I'm guessing you mean the boas when you say "not a threat to life". My friend did say that she had to learn how to feed them right to keep them friendly and docile. It turned out to be about two mice per week. And she also said she'd had an earlier snake that she fed too well, so it grew to be too big for her to handle or wear as jewelry. She donated it to a local zoo, where it was still living the last I heard, and got a new baby boa.
I've read that most of the "show" cobras are defanged. The story I read about the house cobras somewhere in India made the point that they weren't defanged, because they were there primarily for rodent control. The writer also said that the cobras and humans really didn't interact much. Nobody picks up a cobra and cuddles it. The cobras are almost entirely nocturnal, and sleep in their nest until the humans turn the lights (and/or fires) out. If people get up at night for some reason, the cobras just quietly slither out of the way. The writer also mentioned being a bit worried the couple of times that people picked up a cobra and moved it somewhere. Nothing happened, though, presumably because the cobra was accustomed to humans being about. To its little brain, humans are harmless and too big to eat, so we're just ignored as part of the scenery.
I also remember being a little dubious about there never being interactions with children. But the story really didn't say that much on the topic, other than that the locals didn't think there was a problem. This was contrasted with their very similar disbelief that the Europeans huge dogs weren't a danger to children. Of course, we know that some of them are, but that behavior has mostly been bred out of our dogs by the custom that a dog who harms a child simply dies. I wouldn't be surprised if these cobras were really semi-domesticated over the centuries, and made harmless by the same draconian rule.
The usual term for this sort of relationship is "feral", rather than "domesticated". I lived in Florida for a few years, and a lot of people there like the little lizards that are everywhere. They might not have liked them at first, but after seeing a few of them carrying of a cockroach for a meal, you're likely to decide that the little critters are really cute. But they're not pets; they just live in your house and eat your roaches (and keep out of your way).
I also did a small amount of googling, and found references to a few other cases in India where people (mostly rich people) have pet cobras that they like show to visitors, but they're all defanged. They probably get fed dead mice from pet stores, as my friend's boa did. Mice are cheap, and you can get them from pet stores nearly anywhere.
It is interesting that humans seem to like dangerous pets. In our case, in addition to our cockatiels (mostly harmless), we have a blue-crowned conure, and she has a seriously dangerous beak. We've seen her crack open cherry pits. (Try that with your teeth.;-) She could crack a finger bone as easily. It took us about a month before we weren't nervous of her beak. Now we understand her, and we don't consider her dangerous. She is a cute, cuddly little creature who likes to play. But when visitors stick out their hands towards her and she makes a threat face, we warn them off. She's afraid of strangers, and she could hurt them if they don't know how to handle her. I'd estimate that she's about as dangerous as the average house cat or a medium-size dog. After all, they are predators with a mouthful of sharp teeth and some dangerous claws. She has one big, strong beak that she keeps honed to a needle point, plus 8 claws that are roughly comparable to cat or dog claws. Just the sort of critter that we humans like to keep as cute house pets.;-)
Three right turns = one left. It is a universal rule!
Hey, I don't live on euclidian space, you insensitive clod!
Yeah; it's like that old puzzle: A guy goes south one miles, makes a right turn, goes west one mile, shoots a bear, makes a right turn, goes north one mile, and arrives where he started. What color was the bear?
Anyone living on a non-Euclidian world like the Earth should know the answer immediately.;-)
Well, I for one believe in the Last Thursday Theory. This theory states that our world and the rest of the universe was created last Thursday (I forget the time). We were created with all our memories intact. The planet was created with all its fossil beds faking an old world in which geology and evolution had happened. The stars were created, along with the beams of light streaming toward our eyes showing us where they are. The bible was created with all its misleading story about a false (and none to bright) god.
I challenge you to find any evidence that this isn't true.
(Actually, there is also the other theory of why our universe was created: It's actually a simulation study. Each elementary particle in our universe is actually a data cell in the memory of a celestial computer that's running the simulation. Each unit of Planck time is one cycle in the simulation. Occasionally, the simulation is stopped, some editing is done, and the simulation is resumed; we call these events "miracles". We can't actually prove this theory, because if we ever do, the simulation is stopped, and some editing is done to invalidate our proof. This theory is not incompatible with the Last Thursday Theory, of course; last Thursday was when the simulation was started, with data initialized to include our memories, the fossil record, and the stars.)
I noticed quickly that those wikipedia articles talk a lot about mtDNA and Y-DNA evidence. It's true that a lot has beet written on that topic. But I've gotten a distinct impression that people who understand DNA tend to just grin when they hear that, and change the topic to something less silly. Yes, it's likely that our mtDNA and Y-DNA had their origins in a couple of small places, almost certainly in Africa. But that's less than 1% of our DNA, and it doesn't take part in genetic recombination. While it's interesting for several reasons, using it to reason about the origins of the thousands of other genes that distinguish us from chimps is, well, silly, and hard to take seriously as a scientific discussion.
A better characterization of the general scientific attitude toward the debate is "further research is needed". Not that that ever stops people from debating, of course.
It's sorta like the (back on-topic;-) debate back in Charles Darwin's day about the remarkable similarities between those new "dinosaur" fossils and bird skeletons. A small population of scientists argued the question of bird-dinosaur relatedness. The rest of the scientific community said, in effect, "Well, that's very interesting, but we need more evidence." The debate died down because no further evidence was forthcoming. In 1970, all we had was a small number of Archaeopterix fossils, i.e., no progress at all had been made. Then, a couple of decades ago, a few other deposits were found, mostly in China, that had other bird fossils. This quickly revived the question, but it also died quickly as it became obvious to nearly everyone (except the media;-) that birds were indeed a branch of the dinosauria. Everything new was consistent with that hypothesis. Now a major remaining question is "Just when did the avian branch split off?" You'll read a lot of numbers, but there's still a "further research is needed" attitude on that detail, and this new fossil has just added a bit of confusion rather than deciding anything.
Anyway, sometimes it's best to just sit back, listen and chuckle as others debate something for which they don't really have enough good evidence. And if the debate inspires someone to fund further research, well, so much the better.
The American Automobile Association (AAA) has shown via study that the mere act of using or talking into a cellphone is a distraction & reduces response times below that of drunk drivers. People don't like to hear that, but those are the results.
One way to make sense of this is to conjecture that the governments that pass the laws they've been passing have a different motive than safety. If they were honestly trying to improve safety, they'd listen to the studies, and pass laws that improve safety. The studies aren't exactly secret. Many were government-funded, and the media has generally reported the results. The lawmakers have ignored the results, so the real motive must not be safety-related.
The various US cell-phone laws, and this NZ law, can be understood by looking at the changes that they mandate. All the US laws have banned hand-held cell phones, but allow "hands-free" cell phones, and this is to be done by buying some extra equipment that's to be attached to the phone. The NZ law does the same thing, and also apparently requires that you buy separate equipment for GPS nav use.
So the reasonable interpretation is that all the governments involved are trying to get people to buy more electronic equipment for their car. They aren't concerned with safety, because they are ignoring the studies saying that these additional gadgets won't do anything for safety.
Why would the government bodies want people to buy this extra equipment. That's an easy one. The governments are simply on the take. Various people in the governments have been "persuaded" (i.e., bribed) by the suppliers to pass laws requiring the owners of cell phones to buy the extra equipment.
We probably can't get the evidence to support this. But it's an explanation that makes sense. The claims that it's about safety don't make sense, since the required purchases don't add to anyone's safety.
... in beijing 10... archaeological site... fossilized remains proving that China was actually the birthplace of the human race.
Actually, with only a small amount of rephrasing, that's not much in conflict with one of the two competing theories of human development. One is the "Out of Africa" theory, that Africa has always been the center of human development, with people and their genes moving out of Africa, but rarely the other direction. The other is the "multi-center" theory, that people spread from Africa originally, but the slow flow of people and genes was essentially random, with a low level mixing in all directions.
There isn't any conclusive evidence. But everything that's known about humans at any stage is that most groups have always produced travellers, and travel along the coasts of the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Indian Ocean goes back as far as we can collect evidence of humans. Sailors have always been pretty good at gene mixing.
