My take has always been that it's irrelevant whether homosexual relationships are by choice or not.
I completely agree. Gay activists who take the "it isn't a choice" line are stepping into a trap set my conservatives, since they're implying that, if it were a choice, restricting it would somehow be less wrong. I don't have a dog in that fight: choice or not, everytime I throw the dice and no matter how drunk I've been, my partner always ends up being of different gender than I am. At least as far as I've been able to tell. After all, it's bad manners to ask. But anyway-- love's a beautiful thing, and so's a good hook-up, and anyone who wants to prevent that between consenting adults is a sick, twisted slimebucket whose hand should be slapped hard whenever they try to reach for any of the levers of power. It would have been a better world if one of the commandments was "Mind your own goddamned business."
that depends on if you define capitalism to be evil too...
Capitalism is not evil per se. But depending on what you're solving for, it can be an inappropriate solution. It delivers a sort of abstract efficiency in pricing things. It does not deliver fairness or justice. The side effects can be catastrophic, depending on whether you're one of the few beneficiaries or one of the many victims. And externalities such as environmental degradation might end up killing us all.
What's evil is promoting capitalism as a panacea. It's just one of many sub-optimal arrangements for managing scarcity.
A right is something granted to you by some entity. Nowhere are you given explicit permission to nullify the law.
I recall reading somewhere that we are born with inalienable rights, and they are very much not granted to you by the state. The Constitution was written so that powers that were not permitted to the government were forbidden. Rigths were assumed to be expansive unless explicitly limited. One of the objections by the founders to the Bill of Rights was that, since they enumerated rights, they might be regarded as an exhaustive list.
Similarly, jurors do not have to explain the reason for their decisions to anyone. Jury nullification has a checkered past (it came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s when southern juries refused to convict KKK members) but it's a necessary tactic when the legislative process has become so corrupted by legislation-for-hire that unjust and disproportionate laws are on the books.
And if you find yourself on a jury, remember that you're probably the last chance the defendant has for anything approximating justice. Don't give out any information that can get in the way of that. Don't lie, but don't volunteer information.
Me, I always get kicked off by defense peremptory challenges because I fit the "hang-em-high" profile, being a middle-aged, thick-necked Anglo-surnamed man in a so-called "profession." Oh well.
GM doesn't make money on cars. They make money on finance. The only remaining profit center in GM is GMAC. So why should they give a shit how their cars work?
I've been down this road. If you're using powered speakers, why not just go digital (say, over fibre) to the speakers? Forget about copper. Have well-shielded, good-quality DACs and mono amps at the speakers. Transmit with error-correction if you're really paranoid about a clean signal: you get plenty of redundant bandwidth to play with on a fiber. And I suppose you'll want some way to adjust phase between the speakers. That's something you'll probably like to tune. Generally, minimizing the analog part of your signal chain is a simple solution. And wires aren't the only option: with ECC and some good buffering/caching, you could probably just stream the digital over WiFi. I haven't tried it but don't see any significant obstacles.
And if you look at where distortion enters an audio signal chain, the speakers are usually among the biggest sources anyway. It's not that difficult to find good DACs and clean amps. But the physics of speakers is unforgiving. There are plenty of exotic solutions to those problems. If I were an audiophile instead of an engineer, that's the hole I'd probably throw my money into. As it is, I use headphones attached to my laptop. With all the screaming kids rampaging through the house, that's as good as I need. And when they're grown, my hearing will probably be so bad that it won't matter anymore. Too much high-volume listening with headphones...
According to the new rules of the corporate culture, we are stealing every time we expect some product or services for our money. We're stealing when we expect to use an iPhone the way we want to use it. We're stealing when we assume "unlimited" bandwidth means "unlimited" bandwidth. We're stealing when we borrow a book from the library or from friend. We're stealing when we pay for health insurance and then actually use it.
It's a new spin on the old "property is theft" meme. In this case, for us to use our own property is being interpreted as theft by greedheads seduced by visions of an "IP" [sic] goldmine. My newest dystopian vision is the "leasehold hell" world. You won't own anything: it'll all be under draconian restrictive licenses, with legislation-for-hire to back it up. We need to shut the bastards down now or the only remaining forms of property will be corporate-owned.
