Hahahaha. So cute, such trust.:) I assume you jest. But just in case someone believes that, here are some counter examples.
My 1960s era Earth Sciences grade school textbook mentioned the idea that the surface of the Earth might be comprised of several huge plates, and that the land masses might once have been all connected. But "All reputable scientists agree that this could not the case." I remember this, because I had just read a SciAm article discussing plate tectonics (the book was probably five years old at the time.) Also, until Penzias and Wilson _accidentally_ found the echoes of the Big Bang, Hoyle's steady state universe was the authoritative view of the mainstream of astronomy. Actual experts are often, and necessarily wrong - but the process of science tends, over time, to correct errors and converge toward the most reasonable answer given the evidence available. It's still quite possible that there is no dark matter, no dark energy, just a flaw in the equations or a missing piece of evidence.
Clarke's Three Laws are three "laws" of prediction formulated by the British writer and scientist Arthur C. Clarke. They are:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Religions don't like democracy, and autocracies don't like democracy.
Actually, as was pointed out 200 years ago regarding the establishment of the USA, to that time no democracy has ever survived more than about 200 years. Athens was the first democracy I can think of where bread, circuses and the threat of war were used by the leaders to stay elected (See Pericles). The result was a series of wars and the eventual demise of Athens. IMHO the peoples' virtue or lack thereof is the primary risk, and religion is just a convenient excuse or cause celebre'.
As someone else once put it (more or less), democracies last until the people realise they can vote themselves bread and circuses. First the people are virtuous and hardworking, then they become wealthy as a result of that hard work, then they become complacent, then they become greedy/needy/decadent, then (since most people are no longer working their ass off), their system collapses, people start to starve, and revolution, war or takeover by the neighbors is next.
Again, if you check the various {holy} books for half a dozen religions, they are waiting on a worldwide famine to hopefully kill off, or otherwise unmask, the people they're going to kill. And as has been pointed out in history if not once, then more than a dozen times, some powerful people want this to happen. They want to create enough chaos that it will force the hand of their god, force him / her to come back, so they can shore up their faith with actual evidence. I mean, if 50% of the world's population is crying out to the Almighty, surely he'd be moved to answer them, right?
I've done some back-of-the-envelope calculations, and found that, using a VERY broad brush and some simple energy throughput and urban habitat analysis, the Earth could support one trillion people. Life would not be anything like it is now, of course, but the folks who grew up in that world would accept it as what it is. For example, they would probably consider the raising of animals for food as ridiculously barbaric and unsanitary, unlike their pure algae-based rations. One trillion people is about 150 times as many people as we have now. The mean population density, based on our total land area (without even expanding onto and under the oceans) would only be about twice the present density of Bangladesh, or Los Angeles County. A simple way to view this would be to just multiply the population of any given area by 150, by growing both up and out. The Boston-NYC-Virginia metroplex would probably be about the same size but comprised of one 100-story structure after another, and you could probably walk from one city to the other without ever going to ground level.
Many science fiction stories have contemplated huge, high density urban complexes, even ones as large as entire planets (one example would be Trantor, the Imperial capital in Asimov's Foundation series. But to my knowledge nobody has really stuck a number on it, with the idea of making such a place sustainable (in the sense of "everybody doesn't die of starvation, disease or lack of oxygen in a few years".
It's also worth considering that such a density would not be as high as any of various space habitats proposed over the last 50 years, where it is assumed that humans manage to maintain themselves indefinitely in a strongly restricted volume.
Since many parts of the land area are not really conducive to building living space on them, there is also the continental shelf and floating cities, anchored to sea mounts. Other analysts have shown that the total area of such places is greater than the present land mass, so we could possibly double the area we presently contemplate as 'places to live'. (You could put the equivalent of an entire North and South America in the middle of the Pacific, and (given some daunting engineering challenges) it would fit rather nicely. That could be used for food growing and/or living habitat.
I recall an experiment that was done about 40 years ago, I think in NYC. It involved a typical dilapidated tenement building that (I think) was due to be torn down. First the scientists interviewed the tenants, who were about to leave. Then they did their own survey, to determine how many rats were seen. Then (somehow?) they isolated the building and killed all the rats, and counted them. The result was that for every rat reported to have been seen, there were ten actual rats. If that is a reasonable ratio (and I think it is), then take the number of rats that the typical New Yorker sees in a year - let's say six, just to put a number on it - there are ten times that many. Human population of NYC is 8.5 million, so multiply by 60 to get 510 imllion rats. I wouldn't be surprised if that was close (1/2 order of magnitude) to the actual number.
