If this "fighting hand" advantage (or anything resembling it) has been a factor in natural selection, then we ought to see roughly even distibution of left and right handedness, as the advantage would always go to the minority, and thus tip the scales back into balance.
Instead, we find only five percent or so of the population is left-handed.
I do wish the people who leap eagerly to find "evolutionary rationale" for the human foible du jour would at least think their arguments through on their own terms.
Right, so we've got a community site, and some people start using it in a way the owner didn't anticipate, and the owner decides the new use is contrary to the "purpose" of the site, and decides to engage in an increasingly draconian crackdown on the "disruptive" users, yeah?
Hmm.
I'll betting it's only a matter of time before we find Jon Abrams blaming Friendster's every shortcoming, and its overall failure to quite live up to his "vision," on the tro^H^H^H fakesters.
I wasn't aware of the fact that the Nebula awards accepted nominations for works of historical fantasy in addition to sci-fi, but Crouching Tiger is clearly an example of the former.
Incidentally, I got a nice chuckle out of jbennetto making a snide comment about the "Romance" nature of the Best Novel winner, while ignoring the fact that Crouching Tiger is clearly a love story.
You're going to learn 95% of your duties on the job anyway. Apart from good grades, employers are looking for signs that a prospective employee can work well with others.
Part-time work as a waiter is probably more valuable than open-source development credit. Even better would be vounteer work at a homeless shelter, rape-crisis hotline, after-school mentoring program, or similar social work.
While I'm sure there are still a few employers out there looking to exploit a fresh college grad with a completely technocentric mindset, most have learned that it pays to choose a well-rounded individual instead.
Sure they can borrow more, so long as their credit rating is good, and the capital markets aren't too tight.
But borrowing 2 billion to pay off CCC bonds that are trading at a greater than 50% discount? Get real. That means that for less than half the cash, you could instead buy their debt, and own the company when they file ch11. Would you give them the money under those circumstances?
In the eyes of the law, Amazon is headquartered in Delaware. For the rest of us, they are headquartered in Seattle, but not downtown. They moved to Beacon Hill years ago.
Amazon's liabilities are not being "paid off on a continual basis." Interest on the bonds is being paid, but the principle, which amounts to close to three billion dollars, is not being addressed at present.
whether or not Michael's actions constitute "censorship." With that said, I really don't understand why he continues to imply on censorware.com that the Project Censorware site "is no more," when there is a rather nice site for the project at censorware.net. He doesn't even link to that site from censoreware.com, suggesting instead that those interested in fighting censorware ought to contact him via email.
In my stupid opinion, the right thing for Michael to do now is to point the censorware.com nameservers at censorware.net, thereby declawing Seth's complaint, and getting users to the information they're looking for.
OT-- I appreciate your outrage, but calling anyone an idiot is a really good way to get modded down for trolling. Likewise, I think demands that Michael apologize, or that Taco or Andover fire the man, are not going to help anyone or improve the situation.
The glue between apache and oracle is written in C and C++. It is enormous, it is an architectural nightmare, and its name is obidos. Compiled (for the Alpha), it weighs in at over 150M, and compiling it typically takes more than 12 hours. It is monolithic, and a new instance is created with each apache child. It has its very own garbage collector, and its very own web-scripting language (think asp or php, only much, much worse). The code was forked for the auction site, so it has an evil twin named varzea that has to be maintained in parallel. It is, without question, the biggest waste of good programmers that I have ever seen.
The company also uses a mountain of perl, some java, a trace of lisp, and the usual tangle of shell scripts, but none of that is "live" on the site. What you are looking at on their homepage is delivered through the world's most bloated apache module.
(In fairness to apache, it should be noted that obidos was originally written to netscape's nsapi).
Re:A thought experiment
on
The Jungle
·
· Score: 1
Have those tests been re-run since the seventies?
What was used as the metric for "productivity," praytell? Was it the number of lines written? The number of tasks accomplished that had actually been assigned by management?
