Contrast agnostic, those who say they don't know. Atheist CAN mean lack of belief, more often those who call themselves "atheist" have a strong, almost violent belief that rhere is no God. Most refuse to recognize that there are a thousand different concepts called "God", so really they are claiming "nothing can exist which can be called God." To some, the word God means essentially "nature", or "natural laws", which makes the atheist's position untenable.
The two laws you mention ban weapons based largely on APPEARANCE, not functionality, and they don't mention at all the type of guns most often used in murders. You're advocating "scary looking" guns. Exactly what difference do you think a barrel shroud or folding stock would make?
Here's a look at the effectiveness of the "assault weapons" ban from the Washington Post:
I've noticed that when someone lacks any plausible argument, they tend to turn to making up lies about the people they see as their opposition. I don't know if you were fooled by the liar, or you are the liar.
At exactly 7:00 00 AM every Sunday, the Twitter account posts a verse. Why precisely 7:00 AM, never 7:01 or 6:58 AM? Because it's automated, scheduled the week before. So no, the tweet had nothing to do with the shooting that occurred several days after the tweet was scheduled.
> it is impossible to find out the full requirements before you have tried putting out some code. >... emphasis on the word "full"
You may never fully understand all of the users' needs and desires. There are three approaches to handling that:
A) Ask the user's manager what the requirements are. B) Walk over to the user's desk and watch them work for 30 minutes, asking questions. C) Guess, then build the minimum thing that might address some of the requirements.
It's well known that option (a) doesn't work. It's frequently tried, and rarelt effective.
With option (b), I might get 90% of the requirements up front, and have those in mind from the very first moments that I start thinking about a design. I'll also get a rough idea of what categories of additional functions or requirements may come up in the future. Often, I see how the requirements could be simplified by removing a redundant or unnecessary part of the existing process. The point is, I get 90% of the requirements up front.
With option (c), you design and build something that meets 10% of the requirements. When you try to deploy it, you learn about another 10%. So you scrap it and build something that meets 20%. You try to deploy that and learn about another 20%, so you shove twice as much functionallity in wherever it will fit, creating a bit of a mess. You deploy that and find out about another missing 20%, so you pile that 20% on top. Then you learn that the 40% that's still missing is the important part, so you rip out the guts, keeping the gui, and shoehorn the new guts into the old gui. Now you meet 80% of the need - still less than the 90% you could get the first time by sitting down and watching users work before you design anything. And your 80% code is an unholy mess from shoehorning new stuff in at each stage.
> they are either incompetent or uncaring, possibly both.
"They" is mainly a computer algorithm, users vote on stories in the Firehose to determine what appears on the front page. So yes, the algoritm is uncaring.
Beyond that, this isn't "Headline News Now, Up to the Minute Reporting of What's Going on Today". There are sites that do that. Slashdot isn't one of those. Try CNN or Fox.
> destroys too many people's jobs in the name of corporate profits (i.e., the rich getting richer) and/or causes people to be dumber and less skilled in their own survival, then it's not a Good Thing at all.
It was feared that if machines did the math, we'd all become "dumber", unable to do math because the machines would do it. Before that, scribes lost their jobs to the printing press. We'll see indeed, just as we have been seeing for the last thousand years or so.
The other day Slashdot posted a story about a court filing that happened in early 2015 - over a year ago. This particular story is about as fast as Slashdot gets - the news sites covered it Friday, two days ago. I'm sure Slashdot will have a story about the shooting in the next few days, probably after more is known so there can be better discussion.
I absolutely agree that the Agile theory that you don't find out the requirements before you begin work is stupid. Over the medium to long term, without a plan you end up either doing work and then throwing it out three months later, or constantly working around earlier decisions, ending up with a system full of duct tape hacks. That creates unreliable systems that are difficult and expensive to maintain.
Artificial deadlines are just as problematic, however. Properly designing and building a system with certain requirements requires a certain amount of time. That can't be changed by management fiat. Regularly attempting to complete projects in less than the required time can only result in one of these three results:
A) Projects are frequently not completed on time.