Yes, it's not good science to extrapolate from one old study on one building to the much different environs of an entire city, my memory is vague so I probably have everything wrong (except the 10:1 - I'm sure of that), etc., etc. But it's a reasonable hypothetical number to use as a starting point.
Sigh - replying to myself - I just found that Budget Computers is closed.:( It's worth posting what they say on their website.
REQUIEM FOR A SMALL BUSINESS
To Budget Customers,
I could blame the banks, they were not any help.
As a matter of fact they were the reverse.
I could blame the Government who never really extended a helping hand but I guess it is not really their job. But in the end I must take responsibility for this failure,
I am the one who made the decisions.
Now another small business has died and more Families face financial struggle and unemployment, but that is a sign of the times.
I would like to apologize to you, my customers, for leaving you stranded. If I could have done it any other way I would have.
THANK YOU for your loyalty and patronage. I will forever be in your debt.
My current Thinkpad is a Z61M also - I was initially concerned about it's lifespan until I upgraded it to a 64bit processor. The memory still bothers me though - why they put a bios capable of recognizing 4GB with a chipset capable of addressing only 3GB is beyond me...
I'm not even considering anything other than a thinkpad. Since the z61m was still an IBM creation, I have yet to have a Lenovo experience. Hopefully Lenovo is holding the same high standard.
You can do that? I never even considered a new processor. Hmmm. Now I have to think a bit. New processor, new trackpad (my bad), new keyboard so I can see the keys again, see if I can tighten up the hinges and reset the fan, maybe an SSD (put swap on there, makes up for the lack of RAM at the cost of increased SSD wear) and/or bigger hard drive,... Hmmm. Fix up an old friend, or spend the money on the new(er) hotness?
I wish the screen were brighter, also lust after 1080P just for the additional pixels = Vim windows and lines of code. I often code with two vertical panes in Vim so I can compare two files or work on one file in two places.
For those who are curious, I actually got mine used from Budget Computers in Beaverton OR in the spring of 2007 - good folks. They were a bit skeptical when I told them I didn't want Windoze on it 'cause I was installing Ubuntu, but knocked something off the price - don't recall how much. I brought it in to show them the next day.:)
My Z61m, bought in 2007 and used for a couple of hours on a typical day since then, is now getting very rickety but still runs fine. I replaced the hinges once two years ago, and now they are getting dicey again. The keys are almost completely worn clean of any clue to the letters, and the little navigation bumps on f and j are long gone. The screen shows wear from five years of cleaning and general abuse. I replaced the fan a year ago and it has started to make noises again (possibly I just didn't get the alignment right). The trackpad hasn't worked since I replaced the fan, because I accidentally yanked on the flexible flat connection wire/board thingie when I was putting it together.
So, it's time to take the plunge again. This new one might be a candidate. The Z61m has the 1680x1050 screen, and I want to get something at least that good, but faster. I run Compiz with a transparent cube.
I might take this old thing and turn it into a dedicated video front end - remove the screen and connect directly to the TV somehow. Taken out of its case it might not even need a fan most of the time.
You just inspired a thought - they could make it so the keys rise up slightly when the lid is opened, providing longer travel. In fact I would love to see a true shift-lock key again, that stays down when it's engaged. And a pony, of course.
The father of one of my co-workers has spent essentially the entire time since a week after the tsunami, in Japan assisting with the planning and execution of the clean-up. As has been recently exposed in the media, he has been saying all along that things were and are much worse than TEPCO, the government and the Japanese media have been saying, that the response and cleanup efforts have been pathetically bad, and that the exposure for many people and the surrounding area has been much worse than have been let out.
Among other things that have been publicized recently, it's been discovered that TEPCO executives had been instructing their workers to either not wear their radiation monitor badges or to cover them (with lead? I dunno, don't recall) to reduce the workers' apparent exposure.
I've also read that an area of some hundred square miles may remain uninhabitable for decades if not centuries. Sorry, don't recall where - it was a couple of months ago.
They choose to sensationalize and fan the fires of ignorance because it makes for more exciting news, which gets them better ratings, which gets them more money.
