Anybody who sits down and tries to do something "creatively" is a fool, unless he's doing some kind of art for art's sake. And if he calls himself an engineer, he's a fraud. Creativity isn't bad, it's just not an end in itself for an engineer. Creative is what you're forced to be when you've run out of proven ways of doing things.
What I think people may be reacting to is that you can't consistently do your best work if you're churning out one routine project after another. I think a project benefits from having a little bit of ambition built into it. Every project should have an element where you try something you haven't tried before, or do something better than you've ever done before. Each project should teach you something new, something that makes you better on the next one.
I am all too familiar with creativity as a desperate measure to rescue a poorly conceived project. While there is some satisfaction in pulling an astonishing design rabbit out of the hat, ultimately I find such solutions disappointing. There's always some compromise I wish I needn't have made. It's better to do the very best you can across the board and then stretch a bit beyond that, than to hammer together something you thought was impossible and shove it out the door.
Another way of saying this is you should attempt something on each project that might fail, but you should *choose* what this element will be rather than letting chance select your project's Waterloo.
However no process will make a difference if the developers have been directed to build the wrong solution in the first place, even if the code is 100% bug free.
This observation is wise, but I'd go further.
I was thinking recently about all the methodologies that have come down the pike over the years, and reflecting that I have found most of them to be good, but none of them to be sufficient. Furthermore, a lot of us had pretty consistent success before these methodologies came along. In some cases those methods crystallized and focused things we had been doing, but in just as many cases they corrected mistakes we had habitually made. Yet despite making those mistakes we had successful projects, so none of those best practice processes really encapsulate the essential factor in project success.
So what is that essential success factor? I think it's how much you care about the outcome.
The project that enjoys the highest commitment to success by all the parties involved has the greatest chance of succeeding. There are some ironic twists of course, such as projects that receive so much funding that they lose focus, but losing focus is in itself a kind of indifference to the mission of a project, a kind of going through the motions for their own sake. Imagine a software development team that had unlimited funding. Imagine everyone on that team had a child with an incurable disease, and the project when finished would enable a cure for that disease to be found. It wouldn't matter how much money you threw at them, they wouldn't lose focus.
So many failures I've seen have come from project participants who had agendas that took precedence over success. The most common agenda is career ambition: we're going to use XML, or Struts, or REST, or cloud because it'll look good on my resume, not because that technology is what is needed here. Methodologies are somewhat different because they tend to have a broader scope of applicability than a specific technology, but they also provide scope for resume boosting but time wasting activities (e.g., producing design artifacts that aren't strictly necessary).
It's not that resume boosting, or trying out technologies and processes are bad things; they're good things. Trying out some of your pet ideas in the next project is a good thing too. But they have to be overruled by the drive to make *this* project a success.
Oh, come now, be reasonable. For somebody to satisfy your demand, there'd have to be some kind of system that indexed *the entire Internet*. While we're at it, we might as well wish there was a system that magically tracked every image that was used on any web page anyplace in the world.
You already know whether or not you have a problem and whether or not you should do something about it. Imagine you were called upon to advise somebody who was in your position. What would you in good faith and benevolence advise that person to do? That is what *you* should do.
This is not to say that none of the many critiques of clinical psychology and psychiatry have any validity whatsoever. But as valid as many of these critiques are in certain circumstances, they tend to carry a big emotional stick. They may seem to imply that you are a lazy, undisciplined person who wants to take advantage of a fad so he can evade personal responsibility for his failures. In your role as impartial advisor it's easier to weigh such notions dispassionately.
Actually, people with ADHD often have *above* normal ability to focus on one thing to the exclusion of all others for a significant period of time. It's called "hyperfocus". That ability has many advantages, but that *propensity* has serious disadvantages as they fail to switch tasks at the appropriate time.
ADHD is not really about a deficit of *attention*. It's about a lack of voluntary control over attention. Imagine you are starving. You'd have a hard time concentrating on a tedious task if there was food nearby. ADHD brains behave like they're starved for stimulation. They have a hard time sticking to a boring task when a more stimulating one is at hand. That's why stimulant medication helps; they take the edge off a brain's hunger for stimulation so its owner can choose what he wants to use the brain for.
But it is absolutely true that ADHD is part of the normal behavioral spectrum for our species. In primitive societies, people at the ADHD end of the spectrum were good at the vital high stimulation tasks the group needed performed. Things that involved seeking novelty or tolerating danger. In frightening situations it's the people on the non-ADHD end of the scale that have difficulty focusing. People with ADHD can often perform better. In fact for some of those people high stress situations may be the only ones where they feel "normal". That's why people with untreated ADHD can develop the habit of seeking out conflict, or letting problems build to near crisis levels. Those people are misplaced in their work, but in the modern economy it may be hard for them to find a suitable place for their talents.
Well, I didn't say making a successful application performing some restricted set of NLP tasks was BS. It's the notion that a competent "CS person" would claim such an app was impossible because of complexity theory that is BS.