I've been in the industry for a while now. I do not disagree with the study you cite (though I have never read it); indeed, I have seen in the field that a minority of the programmers out there write a hell of a lot more code (and better code) than the rest. But these programmers are not necessarily the ones that contribute most to the value of the business. And outside of commercial software firms, those programmers are rarely the ones most valued by management. If I'm a manager, and I want a weekly statistical widget report, I don't want to hear that my programmer has been developing a general scripting language for the task. And it doesn't help if the programmer in question has an abrasive personality (which is all too often the case).
Corporate management has been building up quite a resentment toward programmers, who are percieved as overpaid and difficult to manage; programmers, given the recent job market, have grown impudent. If demand dries up, the social change experienced by programmers is likely to be more jarring than the economic damage.
Furthermore, I don't think that a programmer who reads this far down into the slashdot comments is likely to be one of the more productive ones (all programmers seem to think that they are part of the fabled "productive elite"-- by definition, most of them are wrong).
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the world economy goes into deep recession for a while, Deep enough to remove demand for programmers or other "computer geeks."
I know it's a stretch. Most of us have never seen a bear market before, let alone a deep recession, and so it is hard to imagine one.
Suppose now that a firm is contracting, and laying off tech workers. Do you know which ones will be the first to go? I'll tell you this much-- it won't be based on ability. It will be based on price and seniority, where price is base pay, and seniority is the degree to which an employee has ingratiated himself to his superiors. Does your boss like you?
Programming, for all of its fascinations, is not brain surgery. An average person can, in a year or less, learn enough programming to acomplish 80% of the tasks that corporations assign to programmers. For the rest of the work, graduate students are sought.
In a deep recession, and without unions, the programmers with jobs will be the ones who majored in communications (aka "advertising" or "self promotion") and then learned VB from a book or at the local community college.
Re:Two thoughts - Reinventing Comics and PayPal
on
Information Poisoning
·
· Score: 1
Oh, thank you. I still have the original issues of the print run of Zot. I warms my heart to see someone else recommending Scott McCloud to the unwashed masses.
My favorite missing h-bomb story was that of the US bombs lost in Palomares, Spain, in 1965; the story is well told in Flora Lewis' account, One of our h-bombs is missing. It's out of print, but your local library probably has a copy. If not, it's available at alibris.com, and probably at other online used bookstores. I found it a Powells.
Other "serious" SF writers?
on
Solaris
·
· Score: 2
Wow. About a month ago, I pruned my bookshelves, and got rid of almost all of my SF.
I kept books by these guys:
Stanislaw Lem
Phillip K Dick
JG Ballard
Karel Capek
And there are a other well-represented authors on the shelf who dabble in sci-fi once in a while: e.g.,
Italo Calvino
Jorge Louis Borges
Haruki Murikami
Looks like my tastes are getting a little pretentious as I get older. Anyone want to point me at other "literary" SF authors?
That's a fine mouthful of utopia-speak, sir, but you're going to need a big team of bad-ass attorneys and lobbyists to get the necessary infrastructure passed into law, with every investment bank in the country trying to squash the effort all the while.
In fact, the headline is entirely appropriate. As the linked article clearly explains, the b+n position was not previously based on the validity of the patent-- b+n were simply arguing that they were not _infringing_ on that patent.
Arguments presented by b+n today, however, state that the preliminary injunction should be lifted precisely because the patent will be proven invalid in the upcoming trial. This is a substantial shift in the substance of the case, (in fact, it indicates an entirely new defense strategy) and merits the announcement that b+n will indeed challenge the validity of the 1-click patent.
I worked as a programmer at amazon.com for a while, and I can tell you that:
1. Yes, their software is incredibly buggy. You'd be amazed. Really.
2. They routinely serve different pages to
a randomly selected fraction of customers in
order to measure customer response to various things. This is a matter of public record, and it comes up pretty often-- I think the last time I saw it was when they market-tested their "tabless" interface.