I think our attraction to disaster is biological - I'm not sure _why_, but we all tend to slow down at accident scenes, just for one example. How much of our interest in Fukushima is just the fatalistic viewing of the tide coming in and washing people away? IIRC there is evidence that other primates do this as well.
I suppose destruction derbies and horror movies are successful for similar reasons. Then there's the infamous Roman spectacles.
I used to live in Pittsburgh(early 1990s). One of the local stations was not getting very good ratings for their 11:00 PM news, and decided to chase ambulances. They began showing video footage of every car crash they could get to. Soon they had among the highest ratings in the area.
I doubt it - if you're near granite, you're getting dosed. Isn't New Hampshire the 'Granite State'? Unless NH granite is special, it's got similar levels of uranium in it, and the resulting radon escaping from it. Granite, from what I've read, is almost always a 'good source' of radiation. Granite from Canada, Washington and Oregon is the primary source of the radiation that makes the Columbia River the most radioactive river in the world.
I did a quick Google to find the typical levels in NH but didn't find a number in a minute or two, and gave up.
I taught a software quality assurance workshop at one of my earlier employers. We discovered that as early as the late 1960s and early 1970s there were already many good metrics for productivity, quality, defects, etc. It turns out that black box testing will only catch something like 30% of the defects. If the group is using good software quality procedures (back then that included structured programming, code walkthroughs, a coherent design cycle, etc.), then a large proportion of the bugs (80%?) were built into the original design. The cost of fixing a bug increased by a factor of 10 with each stage in the design cycle.
An interesting question is whether programming quality back then was harder or easier to achieve - back then just browbeating the machines to get them to do what you want was harder but for most applications there were few networking and multiprocessing problems (other than getting remote jobs to run, etc.); now that part is easy (at the application level, anyway), but we have all these interoperation and security problems.
Nowadays it is effectively impossible to know, much less to anticipate and program around, all the possible problems related to a program running in a multiprocessing network environment. Heck, it's impossible even for a human to anticipate all the possible ways that people might act in their presence while crossing the street, and that's a reasonably useful analogy. One of my recent projects involves pulling data (with permission) from another organization's website. In the last year they have changed the website in ways that break the software at our end almost monthly. We have one guy now essentially 1/2 time doing nothing but updating our code to match their code. Now, a human can figure out how to use their website in a few minutes (with the advantage of a browser that does a lot of work in the background) but we are just not there yet with software - or at least not with our software.
See, the thing is, something like 90% to 95% of all computer users are consumers of information. So that's where the majority of the use cases are. I for one have not figured out a single thing I could use a tablet for - I'm not much of a video watcher, or song player (except in the context of headphones when I'm developing, etc.)
Actually there is one thing - I could use a tablet to provide a remote tool for looking at marine charts, weather and boat diagnostics when I'm sailing. In fact I plan to make my whole boat digital as soon as I get to that point - right now I'm repairing hull damage.:( There is a boat communications protocol standard that is derived from the CANBUS, called NMEA 2000, which allows all your instruments to be connected to a common system. There are even some open source tools for maps, radar, instrumentation, etc. and a budding Linux distro (I forget the name just now - Navigatrix? Also see OpenCPN for maps.)
How did you set that up? I am a long time user of Compiz, and in fact would prefer to just stay in Compiz-land all the time. I started to set up an XFCE + Compiz environment on a 'new' machine, but got bogged down - I confess not spending a lot of time on the project. Any hints/clues appreciated.
(Wishes #1: a way for panel widgets from some other desktop environments to live inside Cairo, so I can add them to my Dock, or an additional dock, all within the 3D environment. This might also take some load off Cairo developers, since any other dock or panel features could be added without further development.)
(Wishes #2: A way to make desktop icons not clickable - I use the Cube in transparent-all-the-time mode with an animated background. But there is some stuff parked on my Desktop and sometimes I accidentally click on one of those when I really just want focus outside any windows.)
(Wishes #3: Extend Compiz to handle arbitrary 'rooms' rather than just the Cube - I have found that you can extend the cube to an arbitrary number (limit?) of sides, so it can be an Octagon if you want. But what I'd really like is to build a multi-room 'house' with different stuff on the 'walls' in each 'room' - analogous to desktops in each room. Then I could go to the 'email room', or the 'office docs room', etc.)