All your anecdote demonstrates is that your group didn't know how to hire computer scientists that were competent -- at least for that job.
It sounds like you're parroting material from some company's web site. Natural language recognition was an active area of research when I was a student in the early 80s, at which point everyone in the CS department would have been well versed in complexity theory. So far as I know NLP has remained an active field of academic research ever since.
In any case you'd have to assume that PNP (as most of us do), and you'd have to show that *every possible useful natural language recognition application requires processing some large volume of data with some NP-Complete algorithm*. That's a pretty tall order.
I've been in this business since the 1980s. When I started, there were proportionately a lot more math geeks in software than there are today, but by the early 90s there wouldn't have been enough math geeks in all the world to do the work that needed to be done. The people who came into the business had the attitude that complexity and computation theory were just a lot of ivory tower rubbish.
There was a certain validity to this attitude. There was ton of work to be done, but almost all of it amounted to assembling endless variations of the same old kinds applications but in new contexts. It was like snapping together different Lego projects. The mathematically difficult work had already been done for the people engaged in that work, and so their intellectual focus shifted to issues of craft and project management, which were by no means trivial things. Some of us kept algorithm books handy for that odd job where the library routines didn't quite do, but we didn't really need much math. We just needed a rough grasp of O notation and the ability to translate pseudocode into C. Most software guys didn't even go that far. They didn't have *any* math books or references on their shelves, just big, fat tutorial books on vendor provided solutions or architectural philosophy.
Then came the Internet.
A lot of Internet related software falls into the Lego Architecture class, but given a world of data that are interconnected, there's more need than ever for people who can create *new* algorithms that can squeeze gems of value out of that mountain of data quicker than the Universe will perish from heat death. Companies like Google or Facebook or LinkedIn can't just slap a Java front end onto an Oracle database. They have to create new ways to structure and process volumes of data magnitudes beyond anything that existed in the early 1990s.
Fundamental (in the sense of "foundational" rather than "beginner's") CS is once again very practical knowledge to have.
It just strikes me as strange that people who would be paranoid enough to encrypt their [probably completely banal and uninteresting] data, when told that their encryption might not actually prevent the world's top spies from accessing said data, would brush off the idea as simple paranoia. Make up your mind, folks: Are you paranoid or aren't you?
I agree. It would be wise to assume that even if the NSA doesn't have the equivalent of a back door, they could well exploit weakness in the software, especially if the user gets just a tiny bit sloppy and lets his paranoia slip just a bit (e.g. leaving plaintext in the hibernate file).
What is interesting is to take this line of reasoning back to the apparent claim that our analysts are already going to town on the stuff they picked up in the Waziristan Mansion. Either (a) those claims are bogus or (b) Osama didn't use any kind of encryption or (c) our crypto geeks have a way through the encryption software he used, which could either be a backdoor or a known but undisclosed weakness.
A is not so interesting and C we've beaten into a temporary coma, but B raises some interesting points.
Osama's survival for so long so champion at the art of discriminating paranoia. So why didn't he use encryption? If we assume he was acting rationally, it must be because he considered the risk of his computer falling into the hands of the enemy negligible compared to the other risks he was running. Either he got cocky, or he didn't give a damn what happened after he was out of the picture.
I don't think Unity is so totally horrible. I'd used it on a netbook and a spare laptop for a bit and aside from a lack of reconfigurability I was reasonably pleased with it. However, when I upgraded my main laptop to 11.04, I switched back to traditional Gnome because Unity didn't fit so well with how I used that machine.
I understand the issue of dedicating limited screen real estate to the launcher, but most of the time that's not so big a deal. More important is that the launcher rapidly becomes less and less useful the more apps you have to manage. That's true of plain Jane app menus too, but the usability of the launcher plunges from "hey this is pretty nice" to "goddamn piece of shit" with astonishing rapidity as you ask more from it. I found myself increasingly relying upon the search feature, which is nice to have in any case, but a real necessity in Unity in a way it isn't, say, in Windows 7. So it isn't just a case of the UI shell hogging screen space the user might want, the launcher really *does* waste space and more importantly, user effort by presenting him with a widget that doesn't work very well.
So my bottom line on Unity is that it's fine on some machines which have limited uses, but a poor choice of default shell.
What I don't understand is why graphical shell designers are so obsessed with creating new widgets and graphical effects but so apparently uninterested in what users are actually trying to do on their machines. One common pattern you see is people who clutter their desktop with documents and folders. It's usually a bad habit because when they switch tasks the stuff they need out on the desktop is different; but it tells me that users employ their computers to do different kinds of tasks on different sets of resources in the context of various projects. So they may have a different constellation of things they need when their pulling together the annual report than when they're projecting cash or something like that. So why don't we see more project management metaphors in user shells?
This isn't about the internet. It's just basic human behaviour.