No. It's not that the smart ones are, in particular, not going into science and engineering.
I don't really know why this is.
Because engineering salaries are depressed by H1-B visa holders who went to grad school in the US. For them, the depressed salaries still look good. For Americans, they don't. People with the intelligence to be good engineers can make a lot more money in a small business, or in some other profession where the labor market isn't so distorted.
I work with H1-B holders: lots of them. On the whole, they work hard and are smart. As for ability, they've got the bell curve just like everyone else has. I won't venture to guess where the H1-B mean is compared to the American mean. The differences between educational systems and cultural norms are too great, but in terms of job performance, I couldn't say either group is consistently better. Depends on what you're trying to do. But the employers' assertion that they're more qualified than Americans to do that work is a self-serving lie. The real "qualification" is their greater willingness to put up with exploitation than a local. So, as a grad student, why would I bust my ass to go into an artificially saturated market?
This is especially true if you simultaneously retrofit fossil fuel plants with carbon capture and storage technology and start expanding the use of nuclear, solar,wind geothermal and tidal power.
Or, better yet, produce the same unit of GDP with less energy input. I dislike the term "negawatts" but those are what we should be looking for first. The US, in particular, is grossly inefficient in its use of energy (why not? It's nearly free for some uses). In order to mitigate the greenhouse-gas problem, we need to be net carbon-negative. That means increasing plant biomass significantly, NOT burning it to release the sequestered CO2 back into the air, and shifting the mix of energy sources away from both fossil fuels and biofuels.
A good start is a very high carbon tax. And no get-out clause to bail out agribusiness.
Like other posters said: half the time they're busted, denormalized lame-ass substitutes for databases. The other half of the time they lead to convoluted algorithms that would be expressed more simply in code. Spreadsheets are the shits-- logic and presentation layer tightly coupled. The only value they give is in sortable and filterable views, and grid controls on a webpage will do that for you nowadays.
If you've found a solution to a problem, consider carefully wrapping some other technology around it just because. Unfortunately my experience was that usually new technology/approaches typically were just because, usually driven by management (not always, and I'm not blaming them).
I've also been in the business over 25 years. You've got a one-sided comparison going... you're looking at all the reasons the new choice is unfounded, but it's often the case that the old solution was chosen for even worse reasons, and even if you finally got it working after years of struggle, that probably led to so many compromises that it's not really something you can live with anyway.
Oh, and Cascade really was worse. Cycle time to correct defects was too long, and there was this unfounded assumption that software could be built like a civil-engineering project. It was just an incorrect approach, no tradeoff there. For UI-intensive systems, JAD sessions work better. As for assembler, maintaining anything of non-trivial complexity was more trouble than it was worth. Been there, had no fun. I use assembler or C where I have to, but something higher-level wherever I can. And except in some unusual circumstances, I'd rather run a server on Linux (or BSD, or Solaris, or even bloody HP/UX) than Windows. So sometimes there is such a thing as progress. But in each of these cases, there was still cost and risk in making the transition. No free lunches here. But I agree that "because it's flavor of the month" is a piss-poor reason to adopt any solution. If there's no return on investment, there's no case for change. I wonder if what you're reacting to is not the new technology, but the over-promising that its advocates used to sell it?
* Use mature, well-tested, effective software (eg. Solaris, Oracle, FreeBSD).
I dunno about that. Has anyone used a major upgrade of Oracle when it first comes out? I'd say that FreeBSD is the most carefully-tested of those three. But a well-tested release of Linux isn't that bad either. If you meant "stay off the bleeding edge," well, yeah, good idea. But don't assume those big vendors are always that rock-solid either.
* Avoid immature fad "technologies" like AJAX.
Some AJAX toolkits and implementations are better than others, but there's so much diversity in client-side async scripting that one could argue that there's really no such thing as AJAX anyway. It's a marketecture. The AJAX problems your project had were the consequence of poor requirements and short-sighted design choices: nobody thought about which browsers needed to be supported so the developers (who seem to have had an irrational MS-only bias) guessed wrong. I've implemented sites using Dojo, and have had no problems with it supporting both Firefox and IE-- though there were some interesting bugs on Safari, which we were not required to support, though some home users turned out to want it after all. More of a corner case than yours (three users in a population of several hundred), but I learned from that mistake.