B) Shortcuts are used regularly, duct tape that makes the next project take longer, while compromising reliability and security.
C) Workers are frequently asked to work long hours, resulting in turnover as well as the same problematic shortcuts as b).
Once in a while, there is an externally imposed deadline - taxes have to be filed by April 15. In such cases, you can either limit the scope and only do as much as you have time to do, or choose from the three failure modes above.
Pretending otherwise may appear to work for a while - the product is delivered. However, by shorting time, the work was necesarily shorted - testing wasn't done, code was copy-pasted from Stackoverflow without understanding what it actually did, or perhaps to make deadline the programmers used code you have no license to use. These things will come back to bite you.
The way to quality software, reliable software that can be maintained with reasonable manpower, is to recognize that it takes as long as it takes. You can rush it no more than you can rush the growing of crops. Is this inconvenient for management? Absolutely! And the job of management is to figure out how to get the best possible results from real world, non-optimal conditions.
In fact, software development management requires talent because not only can you not dictate how long it will take to achieve a predetermined set of requirements, you can't even reliably predict it! Development is a process in which most of the work moves along at a steady pace, but the trouble spots can take unpredictable amounts of time. Yeah, that makes it hard for management. That's why management is paid five times as much as production - because they have the skills to deal with uncertainty on a significant scale.
I remember when I said stuff like that. You're pissed that parties are partisan. So cute. At this stage, you're still rooting for the team you picked, thinking that they aren't just as corrupt, playing you like a piano. Clinton has your name on a list of people like you. At this stage, you don't quite know the politicians' names (Chaney and Regan lol), but you're sure that the politicians on the other team are evil, while the politicians on the team you chose are good. You don't know the names of the Congressional commitees or agencies, or treaties, but you can almost get them half right as you parrot the propaganda you heard on last night's comedy show.
Later, you'll learn the names and start to understand a little bit about what they do. You'll be able to parrot the party propaganda and actually get it right. Hillary will move your name to another list.
Assuming you have an IQ above 87, after that you'll eventually realize what you've been regurgitating is silly propaganda, that Clinton's job since 1977 has been to figure out which lies stage 1 and stage 2 people will fall for.
Without such a mechanism, astrological calculations were done by intelligent, educated people, white-collar workers so to speak. If machines like this took over this kind of work, such artificial intelligence would have probably destroyed the economy. Or maybe that theory has been proven wrong over the last several thousand years of machines becoming more sophisticated all the time.
You hit the nail on the head. I've probably encountered more broken backups than ones that work. Web hosting providers frequently provide backups that stopped working 10 months ago, but nobody noticed. If you haven't recently tested restoring your backups, you probably have no backups.
I like to use remote backups that I can restore from conveniently, so that I restore a file from time to time just because I messed up a couple paragraphs of text or something. These real-life, low-impact restores serve to verify backup and restore is working properly.
I don't know about that; Obama has been pretty open about wiping his ass with the Constitution.
Contrast Hilary Clinton, who has been involved in government since 1977 and her primary responsibility for 38 years has been cover ups and white-washing.
Trump is another who is pretty open about doing and saying things that people don't like.
I totally understand where you're coming from. In Texas we had a pretty good governor from 1995-2000. He did a good job, earning praise from Democrats in the state legislature as well as Republicans. He was good at working across the aisle and getting things done, so I had high hopes when he was elected president. Oops.
I hoped that Obama would inspire the nation, JFK-style. While his own radio ads about "going after corporations" let me know he was intending to cause harm to business owners such as myself, I hoped he would be special. Not so much.
The good news in all of that is this: I thought Bush would be good. I was wrong. I thought Obama would be good, for a Dem. I was wrong. I thing Trump would be bad. I'll be wrong? I hope so!
I've learned that what a candidate says doesn't tell me much about what a president will do.
> These are the employees donating, not the companies. Kind of a big difference, right?
