Clearly my preferred strategy of studying problems, thinking about them, and writing a solution that correctly solves all the problems we can come up with would be utterly unacceptable there. They clearly prefer the strategy of "rapid prototyping", dealing with only a few problems (probably those that customers have reported), and not much bothering with testing the "solution" before delivering it.
It's good to know such things before applying for a job.
And their strategy does seem rather common in the business world, which explains the large percentage of buggy, poorly-designed stuff that we see all the time.
Yes, this includes your home. The local police have to abide by the idea that warrants are required but if the DHS decides you are a possible terrorist threat, citizen of no, you have no rights whatsoever.
And, of course, there has been much discussion recently of the leaked documents outlining the policy that the US government can simply execute anyone labelled "terrorist" at any time. Granted, that hasn't been reviewed by any courts, and the Supreme Court might declare execution without trial unconstitutional. But that might not be much consolation if you're dead.
Then there's the question of where in the world this isn't true.
So it sounds like this applies to anyone living within states like Connecticut, Rhode Island, Hawaii or Florida, all of which are within 100 miles of the ocean shore. Actually, I think that all of Massachusetts (where I live) is also less than 100 miles from the shore, but I might be wrong.
I wonder what fraction of the US population lives within 100 miles of the national border. I'd guess it's well over 50%, but I don't see any easy way to find the number. Anyone know?
For instance, Eldredge and Gould pretty much shook the foundations of evolution when they published their paper on Punctuated equilibrium.
Not really. Dawkins describes PE in the link above as a "minor wrinkle" in evolutionary theory.
Indeed. When the PE papers were published, I was a Comp-Sci grad student working for several biological departments, and saw a lot of the reaction. Most of the biologists just said "Yeah, they're probably onto something." Nobody "converted" overnight; they generally thought that gradualism was part of the story, but catastrophic changes were also probably important. We just didn't know their relative importance. They generally mentioned one case that we already had a lot of data on: The "Columbian catastrophe", i.e., the massive ecological changes around the world in the 1500s, caused by European explorer transporting various species around the world and introducing them in places where they hadn't existed. This was a huge uncontrolled experiment in biological adaptation, and they understood that similar things had almost certainly happened sporadically throughout the planet's history.
Suggesting that PE "shook the foundations" is a media concept at best; actual biologists responded to it primarily as an interesting hypothesis, and thought that it was worth spending research time on. They expected that it would become part of the general theory of evolution; they just didn't know whether it was a major part of the story, or a minor explanation of occasional changes. To nobody's surprise, the evidence eventually said that it was somewhere in the middle, important, but not the full explanation. Sorta like the role of gradualism.
But nuanced stories like that aren't what media reporters want to hear. Much better to make up stories of radical shaking of the very foundations of an edifice. That gets readers' attention.
I always mentally translate "up to" to "less than". It produces a clearer understanding of what they're trying to sell me. Try it sometime; it really clarifies all those"blazingly fast" ads.
... that's unconstitutional and completely immoral and out of sync with American values.
Well, it may be unconstitutional and completely immoral, but the evidence so far is that it's quite in line with the "values" of a lot of the American public. Where's the widespread public outrage? Yeah, there is a tiny minority that's objecting, sometimes loudly, but so far there doesn't seem to be much of a reaction from the general public. So the administration can easily claim that the majority supports them. The major "values" of most of the US population consists of things like who won the recent football game.
Do I believe Wikipedia? Or do I believe Donald Knuth?
Why should you believe either? One of the basic (meta-)principles of mathematics is that you don't have to take anyone's word for something. You can check out their claim yourself, using existing reference material and your own mind. This isn't facetious; mathematical and scientific results have occasionally been shown to be erroneous.
If you are unwilling to do these things, you're abandoning your (and your children's) future to those who are willing to do them (or to pay others to do them;-). The dominant power and wealth in the human society now belongs to those who can handle technology. If you demand belief rather than understanding, you are handing control over to those willing to gain the understanding.
If you can't appreciate the aesthetic justifications for learning about math and science, you certain must be aware of the history of successes and improvements in our world by their practitioners. Few of us would like to go back to stone-age hunter-gatherer societies. It's the experimenters and reasoners that got us past that stage.
