. If we do start living in a work where AI's are creating things that we don't understand, but use anyway, then everyone should be concerned.
That certainly would be scary. But that's not the case here. Researchers certainly understand the algorithm; they just don't understand why it improves TCP performance so much. There is a huge difference.
A lot of math is like that (we understand something to be true, but can't prove why). However, I'm not concerned that those algorithms are going to jump of the page and throttle all of humanity in it's sleep.
Posting to undo moderation.....Sorry...hit "Redundant", meant to hit "Insightful".
Someone mod up please! at $350, I very well may have bought a Surface when it was released.
But now it's a considerably older processor, still has few apps, and the "ooh, new shiny" factor has worn off, so it's unlikely to have a huge following.
+1 Funny, and anybody who doesn't get the reference should be drummed off the site.
Because we should all have exactly the same tastes in literature and/or television.
How wonderfully inclusive of you!
P.S. No, I didn't get the reference. My brain vaguely recalls a Sherlock Holmes reference (father? brother?), but I've only read a few of the stories....
How does this in any way matter? even if the password _were_ encrypted, it's reverseable encryption -- it _has_ to be. So they could just decrypt it, anyway.
Wrong. It could be encrypted with a key that only the user knew. With proper key choices Google would have no way of decrypting
I know some people like to believe that if Google, the NSA, the Chinese or some other group really really wanted to, they could decrypt any encrypted information, even without the password.
This is false. It is still infeasible for anyone to crack Triple DES info encrypted with a reasonable choice of keys.
I do not want your new dropbox I will not try with FireFox I will not have it in my house I will not click it with my mouse I do not want it on the train I cannot use it on the plane My data is not here or there My data could be anywhere! My data is my own and so I do not want this, CEO.
Really?!? Animals are getting married now? Who performs that ceremony?
And now, unless you follow the deviation of restricting yourself to just one partner,
No...you can have as many sexual partners as you can handle. Society has specifically restricted the legal concept of marriage partially to promote familial bonds, and partially due to historical customs.
If there were a significant number of people fighting for polygamous marriages (as there are for gay marriage), then I'd be all for it. As it is, the specific fact that there is very little interest in polygamous relationships indicates that society does not currently consider these types of relationships beneficial or normal, regardless of history.
You call the scheme of picking just one alternate sexuality scheme, promoting it above everything else, and banning the rest, including fully natural behaviour -- "equal"?
You should really read the parent post. His point was:
Yeah, I think you cross a line when you call for the violent overthrow of the government for the crime of treating people equally.....I wasn't aware that Card had done that or advocated to criminalize/keep criminalized homosexual behaviour
Yes, Card had said some asshat words regarding gay marriage. He has the right to do so. He never advocated overthrowing the government for it. He never advocated criminalizing homosexual behavior. He said some words.
Fiscally punishing someone due to their opinion is stupid. It discourages free speech, discourages open communication, and discourages the expression of new ideas. Unfortunately, with free speech and open communication you sometimes end up with idiots like Card spouting off crap. The best thing to do is ignore them.
Kinda explains why "Big Picture" is such an unholy mess. I tried using this as a replacement for my XBox. I really did.
But every single game (including Valve one's) seemed to have a different mechanism for configuring the controller. Sometimes it was in game, sometimes it was by editting.properties files. Sometimes, I couldn't get the controller to work at all, despite steam indicating that the game had controller support.
Even in the Big Picture interface, the menu's were messy and non-intuitive. And even their, sometimes the controller would not function and I'd have to reach for my keyboard / trackpad.
The annoying thing is that when it worked, it worked well. But as it is, I have very low expectations for the steam box.
Threads are evil When I first saw the link to this paper on SQLLite's FAQ, I though "what a silly statement, threads aren't inherently evil...people just don't know how to code them properly".
Then I read the paper.
I'm getting more and more convinced that languages need a new construct for writing parallel code. Threads are inherently non-deterministic, which is really the antithesis of computer programming.
I've heard a lot about outsourcing but from my personal experience outsourcing in real life is pretty much akin to the $5 hair cut.
Funny, my experience has been more with the $300 salon that takes 3 hours to do the job, and still screws up.
The outsourcing firms I've worked with have typically been the larger three-acronym types, working for clients who have become so terrified over IS and IT solutions that they outsource the whole thing to a big, well known firm and pay a pretty penny doing so.