The above are in increasing 'blue sky' -> 'fantasy' order...:)
No, but it does mean there is a known-working distro that distro-maintainers can refer to and compare to their own in development, to determine why feature X is working in the Gnome distro but not in theirs - that is a useful tool. It also means that a comparative testing environment can be set up, to automate (to some extent) the regression testing process. With a bit of camera and image processing work it might even become mostly-automated.
It's probably related to the fact (according to a survey I read some years ago) that most accountants never balance their checkbooks. I would be willing to bet that 70+% of geeks don't backup their personal data regularly, and have less-than-ideal password policies for their own web accounts.
There are really two choices, that have (over time) an exactly equal minimum error rate (= probability of being hacked, etc.) - one is to have multiple independent, dynamically changing methods of securing things; the other is to have one central authority. I repeat - from first principles in information theory - these both have the exact same optimum. Let's say, for the purposes of argument, that the optimal probability of error is 5%. The difference between the two options is the distribution of errors. If one has a single authority, then that 5% chance means that in the event the system is hacked, _everyone_ (100% of the people) is simultaneously vulnerable -> a potential national/global catastrophe. If one has a variety of authentication methods, then at any given time, about 5% of the people are vulnerable, 100% of the time - a potential continuing problem.
Now, of course, it is unlikely that either system will actually reach that optimum, but again the probable 'miss' ratio is likely to be the same on average so that makes no difference.
I'm probably not explaining this well but it's closely related to the reason why (according to some/most biologists) sexual reproduction exists - it increases diversity among the species, making it more difficult for a disease to wipe out the whole species. It's also very (very, very) broadly why most folks don't bet all their chips on one roll of the dice.
So, while all these muddled different methods, none of which work perfectly, makes life more complicated and increases the hassle of maintaining one's own security, it is better (more adaptive) for the society as a whole. It also tends to lead to a smarter population overall (or it would, if financial success had any correlation to evolutionary success - which is not true in a civilized society.)
Slashdot Mirror
Actual experts have never been wrong.
Hahahaha. So cute, such trust. :) I assume you jest. But just in case someone believes that, here are some counter examples.
My 1960s era Earth Sciences grade school textbook mentioned the idea that the surface of the Earth might be comprised of several huge plates, and that the land masses might once have been all connected. But "All reputable scientists agree that this could not the case." I remember this, because I had just read a SciAm article discussing plate tectonics (the book was probably five years old at the time.) Also, until Penzias and Wilson _accidentally_ found the echoes of the Big Bang, Hoyle's steady state universe was the authoritative view of the mainstream of astronomy. Actual experts are often, and necessarily wrong - but the process of science tends, over time, to correct errors and converge toward the most reasonable answer given the evidence available. It's still quite possible that there is no dark matter, no dark energy, just a flaw in the equations or a missing piece of evidence.
Clark's Three Laws
Clarke's Three Laws are three "laws" of prediction formulated by the British writer and scientist Arthur C. Clarke. They are:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
So what does IT have to do with it? The virtue of the geek? :)
Religions don't like democracy, and autocracies don't like democracy.
Actually, as was pointed out 200 years ago regarding the establishment of the USA, to that time no democracy has ever survived more than about 200 years. Athens was the first democracy I can think of where bread, circuses and the threat of war were used by the leaders to stay elected (See Pericles). The result was a series of wars and the eventual demise of Athens. IMHO the peoples' virtue or lack thereof is the primary risk, and religion is just a convenient excuse or cause celebre'.
As someone else once put it (more or less), democracies last until the people realise they can vote themselves bread and circuses. First the people are virtuous and hardworking, then they become wealthy as a result of that hard work, then they become complacent, then they become greedy/needy/decadent, then (since most people are no longer working their ass off), their system collapses, people start to starve, and revolution, war or takeover by the neighbors is next.
Again, if you check the various {holy} books for half a dozen religions, they are waiting on a worldwide famine to hopefully kill off, or otherwise unmask, the people they're going to kill. And as has been pointed out in history if not once, then more than a dozen times, some powerful people want this to happen. They want to create enough chaos that it will force the hand of their god, force him / her to come back, so they can shore up their faith with actual evidence. I mean, if 50% of the world's population is crying out to the Almighty, surely he'd be moved to answer them, right?
Reminds me of "Rainbow Six".