Point taken, but human behavior can be shaped and amplified by its environment, and the Internet is a BIG part of many peoples' environment. It is human nature to weigh beliefs and values against the ones that prevail in their community, say about the acceptability of shoplifting vs. the acceptability of driving ten miles per hour over the speed limit. In most cases this heuristic has some value, but it can be unreasonably hard on, say, a gay atheist sci-fi fan in a small town dominated by evangelical Christians. If you wish you can reverse the scenario and make it a born-again Christian living in an ultra-liberal gay enclave. Either way, such fish-out-of-water individuals find in on-line communities a counterpoint the prevailing opinions of those around them.
That's a good thing, but like most momentous inventions there's a dark side to the on-line community. The tendency to be influenced by the opinions of those around you can broaden viewpoints in real-world communities in ways that don't happen in on-line groups. Imagine a town meeting where fiscal conservatives and education advocates have rough parity. Since neither side can dominate the other, members of each side begin adapting and adopting positions of the other side in order to advance their agendas. An on-line community would simply split where a real-world community evolves. After you've bought into a virtual community that has coalesced around an issue like birtherism, everyone you spend most of your time talking to about the issue with seems to agree with you. Then one day you mention it to your neighbor, only to discover he's apparently a nut who actually thinks Obama was born in Hawaii.
On-line communities shapes "big" ideological opinions in a way that makes them more extreme and less vulnerable to critical examination.
A few years back I spent several days exploring the world of on-line white supremacist and neo-nazi communities. You'd expect those places to feel like scenes from Mel Brooks' *The Producers* for being too over-the-top. But they aren't. On the contrary, they're models of decorum. Why shouldn't there be? Everyone there essentially thinks the same things. There's even a fair facsimile of reasoned debate, as when newcomers bring up some ancient piece of discredited racist pseudoscience. The newcomer is called out in a kind and supportive manner *then pointed to a more impressive piece of racist pseudoscience*.
What these on-line extremist communities do is threefold:
(1) Reinforce the participants' beliefs by providing community that is much more supportive and seems much more reasonable than the real world, while isolating the participants' opinions from any substantial criticism. (2) Train a participant to present the most effective arguments for the community's positions in a way that does not immediately brand him a lunatic, then provide emotional support and post-mortem analysis should he nonetheless be shown a lunatic. (3) Unites what would be a scattered group of isolated misfits into a coordinated community with economic, and in time maybe even political clout.
Please don't haul out technical terms until you understand what they mean. It is entirely permissible in an argument to cite sources that are authoritative *because they have relevant expertise or access to information* to overrule assertions made by those who have no idea what they're talking about, provided it is possible to impeach the credibility or competence of a cited authority. Of course you've got to apply the same standards to all the sources of information in the argument. Thus, I might make an argument that my doctor's diagnosis of diabetes is tainted by the profit motive of treating me for a chronic illness, but I have to be apply the same scrutiny to the motives of the nutritional supplement store owner who wants to treat me for a candida infection.
"I looked at it Obama's birth certificate and it seems fishy to me," is actually *more* an appeal to authority than, "the investigative reporting team of the New York Times looked at the birth certificate and concluded it was valid." While it is proper to assign the highest possible credibility to observations you have made yourself, it is logically improper to extend that credibility to inferences you are not qualified to draw. Those inferences have to withstand much critical scrutiny before they can overrule the inferences of someone specifically trained or experienced in such matters. Otherwise, it's no different than voting for a candidate because a favorite athlete has endorsed him; it's misappropriating legitimate credibility in one area for use in another.
of the striking things about the reaction to the president's calm and — to reasonable minds — entirely persuasive appearance in the White House briefing room
rhetorical nonsense.
I wonder if the irony of that assertion escaped you. Have you never heard of the fallacy of reductio ad ridiculum?
Well, I wouldn't jump to conclusions one way or the other about the effect of bin Laden's death. It's just as much an error to assume that an individual can have no impact as to think of everything in terms of personalities.
Osama bin Laden's notoriety is not the product of his having money or being in the right place at the right time, although those things clearly helped him. He may have been evil, but that doesn't detract from his uncommon leadership ability. The man had cunning, ambition, and especially, imagination. He was by all accounts charismatic, and was gifted at bridging differences with potential rivals. He had serious organizational skills, building a highly resilient, decentralized movement -- some have called it a "brand". People operating under the brand of "Al Qaeda" continue to plot recognizably "Al Qaeda" attacks despite myriad setbacks one might reasonably have expected to be fatal. Osama bin Laden anticipated those setbacks and consequently Al Qaeda by its nature is resilient to them. That resilience may have limited Al Qaeda's ability to score another 9/11 scale success, but the movement's survival as a serious threat is in itself a considerable success.
Clearly one of the setbacks bin Laden must have anticipated would be his own death. So we have to assume that at present Al Qaeda remains quite capable of doing the things Al Qaeda does on a day to day without bin Laden. The question is whether it can continue to *be* Al Qaeda without him. I think clearly his death has near zero impact on Al Qaeda's immediate operational capabilities, but over the long I suspect the Al Qaeda movement will go the way of the Ba'ath movement, degenerating into cliques of bitter rivals united only by a common historical name and an implacable hatred of each other
Why do you think that Verizon now has three classes of phones on their website -- iPhones, smart phones, and feature phones and stopped prominently marketing Android phones?