I've found the technical people at these firms are often either (a) right out of school, and just earning their stripes until they can find a decent job. (b) new immigrants, and just working their until they can find a decent job (c) outsourced entirely, with all the disadvantages of communication and time zones (d) terrible at what they do, and just hiding out
I've seen a few good people, but the firms always seem to add a bureaucratic mess of processes that do nothing but slow down the projects and increase the billable hours for the outsourcer.
And what do these companies offer to command such high rates? Better salespeople.
I'm convinced that many outsourcing firms spend far more time and money hiring and vetting salespeople and PM's than they do on technical resources.
They one thing they are fantastic at is convincing upper management that projects: (a) will take longer than expected (b) will be more complicated than expected (c) need more resources than expected (d) fail due to circumstances entirely outside their control
True, but ask consumers what they think of any operating system: At best they are neutral about it.
This is the whole problem with linux on the desktop. Geeks expect people to want to us a computer, and to enjoy the sheer thrill of having that amount of technology under their control.
Regular users look at a computer as a necessary evil, with about as much control as they'd have riding an elephant. They don't care about the tech, they care about the result.
I believe as far as most customers are concerned, there are no good operating systems...there are just ones they are more familiar with and ones they are less familiar with.
It will be interesting though. The office, windows, and server product divisions really could be run by a magic 8-ball without much impact. Ballmer has shown little ability to get Microsoft to innovate successfully (windows phone, Office 365)...so it will be interesting to see what he does with a very consumer oriented product like the XBox.
True...I was more ranting in agreement with the original comment of "Stop tripling the size of your code for use-cases that no one has asked for, people!" (though perhaps I should have responded to that post...)
Yes, sometimes there definitely are corner-cases that require complexity in code. My issue is that too often I find that programmers attempt to "program themselves out of a corner" when they come to these corner cases, rather than sitting down with the customer, explaining the issue, and understanding the solution prior to coding. This is especially annoying in agile projects where the customer has to invest significant amounts of time in the project in part to prevent this sort of thing from happening.
Yeah, Version 2 is a bitch. It's also why I often think maintenance programmers have a much harder (and in some ways more interesting) job than original developers of systems, even though (in my experience) it tends to be the "rock stars" who get the new development projects.
I really don't understand Dobb's point. He seems to be arguing that agile developers with an "obsessive reverence for simplicity" insist that code be made simpler than it could possibly be written. I've never found that to be the case. Obviously if you are dealing with a complex problem domain, it's gonna have complicated code. However, I have frequently seen the case when code was more complex than it needed to be due to feature creep / gold plating / poor communication with the customer / bad coding skills / poor understanding of the language or tools / etc.
He seems to argue the opposite....that most complaints of complexity are around code that needs to be complex. I dunno...different experiences possibly....
You are missing the fact that energy is measured in Watt-hours, not watts. You wikipedia reference indicated that in 2008 the world consumed a total of 143petawatt-hours of energy over the entire year.
To determine how much of the Sahara needs to be covered by panels to produce this amount of energy, you need to take into account how much sunlight the Sahara receives in an entire year. Based on this paper, it is approximately 3200 hours on the outside margins.
Correct calculation: 143e15watt-hours / ( 400 W/m^2 * 3200 hours of sunlight in the Sahara per year) * 1km^2/1000000m^2 = 111,718km^2
Which is approximately 1.2% of the Sahara desert.
I suspect the 2% number comes from the fact that a 40% efficient solar panel isn't particularly viable, and on average the Sahara receives significantly more that 3200 hours of sunlight.
"girlintraining didn't bother to RTFS, never mind RTFA" -- GoodCode
Binstock addresses many of your "arguments" (if random proverbs by various authors, taken completely out of context can be called arguments) in the summary, never mind the article...
Presumably you (or someone like you) are being paid to hash out all the hidden requirements and assumptions to achieve the customer-stated requirements.
Yes, but this should be done prior to code writing.
Far too often I've seen extremely complicated code designed to handle "what-if" scenarios that never happen.
i.e. Developer: "I wrote that configuration module in case they ever need to change the parameters of X"
Me: "Did you ask if X would ever need to be reconfigured?"
Developer: "Of course! And the client said that sure, if I could make it configurable, go ahead and do so"
Me: "And did you ask how likely it would be that X would need reconfiguration? Or under what circumstances X would need to be reconfigured? Or what types of 'reconfigurations' they think they would need? We're looking at 2 man-months of code, plus testing, plus implementation time here....was any kind of cost-benefit analysis done to see whether it was worth it to write this?"
he trouble with university education, is that most people who teach there are computer scientists, not software engineers with years of experience in the trenches.
