I don't know why this sort of thing hasn't been commonly done for years. It's only about the first thing everybody thinks of when they hear about pushing atoms around with a microscope tip.
Call me when somebody makes lego molecules and a tool for the microscope tip that lets you pick them up and snap them together.
Possibly true, depending on your definition of "simulation," but irrelevant. Extension of the same logic would apply to the interaction between the body and the brain, so you could say "You aren't really feeling the cup in your hand, just receiving data from nerves." The probe is in some ways an extension of the human using it, and the data it provides is no more or less inherently misleading than any natural human sense.
It is certainly not a simulation in a form that causes people to confuse theory and reality. The experimenters certainly understand that the force is amplified and probably inaccurate in other ways, but they can still use the feedback to improve their interactions with the specimen.
BTW, you are really stretching the definition of "simulation." Is a news video on TV a simulation? Your view through a camcorder? If you look through sunglasses, is that view a simulation? Generally, a simulation is a model created from a theory, not a direct representation of real data, and especially not an interaction with real matter (even if indirectly perceived).
This isn't a simulation. The force feedback is proportional to the force measurement at the tip of the microscope. The virus really does push back at the probe with X lbs of force (where X=0.00000...? ).
The visual might be misleading, but they really are feeling viruses squish under the probe. This isn't a matter of confusing theory with reality, this is simply an amplified representation of a physical measurement: the force exerted by/on the probe.
Don't be ridiculous. We've got tonnes of guns in every community. If I decided to go on a murderous rampage with a shotgun, I could go upstairs and get a semi-auto and a jacket with big pockets for holding the boxes of shells. I could also take out a nice 30-06 that would make a good sniper's weapon, as well as the perfect deer rifle. With an extra 20 minute's work I could have a sawed-off shotgun: the ideal hold-up weapon. Just last week I practiced my marksmanship with a.22 shooting a golfball at 30 meters (with about an 80% hit rate; I'm a bit rusty).
This is normal for one of the many hunters in this country. Any of us can buy as many guns as we like and have plenty of practice in how to use them. We don't go around robbing and shooting people because it would be stupid, as well as evil, to do so. It's a tiny fraction of citizens that commit violent crime, and they generally don't bother with guns. Knives are a more popular murder and mugging weapon than guns, probably because a knife doesn't get you shot "just in case."
We have less violent crime in the States, but it's not for lack of guns. It's a societal thing. We don't have the same level of class and racial conflict, for one thing. I think violent crime is more likely in warmer climates, too. People wander around on foot alone more in nice weather.
Guns also probably serve some role in keeping down crime in rural areas. Practically every farmer has guns, and usually close at hand. They need them to exterminate vermin and keep predators properly afraid of humans. This serves as a natural deterrent to crime.
This isn't a good comparison to be making between MS stuff and Linux from a user's viewpoint. Linux-based software compared to MS-based software isn't like a glass of lemonade compared to a full, if poorly prepared, menu.
Nobody knows everything about every possible situation. If something unprecedented goes wrong Red Hat isn't going to be able to snap their fingers and fix it.
The online community is far more useful than any isolated professional support, and you only need a computer staff clued-in enough to access it.
Why does everyone keep saying that they're going to turn a profit eventually?
Their business model is unsustainable. They sell support, and at a flat-rate fee that doesn't cover the cost of support for those who use it. The only way they could turn a profit is to have the vast majority of people who buy their product need little or no support. Sooner or later people are going to figure out that it's stupid to buy the retail package just because they might want the support at some point in the future. After all, they can try to install it for free and then pay for the support only if they need it.
The revenues they have now are a mix of Linux-boosters who are giving charity and ignorant people who don't understand that the software is free.
They will never sustain big corporate clients, because an in-house Linux expert is cheaper and more useful.
Red Hat is never going to turn a profit, unless it becomes a fashionable charity. Yet another high-profile, high-price stock with nothing behind it.
Exactly what made them think using web pages and mailing lists would be better than a correspondence course?
Plain mailing lists are practically useless for anything but announcements. Some sort of threaded system is needed if you are to sort through all the garbage to what you are actually interested in.
In my experience, a good set of course notes (or FAQs or HOW-TOs) is worth infinitely more than the lectures (which the mass chats are analogous to). Regular private chat program use or, preferably, face-to-face contact is needed by all but the most self-reliant students. One of the biggest advantages of a university setting is that the students all study together and teach each other, filling in the little gaps in each others' understanding.
Of course, this could just be a case of a teacher's lousy skill shining through.
He never could have made a buck, anyway.
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Weaving The Web
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If Tim Berners-Lee had tried to get rich (or even make a small profit) from the WWW, it never would have made it. Not only would it have been a failure, but something else would have been perfectly happy to take it's place and he would have lost out entirely in his small potential customer base to more elaborate hypertext systems. He would have just wasted time, effort, and money trying to sell it and I'm sure he knows it perfectly well.
No wonder he gets annoyed when people keep bugging him about why he didn't cash in.