When these pricing discrepencies have come up in the past, amazon was pretty up-front about it, stating that the testing was random and therefore non-discriminatory. Whether or not you believe them is up to you. If you doubt them, I think you could set up a system to collect evidence of discrimination with a fairly small amount of effort.
I'm ecstatic about this news, because now my clients (as in, the people who pay me:) can run php4 on a stable debian (I've been tiding them over with apache 1.3.12+php built from source).
What I'm wondering now is when we can expect to see woody freeze. I apologize for not following the debian-devel list and picking up the debate on my own-- I'd feel like a creep lurking on the devel list for a project that I don't have time to commit to (Some day, debian, I will give back to you, but now is not the time... ).
My suggestion would be to commit to a freeze as soon as the 2.4 kernel is released. My simple-minded resoning is that Xfree 4.0 plus the new kernel should be sufficient reason to push a new stable release out the door.
I suspect that the issue has been discussed in much greater detail on the devel mailing list, and that there are many different schools of thought on the matter. I guess I fall into a hypothetical "updates to >n major packages warrant a new release" school of thought. I hold this view mostly due to frustration-- e.g., I was really upset when I learned that I could not build php out of CVS due to outdated gnu tools in slink.
But enough of my rambling. What we really need here is an update from someone intimate with the devel list. If there is consensus on when woody ought to freeze, what is it? If the matter is still being debated, what are the various viewpoints?
p.s. to debian weekly news: This is the sort of thing we would love to see covered, but I know Joey is spread pretty thin to begin with (perhaps because he's both very productive and quite tactful, to boot? ). Commentary from someone not intimate with the project might be welcome, as an addition to dwn, just as it might be unwelcome as an addition to the devel list.
p.p.s. to (lwn | dwn | linuxworld | linuxtoday) : If you're willing to remburse someone, modestly, to lurk and cover debian-devel, put a notice up on your site (or better yet, just drop me a line:).
Redundancy is all well and good, but it seems to me that this near-simultaneous approach might introduce a greater potential for communications failure.
Might NASA be using this as an opportunity to experiment with novel comm conditions and/or methods? Possible, but I think it's much more likely that there's just some cost savings in the staggered launch/simultaneous flight scheme that I haven't figured out yet.
True, you may eventually find a technical position serving a charitable cause that you can agree with whole-heartedly, but if you are keenly aware of your personal moral imperatives (and creative enough to form a technical plan of action around them), then it may be simpler or quicker to establish your own organization, be it non-profit or for-profit.
2) Contribute to free software that you feel will advance your moral agenda.
Who knows? If your contribution is significant, you may be hired full-time by a privately held company that shares your values, or by a publicly-held company that wishes to be associated with the values implicit in the project you contribute to.
3) I'm late to this party, so I didn't see the numerous "educate!" suggestions before I began composing this response.
I agree that education is valuable, but if you want your teaching to advance your moral imperatives, then you might be better served if you taught the abstract or philosophical benefits of your moral foundations than you would be if you taught general comp-sci topics; general technical knowledge might just as easily be used against your moral precepts as for them (and you'd hardly be the first teacher with rebellious students; the historical record goes back at least as far as Socrates and Plato in that regard. One might even view forensics itself as the "technical" field in that particular teacher/student schism, if one were, e.g., a grad student in search of a easy and entertaining dissertation:).
I think the reason for the rather different themes of those last three books (self v. society rather than self v. self) was Dick's acceptance of his insanity-- he had learned to live with the voices in his head (bka VALIS) by accepting them as not only benign, but benevolent. In his earlier ( and some would say better) work, he was trying to reconcile external reality (represented variously by society, history, his critics, etc) with internal reality (longing for human contact, search for safety, or the simple self-loathing of The Crap Artist) via self-examination and self doubt, and, less obviously, via re-creation of external reality in the act of writing itself. Throughout, the contrast between his internal reality and the world he lived in produced some wonderfully illuminating narratives.
