet released products are going to be abandonware? OK, a few points for honesty, but do they think that anyone with any sense will buy a product abandoned even before release? Or do they think everyone (or enough people) are that utterly stupid?
Since that kind of judgment about others is usually what psychologists call "projection" it tells me all I need to know.
Surely you were already aware that the US gov already knows the price list in detail, and is a major customer. That was outed all over the Internet awhile back (including here), complete with pictures taken by an AT&T employee of one of the setups in a "restricted access" room -- if which I snagged a copy, along with the writings of the (ex) employee before they disappeared.
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We said we didn't want them to have a kill switch too...what hypocrisy.
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All the actions of our government over the last few years are those of a governement afraid it's own people will rise against it, not one worried about our safety from terrorists, should be clear to almost anyone by now.
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To the extent they've stopped even a single credible terrorist plot (I haven't noticed they have prevented a single one) all they've managed is to deny me some good clean fun on moving target practice -- it's a total lose-lose.
Or, Sony would be doing jail time for rooting all those boxes, instead of suing GeoHot for finding out how to turn on "other opsys" after Sony stole back the functionality.
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The fault is giving corps the rights of people, but without the liabilities in my view. We poor humans have to die at some point, they don't. We go to jail when we break the law, they pay a fine that is usually far less than the ill gotten gains they made doing it, so to them there's no rational reason to obey the law.
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Yes, for quite awhile now patents of all kinds (not only software) are used by the shortsighted large players to exclude any competition from smaller ones. The big boys make a show of suing one another, but then settle out of court with some cross license deal.
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The net result is that they no longer have to do any real innovation, and simply fight over a slice of the existing pie, rather than make the size of the pie as a whole bigger. Sure, they hate one another, but they fear any outsider who might come along with something new. Such an outsider has no chance against them, as it costs $1-10 million and years in court to get even an obviously bad patent thrown out. Multiply that by the number of garbage patents the bigs hold and the situation is untenable for anyone new coming along with a great new thing.
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Further, it's an assault on open source software, because those of us who write it cannot afford to defend against things like this, and it's almost impossible to write many lines of code without running afoul of some patent claim.
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Even google is catching this from Oracle at this point, despite Oracle's frequent past urging for Java to go completely free. Now that they own it, it seems they believe that some patents give them the rights to anything running on a VM of any kind (look out.NET and Perl!).
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We are witnessing the best law money can buy (surprised?) -- but it's not even the best law for those promoting it, because they are so shortsighted that they are actually going to create their own demise if they can't force this sort of thing to happen in every single country that has a market.. As one can see from the news, this is precisely what they are trying to do, and with some success.
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The true corrosion comes when anyone small does do something truly nifty. This leverage by the bigs means they can simply steal the new stuff while bankrupting the originator over all the stupid patents the bigs own. This of course means there is no incentive for that small guy to do anything nifty and humanity stalls out.
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It's hard to see how this system can be fixed in reality, as the bigs spend enough on politicians to perpetuate whatever they desire, and there's no reason to believe that throwing the bums out (as if we had a choice other than another set of bums) would do any good -- the new boss would wind up just like the old boss. It's the alternate version of the golden rule -- them with the gold make the rules. Where we failed is letting them get all the gold in the first place, now it's probably too late to do much of anything.
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Too Big To Fail is a rotten concept, and if that is really true for absolutely any enterprise, it should be priority one worldwide to force those too big to fail to break up. Period. Not regulate how they act once that is true -- make it not possible to be true.
But, as we say here, goodluckwiththat.
Looks like everyone did sell -- Nokia's stock is down 13.3% today, for a total of about 20% since Wednesday's close. Rats, I heard the rumor and did have time to short it if I'd believed they could do something so stupid, but didn't. Gheesh. That would have been nice money in an otherwise lackluster market.
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As we've seen on groklaw, every single MS partner has been snuffed one way or another, so it will be interesting to see how they do it to a hardware company, instead of another software outfit.
To heck with a citation, go meet some yourself -- my anecdote IS a citation from my own rather extensive experience. You shouldn't have much trouble finding more. The problem is, any setup to "take a poll" has backers with a preconceived desired outcome in mind, and it's all too easy to phrase any set of questions to get the answers you want to get. So, for once, -- go find out for yourself, that's the only way to get to truth in things like this. Lift a finger, it's worth the effort.
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Your issue on voting patterns is a symptom of the so-called choice we get at the polls, and a sad commentary all its own.
Because the same people who tend to make the NRA happy, also pander to some pretty ignorant things/groups to get their votes too. So if you've got a hard on about gun owners, it's easy to paint them with the brush of who else gets a free ride on our desire for freedom.
In our case, we just want our freedom, and the responsibility that comes with it. Most of the others just want freedom to force others into their world-view (think anything having to do with religion, abortion, socialism). In my experience, gun owners come from all flavors of that debate, but tend to focus more on keeping their own rights than taking away those of others.