So most of the votes are with the "multi-center" theory. This would mean that there hasn't been a true center of humanity for at least tens of thousands of years, and maybe hundreds of thousands. Under this theory, each human gene variant has an origin, and our species is the sum of all these variants, each of which spread from wherever it first appeared. The oldest human settlements in the plains of eastern China would easily qualify as one "birthplace" of our species, along with the other centers in Africa and Europe.
The evidence about the Americas is much weaker. There seem to have been several major influxes of people through Alaska some 11,000 to 13,000 years ago. Knowing how humans build and use boats, it's unlikely that that was all the migration, and there were probably occasional travellers going both directions all the time, but we essentially have no specific evidence of it, only a few interesting "funny" remains. So the Americas may have been an outlier that provided little or no gene input to the rest of humanity before 500 years ago; we don't know.
But it is fairly well accepted that humans evolved first in Africa, spread out, formed a number of population centers, and have been mixing and exchanging genetic material ever since. So every major population center that existed, say, 50,000 years ago should be considered a "birthplace" of our species, in the sense that some useful genetic variation developed there and spread in the usual ways.
The only problem with the Chinese claim is that the word "the" in "the birthplace of the human race" implies uniqueness. China can't have been the only origin of humanity, though they are almost certainly an important "one of many" origins.
To get back on topic, China (especially Liáoníng) is also the origin of most of the avian fossils that we now have. There have been other important avian fossils in South America, and a few elsewhere.
Archaeopteryx really doesn't look all that different from the raptors that came before it, and still has a very dinosaur-like head and no beak. Is it a bird?
Back in the 1970s, when (Yale professor) John Ostrom was reviving the old debate over the relationship between birds and dinosaurs, he brought up a funny and informative piece of evidence: He pointed out that we actually had more Archaeopterix fossils than we thought. There were found in museums in Europe, classified as small dinosaurs.
He suggested that we not treat this as a misclassification at all, but rather as a tacit acknowledgement that those fossils were primitive birds and dinosaurs.
He also said that we need more such fossils, but I suppose everyone agreed with that. The basic problem here is that birds just don't fossilize very well.
I saw an example of this a few years ago. Due to my wife's allergies to furry critters, we have long had pet birds, mostly small parrots. Several of our cockatiels (and one friends') have been buried in a small raised strawberry/flower bed in the backyard. One spring, I decided to dig it up and sift out the rocks and roots of some large weeds (e.g., creeping bellflowers). I used a screen that was easily capable of separating out objects the size of their largest bones (skull, breastbone, etc). I found lots of small pebbles and roots, but no bones at all. In only a few years, their bones and beaks had been completely reduced to topsoil.
We lost two more of our small feathered friends last winter, both older than the 15 years they are expected to live, and they're buried in the center of the same bed. In a year or two, they'll be part of the soil, leaving behind no fossil evidence that they ever existed.
It takes some special, rare conditions for a bird to be turned into a fossil. Their adaptations for flight include very light, hollow bones. It's no mystery at all why the fossil record is so sparse.
But someone who has never owned a parrot? If he walked to a person and bopped his head sideways, I am 100% sure that 99% of the people would have no clue that it means that his neck itches. In fact, I'm pretty sure they couldn't even tell if he is tired, scared or in a bad mood. In all of those most people would think "He flies around and screams. He probably isn't happy?" and couldn't interpret anything more.
Yeah; that was basically what I was saying, though I said it the other way 'round. The writer I was talking about was saying that birds are totally alien to us; I was replying with the biologists' comments about humans having been modified by our domestic critters to have this "empathy" thing that enables us to learn to understand species (animals and plants) that are radically different from us. So, since I've lived with birds for decades, I find them very easy to understand. But I've never lived with horses, so when when my horse-owning friends tell me how communicative they are, I don't see it. I can easily believe it's there, though, from the close coordination you often see between a horse and rider. This fits right in with what the biologists have been saying about us: We aren't born with an instinctive understanding of other creatures, but we (or at least some of us) do have an ability to pick up on other animals' behavior and eventually come to an understanding of what they're communicating.
Another funny anecdote that bird owners can appreciate: While walking with a bunch of co-workers to lunch a couple of years back, one of them made a comment about some birds fighting. I looked where he was looking, and at first didn't see any birds fighting. Then I realized what he was seeing. It was a pair of pigeons, an adult and a juvenile. The juvenile was demanding food from the adult, and the adult was trying to wean the youngster by refusing it the food. To the other guy, it looked like they were fighting. To a person who has watched parent birds raise their babies, it was obvious at a glance what was really going on. That particular behavior isn't much like any human behavior, especially since we don't feed our young by regurgitating food from our crops. But once you've seen it a few times, it's easy to recognize a baby bird saying "Feed me!" while the parent is in effect saying "You're old enough to get your own food, you spoiled brat!"
I'd also agree with that parrot preening invitation. I know exactly the motion you mean, but I expect that it would be meaningless to someone not familiar with parrots. Similarly, I have a friend who has several pet geckos. She likes to tell people how friendly and communicative they are. I can tell that they really like her and they interact a lot, but I don't see the communication. I suppose after a few months around one, I'd start to pick up on their language.
But this has wandered a distance off the topic of why we cook our food. It has led to a few funny scenes in our house. I have several photos of our male cockatiel reaching across a plate to grab chunks of a steak. So much for them being strictly seed eaters. I have this mental image of a flock of several hundred cockatiels descending on a cow and tearing it to pieces. But I suppose not; it would be too tough for them unless it's cooked. The little guy also loves cheeseburgers, especially the cheese and meat, though he likes blood-and-fat-soaked bread, too. I doubt if his wild ancestors ever had such a diet.
I don't remember where the NG story was in India; I vaguely recall that it was southerly. I also don't know how large an area they were writing about. It is interesting how many different cultures there are in India. It's one of the most culturally diverse part of the planet. Not that people there always get along, but they do seem to be generally more tolerant of differences than people are in much of the rest of the world.
I wonder if I could find the video of the kid playing with the cobras again. It did make me a bit nervous for the kid, but it was interesting that the snakes just tolerated it and didn't much interact with the kid.
I do also remember that the story said that people didn't really interact with the cobras much. It wasn't at all like our cats or dogs. Mostly the cobras slept in their nest during the day, and came out to hunt mice after the people had gone to sleep. But the writing was clear, that the people there weren't afraid of the cobras.
For that matter, when I was young (8 or 9), I had a friend who had a pet tarantula. He carried it around on his shoulder, or sometimes it would be in his shirt pocket. Again, they didn't really interact all that much. But the spider trusted him, and tolerated being touched by the few people who were brave enough.
I also had a friend some years ago with a pet boa constrictor. She worked part time as a belly dancer, actually, and used the snake in her act, but she carried it around with her at other times, too. She described it as a large piece of jewelry. She could drape it around her body any way she liked, and dance, and the snake would just hang on. She liked the way that most adults were nervous about it, but she could walk up to children and have them handling the snake very quickly. She also said that handling snake was basically just a question of getting to understand them. Even poisonous snakes usually won't harm humans unless they think they're in danger, so you just have to learn how to make the snake trust you. Boa constrictors are completely harmless to people, though, until they get very big.
I'd guess that the Thai snake handlers have worked with their snakes for a long time, understand what makes them nervous, and don't do those things. If the snakes trust you, and have some food in their belly, they'll tolerate being handled as just one of the things those crazy humans do to you.
There is no question that the domestication process had a major impact on dogs. There has been a kind of taboo on looking at the other side of this, though: what were the effects on the humanoids, how much did our ancestors change due to the new partnership with dogs?... any research in this area runs into a taboo about challenging the "god gave man dominion over the animals" of the dominant religious teachings.
Well, perhaps, in the "silly sciences". But among biologists in general, there has been no sign of such a taboo, and this topic is dealt with quite openly. It is well-understood that, as one text I saw recently put it, humans are one of the species with the most symbiotic relationships. We have domesticated several hundred animal species and several thousand plant species. Much of the reason we've been so successful at this is a major human adaptation that is referred to informally as "empathy". We are capable of understanding other species to a much greater degree than they can understand us.
