When you're a little kid you look up to your parents -- they are your creators.
It's worse than that. Monkeys (whom some of us assume are even more hardwired than we are) defer to alpha males. We have the ability to extrapolate, and we have the legacy monkey wiring that primes us to defer to Big Daddy Silverback. Add a bunch of shrewd shaved apes who figured out how to invoke the authority of BDS to bolster their own authority, let it simmer for a couple of millennia, and here we are.
Based on some of the experiences I've had in this life that gave me the greatest sense of deep connectedness, I'd say the two screwing monkeys were onto something more real and worthwhile.
Even if you have the best web-app in the universe, it still can't accept drag&drop files from the desktop,
Not true. There are drag-and-drop Javascript controls for the usual platforms, though I don't know of any that are platform-independent. I've used them on Windows and Linux and they work.
nor can it safely open multiple windows,
I'm guessing as to what you mean by "safely" in this context, but it's possible (and I've done it) to open multiple windows, and to then maintain state in such a way that related windows are kept in sync and closed together when need be. I used closures, but there are other ways. It's non-trivial, but in a fat client you'd need to solve the same problems.
nor can it interact with any other application on the system (i.e. by using AppleScript on Mac for example),
Indeed. Integration with other desktop apps should generally be distinct from the presentation layer. But it can be done, and web interfaces can drive that. However, that's a situation where you can get into very nasty deployment, integration and proprietary lock-in situations.
nor can it use any OS widget other than the most basic few,
It would be helpful if you could give examples of the "non-basic" widgets that cannot be used, and the reason anyone in their right mind would want to use them in a real application. I have worked on a number of projects that produced enterprise apps, and that were well-adopted and worked. When I do design, I always start from what the UI will do. Note that I didn't say "GUI" since it's not a foregone conclusion that a GUI is needed in every case, and even if it is a GUI, I never assume it has to be a web client: I force an explicit decision as part of the design process. The higher deployment costs, upgrade delays, difficulty of customization, and other downsides of fat clients must be part of that consideration just as much as any real (as opposed to assumed) deficiencies of the web-based implementation.
it'll never be as responsive as a desktop app, and will never have any of the graphical capabilities of a desktop app.
I started many years ago writing real-time code in very large systems. Whenever I hear performance assertions, I don't believe them until I know the real requirement, I know the use case, and I test the alternatives. The reason for this is because I have found that even very clever people are not good at predicting what "acceptable" performance is, and what design decisions deliver it. You need to take a very disciplined approach to this, or you will optimize the wrong things. I see this often in good coders, who will burn hours shaving a few milliseconds off an interaction that is run once a year and triggers a process such as year-end-close that takes days or weeks to complete. Without prototyping and rigorous user observation, you'll never know where the real hot spots are. And my experience of complex widgets is that the users like them less than the developers do. The users are trying to get their job done in the most effective way. And they're generally already familiar with the way a web UI works. Anything different requires training, which is an ongoing cost. I've often run into arguments like yours, and I've resolved it by a simple expedient: I do web-based UI prototypes because (for my team, mileage might vary) the turnaround time is much faster. When performance problems are observed in that early stage, we consider fat clients. If performance is still a problem, we distribute even more and have a full-on desktop-resident app. In my experience, the "prototype" ends up exceeding performance expectations in almost every case and the pro-fat-client folklore is unsupported by facts. The few examples I've seen where that's not the case involve industrial-control systems, air traffic control, and some scenarios where you've got some extremely heavy analytics running against
Maybe the real reason that IT is "suffering" is that companies often don't treat their IT employees like real employees.
In other words, they treat them like their other employees. The whole H1-B program is a scam to depress the salaries of American software people. I've done a lot of work in Silicon Valley and it's become increasingly clear to me that it's not about a skills shortage, it's about being able to pay a guy from (let's use a common example) India a lot less than an equivalently-skilled American would demand, and have that guy unable to leave your company without facing deoprtation, and yet have no job security. A win-win for an unscrupulous employer. No inconvenient unfair dismissal suits. No saying "screw you, I'm going to work for the competition." It's indentured servitude, plus a little "cut chicken to scare monkey."
As for skills, H1B people have a bell curve too. I have met a few great designers/coders, and a lot of schmucks who in a previous stage of IT evolution would have been COBOL drones. Everyone works hard, H1B or US citizen, but so what? My job is to clean up the product of hard work when it has been applied to piss-poor IT decisions. The real problems with IT in the US have to do with pig-ignorant short-term-obsessed management who believe contrary to all experience that free lunches exist, spineless IT managers who go along with the knee-jerk "can't afford to think strategically" mind set, consulting firms selling flavor-of-the-month solutions, and the received wisdom that IT people are in some sense interchangeable. If that's true, you're hiring the wrong ones.
It's not the H1-B person's fault. He/she is doing better by coming to the US despite the abuses, and there's the prospect of a green card a few years in the future. But it puts American professionals in a race to the bottom with respect to working conditions, wages and job security. The best thing for the US would be to shut the H1-B program down. The depressed wages provide a disincentive for anyone trying to enter IT in the US, the exploitation makes working conditions worse for everyone, and the H1-B workers who return home take the knowledge with them. If it's about money, then perhaps top executive compensation would be a better place to look for savings. Our foreign competitors don't reward non-performing execs nearly as lavishly, and there's no evidence that you get better work for $50M per year than you do for $30M. And there's a lot more savings to be found there than in putting the squeeze on IT people.