* Traditional applications offer more flexibility than Web-based applications.
If by "traditional applications" you mean "fat clients," I have to disagree. There are some things fat clients allow that are hard with web apps, such as disconnected operations and tolerable performance with lousy connectivity. Before good client-side web UI toolkits came along, fat clients also gave richer interactions. But those gains were at the cost of nasty deployment problems, DLL hell (or the Java equivalent), sensitivity to OS version and patch level changes, and risk that locally-stored data on client boxes could be lost or corrupted in the event of system failure. Many of the limitations of web clients are really symptoms of poorly-thought-out UI design rather than endemic features of the browser interface.
* Always give much consideration to back-end scalability.
But never prematurely optimize. It seldom works and you end up constraining yourself because of scenarios that never arise. Scalability, capacity, and performance requirements are certainly things a design needs to address. Sounds like those were not articulated on your project, so the designers just threw it together. By the way, while it's quite possible to make dumb choices in.NET implementations that will kill performance, but I've also seen.NET-based systems that handle huge volumes well. I have lots of other reasons to dislike MS technologies, but it's not inevitable that your problems are directly attributable to the choice of.NET. More to incompetent architectural decisions.
* Sometimes a text-based interface is far more efficient than a GUI.
You betcha. Even if there's a GUI, point-and-click is not optimal for frequent, repetitive, time-critical tasks. People who sit in front of a screen all day live by keyboard shortcuts. They'll go carpal on you if they're forced to drag and drop thousands of times a day.
* Get user feedback on software early and often.
ABSOLUTELY. This goes back to the earlier point about requirement validity. Do UI prototypes. Do proofs of concept. Get the UI in front of the users early, and be prepared to redo it if it sucks. The fact that your development team didn't do that is another sign that they were ignorant and arrogant.
* Maintain a reasonable level of heterogeneity, when it comes to software, hardware and vendors.
If you mean that it's good to have a diverse environment, that ain't necessarily so. Supportability's better when you have less diversity. But what IS necessary is standards compliance when imple
My point is that I feel that I cannot currently claim that the theories of homeopathy are Impossible.
But I think it's safe to say that either our current understanding of physical chemistry is drastically wrong in easily measurable ways or the stated theoretical basis of homeopathy is incorrect. Since the predictive power of physical chemistry is about the best that science has to offer, whereas the theoretical underpinnings of homeopathy are plainly derived from magical beliefs with no scientific basis at all, I'd give near-overwhelming odds that homeopathy is nothing but bullshit. It's not certainty, but it's as close to certainty as an empiricist can get.
Oops, I'd like to say more but I need to go get my aura cleaned.
I walk into your store. I look but don't buy. For you, that's a lost opportunity to extract some revenue from my pocket. That is something entirely different than theft. You don't have a claim on my time, my attention, or the money in my pocket.
These guys are no different than aggressive panhandlers who shout abuse if I don't hand them a buck. Don't assume you are entitled to respect from those of us who make a living by means other than parasitism.
The only moral issue is that there are some shitheads who think they have the right to coerce their potential customers. Yeah, and if it wasn't for date rape, you'd never get laid. The only things you deserve are bankruptcy, ignominy and ridicule.
Why are these people so intent on advertising to people who are clearly not interested in it.
Chalk it up to perverse incentives. A certain number of users click on those ads erroneously and the site gets paid for those errors. Some slimeballs even lay out their pages with poor usability just to encourage those errors.
If you try to control the way I look at your content, you will fail. Whatever your business model, you have no assurance that I'll comply with it unless I explicitly agree. And agreement does not entail your having some weasely TOS hidden somewhere on your shitty site. If you can't stay in business when your users are empowered, you should change careers. For your moral improvement, I recommend a new revenue model involving you operating the receiving end of a gloryhole in an inner-city bus station for spare change.