Simple. Because they're luring iPhone customers over from AT&T as their contracts expire.
I think Android fans overestimate how many people actually want Android phones and not just settle for them because they don't want to change carriers.
I'd go further. I'd say that except for geeks and developers, *nobody* sets out to buy their first Android phone, the way they'd set out to buy their first iPhone. They just settle on *an* Android phone as the one that makes the most sense for them. If you look at the Verizon "Smartphone" category, it currently contains 28 phones, two of which are iPhones, two Windows phones, one Palm, five Blackberries and eighteen Android. None of the Android phones are branded as "Android Phones", and they range in price from about the same as the iPhone to free. I'd be willing to bet that iPhone sales kick the crap out of sales of phones in the same price range (e.g. Droid Incredible 2, HTC Thunderbolt etc.)
So: A lot of folks "buying Android phones" aren't buying an *Android phone*. They're buying a cheap or "free" smartphone that meets their needs.
Does this reflect a kind of moral superiority one way or the other? No. It's just different marketing. Apple is a premium brand, and so they make a big deal about their brand and so do their outlets, because they're going to sell iPhones to people looking to "buy iPhones", which sell at a premium price. That doesn't make iPhone buyers dupes, it just means they're looking for a product they know and have confidence in. To use the inevitable car analogy, Apple is like BMW. People don't buy BMWs because they're better at hauling groceries or getting them to work. They buy them because they are enthusiasts. They could get by just as well with a high quality Japanese sedan for all their actual transportation needs, but we Honda Accord types don't scoff at them for paying more for the aesthetics they prefer, and by in large they don't feel morally superior to us either. Furthermore, my sister-in-law drives a nearly totally impractical Honda S2000 which a BMW aficionado might admit is an OK car, although not at all to his taste.
I think it's bizarre that in phones or tablets people feel they have to appoint themselves Zampolit for whatever device they happen to prefer.
And if people stopped being scared for a moment and thought (which they won't), they'd realize exactly who has whom by the proverbial short hairs on the debt issue. China doesn't want to undermine our ability to pay, say by totally cutting off cash to fund our *deficit* (a different but obviously related issue). They can turn down the cash spigot and make us hurt, but not *too* much, and it'd probably be for our own long term good.
Well, that may be harder than it sounds. As zalas pointed out above, the misappropriation of credit is taking place in Chinese cities bordering Russia. They probably have a money laundering scheme that converts that credit into something anonymously negotiable bought from accomplices over the border. By the time you've noticed what's happened, the money has changed hands so many times its in the hands of numerous legitimate businesses and has been for quite a few transactions.
So what you've got to do is trace that chain of transactions back until you find the frauds. Supposing you manage to get the law enforcement agencies of three (or more) different countries to look into this, the bogus "businesses" on the front end of the chain have shut down. The people behind those fraudulent businesses are still there, but they have a new set of businesses and victims. Since they're operating in a country with endemic official corruption and weak business regulation, they'll never get caught unless they're so greedy they do something stupid. Like still doing this when the Chinese government decides it needs to make a show of throwing some corrupt people under the bus.
I hate to be a grammar nazi, but you just modified a noun referring to Barack Obama with an adjective with unambiguously positive connotations. You should write instead, "So, did Obama manage to pull the wool over our eyes?" or possibly, "So, was Obama less wrong than he usually is?"
They're not about sitting around and deciding I am "an X" and comparing my lifestyle etc to "the Ys" in order to find differences, feel that I'm superior, blah blah
Well said. You're supposed to *know* you're better, and "conceal" that knowledge behind a condescending smirk.
Granted, but I had the exact same problem crop up yesterday *immediately after upgrading the kernel*. It could be coincidence but if enough people suddenly discover they have to clean out their fan heatsink then there's probably an additional factor at work.
From what I can tell from the article summary, they're saying the Internet pollutes more than it has to. How does that translate into "hating the Internet"?
I've got a Honda Accord that, the way I drive it, gets about 30mpg. I'd be delighted if it got 40mpg, and I'm sure that an equivalent car (for my purposes) that does that is technologically possible. That I'd prefer such a car doesn't mean I *hate* my Accord. I actually like it. I chose it over, say a mini-van or SUV, as a relatively clean car that enabled me to haul my kids around.
But one of the motivations for the huge job of terraforming Mars would be to create a second, long term home for humanity. If that home had only a several thousand year lifespan it would be much less attractive.
In any case, a nearly entirely CO2 atmosphere wouldn't be what you wanted in a terraforming operation. You'd need a lot more Nitrogen, which is critical in terrestrial biochemstry. Earth's atmosphere is almost 80% N2. Mars' atmosphere is 95% CO2 and 3% N2. If you vaporized some reservoir of dry ice, the proportion of N2 would drop, making it much harder to support life.