Exactly. And it's why I always encourage programmers to write for readability rather than for terseness or whatever the latest cool tool is. Code is also read many more times that it is written.
I'd much rather see a procedure that takes 10 lines is immediately obvious what it does than an "optimized" 5 line procedure that takes some head scratching to figure out.
People who claim "more lines of code mean more probability of error" are typically very wrong. .
You could actually factor out 3^3, which would give you 1 + 2^3 = 3^2 (1 + 8 = 9), so it would be in the right form. Not sure what point that makes. Just wanted to let you know you were wrong.
Huh? 3^3 (27) is not a common factor of A, B and C for the formula the GP gave (3^3 + 6^3 = 3^5)
The specific point is that just because A, B, and C have a common factor (in this case 3), it does not mean you can use the common factor to simplify the equation.
Because of this fact, Fermat's Last Theorem follows from Beal's conjecture quite nicely.
You take a battery camping? You obviously don't get it. The idea is to get away and go without the modern conveniences. I can think of only a few legitimate reasons to take a battery camping
Well thank you for that enlightened view on how other people can enjoy the same activities as you, with different purposes and/or opinions on how to go about enjoying those activities.
You complain about other people on the internet? You obviously don't get it. The idea of the internet is to encourage the free and open exchange of ideas. I can think of only a few legitimate reasons to complain about others on the internet (harassment, excessively inappropriate behavior, trolling, maybe something else I've missed), but seriously complaining about how someone chooses to go camping? Stop posting.
I hope nobody expects laptops that can be used for multiple days in a row without recharging (with sleep mode enabled between sessions of course) or next-gen smart phones that can go a week without recharging. They will figure out how to use that extra power somewhere, leaving us at around the same runtime as before.
So you're basically saying that if a large segment of the market wants extended battery life, nobody is going to chase after that market? Or are you saying that only a small minority of people want extended battery life?
I want both. I want a low power laptop with an extended battery life to use for surfing, email, etc, that only needs to be plugged in once I week. I also want a honking blisters-on-your-lap power-horse that causes the lights to dim when I plug it in to use for development and gaming. More efficient battery designs will help make both of these possible.
I'm certain there is a market for longer life low-power laptops. One of the things I absolutely love about my eBook is that I rarely need to remember to charge it. Once a month or so I put new books on it, leave it plugged in overnight, and that does it. I refuse to use a tablet for eBooks for that reason alone.
TL;DR: "IMO, the wealthy are spending too much time on things that make them more wealth and not enough time on things that help the poor"
How is this at all a new idea? Other that the obligatory bashing of the VC's, Wall Street and new media, there is nothing remotely interesting or insightful in this entire article.
To summarize the summary: "The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it" - Dr. Horrible
Slashdot Mirror
Oh big deal, it will only take twice as long then! I'm certain if they are willing to wait 20 hours, they are willing to wait 30.
P.S.
Please note that the above post is intended as humor and should not be taken as a serious representation of mathematical reasoning.
That certainly would be scary. But that's not the case here. Researchers certainly understand the algorithm; they just don't understand why it improves TCP performance so much. There is a huge difference.
A lot of math is like that (we understand something to be true, but can't prove why). However, I'm not concerned that those algorithms are going to jump of the page and throttle all of humanity in it's sleep.
Posting to undo moderation.....Sorry...hit "Redundant", meant to hit "Insightful".
Someone mod up please! at $350, I very well may have bought a Surface when it was released.
But now it's a considerably older processor, still has few apps, and the "ooh, new shiny" factor has worn off, so it's unlikely to have a huge following.
Because we should all have exactly the same tastes in literature and/or television.
How wonderfully inclusive of you!
P.S.
No, I didn't get the reference. My brain vaguely recalls a Sherlock Holmes reference (father? brother?), but I've only read a few of the stories....
Wrong. It could be encrypted with a key that only the user knew. With proper key choices Google would have no way of decrypting
I know some people like to believe that if Google, the NSA, the Chinese or some other group really really wanted to, they could decrypt any encrypted information, even without the password.
This is false. It is still infeasible for anyone to crack Triple DES info encrypted with a reasonable choice of keys.
Why, Apple of course!
With apologies to Theodore Geisel:
I do not want your new dropbox
I will not try with FireFox
I will not have it in my house
I will not click it with my mouse
I do not want it on the train
I cannot use it on the plane
My data is not here or there
My data could be anywhere!
My data is my own and so
I do not want this, CEO.
Lex Luthor, is that you?
Really?!? Animals are getting married now? Who performs that ceremony?