It's unfortunate that the literati are only lately willing to look for illumination within the sci-fi "golden ghetto," but I hardly blame them-- much sci-fi is, from a traditional literary standpoint, utter crap. There has been a much wider acceptance of the notion that good literature can be written by crazy people (ever heard of Sylvia Plath?), but it would appear that this trend (let alone the ongoing literary critique of the very definitions of insanity) has escaped your notice entirely.
Make sure you have a decent sound card and reasonable speakers/headphones.
Turn it up. Way up. You're listening to explosions, fer chrissakes.
Realize that this is more like a tuned percussion instrument than a conventional pipe organ. You are listening to a composition for percussion. If you haven't heard one before, put yourself in "new experience" mode.
These are live recordings, so pay close attention to the crowd reaction. This instrument frightens people. When's the last time you heard an electric guitar do that?
Slashdot Mirror
Instead, we find only five percent or so of the population is left-handed.
I do wish the people who leap eagerly to find "evolutionary rationale" for the human foible du jour would at least think their arguments through on their own terms.
...of the sort of selective suspension of disbelief that reveals self-styled "hard" sci-fi fans to be, for the most part, utter pillocks.
In space, even?
Right, so we've got a community site, and some people start using it in a way the owner didn't anticipate, and the owner decides the new use is contrary to the "purpose" of the site, and decides to engage in an increasingly draconian crackdown on the "disruptive" users, yeah?
Hmm.
I'll betting it's only a matter of time before we find Jon Abrams blaming Friendster's every shortcoming, and its overall failure to quite live up to his "vision," on the tro^H^H^H fakesters.
Incidentally, I got a nice chuckle out of jbennetto making a snide comment about the "Romance" nature of the Best Novel winner, while ignoring the fact that Crouching Tiger is clearly a love story.
Part-time work as a waiter is probably more valuable than open-source development credit. Even better would be vounteer work at a homeless shelter, rape-crisis hotline, after-school mentoring program, or similar social work.
While I'm sure there are still a few employers out there looking to exploit a fresh college grad with a completely technocentric mindset, most have learned that it pays to choose a well-rounded individual instead.
But borrowing 2 billion to pay off CCC bonds that are trading at a greater than 50% discount? Get real. That means that for less than half the cash, you could instead buy their debt, and own the company when they file ch11. Would you give them the money under those circumstances?
Now. Would you please go look up the terms of the other (much larger) bond issues, and report back?
Five million still doesn't cut it.
In the eyes of the law, Amazon is headquartered in Delaware. For the rest of us, they are headquartered in Seattle, but not downtown. They moved to Beacon Hill years ago.
Five million per quarter isn't going to cut it.
In my stupid opinion, the right thing for Michael to do now is to point the censorware.com nameservers at censorware.net, thereby declawing Seth's complaint, and getting users to the information they're looking for.
OT-- I appreciate your outrage, but calling anyone an idiot is a really good way to get modded down for trolling. Likewise, I think demands that Michael apologize, or that Taco or Andover fire the man, are not going to help anyone or improve the situation.
The glue between apache and oracle is written in C and C++. It is enormous, it is an architectural nightmare, and its name is obidos. Compiled (for the Alpha), it weighs in at over 150M, and compiling it typically takes more than 12 hours. It is monolithic, and a new instance is created with each apache child. It has its very own garbage collector, and its very own web-scripting language (think asp or php, only much, much worse). The code was forked for the auction site, so it has an evil twin named varzea that has to be maintained in parallel. It is, without question, the biggest waste of good programmers that I have ever seen.
The company also uses a mountain of perl, some java, a trace of lisp, and the usual tangle of shell scripts, but none of that is "live" on the site. What you are looking at on their homepage is delivered through the world's most bloated apache module.
(In fairness to apache, it should be noted that obidos was originally written to netscape's nsapi).
Have those tests been re-run since the seventies?
What was used as the metric for "productivity," praytell? Was it the number of lines written? The number of tasks accomplished that had actually been assigned by management?