I can understand going after him for the apostrophe, but indenting paragraphs. Who the hell indents paragraphs on the web, an english teacher with a grudge?
Or those of us trying to make "mobile" web pages.;-)
With such limited screen space, it's just reasonable to treat a blank-line separator as wasting an entire line of usable screen space. Using CSS to indent paragraphs lets you use that blank line for information, wasting only the 2- or 3-em indentation.
Of course, we are still plagued with web "designers" in the mobile arena, and they'll as usual maximize the blank space for (a)esthetic reasons. It's an ongoing battle that will never end, unless we can find a way to eject information minimizers from the web. But there are enough users out there who prefer shiny to information that this will probably never happen.
... what are you going to do when they label you "mentally ill"?
And we might note how easy it can be to get such a label. One of last year's minor science/medical news stories that was picked up by some reporters, and also by a number of comedians, was a change made by the American Psychological Association (APA) to their definition of "depression". The fun part of this story was the previous definition, which included the case of a loved one dying, and a survivor's mourning continuing for more than a month. This was all it took to get a diagnosis of depression, and a "mentally ill" label. The time period has now been extended somewhat, but that won't affect the medical records from previous years.
So if someone close to you dies, you might want to be careful to hide signs of sadness when talking to medical people (or strangers;-), lest you end up on the list of people determined to be mentally ill by a professional psychiatrist.
It really is that easy to get "mentally ill" on your medical record, to be used against you in cases like this.
Is "huge up-front costs" a euphemism for payments to maintain their legal monopoly in most of the neighborhoods that they "server"?
One reason for suspecting this is the recent stories (most recently from a study in Canada that was discussed here on/.) about the actual cost of running an Internet service being less than 1/000 of the money charged the customers. If that's not the explanation of the "huge costs", it must be something else. The obvious guess is the, uh, "campaign contributions" and other related costs of all those zillions of local monopolies that the comms industry has relied on since the development of the telegraph and telephone to prevent any actual competition from arising.
What other sorts of payouts could the phrase "huge up-front costs" refer to? It might be interesting to get a detailed accounting of all this, though I suppose a lot of it would be similarly buried behind a pile of euphemisms.
Pay no attention to those Apple fanbois, or the fandroids neither. It's only the loyal BB partisans who have The Truth.
(Hmmm... We could use an official site to inform us of the current buzzwords for properly insulting the users of various successful commercial products. Anyone know what the BB loyalists are actually disparaged these days?)
I once counseled someone who was working with some physicists from [insert national Federal laboratory here] to market a patent. According to this person it involved faster-than-light communications.
I kept telling him that, no, it was impossible, and I don't care what credentials or patents these people had. I told him to go back and get me more information.
Sounds familiar. I once worked for a company building comm stuff (hardware and software), and had the fun of explaining to management that the current requirement specs required an upgrade to the speed of light. I had to try to explain that this wasn't likely in our universe. Their reply was basically pointing out the ongoing increase of speed of all electronic computing gear, which had been a regular improvement for decades, and there was no reason to expect that it wouldn't continue for decades more. It became clear that their attitude was that if I couldn't handle the task, they'd just have to find people who could, and hire them instead.
So I upgraded my resume, gave notice, and moved on to a somewhat more tractable project. I haven't kept in contact, but I suspect that if they had gotten their required speed-of-light upgrade, I'd have read about it. The last I checked, the reference books still list 299,792,458 m/s as the speed limit. (But who actually uses the books these days?;-)
Nah; more likely he's your garden-variety con man who knows very well that it's worthless, but figures he can get enough money from the marks to make it worth his while to market it.
Actually, I'd wonder why there aren't more bike cranks made in fancy shapes. The actual shape doesn't matter (except for not scraping the ground on a tight turn), so why do people insist on the usual straight-line design? Since the universe doesn't dictate the required shape, it should be open for artistic interpretation.
That got me thinking... Since bacteria are asexual and reproduce by division then,...
That's where you went wrong. Bacteria do have a sexual reproduction process, though mostly they produce by division. Their sexual process is a lot different than ours, but it does involve two bacteria joining cell membranes, exchanging and mixing up portions of their DNA, making a few copies, and then splitting up into cells that contain mixtures of both parents' DNA. This has the usual survival advantage: The offspring that have a "better" combination of genes will do better than the other half of the offspring, and their descendants will have the improved combination of genes.