It would make much more sense to build very large pressurized enclosures in which you gradually built up N2 concentrations until plant life could thrive. CO2 is abundant in the atmosphere, so what you'd really want to find is a large reservoir of water.
On the other hand, there are those who can't review a tablet without gushing over the iPad in every other paragraph. Now the iPad is obviously a very good device, but I suspect these reviewers as using it as a *benchmark*, as if the only viable path for other tablet developers is to clone the iPad as closely as possible.
The Playbook is obviously a different product concept from the iPad. That does not automatically make it a bad one, although I suspect the concept was motivated by the classic high tech business mistake of fearing to cannibalize sales of one's existing products. The PlayBook is a *companion* product for Blackberry phones. It's an *accessory*. Right from there most reviewers seem eager to write the device off because it has limited appeal to non-Blackberry users, but that's simply not reasonable. Just because a device is not useful to *you* doesn't mean it's not useful to *anyone*. Provided that such a companion product is executed and marketed well, it *could* meet the needs of *some* users and generate profits for RIM. That's a big proviso, though, because launching such a product in the wake of the iPad2 and the first of a wave of highly capable Android tablets could well be the marketing equivalent of spitting into the wind. The standards for successful marketing and execution in this scenario are very high. A good case can be made that RIM missed the mark, for example by failing to ensure the PlayBook could be tethered to Blackberry phones on all carriers that sell them. That's a major marketing (not technical) failure.
Still, I think reviewers should erect a firewall between their critique of the product concept from a business standpoint, and their critique of the execution. That would make their review more informative and credible. I think they should say, "I think RIM's attempt to avoid cannibalizing sales of the Blackberry by marketing a companion device is a bad idea. They should produce something more like an iPad clone with Blackberry functionality, even though that will encourage many users to buy a different phone and use the PlayBook for email. That said, if you are a Blackberry user looking for a companion device, here's what you need to know." It's fine if they go on to conclude the device is a piece of crap and would be too expensive even if it weren't, but they should show a little more critical rigor in reaching that conclusion.
Nah. It shows that when you buy a product or service you need to understand what you are paying for, not extrapolate from a buzzword like "cloud".
You can't make a blanket statement one way or another about using something like EC2 without considering the user's needs and capabilities. There may be users who'd find the recent outage intolerable;they probably shouldn't be using EC2. But if they have good reasons to consider EC2 chances are they are goig to spend more money.
Slashdot Mirror
Anybody who sits down and tries to do something "creatively" is a fool, unless he's doing some kind of art for art's sake. And if he calls himself an engineer, he's a fraud. Creativity isn't bad, it's just not an end in itself for an engineer. Creative is what you're forced to be when you've run out of proven ways of doing things.
What I think people may be reacting to is that you can't consistently do your best work if you're churning out one routine project after another. I think a project benefits from having a little bit of ambition built into it. Every project should have an element where you try something you haven't tried before, or do something better than you've ever done before. Each project should teach you something new, something that makes you better on the next one.
I am all too familiar with creativity as a desperate measure to rescue a poorly conceived project. While there is some satisfaction in pulling an astonishing design rabbit out of the hat, ultimately I find such solutions disappointing. There's always some compromise I wish I needn't have made. It's better to do the very best you can across the board and then stretch a bit beyond that, than to hammer together something you thought was impossible and shove it out the door.
Another way of saying this is you should attempt something on each project that might fail, but you should *choose* what this element will be rather than letting chance select your project's Waterloo.
However no process will make a difference if the developers have been directed to build the wrong solution in the first place, even if the code is 100% bug free.
This observation is wise, but I'd go further.
I was thinking recently about all the methodologies that have come down the pike over the years, and reflecting that I have found most of them to be good, but none of them to be sufficient. Furthermore, a lot of us had pretty consistent success before these methodologies came along. In some cases those methods crystallized and focused things we had been doing, but in just as many cases they corrected mistakes we had habitually made. Yet despite making those mistakes we had successful projects, so none of those best practice processes really encapsulate the essential factor in project success.
So what is that essential success factor? I think it's how much you care about the outcome.
The project that enjoys the highest commitment to success by all the parties involved has the greatest chance of succeeding. There are some ironic twists of course, such as projects that receive so much funding that they lose focus, but losing focus is in itself a kind of indifference to the mission of a project, a kind of going through the motions for their own sake. Imagine a software development team that had unlimited funding. Imagine everyone on that team had a child with an incurable disease, and the project when finished would enable a cure for that disease to be found. It wouldn't matter how much money you threw at them, they wouldn't lose focus.
So many failures I've seen have come from project participants who had agendas that took precedence over success. The most common agenda is career ambition: we're going to use XML, or Struts, or REST, or cloud because it'll look good on my resume, not because that technology is what is needed here. Methodologies are somewhat different because they tend to have a broader scope of applicability than a specific technology, but they also provide scope for resume boosting but time wasting activities (e.g., producing design artifacts that aren't strictly necessary).
