There is no magic formula. But there are some simple things that I find help me that have NOTHING to do with the language itself, or it's technical advantages/disadvantages. Strangely, they correlate in no way to popularity of the languages
You need a single document to sell me your new language. If you can't explain the concepts, basically, to a programmer in a page or two (enough that if you try to sell EVERYTHING I get bored reading the document as a whole), then it won't wash. If I can't understand why I should use your language, I won't. (Spreading it across a Wiki doesn't count, unless that Wiki has a complete copy available as a PDF or something readable.)
Your documentation should also help when I have a "how the hell do I do X?" question.
You shouldn't just assume that your way is the best. Ever. Just don't. It'll annoy me.
You shouldn't just assume that I'm happy to spend a year learning the quirks of your language.
I should be able to knock up a quick sample program, that uses one of your new features, and understand it in a matter of minutes. Literally. Minutes. Including downloading and installing your compiler / interpreter and getting it running.
Google sort of understood this with Go: http://golang.org/ They have all of the above, and even an online "compiler". They fail a tiny bit with "what's new" and selling the language, really, which is a bit of a shame, but they do a good job.
Ruby does okay too.
But PHP, one of the most popular languages, has a web-site that doubles as a bomb-site. It's hideous and has always put me off, even if they do have some of this information hidden away. It's not selling the language at all(presumably because they're "big enough" for everyone to just know about it). It's like reading a security/release-mailing blog sometimes.
C# doesn't sell the language at all, anywhere, online as far as I can tell. The first hit is Wikipedia. The next few are resource sites.
As far as I can see, C# succeeded because it was backed by a big company. By contrast, Go is still pretty obscure (which shows you there is no magic formula - Go aces a lot of the checklists but still lingers in the background). PHP succeeded because it was quick, simple, powerful and "came first" in terms of web scripting. It also created one of the web's largest security nightmares, which was something it was supposed to replace (Perl CGI).
C was popular because it was unique at the time, and powerful. C++ was popular basically because C was (that doesn't mean it didn't have advantages too, but it got popular by riding along - not by it's own merit at first, but that's what HAS kept it in place ever since).
There's no way to predict a success. Ruby / Rails came out of nowhere as far as I'm concerned and Ruby's been around since the 90's (Has it? Really? Bloody hell! Where was that hiding?). But things like Haskell were around too in that time and have never really caught on.
It seems the criteria are "ready - while being in the right place and right time", and almost the inverse of what you'd expect given a look at how much they want to ease programmers in. It seems that if you want to stand a good chance of being the next-big-thing, make an awful website, don't put up examples, make the simplest thing complicated or impossible, make an horrendous security mess, and then put it online. Then find the next fad, say your language is perfect for it, and push it everywhere you can.
National driving insurance, paid for by your normal taxes, that covers everyone and everything.
Or putting uninsured drivers in jail.
Both are expensive, but I have no idea why the UK doesn't do the latter anywhere near as often as it should (also, see: driving bans that you can go to court for driving in, and then be punished by being banned from driving - even if your under the minimum age needed to have a driving license!).
If light (a massless entity) can't escape a black hole, then I would suggest that neither can a neutrino. A physicist can correct me if I'm wrong.
Gravity is curvature in space-time, it isn't a "thing pulling you", so to speak. It's caused by the space around you warping to an extent that you can end up "falling" down the bent parts which provides a shorter path than other directions. You don't need to have mass to fall down the folds and bends that OTHER masses have created.
Just built a machine that, depending on some hidden factor, either catches the ball and transports it, throws the ball away off the bottom of the screen, or just misses the catch entirely and lets it smash into the end wall. But the actual result seems random because I don't change anything in-between, just press the spacebar to "launch" a ball.
Sorry, but I played The Incredible Machine when I was a child, thanks, and it was frustrating enough even when it WAS consistent. I don't program in languages that like to change the parameters at random.
What does your contract with Google say about payment schedules?
Because if it says nothing, or says something that means they *can* delay payment, you don't have a leg to stand on and Google aren't technically doing anything wrong (you may have a moral argument, but that's about it).
The only quote I've found is:
"Google expects to initiate payments to your bank account on the second of the month; exceptions to this are weekends or Bank Holidays. Payments will include sales processed from the first day to the last day of the previous month. Google Checkout will send your payout to your bank account; however, your bank may take an additional three business days to register the payout in your bank account. Please contact your bank representative for the specifics of your bank's turnaround time for electronically deposited funds. Note that in the event of a technical issue, your payout may be delayed and is expected to be initiated by the 15th of the month."
Considering it constantly says "expects" and not "will definitely and guaranteeably pay", that suggests to me that there is no "deadline". If you signed up to that, that's your own fault.
Migraines are a different matter that I covered separately in that same post BECAUSE they are nothing to do with headaches and because they have unique drugs that can combat them quite effectively if taken at the onset.
Anybody that confuses or merges migraine and headaches is lacking in understanding themselves. My current and previous partners both suffer severe migraine (up to and including visual effects such as not being able to cross a road because they see cars on the road and/or "seeing" people as headless when the migraine attacks).
And of course some things are subjective but you said it yourself - in a case where "only the strongest paracetamol can give some remedy for a short time", they need to be on the proper drug to deal with that (and/or find the cause of the headaches in the first place) or not at all. It's a case of "mild-drug, quite safe, let's take to help ease a serious warning sign because I always have".
It's not a question of lacking empathy. It's a question of being required to show displaced sympathy. Everyone has headaches, everyone has different severity, but if you are ROUTINELY taking paracetamol when they hit and they have little to NO effect, you're trying to self-medicate where medical advice should be sought.
My previous partner has a severe genetic condition which results in the joint's "safety barriers" being worn away because the collagen in her body is faulty. It's incredibly painful, all over the body, and has any number of weird side effects (immune to some anaesthetics, etc.). Their technique to cope was to take some paracetamol occasionally.