I've done some back-of-the-envelope calculations, and found that, using a VERY broad brush and some simple energy throughput and urban habitat analysis, the Earth could support one trillion people. Life would not be anything like it is now, of course, but the folks who grew up in that world would accept it as what it is. For example, they would probably consider the raising of animals for food as ridiculously barbaric and unsanitary, unlike their pure algae-based rations. One trillion people is about 150 times as many people as we have now. The mean population density, based on our total land area (without even expanding onto and under the oceans) would only be about twice the present density of Bangladesh, or Los Angeles County. A simple way to view this would be to just multiply the population of any given area by 150, by growing both up and out. The Boston-NYC-Virginia metroplex would probably be about the same size but comprised of one 100-story structure after another, and you could probably walk from one city to the other without ever going to ground level.
Many science fiction stories have contemplated huge, high density urban complexes, even ones as large as entire planets (one example would be Trantor, the Imperial capital in Asimov's Foundation series. But to my knowledge nobody has really stuck a number on it, with the idea of making such a place sustainable (in the sense of "everybody doesn't die of starvation, disease or lack of oxygen in a few years".
It's also worth considering that such a density would not be as high as any of various space habitats proposed over the last 50 years, where it is assumed that humans manage to maintain themselves indefinitely in a strongly restricted volume.
Since many parts of the land area are not really conducive to building living space on them, there is also the continental shelf and floating cities, anchored to sea mounts. Other analysts have shown that the total area of such places is greater than the present land mass, so we could possibly double the area we presently contemplate as 'places to live'. (You could put the equivalent of an entire North and South America in the middle of the Pacific, and (given some daunting engineering challenges) it would fit rather nicely. That could be used for food growing and/or living habitat.
I recall an experiment that was done about 40 years ago, I think in NYC. It involved a typical dilapidated tenement building that (I think) was due to be torn down. First the scientists interviewed the tenants, who were about to leave. Then they did their own survey, to determine how many rats were seen. Then (somehow?) they isolated the building and killed all the rats, and counted them. The result was that for every rat reported to have been seen, there were ten actual rats. If that is a reasonable ratio (and I think it is), then take the number of rats that the typical New Yorker sees in a year - let's say six, just to put a number on it - there are ten times that many. Human population of NYC is 8.5 million, so multiply by 60 to get 510 imllion rats. I wouldn't be surprised if that was close (1/2 order of magnitude) to the actual number.
Yes, it's not good science to extrapolate from one old study on one building to the much different environs of an entire city, my memory is vague so I probably have everything wrong (except the 10:1 - I'm sure of that), etc., etc. But it's a reasonable hypothetical number to use as a starting point.
Sigh - replying to myself - I just found that Budget Computers is closed. :( It's worth posting what they say on their website.
REQUIEM FOR A SMALL BUSINESS
To Budget Customers,
I could blame the banks, they were not any help.
As a matter of fact they were the reverse.
I could blame the Government who never really extended a helping hand but I guess it is not really their job.
But in the end I must take responsibility for this failure,
I am the one who made the decisions.
Now another small business has died and more Families face financial struggle and unemployment, but that is a sign of the times.
I would like to apologize to you, my customers, for leaving you stranded. If I could have done it any other way I would have.
THANK YOU for your loyalty and patronage. I will forever be in your debt.
May God bless you,
Tim Anderson
Budget Computers
Owner
My current Thinkpad is a Z61M also - I was initially concerned about it's lifespan until I upgraded it to a 64bit processor. The memory still bothers me though - why they put a bios capable of recognizing 4GB with a chipset capable of addressing only 3GB is beyond me...
I'm not even considering anything other than a thinkpad. Since the z61m was still an IBM creation, I have yet to have a Lenovo experience. Hopefully Lenovo is holding the same high standard.
You can do that? I never even considered a new processor. Hmmm. Now I have to think a bit. New processor, new trackpad (my bad), new keyboard so I can see the keys again, see if I can tighten up the hinges and reset the fan, maybe an SSD (put swap on there, makes up for the lack of RAM at the cost of increased SSD wear) and/or bigger hard drive, ... Hmmm. Fix up an old friend, or spend the money on the new(er) hotness?
I wish the screen were brighter, also lust after 1080P just for the additional pixels = Vim windows and lines of code. I often code with two vertical panes in Vim so I can compare two files or work on one file in two places.