It's not that resume boosting, or trying out technologies and processes are bad things; they're good things. Trying out some of your pet ideas in the next project is a good thing too. But they have to be overruled by the drive to make *this* project a success.
Oh, come now, be reasonable. For somebody to satisfy your demand, there'd have to be some kind of system that indexed *the entire Internet*. While we're at it, we might as well wish there was a system that magically tracked every image that was used on any web page anyplace in the world.
You already know whether or not you have a problem and whether or not you should do something about it. Imagine you were called upon to advise somebody who was in your position. What would you in good faith and benevolence advise that person to do? That is what *you* should do.
This is not to say that none of the many critiques of clinical psychology and psychiatry have any validity whatsoever. But as valid as many of these critiques are in certain circumstances, they tend to carry a big emotional stick. They may seem to imply that you are a lazy, undisciplined person who wants to take advantage of a fad so he can evade personal responsibility for his failures. In your role as impartial advisor it's easier to weigh such notions dispassionately.
Actually, people with ADHD often have *above* normal ability to focus on one thing to the exclusion of all others for a significant period of time. It's called "hyperfocus". That ability has many advantages, but that *propensity* has serious disadvantages as they fail to switch tasks at the appropriate time.
ADHD is not really about a deficit of *attention*. It's about a lack of voluntary control over attention. Imagine you are starving. You'd have a hard time concentrating on a tedious task if there was food nearby. ADHD brains behave like they're starved for stimulation. They have a hard time sticking to a boring task when a more stimulating one is at hand. That's why stimulant medication helps; they take the edge off a brain's hunger for stimulation so its owner can choose what he wants to use the brain for.
But it is absolutely true that ADHD is part of the normal behavioral spectrum for our species. In primitive societies, people at the ADHD end of the spectrum were good at the vital high stimulation tasks the group needed performed. Things that involved seeking novelty or tolerating danger. In frightening situations it's the people on the non-ADHD end of the scale that have difficulty focusing. People with ADHD can often perform better. In fact for some of those people high stress situations may be the only ones where they feel "normal". That's why people with untreated ADHD can develop the habit of seeking out conflict, or letting problems build to near crisis levels. Those people are misplaced in their work, but in the modern economy it may be hard for them to find a suitable place for their talents.
Well, I didn't say making a successful application performing some restricted set of NLP tasks was BS. It's the notion that a competent "CS person" would claim such an app was impossible because of complexity theory that is BS.
All your anecdote demonstrates is that your group didn't know how to hire computer scientists that were competent -- at least for that job.
I call BS.
It sounds like you're parroting material from some company's web site. Natural language recognition was an active area of research when I was a student in the early 80s, at which point everyone in the CS department would have been well versed in complexity theory. So far as I know NLP has remained an active field of academic research ever since.
In any case you'd have to assume that PNP (as most of us do), and you'd have to show that *every possible useful natural language recognition application requires processing some large volume of data with some NP-Complete algorithm*. That's a pretty tall order.
I've been in this business since the 1980s. When I started, there were proportionately a lot more math geeks in software than there are today, but by the early 90s there wouldn't have been enough math geeks in all the world to do the work that needed to be done. The people who came into the business had the attitude that complexity and computation theory were just a lot of ivory tower rubbish.
There was a certain validity to this attitude. There was ton of work to be done, but almost all of it amounted to assembling endless variations of the same old kinds applications but in new contexts. It was like snapping together different Lego projects. The mathematically difficult work had already been done for the people engaged in that work, and so their intellectual focus shifted to issues of craft and project management, which were by no means trivial things. Some of us kept algorithm books handy for that odd job where the library routines didn't quite do, but we didn't really need much math. We just needed a rough grasp of O notation and the ability to translate pseudocode into C. Most software guys didn't even go that far. They didn't have *any* math books or references on their shelves, just big, fat tutorial books on vendor provided solutions or architectural philosophy.
Then came the Internet.
A lot of Internet related software falls into the Lego Architecture class, but given a world of data that are interconnected, there's more need than ever for people who can create *new* algorithms that can squeeze gems of value out of that mountain of data quicker than the Universe will perish from heat death. Companies like Google or Facebook or LinkedIn can't just slap a Java front end onto an Oracle database. They have to create new ways to structure and process volumes of data magnitudes beyond anything that existed in the early 1990s.
Fundamental (in the sense of "foundational" rather than "beginner's") CS is once again very practical knowledge to have.
It just strikes me as strange that people who would be paranoid enough to encrypt their [probably completely banal and uninteresting] data, when told that their encryption might not actually prevent the world's top spies from accessing said data, would brush off the idea as simple paranoia. Make up your mind, folks: Are you paranoid or aren't you?
I agree. It would be wise to assume that even if the NSA doesn't have the equivalent of a back door, they could well exploit weakness in the software, especially if the user gets just a tiny bit sloppy and lets his paranoia slip just a bit (e.g. leaving plaintext in the hibernate file).