Insightful, really? What good would signing.inf files actually do, if every developer or installer had to have a key to do so with? Would that not leak out a lot quicker than Sony's key?
You might be real surprised on what the bulk of people who have guns think about all this. In fact, should you ever actually check, I know you would, and not all of us are tech-unaware. Lots of us belong to an organization that constantly exhorts us to "vote freedom first", for just one example. Most of the members of that tiny organization (NRA) are very strong supporters of ALL personal rights, and this is a threat to them. Virtually all of us have strong feelings about the bill of rights -- all of them, we like them a lot. Most of us would like to add "right to privacy" to them, actually. I know almost none who think the Patriot act is anything but a bad oxymoron.
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But, if you only know gun owners from the lying gun control fanatics, hoplophopic idiots, then you might think as you said. Get out to a local gun club and see for yourself. It's polite, no one wears camo or is a knuckle dragger -- it's a country club without the bar.
Tends to be full of reasonably wealthy and influential folks. Who else can afford to play with some very expensive toys on a tuesday afternoon but successful business owners? Not many, in my experience. And we are not "haters". Just try talking trash, say white supremacy or antisemitism at most gun clubs. It's a way to get thrown out very quickly. Maybe it's a little different in rural Ohio than in Virginia, but as a traveling competitor in various shooting sports, it's sure not what I see around the country.
The truth is, gun ownership has a darwinian effect. If you're stupid, you're in jail or dead pretty quick. If you hate, and act on it, same, and/or, you lose the ability to be an owner (legally). You no longer have anything to prove -- "nobody bothers me".
Fuzzy, you have that exactly right, and that's why getting patent reform is so hard - the big guys may hate each other, but they fear actual competition and innovation from a new startup much more. Even now, since they lost all ability to innovate (don't get me started on this, fanbois, nothing new exists we didn't think of in the early '70s before the hardware existed to make it real - from digital audio to smartphones with touchscreens) -- what they do is merge and acquire to buy marketshare, so shortsighted they don't consider maybe growing the overall pie (ask any stock trader like myself).
Disgusting, but there it is. I've gotten out of the business because now you can't write 5 lines of code or design s simple circuit without violating a patent somewhere. They may be obvious, they may be bad, but it still costs 1-$10 million to defend yourself in court and get a bad patent tossed out.
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Seems to me the trolls have been hitting the big guys too, despite what another uniformed poster on this thread mentions -- just ask MS, IBM, or some notable others about that of late.
Hear, Hear -- and when motorola more or less copied it in the 68k, it was a cause of much joy and overpromising in software -- but we all know where that finally went with the fruit company. I worked with 68ks in a beltway bandit company long before the things publicly existed, and they were nice -- so I had some experience before the fruit guys got their hands on them. In fact, I still have a few in gold topped ceramic DIP chips, huge things for the 10mhz they then had as a top speed.
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Now if you want that nice, orthogonal architecture, you have to go with the semi-obsolete TI TMS320C30 line (which does it all in floating point too, and all in parallel). I used that one in some major telephony projects, including the only non-TI/Telogy (at the time) VOIP implementation. It had enough spare horsepower for us to have the very best one -- seamless audio stretching during dropped packets, all kinds of goodies. It made the company I developed it for a ton of dough -- it's out in the wild under various other brand names now.
Nice thing about all those, which was rarely used, but still cool, is that since the PC was one of the GP registers (as was the stack pointer) one could write position independent code, no fancy linker or loader needed. Just drop it anyplace in memory and call it, done -- with the data position independent too. Pretty cool, but then fancier memory management came around and slowed down all processors using it by adding at least a lookup if not some arithmetic to every single memory access.
Now, some people thought the PDP-8 instruction set was elegant too -- certainly was simple and easy to learn (abbreviated from the bigger PDP15's and PDP-10's). If you want that now, you get a PIC from Microchip -- very close, right down the the conditional skip instructions. So, a lot of the good DEC stuff never really died.
And loved it. It was a fantastic place to work (I had the DC area, then Mid-Atlantic support).
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My Dad bought me a used PDP-8S, then a "straight 8" which were my first computers, a good bit before these newfangled microchips, and this is what I learned programming on, while also engineering my own peripherals. In fact, I wound up cancelling a charter subscription to Byte because they kept dissing the things, which at the time were a ton faster and better than any microchip.
They were actually pretty nice machines, with a read-modify-write able to happen in one core cycle, and later when Silconix attempted a chip version, they were never able to get it as fast as the original, with that nifty Diode-Capacitor-Diode logic (which could create things like and gates where both the inputs didn't have to be there simultaneously as long as they were close enough).
I met Kenny, and he was a righteous dude, actually. The occasion was I was up in Mass taking a course on some new hardware, and talking in the company lunchroom to some Aussies at the table, who turned out to be buyers from some big retail outfit, and we were discussing the merits of this or that DEC product. At the time, the VAX was new, untested, a little flakey, and not as fast as a PDP-11/70 (particularly if the latter was maxed out) but cost more, so I steered them that way -- which would have (did) cost DEC some revenue, but they were nice guys, and it was the correct choice for them in their situation.