The dog is an interesting case, because it's clear that they differ from their wolf ancestors in that they have a good understanding of human psychology, body language, etc. This is true to a lesser degree in a few other domestic species, notably cats and horses. But most of our domestic animals don't really understand us; we understand them (to varying degrees).
Or course, even with dogs, this takes some learning on our part. I ran across a funny example a few months ago. A writer (whose name I've forgotten) wrote that birds in general are "alien" creatures, with a body language totally unlike ours, and basically incomprehensible to primates like us. My reaction was "What? Is there a problem understanding bird behavior?" But I'd read some of the biological articles on the topic, and (probably more importantly) due to my wife's serious allergies to furry critters, I've lived in a house with birds for several decades. One of them right now is a blue-crowned conure, who was a "rescue" bird. She was found in a tree in a nearby town about 20 years ago, and some people who knew parrots got her to come down for some food. She was nearly starved, and had obviously not been a wild bird. She had a couple of homes for a few years, one of them a friend of ours who had retired, was traveling a lot, and asked if we wanted to give her a home. She has lived with us since.
Now, blue-crowned conures are not in any sense domesticated. It's likely that a very recent ancestor was caught in the wild, and she's the result at most a few generations of breeding (if you can call it that). Her species has no adaptations for living with humans, but she gets along well. And it's obvious that the reason is that we can talk to her in her own language. As the bird books would say, she's now part of a flock that's led by a couple of those funny flightless humans. A year ago, she got outside, and was in a neighbor's tree, totally terrified. We spent an hour "talking" her down to lower and lower branches, until finally she flew to my shoulder and started nibbling my ear. We took her back inside her home, and she shows no interest in that horrible outdoors, except to watch out the window when we're not there, squawking a greeting when we walk up to the house. Just as well; she'd die quickly in the New England winter that's coming, if she didn't starve first. (We also have cockatiels, but they've been domesticated and bred for about 150 years.)
Anyway, this isn't anything at all odd. Around the world, people keep all sorts of "undomesticated" animals as pets. There was a nice example years ago in a National Geographic article that started of talking about an area of India where people express wonder about the Europeans who keep huge "wolves" as pets; aren't they afraid of what those animals will do to their children? The article then went into its topic: In that part of India, people have pet cobras that wander freely around the house. They're not worried about the childre
... have a passenger help you with this quest for information.
Heh. The problem is inherent in most GPS devices. Figuring out your position using only the data being broadcast by GPS satellites is an iterative process, and depending on the positions of the satellites, it can take a while for the numbers to converge. Especially on the underpowered CPUs that are in most handheld devices. Yes, there's a solution: Leave the GPS hardware powered on permanently. This isn't practical with current battery and antenna technology. A handheld phone's battery can't keep GPS hardware alive overnight. GPS antennas have improved over the past decade, but batteries haven't improved much. So the GPS hardware gets turned off until you tell the gadget to turn it on by doing something like clicking on your phone's map icon.
When I click on my G1's "Maps" icon at home, it typically comes up showing my position about 6 blocks (1/2 mile, 2/3 km) south of the house, in the middle of a wooded area. After a delay of 2 to 20 seconds or so, it usually jumps to the correct location. Except when it jumps to some place that's wildly wrong, such as the day it told me I was about 100 miles to the southeast, some 20 miles east of Cape Cod, and headed north at around 50 or 60 mph. Then it popped to the correct location, so I quickly switched to the "Where am I?" screen, and found that my current velocity was west-northwest at nearly 300 mph. Then as I watched, it reported some impressive braking, to 0 mph.
Somehow, I don't think either of our cars is quite capable of that driving feat.
a carefully-architected system... designed to implement a specific structure... new requirements don't match that structure
I'd argue this solution was either poorly architected, or poorly scoped and managed.
Of course. And that's a fact of life in almost all software projects. In the modern corporate world, such projects are almost always run by professional managers, not by people with software development expertise. They don't understand software, and never will. The developers have to do their best with instructions that are at best sketchy and ambiguous, and blatantly wrong much of the time. We software developers aren't going to change that; we can only learn how to work under such conditions.
An example from a project about 10 years ago: My main assigned task was developing an SNMP server for a new network switch. Management had accepted that customers wouldn't buy a switch without it, because most of their networking software used SNMP for nearly everything. But the requirements I got included an explicit statement that I was not to implement "GET-NEXT". (I can see the look of fascinated horror on the faces of readers who understand SNMP.;-) The group's managers, in their wisdom, had decided that it wasn't needed. So I developed an agent that didn't do GET-NEXT, knowing full well what would happen. Sure enough, when they made the first deliveries to customers (who had been promised an SNMP agent), the immediate reaction was "This isn't an acceptable SNMP agent; it doesn't do GET-NEXT." I didn't hear the arguments, but eventually my managers understood that the agent violated the SNMP standard, and wouldn't be accepted.
So I got an urgent request: How quickly could I implement GET-NEXT? It turned out that the short answer was "One day." The longer answer was of the form "One day, but...". I knew this would happen, so when I changed the default value of one flag from 0 to 1, GET-NEXT worked. I'd implemented it on the sly, knowing that it would be needed. But I warned them that, due to some deficiencies in the switch's lower-level software, it wouldn't have acceptable response times with requests for some tables. They sent the updated server to the customers, thinking they'd satisfied the terms of the contract - and the customers replied that it worked fine for simple variables, but rows of several tables had response times of more than a day, so it was still unacceptable.
It's at this point that this becomes relevant to our topic here. SNMP's GET-NEXT is the tool used to discover the indexes to sparse arrays. Think "routing table", which is indexed by a 32-bit IP address, but typically has under 100 rows. How long would it take, using network round trips, to run through all possible values of a 32-bit index to discover which rows are populated? That was the only scheme my agent could use for such requests, because the lower-level software that supplied the data had no such discovery scheme. Clients were expected to "just know" the indexes for all arrays, including sparse arrays with 2^32 possible rows (2^64 in version 2). This was not possible for any customers' software. So the low-level system design had to be modified so it could maintain a list of the indexes it was using. This took several months of meetings, most of which were devoted to convincing the managers of the switch's software that something they didn't need and would never use was required to sell the equipment to anyone. They actively resisted trying to understand why, as it wasn't their problem. The actual solution finally came about because two low-level programmers understood the issue, and implemented what I needed on the sly, without telling their managers (though the team leader knew and approved). I worked with them on the redesign that was needed so that their software could collect the data and keep it up to date in an environment
... except the guy who has to go into it six months down the road because a new requirement came up or a new system must be integrated
Well, yeah, but that guy typically has very similar problems with a carefully-architected system. The problem in that case is that the architected system was carefully designed to implement a specific structure, which matched the original requirements. But the new requirements don't match that structure, so the new guy has a choice: Implement a series of ugly kludges to bend the structure to what's now needed, or design a new structure and re-implement the whole thing from scratch.
I've seen any number of tasks that amounted to adding a new feature to a structure that was fundamentally designed to not allow that feature. Not intentionally, of course; the original designers just weren't thinking about the new requirement. Modifying the basic structure can easily destroy the old code, introducing subtle bugs nearly everywhere in the code.
OTOH, if the structure is a lot of separate, independently-designed pieces, with the software equivalent of duct tape (or steel I-beams) holding them together, it's often straightforward to build yet another well-designed module for the new requirement, and graft it into the existing structure in such a way that the old code isn't bothered by presence of the new module.
I have no idea whether or not GPS nav units on the market are so self contained, but nothing inherent about GPS involves the ability of anyone to track you.
The GPS-only nav devices are pretty much all self-contained. But newer devices are appearing on the market that include both GPS and wireless networking. My wife and I both carry one now. She has an iPhone and I have a G1 Android phone; both come out of the box with functioning GPS plus both cell-phone and wifi for downloading maps dynamically.