What is interesting is to take this line of reasoning back to the apparent claim that our analysts are already going to town on the stuff they picked up in the Waziristan Mansion. Either (a) those claims are bogus or (b) Osama didn't use any kind of encryption or (c) our crypto geeks have a way through the encryption software he used, which could either be a backdoor or a known but undisclosed weakness.
A is not so interesting and C we've beaten into a temporary coma, but B raises some interesting points.
Osama's survival for so long so champion at the art of discriminating paranoia. So why didn't he use encryption? If we assume he was acting rationally, it must be because he considered the risk of his computer falling into the hands of the enemy negligible compared to the other risks he was running. Either he got cocky, or he didn't give a damn what happened after he was out of the picture.
I don't think Unity is so totally horrible. I'd used it on a netbook and a spare laptop for a bit and aside from a lack of reconfigurability I was reasonably pleased with it. However, when I upgraded my main laptop to 11.04, I switched back to traditional Gnome because Unity didn't fit so well with how I used that machine.
I understand the issue of dedicating limited screen real estate to the launcher, but most of the time that's not so big a deal. More important is that the launcher rapidly becomes less and less useful the more apps you have to manage. That's true of plain Jane app menus too, but the usability of the launcher plunges from "hey this is pretty nice" to "goddamn piece of shit" with astonishing rapidity as you ask more from it. I found myself increasingly relying upon the search feature, which is nice to have in any case, but a real necessity in Unity in a way it isn't, say, in Windows 7. So it isn't just a case of the UI shell hogging screen space the user might want, the launcher really *does* waste space and more importantly, user effort by presenting him with a widget that doesn't work very well.
So my bottom line on Unity is that it's fine on some machines which have limited uses, but a poor choice of default shell.
What I don't understand is why graphical shell designers are so obsessed with creating new widgets and graphical effects but so apparently uninterested in what users are actually trying to do on their machines. One common pattern you see is people who clutter their desktop with documents and folders. It's usually a bad habit because when they switch tasks the stuff they need out on the desktop is different; but it tells me that users employ their computers to do different kinds of tasks on different sets of resources in the context of various projects. So they may have a different constellation of things they need when their pulling together the annual report than when they're projecting cash or something like that. So why don't we see more project management metaphors in user shells?
This isn't about the internet. It's just basic human behaviour.
Point taken, but human behavior can be shaped and amplified by its environment, and the Internet is a BIG part of many peoples' environment. It is human nature to weigh beliefs and values against the ones that prevail in their community, say about the acceptability of shoplifting vs. the acceptability of driving ten miles per hour over the speed limit. In most cases this heuristic has some value, but it can be unreasonably hard on, say, a gay atheist sci-fi fan in a small town dominated by evangelical Christians. If you wish you can reverse the scenario and make it a born-again Christian living in an ultra-liberal gay enclave. Either way, such fish-out-of-water individuals find in on-line communities a counterpoint the prevailing opinions of those around them.
That's a good thing, but like most momentous inventions there's a dark side to the on-line community. The tendency to be influenced by the opinions of those around you can broaden viewpoints in real-world communities in ways that don't happen in on-line groups. Imagine a town meeting where fiscal conservatives and education advocates have rough parity. Since neither side can dominate the other, members of each side begin adapting and adopting positions of the other side in order to advance their agendas. An on-line community would simply split where a real-world community evolves. After you've bought into a virtual community that has coalesced around an issue like birtherism, everyone you spend most of your time talking to about the issue with seems to agree with you. Then one day you mention it to your neighbor, only to discover he's apparently a nut who actually thinks Obama was born in Hawaii.
On-line communities shapes "big" ideological opinions in a way that makes them more extreme and less vulnerable to critical examination.
A few years back I spent several days exploring the world of on-line white supremacist and neo-nazi communities. You'd expect those places to feel like scenes from Mel Brooks' *The Producers* for being too over-the-top. But they aren't. On the contrary, they're models of decorum. Why shouldn't there be? Everyone there essentially thinks the same things. There's even a fair facsimile of reasoned debate, as when newcomers bring up some ancient piece of discredited racist pseudoscience. The newcomer is called out in a kind and supportive manner *then pointed to a more impressive piece of racist pseudoscience*.
What these on-line extremist communities do is threefold:
(1) Reinforce the participants' beliefs by providing community that is much more supportive and seems much more reasonable than the real world, while isolating the participants' opinions from any substantial criticism.
(2) Train a participant to present the most effective arguments for the community's positions in a way that does not immediately brand him a lunatic, then provide emotional support and post-mortem analysis should he nonetheless be shown a lunatic.
(3) Unites what would be a scattered group of isolated misfits into a coordinated community with economic, and in time maybe even political clout.
professional news organization
argument from authority.
I call "thought terminating cliché".
Please don't haul out technical terms until you understand what they mean. It is entirely permissible in an argument to cite sources that are authoritative *because they have relevant expertise or access to information* to overrule assertions made by those who have no idea what they're talking about, provided it is possible to impeach the credibility or competence of a cited authority. Of course you've got to apply the same standards to all the sources of information in the argument. Thus, I might make an argument that my doctor's diagnosis of diabetes is tainted by the profit motive of treating me for a chronic illness, but I have to be apply the same scrutiny to the motives of the nutritional supplement store owner who wants to treat me for a candida infection.