Their doctor advised them to take some more later. Once the doctor was given clear statements on the VOLUME of the chronic pain and my partner realised (in her own words) "that other people DON'T hurt all the time", they actually gave a medication which they themselves called "one step away from morphine". AND you could still take 8 paracetamol a day with it (which, again, we weren't told until we said that even on the drug given, there was still some pain). And that actually had some effect whereas the paracetamol, from day one, was next-to-useless.
If you have a headache that a headache tablet gets rid of, or helps, you don't have a need for the tablet, it's just convenience. If you have a headache that *isn't* affected enough by paracetamol, you need to get your doctor to give you something stronger. I'm *not* against prescription drugs. I'm against people thinking that "mild", over-the-counter drugs are harmless and effective for everything. They aren't.
All drugs have side-effects. In some those side-effects can be serious and even deadly, but it's pretty unpredictable what the side-effects will be and/or their severity in a particular patient, let alone one that takes other drugs. In others, the side-effects will never appear.
For instance, I'm one of those annoying people who doesn't take drugs unless absolutely necessary - not because I distrust the medical establishment (because I don't) but because if I don't need a drug, I won't take it - and even then, I never experience side-effects or, if I'm honest, much of the drug's effect anyway).
About the only thing I "take" is caffeine, and that only in drinks that happen to contain it - I don't deliberately seek it out or have a drink BECAUSE I need caffeine or because it's caffeinated (i.e. I've never said "Oh, I need a coffee" or had one to "perk me up").
People keep telling me to take headache tablets, cold/flu "remedies", painkillers, etc. etc. etc. and I avoid them like the plague. The people who use them use them CONSTANTLY and still get headaches, flu and pain worse than I ever have. If you have a pack of pills in your bag "just in case" of headache, cold, etc. then you should be made to throw them away - they are purely placebo. In any group of people, you'll find one who has pills for things like that. I *will* give you migraine relief, but that's a different thing entirely.
When I have had surgical work, I take the antibiotics and never get the painkillers. I don't see the point in them if I'm not hurting, but the antibiotics might *actually* be doing something (but I doubt it very much, to be honest).
But, literally ANYTHING I pop into my mouth that I haven't had before could kill me the instant it touches my stomach. You have no way to know. The question is now, and has only ever been, does the risk of the thing that the drug "fixes" overcome the risk of the drug itself? Hell, even paracetamol comes with a huge list of very-dangerous effects it can produce in some people. You can't read them all or not expect them to happen.
All this does is help doctors avoid risk-factors. Maybe they might spot a slightly increased risk that one drug has over a nearly-identical drug. But you're really playing tiny odds anyway. Any serious interactions that weren't down to just plain intolerance of the drug anyway have almost certainly already been found. That's why you do large-scale, long-term medical trials. Any new side-effects discovered will just go into a list of "possibles" but eventually every drug will list every side-effect as a "possible" effect, it's just a question of time and sufficient numbers.
Unless there is a known, dangerous interaction (in which case your doctor won't prescribe them to you simultaneously), nothing has changed, and you cannot begin to second-guess the drug itself. Hell, some people still only find out they are allergic to something in their 40's when they first try it. You can't account for that, and the majority of drug side-effects are minor and rare.
Look for them, by all means, but you might as well just write "There is always a risk of side-effects with any medication" on everything and have done with it, unless you know about a particularly dangerous interaction. Listing them only helps medical databases, not the average guy.
The same way we know they exist, proved they exist, detect them now enough to know that we've created them and the way we "thought" they travelled faster-than-light in Italy last year:
By their interactions with other particles.
They do interact, even though they can, statistically, still pass through entire planets in enough numbers that most come out the other side. But some interact with more-ordinary physical matter along the way that can be detected.
They aren't ghost-like, they are just incredibly low-mass so that they aren't affected by gravity, matter, etc. anywhere near as much as what we think of as solid matter. It's like firing peas at a football goal - most will pass through but a few might interact with it.
And there's a good chance that they never interact with anything even if they pass right through it. For example, if an atom were the size of a football stadium, the nucleus would be a pea in the middle of the pitch, the electrons would be orbiting around the edge of the stadium - everything else is empty space in the atom. That's a lot of space, not even counting the space *between* atoms too.
But send enough of the things, and you'll see a reaction that wouldn't have otherwise occurred as often (neutrinos are streaming through you now, they just aren't interacting that much and if they do, we're talking maybe a single atom or small handful in your whole body).
According to Wiki (which you could have read yourself), 65 billion solar neutrinos per second pass through every square centimetre of the Earth's surface. That's just the solar ones. And they all weigh some mass (definitely) but we interact so rarely that we have little to no way to measure that mass. But we still can prove they exists and can still estimated things like the number of solar neutrinos. So although they go through EVERYTHING, not all of them get through silently.
I would be of the opinion that, if the technology can be made to work, it can be scaled up and my "ideal" application would actually be to have two permanent stations, one either side of the Earth. Power would not be an issue. Interruption would not be an issue (presumably it would be encrypted anyway - that's all we do know with conventional communications methods that can be intercepted).
Positioning would be fixed. And because both stations can be as large and powerful as they like, fixed, and not transmitting anywhere where people might be "affected" (I know, I know, but people are thick), you could literally just keep throwing more resources at it and do a lot better than, say, trying to communicate with a space-based object or similar.
And they could then directly beam information through the Earth itself to the other side.
Given my crude and hasty application of mathematics, this would be a Pi/2-factor reduction in the distance travelled (so just under half), which could mean a lot in terms of international communications traffic. You'd effectively knock the largest international "ping's" down by about 1/2 across the globe without laying a single cable.