Kenny was standing behind me the whole time -- he'd come to the lunchroom to invite them to private talks in his office. Talk about my heart dropping into my gut -- this was my first really good job, and I'd just dissed the company's new flagship product to a very important customer, while the CEO was standing behind me.
Kenny grinned and shook my hand, and complimented me for being an honest guy, saying that was what DEC was all about, thanked me for helping promote that image! Soon after, *I* was promoted to Mid Atlantic support, one of the better jobs DEC had (free everything, expenses, flights on helicopters, full authority to make field-expedient decisions, all very nice).
That job was the basis of my career from then on. At that point I knew everyone big enough to be in computers at all (including the then-new ARPA and that crazy arpanet thing, node in Arlington) -- crap-tons of good contacts, and I never actually had to look for work ever again after that.
From one beltway bandit to the next, to starting and running my own company with a nice customer list, that was what started it all.
We'll miss you Kenny, and my heartfelt condolences to the rest of the family. You weren't always right, but you were always good -- and that counts for more in my book.
Because this will send a wave of uncertainty through the markets and make me money!
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That's really scary -- I trade for my living these days (my own money only) and of course, use computers to do it -- theirs and mine.
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We could hope that all it is is some evilt HFT firm trying to figure out how to quote-stuff better and make a little more money on the spreads quicker, but somehow, having that be the best possible likely outcome is scary itself.
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This house of cards of money that is really only bits is utterly dependent on trust. Probably most here don't have a serious "life savings" put at risk like this (on top of the normal risks we take to get a reward), but believe me, if you wanted to put this country in the crapper, hard and long, this would be one of the easier ways to do it. Think of all the lawsuits over who had what imaginary money seconds before and seconds after a successful crack attack -- with no one having access to their own money until after "one duration of SCO lawsuits" -- ruination for many, and not just the fat cats.
And who stays teachers is what matters. When I went to school (pretty far back there, I'm a '53 baby) we had some outstanding teachers, and some that really stank. Since the rise of the teachers union, it's gotten much worse, with so many considering it a sinecure job -- and teaching should never be that, it's a lot of work to reach each student and set them on fire. I'd quickly accept 3x the class size if every teacher was one of those outstanding ones, and then pay the good ones that much more. Trouble is, the merit system doesn't exist, and those silly tests won't make it either.
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Further, I noticed that among the other kids, the ones who aspired to be teachers weren't the sharpest tools in the shed, by and large. The smart ones all dreamed of being leaders in their fields, and worked and learned accordingly. Nor did most of the ones who planned to be teachers have the outstanding social and leadership skills the good teachers had. I could go on, but evidently this doesn't attract the right sort so easily, but the type of person who likes having a bunch of kids to push around, and to be listened to even when they have little worthwhile to say.
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Now we have a teacher's union, ensuring that when people get laid off, it's the newest ones, not the worst ones. That's gotta help (NOT). Add in the particular political slant the union pushes (one of the functions of teaching is to create the kind of citizens you want later) -- can't be good for anybody. For those as old as me, look at the line the unions push, and look how the votes go these days -- bingo.
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I'd even bet some of the people who responded negatively to the first post here have been so brainwashed by that very situation they don't realize it. Look, sometimes you gotta tell people they are not measuring up; and even if you pick words carefully, it's not a joyful thing to hear or to say if it gets across. We need more "that's not even wrong" out there, some people are so far back they need to know they're not even in the running to be fully there at anything ever, and if they don't lift their sights -- they never will be. A shock is more often than not the least painful way to get that across -- a short sharp pain beats a life of dissatisfaction in my book -- particularly when that dissatisfaction is two way -- no one likes you either, but of course, only says so "nicely". Hit me, but don't water torture me, alright? I'll heal quick enough, maybe even learn to do some hitting myself, and have a happy life thereafter (which I have).
Strange, I agree with most of your rant - particularly that we really ought to re evaluate what prison is for.
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Sadly, perhaps, there is another possibility. Many people in prison are there for pretty good reasons (note qualifier there). I've met a lot of people (Old fart here) and you know, some are just bad, not many, but some.
They're going to do any bad stuff they find is fun if they can. I might argue that this is a smaller number than the prison population -- pretty sure that's true.
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But what if the recidivism rate is kind of related to a selection bias, or in other words, could it be true that some people just belong in prison and sometimes the system gets it right? Nope, not stating the bigger picture well enough here.
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Where do we decide that line? I've seen all manner of "criminal" behavior. Most of the people who did it were reasonably good people, they just ignored some laws in ways that were fun for them, but hurt or endangered no one, or even close. I'd argue those people probably don't belong in prison, only the real asshats who put hurt on others do. And those we might not be too surprised about when they do something bad again. It sucks, because some you "just know" shouldn't come out, but the alternative is much worse -- CS Lewis "That Hideous Strength" kinda speaks to that. Yeah, not a Heinlein this time. I'm sure Bob also said stuff that's relevant.