I've been in the industry for a while now. I do not disagree with the study you cite (though I have never read it); indeed, I have seen in the field that a minority of the programmers out there write a hell of a lot more code (and better code) than the rest. But these programmers are not necessarily the ones that contribute most to the value of the business. And outside of commercial software firms, those programmers are rarely the ones most valued by management. If I'm a manager, and I want a weekly statistical widget report, I don't want to hear that my programmer has been developing a general scripting language for the task. And it doesn't help if the programmer in question has an abrasive personality (which is all too often the case).
Corporate management has been building up quite a resentment toward programmers, who are percieved as overpaid and difficult to manage; programmers, given the recent job market, have grown impudent. If demand dries up, the social change experienced by programmers is likely to be more jarring than the economic damage.
Furthermore, I don't think that a programmer who reads this far down into the slashdot comments is likely to be one of the more productive ones (all programmers seem to think that they are part of the fabled "productive elite"-- by definition, most of them are wrong).
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the world economy goes into deep recession for a while, Deep enough to remove demand for programmers or other "computer geeks."
I know it's a stretch. Most of us have never seen a bear market before, let alone a deep recession, and so it is hard to imagine one.
Suppose now that a firm is contracting, and laying off tech workers. Do you know which ones will be the first to go? I'll tell you this much-- it won't be based on ability. It will be based on price and seniority, where price is base pay, and seniority is the degree to which an employee has ingratiated himself to his superiors. Does your boss like you?
Programming, for all of its fascinations, is not brain surgery. An average person can, in a year or less, learn enough programming to acomplish 80% of the tasks that corporations assign to programmers. For the rest of the work, graduate students are sought.
In a deep recession, and without unions, the programmers with jobs will be the ones who majored in communications (aka "advertising" or "self promotion") and then learned VB from a book or at the local community college.
Oh, thank you. I still have the original issues of the print run of Zot. I warms my heart to see someone else recommending Scott McCloud to the unwashed masses.
My favorite missing h-bomb story was that of the US bombs lost in Palomares, Spain, in 1965; the story is well told in Flora Lewis' account, One of our h-bombs is missing. It's out of print, but your local library probably has a copy. If not, it's available at alibris.com, and probably at other online used bookstores. I found it a Powells.
Wow. About a month ago, I pruned my bookshelves, and got rid of almost all of my SF.
I kept books by these guys:
Stanislaw Lem
Phillip K Dick
JG Ballard
Karel Capek
And there are a other well-represented authors on the shelf who dabble in sci-fi once in a while: e.g.,
Italo Calvino
Jorge Louis Borges
Haruki Murikami
Looks like my tastes are getting a little pretentious as I get older. Anyone want to point me at other "literary" SF authors?
That's a fine mouthful of utopia-speak, sir, but you're going to need a big team of bad-ass attorneys and lobbyists to get the necessary infrastructure passed into law, with every investment bank in the country trying to squash the effort all the while.
Good luck.
In fact, the headline is entirely appropriate. As the linked article clearly explains, the b+n position was not previously based on the validity of the patent-- b+n were simply arguing that they were not _infringing_ on that patent.
Arguments presented by b+n today, however, state that the preliminary injunction should be lifted precisely because the patent will be proven invalid in the upcoming trial. This is a substantial shift in the substance of the case, (in fact, it indicates an entirely new defense strategy) and merits the announcement that b+n will indeed challenge the validity of the 1-click patent.
I worked as a programmer at amazon.com for a while, and I can tell you that:
1. Yes, their software is incredibly buggy. You'd be amazed. Really.
2. They routinely serve different pages to
a randomly selected fraction of customers in
order to measure customer response to various things. This is a matter of public record, and it comes up pretty often-- I think the last time I saw it was when they market-tested their "tabless" interface.
When these pricing discrepencies have come up in the past, amazon was pretty up-front about it, stating that the testing was random and therefore non-discriminatory. Whether or not you believe them is up to you. If you doubt them, I think you could set up a system to collect evidence of discrimination with a fairly small amount of effort.
I'm ecstatic about this news, because now my clients (as in, the people who pay me :) can run php4 on a stable debian (I've been tiding them over with apache 1.3.12+php built from source).