And the more of these stations you set up, joint to a conventional "wired" net, the more savings you could have. Connecting small places would just be a matter of building a station, not cabling to them. You wouldn't get interference or ships cutting international lines. And it doesn't have to be "the other side of Earth", you can slice a chord to any point on the surface of the planet (e.g. a nice, secure "uninterruptible" line between the White House and Downing Street, for example, or two trading centres, in the fastest physically-possible time to transmit that information between the two).
The possibilities are interesting, enough that if it's genuine, you'll have international comms companies and even governments that will want to fund it. A data link between any two parts of the globe for the cost of two buildings and no cables? Bargain, even if it takes 30 years of R&D to get it up to speed.
A guitarist today requires as much skill as a guitarist in the past. The music moved on but still requires skill to perform. Modern art is the equivalent of those "4 minutes of silence" tracks you get - takes NO SKILL to perform, or to reproduce in it's original media, but hailed as "artistic".
Taking a photograph is also considerably less skilful (though at least has SOME skill to it) than painting an image that *looks* as real as a photograph. Even today, if you can paint THAT well that people think it's real, people are astounded and think it's amazing. Because it takes skill. It doesn't take skill, beyond a printer's apprenticeship, to put up a poster from a photograph you took.
Pretension does not make art. Skill makes art. A measure of skill is reproducibility. If I can't make a picture look like the Mona Lisa using only the tools and techniques the artist used, then it requires skill to do. If, however, you have a few stripes or a splodge on a bit of paper that I *CAN* reproduce myself quite simply using the same materials, then it's not really skilful and thus, I would argue, no really "art".
This definition was the shared, global definition of art right up until the 20's, thus proving my point.
Ah, one of the first versions of Windows to come with a Tablet edition.
You'd think that if you couldn't make it successful, or even sound like a good idea, in 2001, you'd have given up by now but not Microsoft!
And I have to echo: Tablets are nice, and have their place. Give one to your local C programmer, though, and he'll turn it into a laptop in order to be able to use the damn thing like a PC. Don't even get me started on those people can't drag and drop with a mouse - how the hell do you expect them to slide, split, gesture, etc. to do the same?
"da Vinci" means "of Vinci", the town he was born in. It is common practice to name people after where they came from because family names weren't so distinct, or weren't available, (or because one family could OWN a small town) and "Leonardo of Vinci" provides a lot more accuracy than "Leonardo" (a very, very common Italian name).
Similarly, Fibonacci was actually better known as Leonardo of Pisa ("Leonardo Pisano") - it's doubtful he was ever really called Fibonacci in real life. The Pythagoras that you probably know best was "Pythagoras of Samos" (because there were so damn many of them). Caravaggio was actually known as "Michelangelo of Caravaggio" and has no relation to the Michelangelo who painted the Sistine Chapel. Plato's name was really Aristocles.
The modern system of family name is just that - modern. Before that, your name could be derived from your job (Smith, Baker, etc.), your nickname, your birth-town, your main residence, your parent's nickname, the name of the local lord, etc.
Thus, suggesting that modern norms be applied to historical names is absolutely ridiculous because - almost certainly - nobody ever referred to anyone in that way back then. Hell, we're not even sure if some famous historical characters were EVER called by the names we use for them.
He was Leonardo, from Vinci. He'd probably look around in the street if you called him Leonardo. That's about all we know. The only other name ever given to him was actually his father's (Piero - again, another common Italian name).
The painting's been behind a wall for the last X hundred years. How much better do you think preservation can get?
Modern preservation techniques range from having to combat mould, damp, humidity, dryness, insect infestation, frame cracking, etc. to just plain vandalism-proofing. Go read all the stuff that's been done to the Mona Lisa (the one painting most people would agree should be touched and played with as little as physically possible). The reason this hidden painting has survived so long is because WE DIDN'T KNOW IT WAS THERE.
Hell, even the drilling would have introduced dirt, dust, metal shavings, spores, etc. into the cavity that may not have been there (even if it wasn't air-tight). It's not a question of keeping that nice painting your mother gave you - it's hundreds of years old and will need to be preserved for hundreds more, and that makes preservation a different story.
Having said that, it's *BEHIND* an equally important fresco. If you had to tear down a Picasso to get to a 'da Vinci', you can't make that decision on your own. This is the same. And, we know that he thought that painting was shite, which is why he destroyed it and it was covered up. So you're actually tearing down one good, famous work for another crap, un-missed work that sits behind it by someone else - and in the process disturbing both that have been there for hundreds of years without problems.
Celebrity over talent. As I had a lengthy post about this on The Reg recently, I feel I need to comment.
It's a problem with the modern definition of art. Now "art" is about something by a celebrity that "makes you think". Historically, art was about talent - something you can't just reproduce. Now literally anybody could "recreate" one of the modern works in an afternoon and it would be *indistinguishable* from the original. Modern artists were asked to provide works for the 2012 Olympics here in London. I was genuinely of the belief that they were children's drawings for the same until I read the caption properly.
So even though Leonardo had obvious talent (and would NOT have been so famous otherwise), making works that only an expert painter could even approach, the modern art movement has to regard him as a celebrity in order to stay consistent. It's not about the "interpretation" of the "piece" rather than, say, the fact that it's a fucking good picture made with brushes and oils. Thus, you turn the value of the art from the talent used to create it to the celebrity name attached to it, and so any crappy sketch that could be attributed to him, some pillock will pay millions for so they can say "That's a 'da Vinci'". Not because it actually LOOKS good, or is a skilful piece of art.
Art *was* never about interpretation, but skill. It was never about celebrity, except as a recognised talent. Just because Turner did a shit in his toilet bowl does not make that shit art.
But, try and tell modern artists that and they laugh at you, mainly because they've redefined art to be something that they can be "good" at even if they are bad, and also something that they can claim you "don't understand". It started in the 1920's or thereabouts. Before that, if you did a crappy piece of art for your king, he'd have chopped your head off (or thereabouts).