Or close enough. Not long ago I had a trucker come to my door, out of breath, having stuck his tractor at the bottom of the hill I live near the top of, being brought this way by MapQuest and GPS. Nothing special you say...well, evidently those services thought a 1 lane gravel road going straight up a mountain (in SW VA), complete with cliffs, deep ditches, and short radius turns was a perfectly fine route to send this dupe on. Believe me, there are plenty of small cars that don't make it on that road, and it took "the million dollar wrecker" many hours to extract this guy, probably cost him his job on top of it.
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Now, the real question was actually even how he got as far as he did. He'd had to go up and down and around for a couple miles of almost-that-bad road to get where he got stuck in a place utterly obvious a tractor couldn't go -- it was longer and straighter than the distance between two hairpins near the bottom of that hill, and driving skill at that point made no difference. I'd have to suppose this guy didn't realize that it was pointless, and that even an hour of carefully backing up the way he came would be a better plan -- there is no place to turn one of these.
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What is truly hilarious is that he would only have saved two miles (out of 10-15) doing this over simply using the main, paved roads -- this was a "shortcut", and the way no one goes who knows the roads here -- too hard on the vehicle to be worth saving the miles, and you save no gas at all.
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So yeah, it took both driver ignorance AND a lousy GPS to get there, but it seems both were willin'.
So, learn to code, or shut up. Wish I had a nickel for every "great idea" someone made me sign an NDA to see -- all were ridiculous, no exceptions, and some were epically stupid. No market research (does anyone want this?). No realization that either it exists already, or has been done already and has failed because they didn't figure out all the consequences (intended or otherwise).
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The idea that you can make money off an idea is bull. You make money off solving a problem, creating value. Ideas are cheap as can be. Results are another story. I've been giving away ideas my whole life, and selling the work to make them real instead. That works fine. Eye-pee is for morons.
Not his ego, which is at least partly earned (and I am not a fanboi). The main way his ego is going to hurt them is he doesn't allow other visionaries to rise within the company -- no good succession plan, and everybody is mortal, no matter how smart or rich they are.
Sure, he's got top-rate managers, and they'll do for awhile. But a place built like Apple -- their core business model -- needs a leader, which is a different thing entirely.
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I don't know crap about this, having been a serial entrepreneur of several successful companies, which I sold and then retired.
Apple is on very shaky ground at this point, and though I might not like Mr Jobs or idolize him -- He's serious business as a human, and I hope he gets better ASAP, like I would anybody. It's no fun being sick and being faced with one's own mortality, as I know from personal experience, and less fun yet when you realize that a lot of people truly depend on you being around to make their lives go as well.
I do fusion right here in my lab. Even a tiny difference matters when you're looking at the tiny difference between two masses there, like the difference between two D atoms and one He -- and we don't know if this error is different on different atoms...
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In some cases it could make the difference between exo and endo thermic reactions and that's huge...
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But yes, a percent error multiplied by a constant is still the same percent. But it's a different magnitude, especially if the error differs from thing to thing under measurement.
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I'll use the old burgler alarm problem. Normally, you have some sensor output. It takes on values in one distribution when there is an intruder present, and another distribution when there isn't one. Normally, these probability distributions have some overlap. So one sets a decision threshold such that the cost of a missed detect times the probability of a missed detect equals the cost of a false alarm times the probability of a false alarm. This almost always results in lowest total system costs, and once you get that equality going, it's the best you can do -- you've hit the max dynamic range in this system. (yes, I know I'm misusing that word a little)
The only thing you can to to improve this, is have a better sensor that gives distributions that have less (or no) overlap. That's what I call increasing the dynamic range of a system in this context. There are a lot of ways that work -- in the above case, you might add another type of sensor, and do decisions based on joint probabilities, or signal process the original sensor better -- any of a number of things.
In the case of computer software, there are numerous examples of trying to increase the dynamic range that I consider utter failures. On example is adding a garbage collector to a language to "free" the coder from having to do good design, or even really understand what he's coding. As a result, his program goes off on "demented errands of its own" at random, making it more or less impossible to do things with real time deadlines and reliably meet them -- all we did there was move the threshold, we didn't really improve dynamic range.
Drag drop gui programming with objects comes to mind as another thing of this sort. Yes, you can now leverage code you don't understand, making it possible for monkeys to code. The trouble with that of course is that you enable monkeys to code, and get code written by well, monkeys. While it can be done right, and I know a few devs who do, the main apps that crash on my windows box are all .NET monkey code stuff that you get stuck with when you buy a mass spectrometer, an arbitrary waveform generator, stuff like that (and I'm a linux guy, so I run those windows in virtual box so my whole world doesn't crash when that pure crap does).