For those who are curious, I actually got mine used from Budget Computers in Beaverton OR in the spring of 2007 - good folks. They were a bit skeptical when I told them I didn't want Windoze on it 'cause I was installing Ubuntu, but knocked something off the price - don't recall how much. I brought it in to show them the next day. :)
My Z61m, bought in 2007 and used for a couple of hours on a typical day since then, is now getting very rickety but still runs fine. I replaced the hinges once two years ago, and now they are getting dicey again. The keys are almost completely worn clean of any clue to the letters, and the little navigation bumps on f and j are long gone. The screen shows wear from five years of cleaning and general abuse. I replaced the fan a year ago and it has started to make noises again (possibly I just didn't get the alignment right). The trackpad hasn't worked since I replaced the fan, because I accidentally yanked on the flexible flat connection wire/board thingie when I was putting it together.
So, it's time to take the plunge again. This new one might be a candidate. The Z61m has the 1680x1050 screen, and I want to get something at least that good, but faster. I run Compiz with a transparent cube.
I might take this old thing and turn it into a dedicated video front end - remove the screen and connect directly to the TV somehow. Taken out of its case it might not even need a fan most of the time.
You just inspired a thought - they could make it so the keys rise up slightly when the lid is opened, providing longer travel. In fact I would love to see a true shift-lock key again, that stays down when it's engaged. And a pony, of course.
The father of one of my co-workers has spent essentially the entire time since a week after the tsunami, in Japan assisting with the planning and execution of the clean-up. As has been recently exposed in the media, he has been saying all along that things were and are much worse than TEPCO, the government and the Japanese media have been saying, that the response and cleanup efforts have been pathetically bad, and that the exposure for many people and the surrounding area has been much worse than have been let out.
Among other things that have been publicized recently, it's been discovered that TEPCO executives had been instructing their workers to either not wear their radiation monitor badges or to cover them (with lead? I dunno, don't recall) to reduce the workers' apparent exposure.
I've also read that an area of some hundred square miles may remain uninhabitable for decades if not centuries. Sorry, don't recall where - it was a couple of months ago.
They choose to sensationalize and fan the fires of ignorance because it makes for more exciting news, which gets them better ratings, which gets them more money.
I think our attraction to disaster is biological - I'm not sure _why_, but we all tend to slow down at accident scenes, just for one example. How much of our interest in Fukushima is just the fatalistic viewing of the tide coming in and washing people away? IIRC there is evidence that other primates do this as well.
I suppose destruction derbies and horror movies are successful for similar reasons. Then there's the infamous Roman spectacles.
I used to live in Pittsburgh(early 1990s). One of the local stations was not getting very good ratings for their 11:00 PM news, and decided to chase ambulances. They began showing video footage of every car crash they could get to. Soon they had among the highest ratings in the area.
I doubt it - if you're near granite, you're getting dosed. Isn't New Hampshire the 'Granite State'? Unless NH granite is special, it's got similar levels of uranium in it, and the resulting radon escaping from it. Granite, from what I've read, is almost always a 'good source' of radiation. Granite from Canada, Washington and Oregon is the primary source of the radiation that makes the Columbia River the most radioactive river in the world.
I did a quick Google to find the typical levels in NH but didn't find a number in a minute or two, and gave up.
Strange, the other day I was thinking that Facebook wouldn't be so bad if you got rid of all those people.
Kinda like California!
So you're saying that each person that leaves Facebook and goes to Google+ reduces the mean IQ of both?
My nephew once suggested, "Ask yourself how important this problem is, viewed from 40,000 light years out."
because there was a corner case nobody thought of, or an interaction of modules that no one anticipated.
I taught a software quality assurance workshop at one of my earlier employers. We discovered that as early as the late 1960s and early 1970s there were already many good metrics for productivity, quality, defects, etc. It turns out that black box testing will only catch something like 30% of the defects. If the group is using good software quality procedures (back then that included structured programming, code walkthroughs, a coherent design cycle, etc.), then a large proportion of the bugs (80%?) were built into the original design. The cost of fixing a bug increased by a factor of 10 with each stage in the design cycle.
An interesting question is whether programming quality back then was harder or easier to achieve - back then just browbeating the machines to get them to do what you want was harder but for most applications there were few networking and multiprocessing problems (other than getting remote jobs to run, etc.); now that part is easy (at the application level, anyway), but we have all these interoperation and security problems.