What is the WWW that he created? Just HTTP and HTML (and, I suppose, URLs). HTTP was never entirely necessary, the browser could log into FTP servers and get the file in the address or whatever, but at any rate HTTP is just the obvious modifications to make transparent linking simple. HTML is okay, but it's not really unusually well suited to the job. Any reasonably complete document format with hyperlinks hacked in would have done the job.
Realistically, he might have brought the WWW along a year quicker than it would have shown up on its own. We might have been using plaintext in an FTP client with a text reader modified to recognize FTP addresses with a path appended (IMHO, we might have been better off if the idea of hidden "links" was never invented and you could always see the address you were going to). We also might have had something like Curl as the basis of the WWW, and not have to be messing around with Javascript and Java and XML and all that other junk.
Hypertext had been around for a while before the WWW, as had the internet. Somebody was going to put them together sooner or later, and it was inevitable that it would take off like a rocket. The WWW that Tim Berners-Lee created isn't so much a particularly good implementation, just the first free one.
An employer is not a ruler. If you don't like your employer's policies you can go work somewhere else, unless you're incompetent, in which case you don't deserve the job anyway.
That an employer monitors his employees actions does not make it a very authoritarian and controlled atmosphere. What he might do with the information could make it so. If he uses it to weed out the slackers and incompetents, I say more power to him, he does his honest employees a favour. If he uses it to harass productive workers, he's obviously an authoratarian jackass and I would choose to seek other employment. The information has valid uses and there's nothing inherently wrong with gathering it.
In any non-desk job it is expected that the boss will watch you work sometimes, or even most of the time. Why should it be different for computer workers?
Incidentally, I run my own business (I don't have any employees). I enjoy the freedom, and I hope I'll eventually make more than I would have by working for somebody else. I do have to work a lot harder though; my days had ends when I was a corporate employee. Regular paychecks were nice too. It's not for everyone.
As for requiring people to punch in at 8AM, there are clear benefits to having everybody at work at the same time, not to mention the way a professional atmosphere can boost productivity. Is it stupid and counterproductive? Maybe, I don't know all the details, I can see how it could be in a few cases (with really dedicated workers, and/or work that is ideally suited to flex-time). For all I know, they could have had a major problem with people traipsing in at 11AM and leaving at 5PM and taking pay for a full 8 hour day. Anyone who didn't like it could find other work, though, or threaten to do so unless the policy is changed. But they didn't, did they? They grumbled among each other and maybe a few played childish tricks to get back at the management and maybe some used it as an excuse to screw around and do less work, all the while telling managers that they were okay with it. Which sounds more like weasels?
I'd give you good odds for a wager that if the management announced a new policy that everybody had to wear kilts to work, the whiners would grumble among themselves again but comply while the people you call "weasels" would complain to the management and quit if the policy was not cancelled.
I'd also be willing to bet that the "weasels" get a good deal more work done, while the grumblers think it's unreasonable to be forced to be at work since they don't really do anything there anyway. It's similar to the way that stupid children often call the brightest ones "teacher's pets" because they don't want to admit to themselves that the fundamental difference is ability, not attitude (though there are also cases where the epithet is accurate).
If people worth hiring refuse to accept unreasonable policies, then businesses will not have them. As I said, you make your own Hell.
It's like that everywhere. A profession is a conspiracy against the layman; when one gets government recognition it just means that the government will wipe out any competition for them. Generally speaking, governments do not reassess the competence or integrity of the professional body even if hundreds of years pass after their initial cartel approval.
Whenever something crooked needs a rubber stamp, you can always find someone who will give it, even though it might mean giving them a big enough bribe for them to skip country and live comfortably when their role becomes evident. In some countries this is not as obvious, because the general population they would screw is rich enough to hire independent auditors and powerful enough to bite back, making it relatively dangerous and unprofitable to cheat.
Incompetents always manage to slip through, too. Certification procedures generally involve more time than anything else. Any of the tests involved can be passed by practically anyone with enough cramming. I remember in Engineering school the way my classmates used to look through old exams until they could be certain that they had already found questions that were nearly identical to the ones on the exam. Being patient, punctual, orderly, and studious can substitute for competence when it comes to meeting requirements for certification.
Never mind that any certification is essentially meaningless once a few years have passed since the subject was evaluated.
I once knew an electrical engineer (yes, certified and employed, and with an engineering degree from a respectable university) who couldn't figure out how to wire up two lights to a switch so they would both go on at the proper brightness when the switch was flipped. Incidentally, she was only a few years out of university, so it's not like this was some 80-year-old who decided he didn't want to be an engineer after all and hadn't looked at a wire in 50 years.
I have heard countless other similar stories. Practically every office has its certified incompetents, and people just route work around them.
When you're being paid to do a job, you are expected to do a job. It's a Golden Rule thing. If you were an employer, you'd want to be able to evaluate your employee's work.
Honest workers consider their employer a partner of sorts. They have made a deal to do work in return for pay, and they don't have the right to use company resources (including their paid time) for their personal gain or entertainment, unless the employer gives permission, any more than the company has the right to decide not to pay them. They resent any lazy and deceptive co-workers they may have, who take the same pay but don't give the same work, especially since the honest workers usually take up the slack and the dishonest ones claim credit for work they didn't do.