This is both a good and a bad thing. We have a 6-year-old Garmin GPS gadget whose maps are no longer correct for some parts of the local road system. We live near Boston, and the Big Dig seriously altered a lot of the streets and highways on the south side of the city. Updating the maps for that area would cost us $150 for a new set of CDs, and we haven't done it.
Both the GPS-enabled cell phones dynamically download maps of the immediate vicinity, and those maps are (usually) current. But we've found that when we drive out into the countryside and lose cell service, we often run off the map, and don't see any more maps until we drive into an area with cell service. The people who write the software haven't figured out that we need a way to tell it to look ahead and pre-load the maps.
So neither kind of GPS gadget does a good job of providing correct maps all the time, even for areas inside or near a major US city.
But, getting back to the quote above, they can all provide a history of our GPS coordinates during the recent past. Except for when the go crazy and think we're driving around somewhere out in the ocean. (And that's not hypothetical.) It'd be fun to see some authority try to use the GPS gadgets' history in court, and try to explain the "evidence" saying we'd been driving around 20 miles out at sea for half an hour, and then we zipped at 800 mph to a point on a highway 15 miles inland. Or all the times that we apparently drove off a road onto a lake, drove around on the lake a while, then drove back to the road.
Because FTP sends everything, including your id and password, in the clear. It is no longer used by anyone with a grain of sense.
FTP has mostly been replaced by scp, sftp, rsync+ssh, or other software that encrypts the data. This doesn't stand out in international traffic like you might think, because such a huge portion of network traffic is now encrypted. For instance, all your credit card transactions and your online banking are encrypted, mostly to prevent the ISPs from picking off your account numbers and PINs and selling them to the highest bidders.
Dogs can't sniff them out so unless they're going to start strip-searching *everybody*...
Strip searches aren't nearly good enough. They'll have to do body-cavity searches if they're to find SD cards and USB memory gadgets wherever they may be hidden.
You don't have to cross the border to have such problems. A few weeks ago, my wife and I drove from San Diego to Yuma, and took I-8 most of the way. This was entirely within the US. But for several miles, I-8 is only a mile or so from the Mexican border. Her next bill from AT&T for her iPhone showed several hundred dollars in "roaming" charges during the short time we were in that section of the highway, although she didn't use the iPhone at all during the drive. But it did things like checking her email, using relay towers on the Mexican side of the border.
She's disputing the charges, and maybe AT&T will cancel them. We'll see. But at least the phone companies have developed some clever ways of running up the charges if you even come within electronic reach of the borders.
Funny thing is that my T-Mobile G1 phone didn't show any such charges. Maybe that's why they're not as big as AT they haven't learned to augment their income by using such tricks. OTOH, we've found that their customers seem to like them better, FWIW, while everyone we talk to seems to hate AT&T. (But she loves her iPhone.;-)
I always get asked, "How did you get good with computers?" To which I reply, "I was just able to read."
Well, the computer industry is slowly learning how to deal with people like you. More and more, they are implementing the "no documentation at all" standard. In the near future, it won't matter that you know how to read, because there will be no document anywhere for anything.
Actually, for Microsoft and Apple stuff, they're pretty much there now. Most of their new stuff has no written documentation at all. Their one remaining problem is that there are online forums where people actually write about such things, and google can quickly find them for you. But MS and Apple are working on ways of confounding that approach.
So soon you'll have no choice but to ask around to find out how to do something. If you do this via email or IM, your message will be hidden from others, so they won't be able to read the results.
I just wasted a number of hours trying to help a friend figure out how to deal with an incomprehensible Vista error message that makes logins totally fail. There are several thousand questions about the specific message online, and it appears that several hundred people have managed to fix it. But so far, none of the discussions we've found actually say what they did to fix it. So we've apparently hit a brick wall, despite all the bandwidth taken up by discussions of this particular problem. This illustrates how the MS community is learning to hobble those who can read, and ensure that there is nothing useful online on the topic.
But *really* competently designed software do the tasks *on behalf* of the user, so he can go for more gratifying things. So the parent poster is right: properly designed software makes user testing moot; there's nothing to test.
Unfortunately, doing that well will have to wait until we have good mind-reading hardware available on all our machines. Until then, it'll be necessary for the users to tell the computer something about what is wanted. And it'll have to be in a language that the computer understands.
Of course, when we have the mind-reading hardware (and good software libraries to translate it into something the programming languages can deal with), we'll have other problems. There have already been a few good cartoons about this subject. They usually have a user testing out the new "It knows what you're thinking" computer system, and an attractive person of the opposite sex walks by. The computer promptly does just what the user was thinking...
I've worked in a lot of software development projects over several decades, and I can say that this STFU protocol is nothing new. In almost most projects, the developers are never allowed contact with actual users. This is commonly used as an explanation for why software is usually so awful from a user's viewpoint. But managers consider user interaction a waste of expensive developer time, and do all they can to prevent it from happening.
Now, I can appreciate Shuttleworth's approach, since it seems to have the useful feature that the developer gets to observe the poor user's frustrations. But it probably does little to really solve the problem, since the developer (being a computer expert) probably develops little understanding of why the user is so frustrated. It's all too easy to dismiss the user's problem as mere ignorance. This does nothing to improve the usability of anything. To get any improvement, you need ongoing interaction between the developers and an assortment of users with varying knowledge of the subject area.
I have no idea how to change the software-development culture to encourage this. But it seems obvious that Shuttleworth's method won't do much to fix the problem. It may humble the developer somewhat, but unless it communicates more information than "ignorant user", it doesn't do anything to improve the painfully slow process of making new software usable by non-developers.
Of course new users are ignorant. They're new users, after all. They aren't the developers. There's no way they can have prior knowledge of how the software works. And if the developers have been kept apart from the users, there's no way the developers will produce something that makes much sense to most new users.
Actually, there was one project I worked on that provided access to ignorant users. The managers of the project were excellent ignorant users, at least at first. I found that they were very good test subjects for new versions of the software. They had a sense of humor about it, especially when I told them that they were losing their value to the group. They were becoming knowledgeable users of the software, and were losing their value as test subjects. They laughed, and found us some more ignorant users to test with. That product's introduction actually went fairly smoothly, and we got a lot of orders for the first release of the product.
But few managers are so understanding of the problems developers have in understanding how to make the software work well for novices.
Edu4 had not only removed GPL copyrights from VNC, thus making the product likely to be considered counterfeit, but also introduced a backdoor
Hmmm... In a number of countries, doing this secretly without a court order would be a criminal offense, punishable by large fines and/or some amount of prison time. I wonder if this is the case in France? Anyone know?
I've written a lot of software, and in most of it I've included debug hooks that I leave in the deliverable for when the users are having problems. I always document the debug hooks. It can be really handy if Customer Support can tell them "Add a -d3 option to the foo command and send us the log file." In several cases, I've included warnings that at levels N and above, the debug log may include things like passwords and encryption keys, so they should be very careful with the logs and erase them quickly. I do this mostly to let them know that such help is available when they need it. But I'm also always thinking that debug hooks can easily qualify as "backdoors", and are probably illegal unless the user is fully informed of their presence. On a couple of projects, the managers have ordered that this information be removed from the documentation. I've let them know (as nicely as I can) that they could be committing a criminal act in hiding the this information from customers. In each case, they have ignored this and trimmed the documentation anyway. So I kept copies of the email, just in case I'm called to testify. So far, this has never happened.
I can't figure out if this case is over contract law...
Right now, there's a message directly above from "russotto", giving an auto analogy that might explain it. In general, if A hands X to B with instructions that X is to be delivered to C, and B keeps X rather than delivering it, A and C both have grounds to sue B. The exact wording of the charges will vary depending on the nature of the deliverable product X and the relationships between A, B and C. But B can't just say "I'm not involved in the relationship between A and C, and keep X for personal use.
So do English cows also leave behind muffins? Over here in the Colonies, they're often called meadow muffins or cow pies. It could be interesting to know what the actual English call them.
I've always thought that this particular metaphor was a bit weak, since the American "muffin" is a rather small cake. It would make more sense to refer to horse droppings as muffins. But there's often no accounting for slang.
