Evidently, cancer can also be cured by inject people with a bullet. From the article, "As the bullet kills the patient, the cancer cells experiences death, but beyond that the side effects have been minimal."
Next time tech support tells you that they are America, ask them "What time is it?"
Then watch (listen to) them squirm.
I don't care where in the world tech support people are. I just need competent help. Give me competent help and you can live on the moon for all I care.
Give me an competent foreigner over a incompetent American any day of the week.
You have to do what you love to do. You may or may not love IT. But whatever you love, try to abstract out the essence of what it is about that particular activity that you love. And then try to reduce it to a single sentence.
For me, it's "to create something from nothing using just my mind". Once you have the abstract statement, then you can look for the many different activities that will map to it.
For example, designing software system, creating music, writing software, writing stories, photography (still and motion) are all things that easily map to my abstract statement. Any of these activities will make me happy.
Finding this statement has taken me years. It won't happen overnight. Once you find it, you can apply it to whatever endeavor you choose.
Next, you have to look to the marketplace to find the most marketable activity that fits you statement and then try to find work doing that. If you think about it, there is no human activity that someone somewhere isn't being paid for. Some activities pay more than others and some jobs are easier to come by than others. Typically, the more fun a job is, the more people want to do it. The trick is to find your activity in an area that most people find mundane.
The earth has supposedly been warming over some period of very, very recent history. So with over 4 billion years of weather, we humans in our infinite wisdom are choosing about 100 years of data and trying to extrapolate where the earth is heading.
Let's face it, religious zealots have been calling for the End of the World since the beginning of time and now Scientific zealots are getting into the act.
What's really funny is that when I was a kid the real weather scare was the coming Ice Age. What happen to those Ice Age zealots anyway? Probably driven underground by the latest "Sky is Falling" group known as the Global Warming evangelists.
I'm so sick of the press reporting on predictions of idiots from idiot scientists to idiot psychics as if they were fact and then never following up when most of these nutballs are wrong.
I guess the press doesn't want to report on the failings of these wackjobs since the press was the ones who gave them credence in the first damn place.
We had Y2K in our industry and look how many billions were spent on something that we all knew was a bunch of BS. Many people post rationalized that the reason nothing bad happened was because something was done. But these people were part of the problem and don't want to admit to their bosses that huge amounts of money didn't need to be spent. And if you don't believe me, just look at the countries that didn't spend the money we did. No doomsday for them even though very little was done.
Global warming is going to follow the same stupid path. Tomorrow there will be a new threat and billions will be spent on that problem, meanwhile we'll be paying $10.00 / gallon for gas and no one will be solving the real problems.
The free-radio industry is looking at moving to digital broadcasts (like that's going to save them).
Imagine a TiVo-like device that records everything off of the radio, digitally. Now imagine I skim through this "data" for songs I like, save them to my hard drive and I'm done.
No RIAA beating down my door. No lawsuits. No illegal activity.
Maybe this information is being leaked to the public to cause us to worry about our hardware being destroyed so that they can, in a few months, announce that they've removed that particular feature. So when they do come out with their real DRM, we won't be outraged since connecting it to the Internet it will seem benign compared to hardware destruction.
Language developers need to decide what well structured programs look like. (When I say structured, I don't mean "Structured Programming.")
Once the rules for how to structure logic has been determined (to the best of ones ability) then a language that formalizes those constructs should be created.
We have plenty of languages that are great for defining logic, but none for structuring it.
So how do we do this? I suggest looking to the universe for answers.
In the hardware world, there is no need for garbage collectors. The laws of the universe restrict hardware engineers and so they must decide which hardware device is going to exclusively own a resister or a capacitor.
The reason for garbage collection is because of the unrestricted nature of the state-of-the-art languages. Any old object can point to any other object.
If hardware was designed like software, then a circuit board plugged into you motherboard would share a resister or two with the circuit board on you hard drive. It wouldn't take a genius to see that this is a bad idea. But in software it's done all the time.
There are many other such problems that garbage collection causes like breaking encapsulation, causing memory leaks (i.e. objects aren't collected because some object incorrectly is still referencing it), slowing down your program, indeterministic destruction of objects, etc.