No...you can have as many sexual partners as you can handle. Society has specifically restricted the legal concept of marriage partially to promote familial bonds, and partially due to historical customs.
If there were a significant number of people fighting for polygamous marriages (as there are for gay marriage), then I'd be all for it. As it is, the specific fact that there is very little interest in polygamous relationships indicates that society does not currently consider these types of relationships beneficial or normal, regardless of history.
You should really read the parent post. His point was:
Yes, Card had said some asshat words regarding gay marriage. He has the right to do so. He never advocated overthrowing the government for it. He never advocated criminalizing homosexual behavior. He said some words.
Fiscally punishing someone due to their opinion is stupid. It discourages free speech, discourages open communication, and discourages the expression of new ideas. Unfortunately, with free speech and open communication you sometimes end up with idiots like Card spouting off crap. The best thing to do is ignore them.
Pretty good, if short read.
Kinda explains why "Big Picture" is such an unholy mess. I tried using this as a replacement for my XBox. I really did.
But every single game (including Valve one's) seemed to have a different mechanism for configuring the controller. Sometimes it was in game, sometimes it was by editting .properties files. Sometimes, I couldn't get the controller to work at all, despite steam indicating that the game had controller support.
Even in the Big Picture interface, the menu's were messy and non-intuitive. And even their, sometimes the controller would not function and I'd have to reach for my keyboard / trackpad.
The annoying thing is that when it worked, it worked well. But as it is, I have very low expectations for the steam box.
Wow, sarcasm! That's original!
- Dr. Horrible
Threads are evil
When I first saw the link to this paper on SQLLite's FAQ, I though "what a silly statement, threads aren't inherently evil...people just don't know how to code them properly".
Then I read the paper.
I'm getting more and more convinced that languages need a new construct for writing parallel code. Threads are inherently non-deterministic, which is really the antithesis of computer programming.
Funny, my experience has been more with the $300 salon that takes 3 hours to do the job, and still screws up.
The outsourcing firms I've worked with have typically been the larger three-acronym types, working for clients who have become so terrified over IS and IT solutions that they outsource the whole thing to a big, well known firm and pay a pretty penny doing so.
I've found the technical people at these firms are often either
(a) right out of school, and just earning their stripes until they can find a decent job.
(b) new immigrants, and just working their until they can find a decent job
(c) outsourced entirely, with all the disadvantages of communication and time zones
(d) terrible at what they do, and just hiding out
I've seen a few good people, but the firms always seem to add a bureaucratic mess of processes that do nothing but slow down the projects and increase the billable hours for the outsourcer.
And what do these companies offer to command such high rates?
Better salespeople.
I'm convinced that many outsourcing firms spend far more time and money hiring and vetting salespeople and PM's than they do on technical resources.
They one thing they are fantastic at is convincing upper management that projects:
(a) will take longer than expected
(b) will be more complicated than expected
(c) need more resources than expected
(d) fail due to circumstances entirely outside their control
True, but ask consumers what they think of any operating system: At best they are neutral about it.
This is the whole problem with linux on the desktop. Geeks expect people to want to us a computer, and to enjoy the sheer thrill of having that amount of technology under their control.
Regular users look at a computer as a necessary evil, with about as much control as they'd have riding an elephant. They don't care about the tech, they care about the result.
I believe as far as most customers are concerned, there are no good operating systems...there are just ones they are more familiar with and ones they are less familiar with.
It will be interesting though. The office, windows, and server product divisions really could be run by a magic 8-ball without much impact. Ballmer has shown little ability to get Microsoft to innovate successfully (windows phone, Office 365)...so it will be interesting to see what he does with a very consumer oriented product like the XBox.
True...I was more ranting in agreement with the original comment of "Stop tripling the size of your code for use-cases that no one has asked for, people!" (though perhaps I should have responded to that post...)
Yes, sometimes there definitely are corner-cases that require complexity in code. My issue is that too often I find that programmers attempt to "program themselves out of a corner" when they come to these corner cases, rather than sitting down with the customer, explaining the issue, and understanding the solution prior to coding. This is especially annoying in agile projects where the customer has to invest significant amounts of time in the project in part to prevent this sort of thing from happening.
Yeah, Version 2 is a bitch. It's also why I often think maintenance programmers have a much harder (and in some ways more interesting) job than original developers of systems, even though (in my experience) it tends to be the "rock stars" who get the new development projects.