Admire the SKILL of the artist, not the name or the "thought process". There are still skilful artists out there, but you won't find them in the Tate because they aren't "arty" enough.
Would my suggestion of "get rid of private investment, company involvement and sponsorship, 'research projects', and fancy ideas for improving education and get back to the good-old-fashioned teaching that involves: Throwing out the wastrels who don't care about their education and making the others work instead of coast" go down well with the X-Prize founders?
Really? Please explain the hidden Amazonian tribes that wipe themselves out without external intervention. Violence is not just conditioning, there's an element inherent in the human make-up. It's also not surprising. Chimpanzees and primates can be murderous by their very natures (chimps, especially, will routinely murder their own).
People who believe that humans are "acclimatised" into violence are no different to those who think we should eat only vegetables. There's a conscious effort you can make to go either way, and people pass their conscious efforts onto their children, but there's also a natural state that, if left to our own devices we will revert to. You would never be able to do the experiment, but if you left human children that had never been exposed to another human in the wild (somehow), they would resort to violence at some point (and not just in self-defence).
The Amish are not immune to violence, either, even amongst themselves (though they do emphasise a "brain over brawn" approach to make you stop and think before you do it - something that's NOT instinctual). A quick Google shows you that but, of course, not much Amish news ends up on Google at all!
A child will bash another over the head with a toy in order to take it from them. They will even bite and kick in anger before they can walk. Sure, you can be conditioned, but there's also a basal response before that kicks in.
None of which excuses such behaviour - you *CAN* be conditioned to be nicer, and it's not difficult when you're young. But to say that violence is the "norm" in modern society is getting increasingly untrue, and to suggest we condition children to accept it is even worse.
90% of the people who grew up watching violent movies, the news, etc. do NOT go on to commit any sort of violent acts, ever, at all. When people riot, the vast majority of people run away, not join in. When people go to war, desertion is rife and (nowadays with professional armies) only those who volunteered would go into battle, and there the conventions of war are generally obeyed (except by certain countries *COUGH*).
We don't have violence *because* of the media (I'm using the definition of media as ANYTHING, not just news-crews and journalists). We have violence *even though* the media exists. We'd have it if it didn't exist, plus a lot more misinformation, rumour, uneducated people (how many could "imagine" what it's like to be in a war without media coverage of some sort?), etc. which all lead to further causes of violence.
They "evolved" to do so. That's the answer. Natural selection. Those who were co-operative at times were more successful and hence more likely to survive. But it doesn't extend to year-round co-operation like your wren example. In the breeding season, competition gives you a better chance of producing offspring. In the winter, co-operation gives you a better chance of surviving the winter and not waste your energy fighting (because not of the females are breeding then anyway). Maybe bonobos live a different way in a different environment to chimps, buy any chance?
There's no "magic" here. The species evolved this way because of a history of random choices of co-operation (or at least tolerance) versus competition and, over time, this converges to a pattern of least resistance to survival wherever they happen to habitate.
Humans co-operate when it's advantageous (collecting food), but not when it's not (fighting over women, protecting your family, etc.). It's no great mystery, unless you want to identify the EXACT point it evolved or the EXACT cause of the evolution - but that's not going to be any use to you at all, really. Evolution is random and only converges on a best solution by chance.
Actually, no. Read the forums there. They tested ONLY the electronics (i.e. that the caps etc. were the correct value, the right current was on port X, etc.). They did not test network functionality. They NEVER plugged it into a network box.
And what sort of test regime is it if you only test with a short LAN segment without checking, e.g. signal strength, expect cable loss, etc.? That's exactly my point.
Who said you have to win? Note my post. In the case of such employment law, the way to go is fee-less on the plaintiffs end and very costly on the other, no matter who wins. And worst would *not* be a loss where you paid both side (i.e. you were forced to pay for your own stupidity in bringing the case) - only a loss that you had to "pay" your no-win, no-fee lawyer, because it might not be possible to prove you DON'T have a case.
But before it ever got that far, you'd have cost them more than any in-house counsel they have, and made them change their employment practice purely because such a ridiculous question on an interview is NOT viewed in a good light by employment law.
Someone in China (the same guys that did the mistake in the first place, which most mentions have assumed to be a deliberate cost-saving measure rather than a true accident) has to receive those units back, hand-unsolder 10,000 connectors and hand-solder 10,000 correct connectors back into place before then packaging them up and sending them back to the UK.
Where, still, as far as we know, there's been no tests of functionality other than networking (i.e. they haven't seen if similar issues affect the other ports like the display, etc.). And then someone has to test a good portion of them again before sending them onto the suppliers.
Meanwhile, they have to source a supply of 100,000's of the proper connectors for future runs, which they are just starting now. And hope that the network WAS the only problem.
In effect, they did no actual testing of the actual device functionality ("it'll all just work if the factory did their job") until the entire first batch was opened in the UK. The testing in the manufacturing facility was purely electronic and COMPLETELY missed this problem (surprise, surprise). And immediately upon opening them here, they spotted a problem, which took FOUR DAYS to isolate (and was isolated only because they were baffled and broke one of the connectors open and happened to spot the difference) and now it all has to be sent back for more work.
That's a mite more than a "minor bump". Not irreconcilable, but certainly not a bump. More like a hard jolt with metal grinding. I sincerely hope it doesn't turn into another OP, but given that we've gone from "No preorders" to well, pre-orders, and a full launch to, well, we'll tell you when we have a working device in the same country as our distributors, the slippery slope has certainly started. Of course they can recover the situation. The question is, what other mistakes have they made in their supply chain of making 10,000 bare PCB's with components (something that happens thousand-fold times every day).
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There is no magic formula. But there are some simple things that I find help me that have NOTHING to do with the language itself, or it's technical advantages/disadvantages. Strangely, they correlate in no way to popularity of the languages
You need a single document to sell me your new language. If you can't explain the concepts, basically, to a programmer in a page or two (enough that if you try to sell EVERYTHING I get bored reading the document as a whole), then it won't wash. If I can't understand why I should use your language, I won't. (Spreading it across a Wiki doesn't count, unless that Wiki has a complete copy available as a PDF or something readable.)