There are many other problems with programming that need to be solved, e.g. how to easily develop multithreaded programming without little or no extra coding. (I've personally developed such a model, one that also gives the developer the speed of manual allocation of objects with the automatic deallocation of a garbage collector with no extra CPU cycles wasted AND deterministic destruction of objects.)
Also, imagine only needing a single collection class instead of dozens. (I've also achieved this.)
With proper models, we can achieve such things.
We need to reconsider everything to innovate. Nothing is sacred. Everything should be up for a redesign.
Unfortunately, all we seem to do is evolve languages to add a special flavor of a loop construct.
While I agree that things are harder because they are more complex, I think you may have missed my inital point.
Things are more difficult because we are using effectively the same tools for a more difficult job.
Riding your bike to school was fine, but try riding it to work. Not so easy. Sure we have attached a motor to your old Schwinn and now it goes much faster, but it's still a just bike.
I think that systems are complex because of bad design first and bad implementation second. If you have a bad design, no amount of good implementation is going to save you. If you have a good design that's poorly implemented, then there was no point of having a good design.
As far as languages are concerned, you could implement an object oriented approach to a C program (good design, bad implementation), but it is much easier to design a language that embodies that approach, i.e. C++.
I've spent most of my 23 years programming, designing systems. Every time that I go the extra mile to do the best design that I can with the time allotted, the programming is simplified and complexity is reduced.
Good designers see everything the same, good programmers see everything different. The best designs have their complexity in the structure not the code. Most systems have their complexity in the code.
What are the problems today in languages that cause complexity in coding? Inheritance, garbage collection, OO languages that break encapsulation (.NET, Java, any programming language that uses GC), multiple objects being "owned" by more than one other object, multi-threading locks that are defined at programming level instead of structural level, etc.
What I'm tired of seeing in "new" languages is the same old same old. Sure the syntax is different or some esoteric problem that the language designer had implementing a particular system in an existing language has been solved by their "new" language. But the basic concepts are identical to most existing languages.
The only real innovation, (if you can call it that), that's been made in a recent (10 year old language) mainstream language, viz. Java, is by making INTERFACE a language element. Granted, interfaces have been around forever, but Java is the first mainstream language to implement it at the language level.
What is needed is someone to completely throw out everything they thought they knew about languages and start from scratch using everything they know about complex system development.
You may ask yourself, "Why don't I do this?" Because there's no money in it and once I did, I'd have to convince the religious to convert. Not worth it.
I'll agree that the FOR loop example was a flippant one. My point is that we code the same way we always have, one nasty for loop after another.
One thing that OO programming did was allow us to reduce the number of IF THEN ELSE structures that we needed by putting the complexity into the structure of the design.
I think that I'd like to see a reduction in the need for FOR loops and the IF THEN ELSE structure by developing language constructs that intrinsically were those things but at a higher level. Iterators are an example of that, albeit a poor one.
If you think about it, FOR loops are used to iterate over collections. Even a FOR loop from 1 to 10 is an iteration of a collection of: {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10}.
I think we need to think about programming differently now that we've been doing it for 40 to 50 years. When I say differently, I don't mean graphically. Graphical programming is like reading a newspaper through a pinhole.
Before we can ever hope to innovate the OS, we must first innovate software development, i.e. languages.
All the language techniques that we use are rooted in old technologies. Its still just as hard to code today as ever, if not harder.
I've been programming since 1980 and back then you wrote everything yourself. It was a lot of work but at least you controlled the quality of the system because you wrote it all.
Today, systems are so complex (unnecessarily so), and the technology hasn't changed enough to keep up with the demand. We still write for loops like we always have.
The spoon is a fine tool when all you dig are holes in ice cream but when you have to dig a trench in the ground, forget it.
Don't waste time looking for creativity at work. If you have it great, but expecting it and being frustrated because it's not there is just a waste of time and energy. Companies don't care about your creative needs. They barely care about your work environment needs.
After about 20 years in this business, I finally got a hobby. One that fulfils my creative needs. Now I control it on my own terms, one hundred percent.
I think the biggest mistake in the educational system is that it uses passive learning instead of active learning as its model.
Nobody learns how to drive a car by just reading about it, watching movies about it and listening to the teacher talk about it.