Me, I'm middle-aged and doing well in the business, but I've advised my son, who's more talented than I am, to do something else for a living since this gravy train has long ago moved on. US corporations and their kleptomanagers have already poisoned that well.
The Persians did wonderful things, and so did the Arabs. Al-Battani, Ibn Younus and Al-Zarqali were all important and their works were translated into Latin in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, so they not only advanced science but also contributed to the recovery of the Europeans from their post-Roman hangover. Under the Ottomans, an even wider range of nationalities contributed. If you're implying that everything important came from the Persians, I've heard that tune before regarding any number of other nationalities. Persian culture is brilliant, special and unique. And y'know what? So's everyone else's. Yawn.
There's little evidence that medieval Islamic mathematics or astronomy were the basis for the work of Leibniz or Newton, though they may have anticipated some of their work. But the same could be said (perhaps more so) of Eudoxus and Archimedes. And this minimizes the power and generality of Newton's and Leibniz's techniques compared to the less abstract methods of their precursors. There's a reason we use the calculus now instead of the method of exhaustion, and it's not Eurocentrism.
Time for some definitions. Were the Fenians a "real terror threat?" And how about the French Resistance? Or the Algerians driving out the French? How about the ANC?
I have met people who have been on the receiving end of the attentions of the "intelligent" Israeli security forces and those of the equally intelligent and famously well-run Israeli military. I never want to see the US go down that road. Me, I'm still hoping Abu Ghraib and uncounted civilian casualties are aberrations, not the new norm, for Americans.
"Maybe they know what they're doing." Yeah, and that's why they're at peace with their neighbors. Or maybe there would be peace if only every single person in the Middle East except the Israelis weren't such evil, vengeful fanatics, right?
A less contorted explanation is that the same propaganda and manipulation that keeps corrupt right-wing thugs in power in Israel is also being market-tested here by our own home-grown force-worshipping greedheads. Because fear is useful in forcing compliance, and fearful people are more likely to acquiesce in brutality.
So I really don't care how the Israelis do airport security, anymore than I want pointers from them on bullozing houses or gunning down stone-throwing kids. It's justice that I want to see done. The Israelis who do that, I'm willing to learn from. But to see heavy-handed police-state tactics, there's no need to travel that far. More's the pity.
If the government was seriously interested in reducing the threat from terrorism, they would've come up with a comprehensive, and practical, plan for creating stability and peace in the Middle East.
You missed a condition: "and if they were competent." They are corrupt, ignorant, blinded by ideology, and most importantly, the most complex and disciplined task they ever accomplished was the propaganda effort that led to the war. They haven't been able to do a single thing right besides that, and that was wrong too. So suggesting that they might have thought things through better is completely beside the point. They are motivated by anger at free people in the US (that's why they hate anything that empowers more people), by greed, and by lust for power.
But you're right. I'd take to TSA and put them to work filling sandbags somewhere. That's more likely to help save lives than the pointless charade they're doing now.
Until that day, the terrorists are winning because we live in fear.
Interesting how "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" has become a kind of playbook for the enemies of our rights. So I'd say that Bush and his gang of authoritarians have won, not the terrorists. There isn't a long beard on my face, my wife continues to go out of the house without wrapping herself in black, and those demons at the strip mall are still renting out rude DVDs. But there's a no-fly list, our phones and Internet connections are tapped, habeas corpus is under seige, and we're still fighting a war with a country that didn't attack us on 9/11 or at any other time. Based on the Bush junta's targets, it looks like they're more afraid of us and anyone in the way of the oil companies than they are of Binladen. Which makes sense: if anyone will remove them from office, try them for crimes against humantiy and lock them away, it's going to have to be us.
Based on the incompetence shown by the Bushites so far in achieving their stated objective, Binladen has more to fear from us too. There's a chance that someone other than Bush might actually commit resources to eliminating the terrorists rather than squandering vast resources oppressing those they're pretending to protect and diverting cash to profiteers and corrupt associates.
Unlike some who oppose the war, I'm not a pacifist. I believe that there's a moral imperative to defend yourself against lethal attack. And if you are attacked, you fight against those who attacked you, not against your own people or some third party. If we are really in mortal danger from terrorism, Bush has, through malice or stupidity, undermined our efforts to defend ourselves. If not, he started a war of aggression based entirely on lies. Either way, he and his accomplices belong behind bars.
Regardless of your channges in this particular case, Texas has laws that are strongly biased in favor the the employer. The system is rigged. You should take this chance to get the hell out of there and start living somewhere that doesn't have the plantation mentality.
Companies always scream 'let the market decide', yet they manage to pressure politicians into passing laws which are anything but the market deciding.
You said it. There are two markets and two sets of customers. There is the market for entertainment media, and the market for legislation-for-hire. Big Content firms play in both to (in their view) increase the size of their market while creating barriers to entry for competitors. Hardware manufacturers respond to the demands of end users but also those of Big Content firms. Even though Big Content doesn't buy the products, they can make life hell for hardware manufacturers who don't toe the line defined by the legislation-for-hire purchased by Big Content. Hardware manufacturers also try to buy legislation, but so far they haven't gotten as much traction. We, as consumers, have very little input into this process.