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I'm guessing you mean the boas when you say "not a threat to life". My friend did say that she had to learn how to feed them right to keep them friendly and docile. It turned out to be about two mice per week. And she also said she'd had an earlier snake that she fed too well, so it grew to be too big for her to handle or wear as jewelry. She donated it to a local zoo, where it was still living the last I heard, and got a new baby boa.
I've read that most of the "show" cobras are defanged. The story I read about the house cobras somewhere in India made the point that they weren't defanged, because they were there primarily for rodent control. The writer also said that the cobras and humans really didn't interact much. Nobody picks up a cobra and cuddles it. The cobras are almost entirely nocturnal, and sleep in their nest until the humans turn the lights (and/or fires) out. If people get up at night for some reason, the cobras just quietly slither out of the way. The writer also mentioned being a bit worried the couple of times that people picked up a cobra and moved it somewhere. Nothing happened, though, presumably because the cobra was accustomed to humans being about. To its little brain, humans are harmless and too big to eat, so we're just ignored as part of the scenery.
I also remember being a little dubious about there never being interactions with children. But the story really didn't say that much on the topic, other than that the locals didn't think there was a problem. This was contrasted with their very similar disbelief that the Europeans huge dogs weren't a danger to children. Of course, we know that some of them are, but that behavior has mostly been bred out of our dogs by the custom that a dog who harms a child simply dies. I wouldn't be surprised if these cobras were really semi-domesticated over the centuries, and made harmless by the same draconian rule.
The usual term for this sort of relationship is "feral", rather than "domesticated". I lived in Florida for a few years, and a lot of people there like the little lizards that are everywhere. They might not have liked them at first, but after seeing a few of them carrying of a cockroach for a meal, you're likely to decide that the little critters are really cute. But they're not pets; they just live in your house and eat your roaches (and keep out of your way).
I also did a small amount of googling, and found references to a few other cases in India where people (mostly rich people) have pet cobras that they like show to visitors, but they're all defanged. They probably get fed dead mice from pet stores, as my friend's boa did. Mice are cheap, and you can get them from pet stores nearly anywhere.
It is interesting that humans seem to like dangerous pets. In our case, in addition to our cockatiels (mostly harmless), we have a blue-crowned conure, and she has a seriously dangerous beak. We've seen her crack open cherry pits. (Try that with your teeth. ;-) She could crack a finger bone as easily. It took us about a month before we weren't nervous of her beak. Now we understand her, and we don't consider her dangerous. She is a cute, cuddly little creature who likes to play. But when visitors stick out their hands towards her and she makes a threat face, we warn them off. She's afraid of strangers, and she could hurt them if they don't know how to handle her. I'd estimate that she's about as dangerous as the average house cat or a medium-size dog. After all, they are predators with a mouthful of sharp teeth and some dangerous claws. She has one big, strong beak that she keeps honed to a needle point, plus 8 claws that are roughly comparable to cat or dog claws. Just the sort of critter that we humans like to keep as cute house pets. ;-)
Yeah; it's like that old puzzle: A guy goes south one miles, makes a right turn, goes west one mile, shoots a bear, makes a right turn, goes north one mile, and arrives where he started. What color was the bear?
Anyone living on a non-Euclidian world like the Earth should know the answer immediately. ;-)
Well, I for one believe in the Last Thursday Theory. This theory states that our world and the rest of the universe was created last Thursday (I forget the time). We were created with all our memories intact. The planet was created with all its fossil beds faking an old world in which geology and evolution had happened. The stars were created, along with the beams of light streaming toward our eyes showing us where they are. The bible was created with all its misleading story about a false (and none to bright) god.
I challenge you to find any evidence that this isn't true.
(Actually, there is also the other theory of why our universe was created: It's actually a simulation study. Each elementary particle in our universe is actually a data cell in the memory of a celestial computer that's running the simulation. Each unit of Planck time is one cycle in the simulation. Occasionally, the simulation is stopped, some editing is done, and the simulation is resumed; we call these events "miracles". We can't actually prove this theory, because if we ever do, the simulation is stopped, and some editing is done to invalidate our proof. This theory is not incompatible with the Last Thursday Theory, of course; last Thursday was when the simulation was started, with data initialized to include our memories, the fossil record, and the stars.)
I noticed quickly that those wikipedia articles talk a lot about mtDNA and Y-DNA evidence. It's true that a lot has beet written on that topic. But I've gotten a distinct impression that people who understand DNA tend to just grin when they hear that, and change the topic to something less silly. Yes, it's likely that our mtDNA and Y-DNA had their origins in a couple of small places, almost certainly in Africa. But that's less than 1% of our DNA, and it doesn't take part in genetic recombination. While it's interesting for several reasons, using it to reason about the origins of the thousands of other genes that distinguish us from chimps is, well, silly, and hard to take seriously as a scientific discussion.
A better characterization of the general scientific attitude toward the debate is "further research is needed". Not that that ever stops people from debating, of course.
It's sorta like the (back on-topic ;-) debate back in Charles Darwin's day about the remarkable similarities between those new "dinosaur" fossils and bird skeletons. A small population of scientists argued the question of bird-dinosaur relatedness. The rest of the scientific community said, in effect, "Well, that's very interesting, but we need more evidence." The debate died down because no further evidence was forthcoming. In 1970, all we had was a small number of Archaeopterix fossils, i.e., no progress at all had been made. Then, a couple of decades ago, a few other deposits were found, mostly in China, that had other bird fossils. This quickly revived the question, but it also died quickly as it became obvious to nearly everyone (except the media;-) that birds were indeed a branch of the dinosauria. Everything new was consistent with that hypothesis. Now a major remaining question is "Just when did the avian branch split off?" You'll read a lot of numbers, but there's still a "further research is needed" attitude on that detail, and this new fossil has just added a bit of confusion rather than deciding anything.
Anyway, sometimes it's best to just sit back, listen and chuckle as others debate something for which they don't really have enough good evidence. And if the debate inspires someone to fund further research, well, so much the better.
The American Automobile Association (AAA) has shown via study that the mere act of using or talking into a cellphone is a distraction & reduces response times below that of drunk drivers. People don't like to hear that, but those are the results.
One way to make sense of this is to conjecture that the governments that pass the laws they've been passing have a different motive than safety. If they were honestly trying to improve safety, they'd listen to the studies, and pass laws that improve safety. The studies aren't exactly secret. Many were government-funded, and the media has generally reported the results. The lawmakers have ignored the results, so the real motive must not be safety-related.
The various US cell-phone laws, and this NZ law, can be understood by looking at the changes that they mandate. All the US laws have banned hand-held cell phones, but allow "hands-free" cell phones, and this is to be done by buying some extra equipment that's to be attached to the phone. The NZ law does the same thing, and also apparently requires that you buy separate equipment for GPS nav use.
So the reasonable interpretation is that all the governments involved are trying to get people to buy more electronic equipment for their car. They aren't concerned with safety, because they are ignoring the studies saying that these additional gadgets won't do anything for safety.
Why would the government bodies want people to buy this extra equipment. That's an easy one. The governments are simply on the take. Various people in the governments have been "persuaded" (i.e., bribed) by the suppliers to pass laws requiring the owners of cell phones to buy the extra equipment.
We probably can't get the evidence to support this. But it's an explanation that makes sense. The claims that it's about safety don't make sense, since the required purchases don't add to anyone's safety.
... in beijing 10 ... archaeological site... fossilized remains proving that China was actually the birthplace of the human race.
Actually, with only a small amount of rephrasing, that's not much in conflict with one of the two competing theories of human development. One is the "Out of Africa" theory, that Africa has always been the center of human development, with people and their genes moving out of Africa, but rarely the other direction. The other is the "multi-center" theory, that people spread from Africa originally, but the slow flow of people and genes was essentially random, with a low level mixing in all directions.
There isn't any conclusive evidence. But everything that's known about humans at any stage is that most groups have always produced travellers, and travel along the coasts of the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Indian Ocean goes back as far as we can collect evidence of humans. Sailors have always been pretty good at gene mixing.