Your documentation should also help when I have a "how the hell do I do X?" question.
You shouldn't just assume that your way is the best. Ever. Just don't. It'll annoy me.
You shouldn't just assume that I'm happy to spend a year learning the quirks of your language.
I should be able to knock up a quick sample program, that uses one of your new features, and understand it in a matter of minutes. Literally. Minutes. Including downloading and installing your compiler / interpreter and getting it running.
Google sort of understood this with Go: http://golang.org/ They have all of the above, and even an online "compiler". They fail a tiny bit with "what's new" and selling the language, really, which is a bit of a shame, but they do a good job.
Ruby does okay too.
But PHP, one of the most popular languages, has a web-site that doubles as a bomb-site. It's hideous and has always put me off, even if they do have some of this information hidden away. It's not selling the language at all(presumably because they're "big enough" for everyone to just know about it). It's like reading a security/release-mailing blog sometimes.
C# doesn't sell the language at all, anywhere, online as far as I can tell. The first hit is Wikipedia. The next few are resource sites.
As far as I can see, C# succeeded because it was backed by a big company. By contrast, Go is still pretty obscure (which shows you there is no magic formula - Go aces a lot of the checklists but still lingers in the background). PHP succeeded because it was quick, simple, powerful and "came first" in terms of web scripting. It also created one of the web's largest security nightmares, which was something it was supposed to replace (Perl CGI).
C was popular because it was unique at the time, and powerful. C++ was popular basically because C was (that doesn't mean it didn't have advantages too, but it got popular by riding along - not by it's own merit at first, but that's what HAS kept it in place ever since).
There's no way to predict a success. Ruby / Rails came out of nowhere as far as I'm concerned and Ruby's been around since the 90's (Has it? Really? Bloody hell! Where was that hiding?). But things like Haskell were around too in that time and have never really caught on.
It seems the criteria are "ready - while being in the right place and right time", and almost the inverse of what you'd expect given a look at how much they want to ease programmers in. It seems that if you want to stand a good chance of being the next-big-thing, make an awful website, don't put up examples, make the simplest thing complicated or impossible, make an horrendous security mess, and then put it online. Then find the next fad, say your language is perfect for it, and push it everywhere you can.
P.S. You think London doesn't have drivers from all over the world on our roads either?
Hint: The UK is 30 miles from France joined by a lovely underground train tunnel that is DESIGNED to carry personal cars between the two.
National driving insurance, paid for by your normal taxes, that covers everyone and everything.
Or putting uninsured drivers in jail.
Both are expensive, but I have no idea why the UK doesn't do the latter anywhere near as often as it should (also, see: driving bans that you can go to court for driving in, and then be punished by being banned from driving - even if your under the minimum age needed to have a driving license!).
If light (a massless entity) can't escape a black hole, then I would suggest that neither can a neutrino. A physicist can correct me if I'm wrong.
Gravity is curvature in space-time, it isn't a "thing pulling you", so to speak. It's caused by the space around you warping to an extent that you can end up "falling" down the bent parts which provides a shorter path than other directions. You don't need to have mass to fall down the folds and bends that OTHER masses have created.
Just built a machine that, depending on some hidden factor, either catches the ball and transports it, throws the ball away off the bottom of the screen, or just misses the catch entirely and lets it smash into the end wall. But the actual result seems random because I don't change anything in-between, just press the spacebar to "launch" a ball.
Sorry, but I played The Incredible Machine when I was a child, thanks, and it was frustrating enough even when it WAS consistent. I don't program in languages that like to change the parameters at random.
What does your contract with Google say about payment schedules?
Because if it says nothing, or says something that means they *can* delay payment, you don't have a leg to stand on and Google aren't technically doing anything wrong (you may have a moral argument, but that's about it).
The only quote I've found is:
"Google expects to initiate payments to your bank account on the second of the month; exceptions to this are weekends or Bank Holidays. Payments will include sales processed from the first day to the last day of the previous month. Google Checkout will send your payout to your bank account; however, your bank may take an additional three business days to register the payout in your bank account. Please contact your bank representative for the specifics of your bank's turnaround time for electronically deposited funds. Note that in the event of a technical issue, your payout may be delayed and is expected to be initiated by the 15th of the month."
Considering it constantly says "expects" and not "will definitely and guaranteeably pay", that suggests to me that there is no "deadline". If you signed up to that, that's your own fault.
Migraines are a different matter that I covered separately in that same post BECAUSE they are nothing to do with headaches and because they have unique drugs that can combat them quite effectively if taken at the onset.
Anybody that confuses or merges migraine and headaches is lacking in understanding themselves. My current and previous partners both suffer severe migraine (up to and including visual effects such as not being able to cross a road because they see cars on the road and/or "seeing" people as headless when the migraine attacks).
And of course some things are subjective but you said it yourself - in a case where "only the strongest paracetamol can give some remedy for a short time", they need to be on the proper drug to deal with that (and/or find the cause of the headaches in the first place) or not at all. It's a case of "mild-drug, quite safe, let's take to help ease a serious warning sign because I always have".
It's not a question of lacking empathy. It's a question of being required to show displaced sympathy. Everyone has headaches, everyone has different severity, but if you are ROUTINELY taking paracetamol when they hit and they have little to NO effect, you're trying to self-medicate where medical advice should be sought.
My previous partner has a severe genetic condition which results in the joint's "safety barriers" being worn away because the collagen in her body is faulty. It's incredibly painful, all over the body, and has any number of weird side effects (immune to some anaesthetics, etc.). Their technique to cope was to take some paracetamol occasionally.