The term "free market" in the US has been subverted to mean "not regulated in the consumer's interest." But the playing field is not level, the referees are on the take, and the house always wins. In short, the game is rigged. Corporations do everything they can to avoid competition, and their ideal condition is to be handed a guaranteed revenue stream that's protected by John Law. If that means consumers are screwed or the institutions of civil society are strangled, fine. Better to be a subsidy whore than to risk losing a fair fight.
Put another way, "free market" has come to mean that capital can move unencumbered. It doesn't mean consumers are in any way free.
This logic is the essence of the Bush Era. The theory is entirely devoted to power.
They have only one rationale: "Because I said so." And their political philosophy is the Divine Right of Kings. We've been down that road before with absolute monarchies. It inevitably leads to torture, corruption and wars of adventure.
Drop the talk of impeachment. The gutless wonders in Congress are right on that point: by the time impeachment proceedings are completed Bush will already be out of office or nearly so. Instead we should get straight to the point and try the sons of bitches for crimes against humanity. That's what should happen under the rule of law. Anything less won't be justice and won't be a deterrent to the next generation of gangsters who seize power. Torture, kidnapping, waging war against a country that had not attacked you and had no capability or intention to do so, killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians in the process-- they locked up Milosevic and Noriega for less. Even some of the Nuremberg generals committed lesser crimes than this. Americans need to send a message to the world (and to the scum of the earth who grabbed control) that we won't let this madness happen again, and that there's no such thing as impunity here.
This is not political vengeance. It's an assertion that there are basic human values, and that any leader that violates them will be held accountable. We have just lived through a catastrophic failure of checks and balances, and now we need to very systematically re-impose sanctions against the criminal abuse of executive power, and ensure that it won't happen again.
This is what we should be demanding from Congress and the courts. Impeachment is a political process. This is a criminal matter and should be handled as such.
I have OOO on our four laptops at home, which don't have Windows loaded on them.
While the user experience on Word and PowerPoint are inconsistent, baroque and infuriating, OOO has managed to be even more opaque, arbitrarily complicated and unintuitive. No small achievement, that.
I use it only because of the compatibility it provides with.doc,.ppt and.xls. But it's one of the few software packages I use on Linux that I positively dislike. I'd ditch it in a second if there something less user-hostile were available.
That's the fundamental problem with "compatibility packages." There's file-format compatibility, and there's similarity of user experience. The first is essential to interoperability, and I suppose the other is regarded as necessary to keep a lid on training and cutover costs. But user experience similarity is only a good thing if the original software had a decent UE to begin with.
To further exacerbate my feelings of powerless in this whole matter, if there were a Visio clone out there with the same annoying UE problems, I'd hold my nose and use that too.
Socially, the US is much closer to a third-world country that happens to be very wealthy than it is to most of the societies in Western Europe. And politically, the US has a lot in common with societies ruled by jumped-up trigger-happy kleptocratic generalissimos like Pinochet than it does with politicians in a correctly functioning civil society. Arbitrary invasions, draconian laws, the death penalty, inadequate or nonexistent social services, an overworked population, the rich living in walled enclaves while poor people starve-- these are all signs of decadence, barbarism and corruption.
The majority of us who work hard and don't hurt other people are being ripped off and exploited by (to revive a historical phrase) malefactors of great wealth. As we contribute to the economy, it doesn't escape our notice that we're putting in a lot more than we're getting back, and yet the scale of parasitism and looting continues to grow.
Suffice to say that this is not a sustainable situation.
Any DRM scheme that allows fair use can be abused, since it is impossible to distinguish legitimate time-shifting and format-shifting from copying with malicious intent. Therefore, any DRM scheme that cannot be bypassed by emulating the exercise of fair-use rights will necessarily prevent the exercise those rights. And that's why I am against it. DRM's absurd extension of the ability to arbitrarily assert property rights is unethical and fails to balance the rights of the producer against those of the consumer.
Anti-Lock brakes, Electronic Stability Control and automatic headlights are all existing examples of taking control away from the driver.
ABS takes away the driver's ability to lock the wheels of a vehicle when it has no traction. Saying that takes away control is like saying that engineering an SUV to have a lower center of gravity to prevent overturning takes away a driver's control.
This isn't so much about control as about choice. A more relevant example is airbags. There was essentially no consumer demand for airbags, and airbags don't improve safety all that much for seat-belt users. In addition, they have nasty side-effects like going off in non-collision situations and sometimes killing small people when they do go off. But the auto industry is so heavily regulated that they know that the real sales job is to the regulator, not to the individual consumer. When a new, costly, maintenance-hungry technology comes along that the consumers don't want, the carmakers influence the regulators to force all carmakers to adopt it. Because it's mandated, they give themselves a nice profit margin, and there's no airbag-free competition for the consumer to go to. Read the history of how Iacocca lobbied Washington on airbags for the full story.