The upshot is that true dynamic range improvement is really hard to do. Remember Microsoft's "information at your fingertips" and that new file system Vista was supposed to have that'd find all your photos and organize them for you? Remember the slashdot thread about how interesting that would be when mom looked in here photos and saw your pron? Seemed like a neat idea at the time! But that was so dumb even they figured out it would be a bad idea -- their heart was in the right place, trying to make it easier, but the unintended consequences not so nice; -- and sometimes those are second order (see monkey coding).
True innovation has as a defining characteristic that it improves dynamic range -- the freedom vs responsibility tradeoff. Most things called innovation don't satisfy this, but I'd rather consider that a misuse of language -- like the hacker misuse (without distinguishing it from cracker).
An obvious example that gets the word innovation misused more than most is that handy device many carry around these days -- which is called innovative, even though Dick Tracy cartoons had it at the time of my birth, and all the "innovation" was simply refinement, and most not done by the popular fruit themed company at all, but by chip manufacturers and FOSS coders to tell the truth. We knew back in the '70s that computers were going to get portable and even be able to handle multimedia in our shop -- this isn't innovation, it's mere refinement.
Now, get off my lawn. If it were actually innovative, I'd buy one.
Since I often have to use paypal (some ebay vendors give no other choice for example) this is just what I do. Actually, I do it reversed. I created a separate checking account just for ebay, and only put money in it as needed, more or less the exact amount for the transaction, and only a little slush to keep the bank happy. Of course, you have to make sure your bank really understands this and doesn't add stupid "features" like "overdraft protection" when paypal comes to rob you, that will siphon money out of some other account at the bank and charge you for the "privilege" of not protecting you from paypal. I buy more than I sell, so this is lots less work. I just xfer the money from another account via online banking, then do the paypal thing. Good grief, never let those thieves have real access to real money!
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At the time, I thought it pretty dumb. Turns out I was dumb I guess. No big surprise there, I was young then too.
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Here's the deal now -- the military has bought into the COTS stuff all the way. They get the internet "free" in essence, avoiding having to build out a similar network that goes everywhere -- prohibitive expense to say the least. In fact, organizations from power companies and refineries to grocery stores that used to use dedicated leased lines got suckered into the same deal. And now, we have a problem...and it's not widely recognized as it should be. As recently as a year or so ago, even Bruce Schneier didn't know this and thought cyber-threats unlikely against such types of systems. Oops -- when cheap is offered and seems to work well (leased lines from a monopoly aren't so cheap, ya know) -- people flock to it. And here we are.
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On the other hand, most computer security is a joke, because we don't say, fine microsoft for bugs that actually do cost a lot of people a lot of time and money. As Bruce points out, if there's no consequences to the people who make defective things, why would they ever stop doing it?
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It wasn't all that long ago when just getting two computers to talk at all was a real hard thing. I worked for DEC way back in the day, and just getting a serial connection to a big IBM in the same building was a major issue, taking specialized hardware on both ends -- DEC was ASCII, IBM EBCDIC , and that was the very least of it -- control signals, protocols and so on. So when it became easy, no one really built security in -- it was so hard to do on purpose, the idea that some outsider would try it was a ludicrous joke (and then, it was all real wires and leased lines too). Who would try to break a perfectly good computer? MS fell afoul of this too -- in the rush to get anything to just work at all, forget any extra work on making it "safe" in any sense of the word -- that would just generate error messages, and cut sales.
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Thing is (and I'm just quoting Bruce again) - you can't easily add security from the outside, post design. That's the hard on the outside, soft and chewy on the inside model currently in use by MS products (and in the Far Side alligator joke). No, you pretty much have to design it in. Again, prohibitively expensive -- and now you have to write all new apps to run in the new enviornment too. Much of MS's stuff that does remote procedures (OLE, ActiveX, COM, DCOM) for just one example -- total security hole, and most of their apps won't run without it. Linux is a little better off, of course, but still -- accident waiting to happen if a real adversary is attacking with country-class resources.
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At least Unix (pre linux) got used in a bunch of college machines, where people with too much time on their hands and a lot of motivation to get grades changed or free tuition has been so hacked most of the easy stuff (later designs used in linux too) has been fixed....but still....
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Well, they could pray for them on their own hacked website, perhaps.
As a poster above said. Fuck sony. No way those asshats get a single dime off me after all they've done.
This can be a pretty life saving thing for the good guys, and devastating to the other side -- who's going to shoot at a bird? Sure, they'll figure it out, but that's not an easy target, and shooting also tells you where the bad guy is pretty close.
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I tend to agree with the parent, looking back on my own life, and I was raised in a very right wing way. I saw things in black and white then, and didn't consider things like what it would cost, unintended consequences and so on. Some of that turned out pretty left wing (the left wing isn't liberal, they're as central power as it gets, a left wing fascist is still a fascist). None of it was strictly liberal, except I wanted more sex and more drugs, of course.