This sexual reproduction process is generally called "conjugation". Google it for further information. The process has some interesting features that are rather different from our reproductive process. One feature is that many bacteria have small pieces of DNA called plasmids that they can "donate" to others via conjugation. In this special case, one bacterium essentially gives a copy of the plasmid to another bacterium that lacks it. This is known to be used to transfer genes that implement resistance to toxic substances (e.g., antibiotics) among a population of similar bacteria. We can't donate our genes to another living human that lacks them, but many bacteria can. Sometimes this even happens between species that aren't close relatives.
No matter how smart you think you are, you will get screwed trying to roll your own date handling.
So you're telling me that I should trust the date-handling library routines provided by hugely successful corporations like Adobe and Apple, right?;-)
And yes, I have seem my code's time handling badly screwed up because I trusted the delivered library routines. So I learned to test them thoroughly, and in a few cases, I've had to replace them with routines that were correct. Granted, I usually got these from online open-source repositories, but in a few cases I've had to augment these with some code of my own - and send them my code. They've generally thanked me for the contribution, and sometimes said that they got some good laughs from my descriptions of the problems in our local library routines.
True naivetï½ is trusting code supplied by an organization whose primary motive is profit, not engineering quality.
Hey, it's a real service to some of us webmasters. We can now add a little routine to our servers that scans everything send, looks for these URLs, and when it finds them, changes them to a random item from a list of URLs. For that list, we need someone to build a site that provides the URLs for things like rickrolls, goatses, etc., and keeps it up to date.
With the help of this little list, we can probably cut way down on their incoming traffic. But we need to pass the word to other webmasters, and bring as many sites into "compliance" as we can manage.
(It might also help if the owners of the sites on this list would send us lists of their main competitors, so we can make "relevant" redirections of the URLs that they don't want us to tell people about.)
The space probe crash was a case of someone not labeling units.
An interesting aside is that there has been somewhat of a background discussion of just this within the software industry for some time, starting at least by the late 70s (and possibly earlier). Basically, lots of people have repeatedly point out that most such problems could be prevented if programming languages required that numbers have attached units, or alternatively, variable declarations included a unit (which could be null for dimensionless variables, of course). This discussion has been routinely ignored by almost all language developers.
In this light, one way of rephrasing the problem is that NASA's programming languages don't include (and enforce) numbers with attached units. If they did, that crash wouldn't have happened, because the code would automagically convert when units don't match (or raise an "incompatible units" exception).
It would in fact be reasonably easy to do this with most programming languages, and the internals of the implementation have been written zillions of times in various projects that decide they need such labelling. Moving the code from a run-time library (for a language with only dimensionless numbers) into the language itself would be straightforward, and would greatly increase the probability that programmers would use units.
I have used a few languages that include the ability to represent numbers with arbitrary suffixes. But the languages I've seen just carry over a suffix, usually from the first operand, into the result of an operation This doesn't help solve the problem. It still relies on the programmer to do all the checking, and allows adding numbers with different units without doing a conversion. I have also read rumors that a few languages with real units on numbers have been implemented. I've just never seen them used in any "real world" projects.
Anyway, as an occasion language implementer, I know how easy it would be to do this. But I'm not holding my breath until I see the idea adopted. When I've seen it mentioned in software discussions, the usual reaction is usually along the lines of "Yeah, that's obviously a good idea, but the language crowd will never lower themselves to giving us something so simple and useful." There's a lot of cynicism going around...
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly my preferred strategy of studying problems, thinking about them, and writing a solution that correctly solves all the problems we can come up with would be utterly unacceptable there. They clearly prefer the strategy of "rapid prototyping", dealing with only a few problems (probably those that customers have reported), and not much bothering with testing the "solution" before delivering it.
It's good to know such things before applying for a job.
And their strategy does seem rather common in the business world, which explains the large percentage of buggy, poorly-designed stuff that we see all the time.
Yes, this includes your home. The local police have to abide by the idea that warrants are required but if the DHS decides you are a possible terrorist threat, citizen of no, you have no rights whatsoever.
And, of course, there has been much discussion recently of the leaked documents outlining the policy that the US government can simply execute anyone labelled "terrorist" at any time. Granted, that hasn't been reviewed by any courts, and the Supreme Court might declare execution without trial unconstitutional. But that might not be much consolation if you're dead.