We, i.e. humans, learn best by doing. Kids are no different. If you're going to teach math, make an activity out of it. Give kids a goal that requires math to achieve it. Math was invented/discovered out of a real world need. Kids would best be served by seeing the need early on and then experiencing math in order to achieve their goal.
I always swore that if I was ever in a position to teach a class (kids or adults) about how a computer works, that I would build a computer out of the people in the class. I'd have some of the class as memory, someone as the CPU, etc. I'd have an address bus and data bus that they'd have to follow. Then we'd execute a simple program to add 2 numbers.
I'd do this on the first day. Then all the book learning and lectures would be based on a common experience, viz. the human-computer made up of their classmates. This is active learning.
I think the meaning of "innovation" has changed over the years. To me, innovation means doing things that haven't been done before to solve an old problem in a more efficient way or to solve a problem that was unsolvable with current technology.
I don't believe that Linux, Firefox, JBoss, etc. are real innovations. They are simply a better fill-in-the-blank.
While the idea of free and open software makes sense from the emotional stand point, it runs counter to software as a profession where one expects to get paid.
The prevailing "wisdom" on Slashdot is that OSS is far superior based on the simple fact that it is free. However, another belief on these same boards is that outsourcing is terrible and wrong and all things evil but is mainly maintenance programming or application programming. The real programming is done in the developed countries.
Let's assume that all of this is true for a moment. What do we have by applying these common beliefs?
OSS is very innovative and outsourcing, while evil, isn't really the cream of the crop development. So the innovative, i.e. cream programming, work is best done for free and the drudgery jobs are going to be outsourced.
Great. So how do we get paid????
Free software = End of Innovation
on
Ballmer on Innovation
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
PROBLEM: Giving away software has killed technological innovations.
Why should Microsoft or any company for that matter spend millions on technological innovations when the market price for software is quickly approaching zero?
How much would you pay for a car if you could get a free one, albeit a no-frills one? How quickly would the car prices drop and the car manufactures stop creating new ones in such a market?
When programmer's jobs are being outsourced to other countries, the programming community is developing sophisticated software systems that could easily compete in the marketplace and giving them away.
We are destroying the very environment that we depend on for a living wage by working for free.
SOLUTION: Stop giving businesses free licenses to Open Source Software.
By making businesses pay, it reminds them that what we do is hard and worth money. The market price for software can begin to rise up creating software development jobs in this country and innovation can begin to rise up from the dead.
I'm using the googlebar extension for FireFox and it is far better. When it comes to the Auto Fill function, I've found the Autofill extension is better than the auto fill in the new google toolbar for FireFox which doesn't let me put in credit card information like they do in IE.
I think I'll wait for the next version of this tool.
People like the movie experience as a social event. If Hollywood would make better movies and stop sequels and making movie versions of TV shows, games, cereals and anything else that happens to enter into the public consciousness then people would go more.
Also get rid of the commercials at the beginning of the show. Nobody wants to pay for commercials (even though we do on cable). I think that they should bring back cartoons before a show.
Another problem is the fact that the studios make all of there money in the first few weeks of a release. This means that movies that suck and die on word of mouth don't hurt them anywhere as much as they hurt the theater owners.
Simply give people their money's worth and they will pay. It's not rocket science.
It wasn't that long ago when everyone was talking about telecommuting and how it would save millions for people because they wouldn't have to drive their cars to work. With the Internet, people could work from home.
Programming should have been the first job that could have been done remotely. If programmers can't make telecommuting possible, than no one can.
Turns out that telecommuting never materialized. Why? Because management can't stand not being able to watch people like a hawk. (Besides meetings, what else do they have to do?)
And even now, management can't seem to manage programming projects when the developers are just down the hall from them. What made us think that telecommuting could ever work.
Now outsourcing (global telecommuting) is being tried because of money. So following this line of logic we would conclude that telecommuting in this country failed because we paid programmers too much money and those same programmers lived too close to the company and were culturally too familiar with other people in the company.
What is needed is people half a world away who literally work while management sleeps and who program to written specifications (since that's always worked so well in the past) and can get the simplest of questions answered in a matter of days via email, fax or voice mail (ain't technology great). Yes that's will surely succeed in producing products of equal or higher quality than domestic products at "competitive" prices and will line the pockets of every shareholder throughout this great land.