I've had co-workers I would have been glad to see fired. It is an embarassment to be in a department considered a joke by the rest of the company because only a few people do any work.
Don't forget that the "pointy haired bosses" are usually employees too, and potentially subject to the same monitoring. Many a Dilberted employee would love to see his boss get caught by one of the higher-ups, even more so than than he'd like to see a lazy co-worker he's been carrying get the same.
This is no different from a construction foreman watching his workers to make sure they are actually working. If they didn't do so, then one man might be screwing around or doing a half-assed job and all the boss would know is that his group isn't working as productively as possible. Just because information workers are given cubicles to reduce distractions doesn't mean that they have some right to privacy so their boss can't see them screw around on the job.
Put simply, employees don't have a right to privacy on the job, and they don't have any right to expect to be trusted purely by virtue of being employees. Employers have a right to know that their employeers are working and trust has to be earned.
The truth is, the honest employees have nothing to fear. They expect their bosses to check that they are working and don't care, or even appreciate the attention, the evidence that the boss does care about and value what they are doing. They also know that a competent boss won't interfere with a certain amount of networking and an occasional idle moment as they gather their thoughts. At any rate, nobody you want to work for is going to fire you for catching you being lazy once, they're just going to talk to you about it and straighten you out about what the boundaries are. It is the liars and cheats who see a system of constant fear growing from this.
What I wonder about is the psychology of people who think "cubicle drones" and "pointy haired bosses" are the norm, and employers and employees are natural enemies who try to screw each other as much as possible. What a vicious mindset! It seems to me that incompetent bosses and deceitful workers find each other, while people who do real work move on to where they are recognized an appreciated. Many people have moved through these miserable places because they are always hiring replacements, but only the ones who would choose a place where they can sneak around and get paid for doing little or no work actually stay there. We make our own Hell, and it can only be a Purgatory for those who don't deserve it.
It doesn't look very impressive. From the sample stories, it appears to be capable of nothing more than very short, simple stories with a very limited range.
Unless they reveal the internals, or release several hundred stories generated by the program with no human selection or input, there is no reason to believe they have accomplished anything new or interesting. It appears to me that this is a story compiler, not a story writer. The "programmers" wrote the facts of the story and the computer compiled it into a linear story of a fixed format written in English: -detailed view of betrayed -establishment of trust -opportunity for betrayal -initiation of betrayal event (but not the complex details of the confrontation that would ensue) -short view of betrayer afterwards
There may be an ad-libbing function too that generates variations from combining random selections from lists, but this can hardly be called AI.
The sample stories show no motivation of any sort. They are nonsense stories. There is no character more easy to write about than a madman, because his actions don't need to be logical.
The exception is the self-betrayal story, which displays a very simple motivation (if that's even the right word): the betrayer/betrayed hates what he has to do and freezes in the middle of it. With such a small sample, there's no reason to assume anything but that the program can produce no other motivation.
BTW, does anyone doubt that the AOL community can produce lifeless prose indistinguishable from that which a program can create? I've taken a few minutes to identify bots in chats before, but only because I've had equally lame conversations with people who have nothing worth saying, are often distracted because they're doing five other things with their computer at the same time, commonly only want to talk about one very specific thing, and sometimes don't know English very well. Any humans can seem like a bot with sufficient limitations on the interaction.
In summary, it looks like this costs a lot more effort than it pays back. It takes immense human effort to produce short stories of very limited range in an apparently fixed format. The creativity displayed here is human, and a human using this tool could not compete with a professional author spending the same effort. While it might be able to produce hundreds of stories from a single input, nobody would want to read them all because they would all be the same story underneath.
Actual working programmers have relatively rare opportunities to apply such knowledge. Most of the hard but tidy problems are Somebody Else's problems, and neatly tucked away behind some interface which has to be learned and used.
The problems most real programmers face are trivial, but extremely numerous. They glue this bit to that, make an interface that the customer can live with, add this little feature, find that 3-year-old typo that ruins the app, etc. The problems are mostly in understanding what has to be done and learning the interfaces to the parts it affects.
As for unsolvable problems, my experience is that these are academic hair-splitting. Like that old saw: "It is impossible to create a program which detects infinite loops." This is only mathematically true, not practically relevant. One could trivially write a program which expresses the conditions under which each loop will be infinite, and non-trivially sort these into always true, sometimes true, maybe true, and never true. Furthermore, it could deduce more abstract conditions for the "sometimes" and "maybe" cases and sometimes reduce them to "always" or "never". Ultimately, it could warn the programmer that the program will never terminate no matter what the inputs (a clear and obvious bug), or in many cases it could give conditions which the input must meet for the program to terminate (and, of course, point out those areas of the program which it can't understand as potential trouble spots, and hand this information over to the debugger). It would not be theoretically perfect, but it could be extremely useful, and it might even be possible to write every useful program in such a way that the loop-checker could verify it.