Their doctor advised them to take some more later. Once the doctor was given clear statements on the VOLUME of the chronic pain and my partner realised (in her own words) "that other people DON'T hurt all the time", they actually gave a medication which they themselves called "one step away from morphine". AND you could still take 8 paracetamol a day with it (which, again, we weren't told until we said that even on the drug given, there was still some pain). And that actually had some effect whereas the paracetamol, from day one, was next-to-useless.
If you have a headache that a headache tablet gets rid of, or helps, you don't have a need for the tablet, it's just convenience. If you have a headache that *isn't* affected enough by paracetamol, you need to get your doctor to give you something stronger. I'm *not* against prescription drugs. I'm against people thinking that "mild", over-the-counter drugs are harmless and effective for everything. They aren't.
All drugs have side-effects. In some those side-effects can be serious and even deadly, but it's pretty unpredictable what the side-effects will be and/or their severity in a particular patient, let alone one that takes other drugs. In others, the side-effects will never appear.
For instance, I'm one of those annoying people who doesn't take drugs unless absolutely necessary - not because I distrust the medical establishment (because I don't) but because if I don't need a drug, I won't take it - and even then, I never experience side-effects or, if I'm honest, much of the drug's effect anyway).
About the only thing I "take" is caffeine, and that only in drinks that happen to contain it - I don't deliberately seek it out or have a drink BECAUSE I need caffeine or because it's caffeinated (i.e. I've never said "Oh, I need a coffee" or had one to "perk me up").
People keep telling me to take headache tablets, cold/flu "remedies", painkillers, etc. etc. etc. and I avoid them like the plague. The people who use them use them CONSTANTLY and still get headaches, flu and pain worse than I ever have. If you have a pack of pills in your bag "just in case" of headache, cold, etc. then you should be made to throw them away - they are purely placebo. In any group of people, you'll find one who has pills for things like that. I *will* give you migraine relief, but that's a different thing entirely.
When I have had surgical work, I take the antibiotics and never get the painkillers. I don't see the point in them if I'm not hurting, but the antibiotics might *actually* be doing something (but I doubt it very much, to be honest).
But, literally ANYTHING I pop into my mouth that I haven't had before could kill me the instant it touches my stomach. You have no way to know. The question is now, and has only ever been, does the risk of the thing that the drug "fixes" overcome the risk of the drug itself? Hell, even paracetamol comes with a huge list of very-dangerous effects it can produce in some people. You can't read them all or not expect them to happen.
All this does is help doctors avoid risk-factors. Maybe they might spot a slightly increased risk that one drug has over a nearly-identical drug. But you're really playing tiny odds anyway. Any serious interactions that weren't down to just plain intolerance of the drug anyway have almost certainly already been found. That's why you do large-scale, long-term medical trials. Any new side-effects discovered will just go into a list of "possibles" but eventually every drug will list every side-effect as a "possible" effect, it's just a question of time and sufficient numbers.
Unless there is a known, dangerous interaction (in which case your doctor won't prescribe them to you simultaneously), nothing has changed, and you cannot begin to second-guess the drug itself. Hell, some people still only find out they are allergic to something in their 40's when they first try it. You can't account for that, and the majority of drug side-effects are minor and rare.
Look for them, by all means, but you might as well just write "There is always a risk of side-effects with any medication" on everything and have done with it, unless you know about a particularly dangerous interaction. Listing them only helps medical databases, not the average guy.
The same way we know they exist, proved they exist, detect them now enough to know that we've created them and the way we "thought" they travelled faster-than-light in Italy last year:
By their interactions with other particles.
They do interact, even though they can, statistically, still pass through entire planets in enough numbers that most come out the other side. But some interact with more-ordinary physical matter along the way that can be detected.
They aren't ghost-like, they are just incredibly low-mass so that they aren't affected by gravity, matter, etc. anywhere near as much as what we think of as solid matter. It's like firing peas at a football goal - most will pass through but a few might interact with it.
And there's a good chance that they never interact with anything even if they pass right through it. For example, if an atom were the size of a football stadium, the nucleus would be a pea in the middle of the pitch, the electrons would be orbiting around the edge of the stadium - everything else is empty space in the atom. That's a lot of space, not even counting the space *between* atoms too.
But send enough of the things, and you'll see a reaction that wouldn't have otherwise occurred as often (neutrinos are streaming through you now, they just aren't interacting that much and if they do, we're talking maybe a single atom or small handful in your whole body).
According to Wiki (which you could have read yourself), 65 billion solar neutrinos per second pass through every square centimetre of the Earth's surface. That's just the solar ones. And they all weigh some mass (definitely) but we interact so rarely that we have little to no way to measure that mass. But we still can prove they exists and can still estimated things like the number of solar neutrinos. So although they go through EVERYTHING, not all of them get through silently.
I would be of the opinion that, if the technology can be made to work, it can be scaled up and my "ideal" application would actually be to have two permanent stations, one either side of the Earth. Power would not be an issue. Interruption would not be an issue (presumably it would be encrypted anyway - that's all we do know with conventional communications methods that can be intercepted).
Positioning would be fixed. And because both stations can be as large and powerful as they like, fixed, and not transmitting anywhere where people might be "affected" (I know, I know, but people are thick), you could literally just keep throwing more resources at it and do a lot better than, say, trying to communicate with a space-based object or similar.
And they could then directly beam information through the Earth itself to the other side.
Given my crude and hasty application of mathematics, this would be a Pi/2-factor reduction in the distance travelled (so just under half), which could mean a lot in terms of international communications traffic. You'd effectively knock the largest international "ping's" down by about 1/2 across the globe without laying a single cable.
And the more of these stations you set up, joint to a conventional "wired" net, the more savings you could have. Connecting small places would just be a matter of building a station, not cabling to them. You wouldn't get interference or ships cutting international lines. And it doesn't have to be "the other side of Earth", you can slice a chord to any point on the surface of the planet (e.g. a nice, secure "uninterruptible" line between the White House and Downing Street, for example, or two trading centres, in the fastest physically-possible time to transmit that information between the two).