The problem is that Moore's Law hasn't gone through enough iterations yet.
If you look at how the Universe solves problems, it does it by killing the problem with numbers.
At the risk of producing fodder for subsequent joke posts, take the problem of impregnation:
If a programmer where to solve the problem of impregnating a woman, he would build and super smart egg-seeking sperm with AI for recognizing an egg. The shell of this uber-sperm would be impervious to the acids in a woman's body and it would be turbo charged to get to its destination in a matter of milliseconds.
But how does the universe solve this problem. It kills it with numbers. To impregnate a woman takes millions and millions of stupid little sperm each swimming aimlessly. They have zero intelligence. They simply swim. And as unlikely of a solution as this may sound, it clearly works.
Programming in its essence is simply solving problems. We need to learn more from the universe. We need to have thousands to millions of really simple processors all working on very, very simple (read provable) algorithms to solve problems. We need memory at the PENTA level. We need to "grow" solutions via Genetic Engineering practices of the survival of the fittest (in business this might be the fastest solutions, or least expensive).
But what we have is MEGABYTES of data and a single really, really smart CPU. Our programs have at most half a dozen threads running instead of millions. Our systems are so complex that no one person can understand them. In nature, this is not a problem since the mechanism for maintenance and upgrades is automated.
And to build complex systems, we need to understand emergent behaviors. This fascinating subject has no discovered laws that we can apply to complex programming systems yet. Then there is GP (Genetic Programming). Another subject that is not studied enough. Emergent behaviors and GP are not the full solution but contain small gems of the solution.
We should learn from nature, the most sophisticated problem solving machine that we have at our disposal. From this knowledge, we can build systems that will build systems that will build systems... that will solve problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Evidently, cancer can also be cured by inject people with a bullet. From the article, "As the bullet kills the patient, the cancer cells experiences death, but beyond that the side effects have been minimal."
Next time tech support tells you that they are America, ask them "What time is it?"
Then watch (listen to) them squirm.
I don't care where in the world tech support people are. I just need competent help. Give me competent help and you can live on the moon for all I care.
Give me an competent foreigner over a incompetent American any day of the week.
You have to do what you love to do. You may or may not love IT. But whatever you love, try to abstract out the essence of what it is about that particular activity that you love. And then try to reduce it to a single sentence.
For me, it's "to create something from nothing using just my mind". Once you have the abstract statement, then you can look for the many different activities that will map to it.
For example, designing software system, creating music, writing software, writing stories, photography (still and motion) are all things that easily map to my abstract statement. Any of these activities will make me happy.
Finding this statement has taken me years. It won't happen overnight. Once you find it, you can apply it to whatever endeavor you choose.
Next, you have to look to the marketplace to find the most marketable activity that fits you statement and then try to find work doing that. If you think about it, there is no human activity that someone somewhere isn't being paid for. Some activities pay more than others and some jobs are easier to come by than others. Typically, the more fun a job is, the more people want to do it. The trick is to find your activity in an area that most people find mundane.
Good luck.
The earth has supposedly been warming over some period of very, very recent history. So with over 4 billion years of weather, we humans in our infinite wisdom are choosing about 100 years of data and trying to extrapolate where the earth is heading.
Let's face it, religious zealots have been calling for the End of the World since the beginning of time and now Scientific zealots are getting into the act.
What's really funny is that when I was a kid the real weather scare was the coming Ice Age. What happen to those Ice Age zealots anyway? Probably driven underground by the latest "Sky is Falling" group known as the Global Warming evangelists.
I'm so sick of the press reporting on predictions of idiots from idiot scientists to idiot psychics as if they were fact and then never following up when most of these nutballs are wrong.
I guess the press doesn't want to report on the failings of these wackjobs since the press was the ones who gave them credence in the first damn place.
We had Y2K in our industry and look how many billions were spent on something that we all knew was a bunch of BS. Many people post rationalized that the reason nothing bad happened was because something was done. But these people were part of the problem and don't want to admit to their bosses that huge amounts of money didn't need to be spent. And if you don't believe me, just look at the countries that didn't spend the money we did. No doomsday for them even though very little was done.