There's a big difference between a problem being mathematically impossible to correctly answer in all conceivable situations with a yes or no, and a problem being impossible to answer correctly in most practical cases and to tell a human to deal with the rest.
In other words, special cases are the stuff of the real world, with the need for general solutions few and generally encapsulated into libraries.
Most working programmers work with small data sets, and when they don't, they are usually accessing a database. They don't care about "for sufficient values of N" because for sufficient values of N their programs give up and print an error message (or just crash).
Don't get me wrong, I have the available volumes of TAoCP in the latest editions and have read them (not that I remember a great deal of detailed information from them, I still look through them and other books when I want a hashing function or a pseudo-random number generator). Being a games programmer, I am very concerned with efficiency so I have a great many opportunities to apply my knowledge of algorithms and data structures; often to intractable problems (fortunately, for games you can often get away with just making it look like you've solved the problem;) ). It's just that most programmers I've met and worked with seldom have any need to do anything themselves that is more complicated than looping through a list.
Most programmers can't pick up a the skills and habits of writing effectively and efficiently in a new language in a few days either. More importantly, they can't pick up a new library in a few days. What distinguishes two programmers in terms of usefulness is rarely "how algorithmic one is," but one's ability to learn new interfaces quickly, to write thousands of lines of clean, readable code and to spot common errors quickly. Even more important is that intangible ability to just make it work, to dive into that horrible tangle of a million lines of poorly written code and come back up with a new feature or a fixed bug without bringing the system down. That is the real complexity working programmers deal with. Skill with algorithms is trivial next to this ability to cope.
In other words, software engineers don't need to be computer scientists (though it can help).
Atrophy is generally linked to lack of use, and I've heard many times (and seen a few supporting examples) that your mind stays sharp as long as you keep using it, especially for learning. I've also heard that the brain contains stem cells, and can actually grow new neurons if it needs them.
...or perhaps this is more accurately called "splitting hairs." Ah well, an exercise in pedantry by any other name...
I just felt obliged to point out that while mtDNA may mutate faster, it is generally very nearly identical to the female parent, whereas nuclear DNA differs more from the parent because it is mixed half-and-half with that of the male parent. It's obviously not mutation, but it might explain where the idea came from.
Also, favorable mutations are propagated more quickly in nuclear DNA due to the advantages of sexual reproduction. If one defines mutation rate as changes in the genome over time, it might change the answer.
And finally, I have a question: is this higher mutation rate per nucleotide, per molecule, or a per organism? Nuclear DNA may be more stable, but there are a lot more potentially mutated nucleotides in a set of human chromosomes than there are in a mitochondrion.
Well, since there's never any secure connection in which to establish a secret key, it has to be a public key system. A 40-bit public key system. Not exactly my idea of strong encryption.
Security through obscurity means hiding the details of your encryption, not preventing access to the data. You always make a system less secure by making it easier to access the communication channel. To crack an isolated cable-based LAN, you need to connect a cable somehow; if there is any sort of security effort, this is a non-trivial obstacle. To crack a radio LAN, you only need to get within connection range, or maybe just use a directional antenna (assuming it's not in a shielded building).
Even if I had encryption that every expert assured me could not be cracked for the next thousand years, I'd still prefer not to broadcast the encrypted data. Much less if I am not bothering with encryption.
Geez, next people will be saying that having secret passwords or not broadcasting the private key of public key cryptograpy is "security through obscurity." Something needs to be secret.
Ahh, Apple, we can always trust you to make life easier for all of us. Now, thanks to AirPort, that includes those of us who want to steal secrets.
Call me paranoid, but I like my confidential data to stay tucked away inside of wires, not broadcast to anyone who is listening.
Not this is really a much bigger security threat. I mean, people have been aiming parabolic antennas at monitors to see what's on the screen practically since CRTs were invented. OTOH, you can't crack a CRT radio signature and ask it to dump you the data on the hard drives.
I still don't see the big fuss about connecting a few wires, though. If they can make a good networking system that works over the airwaves, they should be (and undoubtedly are) able to make a much better, cheaper one that works over cheap co-ax that's as easy to hook up as your VCR.
BTW, there's already stuff like this for PCs. Maybe not anything this good and cheap on the market, but if history is any indicator, better and cheaper things will be out soon. I seem to remember hearing about a set of cordless network peripherals that just plug into a USB port and go.
(sorry for the aimless ramble, my brain's a little fuzzy today)
Don't be ridiculous, of course any Joe Schmoe can contribute a random "update" to War and Peace. I don't believe anyone would want the "updated" copy, but you never know.
Whatever happened to public domain software? Unlike other kinds of "free" software, it doesn't place any claim on the work of others, whereas the GPL automatically grabs all the rights to your work for the FSF (remember that they retain the right to issue new versions of the GPL). Free software, eh? Free to dump your work into it and never get anything back is more like it.
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I don't know why this sort of thing hasn't been commonly done for years. It's only about the first thing everybody thinks of when they hear about pushing atoms around with a microscope tip.
Call me when somebody makes lego molecules and a tool for the microscope tip that lets you pick them up and snap them together.