The possibilities are interesting, enough that if it's genuine, you'll have international comms companies and even governments that will want to fund it. A data link between any two parts of the globe for the cost of two buildings and no cables? Bargain, even if it takes 30 years of R&D to get it up to speed.
Damn. Only another TWO WHOLE YEARS of support then. That's about 1 laptop or half-a-desktop lifetime for me.
You miss the point.
A guitarist today requires as much skill as a guitarist in the past. The music moved on but still requires skill to perform. Modern art is the equivalent of those "4 minutes of silence" tracks you get - takes NO SKILL to perform, or to reproduce in it's original media, but hailed as "artistic".
Taking a photograph is also considerably less skilful (though at least has SOME skill to it) than painting an image that *looks* as real as a photograph. Even today, if you can paint THAT well that people think it's real, people are astounded and think it's amazing. Because it takes skill. It doesn't take skill, beyond a printer's apprenticeship, to put up a poster from a photograph you took.
Pretension does not make art. Skill makes art. A measure of skill is reproducibility. If I can't make a picture look like the Mona Lisa using only the tools and techniques the artist used, then it requires skill to do. If, however, you have a few stripes or a splodge on a bit of paper that I *CAN* reproduce myself quite simply using the same materials, then it's not really skilful and thus, I would argue, no really "art".
This definition was the shared, global definition of art right up until the 20's, thus proving my point.
Ah, one of the first versions of Windows to come with a Tablet edition.
You'd think that if you couldn't make it successful, or even sound like a good idea, in 2001, you'd have given up by now but not Microsoft!
And I have to echo: Tablets are nice, and have their place. Give one to your local C programmer, though, and he'll turn it into a laptop in order to be able to use the damn thing like a PC. Don't even get me started on those people can't drag and drop with a mouse - how the hell do you expect them to slide, split, gesture, etc. to do the same?
This was my turning point:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-15577818
"da Vinci" means "of Vinci", the town he was born in. It is common practice to name people after where they came from because family names weren't so distinct, or weren't available, (or because one family could OWN a small town) and "Leonardo of Vinci" provides a lot more accuracy than "Leonardo" (a very, very common Italian name).
Similarly, Fibonacci was actually better known as Leonardo of Pisa ("Leonardo Pisano") - it's doubtful he was ever really called Fibonacci in real life. The Pythagoras that you probably know best was "Pythagoras of Samos" (because there were so damn many of them). Caravaggio was actually known as "Michelangelo of Caravaggio" and has no relation to the Michelangelo who painted the Sistine Chapel. Plato's name was really Aristocles.
The modern system of family name is just that - modern. Before that, your name could be derived from your job (Smith, Baker, etc.), your nickname, your birth-town, your main residence, your parent's nickname, the name of the local lord, etc.
Thus, suggesting that modern norms be applied to historical names is absolutely ridiculous because - almost certainly - nobody ever referred to anyone in that way back then. Hell, we're not even sure if some famous historical characters were EVER called by the names we use for them.
He was Leonardo, from Vinci. He'd probably look around in the street if you called him Leonardo. That's about all we know. The only other name ever given to him was actually his father's (Piero - again, another common Italian name).
The painting's been behind a wall for the last X hundred years. How much better do you think preservation can get?
Modern preservation techniques range from having to combat mould, damp, humidity, dryness, insect infestation, frame cracking, etc. to just plain vandalism-proofing. Go read all the stuff that's been done to the Mona Lisa (the one painting most people would agree should be touched and played with as little as physically possible). The reason this hidden painting has survived so long is because WE DIDN'T KNOW IT WAS THERE.
Hell, even the drilling would have introduced dirt, dust, metal shavings, spores, etc. into the cavity that may not have been there (even if it wasn't air-tight). It's not a question of keeping that nice painting your mother gave you - it's hundreds of years old and will need to be preserved for hundreds more, and that makes preservation a different story.
Having said that, it's *BEHIND* an equally important fresco. If you had to tear down a Picasso to get to a 'da Vinci', you can't make that decision on your own. This is the same. And, we know that he thought that painting was shite, which is why he destroyed it and it was covered up. So you're actually tearing down one good, famous work for another crap, un-missed work that sits behind it by someone else - and in the process disturbing both that have been there for hundreds of years without problems.
Celebrity over talent. As I had a lengthy post about this on The Reg recently, I feel I need to comment.
It's a problem with the modern definition of art. Now "art" is about something by a celebrity that "makes you think". Historically, art was about talent - something you can't just reproduce. Now literally anybody could "recreate" one of the modern works in an afternoon and it would be *indistinguishable* from the original. Modern artists were asked to provide works for the 2012 Olympics here in London. I was genuinely of the belief that they were children's drawings for the same until I read the caption properly.
So even though Leonardo had obvious talent (and would NOT have been so famous otherwise), making works that only an expert painter could even approach, the modern art movement has to regard him as a celebrity in order to stay consistent. It's not about the "interpretation" of the "piece" rather than, say, the fact that it's a fucking good picture made with brushes and oils. Thus, you turn the value of the art from the talent used to create it to the celebrity name attached to it, and so any crappy sketch that could be attributed to him, some pillock will pay millions for so they can say "That's a 'da Vinci'". Not because it actually LOOKS good, or is a skilful piece of art.
Art *was* never about interpretation, but skill. It was never about celebrity, except as a recognised talent. Just because Turner did a shit in his toilet bowl does not make that shit art.
But, try and tell modern artists that and they laugh at you, mainly because they've redefined art to be something that they can be "good" at even if they are bad, and also something that they can claim you "don't understand". It started in the 1920's or thereabouts. Before that, if you did a crappy piece of art for your king, he'd have chopped your head off (or thereabouts).