That'll be the sales cycle for this gadget too. MADD will bang the drum for their own reasons, then some suck-ass state legislator in California will propose a law because "safety lobbying groups demand it," and soon we'll all be paying even more for cars that do something we never asked for. And we'll also get to pick up the tab for the maintenance costs, and vehicle inspections will be added to the smog check to force us to keep the AlcoNanny working. And the insurance companies will put the boot in too, since they'll have another excuse to screw owners of older vehicles who don't have the wonderful new technology.
Want to really improve safety? Tax cars punitively in urban areas and spend the tax money on traffic-calming measures, public transport, park-and-ride lots and bike lanes. It'll also cut down on pollution and people will be fitter. And have zoning laws that discourage suburban sprawl and encourage infill development. I don't like drunks on the Muni, but I'd rather have them there than behind the wheel.
Liberals are indeed a mixed bunch, and so are conservatives. For much of US history they haven't really disagreed on such matters as the protection of the privileges of the ruling class, or the desirability of US interference in other countries' politics. Liberals in the US have also been quite willing to support imperialist wars. Voters get the choice between smug paternalism and the punitive variety. But all their kids go to the same prep schools.
On a personal level, when I was younger, good liberals didn't like it any more than knuckle-dragging troglodyte conservatives when I was doing the horizontal hula with their daughters on their nice Persian carpets.
It's the Ratchet Effect: the conservatives tighten the screws, and the liberals don't. But they don't loosen them either.
A person who uses drugs is far more likely than one who does not to sell or give away secrets (to support their habit, pay off debts, or prevent blackmail - also, they could be compromised simply by a "friend" asking questions while high and vulnerable to such probing). Drug use is a major national security risk.
And what evidence to you have that this is so, except that illegality of drug use provides a leverage point for blackmail? That's circular reasoning. The same reasoning that was once fallaciously applied to homosexuality.
Well, heroin, coke, maybe, since they're reasons someone would need large amounts of money. But compulsive gambling is an even more likely risk. And expensive tastes: Ames spent his money on real estate and nice furniture, not smack. All of these can be detected by analysis of spending patterns. No polygraph needed.
And the fact that you allowed yourself to be intimidated is no more relevant than if they took you into a room with a bunch of goons and a crystal ball and told you that they could read your mind: the real question is whether it will find anyone who is really there to steal secrets. If it doesn't do that, it should be eliminated.
One of the values that's worth preserving in this country is the refusal to tolerate arbitrary authority. And critical thinking is even more essential in the so-called "national security community" than elsewhere in this society. That's the last place you want to weed out everyone but those who are "just following orders." If you want to do some good for this country, you can start by firing the polygraph snake-oil salesmen and replacing them with people who can think for themselves as they do counterintelligence.
By that logic because religion has no scientific basis, anyone who is religious cannot also be a scientist.
Yeah, that's right. There are some scientists who also happen to be religious, but that's only because of the amazing human ability to compartmentalize conflicting aspects of their lives and turn a blind eye to the inherent hypocrisy.
The guy's right, by the way. For similar reasons, I've walked off jobs because I refuse to be piss-tested. I don't do drugs, I'm an infrequent drinker, nearest to a chemical vice is drinking too much espresso, but as a matter of principle, it's none of their goddamned business. And I've never gone a day without being employed. The only reason not to stand up to the bastards is cowardice, or the all-American tendency to grovel before any authority, no matter how illegitimate or irrational.
Cloned, and undetected, it will affect many many more people.
I think that the real problem is that cloning makes it easier to reduce population diversity. Monoculture is a disaster waiting to happen, and the short-term business interest in uniformity needs to be balanced by forces ensuring that variability is maintained in populations. It's not just what a bad choice of what to clone will do to whoever consumes the meat. It's also the risk of a disease taking down the whole population of cloned individuals. And they could very well incubate something that will kill us too, and if they do get ill, the industrial agriculture bozos will handle it be loading them up with antibiotics, so the bugs will be resistant when they get to us.
The underlying problem is this inane notion that Henry Ford-style mass production is appropriate for food. Industrial agriculture is trying to move in this direction at the same time that consumer-goods manufacturing is trying to achieve greater diversity and higher customization.
Look, all of this is further evidence, if any was needed, that it is possible for the government to be simultaneously brutal and incompetent. Keep in mind that the rationale for the Bush junta's continuing use of draconian methods is that the additional heavyhandedness is needed so that they can be more effective in fighting terrorism. But they have repeatedly demonstrated that they're capable of extreme repression even when it has no effect on terrorism, or even promotes it.
All that these screening programs demonstrate is that the TSA is either ignorant of the consequences of false positives in statistically-based methods of detection, or they know the consequences and just don't care. Here's a thought experiment. Consider a conservative estimate of the number of passenger flights in the USA (635 million domestic only in 2005, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics), and assume that 100 of those involve terrorists with the intention and capability of taking down a flight. Now let's say that the test is unbelievably sensitive, and can correctly pick 90% of those terrorists out of the general population. Let's also assume that the test is far better than it's likely to be in protecting the innocent, and only throws a false positive (falsely identifies an innocent person as a terrorist) in 1% of the cases.
In that case, Bayes' theorem shows that the odds that a person flagged as a potential terrorist by the screening is actually a terrorist is slightly less than 1/72000.
And remember, in the real world, the signal/noise ratio is likely to be even worse.
So unless the bad guys are singularly inept, a kind way of stating the conclusion is that the screening isn't helping you all that much.