Possibly true, depending on your definition of "simulation," but irrelevant. Extension of the same logic would apply to the interaction between the body and the brain, so you could say "You aren't really feeling the cup in your hand, just receiving data from nerves." The probe is in some ways an extension of the human using it, and the data it provides is no more or less inherently misleading than any natural human sense.
It is certainly not a simulation in a form that causes people to confuse theory and reality. The experimenters certainly understand that the force is amplified and probably inaccurate in other ways, but they can still use the feedback to improve their interactions with the specimen.
BTW, you are really stretching the definition of "simulation." Is a news video on TV a simulation? Your view through a camcorder? If you look through sunglasses, is that view a simulation? Generally, a simulation is a model created from a theory, not a direct representation of real data, and especially not an interaction with real matter (even if indirectly perceived).
This isn't a simulation. The force feedback is proportional to the force measurement at the tip of the microscope. The virus really does push back at the probe with X lbs of force (where X=0.00000...? ).
The visual might be misleading, but they really are feeling viruses squish under the probe. This isn't a matter of confusing theory with reality, this is simply an amplified representation of a physical measurement: the force exerted by/on the probe.
Sorry, couldn' resist. ^_^
Don't be ridiculous. We've got tonnes of guns in every community. If I decided to go on a murderous rampage with a shotgun, I could go upstairs and get a semi-auto and a jacket with big pockets for holding the boxes of shells. I could also take out a nice 30-06 that would make a good sniper's weapon, as well as the perfect deer rifle. With an extra 20 minute's work I could have a sawed-off shotgun: the ideal hold-up weapon. Just last week I practiced my marksmanship with a .22 shooting a golfball at 30 meters (with about an 80% hit rate; I'm a bit rusty).
This is normal for one of the many hunters in this country. Any of us can buy as many guns as we like and have plenty of practice in how to use them. We don't go around robbing and shooting people because it would be stupid, as well as evil, to do so. It's a tiny fraction of citizens that commit violent crime, and they generally don't bother with guns. Knives are a more popular murder and mugging weapon than guns, probably because a knife doesn't get you shot "just in case."
We have less violent crime in the States, but it's not for lack of guns. It's a societal thing. We don't have the same level of class and racial conflict, for one thing. I think violent crime is more likely in warmer climates, too. People wander around on foot alone more in nice weather.
Guns also probably serve some role in keeping down crime in rural areas. Practically every farmer has guns, and usually close at hand. They need them to exterminate vermin and keep predators properly afraid of humans. This serves as a natural deterrent to crime.
This isn't a good comparison to be making between MS stuff and Linux from a user's viewpoint. Linux-based software compared to MS-based software isn't like a glass of lemonade compared to a full, if poorly prepared, menu.
OTOH, if the restaurant is under inspection by the health department...
Nobody knows everything about every possible situation. If something unprecedented goes wrong Red Hat isn't going to be able to snap their fingers and fix it.
The online community is far more useful than any isolated professional support, and you only need a computer staff clued-in enough to access it.
Why does everyone keep saying that they're going to turn a profit eventually?
Their business model is unsustainable. They sell support, and at a flat-rate fee that doesn't cover the cost of support for those who use it. The only way they could turn a profit is to have the vast majority of people who buy their product need little or no support. Sooner or later people are going to figure out that it's stupid to buy the retail package just because they might want the support at some point in the future. After all, they can try to install it for free and then pay for the support only if they need it.
The revenues they have now are a mix of Linux-boosters who are giving charity and ignorant people who don't understand that the software is free.
They will never sustain big corporate clients, because an in-house Linux expert is cheaper and more useful.
Red Hat is never going to turn a profit, unless it becomes a fashionable charity. Yet another high-profile, high-price stock with nothing behind it.
...and assuming that nobody changes the topic (which they should) or includes half of the message they are replying to (which they shouldn't).
A good mail reader can help, but it's just not as good as an inherently threaded system.
Exactly what made them think using web pages and mailing lists would be better than a correspondence course?
Plain mailing lists are practically useless for anything but announcements. Some sort of threaded system is needed if you are to sort through all the garbage to what you are actually interested in.
In my experience, a good set of course notes (or FAQs or HOW-TOs) is worth infinitely more than the lectures (which the mass chats are analogous to). Regular private chat program use or, preferably, face-to-face contact is needed by all but the most self-reliant students. One of the biggest advantages of a university setting is that the students all study together and teach each other, filling in the little gaps in each others' understanding.
Of course, this could just be a case of a teacher's lousy skill shining through.
If Tim Berners-Lee had tried to get rich (or even make a small profit) from the WWW, it never would have made it. Not only would it have been a failure, but something else would have been perfectly happy to take it's place and he would have lost out entirely in his small potential customer base to more elaborate hypertext systems. He would have just wasted time, effort, and money trying to sell it and I'm sure he knows it perfectly well.
No wonder he gets annoyed when people keep bugging him about why he didn't cash in.