Using Sander's largest listed contributor as an example, the corporation itself donated about twice as much of the PAC money than the executives and other employees. Most of the money, 2/3rds, is direct from the corporation.
> Or maybe you're against the employees of any company donating to a candidate?
I'm not against any legal donations, whether from one person or from a group of people. I find it rather strange that some people fall for the ridiculous argument that when people work together as a group they should lose their rights. Nobody believed that when it was Michael Moore's corporation, that was a desperate, last-ditch argument once when a group of conservatives made a movie too. Personally, I'm a supporter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation Inc. I think it's right that me and other like minded people can work together via the EFF.
> "Where is the rugged 16GB RAM / 1TB Storage / 20-hour battery tablet?"
I think the submitter might be happier looking under a different category in Newegg. Newegg has 26 options with 8-16GB of RAM, and 256GB-1TB storage. Most products with that much RAM and storage ALSO come with a detachable or fold-away keyboard, so they are listed in the "2 in 1" category.
> Bernie Sanders was the only major candidate so far in my lifetime who wasn't bought and paid for by the corporations
According to his FEC filings, Sanders is paid for by Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and by the post office (tax money). https://www.opensecrets.org/po...
Bernie also has quite a few illegal contributions:
> and what do you propose as solution? > Removing macros? Further dumbing down systems ?
The problem is that Microsoft dumbed it too much. They have one button where they should have two. The ONLY option is the new UI is "Run Content". There should be a "No Thanks" button.
As explained in the fine summary, the recommendation is something like the old warning, which actually worked, or least an option labeled "dismiss", "cancel", or "disable macros". Here's one MS UI that worked:
Microsoft traded that for a single button with the instruction "Enable Content". There is no more "disable macros" option anymore. Anyone who isn't sure what they should do will often click the one and only option Microsoft provides: run the macros. There should be a button to dismiss the message without running macros.
Typically, a board member is required to spend about $50,000 of their $150K compensation buying company stock, and hold that stock. That aligns their interests with those of investors, because typically most board members are NOT major stock holders. They are HIRED (nominated) by major stock holders, or more often by representatives of the stockholders, the fund managers. They are professional accountants, strategic managers, etc. People who are very successful are often so succesful because they put qualified professionals in charge, not because they try to make all of the decisions themselves.
> does Yahoo seem to be dismantling their company piece by piece until nothing of value is left?
There's already not much of value left. 90% of Yahoo's value (market cap) is the Alibaba stock they own. Investing in Yahoo is just an indirect way of investing in Alibaba, with a small serving of "maybe Yahoo has some potential" on the side. Yahoo hasn't been doing well in their business, so the best course of action may well be to sell off assets to other companies who can manage them better. The other option may well be having the assets slowly rot under Yahoo's control.
Did you by chance mean the top executives when you said "the board of directors"? The board doesn't typically have generous golden parachutes like the key executives do. Board members, who serve at the pleasure of the stockholders, get paid around $150,000/year or so to attend several meetings each year. If I were on the board, I would want to keep getting that money for many years.
Rust is a memory-safe language, meaning it is less vulnerable than C to certain types of bugs. That's great.
PHP is also memory-safe, as are most languages. Does that mean that writing software in PHP makes it secure? Quite obviously not, especially older versions of PHP. I certainly hope the current Mozilla developers don't have any false sense of security from using Rust.
Rust has a few tools which help mitigate specific types of vulnerabilities, often turning information leak bugs into denial of service instead. That's nice, but one should be careful not to overestimate the security benefit. If the programmers continue to try to write code that works, it'll still be full of security holes until they start thinking about what happens when things don't work - when a port number is higher than 65536, when http headers contain illegal bytes, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.dictionary.com/brow...
Contrast agnostic, those who say they don't know. Atheist CAN mean lack of belief, more often those who call themselves "atheist" have a strong, almost violent belief that rhere is no God. Most refuse to recognize that there are a thousand different concepts called "God", so really they are claiming "nothing can exist which can be called God." To some, the word God means essentially "nature", or "natural laws", which makes the atheist's position untenable.