Based on this dismal calculation, a more correct course of action would be to invest heavily in human intelligence and to shitcan the snooping programs. It might also be wise to round up the idiots who thought of this in the first place and reassign them to work that's more likely to save American lives, such as patching up potholes on the interstates. Assuming, that is, that they can be trained to push hot asphalt into holes.
This is the real danger in the Middle East right now: the posturing of Iran and Israel to get the US involved in the Middle East - each in their own way and for their own goals.
Yeah, but... that assumes that we have no choice but to be influenced by them. The US doesn't have to get involved in the Middle East at all. How about this for a start? Cut off the billions a year we're sending the Israelis-- they've never done a damned thing for us besides used us as muscle to keep the Arabs down so they could keep their little apartheid state going. And how many times have our so-called "allies" in Israel ever shed a drop of blood to help the US? Zilch. The first thing we should be doing is correcting the wrong thinking that those guys are the 51st state. Sorry, kids, but they're not. They have their national interests, and they're not identical to ours. It's a sign of the gutlessness of our leaders that nobody who's elected in the US can stand up and state that obvious fact. Entangling alliances indeed.
And anyway, so what if the Iranians have a couple nukes? They're not pointing them at us, and we have tens of thousands of nukes ourselves that we can use if they ever so much as think of doing so. And we didn't seem to mind all that much that the Israelis have a few hundred of them. And as for how odious the Iranian regime might be, why should we care? Humanitarian reasons? Since when have we been in the business of doing anything about murderous, repressive regimes unless there's a buck to be made for Halliburton in the process? Or if suddenly the world has changed and now we really are in that business instead of just being a bunch of hypocrites, why don't we start by cutting off foreign aid to Egypt, Pakistan and plenty of other criminal governments we directly support? It's not like that weasely dictator Musharraf is helping us catch Binladen. The Pakistani ISI is more likely sheltering him.
I'm not advocating isolationism. But our government's tendency to indiscriminately stick their noses into other people's business contributes to instability, stirs up anger against Americans, and kills huge numbers of innocent people in the process. And yet there are still people in the US who are looking for another fight.
Repressive governments deserve to be driven out. But sadly, the US government is not in a position to do that for anyone else. And at this point we in the US should be more focused on rolling back the repression that our own government is inflicting on us and the rest of the world before it gets even more out of hand. Everything else, even oil, is secondary.
Once you grok the small pieces, then you can usefully study the higher-level design.
I think you have to toggle between the big picture and the micro-world. I usually start with the interaction (or the interface) and build in. Then keep questioning the high-level design as I flesh out the small pieces, and redesign/rethink as needed. It's an oversimplification to say that either a bottom-up or top-down approach is better. It's more useful to think of them as two complementary views of the solution.
Good thing we won the cold war. Now we're safe from totalitarian governments that spy on their own citizens and maintain huge files that determine future employment prospects. In our free country, our employers do that instead.
Oh yeah, now the government AND the employers do it here.
There will come a day when neither governments nor employers can violate privacy like this.
And I'm sick of the justification of every intrusion or outrage that it might (or even will) prevent something bad from happening. Fine. Let it happen.
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Based on some of the experiences I've had in this life that gave me the greatest sense of deep connectedness, I'd say the two screwing monkeys were onto something more real and worthwhile.
Not true. There are drag-and-drop Javascript controls for the usual platforms, though I don't know of any that are platform-independent. I've used them on Windows and Linux and they work.
I'm guessing as to what you mean by "safely" in this context, but it's possible (and I've done it) to open multiple windows, and to then maintain state in such a way that related windows are kept in sync and closed together when need be. I used closures, but there are other ways. It's non-trivial, but in a fat client you'd need to solve the same problems.
Indeed. Integration with other desktop apps should generally be distinct from the presentation layer. But it can be done, and web interfaces can drive that. However, that's a situation where you can get into very nasty deployment, integration and proprietary lock-in situations.
It would be helpful if you could give examples of the "non-basic" widgets that cannot be used, and the reason anyone in their right mind would want to use them in a real application. I have worked on a number of projects that produced enterprise apps, and that were well-adopted and worked. When I do design, I always start from what the UI will do. Note that I didn't say "GUI" since it's not a foregone conclusion that a GUI is needed in every case, and even if it is a GUI, I never assume it has to be a web client: I force an explicit decision as part of the design process. The higher deployment costs, upgrade delays, difficulty of customization, and other downsides of fat clients must be part of that consideration just as much as any real (as opposed to assumed) deficiencies of the web-based implementation.