So most of the votes are with the "multi-center" theory. This would mean that there hasn't been a true center of humanity for at least tens of thousands of years, and maybe hundreds of thousands. Under this theory, each human gene variant has an origin, and our species is the sum of all these variants, each of which spread from wherever it first appeared. The oldest human settlements in the plains of eastern China would easily qualify as one "birthplace" of our species, along with the other centers in Africa and Europe.
The evidence about the Americas is much weaker. There seem to have been several major influxes of people through Alaska some 11,000 to 13,000 years ago. Knowing how humans build and use boats, it's unlikely that that was all the migration, and there were probably occasional travellers going both directions all the time, but we essentially have no specific evidence of it, only a few interesting "funny" remains. So the Americas may have been an outlier that provided little or no gene input to the rest of humanity before 500 years ago; we don't know.
But it is fairly well accepted that humans evolved first in Africa, spread out, formed a number of population centers, and have been mixing and exchanging genetic material ever since. So every major population center that existed, say, 50,000 years ago should be considered a "birthplace" of our species, in the sense that some useful genetic variation developed there and spread in the usual ways.
The only problem with the Chinese claim is that the word "the" in "the birthplace of the human race" implies uniqueness. China can't have been the only origin of humanity, though they are almost certainly an important "one of many" origins.
To get back on topic, China (especially Liáoníng) is also the origin of most of the avian fossils that we now have. There have been other important avian fossils in South America, and a few elsewhere.
Isn't it obvious? God would grant them flight, and we would get a new species.
Too late; it's already happened.
[Note the March 31, 2008 date on the video. ;-]
Archaeopteryx really doesn't look all that different from the raptors that came before it, and still has a very dinosaur-like head and no beak. Is it a bird?
Back in the 1970s, when (Yale professor) John Ostrom was reviving the old debate over the relationship between birds and dinosaurs, he brought up a funny and informative piece of evidence: He pointed out that we actually had more Archaeopterix fossils than we thought. There were found in museums in Europe, classified as small dinosaurs.
He suggested that we not treat this as a misclassification at all, but rather as a tacit acknowledgement that those fossils were primitive birds and dinosaurs.
He also said that we need more such fossils, but I suppose everyone agreed with that. The basic problem here is that birds just don't fossilize very well.
I saw an example of this a few years ago. Due to my wife's allergies to furry critters, we have long had pet birds, mostly small parrots. Several of our cockatiels (and one friends') have been buried in a small raised strawberry/flower bed in the backyard. One spring, I decided to dig it up and sift out the rocks and roots of some large weeds (e.g., creeping bellflowers). I used a screen that was easily capable of separating out objects the size of their largest bones (skull, breastbone, etc). I found lots of small pebbles and roots, but no bones at all. In only a few years, their bones and beaks had been completely reduced to topsoil.
We lost two more of our small feathered friends last winter, both older than the 15 years they are expected to live, and they're buried in the center of the same bed. In a year or two, they'll be part of the soil, leaving behind no fossil evidence that they ever existed.
It takes some special, rare conditions for a bird to be turned into a fossil. Their adaptations for flight include very light, hollow bones. It's no mystery at all why the fossil record is so sparse.
... clarify if you were going for strawman or false dichotomy ?
Are you trying to subtly sneak in a presumption that it can't be both?
But someone who has never owned a parrot? If he walked to a person and bopped his head sideways, I am 100% sure that 99% of the people would have no clue that it means that his neck itches. In fact, I'm pretty sure they couldn't even tell if he is tired, scared or in a bad mood. In all of those most people would think "He flies around and screams. He probably isn't happy?" and couldn't interpret anything more.
Yeah; that was basically what I was saying, though I said it the other way 'round. The writer I was talking about was saying that birds are totally alien to us; I was replying with the biologists' comments about humans having been modified by our domestic critters to have this "empathy" thing that enables us to learn to understand species (animals and plants) that are radically different from us. So, since I've lived with birds for decades, I find them very easy to understand. But I've never lived with horses, so when when my horse-owning friends tell me how communicative they are, I don't see it. I can easily believe it's there, though, from the close coordination you often see between a horse and rider. This fits right in with what the biologists have been saying about us: We aren't born with an instinctive understanding of other creatures, but we (or at least some of us) do have an ability to pick up on other animals' behavior and eventually come to an understanding of what they're communicating.
Another funny anecdote that bird owners can appreciate: While walking with a bunch of co-workers to lunch a couple of years back, one of them made a comment about some birds fighting. I looked where he was looking, and at first didn't see any birds fighting. Then I realized what he was seeing. It was a pair of pigeons, an adult and a juvenile. The juvenile was demanding food from the adult, and the adult was trying to wean the youngster by refusing it the food. To the other guy, it looked like they were fighting. To a person who has watched parent birds raise their babies, it was obvious at a glance what was really going on. That particular behavior isn't much like any human behavior, especially since we don't feed our young by regurgitating food from our crops. But once you've seen it a few times, it's easy to recognize a baby bird saying "Feed me!" while the parent is in effect saying "You're old enough to get your own food, you spoiled brat!"
I'd also agree with that parrot preening invitation. I know exactly the motion you mean, but I expect that it would be meaningless to someone not familiar with parrots. Similarly, I have a friend who has several pet geckos. She likes to tell people how friendly and communicative they are. I can tell that they really like her and they interact a lot, but I don't see the communication. I suppose after a few months around one, I'd start to pick up on their language.
But this has wandered a distance off the topic of why we cook our food. It has led to a few funny scenes in our house. I have several photos of our male cockatiel reaching across a plate to grab chunks of a steak. So much for them being strictly seed eaters. I have this mental image of a flock of several hundred cockatiels descending on a cow and tearing it to pieces. But I suppose not; it would be too tough for them unless it's cooked. The little guy also loves cheeseburgers, especially the cheese and meat, though he likes blood-and-fat-soaked bread, too. I doubt if his wild ancestors ever had such a diet.
I'll have to look that up; it sounds impressive.
I don't remember where the NG story was in India; I vaguely recall that it was southerly. I also don't know how large an area they were writing about. It is interesting how many different cultures there are in India. It's one of the most culturally diverse part of the planet. Not that people there always get along, but they do seem to be generally more tolerant of differences than people are in much of the rest of the world.
I wonder if I could find the video of the kid playing with the cobras again. It did make me a bit nervous for the kid, but it was interesting that the snakes just tolerated it and didn't much interact with the kid.
I do also remember that the story said that people didn't really interact with the cobras much. It wasn't at all like our cats or dogs. Mostly the cobras slept in their nest during the day, and came out to hunt mice after the people had gone to sleep. But the writing was clear, that the people there weren't afraid of the cobras.
For that matter, when I was young (8 or 9), I had a friend who had a pet tarantula. He carried it around on his shoulder, or sometimes it would be in his shirt pocket. Again, they didn't really interact all that much. But the spider trusted him, and tolerated being touched by the few people who were brave enough.
I also had a friend some years ago with a pet boa constrictor. She worked part time as a belly dancer, actually, and used the snake in her act, but she carried it around with her at other times, too. She described it as a large piece of jewelry. She could drape it around her body any way she liked, and dance, and the snake would just hang on. She liked the way that most adults were nervous about it, but she could walk up to children and have them handling the snake very quickly. She also said that handling snake was basically just a question of getting to understand them. Even poisonous snakes usually won't harm humans unless they think they're in danger, so you just have to learn how to make the snake trust you. Boa constrictors are completely harmless to people, though, until they get very big.
I'd guess that the Thai snake handlers have worked with their snakes for a long time, understand what makes them nervous, and don't do those things. If the snakes trust you, and have some food in their belly, they'll tolerate being handled as just one of the things those crazy humans do to you.
There is no question that the domestication process had a major impact on dogs. There has been a kind of taboo on looking at the other side of this, though: what were the effects on the humanoids, how much did our ancestors change due to the new partnership with dogs? ... any research in this area runs into a taboo about challenging the "god gave man dominion over the animals" of the dominant religious teachings.