Then there's the question of where in the world this isn't true.
So it sounds like this applies to anyone living within states like Connecticut, Rhode Island, Hawaii or Florida, all of which are within 100 miles of the ocean shore. Actually, I think that all of Massachusetts (where I live) is also less than 100 miles from the shore, but I might be wrong.
I wonder what fraction of the US population lives within 100 miles of the national border. I'd guess it's well over 50%, but I don't see any easy way to find the number. Anyone know?
For instance, Eldredge and Gould pretty much shook the foundations of evolution when they published their paper on Punctuated equilibrium.
Not really. Dawkins describes PE in the link above as a "minor wrinkle" in evolutionary theory.
Indeed. When the PE papers were published, I was a Comp-Sci grad student working for several biological departments, and saw a lot of the reaction. Most of the biologists just said "Yeah, they're probably onto something." Nobody "converted" overnight; they generally thought that gradualism was part of the story, but catastrophic changes were also probably important. We just didn't know their relative importance. They generally mentioned one case that we already had a lot of data on: The "Columbian catastrophe", i.e., the massive ecological changes around the world in the 1500s, caused by European explorer transporting various species around the world and introducing them in places where they hadn't existed. This was a huge uncontrolled experiment in biological adaptation, and they understood that similar things had almost certainly happened sporadically throughout the planet's history.
Suggesting that PE "shook the foundations" is a media concept at best; actual biologists responded to it primarily as an interesting hypothesis, and thought that it was worth spending research time on. They expected that it would become part of the general theory of evolution; they just didn't know whether it was a major part of the story, or a minor explanation of occasional changes. To nobody's surprise, the evidence eventually said that it was somewhere in the middle, important, but not the full explanation. Sorta like the role of gradualism.
But nuanced stories like that aren't what media reporters want to hear. Much better to make up stories of radical shaking of the very foundations of an edifice. That gets readers' attention.
I guess it really doesn't take any facts for the idiots to start clamoring about how all business' are evil.
Yeah, when we know that in reality, only about 90% of them are evil. And those 90% are giving the other 10% a bad name.
(Dunno if I need a ;-) here or not ...)
And why should bytes that don't even make it to my machine count towards my usage?
I think the answer to that contains the phrase "because they can". ;-)
I always mentally translate "up to" to "less than". It produces a clearer understanding of what they're trying to sell me. Try it sometime; it really clarifies all those"blazingly fast" ads.
... that's unconstitutional and completely immoral and out of sync with American values.
Well, it may be unconstitutional and completely immoral, but the evidence so far is that it's quite in line with the "values" of a lot of the American public. Where's the widespread public outrage? Yeah, there is a tiny minority that's objecting, sometimes loudly, but so far there doesn't seem to be much of a reaction from the general public. So the administration can easily claim that the majority supports them. The major "values" of most of the US population consists of things like who won the recent football game.
Do I believe Wikipedia? Or do I believe Donald Knuth?
Why should you believe either? One of the basic (meta-)principles of mathematics is that you don't have to take anyone's word for something. You can check out their claim yourself, using existing reference material and your own mind. This isn't facetious; mathematical and scientific results have occasionally been shown to be erroneous.
If you are unwilling to do these things, you're abandoning your (and your children's) future to those who are willing to do them (or to pay others to do them ;-). The dominant power and wealth in the human society now belongs to those who can handle technology. If you demand belief rather than understanding, you are handing control over to those willing to gain the understanding.
If you can't appreciate the aesthetic justifications for learning about math and science, you certain must be aware of the history of successes and improvements in our world by their practitioners. Few of us would like to go back to stone-age hunter-gatherer societies. It's the experimenters and reasoners that got us past that stage.
That doesn't make it right that they can go around spouting marketing facts.
FTFY. ;-)
I can understand going after him for the apostrophe, but indenting paragraphs. Who the hell indents paragraphs on the web, an english teacher with a grudge?
Or those of us trying to make "mobile" web pages. ;-)
With such limited screen space, it's just reasonable to treat a blank-line separator as wasting an entire line of usable screen space. Using CSS to indent paragraphs lets you use that blank line for information, wasting only the 2- or 3-em indentation.