Global warming is going to follow the same stupid path. Tomorrow there will be a new threat and billions will be spent on that problem, meanwhile we'll be paying $10.00 / gallon for gas and no one will be solving the real problems.
Hollywood markets to the 18 year-olds is a real problem since the majority of the population is over 40 thanks to the babyboomers.
Box office will continue to decline (among many many other markets) until marketeers realize that the babyboomers have grown up.
The free-radio industry is looking at moving to digital broadcasts (like that's going to save them).
Imagine a TiVo-like device that records everything off of the radio, digitally.
Now imagine I skim through this "data" for songs I like, save them to my hard drive and I'm done.
No RIAA beating down my door. No lawsuits. No illegal activity.
If the government can take my property for the "public good", why can't it take the property of the drug companies?
Maybe this information is being leaked to the public to cause us to worry about our hardware being destroyed so that they can, in a few months, announce that they've removed that particular feature. So when they do come out with their real DRM, we won't be outraged since connecting it to the Internet it will seem benign compared to hardware destruction.
Please remember to remove you tinfoil hat.
Language developers need to decide what well structured programs look like. (When I say structured, I don't mean "Structured Programming.")
Once the rules for how to structure logic has been determined (to the best of ones ability) then a language that formalizes those constructs should be created.
We have plenty of languages that are great for defining logic, but none for structuring it.
So how do we do this? I suggest looking to the universe for answers.
In the hardware world, there is no need for garbage collectors. The laws of the universe restrict hardware engineers and so they must decide which hardware device is going to exclusively own a resister or a capacitor.
The reason for garbage collection is because of the unrestricted nature of the state-of-the-art languages. Any old object can point to any other object.
If hardware was designed like software, then a circuit board plugged into you motherboard would share a resister or two with the circuit board on you hard drive. It wouldn't take a genius to see that this is a bad idea. But in software it's done all the time.
There are many other such problems that garbage collection causes like breaking encapsulation, causing memory leaks (i.e. objects aren't collected because some object incorrectly is still referencing it), slowing down your program, indeterministic destruction of objects, etc.
There are many other problems with programming that need to be solved, e.g. how to easily develop multithreaded programming without little or no extra coding. (I've personally developed such a model, one that also gives the developer the speed of manual allocation of objects with the automatic deallocation of a garbage collector with no extra CPU cycles wasted AND deterministic destruction of objects.)
Also, imagine only needing a single collection class instead of dozens. (I've also achieved this.)
With proper models, we can achieve such things.
We need to reconsider everything to innovate. Nothing is sacred. Everything should be up for a redesign.
Unfortunately, all we seem to do is evolve languages to add a special flavor of a loop construct.
While I agree that things are harder because they are more complex, I think you may have missed my inital point.
Things are more difficult because we are using effectively the same tools for a more difficult job.
Riding your bike to school was fine, but try riding it to work. Not so easy. Sure we have attached a motor to your old Schwinn and now it goes much faster, but it's still a just bike.
I think that systems are complex because of bad design first and bad implementation second. If you have a bad design, no amount of good implementation is going to save you. If you have a good design that's poorly implemented, then there was no point of having a good design.
As far as languages are concerned, you could implement an object oriented approach to a C program (good design, bad implementation), but it is much easier to design a language that embodies that approach, i.e. C++.
I've spent most of my 23 years programming, designing systems. Every time that I go the extra mile to do the best design that I can with the time allotted, the programming is simplified and complexity is reduced.
Good designers see everything the same, good programmers see everything different. The best designs have their complexity in the structure not the code. Most systems have their complexity in the code.
What are the problems today in languages that cause complexity in coding? Inheritance, garbage collection, OO languages that break encapsulation (.NET, Java, any programming language that uses GC), multiple objects being "owned" by more than one other object, multi-threading locks that are defined at programming level instead of structural level, etc.
What I'm tired of seeing in "new" languages is the same old same old. Sure the syntax is different or some esoteric problem that the language designer had implementing a particular system in an existing language has been solved by their "new" language. But the basic concepts are identical to most existing languages.
The only real innovation, (if you can call it that), that's been made in a recent (10 year old language) mainstream language, viz. Java, is by making INTERFACE a language element. Granted, interfaces have been around forever, but Java is the first mainstream language to implement it at the language level.