Well, perhaps, in the "silly sciences". But among biologists in general, there has been no sign of such a taboo, and this topic is dealt with quite openly. It is well-understood that, as one text I saw recently put it, humans are one of the species with the most symbiotic relationships. We have domesticated several hundred animal species and several thousand plant species. Much of the reason we've been so successful at this is a major human adaptation that is referred to informally as "empathy". We are capable of understanding other species to a much greater degree than they can understand us.
The dog is an interesting case, because it's clear that they differ from their wolf ancestors in that they have a good understanding of human psychology, body language, etc. This is true to a lesser degree in a few other domestic species, notably cats and horses. But most of our domestic animals don't really understand us; we understand them (to varying degrees).
Or course, even with dogs, this takes some learning on our part. I ran across a funny example a few months ago. A writer (whose name I've forgotten) wrote that birds in general are "alien" creatures, with a body language totally unlike ours, and basically incomprehensible to primates like us. My reaction was "What? Is there a problem understanding bird behavior?" But I'd read some of the biological articles on the topic, and (probably more importantly) due to my wife's serious allergies to furry critters, I've lived in a house with birds for several decades. One of them right now is a blue-crowned conure, who was a "rescue" bird. She was found in a tree in a nearby town about 20 years ago, and some people who knew parrots got her to come down for some food. She was nearly starved, and had obviously not been a wild bird. She had a couple of homes for a few years, one of them a friend of ours who had retired, was traveling a lot, and asked if we wanted to give her a home. She has lived with us since.
Now, blue-crowned conures are not in any sense domesticated. It's likely that a very recent ancestor was caught in the wild, and she's the result at most a few generations of breeding (if you can call it that). Her species has no adaptations for living with humans, but she gets along well. And it's obvious that the reason is that we can talk to her in her own language. As the bird books would say, she's now part of a flock that's led by a couple of those funny flightless humans. A year ago, she got outside, and was in a neighbor's tree, totally terrified. We spent an hour "talking" her down to lower and lower branches, until finally she flew to my shoulder and started nibbling my ear. We took her back inside her home, and she shows no interest in that horrible outdoors, except to watch out the window when we're not there, squawking a greeting when we walk up to the house. Just as well; she'd die quickly in the New England winter that's coming, if she didn't starve first. (We also have cockatiels, but they've been domesticated and bred for about 150 years.)
Anyway, this isn't anything at all odd. Around the world, people keep all sorts of "undomesticated" animals as pets. There was a nice example years ago in a National Geographic article that started of talking about an area of India where people express wonder about the Europeans who keep huge "wolves" as pets; aren't they afraid of what those animals will do to their children? The article then went into its topic: In that part of India, people have pet cobras that wander freely around the house. They're not worried about the childre
... have a passenger help you with this quest for information.
Heh. The problem is inherent in most GPS devices. Figuring out your position using only the data being broadcast by GPS satellites is an iterative process, and depending on the positions of the satellites, it can take a while for the numbers to converge. Especially on the underpowered CPUs that are in most handheld devices. Yes, there's a solution: Leave the GPS hardware powered on permanently. This isn't practical with current battery and antenna technology. A handheld phone's battery can't keep GPS hardware alive overnight. GPS antennas have improved over the past decade, but batteries haven't improved much. So the GPS hardware gets turned off until you tell the gadget to turn it on by doing something like clicking on your phone's map icon.
When I click on my G1's "Maps" icon at home, it typically comes up showing my position about 6 blocks (1/2 mile, 2/3 km) south of the house, in the middle of a wooded area. After a delay of 2 to 20 seconds or so, it usually jumps to the correct location. Except when it jumps to some place that's wildly wrong, such as the day it told me I was about 100 miles to the southeast, some 20 miles east of Cape Cod, and headed north at around 50 or 60 mph. Then it popped to the correct location, so I quickly switched to the "Where am I?" screen, and found that my current velocity was west-northwest at nearly 300 mph. Then as I watched, it reported some impressive braking, to 0 mph.
Somehow, I don't think either of our cars is quite capable of that driving feat.
Of course. And that's a fact of life in almost all software projects. In the modern corporate world, such projects are almost always run by professional managers, not by people with software development expertise. They don't understand software, and never will. The developers have to do their best with instructions that are at best sketchy and ambiguous, and blatantly wrong much of the time. We software developers aren't going to change that; we can only learn how to work under such conditions.
An example from a project about 10 years ago: My main assigned task was developing an SNMP server for a new network switch. Management had accepted that customers wouldn't buy a switch without it, because most of their networking software used SNMP for nearly everything. But the requirements I got included an explicit statement that I was not to implement "GET-NEXT". (I can see the look of fascinated horror on the faces of readers who understand SNMP. ;-) The group's managers, in their wisdom, had decided that it wasn't needed. So I developed an agent that didn't do GET-NEXT, knowing full well what would happen. Sure enough, when they made the first deliveries to customers (who had been promised an SNMP agent), the immediate reaction was "This isn't an acceptable SNMP agent; it doesn't do GET-NEXT." I didn't hear the arguments, but eventually my managers understood that the agent violated the SNMP standard, and wouldn't be accepted.
So I got an urgent request: How quickly could I implement GET-NEXT? It turned out that the short answer was "One day." The longer answer was of the form "One day, but ...". I knew this would happen, so when I changed the default value of one flag from 0 to 1, GET-NEXT worked. I'd implemented it on the sly, knowing that it would be needed. But I warned them that, due to some deficiencies in the switch's lower-level software, it wouldn't have acceptable response times with requests for some tables. They sent the updated server to the customers, thinking they'd satisfied the terms of the contract - and the customers replied that it worked fine for simple variables, but rows of several tables had response times of more than a day, so it was still unacceptable.
It's at this point that this becomes relevant to our topic here. SNMP's GET-NEXT is the tool used to discover the indexes to sparse arrays. Think "routing table", which is indexed by a 32-bit IP address, but typically has under 100 rows. How long would it take, using network round trips, to run through all possible values of a 32-bit index to discover which rows are populated? That was the only scheme my agent could use for such requests, because the lower-level software that supplied the data had no such discovery scheme. Clients were expected to "just know" the indexes for all arrays, including sparse arrays with 2^32 possible rows (2^64 in version 2). This was not possible for any customers' software. So the low-level system design had to be modified so it could maintain a list of the indexes it was using. This took several months of meetings, most of which were devoted to convincing the managers of the switch's software that something they didn't need and would never use was required to sell the equipment to anyone. They actively resisted trying to understand why, as it wasn't their problem. The actual solution finally came about because two low-level programmers understood the issue, and implemented what I needed on the sly, without telling their managers (though the team leader knew and approved). I worked with them on the redesign that was needed so that their software could collect the data and keep it up to date in an environment
Well, yeah, but that guy typically has very similar problems with a carefully-architected system. The problem in that case is that the architected system was carefully designed to implement a specific structure, which matched the original requirements. But the new requirements don't match that structure, so the new guy has a choice: Implement a series of ugly kludges to bend the structure to what's now needed, or design a new structure and re-implement the whole thing from scratch.
I've seen any number of tasks that amounted to adding a new feature to a structure that was fundamentally designed to not allow that feature. Not intentionally, of course; the original designers just weren't thinking about the new requirement. Modifying the basic structure can easily destroy the old code, introducing subtle bugs nearly everywhere in the code.
OTOH, if the structure is a lot of separate, independently-designed pieces, with the software equivalent of duct tape (or steel I-beams) holding them together, it's often straightforward to build yet another well-designed module for the new requirement, and graft it into the existing structure in such a way that the old code isn't bothered by presence of the new module.
I have no idea whether or not GPS nav units on the market are so self contained, but nothing inherent about GPS involves the ability of anyone to track you.
The GPS-only nav devices are pretty much all self-contained. But newer devices are appearing on the market that include both GPS and wireless networking. My wife and I both carry one now. She has an iPhone and I have a G1 Android phone; both come out of the box with functioning GPS plus both cell-phone and wifi for downloading maps dynamically.
This is both a good and a bad thing. We have a 6-year-old Garmin GPS gadget whose maps are no longer correct for some parts of the local road system. We live near Boston, and the Big Dig seriously altered a lot of the streets and highways on the south side of the city. Updating the maps for that area would cost us $150 for a new set of CDs, and we haven't done it.