Of course, we are still plagued with web "designers" in the mobile arena, and they'll as usual maximize the blank space for (a)esthetic reasons. It's an ongoing battle that will never end, unless we can find a way to eject information minimizers from the web. But there are enough users out there who prefer shiny to information that this will probably never happen.
... what are you going to do when they label you "mentally ill"?
And we might note how easy it can be to get such a label. One of last year's minor science/medical news stories that was picked up by some reporters, and also by a number of comedians, was a change made by the American Psychological Association (APA) to their definition of "depression". The fun part of this story was the previous definition, which included the case of a loved one dying, and a survivor's mourning continuing for more than a month. This was all it took to get a diagnosis of depression, and a "mentally ill" label. The time period has now been extended somewhat, but that won't affect the medical records from previous years.
So if someone close to you dies, you might want to be careful to hide signs of sadness when talking to medical people (or strangers ;-), lest you end up on the list of people determined to be mentally ill by a professional psychiatrist.
It really is that easy to get "mentally ill" on your medical record, to be used against you in cases like this.
Is "huge up-front costs" a euphemism for payments to maintain their legal monopoly in most of the neighborhoods that they "server"?
One reason for suspecting this is the recent stories (most recently from a study in Canada that was discussed here on /.) about the actual cost of running an Internet service being less than 1/000 of the money charged the customers. If that's not the explanation of the "huge costs", it must be something else. The obvious guess is the, uh, "campaign contributions" and other related costs of all those zillions of local monopolies that the comms industry has relied on since the development of the telegraph and telephone to prevent any actual competition from arising.
What other sorts of payouts could the phrase "huge up-front costs" refer to? It might be interesting to get a detailed accounting of all this, though I suppose a lot of it would be similarly buried behind a pile of euphemisms.
and i want more weather apps! NEVER enough weather apps!
Yeah, yeah; you talk about the weather, but what have you ever done about it?
But, RIM's dead! The interblogs told me so!
Pay no attention to those Apple fanbois, or the fandroids neither. It's only the loyal BB partisans who have The Truth.
(Hmmm ... We could use an official site to inform us of the current buzzwords for properly insulting the users of various successful commercial products. Anyone know what the BB loyalists are actually disparaged these days?)
I won't be happy until I can get the full 24 track raw unmixed tracks at 96kHz and mix it myself....
You can buy that after you've already paid for all the lower-quality versions that they sell.
It's clear from the current discussion and the recording industry's history that this isn't actually a joke ...
I once counseled someone who was working with some physicists from [insert national Federal laboratory here] to market a patent. According to this person it involved faster-than-light communications. I kept telling him that, no, it was impossible, and I don't care what credentials or patents these people had. I told him to go back and get me more information.
Sounds familiar. I once worked for a company building comm stuff (hardware and software), and had the fun of explaining to management that the current requirement specs required an upgrade to the speed of light. I had to try to explain that this wasn't likely in our universe. Their reply was basically pointing out the ongoing increase of speed of all electronic computing gear, which had been a regular improvement for decades, and there was no reason to expect that it wouldn't continue for decades more. It became clear that their attitude was that if I couldn't handle the task, they'd just have to find people who could, and hire them instead.
So I upgraded my resume, gave notice, and moved on to a somewhat more tractable project. I haven't kept in contact, but I suspect that if they had gotten their required speed-of-light upgrade, I'd have read about it. The last I checked, the reference books still list 299,792,458 m/s as the speed limit. (But who actually uses the books these days? ;-)
I guess either he's completely deluded
Spot on, end of story.
Nah; more likely he's your garden-variety con man who knows very well that it's worthless, but figures he can get enough money from the marks to make it worth his while to market it.
Actually, I'd wonder why there aren't more bike cranks made in fancy shapes. The actual shape doesn't matter (except for not scraping the ground on a tight turn), so why do people insist on the usual straight-line design? Since the universe doesn't dictate the required shape, it should be open for artistic interpretation.
That got me thinking... Since bacteria are asexual and reproduce by division then, ...
That's where you went wrong. Bacteria do have a sexual reproduction process, though mostly they produce by division. Their sexual process is a lot different than ours, but it does involve two bacteria joining cell membranes, exchanging and mixing up portions of their DNA, making a few copies, and then splitting up into cells that contain mixtures of both parents' DNA. This has the usual survival advantage: The offspring that have a "better" combination of genes will do better than the other half of the offspring, and their descendants will have the improved combination of genes.