Admire the SKILL of the artist, not the name or the "thought process". There are still skilful artists out there, but you won't find them in the Tate because they aren't "arty" enough.
Would my suggestion of "get rid of private investment, company involvement and sponsorship, 'research projects', and fancy ideas for improving education and get back to the good-old-fashioned teaching that involves: Throwing out the wastrels who don't care about their education and making the others work instead of coast" go down well with the X-Prize founders?
Really? Please explain the hidden Amazonian tribes that wipe themselves out without external intervention. Violence is not just conditioning, there's an element inherent in the human make-up. It's also not surprising. Chimpanzees and primates can be murderous by their very natures (chimps, especially, will routinely murder their own).
People who believe that humans are "acclimatised" into violence are no different to those who think we should eat only vegetables. There's a conscious effort you can make to go either way, and people pass their conscious efforts onto their children, but there's also a natural state that, if left to our own devices we will revert to. You would never be able to do the experiment, but if you left human children that had never been exposed to another human in the wild (somehow), they would resort to violence at some point (and not just in self-defence).
The Amish are not immune to violence, either, even amongst themselves (though they do emphasise a "brain over brawn" approach to make you stop and think before you do it - something that's NOT instinctual). A quick Google shows you that but, of course, not much Amish news ends up on Google at all!
A child will bash another over the head with a toy in order to take it from them. They will even bite and kick in anger before they can walk. Sure, you can be conditioned, but there's also a basal response before that kicks in.
None of which excuses such behaviour - you *CAN* be conditioned to be nicer, and it's not difficult when you're young. But to say that violence is the "norm" in modern society is getting increasingly untrue, and to suggest we condition children to accept it is even worse.
90% of the people who grew up watching violent movies, the news, etc. do NOT go on to commit any sort of violent acts, ever, at all. When people riot, the vast majority of people run away, not join in. When people go to war, desertion is rife and (nowadays with professional armies) only those who volunteered would go into battle, and there the conventions of war are generally obeyed (except by certain countries *COUGH*).
We don't have violence *because* of the media (I'm using the definition of media as ANYTHING, not just news-crews and journalists). We have violence *even though* the media exists. We'd have it if it didn't exist, plus a lot more misinformation, rumour, uneducated people (how many could "imagine" what it's like to be in a war without media coverage of some sort?), etc. which all lead to further causes of violence.
They "evolved" to do so. That's the answer. Natural selection. Those who were co-operative at times were more successful and hence more likely to survive. But it doesn't extend to year-round co-operation like your wren example. In the breeding season, competition gives you a better chance of producing offspring. In the winter, co-operation gives you a better chance of surviving the winter and not waste your energy fighting (because not of the females are breeding then anyway). Maybe bonobos live a different way in a different environment to chimps, buy any chance?
There's no "magic" here. The species evolved this way because of a history of random choices of co-operation (or at least tolerance) versus competition and, over time, this converges to a pattern of least resistance to survival wherever they happen to habitate.
Humans co-operate when it's advantageous (collecting food), but not when it's not (fighting over women, protecting your family, etc.). It's no great mystery, unless you want to identify the EXACT point it evolved or the EXACT cause of the evolution - but that's not going to be any use to you at all, really. Evolution is random and only converges on a best solution by chance.
Actually, no. Read the forums there. They tested ONLY the electronics (i.e. that the caps etc. were the correct value, the right current was on port X, etc.). They did not test network functionality. They NEVER plugged it into a network box.
And what sort of test regime is it if you only test with a short LAN segment without checking, e.g. signal strength, expect cable loss, etc.? That's exactly my point.
Who said you have to win? Note my post. In the case of such employment law, the way to go is fee-less on the plaintiffs end and very costly on the other, no matter who wins. And worst would *not* be a loss where you paid both side (i.e. you were forced to pay for your own stupidity in bringing the case) - only a loss that you had to "pay" your no-win, no-fee lawyer, because it might not be possible to prove you DON'T have a case.
But before it ever got that far, you'd have cost them more than any in-house counsel they have, and made them change their employment practice purely because such a ridiculous question on an interview is NOT viewed in a good light by employment law.
Someone in China (the same guys that did the mistake in the first place, which most mentions have assumed to be a deliberate cost-saving measure rather than a true accident) has to receive those units back, hand-unsolder 10,000 connectors and hand-solder 10,000 correct connectors back into place before then packaging them up and sending them back to the UK.
Where, still, as far as we know, there's been no tests of functionality other than networking (i.e. they haven't seen if similar issues affect the other ports like the display, etc.). And then someone has to test a good portion of them again before sending them onto the suppliers.
Meanwhile, they have to source a supply of 100,000's of the proper connectors for future runs, which they are just starting now. And hope that the network WAS the only problem.
In effect, they did no actual testing of the actual device functionality ("it'll all just work if the factory did their job") until the entire first batch was opened in the UK. The testing in the manufacturing facility was purely electronic and COMPLETELY missed this problem (surprise, surprise). And immediately upon opening them here, they spotted a problem, which took FOUR DAYS to isolate (and was isolated only because they were baffled and broke one of the connectors open and happened to spot the difference) and now it all has to be sent back for more work.
That's a mite more than a "minor bump". Not irreconcilable, but certainly not a bump. More like a hard jolt with metal grinding. I sincerely hope it doesn't turn into another OP, but given that we've gone from "No preorders" to well, pre-orders, and a full launch to, well, we'll tell you when we have a working device in the same country as our distributors, the slippery slope has certainly started. Of course they can recover the situation. The question is, what other mistakes have they made in their supply chain of making 10,000 bare PCB's with components (something that happens thousand-fold times every day).
And so the descent into a clone of the OpenPandora project continues...
My no-win, no-fee lawyer and EU courts will cost you a lot more than your house counsel will ever save you if you try to pull that trick on me.