What is the WWW that he created? Just HTTP and HTML (and, I suppose, URLs). HTTP was never entirely necessary, the browser could log into FTP servers and get the file in the address or whatever, but at any rate HTTP is just the obvious modifications to make transparent linking simple. HTML is okay, but it's not really unusually well suited to the job. Any reasonably complete document format with hyperlinks hacked in would have done the job.
Realistically, he might have brought the WWW along a year quicker than it would have shown up on its own. We might have been using plaintext in an FTP client with a text reader modified to recognize FTP addresses with a path appended (IMHO, we might have been better off if the idea of hidden "links" was never invented and you could always see the address you were going to). We also might have had something like Curl as the basis of the WWW, and not have to be messing around with Javascript and Java and XML and all that other junk.
Hypertext had been around for a while before the WWW, as had the internet. Somebody was going to put them together sooner or later, and it was inevitable that it would take off like a rocket. The WWW that Tim Berners-Lee created isn't so much a particularly good implementation, just the first free one.
An employer is not a ruler. If you don't like your employer's policies you can go work somewhere else, unless you're incompetent, in which case you don't deserve the job anyway.
That an employer monitors his employees actions does not make it a very authoritarian and controlled atmosphere. What he might do with the information could make it so. If he uses it to weed out the slackers and incompetents, I say more power to him, he does his honest employees a favour. If he uses it to harass productive workers, he's obviously an authoratarian jackass and I would choose to seek other employment. The information has valid uses and there's nothing inherently wrong with gathering it.
In any non-desk job it is expected that the boss will watch you work sometimes, or even most of the time. Why should it be different for computer workers?
Incidentally, I run my own business (I don't have any employees). I enjoy the freedom, and I hope I'll eventually make more than I would have by working for somebody else. I do have to work a lot harder though; my days had ends when I was a corporate employee. Regular paychecks were nice too. It's not for everyone.
As for requiring people to punch in at 8AM, there are clear benefits to having everybody at work at the same time, not to mention the way a professional atmosphere can boost productivity. Is it stupid and counterproductive? Maybe, I don't know all the details, I can see how it could be in a few cases (with really dedicated workers, and/or work that is ideally suited to flex-time). For all I know, they could have had a major problem with people traipsing in at 11AM and leaving at 5PM and taking pay for a full 8 hour day. Anyone who didn't like it could find other work, though, or threaten to do so unless the policy is changed. But they didn't, did they? They grumbled among each other and maybe a few played childish tricks to get back at the management and maybe some used it as an excuse to screw around and do less work, all the while telling managers that they were okay with it. Which sounds more like weasels?
I'd give you good odds for a wager that if the management announced a new policy that everybody had to wear kilts to work, the whiners would grumble among themselves again but comply while the people you call "weasels" would complain to the management and quit if the policy was not cancelled.
I'd also be willing to bet that the "weasels" get a good deal more work done, while the grumblers think it's unreasonable to be forced to be at work since they don't really do anything there anyway. It's similar to the way that stupid children often call the brightest ones "teacher's pets" because they don't want to admit to themselves that the fundamental difference is ability, not attitude (though there are also cases where the epithet is accurate).
If people worth hiring refuse to accept unreasonable policies, then businesses will not have them. As I said, you make your own Hell.
It's like that everywhere. A profession is a conspiracy against the layman; when one gets government recognition it just means that the government will wipe out any competition for them. Generally speaking, governments do not reassess the competence or integrity of the professional body even if hundreds of years pass after their initial cartel approval.
Whenever something crooked needs a rubber stamp, you can always find someone who will give it, even though it might mean giving them a big enough bribe for them to skip country and live comfortably when their role becomes evident. In some countries this is not as obvious, because the general population they would screw is rich enough to hire independent auditors and powerful enough to bite back, making it relatively dangerous and unprofitable to cheat.
Incompetents always manage to slip through, too. Certification procedures generally involve more time than anything else. Any of the tests involved can be passed by practically anyone with enough cramming. I remember in Engineering school the way my classmates used to look through old exams until they could be certain that they had already found questions that were nearly identical to the ones on the exam. Being patient, punctual, orderly, and studious can substitute for competence when it comes to meeting requirements for certification.
Never mind that any certification is essentially meaningless once a few years have passed since the subject was evaluated.
I once knew an electrical engineer (yes, certified and employed, and with an engineering degree from a respectable university) who couldn't figure out how to wire up two lights to a switch so they would both go on at the proper brightness when the switch was flipped. Incidentally, she was only a few years out of university, so it's not like this was some 80-year-old who decided he didn't want to be an engineer after all and hadn't looked at a wire in 50 years.
I have heard countless other similar stories. Practically every office has its certified incompetents, and people just route work around them.
(BTW, I'm from Canada)
When you're being paid to do a job, you are expected to do a job. It's a Golden Rule thing. If you were an employer, you'd want to be able to evaluate your employee's work.
Honest workers consider their employer a partner of sorts. They have made a deal to do work in return for pay, and they don't have the right to use company resources (including their paid time) for their personal gain or entertainment, unless the employer gives permission, any more than the company has the right to decide not to pay them. They resent any lazy and deceptive co-workers they may have, who take the same pay but don't give the same work, especially since the honest workers usually take up the slack and the dishonest ones claim credit for work they didn't do.