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As I get older and richer, I tend to be more conservative -- not right wing or republican, and it's more or less for the reasons the parent mentions. Now that I've worked a whole life to keep a tiny fraction of the value I've produced, by golly, I'd like to hang on to some, and I think my judgment is to the point where it's proven well enough to utterly reject some left wing wacko saying "I know what's best for you" as Gore said. Or for that matter, a right wing one. I want both to simply leave me alone doggonit -- I've got it handled, so go fool with those who don't.
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I don't see things so much in black and white as I used to, I can foretell unintended consequences better, and the more hard core about some things people are the more I suspect them of creating controversy merely to benefit from it themselves. And I find that yes, most of the conservative people I know are the older ones (but they aren't all right wing).
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This destruction of the language we've allowed the pols and MSM to do is a big part of the problem, IMO.
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Conservative used to mean things like "look before you leap", "spend less than you make", and "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"
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Liberal used to mean something more like "let people decide what's best for them", "let things work themselves out" and at the begginning of it, "care about others" which is sort of a shared value.
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Now, conservative means "no gay marriage" at a time when any kind of family is better than none. And "make all those people act like I think I should act, even though I don't", and "no abortion ever". And "lets go kick some ass and force democracy on those who don't have a clue that it shouldn't be 'winner takes all'.
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And liberal means "force everyone to pay for everyone else on the dole" "force everyone to pay for other's health issues, even if they are self generated problems" and of course "we know what's best for you".
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While I'd like to give the credit, I've been: An engineer
A rock and roll star
A race driver
A homeless bum
A homesteader
A stock trader
A physicist
A business owner
And a few more. So which me (just one person) are they talking about?
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I just wish all those turkeys would quit with the runination of my language and get off my lawn. Voting doesn't work. When you vote one set of bums out, the new ones claim a mandate. No, we just voted your sorry butt in as the only other false "choice" -- and you're next, turkeys. Just leave us alone, we'll all figure out "whats best for us" without a bunch of government, non-value producing parasites feeding at the trough we are forced to keep full off our labor.
More than one reason. The footgun is in full auto mode. Announcing some not yet released products are going to be abandonware? OK, a few points for honesty, but do they think that anyone with any sense will buy a product abandoned even before release? Or do they think everyone (or enough people) are that utterly stupid?
Since that kind of judgment about others is usually what psychologists call "projection" it tells me all I need to know.
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We said we didn't want them to have a kill switch too...what hypocrisy.
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All the actions of our government over the last few years are those of a governement afraid it's own people will rise against it, not one worried about our safety from terrorists, should be clear to almost anyone by now.
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To the extent they've stopped even a single credible terrorist plot (I haven't noticed they have prevented a single one) all they've managed is to deny me some good clean fun on moving target practice -- it's a total lose-lose.
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The fault is giving corps the rights of people, but without the liabilities in my view. We poor humans have to die at some point, they don't. We go to jail when we break the law, they pay a fine that is usually far less than the ill gotten gains they made doing it, so to them there's no rational reason to obey the law.
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Best law money can buy, but for who?
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The net result is that they no longer have to do any real innovation, and simply fight over a slice of the existing pie, rather than make the size of the pie as a whole bigger. Sure, they hate one another, but they fear any outsider who might come along with something new. Such an outsider has no chance against them, as it costs $1-10 million and years in court to get even an obviously bad patent thrown out. Multiply that by the number of garbage patents the bigs hold and the situation is untenable for anyone new coming along with a great new thing.
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Further, it's an assault on open source software, because those of us who write it cannot afford to defend against things like this, and it's almost impossible to write many lines of code without running afoul of some patent claim.
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Even google is catching this from Oracle at this point, despite Oracle's frequent past urging for Java to go completely free. Now that they own it, it seems they believe that some patents give them the rights to anything running on a VM of any kind (look out .NET and Perl!).
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We are witnessing the best law money can buy (surprised?) -- but it's not even the best law for those promoting it, because they are so shortsighted that they are actually going to create their own demise if they can't force this sort of thing to happen in every single country that has a market.. As one can see from the news, this is precisely what they are trying to do, and with some success.
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The true corrosion comes when anyone small does do something truly nifty. This leverage by the bigs means they can simply steal the new stuff while bankrupting the originator over all the stupid patents the bigs own. This of course means there is no incentive for that small guy to do anything nifty and humanity stalls out.
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It's hard to see how this system can be fixed in reality, as the bigs spend enough on politicians to perpetuate whatever they desire, and there's no reason to believe that throwing the bums out (as if we had a choice other than another set of bums) would do any good -- the new boss would wind up just like the old boss. It's the alternate version of the golden rule -- them with the gold make the rules. Where we failed is letting them get all the gold in the first place, now it's probably too late to do much of anything.
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Too Big To Fail is a rotten concept, and if that is really true for absolutely any enterprise, it should be priority one worldwide to force those too big to fail to break up. Period. Not regulate how they act once that is true -- make it not possible to be true. But, as we say here, goodluckwiththat.
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As we've seen on groklaw, every single MS partner has been snuffed one way or another, so it will be interesting to see how they do it to a hardware company, instead of another software outfit.