The two laws you mention ban weapons based largely on APPEARANCE, not functionality, and they don't mention at all the type of guns most often used in murders. You're advocating "scary looking" guns. Exactly what difference do you think a barrel shroud or folding stock would make?
Here's a look at the effectiveness of the "assault weapons" ban from the Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
I've noticed that when someone lacks any plausible argument, they tend to turn to making up lies about the people they see as their opposition. I don't know if you were fooled by the liar, or you are the liar.
At exactly 7:00 00 AM every Sunday, the Twitter account posts a verse. Why precisely 7:00 AM, never 7:01 or 6:58 AM? Because it's automated, scheduled the week before. So no, the tweet had nothing to do with the shooting that occurred several days after the tweet was scheduled.
That's true, is Europe you like to have your random violence at football matches, don't you.
> it is impossible to find out the full requirements before you have tried putting out some code.
>... emphasis on the word "full"
You may never fully understand all of the users' needs and desires. There are three approaches to handling that:
A) Ask the user's manager what the requirements are.
B) Walk over to the user's desk and watch them work for 30 minutes, asking questions.
C) Guess, then build the minimum thing that might address some of the requirements.
It's well known that option (a) doesn't work. It's frequently tried, and rarelt effective.
With option (b), I might get 90% of the requirements up front, and have those in mind from the very first moments that I start thinking about a design. I'll also get a rough idea of what categories of additional functions or requirements may come up in the future. Often, I see how the requirements could be simplified by removing a redundant or unnecessary part of the existing process. The point is, I get 90% of the requirements up front.
With option (c), you design and build something that meets 10% of the requirements. When you try to deploy it, you learn about another 10%. So you scrap it and build something that meets 20%. You try to deploy that and learn about another 20%, so you shove twice as much functionallity in wherever it will fit, creating a bit of a mess. You deploy that and find out about another missing 20%, so you pile that 20% on top. Then you learn that the 40% that's still missing is the important part, so you rip out the guts, keeping the gui, and shoehorn the new guts into the old gui. Now you meet 80% of the need - still less than the 90% you could get the first time by sitting down and watching users work before you design anything. And your 80% code is an unholy mess from shoehorning new stuff in at each stage.
> they are either incompetent or uncaring, possibly both.
"They" is mainly a computer algorithm, users vote on stories in the Firehose to determine what appears on the front page. So yes, the algoritm is uncaring.
Beyond that, this isn't "Headline News Now, Up to the Minute Reporting of What's Going on Today". There are sites that do that. Slashdot isn't one of those. Try CNN or Fox.
> destroys too many people's jobs in the name of corporate profits (i.e., the rich getting richer) and/or causes people to be dumber and less skilled in their own survival, then it's not a Good Thing at all.
It was feared that if machines did the math, we'd all become "dumber", unable to do math because the machines would do it. Before that, scribes lost their jobs to the printing press. We'll see indeed, just as we have been seeing for the last thousand years or so.
The other day Slashdot posted a story about a court filing that happened in early 2015 - over a year ago. This particular story is about as fast as Slashdot gets - the news sites covered it Friday, two days ago. I'm sure Slashdot will have a story about the shooting in the next few days, probably after more is known so there can be better discussion.
I absolutely agree that the Agile theory that you don't find out the requirements before you begin work is stupid. Over the medium to long term, without a plan you end up either doing work and then throwing it out three months later, or constantly working around earlier decisions, ending up with a system full of duct tape hacks. That creates unreliable systems that are difficult and expensive to maintain.
Artificial deadlines are just as problematic, however. Properly designing and building a system with certain requirements requires a certain amount of time. That can't be changed by management fiat. Regularly attempting to complete projects in less than the required time can only result in one of these three results:
A) Projects are frequently not completed on time.
B) Shortcuts are used regularly, duct tape that makes the next project take longer, while compromising reliability and security.
C) Workers are frequently asked to work long hours, resulting in turnover as well as the same problematic shortcuts as b).