I've had co-workers I would have been glad to see fired. It is an embarassment to be in a department considered a joke by the rest of the company because only a few people do any work.
Don't forget that the "pointy haired bosses" are usually employees too, and potentially subject to the same monitoring. Many a Dilberted employee would love to see his boss get caught by one of the higher-ups, even more so than than he'd like to see a lazy co-worker he's been carrying get the same.
This is no different from a construction foreman watching his workers to make sure they are actually working. If they didn't do so, then one man might be screwing around or doing a half-assed job and all the boss would know is that his group isn't working as productively as possible. Just because information workers are given cubicles to reduce distractions doesn't mean that they have some right to privacy so their boss can't see them screw around on the job.
Put simply, employees don't have a right to privacy on the job, and they don't have any right to expect to be trusted purely by virtue of being employees. Employers have a right to know that their employeers are working and trust has to be earned.
The truth is, the honest employees have nothing to fear. They expect their bosses to check that they are working and don't care, or even appreciate the attention, the evidence that the boss does care about and value what they are doing. They also know that a competent boss won't interfere with a certain amount of networking and an occasional idle moment as they gather their thoughts. At any rate, nobody you want to work for is going to fire you for catching you being lazy once, they're just going to talk to you about it and straighten you out about what the boundaries are. It is the liars and cheats who see a system of constant fear growing from this.
What I wonder about is the psychology of people who think "cubicle drones" and "pointy haired bosses" are the norm, and employers and employees are natural enemies who try to screw each other as much as possible. What a vicious mindset! It seems to me that incompetent bosses and deceitful workers find each other, while people who do real work move on to where they are recognized an appreciated. Many people have moved through these miserable places because they are always hiring replacements, but only the ones who would choose a place where they can sneak around and get paid for doing little or no work actually stay there. We make our own Hell, and it can only be a Purgatory for those who don't deserve it.
It doesn't look very impressive. From the sample stories, it appears to be capable of nothing more than very short, simple stories with a very limited range.
Unless they reveal the internals, or release several hundred stories generated by the program with no human selection or input, there is no reason to believe they have accomplished anything new or interesting. It appears to me that this is a story compiler, not a story writer. The "programmers" wrote the facts of the story and the computer compiled it into a linear story of a fixed format written in English:
-detailed view of betrayed
-establishment of trust
-opportunity for betrayal
-initiation of betrayal event (but not the complex details of the confrontation that would ensue)
-short view of betrayer afterwards
There may be an ad-libbing function too that generates variations from combining random selections from lists, but this can hardly be called AI.
The sample stories show no motivation of any sort. They are nonsense stories. There is no character more easy to write about than a madman, because his actions don't need to be logical.
The exception is the self-betrayal story, which displays a very simple motivation (if that's even the right word): the betrayer/betrayed hates what he has to do and freezes in the middle of it. With such a small sample, there's no reason to assume anything but that the program can produce no other motivation.
BTW, does anyone doubt that the AOL community can produce lifeless prose indistinguishable from that which a program can create? I've taken a few minutes to identify bots in chats before, but only because I've had equally lame conversations with people who have nothing worth saying, are often distracted because they're doing five other things with their computer at the same time, commonly only want to talk about one very specific thing, and sometimes don't know English very well. Any humans can seem like a bot with sufficient limitations on the interaction.
In summary, it looks like this costs a lot more effort than it pays back. It takes immense human effort to produce short stories of very limited range in an apparently fixed format. The creativity displayed here is human, and a human using this tool could not compete with a professional author spending the same effort. While it might be able to produce hundreds of stories from a single input, nobody would want to read them all because they would all be the same story underneath.
Actual working programmers have relatively rare opportunities to apply such knowledge. Most of the hard but tidy problems are Somebody Else's problems, and neatly tucked away behind some interface which has to be learned and used.
;) ). It's just that most programmers I've met and worked with seldom have any need to do anything themselves that is more complicated than looping through a list.
The problems most real programmers face are trivial, but extremely numerous. They glue this bit to that, make an interface that the customer can live with, add this little feature, find that 3-year-old typo that ruins the app, etc. The problems are mostly in understanding what has to be done and learning the interfaces to the parts it affects.
As for unsolvable problems, my experience is that these are academic hair-splitting. Like that old saw: "It is impossible to create a program which detects infinite loops." This is only mathematically true, not practically relevant. One could trivially write a program which expresses the conditions under which each loop will be infinite, and non-trivially sort these into always true, sometimes true, maybe true, and never true. Furthermore, it could deduce more abstract conditions for the "sometimes" and "maybe" cases and sometimes reduce them to "always" or "never". Ultimately, it could warn the programmer that the program will never terminate no matter what the inputs (a clear and obvious bug), or in many cases it could give conditions which the input must meet for the program to terminate (and, of course, point out those areas of the program which it can't understand as potential trouble spots, and hand this information over to the debugger). It would not be theoretically perfect, but it could be extremely useful, and it might even be possible to write every useful program in such a way that the loop-checker could verify it.