I started many years ago writing real-time code in very large systems. Whenever I hear performance assertions, I don't believe them until I know the real requirement, I know the use case, and I test the alternatives. The reason for this is because I have found that even very clever people are not good at predicting what "acceptable" performance is, and what design decisions deliver it. You need to take a very disciplined approach to this, or you will optimize the wrong things. I see this often in good coders, who will burn hours shaving a few milliseconds off an interaction that is run once a year and triggers a process such as year-end-close that takes days or weeks to complete. Without prototyping and rigorous user observation, you'll never know where the real hot spots are. And my experience of complex widgets is that the users like them less than the developers do. The users are trying to get their job done in the most effective way. And they're generally already familiar with the way a web UI works. Anything different requires training, which is an ongoing cost. I've often run into arguments like yours, and I've resolved it by a simple expedient: I do web-based UI prototypes because (for my team, mileage might vary) the turnaround time is much faster. When performance problems are observed in that early stage, we consider fat clients. If performance is still a problem, we distribute even more and have a full-on desktop-resident app. In my experience, the "prototype" ends up exceeding performance expectations in almost every case and the pro-fat-client folklore is unsupported by facts. The few examples I've seen where that's not the case involve industrial-control systems, air traffic control, and some scenarios where you've got some extremely heavy analytics running against
As for skills, H1B people have a bell curve too. I have met a few great designers/coders, and a lot of schmucks who in a previous stage of IT evolution would have been COBOL drones. Everyone works hard, H1B or US citizen, but so what? My job is to clean up the product of hard work when it has been applied to piss-poor IT decisions. The real problems with IT in the US have to do with pig-ignorant short-term-obsessed management who believe contrary to all experience that free lunches exist, spineless IT managers who go along with the knee-jerk "can't afford to think strategically" mind set, consulting firms selling flavor-of-the-month solutions, and the received wisdom that IT people are in some sense interchangeable. If that's true, you're hiring the wrong ones.
It's not the H1-B person's fault. He/she is doing better by coming to the US despite the abuses, and there's the prospect of a green card a few years in the future. But it puts American professionals in a race to the bottom with respect to working conditions, wages and job security. The best thing for the US would be to shut the H1-B program down. The depressed wages provide a disincentive for anyone trying to enter IT in the US, the exploitation makes working conditions worse for everyone, and the H1-B workers who return home take the knowledge with them. If it's about money, then perhaps top executive compensation would be a better place to look for savings. Our foreign competitors don't reward non-performing execs nearly as lavishly, and there's no evidence that you get better work for $50M per year than you do for $30M. And there's a lot more savings to be found there than in putting the squeeze on IT people.
Me, I'm middle-aged and doing well in the business, but I've advised my son, who's more talented than I am, to do something else for a living since this gravy train has long ago moved on. US corporations and their kleptomanagers have already poisoned that well.
The Persians did wonderful things, and so did the Arabs. Al-Battani, Ibn Younus and Al-Zarqali were all important and their works were translated into Latin in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, so they not only advanced science but also contributed to the recovery of the Europeans from their post-Roman hangover. Under the Ottomans, an even wider range of nationalities contributed. If you're implying that everything important came from the Persians, I've heard that tune before regarding any number of other nationalities. Persian culture is brilliant, special and unique. And y'know what? So's everyone else's. Yawn.
There's little evidence that medieval Islamic mathematics or astronomy were the basis for the work of Leibniz or Newton, though they may have anticipated some of their work. But the same could be said (perhaps more so) of Eudoxus and Archimedes. And this minimizes the power and generality of Newton's and Leibniz's techniques compared to the less abstract methods of their precursors. There's a reason we use the calculus now instead of the method of exhaustion, and it's not Eurocentrism.
I have met people who have been on the receiving end of the attentions of the "intelligent" Israeli security forces and those of the equally intelligent and famously well-run Israeli military. I never want to see the US go down that road. Me, I'm still hoping Abu Ghraib and uncounted civilian casualties are aberrations, not the new norm, for Americans.
"Maybe they know what they're doing." Yeah, and that's why they're at peace with their neighbors. Or maybe there would be peace if only every single person in the Middle East except the Israelis weren't such evil, vengeful fanatics, right?
A less contorted explanation is that the same propaganda and manipulation that keeps corrupt right-wing thugs in power in Israel is also being market-tested here by our own home-grown force-worshipping greedheads. Because fear is useful in forcing compliance, and fearful people are more likely to acquiesce in brutality.
So I really don't care how the Israelis do airport security, anymore than I want pointers from them on bullozing houses or gunning down stone-throwing kids. It's justice that I want to see done. The Israelis who do that, I'm willing to learn from. But to see heavy-handed police-state tactics, there's no need to travel that far. More's the pity.
But you're right. I'd take to TSA and put them to work filling sandbags somewhere. That's more likely to help save lives than the pointless charade they're doing now.
Based on the incompetence shown by the Bushites so far in achieving their stated objective, Binladen has more to fear from us too. There's a chance that someone other than Bush might actually commit resources to eliminating the terrorists rather than squandering vast resources oppressing those they're pretending to protect and diverting cash to profiteers and corrupt associates.
Unlike some who oppose the war, I'm not a pacifist. I believe that there's a moral imperative to defend yourself against lethal attack. And if you are attacked, you fight against those who attacked you, not against your own people or some third party. If we are really in mortal danger from terrorism, Bush has, through malice or stupidity, undermined our efforts to defend ourselves. If not, he started a war of aggression based entirely on lies. Either way, he and his accomplices belong behind bars.
Regardless of your channges in this particular case, Texas has laws that are strongly biased in favor the the employer. The system is rigged. You should take this chance to get the hell out of there and start living somewhere that doesn't have the plantation mentality.