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Your issue on voting patterns is a symptom of the so-called choice we get at the polls, and a sad commentary all its own. Because the same people who tend to make the NRA happy, also pander to some pretty ignorant things/groups to get their votes too. So if you've got a hard on about gun owners, it's easy to paint them with the brush of who else gets a free ride on our desire for freedom. In our case, we just want our freedom, and the responsibility that comes with it. Most of the others just want freedom to force others into their world-view (think anything having to do with religion, abortion, socialism). In my experience, gun owners come from all flavors of that debate, but tend to focus more on keeping their own rights than taking away those of others.
Insightful, really? What good would signing .inf files actually do, if every developer or installer had to have a key to do so with? Would that not leak out a lot quicker than Sony's key?
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But, if you only know gun owners from the lying gun control fanatics, hoplophopic idiots, then you might think as you said. Get out to a local gun club and see for yourself. It's polite, no one wears camo or is a knuckle dragger -- it's a country club without the bar. Tends to be full of reasonably wealthy and influential folks. Who else can afford to play with some very expensive toys on a tuesday afternoon but successful business owners? Not many, in my experience. And we are not "haters". Just try talking trash, say white supremacy or antisemitism at most gun clubs. It's a way to get thrown out very quickly. Maybe it's a little different in rural Ohio than in Virginia, but as a traveling competitor in various shooting sports, it's sure not what I see around the country.
The truth is, gun ownership has a darwinian effect. If you're stupid, you're in jail or dead pretty quick. If you hate, and act on it, same, and/or, you lose the ability to be an owner (legally). You no longer have anything to prove -- "nobody bothers me".
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Seems to me the trolls have been hitting the big guys too, despite what another uniformed poster on this thread mentions -- just ask MS, IBM, or some notable others about that of late.
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Now if you want that nice, orthogonal architecture, you have to go with the semi-obsolete TI TMS320C30 line (which does it all in floating point too, and all in parallel). I used that one in some major telephony projects, including the only non-TI/Telogy (at the time) VOIP implementation. It had enough spare horsepower for us to have the very best one -- seamless audio stretching during dropped packets, all kinds of goodies. It made the company I developed it for a ton of dough -- it's out in the wild under various other brand names now.
Nice thing about all those, which was rarely used, but still cool, is that since the PC was one of the GP registers (as was the stack pointer) one could write position independent code, no fancy linker or loader needed. Just drop it anyplace in memory and call it, done -- with the data position independent too. Pretty cool, but then fancier memory management came around and slowed down all processors using it by adding at least a lookup if not some arithmetic to every single memory access.
Now, some people thought the PDP-8 instruction set was elegant too -- certainly was simple and easy to learn (abbreviated from the bigger PDP15's and PDP-10's). If you want that now, you get a PIC from Microchip -- very close, right down the the conditional skip instructions. So, a lot of the good DEC stuff never really died.
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My Dad bought me a used PDP-8S, then a "straight 8" which were my first computers, a good bit before these newfangled microchips, and this is what I learned programming on, while also engineering my own peripherals. In fact, I wound up cancelling a charter subscription to Byte because they kept dissing the things, which at the time were a ton faster and better than any microchip. They were actually pretty nice machines, with a read-modify-write able to happen in one core cycle, and later when Silconix attempted a chip version, they were never able to get it as fast as the original, with that nifty Diode-Capacitor-Diode logic (which could create things like and gates where both the inputs didn't have to be there simultaneously as long as they were close enough).
I met Kenny, and he was a righteous dude, actually. The occasion was I was up in Mass taking a course on some new hardware, and talking in the company lunchroom to some Aussies at the table, who turned out to be buyers from some big retail outfit, and we were discussing the merits of this or that DEC product. At the time, the VAX was new, untested, a little flakey, and not as fast as a PDP-11/70 (particularly if the latter was maxed out) but cost more, so I steered them that way -- which would have (did) cost DEC some revenue, but they were nice guys, and it was the correct choice for them in their situation.
Kenny was standing behind me the whole time -- he'd come to the lunchroom to invite them to private talks in his office. Talk about my heart dropping into my gut -- this was my first really good job, and I'd just dissed the company's new flagship product to a very important customer, while the CEO was standing behind me.
Kenny grinned and shook my hand, and complimented me for being an honest guy, saying that was what DEC was all about, thanked me for helping promote that image! Soon after, *I* was promoted to Mid Atlantic support, one of the better jobs DEC had (free everything, expenses, flights on helicopters, full authority to make field-expedient decisions, all very nice).
That job was the basis of my career from then on. At that point I knew everyone big enough to be in computers at all (including the then-new ARPA and that crazy arpanet thing, node in Arlington) -- crap-tons of good contacts, and I never actually had to look for work ever again after that. From one beltway bandit to the next, to starting and running my own company with a nice customer list, that was what started it all.
We'll miss you Kenny, and my heartfelt condolences to the rest of the family. You weren't always right, but you were always good -- and that counts for more in my book.