PS. I'd really like to find a way to reliably block those goddamned "Skip this Ad" ads. For now I abandon any site that displays one of those.
Hm. And all this time I thought anarchism was the opposite of authoritarianism. And it's not telling the full story to state that everything big government touches turns to shit: while to a great extent that's true of government, it is also true of any powerful, unaccountable group. Recent American history has been an object lesson in the private sector's ability to be every bit as brutal, corrupt, uncaring and incompetent as the government. Power's the problem: whether it's public or private is a distinction without a difference.
SAAS has worse problems than server availability. It creates nasty integration problems since your critical enterprise data is not only crossing an interface, but the other side of that interface is not in your control. That's not just an integration problem: I'm waiting for a security breach against one of the big SAAS vendors. And not only is it closed-source, it's closed-source managed by a third party that doesn't have the same priorities that you have. So if you need to fix or customize anything on the SAAS side, you're well and truly screwed.
The only reason SAAS emerged at all was as a response to the poor performance of most in-house corporate IT departments. Why wait for your own geeks to implement something badly in a year when you can go to an ASP who will give it to you in a couple of months? And of course there are the perverse incentives in how capital expenditure is accounted for versus externalized services. But the main motivation is that business managers just don't trust their own IT people. And based on the performance of most IT management, no wonder.
Let's face it, Linux/Debian are technically superior to MS Windows, but the lack of a unified infrastructure and the million forks completely prevent is from usurping any type of power on the desktop.
No, the "million forks" is one of the main reasons that GNU/Linux is technically superior to Windows: monocultures inhibit innovation. "Let a million forks bloom! Let a thousand schools of thought contend!" Or something like that. And Linus understands that, even with the kernel: it's one of the motivations for using git. Easier to fork and merge.
It might also be that advertising has something to do with Apple's success. If, by "success" you mean that they're making nice, reasonably well-integrated desktop systems to appeal to the same kind of consumers as Bose does in the audio market or Audi with cars: those who like gimmicky design as much as they like functionality and want to pay more for the perception that they're somehow on the cutting edge without having to actually do anything special as a result. Most Mac users I know don't give a shit about the technical aspects, they just like the eye candy and the fact that a Mac is a positional good. It's not solely that it "just works"-- my family has Mandriva on laptops and they all "just work" too. I wouldn't mind more usability awareness in some UIs (especially in KDE) but I don't blame this on the fact that I have a choice of UIs.
If I'm the publisher and decide not to publish something, then it's self-censorship, which *IS* different.
The conservatives keep going on about how the private sector is better than the government at this or that. Why should arbitrary repression not be one of the things they're better at?
Trying to pretend religion is the cause of humankind's problems and that people would all get along merrily if it were not for religion is just as absurd.
Religion has indeed been used as an excuse for a huge amount of violence throughout history. Since it is largely superstition, it is not only a cause of violence, but an entirely dispensible one. But that is not at all the same thing as saying that, if there were no religion, there would be no more irrational violence in the world. Here's an analogy: smallpox is not the only cause of death. So does that mean that we should not eliminate smallpox as a cause of death, since there would still be others?
"Vinyl/DAT/reel-to-reel/(insert esoteric, dated format) is better Just Because, and if you have anything less than $30/foot oxygen-free gold plated lamp wire pulled right out of Richard Gere's ass connecting your amp to your $5000 speakers, you're rotting holes in your brain."
Gold cables are nature's way of redistributing resources from dipsticks with money to weasels. I'm not sure I like the weasels any better, but still...
I've used laptops to create music. Direct synthesis to CD, live tracks via an ACD, mixed using headphones directly connected to the little skanky computer audio-out. Even then, with a decent set of headphones, you can readily distinguish an AIFF stream from an MP3 in a duoble-blind test. A studio-quality signal chain sounds cleaner for this kind of work, but it's a couple of orders of magnitude more costly too. I did early mixes on the computer and mastered in a studio (good to have family members in the business).
So you don't even need the $500 stereo to tell the difference.