There's a big difference between a problem being mathematically impossible to correctly answer in all conceivable situations with a yes or no, and a problem being impossible to answer correctly in most practical cases and to tell a human to deal with the rest.
In other words, special cases are the stuff of the real world, with the need for general solutions few and generally encapsulated into libraries.
Most working programmers work with small data sets, and when they don't, they are usually accessing a database. They don't care about "for sufficient values of N" because for sufficient values of N their programs give up and print an error message (or just crash).
Don't get me wrong, I have the available volumes of TAoCP in the latest editions and have read them (not that I remember a great deal of detailed information from them, I still look through them and other books when I want a hashing function or a pseudo-random number generator). Being a games programmer, I am very concerned with efficiency so I have a great many opportunities to apply my knowledge of algorithms and data structures; often to intractable problems (fortunately, for games you can often get away with just making it look like you've solved the problem
Most programmers can't pick up a the skills and habits of writing effectively and efficiently in a new language in a few days either. More importantly, they can't pick up a new library in a few days. What distinguishes two programmers in terms of usefulness is rarely "how algorithmic one is," but one's ability to learn new interfaces quickly, to write thousands of lines of clean, readable code and to spot common errors quickly. Even more important is that intangible ability to just make it work, to dive into that horrible tangle of a million lines of poorly written code and come back up with a new feature or a fixed bug without bringing the system down. That is the real complexity working programmers deal with. Skill with algorithms is trivial next to this ability to cope.
In other words, software engineers don't need to be computer scientists (though it can help).
Use it or lose it.
Atrophy is generally linked to lack of use, and I've heard many times (and seen a few supporting examples) that your mind stays sharp as long as you keep using it, especially for learning. I've also heard that the brain contains stem cells, and can actually grow new neurons if it needs them.
Makes your wonder...
...or perhaps this is more accurately called "splitting hairs." Ah well, an exercise in pedantry by any other name...
I just felt obliged to point out that while mtDNA may mutate faster, it is generally very nearly identical to the female parent, whereas nuclear DNA differs more from the parent because it is mixed half-and-half with that of the male parent. It's obviously not mutation, but it might explain where the idea came from.
Also, favorable mutations are propagated more quickly in nuclear DNA due to the advantages of sexual reproduction. If one defines mutation rate as changes in the genome over time, it might change the answer.
And finally, I have a question: is this higher mutation rate per nucleotide, per molecule, or a per organism? Nuclear DNA may be more stable, but there are a lot more potentially mutated nucleotides in a set of human chromosomes than there are in a mitochondrion.
Sorry, just couldn't resist.
Anyone else remember that demented little thread?
Well, since there's never any secure connection in which to establish a secret key, it has to be a public key system. A 40-bit public key system. Not exactly my idea of strong encryption.
I'm aware of AirPort's built-in encryption; I've been comparing it only to a theoretical wired system with the same security features.
Security through obscurity means hiding the details of your encryption, not preventing access to the data. You always make a system less secure by making it easier to access the communication channel. To crack an isolated cable-based LAN, you need to connect a cable somehow; if there is any sort of security effort, this is a non-trivial obstacle. To crack a radio LAN, you only need to get within connection range, or maybe just use a directional antenna (assuming it's not in a shielded building).
Even if I had encryption that every expert assured me could not be cracked for the next thousand years, I'd still prefer not to broadcast the encrypted data. Much less if I am not bothering with encryption.
Geez, next people will be saying that having secret passwords or not broadcasting the private key of public key cryptograpy is "security through obscurity." Something needs to be secret.
Ahh, Apple, we can always trust you to make life easier for all of us. Now, thanks to AirPort, that includes those of us who want to steal secrets.
Call me paranoid, but I like my confidential data to stay tucked away inside of wires, not broadcast to anyone who is listening.
Not this is really a much bigger security threat. I mean, people have been aiming parabolic antennas at monitors to see what's on the screen practically since CRTs were invented. OTOH, you can't crack a CRT radio signature and ask it to dump you the data on the hard drives.
I still don't see the big fuss about connecting a few wires, though. If they can make a good networking system that works over the airwaves, they should be (and undoubtedly are) able to make a much better, cheaper one that works over cheap co-ax that's as easy to hook up as your VCR.
BTW, there's already stuff like this for PCs. Maybe not anything this good and cheap on the market, but if history is any indicator, better and cheaper things will be out soon. I seem to remember hearing about a set of cordless network peripherals that just plug into a USB port and go.
(sorry for the aimless ramble, my brain's a little fuzzy today)
Don't be ridiculous, of course any Joe Schmoe can contribute a random "update" to War and Peace. I don't believe anyone would want the "updated" copy, but you never know.
Whatever happened to public domain software? Unlike other kinds of "free" software, it doesn't place any claim on the work of others, whereas the GPL automatically grabs all the rights to your work for the FSF (remember that they retain the right to issue new versions of the GPL). Free software, eh? Free to dump your work into it and never get anything back is more like it.