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That's really scary -- I trade for my living these days (my own money only) and of course, use computers to do it -- theirs and mine.
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We could hope that all it is is some evilt HFT firm trying to figure out how to quote-stuff better and make a little more money on the spreads quicker, but somehow, having that be the best possible likely outcome is scary itself.
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This house of cards of money that is really only bits is utterly dependent on trust. Probably most here don't have a serious "life savings" put at risk like this (on top of the normal risks we take to get a reward), but believe me, if you wanted to put this country in the crapper, hard and long, this would be one of the easier ways to do it. Think of all the lawsuits over who had what imaginary money seconds before and seconds after a successful crack attack -- with no one having access to their own money until after "one duration of SCO lawsuits" -- ruination for many, and not just the fat cats.
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Further, I noticed that among the other kids, the ones who aspired to be teachers weren't the sharpest tools in the shed, by and large. The smart ones all dreamed of being leaders in their fields, and worked and learned accordingly. Nor did most of the ones who planned to be teachers have the outstanding social and leadership skills the good teachers had. I could go on, but evidently this doesn't attract the right sort so easily, but the type of person who likes having a bunch of kids to push around, and to be listened to even when they have little worthwhile to say.
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Now we have a teacher's union, ensuring that when people get laid off, it's the newest ones, not the worst ones. That's gotta help (NOT). Add in the particular political slant the union pushes (one of the functions of teaching is to create the kind of citizens you want later) -- can't be good for anybody. For those as old as me, look at the line the unions push, and look how the votes go these days -- bingo.
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I'd even bet some of the people who responded negatively to the first post here have been so brainwashed by that very situation they don't realize it. Look, sometimes you gotta tell people they are not measuring up; and even if you pick words carefully, it's not a joyful thing to hear or to say if it gets across. We need more "that's not even wrong" out there, some people are so far back they need to know they're not even in the running to be fully there at anything ever, and if they don't lift their sights -- they never will be. A shock is more often than not the least painful way to get that across -- a short sharp pain beats a life of dissatisfaction in my book -- particularly when that dissatisfaction is two way -- no one likes you either, but of course, only says so "nicely". Hit me, but don't water torture me, alright? I'll heal quick enough, maybe even learn to do some hitting myself, and have a happy life thereafter (which I have).
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Sadly, perhaps, there is another possibility. Many people in prison are there for pretty good reasons (note qualifier there). I've met a lot of people (Old fart here) and you know, some are just bad, not many, but some. They're going to do any bad stuff they find is fun if they can. I might argue that this is a smaller number than the prison population -- pretty sure that's true.
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But what if the recidivism rate is kind of related to a selection bias, or in other words, could it be true that some people just belong in prison and sometimes the system gets it right? Nope, not stating the bigger picture well enough here.
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Where do we decide that line? I've seen all manner of "criminal" behavior. Most of the people who did it were reasonably good people, they just ignored some laws in ways that were fun for them, but hurt or endangered no one, or even close. I'd argue those people probably don't belong in prison, only the real asshats who put hurt on others do. And those we might not be too surprised about when they do something bad again. It sucks, because some you "just know" shouldn't come out, but the alternative is much worse -- CS Lewis "That Hideous Strength" kinda speaks to that. Yeah, not a Heinlein this time. I'm sure Bob also said stuff that's relevant.
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Now, the real question was actually even how he got as far as he did. He'd had to go up and down and around for a couple miles of almost-that-bad road to get where he got stuck in a place utterly obvious a tractor couldn't go -- it was longer and straighter than the distance between two hairpins near the bottom of that hill, and driving skill at that point made no difference. I'd have to suppose this guy didn't realize that it was pointless, and that even an hour of carefully backing up the way he came would be a better plan -- there is no place to turn one of these.
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What is truly hilarious is that he would only have saved two miles (out of 10-15) doing this over simply using the main, paved roads -- this was a "shortcut", and the way no one goes who knows the roads here -- too hard on the vehicle to be worth saving the miles, and you save no gas at all.
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So yeah, it took both driver ignorance AND a lousy GPS to get there, but it seems both were willin'.
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The idea that you can make money off an idea is bull. You make money off solving a problem, creating value. Ideas are cheap as can be. Results are another story. I've been giving away ideas my whole life, and selling the work to make them real instead. That works fine. Eye-pee is for morons.
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I don't know crap about this, having been a serial entrepreneur of several successful companies, which I sold and then retired. Apple is on very shaky ground at this point, and though I might not like Mr Jobs or idolize him -- He's serious business as a human, and I hope he gets better ASAP, like I would anybody. It's no fun being sick and being faced with one's own mortality, as I know from personal experience, and less fun yet when you realize that a lot of people truly depend on you being around to make their lives go as well.
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In some cases it could make the difference between exo and endo thermic reactions and that's huge...
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But yes, a percent error multiplied by a constant is still the same percent. But it's a different magnitude, especially if the error differs from thing to thing under measurement.