Once in a while, there is an externally imposed deadline - taxes have to be filed by April 15. In such cases, you can either limit the scope and only do as much as you have time
to do, or choose from the three failure modes above.
Pretending otherwise may appear to work for a while - the product is delivered. However, by shorting time, the work was necesarily shorted - testing wasn't done, code was copy-pasted from Stackoverflow without understanding what it actually did, or perhaps to make deadline the programmers used code you have no license to use. These things will come back to bite you.
The way to quality software, reliable software that can be maintained with reasonable manpower, is to recognize that it takes as long as it takes. You can rush it no more than you can rush the growing of crops. Is this inconvenient for management? Absolutely! And the job of management is to figure out how to get the best possible results from real world, non-optimal conditions.
In fact, software development management requires talent because not only can you not dictate how long it will take to achieve a predetermined set of requirements, you can't even reliably predict it! Development is a process in which most of the work moves along at a steady pace, but the trouble spots can take unpredictable amounts of time. Yeah, that makes it hard for management. That's why management is paid five times as much as production - because they have the skills to deal with uncertainty on a significant scale.
I remember when I said stuff like that. You're pissed that parties are partisan. So cute. At this stage, you're still rooting for the team you picked, thinking that they aren't just as corrupt, playing you like a piano. Clinton has your name on a list of people like you. At this stage, you don't quite know the politicians' names (Chaney and Regan lol), but you're sure that the politicians on the other team are evil, while the politicians on the team you chose are good. You don't know the names of the Congressional commitees or agencies, or treaties, but you can almost get them half right as you parrot the propaganda you heard on last night's comedy show.
Later, you'll learn the names and start to understand a little bit about what they do. You'll be able to parrot the party propaganda and actually get it right. Hillary will move your name to another list.
Assuming you have an IQ above 87, after that you'll eventually realize what you've been regurgitating is silly propaganda, that Clinton's job since 1977 has been to figure out which lies stage 1 and stage 2 people will fall for.
Without such a mechanism, astrological calculations were done by intelligent, educated people, white-collar workers so to speak. If machines like this took over this kind of work, such artificial intelligence would have probably destroyed the economy. Or maybe that theory has been proven wrong over the last several thousand years of machines becoming more sophisticated all the time.
You hit the nail on the head. I've probably encountered more broken backups than ones that work. Web hosting providers frequently provide backups that stopped working 10 months ago, but nobody noticed. If you haven't recently tested restoring your backups, you probably have no backups.
I like to use remote backups that I can restore from conveniently, so that I restore a file from time to time just because I messed up a couple paragraphs of text or something. These real-life, low-impact restores serve to verify backup and restore is working properly.
I don't know about that; Obama has been pretty open about wiping his ass with the Constitution.
Contrast Hilary Clinton, who has been involved in government since 1977 and her primary responsibility for 38 years has been cover ups and white-washing.
Trump is another who is pretty open about doing and saying things that people don't like.
> mushrooms were growing out of them.
What kind of mushrooms does the DEA grow? ;)
I totally understand where you're coming from. In Texas we had a pretty good governor from 1995-2000. He did a good job, earning praise from Democrats in the state legislature as well as Republicans. He was good at working across the aisle and getting things done, so I had high hopes when he was elected president. Oops.
I hoped that Obama would inspire the nation, JFK-style. While his own radio ads about "going after corporations" let me know he was intending to cause harm to business owners such as myself, I hoped he would be special. Not so much.
The good news in all of that is this:
I thought Bush would be good. I was wrong.
I thought Obama would be good, for a Dem. I was wrong.
I thing Trump would be bad. I'll be wrong? I hope so!
I've learned that what a candidate says doesn't tell me much about what a president will do.
> These are the employees donating, not the companies. Kind of a big difference, right?
Using Sander's largest listed contributor as an example, the corporation itself donated about twice as much of the PAC money than the executives and other employees. Most of the money, 2/3rds, is direct from the corporation.