Both the GPS-enabled cell phones dynamically download maps of the immediate vicinity, and those maps are (usually) current. But we've found that when we drive out into the countryside and lose cell service, we often run off the map, and don't see any more maps until we drive into an area with cell service. The people who write the software haven't figured out that we need a way to tell it to look ahead and pre-load the maps.
So neither kind of GPS gadget does a good job of providing correct maps all the time, even for areas inside or near a major US city.
But, getting back to the quote above, they can all provide a history of our GPS coordinates during the recent past. Except for when the go crazy and think we're driving around somewhere out in the ocean. (And that's not hypothetical.) It'd be fun to see some authority try to use the GPS gadgets' history in court, and try to explain the "evidence" saying we'd been driving around 20 miles out at sea for half an hour, and then we zipped at 800 mph to a point on a highway 15 miles inland. Or all the times that we apparently drove off a road onto a lake, drove around on the lake a while, then drove back to the road.
Why not just FTP it.
Because FTP sends everything, including your id and password, in the clear. It is no longer used by anyone with a grain of sense.
FTP has mostly been replaced by scp, sftp, rsync+ssh, or other software that encrypts the data. This doesn't stand out in international traffic like you might think, because such a huge portion of network traffic is now encrypted. For instance, all your credit card transactions and your online banking are encrypted, mostly to prevent the ISPs from picking off your account numbers and PINs and selling them to the highest bidders.
Dogs can't sniff them out so unless they're going to start strip-searching *everybody* ...
Strip searches aren't nearly good enough. They'll have to do body-cavity searches if they're to find SD cards and USB memory gadgets wherever they may be hidden.
You don't have to cross the border to have such problems. A few weeks ago, my wife and I drove from San Diego to Yuma, and took I-8 most of the way. This was entirely within the US. But for several miles, I-8 is only a mile or so from the Mexican border. Her next bill from AT&T for her iPhone showed several hundred dollars in "roaming" charges during the short time we were in that section of the highway, although she didn't use the iPhone at all during the drive. But it did things like checking her email, using relay towers on the Mexican side of the border.
She's disputing the charges, and maybe AT&T will cancel them. We'll see. But at least the phone companies have developed some clever ways of running up the charges if you even come within electronic reach of the borders.
Funny thing is that my T-Mobile G1 phone didn't show any such charges. Maybe that's why they're not as big as AT they haven't learned to augment their income by using such tricks. OTOH, we've found that their customers seem to like them better, FWIW, while everyone we talk to seems to hate AT&T. (But she loves her iPhone. ;-)
I always get asked, "How did you get good with computers?" To which I reply, "I was just able to read."
Well, the computer industry is slowly learning how to deal with people like you. More and more, they are implementing the "no documentation at all" standard. In the near future, it won't matter that you know how to read, because there will be no document anywhere for anything.
Actually, for Microsoft and Apple stuff, they're pretty much there now. Most of their new stuff has no written documentation at all. Their one remaining problem is that there are online forums where people actually write about such things, and google can quickly find them for you. But MS and Apple are working on ways of confounding that approach.
So soon you'll have no choice but to ask around to find out how to do something. If you do this via email or IM, your message will be hidden from others, so they won't be able to read the results.
I just wasted a number of hours trying to help a friend figure out how to deal with an incomprehensible Vista error message that makes logins totally fail. There are several thousand questions about the specific message online, and it appears that several hundred people have managed to fix it. But so far, none of the discussions we've found actually say what they did to fix it. So we've apparently hit a brick wall, despite all the bandwidth taken up by discussions of this particular problem. This illustrates how the MS community is learning to hobble those who can read, and ensure that there is nothing useful online on the topic.
Lessee; do I need a ;-) here?
But *really* competently designed software do the tasks *on behalf* of the user, so he can go for more gratifying things. So the parent poster is right: properly designed software makes user testing moot; there's nothing to test.
Unfortunately, doing that well will have to wait until we have good mind-reading hardware available on all our machines. Until then, it'll be necessary for the users to tell the computer something about what is wanted. And it'll have to be in a language that the computer understands.
Of course, when we have the mind-reading hardware (and good software libraries to translate it into something the programming languages can deal with), we'll have other problems. There have already been a few good cartoons about this subject. They usually have a user testing out the new "It knows what you're thinking" computer system, and an attractive person of the opposite sex walks by. The computer promptly does just what the user was thinking ...
I've worked in a lot of software development projects over several decades, and I can say that this STFU protocol is nothing new. In almost most projects, the developers are never allowed contact with actual users. This is commonly used as an explanation for why software is usually so awful from a user's viewpoint. But managers consider user interaction a waste of expensive developer time, and do all they can to prevent it from happening.
Now, I can appreciate Shuttleworth's approach, since it seems to have the useful feature that the developer gets to observe the poor user's frustrations. But it probably does little to really solve the problem, since the developer (being a computer expert) probably develops little understanding of why the user is so frustrated. It's all too easy to dismiss the user's problem as mere ignorance. This does nothing to improve the usability of anything. To get any improvement, you need ongoing interaction between the developers and an assortment of users with varying knowledge of the subject area.
I have no idea how to change the software-development culture to encourage this. But it seems obvious that Shuttleworth's method won't do much to fix the problem. It may humble the developer somewhat, but unless it communicates more information than "ignorant user", it doesn't do anything to improve the painfully slow process of making new software usable by non-developers.
Of course new users are ignorant. They're new users, after all. They aren't the developers. There's no way they can have prior knowledge of how the software works. And if the developers have been kept apart from the users, there's no way the developers will produce something that makes much sense to most new users.
Actually, there was one project I worked on that provided access to ignorant users. The managers of the project were excellent ignorant users, at least at first. I found that they were very good test subjects for new versions of the software. They had a sense of humor about it, especially when I told them that they were losing their value to the group. They were becoming knowledgeable users of the software, and were losing their value as test subjects. They laughed, and found us some more ignorant users to test with. That product's introduction actually went fairly smoothly, and we got a lot of orders for the first release of the product.
But few managers are so understanding of the problems developers have in understanding how to make the software work well for novices.
Edu4 had not only removed GPL copyrights from VNC, thus making the product likely to be considered counterfeit, but also introduced a backdoor
Hmmm ... In a number of countries, doing this secretly without a court order would be a criminal offense, punishable by large fines and/or some amount of prison time. I wonder if this is the case in France? Anyone know?
I've written a lot of software, and in most of it I've included debug hooks that I leave in the deliverable for when the users are having problems. I always document the debug hooks. It can be really handy if Customer Support can tell them "Add a -d3 option to the foo command and send us the log file." In several cases, I've included warnings that at levels N and above, the debug log may include things like passwords and encryption keys, so they should be very careful with the logs and erase them quickly. I do this mostly to let them know that such help is available when they need it. But I'm also always thinking that debug hooks can easily qualify as "backdoors", and are probably illegal unless the user is fully informed of their presence. On a couple of projects, the managers have ordered that this information be removed from the documentation. I've let them know (as nicely as I can) that they could be committing a criminal act in hiding the this information from customers. In each case, they have ignored this and trimmed the documentation anyway. So I kept copies of the email, just in case I'm called to testify. So far, this has never happened.
I can't figure out if this case is over contract law ...
Right now, there's a message directly above from "russotto", giving an auto analogy that might explain it. In general, if A hands X to B with instructions that X is to be delivered to C, and B keeps X rather than delivering it, A and C both have grounds to sue B. The exact wording of the charges will vary depending on the nature of the deliverable product X and the relationships between A, B and C. But B can't just say "I'm not involved in the relationship between A and C, and keep X for personal use.
So do English cows also leave behind muffins? Over here in the Colonies, they're often called meadow muffins or cow pies. It could be interesting to know what the actual English call them.
I've always thought that this particular metaphor was a bit weak, since the American "muffin" is a rather small cake. It would make more sense to refer to horse droppings as muffins. But there's often no accounting for slang.