Along with noiselike sound sources such as cymbals, lossy compression also does a number on sharp transients. My own pet peeve is what happens to pick noise on acoustic instruments, as well as the "swoosh" effect on higher-frequency percussion events. Even at 256kbps you can hear mushiness. And my high-end hearing is not what it used to be-- I don't think I can hear much above 18khz anymore.
What I wonder is how many engineers are now recording and mixing so that the song will sound OK even when it's mashed into a 128kbps MP3. Similar to how they used to listen to trial mixes on shitty speakers from AM radios since that's how the kids would hear it back in the day. You think there was an esthetic reason for all that compression? It was making the best of the limitations of the medium.
Slashdot Mirror
And automata? I'd guess 2050 is wildly premature.
What's evil is promoting capitalism as a panacea. It's just one of many sub-optimal arrangements for managing scarcity.
Similarly, jurors do not have to explain the reason for their decisions to anyone. Jury nullification has a checkered past (it came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s when southern juries refused to convict KKK members) but it's a necessary tactic when the legislative process has become so corrupted by legislation-for-hire that unjust and disproportionate laws are on the books.
And if you find yourself on a jury, remember that you're probably the last chance the defendant has for anything approximating justice. Don't give out any information that can get in the way of that. Don't lie, but don't volunteer information.
Me, I always get kicked off by defense peremptory challenges because I fit the "hang-em-high" profile, being a middle-aged, thick-necked Anglo-surnamed man in a so-called "profession." Oh well.
GM doesn't make money on cars. They make money on finance. The only remaining profit center in GM is GMAC. So why should they give a shit how their cars work?
I've been down this road. If you're using powered speakers, why not just go digital (say, over fibre) to the speakers? Forget about copper. Have well-shielded, good-quality DACs and mono amps at the speakers. Transmit with error-correction if you're really paranoid about a clean signal: you get plenty of redundant bandwidth to play with on a fiber. And I suppose you'll want some way to adjust phase between the speakers. That's something you'll probably like to tune. Generally, minimizing the analog part of your signal chain is a simple solution. And wires aren't the only option: with ECC and some good buffering/caching, you could probably just stream the digital over WiFi. I haven't tried it but don't see any significant obstacles.
And if you look at where distortion enters an audio signal chain, the speakers are usually among the biggest sources anyway. It's not that difficult to find good DACs and clean amps. But the physics of speakers is unforgiving. There are plenty of exotic solutions to those problems. If I were an audiophile instead of an engineer, that's the hole I'd probably throw my money into. As it is, I use headphones attached to my laptop. With all the screaming kids rampaging through the house, that's as good as I need. And when they're grown, my hearing will probably be so bad that it won't matter anymore. Too much high-volume listening with headphones...
I work with H1-B holders: lots of them. On the whole, they work hard and are smart. As for ability, they've got the bell curve just like everyone else has. I won't venture to guess where the H1-B mean is compared to the American mean. The differences between educational systems and cultural norms are too great, but in terms of job performance, I couldn't say either group is consistently better. Depends on what you're trying to do. But the employers' assertion that they're more qualified than Americans to do that work is a self-serving lie. The real "qualification" is their greater willingness to put up with exploitation than a local. So, as a grad student, why would I bust my ass to go into an artificially saturated market?
A good start is a very high carbon tax. And no get-out clause to bail out agribusiness.
Like other posters said: half the time they're busted, denormalized lame-ass substitutes for databases. The other half of the time they lead to convoluted algorithms that would be expressed more simply in code. Spreadsheets are the shits-- logic and presentation layer tightly coupled. The only value they give is in sortable and filterable views, and grid controls on a webpage will do that for you nowadays.
Oh, and Cascade really was worse. Cycle time to correct defects was too long, and there was this unfounded assumption that software could be built like a civil-engineering project. It was just an incorrect approach, no tradeoff there. For UI-intensive systems, JAD sessions work better. As for assembler, maintaining anything of non-trivial complexity was more trouble than it was worth. Been there, had no fun. I use assembler or C where I have to, but something higher-level wherever I can. And except in some unusual circumstances, I'd rather run a server on Linux (or BSD, or Solaris, or even bloody HP/UX) than Windows. So sometimes there is such a thing as progress. But in each of these cases, there was still cost and risk in making the transition. No free lunches here. But I agree that "because it's flavor of the month" is a piss-poor reason to adopt any solution. If there's no return on investment, there's no case for change. I wonder if what you're reacting to is not the new technology, but the over-promising that its advocates used to sell it?