The term "free market" in the US has been subverted to mean "not regulated in the consumer's interest." But the playing field is not level, the referees are on the take, and the house always wins. In short, the game is rigged. Corporations do everything they can to avoid competition, and their ideal condition is to be handed a guaranteed revenue stream that's protected by John Law. If that means consumers are screwed or the institutions of civil society are strangled, fine. Better to be a subsidy whore than to risk losing a fair fight.
Put another way, "free market" has come to mean that capital can move unencumbered. It doesn't mean consumers are in any way free.
Drop the talk of impeachment. The gutless wonders in Congress are right on that point: by the time impeachment proceedings are completed Bush will already be out of office or nearly so. Instead we should get straight to the point and try the sons of bitches for crimes against humanity. That's what should happen under the rule of law. Anything less won't be justice and won't be a deterrent to the next generation of gangsters who seize power. Torture, kidnapping, waging war against a country that had not attacked you and had no capability or intention to do so, killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians in the process-- they locked up Milosevic and Noriega for less. Even some of the Nuremberg generals committed lesser crimes than this. Americans need to send a message to the world (and to the scum of the earth who grabbed control) that we won't let this madness happen again, and that there's no such thing as impunity here.
This is not political vengeance. It's an assertion that there are basic human values, and that any leader that violates them will be held accountable. We have just lived through a catastrophic failure of checks and balances, and now we need to very systematically re-impose sanctions against the criminal abuse of executive power, and ensure that it won't happen again.
This is what we should be demanding from Congress and the courts. Impeachment is a political process. This is a criminal matter and should be handled as such.
I have OOO on our four laptops at home, which don't have Windows loaded on them.
.doc, .ppt and .xls. But it's one of the few software packages I use on Linux that I positively dislike. I'd ditch it in a second if there something less user-hostile were available.
While the user experience on Word and PowerPoint are inconsistent, baroque and infuriating, OOO has managed to be even more opaque, arbitrarily complicated and unintuitive. No small achievement, that.
I use it only because of the compatibility it provides with
That's the fundamental problem with "compatibility packages." There's file-format compatibility, and there's similarity of user experience. The first is essential to interoperability, and I suppose the other is regarded as necessary to keep a lid on training and cutover costs. But user experience similarity is only a good thing if the original software had a decent UE to begin with.
To further exacerbate my feelings of powerless in this whole matter, if there were a Visio clone out there with the same annoying UE problems, I'd hold my nose and use that too.
Socially, the US is much closer to a third-world country that happens to be very wealthy than it is to most of the societies in Western Europe. And politically, the US has a lot in common with societies ruled by jumped-up trigger-happy kleptocratic generalissimos like Pinochet than it does with politicians in a correctly functioning civil society. Arbitrary invasions, draconian laws, the death penalty, inadequate or nonexistent social services, an overworked population, the rich living in walled enclaves while poor people starve-- these are all signs of decadence, barbarism and corruption.
The majority of us who work hard and don't hurt other people are being ripped off and exploited by (to revive a historical phrase) malefactors of great wealth. As we contribute to the economy, it doesn't escape our notice that we're putting in a lot more than we're getting back, and yet the scale of parasitism and looting continues to grow.
Suffice to say that this is not a sustainable situation.
Any DRM scheme that allows fair use can be abused, since it is impossible to distinguish legitimate time-shifting and format-shifting from copying with malicious intent. Therefore, any DRM scheme that cannot be bypassed by emulating the exercise of fair-use rights will necessarily prevent the exercise those rights. And that's why I am against it. DRM's absurd extension of the ability to arbitrarily assert property rights is unethical and fails to balance the rights of the producer against those of the consumer.
This isn't so much about control as about choice. A more relevant example is airbags. There was essentially no consumer demand for airbags, and airbags don't improve safety all that much for seat-belt users. In addition, they have nasty side-effects like going off in non-collision situations and sometimes killing small people when they do go off. But the auto industry is so heavily regulated that they know that the real sales job is to the regulator, not to the individual consumer. When a new, costly, maintenance-hungry technology comes along that the consumers don't want, the carmakers influence the regulators to force all carmakers to adopt it. Because it's mandated, they give themselves a nice profit margin, and there's no airbag-free competition for the consumer to go to. Read the history of how Iacocca lobbied Washington on airbags for the full story.
That'll be the sales cycle for this gadget too. MADD will bang the drum for their own reasons, then some suck-ass state legislator in California will propose a law because "safety lobbying groups demand it," and soon we'll all be paying even more for cars that do something we never asked for. And we'll also get to pick up the tab for the maintenance costs, and vehicle inspections will be added to the smog check to force us to keep the AlcoNanny working. And the insurance companies will put the boot in too, since they'll have another excuse to screw owners of older vehicles who don't have the wonderful new technology.
Want to really improve safety? Tax cars punitively in urban areas and spend the tax money on traffic-calming measures, public transport, park-and-ride lots and bike lanes. It'll also cut down on pollution and people will be fitter. And have zoning laws that discourage suburban sprawl and encourage infill development. I don't like drunks on the Muni, but I'd rather have them there than behind the wheel.
Liberals are indeed a mixed bunch, and so are conservatives. For much of US history they haven't really disagreed on such matters as the protection of the privileges of the ruling class, or the desirability of US interference in other countries' politics. Liberals in the US have also been quite willing to support imperialist wars. Voters get the choice between smug paternalism and the punitive variety. But all their kids go to the same prep schools.