:).
What I'm wondering now is when we can expect to see woody freeze. I apologize for not following the debian-devel list and picking up the debate on my own-- I'd feel like a creep lurking on the devel list for a project that I don't have time to commit to (Some day, debian, I will give back to you, but now is not the time... ).
My suggestion would be to commit to a freeze as soon as the 2.4 kernel is released. My simple-minded resoning is that Xfree 4.0 plus the new kernel should be sufficient reason to push a new stable release out the door.
I suspect that the issue has been discussed in much greater detail on the devel mailing list, and that there are many different schools of thought on the matter. I guess I fall into a hypothetical "updates to >n major packages warrant a new release" school of thought. I hold this view mostly due to frustration-- e.g., I was really upset when I learned that I could not build php out of CVS due to outdated gnu tools in slink.
But enough of my rambling. What we really need here is an update from someone intimate with the devel list. If there is consensus on when woody ought to freeze, what is it? If the matter is still being debated, what are the various viewpoints?
p.s. to debian weekly news: This is the sort of thing we would love to see covered, but I know Joey is spread pretty thin to begin with (perhaps because he's both very productive and quite tactful, to boot? ). Commentary from someone not intimate with the project might be welcome, as an addition to dwn, just as it might be unwelcome as an addition to the devel list.
p.p.s. to (lwn | dwn | linuxworld | linuxtoday) : If you're willing to remburse someone, modestly, to lurk and cover debian-devel, put a notice up on your site (or better yet, just drop me a line
Redundancy is all well and good, but it seems to me that this near-simultaneous approach might introduce a greater potential for communications failure.
Might NASA be using this as an opportunity to experiment with novel comm conditions and/or methods? Possible, but I think it's much more likely that there's just some cost savings in the staggered launch/simultaneous flight scheme that I haven't figured out yet.
1) Form your own organization.
True, you may eventually find a technical position serving a charitable cause that you can agree with whole-heartedly, but if you are keenly aware of your personal moral imperatives (and creative enough to form a technical plan of action around them), then it may be simpler or quicker to establish your own organization, be it non-profit or for-profit.
2) Contribute to free software that you feel will advance your moral agenda.
Who knows? If your contribution is significant, you may be hired full-time by a privately held company that shares your values, or by a publicly-held company that wishes to be associated with the values implicit in the project you contribute to.
3) I'm late to this party, so I didn't see the numerous "educate!" suggestions before I began composing this response.
I agree that education is valuable, but if you want your teaching to advance your moral imperatives, then you might be better served if you taught the abstract or philosophical benefits of your moral foundations than you would be if you taught general comp-sci topics; general technical knowledge might just as easily be used against your moral precepts as for them (and you'd hardly be the first teacher with rebellious students; the historical record goes back at least as far as Socrates and Plato in that regard. One might even view forensics itself as the "technical" field in that particular teacher/student schism, if one were, e.g., a grad student in search of a easy and entertaining dissertation :).
I think the reason for the rather different themes of those last three books (self v. society rather than self v. self) was Dick's acceptance of his insanity-- he had learned to live with the voices in his head (bka VALIS) by accepting them as not only benign, but benevolent. In his earlier ( and some would say better) work, he was trying to reconcile external reality (represented variously by society, history, his critics, etc) with internal reality (longing for human contact, search for safety, or the simple self-loathing of The Crap Artist) via self-examination and self doubt, and, less obviously, via re-creation of external reality in the act of writing itself. Throughout, the contrast between his internal reality and the world he lived in produced some wonderfully illuminating narratives.
It's unfortunate that the literati are only lately willing to look for illumination within the sci-fi "golden ghetto," but I hardly blame them-- much sci-fi is, from a traditional literary standpoint, utter crap. There has been a much wider acceptance of the notion that good literature can be written by crazy people (ever heard of Sylvia Plath?), but it would appear that this trend (let alone the ongoing literary critique of the very definitions of insanity) has escaped your notice entirely.
Mini How-to: