When is someone a programmer? I wrote my first programs on a calculator. They were more like macros actually. Was I a programmer? Of course not. Then I wrote my first BASIC program on an Apple ][ of a friend at highschool. Was I a programmer? Not really. Then I saved up all my money and got myself a C64 and wrote programs in BASIC, then 6510 assembly. Was I a programmer? Well, perhaps, but only 15, so what did I know? A couple of years later I bought myself an Amiga 500. Wrote some stuff in 68000 assembly. When studying computer science, I learned a lot of useless program languages, but also C. Wrote lots of programs in C. Then I started a small company, hired an office space where 10Mb ethernet sockets from the wall connected directly to the net for a low fee, built and hosted web sites on a Intel 80486 running Linux. This was 1995. When I got my first job at an internationally operating start-up, I was busy configuring servers running NT, load balancers, firewalls but also did some SQL and coded some Cold Fusion for the company web site. My old trusty 486 served as DNS server. Was I a programmer? Nah, I did not really consider myself one.
The start-up went nowhere and I moved on. I did, and still do, enjoy programming tremendously. I sometimes still do it in my free time as a hobby. So I got a new job and with this job I could program all day. I made long hours that did not feel like long days at all as I was doing some very nice things, or at least that's what I thought. I was making enhancements to core parts of the software, and even got multithreading working for them, something that they were not able to because of compiler bugs, which I also helped finding. I was refactoring their code at high speed, because there was a lot of room for improvement, to say it politely. I often stared with disbelief and some amusement at the nonsensical functional designs handed to me. But worse, I started to clash with their main programmer, who had been there for a long time, and did not like what he saw. Our manager did not extend my contract after a year. He did not like it either. I was using object oriented techniques which they were not used to, it was a "different paradigm" for them, as the manager put it.
This was a disillusion. Programmers at the time were hard to find, and I could not believe that this was happening to me. Was this manager clueless? Probably. Was their main programmer pulling my leg? Perhaps. But I was sure I had done some very valuable things for them and as a reward, I was thrown out. Apparantly, I had been unable to demonstrate my abilities sufficiently. That might have been either my or their shortcoming, but for me that did not matter. I decided to abandon programming, or rather, developing. I felt developing did not receive the respect it deserved. It was often looked down upon by management and being outsourced to India. I decided to become a business analyst.
Life as a business analyst was a walk in the park compared to programming. I could now make designs on a higher level, but with my technical background, also talk to the guys that were going to implement it. I would never hand over a design that the developers would be unable to build. Also, the deadlines where less pressing. In the cycle design-develop-test-release, the time pressure existed mainly in develop and test. The testers would be the ones making extra hours when a release deadline was to be met.
I had been a business analyst for a couple of years at several banks. They have large systems and a high rate of IT staff turnover. Generally at banks, knowledge it sparse, documentation often non-existent, and management not competent on a technical level. They do have enough money though so they just bring in loads of consultants. So being a consultant I benefitted handsomely financially as well. My days as a programmer that got no love were soon forgotten by just looking at my bank account every now and then. I worked happily with the Indian vendor (Infosys) who created just horrible code, but ultimat
Security can easily be improved by the use of a 4 digit pin-code which is to be tattooed to the forehead of the owner and automatically read using OCR.
This seems obvious to me, but bills like this should be formulated in terms of what they actually do, regardless of the technology used.
In this case, the bill should simply state that a warrant is required when someones location is actively monitored within a certain precision for a certain time period.
Same with laws around cookies, which is a topic among lawmakers in some countries. Instead targeting cookies, these laws should address the fact that a user is uniquely identified across sessions and/or websites. Cookies are just one way to achieve this, but there are others which do not even require cookies, such IP number in combination with all sorts of data such as browser agent, os, screen resolution etc. etc. that makes any user pretty much unique even without cookies.
We're not evolving, we're devolving. Before contraception and abortion existed, successful males would reproduce at a much higher rate than now. Morality aside, it is not hard to imagine the successful alpha-male impregnating lots of pretty (read: having good genes) girls and creating much more offspring than the less wanted males.
This is a thing of the past for a couple of generations now. We are living in the genetically unhealthy situation where highly successful males produce only marginally more offspring than regular dudes. It must be feared that for even the maintenance of the quality of our genes requires alpha males to reproduce at a significantly higher rate. Now that this is no longer happening, the quality of our genes will only but degrade and quickly too - in a matter of a couple of hundreds of years we'll see the effects, whatever they will be. Most likely it will start with us getting dumber and more reliant on medical care.
Just use a fiber optic cable to make them wait longer. Or bounce between mirrors in a zigzag - this way light trajectory can be long, but the spatial distance can be short.
This would cause the photon to interact and hence the waveform to collapse.
Without taking a position whether or not global warming is caused by human activities:
- There is a complete industry now that exists by the grace of the belief that GW is man-made and we can do something about it. This is business having an interest in governments and public believing we should reduce CO2 emissions.
- Being a GW denier is silly. However try taking the position that GW is not entirely man-made, or that GW will not be as damaging as to justify billions of investments. You will get attacked almost in the way blasphemists were attacked in the middle ages. You are a non-believer, and you should go along with the "common believe" and "consensus", what we all think. How dare you disagree? But science is not consensus based. One experiment is all it takes to create new insights, models, theories.
I feel frustrated by governments taking GW as an excuse to raise taxes and increase influence on everyones personal life whenever they can. For instance, banning the light bulb - just how stupid is that?
Indeed, and it would be even more interesting to see in how far the randomness of these numbers holds up when tested to extremes. It would be a huge result if these numbers can not be tested to be 100% pure random.
The way patents work almost forces companies to pursuit the aggregation of huge numbers of senseless patents. How else can a company defend itself against companies doing exactly the same and suing the shit out of them? The patent trolls are not the ones to blame - the problem is the legal framework around patents that allows "trolls" to exist in the first place and build a profitable business on it.
The xkcd assumes 44 bits of entropy by using four words, so 11 bits of entropy per word. That means the average frequency of the words in a phrase should be 2^11 = 2048 to achieve a total entropy of 44 bits, which is not an outrageous assumption, IMO.
In the future, page rankings will be mostly crowd-sourced. The +1 button is just the beginning.
The financial stakes of a high ranking are large enough for SEO experts to make search results increasingly meaningless by propelling their irrelevant page high up into the ranks by whatever means they can possibly think of. It is an arms race and I'm sure Google must have a lot of resources devoted to keep this problem under control.
#1. The universe has no edge, no center, i.e., that no matter where in the universe you are, it stretches out in all directions as if you were at the center.
That's it. That's all insight you need to understand the theories. Everything else follows from it.
From #1 follows:
#2. The position of any object in the universe can only be defined in terms of other objects in the universe. For example, the position of the earth is generally defined relative to the position of the sun. "Absolute" positions (i.e., not defined in terms of other objects) do not exist.
#3. Since the position of objects can only be defined in terms of positions of other objects, this automatically also holds true for velocity. The speed of an object can only be defined in terms of speeds of other objects. For example, the speed of the sun in our solar system is (close to) zero (by definition), but generally non-zero relative to other stars. Any non-accelerating object may equally well be viewed as being stationary. There are no "absolute" velocities in the universe, since measuring an absolute velocity would require a stationary object holding a fixed absolute position in space, but we said absolute positions do not exist (#2).
#4. The speed of light traveling through space is constant.
Now imagine a non-relativistic universe. Then, #4 would contradict #3 (and therefore #2 and #1). Since if the speed of light is constant, an observer standing on some rock in space could measure its absolute velocity in the universe by measuring up how fast photons pass it by. If the observer finds that the speed of photons coming from some direction is 99% of c, then the observer would rightfully conclude that his rock was moving at 1% of c in that same direction.
Einstein understood that "position is relative" and "speed of light is constant" were both true. But that means that it must be impossible for an observer to measure his speed relative to the speed of light:
Imagine an observer in a spaceship who wants to establish its absolute speed in the universe. He switches off all engines and measures the speed of light in all directions and finds it to be exactly c. Not knowing the universe is relativistic, he concludes he is exactly stationary. Next, he speeds to 10% of c in some direction, switches off his engines and again measures the speed of c. To his surprise, he again finds the speed of light is c in all directions!
No matter how fast the observer moves (relative to its original speed), he always measures the speed of light to be c in all directions. The observer always sees photons pass him at a speed of c. Even when travelling at 99.9999% of the speed of light relative to a photon source, he still sees these photons passing him by at the speed of c.
The observer establishes the velocity of a photon by is measuring how much time it took the photon to travel from A to B. If the speed of c is constant, and at the same time the observer always measures c regardless of his own velocity, this must mean that clocks and dimensions of his spaceship must vary.
For instance, when moving away from a planet at 99% of c, photons coming from that planet are still being measured to have a speed of c. The time a photon coming from the planet takes to travel some fixed distance is constant regardless of the speed of the spaceship relative to the planet. This means that clocks on board of the spaceship must be moving slower than clocks on that planet, and such that the time the photon takes to travel a fixed distance, is fixed and c for the observer.
The patent system is broken. Lodsys however can not be held accountable for that.
Big companies sueing the snot out of each other with patents: accepted.
Big companies sueing the snot out of smaller companies treading on their lawn: accepted.
Small companies sueing big companies: surely, now we have a problem?
Sure, it's the business model of Lodsys to hoard patents and sue. But the regulatory framework around patents facilitated its business model. Lodsys plays by the rules. The only really significant difference being, this time around it's a small company sueing the big boys and now suddenly there is a problem.
Lodsys nicely shows the brokenness of the patent system. We should be more thankful.
- The machine should be such that it proofs to voter that his vote has been registered correctly.
- The machine should produce a tangible ballot for each vote casted.
- It should be impossible for anyone to find out how someone voted.
The desire of up-to-the-minute results is understandable but should be secondary to the principles above. Yet, I don't think the demands are mutually exclusive.
I can imagine a design where the voter can see his ballot, for instance behind a sheet of glass. The voter votes by pressing a button which causes a physical hole to be punched in the ballot. It should be clear to the voter how he voted from the position of the hole in the ballot. Then, the ballot should be visibly dropped in a sealed box. The voter should not be able to physically access the ballot.
The ballots are machine-countable since the holes were punched in mechanically. More importantly, the ballots can also be recounted manually if required.
I can imagine a setup where for instance every couple of rows has its own wifi-network on its own channel. This way, bandwidth can be increased to levels which enable streaming video to more than just a few passengers simultaneously.
This would require multiple wifi hotspots in the plane, so some wiring is obviously still required.
Yes. The tablet game is about usability, not specs. Usability means long battery life, responsive touch screen, responsive software, a good UI, and tons of good apps. The tablet game is also about image, lifestyle. The product has to be perceived as being cool, so a good design is a must-have, as is marketing that acknowledges the importance of being cool.
Just forget about GB, megapixel, GHz, number of cores, pixels per inch. Although not totally irrelevant, the specs don't make the difference in the tablet arena. Tablets have come into the realm of techno-dummies that don't give a shit about specs. They will ask things like "can I read a book on it", "can I download music", "can I surf the internet". Weird, I know. And whether Flash is supported... believe me, most buyers don't even know what the hell that is, let alone go ask for it.
Google knows that no matter how smart your page rank system is, it will be gamed to the level it becomes unusable. Obviously, the +1 button will also be gamed, but at least it is going to be a bit harder. Expect botnets to take care of this, though.
Clearly, social ranking is going to be more important than algorithmic ranking. Googles pigeons have their best times behind them.
When has Microsoft demonstrated any vision beyond marketing? Microsoft makes profit out of their monopolies (Windows and Office) only. Everything else loses them money. Check out their annual reports if you don't believe me.
Slashdot Mirror
When is someone a programmer? I wrote my first programs on a calculator. They were more like macros actually. Was I a programmer? Of course not. Then I wrote my first BASIC program on an Apple ][ of a friend at highschool. Was I a programmer? Not really. Then I saved up all my money and got myself a C64 and wrote programs in BASIC, then 6510 assembly. Was I a programmer? Well, perhaps, but only 15, so what did I know? A couple of years later I bought myself an Amiga 500. Wrote some stuff in 68000 assembly. When studying computer science, I learned a lot of useless program languages, but also C. Wrote lots of programs in C. Then I started a small company, hired an office space where 10Mb ethernet sockets from the wall connected directly to the net for a low fee, built and hosted web sites on a Intel 80486 running Linux. This was 1995. When I got my first job at an internationally operating start-up, I was busy configuring servers running NT, load balancers, firewalls but also did some SQL and coded some Cold Fusion for the company web site. My old trusty 486 served as DNS server. Was I a programmer? Nah, I did not really consider myself one.
The start-up went nowhere and I moved on. I did, and still do, enjoy programming tremendously. I sometimes still do it in my free time as a hobby. So I got a new job and with this job I could program all day. I made long hours that did not feel like long days at all as I was doing some very nice things, or at least that's what I thought. I was making enhancements to core parts of the software, and even got multithreading working for them, something that they were not able to because of compiler bugs, which I also helped finding. I was refactoring their code at high speed, because there was a lot of room for improvement, to say it politely. I often stared with disbelief and some amusement at the nonsensical functional designs handed to me. But worse, I started to clash with their main programmer, who had been there for a long time, and did not like what he saw. Our manager did not extend my contract after a year. He did not like it either. I was using object oriented techniques which they were not used to, it was a "different paradigm" for them, as the manager put it.
This was a disillusion. Programmers at the time were hard to find, and I could not believe that this was happening to me. Was this manager clueless? Probably. Was their main programmer pulling my leg? Perhaps. But I was sure I had done some very valuable things for them and as a reward, I was thrown out. Apparantly, I had been unable to demonstrate my abilities sufficiently. That might have been either my or their shortcoming, but for me that did not matter. I decided to abandon programming, or rather, developing. I felt developing did not receive the respect it deserved. It was often looked down upon by management and being outsourced to India. I decided to become a business analyst.
Life as a business analyst was a walk in the park compared to programming. I could now make designs on a higher level, but with my technical background, also talk to the guys that were going to implement it. I would never hand over a design that the developers would be unable to build. Also, the deadlines where less pressing. In the cycle design-develop-test-release, the time pressure existed mainly in develop and test. The testers would be the ones making extra hours when a release deadline was to be met.
I had been a business analyst for a couple of years at several banks. They have large systems and a high rate of IT staff turnover. Generally at banks, knowledge it sparse, documentation often non-existent, and management not competent on a technical level. They do have enough money though so they just bring in loads of consultants. So being a consultant I benefitted handsomely financially as well. My days as a programmer that got no love were soon forgotten by just looking at my bank account every now and then. I worked happily with the Indian vendor (Infosys) who created just horrible code, but ultimat
Security can easily be improved by the use of a 4 digit pin-code which is to be tattooed to the forehead of the owner and automatically read using OCR.
This seems obvious to me, but bills like this should be formulated in terms of what they actually do, regardless of the technology used.
In this case, the bill should simply state that a warrant is required when someones location is actively monitored within a certain precision for a certain time period.
Same with laws around cookies, which is a topic among lawmakers in some countries. Instead targeting cookies, these laws should address the fact that a user is uniquely identified across sessions and/or websites. Cookies are just one way to achieve this, but there are others which do not even require cookies, such IP number in combination with all sorts of data such as browser agent, os, screen resolution etc. etc. that makes any user pretty much unique even without cookies.
We're not evolving, we're devolving. Before contraception and abortion existed, successful males would reproduce at a much higher rate than now. Morality aside, it is not hard to imagine the successful alpha-male impregnating lots of pretty (read: having good genes) girls and creating much more offspring than the less wanted males.
This is a thing of the past for a couple of generations now. We are living in the genetically unhealthy situation where highly successful males produce only marginally more offspring than regular dudes. It must be feared that for even the maintenance of the quality of our genes requires alpha males to reproduce at a significantly higher rate. Now that this is no longer happening, the quality of our genes will only but degrade and quickly too - in a matter of a couple of hundreds of years we'll see the effects, whatever they will be. Most likely it will start with us getting dumber and more reliant on medical care.
Just use a fiber optic cable to make them wait longer. Or bounce between mirrors in a zigzag - this way light trajectory can be long, but the spatial distance can be short.
This would cause the photon to interact and hence the waveform to collapse.
But what happens to efficiency when it's freezing and I turn on the heater during my trip?
Without taking a position whether or not global warming is caused by human activities:
- There is a complete industry now that exists by the grace of the belief that GW is man-made and we can do something about it. This is business having an interest in governments and public believing we should reduce CO2 emissions.
- Being a GW denier is silly. However try taking the position that GW is not entirely man-made, or that GW will not be as damaging as to justify billions of investments. You will get attacked almost in the way blasphemists were attacked in the middle ages. You are a non-believer, and you should go along with the "common believe" and "consensus", what we all think. How dare you disagree? But science is not consensus based. One experiment is all it takes to create new insights, models, theories.
I feel frustrated by governments taking GW as an excuse to raise taxes and increase influence on everyones personal life whenever they can. For instance, banning the light bulb - just how stupid is that?
Indeed, and it would be even more interesting to see in how far the randomness of these numbers holds up when tested to extremes. It would be a huge result if these numbers can not be tested to be 100% pure random.
The way patents work almost forces companies to pursuit the aggregation of huge numbers of senseless patents. How else can a company defend itself against companies doing exactly the same and suing the shit out of them? The patent trolls are not the ones to blame - the problem is the legal framework around patents that allows "trolls" to exist in the first place and build a profitable business on it.
The xkcd assumes 44 bits of entropy by using four words, so 11 bits of entropy per word. That means the average frequency of the words in a phrase should be 2^11 = 2048 to achieve a total entropy of 44 bits, which is not an outrageous assumption, IMO.
You're making it sound as if it is a stretch to call SOPA censorship. It is not.
In cases where avoiding tampering is crucial, just log to a write-once filesystem, or, indeed, a printer.
In the future, page rankings will be mostly crowd-sourced. The +1 button is just the beginning.
The financial stakes of a high ranking are large enough for SEO experts to make search results increasingly meaningless by propelling their irrelevant page high up into the ranks by whatever means they can possibly think of. It is an arms race and I'm sure Google must have a lot of resources devoted to keep this problem under control.
For me it was immediately obvious that improving the ranking algorithm was the whole point of the +1 button.
#1. The universe has no edge, no center, i.e., that no matter where in the universe you are, it stretches out in all directions as if you were at the center.
That's it. That's all insight you need to understand the theories. Everything else follows from it.
From #1 follows:
#2. The position of any object in the universe can only be defined in terms of other objects in the universe. For example, the position of the earth is generally defined relative to the position of the sun. "Absolute" positions (i.e., not defined in terms of other objects) do not exist.
#3. Since the position of objects can only be defined in terms of positions of other objects, this automatically also holds true for velocity. The speed of an object can only be defined in terms of speeds of other objects. For example, the speed of the sun in our solar system is (close to) zero (by definition), but generally non-zero relative to other stars. Any non-accelerating object may equally well be viewed as being stationary. There are no "absolute" velocities in the universe, since measuring an absolute velocity would require a stationary object holding a fixed absolute position in space, but we said absolute positions do not exist (#2).
#4. The speed of light traveling through space is constant.
Now imagine a non-relativistic universe. Then, #4 would contradict #3 (and therefore #2 and #1). Since if the speed of light is constant, an observer standing on some rock in space could measure its absolute velocity in the universe by measuring up how fast photons pass it by. If the observer finds that the speed of photons coming from some direction is 99% of c, then the observer would rightfully conclude that his rock was moving at 1% of c in that same direction.
Einstein understood that "position is relative" and "speed of light is constant" were both true. But that means that it must be impossible for an observer to measure his speed relative to the speed of light:
Imagine an observer in a spaceship who wants to establish its absolute speed in the universe. He switches off all engines and measures the speed of light in all directions and finds it to be exactly c. Not knowing the universe is relativistic, he concludes he is exactly stationary. Next, he speeds to 10% of c in some direction, switches off his engines and again measures the speed of c. To his surprise, he again finds the speed of light is c in all directions!
No matter how fast the observer moves (relative to its original speed), he always measures the speed of light to be c in all directions. The observer always sees photons pass him at a speed of c. Even when travelling at 99.9999% of the speed of light relative to a photon source, he still sees these photons passing him by at the speed of c.
The observer establishes the velocity of a photon by is measuring how much time it took the photon to travel from A to B. If the speed of c is constant, and at the same time the observer always measures c regardless of his own velocity, this must mean that clocks and dimensions of his spaceship must vary.
For instance, when moving away from a planet at 99% of c, photons coming from that planet are still being measured to have a speed of c. The time a photon coming from the planet takes to travel some fixed distance is constant regardless of the speed of the spaceship relative to the planet. This means that clocks on board of the spaceship must be moving slower than clocks on that planet, and such that the time the photon takes to travel a fixed distance, is fixed and c for the observer.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_special_relativity
type inference which should save quite a few people from RSI
... and never coded anything beyond a two-dice simulation.
Because surely, the hard work of writing code is in all that typing.
and make refactoring code a bit less obnoxious
Because yeah, refactoring is all about continuously retyping your variables.
I haven't heavily used C++ in years
The patent system is broken. Lodsys however can not be held accountable for that.
Big companies sueing the snot out of each other with patents: accepted.
Big companies sueing the snot out of smaller companies treading on their lawn: accepted.
Small companies sueing big companies: surely, now we have a problem?
Sure, it's the business model of Lodsys to hoard patents and sue. But the regulatory framework around patents facilitated its business model. Lodsys plays by the rules. The only really significant difference being, this time around it's a small company sueing the big boys and now suddenly there is a problem.
Lodsys nicely shows the brokenness of the patent system. We should be more thankful.
I would design a voting machine as follows.
Principles:
- The machine should be such that it proofs to voter that his vote has been registered correctly.
- The machine should produce a tangible ballot for each vote casted.
- It should be impossible for anyone to find out how someone voted.
The desire of up-to-the-minute results is understandable but should be secondary to the principles above. Yet, I don't think the demands are mutually exclusive.
I can imagine a design where the voter can see his ballot, for instance behind a sheet of glass. The voter votes by pressing a button which causes a physical hole to be punched in the ballot. It should be clear to the voter how he voted from the position of the hole in the ballot. Then, the ballot should be visibly dropped in a sealed box. The voter should not be able to physically access the ballot.
The ballots are machine-countable since the holes were punched in mechanically. More importantly, the ballots can also be recounted manually if required.
I can imagine a setup where for instance every couple of rows has its own wifi-network on its own channel. This way, bandwidth can be increased to levels which enable streaming video to more than just a few passengers simultaneously.
This would require multiple wifi hotspots in the plane, so some wiring is obviously still required.
see subject
equivalent to a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books stretching from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth
Glad to see we finally got rid of that silly "library of congress" unit.
Yes. The tablet game is about usability, not specs. Usability means long battery life, responsive touch screen, responsive software, a good UI, and tons of good apps. The tablet game is also about image, lifestyle. The product has to be perceived as being cool, so a good design is a must-have, as is marketing that acknowledges the importance of being cool.
Just forget about GB, megapixel, GHz, number of cores, pixels per inch. Although not totally irrelevant, the specs don't make the difference in the tablet arena. Tablets have come into the realm of techno-dummies that don't give a shit about specs. They will ask things like "can I read a book on it", "can I download music", "can I surf the internet". Weird, I know. And whether Flash is supported... believe me, most buyers don't even know what the hell that is, let alone go ask for it.
So? Your quote does nowhere show that Google will NOT aggregate the information to improve their pagerank algorithm.
Actually, it is likely the whole point.
I am convinced that Google will also use the aggregate of this information to improve their pagerank engine.
Google knows that no matter how smart your page rank system is, it will be gamed to the level it becomes unusable. Obviously, the +1 button will also be gamed, but at least it is going to be a bit harder. Expect botnets to take care of this, though.
Clearly, social ranking is going to be more important than algorithmic ranking. Googles pigeons have their best times behind them.
When has Microsoft demonstrated any vision beyond marketing? Microsoft makes profit out of their monopolies (Windows and Office) only. Everything else loses them money. Check out their annual reports if you don't believe me.
I wrote a blog-entry about this.