This sexual reproduction process is generally called "conjugation". Google it for further information. The process has some interesting features that are rather different from our reproductive process. One feature is that many bacteria have small pieces of DNA called plasmids that they can "donate" to others via conjugation. In this special case, one bacterium essentially gives a copy of the plasmid to another bacterium that lacks it. This is known to be used to transfer genes that implement resistance to toxic substances (e.g., antibiotics) among a population of similar bacteria. We can't donate our genes to another living human that lacks them, but many bacteria can. Sometimes this even happens between species that aren't close relatives.
and daylight savings time is the worst idea ever!
and any number of economist types have even told us that it totally fails at its advertised advantages. ;-)
But I wouldn't call it the worst idea ever. It's social and economic problems aren't in a league with such ideas as slavery, war, and religion. ;-)
True naivetý is ...
Jeez; ya can't even get away with using a mot franÃais that's commonly used in English here. And we're talking about quality products ...
No matter how smart you think you are, you will get screwed trying to roll your own date handling.
So you're telling me that I should trust the date-handling library routines provided by hugely successful corporations like Adobe and Apple, right? ;-)
And yes, I have seem my code's time handling badly screwed up because I trusted the delivered library routines. So I learned to test them thoroughly, and in a few cases, I've had to replace them with routines that were correct. Granted, I usually got these from online open-source repositories, but in a few cases I've had to augment these with some code of my own - and send them my code. They've generally thanked me for the contribution, and sometimes said that they got some good laughs from my descriptions of the problems in our local library routines.
True naivetï½ is trusting code supplied by an organization whose primary motive is profit, not engineering quality.
Why are you posting links to these jackasses?
Hey, it's a real service to some of us webmasters. We can now add a little routine to our servers that scans everything send, looks for these URLs, and when it finds them, changes them to a random item from a list of URLs. For that list, we need someone to build a site that provides the URLs for things like rickrolls, goatses, etc., and keeps it up to date.
With the help of this little list, we can probably cut way down on their incoming traffic. But we need to pass the word to other webmasters, and bring as many sites into "compliance" as we can manage.
(It might also help if the owners of the sites on this list would send us lists of their main competitors, so we can make "relevant" redirections of the URLs that they don't want us to tell people about.)
The space probe crash was a case of someone not labeling units.
An interesting aside is that there has been somewhat of a background discussion of just this within the software industry for some time, starting at least by the late 70s (and possibly earlier). Basically, lots of people have repeatedly point out that most such problems could be prevented if programming languages required that numbers have attached units, or alternatively, variable declarations included a unit (which could be null for dimensionless variables, of course). This discussion has been routinely ignored by almost all language developers.
In this light, one way of rephrasing the problem is that NASA's programming languages don't include (and enforce) numbers with attached units. If they did, that crash wouldn't have happened, because the code would automagically convert when units don't match (or raise an "incompatible units" exception).
It would in fact be reasonably easy to do this with most programming languages, and the internals of the implementation have been written zillions of times in various projects that decide they need such labelling. Moving the code from a run-time library (for a language with only dimensionless numbers) into the language itself would be straightforward, and would greatly increase the probability that programmers would use units.
I have used a few languages that include the ability to represent numbers with arbitrary suffixes. But the languages I've seen just carry over a suffix, usually from the first operand, into the result of an operation This doesn't help solve the problem. It still relies on the programmer to do all the checking, and allows adding numbers with different units without doing a conversion. I have also read rumors that a few languages with real units on numbers have been implemented. I've just never seen them used in any "real world" projects.
Anyway, as an occasion language implementer, I know how easy it would be to do this. But I'm not holding my breath until I see the idea adopted. When I've seen it mentioned in software discussions, the usual reaction is usually along the lines of "Yeah, that's obviously a good idea, but the language crowd will never lower themselves to giving us something so simple and useful." There's a lot of cynicism going around ...
So in theory, your statement would be correct.
Damn; it always sorta ruins a joke when someone shows that it's true. ;-)
Oh, well; I didn't get any "funny" moderation, anyway. I guess it was too subtle for the /. crowd.