In the US now, it would be more like shouting "fire" in a burning theater.
Oops, I'd like to say more but I need to go get my aura cleaned.
I walk into your store. I look but don't buy. For you, that's a lost opportunity to extract some revenue from my pocket. That is something entirely different than theft. You don't have a claim on my time, my attention, or the money in my pocket.
These guys are no different than aggressive panhandlers who shout abuse if I don't hand them a buck. Don't assume you are entitled to respect from those of us who make a living by means other than parasitism.
The only moral issue is that there are some shitheads who think they have the right to coerce their potential customers. Yeah, and if it wasn't for date rape, you'd never get laid. The only things you deserve are bankruptcy, ignominy and ridicule.
If you try to control the way I look at your content, you will fail. Whatever your business model, you have no assurance that I'll comply with it unless I explicitly agree. And agreement does not entail your having some weasely TOS hidden somewhere on your shitty site. If you can't stay in business when your users are empowered, you should change careers. For your moral improvement, I recommend a new revenue model involving you operating the receiving end of a gloryhole in an inner-city bus station for spare change.
PS. I'd really like to find a way to reliably block those goddamned "Skip this Ad" ads. For now I abandon any site that displays one of those.
It has to happen by chance from time to time...
SAAS has worse problems than server availability. It creates nasty integration problems since your critical enterprise data is not only crossing an interface, but the other side of that interface is not in your control. That's not just an integration problem: I'm waiting for a security breach against one of the big SAAS vendors. And not only is it closed-source, it's closed-source managed by a third party that doesn't have the same priorities that you have. So if you need to fix or customize anything on the SAAS side, you're well and truly screwed.
The only reason SAAS emerged at all was as a response to the poor performance of most in-house corporate IT departments. Why wait for your own geeks to implement something badly in a year when you can go to an ASP who will give it to you in a couple of months? And of course there are the perverse incentives in how capital expenditure is accounted for versus externalized services. But the main motivation is that business managers just don't trust their own IT people. And based on the performance of most IT management, no wonder.
It might also be that advertising has something to do with Apple's success. If, by "success" you mean that they're making nice, reasonably well-integrated desktop systems to appeal to the same kind of consumers as Bose does in the audio market or Audi with cars: those who like gimmicky design as much as they like functionality and want to pay more for the perception that they're somehow on the cutting edge without having to actually do anything special as a result. Most Mac users I know don't give a shit about the technical aspects, they just like the eye candy and the fact that a Mac is a positional good. It's not solely that it "just works"-- my family has Mandriva on laptops and they all "just work" too. I wouldn't mind more usability awareness in some UIs (especially in KDE) but I don't blame this on the fact that I have a choice of UIs.
Because going in the right direction is good, and going in the wrong direction is bad.
I've used laptops to create music. Direct synthesis to CD, live tracks via an ACD, mixed using headphones directly connected to the little skanky computer audio-out. Even then, with a decent set of headphones, you can readily distinguish an AIFF stream from an MP3 in a duoble-blind test. A studio-quality signal chain sounds cleaner for this kind of work, but it's a couple of orders of magnitude more costly too. I did early mixes on the computer and mastered in a studio (good to have family members in the business).
So you don't even need the $500 stereo to tell the difference.
Along with noiselike sound sources such as cymbals, lossy compression also does a number on sharp transients. My own pet peeve is what happens to pick noise on acoustic instruments, as well as the "swoosh" effect on higher-frequency percussion events. Even at 256kbps you can hear mushiness. And my high-end hearing is not what it used to be-- I don't think I can hear much above 18khz anymore.
What I wonder is how many engineers are now recording and mixing so that the song will sound OK even when it's mashed into a 128kbps MP3. Similar to how they used to listen to trial mixes on shitty speakers from AM radios since that's how the kids would hear it back in the day. You think there was an esthetic reason for all that compression? It was making the best of the limitations of the medium.