Nowadays it is effectively impossible to know, much less to anticipate and program around, all the possible problems related to a program running in a multiprocessing network environment. Heck, it's impossible even for a human to anticipate all the possible ways that people might act in their presence while crossing the street, and that's a reasonably useful analogy. One of my recent projects involves pulling data (with permission) from another organization's website. In the last year they have changed the website in ways that break the software at our end almost monthly. We have one guy now essentially 1/2 time doing nothing but updating our code to match their code. Now, a human can figure out how to use their website in a few minutes (with the advantage of a browser that does a lot of work in the background) but we are just not there yet with software - or at least not with our software.
OMG - I remember CDE on Suns. What a ClusterF..k - a triumph of the bureaucratic minds at Sun+HP+IBM.
Kinda like the movies "Based on a true story"
See, the thing is, something like 90% to 95% of all computer users are consumers of information. So that's where the majority of the use cases are. I for one have not figured out a single thing I could use a tablet for - I'm not much of a video watcher, or song player (except in the context of headphones when I'm developing, etc.)
Actually there is one thing - I could use a tablet to provide a remote tool for looking at marine charts, weather and boat diagnostics when I'm sailing. In fact I plan to make my whole boat digital as soon as I get to that point - right now I'm repairing hull damage. :( There is a boat communications protocol standard that is derived from the CANBUS, called NMEA 2000, which allows all your instruments to be connected to a common system. There are even some open source tools for maps, radar, instrumentation, etc. and a budding Linux distro (I forget the name just now - Navigatrix? Also see OpenCPN for maps.)
I currently use XFCE+Compiz 8.4 at home
How did you set that up? I am a long time user of Compiz, and in fact would prefer to just stay in Compiz-land all the time. I started to set up an XFCE + Compiz environment on a 'new' machine, but got bogged down - I confess not spending a lot of time on the project. Any hints/clues appreciated.
(Wishes #1: a way for panel widgets from some other desktop environments to live inside Cairo, so I can add them to my Dock, or an additional dock, all within the 3D environment. This might also take some load off Cairo developers, since any other dock or panel features could be added without further development.)
(Wishes #2: A way to make desktop icons not clickable - I use the Cube in transparent-all-the-time mode with an animated background. But there is some stuff parked on my Desktop and sometimes I accidentally click on one of those when I really just want focus outside any windows.)
(Wishes #3: Extend Compiz to handle arbitrary 'rooms' rather than just the Cube - I have found that you can extend the cube to an arbitrary number (limit?) of sides, so it can be an Octagon if you want. But what I'd really like is to build a multi-room 'house' with different stuff on the 'walls' in each 'room' - analogous to desktops in each room. Then I could go to the 'email room', or the 'office docs room', etc.)
The above are in increasing 'blue sky' -> 'fantasy' order... :)
No, but it does mean there is a known-working distro that distro-maintainers can refer to and compare to their own in development, to determine why feature X is working in the Gnome distro but not in theirs - that is a useful tool. It also means that a comparative testing environment can be set up, to automate (to some extent) the regression testing process. With a bit of camera and image processing work it might even become mostly-automated.
It's probably related to the fact (according to a survey I read some years ago) that most accountants never balance their checkbooks. I would be willing to bet that 70+% of geeks don't backup their personal data regularly, and have less-than-ideal password policies for their own web accounts.
There are really two choices, that have (over time) an exactly equal minimum error rate (= probability of being hacked, etc.) - one is to have multiple independent, dynamically changing methods of securing things; the other is to have one central authority. I repeat - from first principles in information theory - these both have the exact same optimum. Let's say, for the purposes of argument, that the optimal probability of error is 5%. The difference between the two options is the distribution of errors. If one has a single authority, then that 5% chance means that in the event the system is hacked, _everyone_ (100% of the people) is simultaneously vulnerable -> a potential national/global catastrophe. If one has a variety of authentication methods, then at any given time, about 5% of the people are vulnerable, 100% of the time - a potential continuing problem.
Now, of course, it is unlikely that either system will actually reach that optimum, but again the probable 'miss' ratio is likely to be the same on average so that makes no difference.
I'm probably not explaining this well but it's closely related to the reason why (according to some/most biologists) sexual reproduction exists - it increases diversity among the species, making it more difficult for a disease to wipe out the whole species. It's also very (very, very) broadly why most folks don't bet all their chips on one roll of the dice.
So, while all these muddled different methods, none of which work perfectly, makes life more complicated and increases the hassle of maintaining one's own security, it is better (more adaptive) for the society as a whole. It also tends to lead to a smarter population overall (or it would, if financial success had any correlation to evolutionary success - which is not true in a civilized society.)