On a personal level, when I was younger, good liberals didn't like it any more than knuckle-dragging troglodyte conservatives when I was doing the horizontal hula with their daughters on their nice Persian carpets.
It's the Ratchet Effect: the conservatives tighten the screws, and the liberals don't. But they don't loosen them either.
Well, heroin, coke, maybe, since they're reasons someone would need large amounts of money. But compulsive gambling is an even more likely risk. And expensive tastes: Ames spent his money on real estate and nice furniture, not smack. All of these can be detected by analysis of spending patterns. No polygraph needed.
And the fact that you allowed yourself to be intimidated is no more relevant than if they took you into a room with a bunch of goons and a crystal ball and told you that they could read your mind: the real question is whether it will find anyone who is really there to steal secrets. If it doesn't do that, it should be eliminated.
One of the values that's worth preserving in this country is the refusal to tolerate arbitrary authority. And critical thinking is even more essential in the so-called "national security community" than elsewhere in this society. That's the last place you want to weed out everyone but those who are "just following orders." If you want to do some good for this country, you can start by firing the polygraph snake-oil salesmen and replacing them with people who can think for themselves as they do counterintelligence.
The guy's right, by the way. For similar reasons, I've walked off jobs because I refuse to be piss-tested. I don't do drugs, I'm an infrequent drinker, nearest to a chemical vice is drinking too much espresso, but as a matter of principle, it's none of their goddamned business. And I've never gone a day without being employed. The only reason not to stand up to the bastards is cowardice, or the all-American tendency to grovel before any authority, no matter how illegitimate or irrational.
And shade for the young.
The underlying problem is this inane notion that Henry Ford-style mass production is appropriate for food. Industrial agriculture is trying to move in this direction at the same time that consumer-goods manufacturing is trying to achieve greater diversity and higher customization.
Look, all of this is further evidence, if any was needed, that it is possible for the government to be simultaneously brutal and incompetent. Keep in mind that the rationale for the Bush junta's continuing use of draconian methods is that the additional heavyhandedness is needed so that they can be more effective in fighting terrorism. But they have repeatedly demonstrated that they're capable of extreme repression even when it has no effect on terrorism, or even promotes it.
All that these screening programs demonstrate is that the TSA is either ignorant of the consequences of false positives in statistically-based methods of detection, or they know the consequences and just don't care. Here's a thought experiment. Consider a conservative estimate of the number of passenger flights in the USA (635 million domestic only in 2005, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics), and assume that 100 of those involve terrorists with the intention and capability of taking down a flight. Now let's say that the test is unbelievably sensitive, and can correctly pick 90% of those terrorists out of the general population. Let's also assume that the test is far better than it's likely to be in protecting the innocent, and only throws a false positive (falsely identifies an innocent person as a terrorist) in 1% of the cases.
In that case, Bayes' theorem shows that the odds that a person flagged as a potential terrorist by the screening is actually a terrorist is slightly less than 1/72000.
And remember, in the real world, the signal/noise ratio is likely to be even worse.
So unless the bad guys are singularly inept, a kind way of stating the conclusion is that the screening isn't helping you all that much.
Based on this dismal calculation, a more correct course of action would be to invest heavily in human intelligence and to shitcan the snooping programs. It might also be wise to round up the idiots who thought of this in the first place and reassign them to work that's more likely to save American lives, such as patching up potholes on the interstates. Assuming, that is, that they can be trained to push hot asphalt into holes.
And anyway, so what if the Iranians have a couple nukes? They're not pointing them at us, and we have tens of thousands of nukes ourselves that we can use if they ever so much as think of doing so. And we didn't seem to mind all that much that the Israelis have a few hundred of them. And as for how odious the Iranian regime might be, why should we care? Humanitarian reasons? Since when have we been in the business of doing anything about murderous, repressive regimes unless there's a buck to be made for Halliburton in the process? Or if suddenly the world has changed and now we really are in that business instead of just being a bunch of hypocrites, why don't we start by cutting off foreign aid to Egypt, Pakistan and plenty of other criminal governments we directly support? It's not like that weasely dictator Musharraf is helping us catch Binladen. The Pakistani ISI is more likely sheltering him.
I'm not advocating isolationism. But our government's tendency to indiscriminately stick their noses into other people's business contributes to instability, stirs up anger against Americans, and kills huge numbers of innocent people in the process. And yet there are still people in the US who are looking for another fight.
Repressive governments deserve to be driven out. But sadly, the US government is not in a position to do that for anyone else. And at this point we in the US should be more focused on rolling back the repression that our own government is inflicting on us and the rest of the world before it gets even more out of hand. Everything else, even oil, is secondary.
Good thing we won the cold war. Now we're safe from totalitarian governments that spy on their own citizens and maintain huge files that determine future employment prospects. In our free country, our employers do that instead.
Oh yeah, now the government AND the employers do it here.
There will come a day when neither governments nor employers can violate privacy like this.
And I'm sick of the justification of every intrusion or outrage that it might (or even will) prevent something bad from happening. Fine. Let it happen.
Yeah, it appears to me that the main risk is when you can't produce records that fall within the period specified in your retention policy.
And of course as the PP mentioned, it also helps if your retention policy complies with the law.