I really don't understand Dobb's point. He seems to be arguing that agile developers with an "obsessive reverence for simplicity" insist that code be made simpler than it could possibly be written. I've never found that to be the case. Obviously if you are dealing with a complex problem domain, it's gonna have complicated code. However, I have frequently seen the case when code was more complex than it needed to be due to feature creep / gold plating / poor communication with the customer / bad coding skills / poor understanding of the language or tools / etc.
He seems to argue the opposite....that most complaints of complexity are around code that needs to be complex. I dunno...different experiences possibly....
TLDR:
- Source data
- Source data
- Source data
- Arithmetic
- Unsourced numbers you pulled out of your ass
- Conclusion that you'd already decided upon prior to starting the post.
Worst...Arithmetic....Ever.
You are missing the fact that energy is measured in Watt-hours, not watts. You wikipedia reference indicated that in 2008 the world consumed a total of 143petawatt-hours of energy over the entire year.
To determine how much of the Sahara needs to be covered by panels to produce this amount of energy, you need to take into account how much sunlight the Sahara receives in an entire year. Based on this paper, it is approximately 3200 hours on the outside margins.
Correct calculation:
143e15watt-hours / ( 400 W/m^2 * 3200 hours of sunlight in the Sahara per year) * 1km^2/1000000m^2 = 111,718km^2
Which is approximately 1.2% of the Sahara desert.
I suspect the 2% number comes from the fact that a 40% efficient solar panel isn't particularly viable, and on average the Sahara receives significantly more that 3200 hours of sunlight.
"girlintraining didn't bother to RTFS, never mind RTFA"
-- GoodCode
Binstock addresses many of your "arguments" (if random proverbs by various authors, taken completely out of context can be called arguments) in the summary, never mind the article...
Yes, but this should be done prior to code writing.
Far too often I've seen extremely complicated code designed to handle "what-if" scenarios that never happen.
i.e.
Developer: "I wrote that configuration module in case they ever need to change the parameters of X"
Me: "Did you ask if X would ever need to be reconfigured?"
Developer: "Of course! And the client said that sure, if I could make it configurable, go ahead and do so"
Me: "And did you ask how likely it would be that X would need reconfiguration? Or under what circumstances X would need to be reconfigured? Or what types of 'reconfigurations' they think they would need? We're looking at 2 man-months of code, plus testing, plus implementation time here....was any kind of cost-benefit analysis done to see whether it was worth it to write this?"
Developer: [blank stare]
From TFS:
Which part of "remote" did you not understand?
Exactly. And it's why I always encourage programmers to write for readability rather than for terseness or whatever the latest cool tool is. Code is also read many more times that it is written.
I'd much rather see a procedure that takes 10 lines is immediately obvious what it does than an "optimized" 5 line procedure that takes some head scratching to figure out.
People who claim "more lines of code mean more probability of error" are typically very wrong. .
Huh? 3^3 (27) is not a common factor of A, B and C for the formula the GP gave (3^3 + 6^3 = 3^5)
The specific point is that just because A, B, and C have a common factor (in this case 3), it does not mean you can use the common factor to simplify the equation.
Because of this fact, Fermat's Last Theorem follows from Beal's conjecture quite nicely.
The GP was not wrong.
Well thank you for that enlightened view on how other people can enjoy the same activities as you, with different purposes and/or opinions on how to go about enjoying those activities.
You complain about other people on the internet? You obviously don't get it. The idea of the internet is to encourage the free and open exchange of ideas. I can think of only a few legitimate reasons to complain about others on the internet (harassment, excessively inappropriate behavior, trolling, maybe something else I've missed), but seriously complaining about how someone chooses to go camping? Stop posting.
So you're basically saying that if a large segment of the market wants extended battery life, nobody is going to chase after that market?
Or are you saying that only a small minority of people want extended battery life?
I want both. I want a low power laptop with an extended battery life to use for surfing, email, etc, that only needs to be plugged in once I week. I also want a honking blisters-on-your-lap power-horse that causes the lights to dim when I plug it in to use for development and gaming. More efficient battery designs will help make both of these possible.
I'm certain there is a market for longer life low-power laptops. One of the things I absolutely love about my eBook is that I rarely need to remember to charge it. Once a month or so I put new books on it, leave it plugged in overnight, and that does it. I refuse to use a tablet for eBooks for that reason alone.
TL;DR:
"IMO, the wealthy are spending too much time on things that make them more wealth and not enough time on things that help the poor"
How is this at all a new idea? Other that the obligatory bashing of the VC's, Wall Street and new media, there is nothing remotely interesting or insightful in this entire article.
To summarize the summary:
"The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it" - Dr. Horrible