> Or maybe you're against the employees of any company donating to a candidate?
I'm not against any legal donations, whether from one person or from a group of people. I find it rather strange that some people fall for the ridiculous argument that when people work together as a group they should lose their rights. Nobody believed that when it was Michael Moore's corporation, that was a desperate, last-ditch argument once when a group of conservatives made a movie too. Personally, I'm a supporter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation Inc. I think it's right that me and other like minded people can work together via the EFF.
> "Where is the rugged 16GB RAM / 1TB Storage / 20-hour battery tablet?"
I think the submitter might be happier looking under a different category in Newegg. Newegg has 26 options with 8-16GB of RAM, and 256GB-1TB storage. Most products with that much RAM and storage ALSO come with a detachable or fold-away keyboard, so they are listed in the "2 in 1" category.
> Bernie Sanders was the only major candidate so far in my lifetime who wasn't bought and paid for by the corporations
According to his FEC filings, Sanders is paid for by Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and by the post office (tax money).
https://www.opensecrets.org/po...
Bernie also has quite a few illegal contributions:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
Clinton is paid for primarily by Wall Street. As I recall, 8 of her top 10 donors are investment firms.
Reality TV star Donald Trump has largely paid for his own campaign so far. He's spent less by making ridiculous statements to get free press.
Of course, we all know that in Windows, clicking the X on the right now means "go ahead and do it". :)
Somebody had to say it.
> and what do you propose as solution?
> Removing macros? Further dumbing down systems ?
The problem is that Microsoft dumbed it too much. They have one button where they should have two. The ONLY option is the new UI is "Run Content". There should be a "No Thanks" button.
As explained in the fine summary, the recommendation is something like the old warning, which actually worked, or least an option labeled "dismiss", "cancel", or "disable macros". Here's one MS UI that worked:
http://i1-news.softpedia-stati...
Microsoft traded that for a single button with the instruction "Enable Content". There is no more "disable macros" option anymore. Anyone who isn't sure what they should do will often click the one and only option Microsoft provides: run the macros. There should be a button to dismiss the message without running macros.
I've been on a couple of boards.
Typically, a board member is required to spend about $50,000 of their $150K compensation buying company stock, and hold that stock. That aligns their interests with those of investors, because typically most board members are NOT major stock holders. They are HIRED (nominated) by major stock holders, or more often by representatives of the stockholders, the fund managers. They are professional accountants, strategic managers, etc. People who are very successful are often so succesful because they put qualified professionals in charge, not because they try to make all of the decisions themselves.
> does Yahoo seem to be dismantling their company piece by piece until nothing of value is left?
There's already not much of value left. 90% of Yahoo's value (market cap) is the Alibaba stock they own. Investing in Yahoo is just an indirect way of investing in Alibaba, with a small serving of "maybe Yahoo has some potential" on the side. Yahoo hasn't been doing well in their business, so the best course of action may well be to sell off assets to other companies who can manage them better. The other option may well be having the assets slowly rot under Yahoo's control.
Did you by chance mean the top executives when you said "the board of directors"? The board doesn't typically have generous golden parachutes like the key executives do. Board members, who serve at the pleasure of the stockholders, get paid around $150,000/year or so to attend several meetings each year. If I were on the board, I would want to keep getting that money for many years.
Rust is a memory-safe language, meaning it is less vulnerable than C to certain types of bugs. That's great.
PHP is also memory-safe, as are most languages. Does that mean that writing software in PHP makes it secure? Quite obviously not, especially older versions of PHP. I certainly hope the current Mozilla developers don't have any false sense of security from using Rust.
Rust has a few tools which help mitigate specific types of vulnerabilities, often turning information leak bugs into denial of service instead. That's nice, but one should be careful not to overestimate the security benefit. If the programmers continue to try to write code that works, it'll still be full of security holes until they start thinking about what happens when things don't work - when a port number is higher than 65536, when http headers contain illegal bytes, etc.
That's interesting. I sent Meyer a note quoting what you said.