What is needed is someone to completely throw out everything they thought they knew about languages and start from scratch using everything they know about complex system development.
You may ask yourself, "Why don't I do this?" Because there's no money in it and once I did, I'd have to convince the religious to convert. Not worth it.
I'll agree that the FOR loop example was a flippant one. My point is that we code the same way we always have, one nasty for loop after another.
One thing that OO programming did was allow us to reduce the number of IF THEN ELSE structures that we needed by putting the complexity into the structure of the design.
I think that I'd like to see a reduction in the need for FOR loops and the IF THEN ELSE structure by developing language constructs that intrinsically were those things but at a higher level. Iterators are an example of that, albeit a poor one.
If you think about it, FOR loops are used to iterate over collections. Even a FOR loop from 1 to 10 is an iteration of a collection of: {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10}.
I think we need to think about programming differently now that we've been doing it for 40 to 50 years. When I say differently, I don't mean graphically. Graphical programming is like reading a newspaper through a pinhole.
Before we can ever hope to innovate the OS, we must first innovate software development, i.e. languages.
All the language techniques that we use are rooted in old technologies. Its still just as hard to code today as ever, if not harder.
I've been programming since 1980 and back then you wrote everything yourself. It was a lot of work but at least you controlled the quality of the system because you wrote it all.
Today, systems are so complex (unnecessarily so), and the technology hasn't changed enough to keep up with the demand. We still write for loops like we always have.
The spoon is a fine tool when all you dig are holes in ice cream but when you have to dig a trench in the ground, forget it.
Don't waste time looking for creativity at work. If you have it great, but expecting it and being frustrated because it's not there is just a waste of time and energy. Companies don't care about your creative needs. They barely care about your work environment needs.
After about 20 years in this business, I finally got a hobby. One that fulfils my creative needs. Now I control it on my own terms, one hundred percent.
I think the biggest mistake in the educational system is that it uses passive learning instead of active learning as its model.
Nobody learns how to drive a car by just reading about it, watching movies about it and listening to the teacher talk about it.
We, i.e. humans, learn best by doing. Kids are no different. If you're going to teach math, make an activity out of it. Give kids a goal that requires math to achieve it. Math was invented/discovered out of a real world need. Kids would best be served by seeing the need early on and then experiencing math in order to achieve their goal.
I always swore that if I was ever in a position to teach a class (kids or adults) about how a computer works, that I would build a computer out of the people in the class. I'd have some of the class as memory, someone as the CPU, etc. I'd have an address bus and data bus that they'd have to follow. Then we'd execute a simple program to add 2 numbers.
I'd do this on the first day. Then all the book learning and lectures would be based on a common experience, viz. the human-computer made up of their classmates. This is active learning.
I think the meaning of "innovation" has changed over the years. To me, innovation means doing things that haven't been done before to solve an old problem in a more efficient way or to solve a problem that was unsolvable with current technology.
I don't believe that Linux, Firefox, JBoss, etc. are real innovations. They are simply a better fill-in-the-blank.
While the idea of free and open software makes sense from the emotional stand point, it runs counter to software as a profession where one expects to get paid.
The prevailing "wisdom" on Slashdot is that OSS is far superior based on the simple fact that it is free. However, another belief on these same boards is that outsourcing is terrible and wrong and all things evil but is mainly maintenance programming or application programming. The real programming is done in the developed countries.
Let's assume that all of this is true for a moment. What do we have by applying these common beliefs?
OSS is very innovative and outsourcing, while evil, isn't really the cream of the crop development. So the innovative, i.e. cream programming, work is best done for free and the drudgery jobs are going to be outsourced.
Great. So how do we get paid????
PROBLEM: Giving away software has killed technological innovations.
Why should Microsoft or any company for that matter spend millions on technological innovations when the market price for software is quickly approaching zero?
How much would you pay for a car if you could get a free one, albeit a no-frills one? How quickly would the car prices drop and the car manufactures stop creating new ones in such a market?
When programmer's jobs are being outsourced to other countries, the programming community is developing sophisticated software systems that could easily compete in the marketplace and giving them away.
We are destroying the very environment that we depend on for a living wage by working for free.
SOLUTION: Stop giving businesses free licenses to Open Source Software.
By making businesses pay, it reminds them that what we do is hard and worth money. The market price for software can begin to rise up creating software development jobs in this country and innovation can begin to rise up from the dead.
I'm using the googlebar extension for FireFox and it is far better. When it comes to the Auto Fill function, I've found the Autofill extension is better than the auto fill in the new google toolbar for FireFox which doesn't let me put in credit card information like they do in IE.
I think I'll wait for the next version of this tool.
Am I the only person on the planet who finds that the EFF's director's name Shari Steele (Share & Steal) is ironic?
People like the movie experience as a social event. If Hollywood would make better movies and stop sequels and making movie versions of TV shows, games, cereals and anything else that happens to enter into the public consciousness then people would go more.
Also get rid of the commercials at the beginning of the show. Nobody wants to pay for commercials (even though we do on cable). I think that they should bring back cartoons before a show.
Another problem is the fact that the studios make all of there money in the first few weeks of a release. This means that movies that suck and die on word of mouth don't hurt them anywhere as much as they hurt the theater owners.
Simply give people their money's worth and they will pay. It's not rocket science.
After reading Paul Graham's article Submarine I have to ask myself who gains by this belief being believed by the mainstream.
We are overloaded with data not information.
It wasn't that long ago when everyone was talking about telecommuting and how it would save millions for people because they wouldn't have to drive their cars to work. With the Internet, people could work from home.
Programming should have been the first job that could have been done remotely. If programmers can't make telecommuting possible, than no one can.
Turns out that telecommuting never materialized. Why? Because management can't stand not being able to watch people like a hawk. (Besides meetings, what else do they have to do?)
And even now, management can't seem to manage programming projects when the developers are just down the hall from them. What made us think that telecommuting could ever work.
Now outsourcing (global telecommuting) is being tried because of money. So following this line of logic we would conclude that telecommuting in this country failed because we paid programmers too much money and those same programmers lived too close to the company and were culturally too familiar with other people in the company.
What is needed is people half a world away who literally work while management sleeps and who program to written specifications (since that's always worked so well in the past) and can get the simplest of questions answered in a matter of days via email, fax or voice mail (ain't technology great). Yes that's will surely succeed in producing products of equal or higher quality than domestic products at "competitive" prices and will line the pockets of every shareholder throughout this great land.
I can hardly wait.
Great Joke !
But there is a place that gives out free BBQ and teriyaki sauce samples. They'll mail it to your home.
www.givemefoods.com
I disagree.
The problem is that Moore's Law hasn't gone through enough iterations yet.
If you look at how the Universe solves problems, it does it by killing the problem with numbers.
At the risk of producing fodder for subsequent joke posts, take the problem of impregnation:
If a programmer where to solve the problem of impregnating a woman, he would build and super smart egg-seeking sperm with AI for recognizing an egg. The shell of this uber-sperm would be impervious to the acids in a woman's body and it would be turbo charged to get to its destination in a matter of milliseconds.
But how does the universe solve this problem. It kills it with numbers. To impregnate a woman takes millions and millions of stupid little sperm each swimming aimlessly. They have zero intelligence. They simply swim. And as unlikely of a solution as this may sound, it clearly works.
Programming in its essence is simply solving problems. We need to learn more from the universe. We need to have thousands to millions of really simple processors all working on very, very simple (read provable) algorithms to solve problems. We need memory at the PENTA level. We need to "grow" solutions via Genetic Engineering practices of the survival of the fittest (in business this might be the fastest solutions, or least expensive).
But what we have is MEGABYTES of data and a single really, really smart CPU. Our programs have at most half a dozen threads running instead of millions. Our systems are so complex that no one person can understand them. In nature, this is not a problem since the mechanism for maintenance and upgrades is automated.
And to build complex systems, we need to understand emergent behaviors. This fascinating subject has no discovered laws that we can apply to complex programming systems yet. Then there is GP (Genetic Programming). Another subject that is not studied enough. Emergent behaviors and GP are not the full solution but contain small gems of the solution.
We should learn from nature, the most sophisticated problem solving machine that we have at our disposal. From this knowledge, we can build systems that will build systems that will build systems... that will solve problems.