"I looked at it Obama's birth certificate and it seems fishy to me," is actually *more* an appeal to authority than, "the investigative reporting team of the New York Times looked at the birth certificate and concluded it was valid." While it is proper to assign the highest possible credibility to observations you have made yourself, it is logically improper to extend that credibility to inferences you are not qualified to draw. Those inferences have to withstand much critical scrutiny before they can overrule the inferences of someone specifically trained or experienced in such matters. Otherwise, it's no different than voting for a candidate because a favorite athlete has endorsed him; it's misappropriating legitimate credibility in one area for use in another.
of the striking things about the reaction to the president's calm and — to reasonable minds — entirely persuasive appearance in the White House briefing room
rhetorical nonsense.
I wonder if the irony of that assertion escaped you. Have you never heard of the fallacy of reductio ad ridiculum?
Well, I wouldn't jump to conclusions one way or the other about the effect of bin Laden's death. It's just as much an error to assume that an individual can have no impact as to think of everything in terms of personalities.
Osama bin Laden's notoriety is not the product of his having money or being in the right place at the right time, although those things clearly helped him. He may have been evil, but that doesn't detract from his uncommon leadership ability. The man had cunning, ambition, and especially, imagination. He was by all accounts charismatic, and was gifted at bridging differences with potential rivals. He had serious organizational skills, building a highly resilient, decentralized movement -- some have called it a "brand". People operating under the brand of "Al Qaeda" continue to plot recognizably "Al Qaeda" attacks despite myriad setbacks one might reasonably have expected to be fatal. Osama bin Laden anticipated those setbacks and consequently Al Qaeda by its nature is resilient to them. That resilience may have limited Al Qaeda's ability to score another 9/11 scale success, but the movement's survival as a serious threat is in itself a considerable success.
Clearly one of the setbacks bin Laden must have anticipated would be his own death. So we have to assume that at present Al Qaeda remains quite capable of doing the things Al Qaeda does on a day to day without bin Laden. The question is whether it can continue to *be* Al Qaeda without him. I think clearly his death has near zero impact on Al Qaeda's immediate operational capabilities, but over the long I suspect the Al Qaeda movement will go the way of the Ba'ath movement, degenerating into cliques of bitter rivals united only by a common historical name and an implacable hatred of each other
Why do you think that Verizon now has three classes of phones on their website -- iPhones, smart phones, and feature phones and stopped prominently marketing Android phones?
Simple. Because they're luring iPhone customers over from AT&T as their contracts expire.
I think Android fans overestimate how many people actually want Android phones and not just settle for them because they don't want to change carriers.
I'd go further. I'd say that except for geeks and developers, *nobody* sets out to buy their first Android phone, the way they'd set out to buy their first iPhone. They just settle on *an* Android phone as the one that makes the most sense for them. If you look at the Verizon "Smartphone" category, it currently contains 28 phones, two of which are iPhones, two Windows phones, one Palm, five Blackberries and eighteen Android. None of the Android phones are branded as "Android Phones", and they range in price from about the same as the iPhone to free. I'd be willing to bet that iPhone sales kick the crap out of sales of phones in the same price range (e.g. Droid Incredible 2, HTC Thunderbolt etc.)
So: A lot of folks "buying Android phones" aren't buying an *Android phone*. They're buying a cheap or "free" smartphone that meets their needs.
Does this reflect a kind of moral superiority one way or the other? No. It's just different marketing. Apple is a premium brand, and so they make a big deal about their brand and so do their outlets, because they're going to sell iPhones to people looking to "buy iPhones", which sell at a premium price. That doesn't make iPhone buyers dupes, it just means they're looking for a product they know and have confidence in. To use the inevitable car analogy, Apple is like BMW. People don't buy BMWs because they're better at hauling groceries or getting them to work. They buy them because they are enthusiasts. They could get by just as well with a high quality Japanese sedan for all their actual transportation needs, but we Honda Accord types don't scoff at them for paying more for the aesthetics they prefer, and by in large they don't feel morally superior to us either. Furthermore, my sister-in-law drives a nearly totally impractical Honda S2000 which a BMW aficionado might admit is an OK car, although not at all to his taste.
I think it's bizarre that in phones or tablets people feel they have to appoint themselves Zampolit for whatever device they happen to prefer.
And if people stopped being scared for a moment and thought (which they won't), they'd realize exactly who has whom by the proverbial short hairs on the debt issue. China doesn't want to undermine our ability to pay, say by totally cutting off cash to fund our *deficit* (a different but obviously related issue). They can turn down the cash spigot and make us hurt, but not *too* much, and it'd probably be for our own long term good.
Well, that may be harder than it sounds. As zalas pointed out above, the misappropriation of credit is taking place in Chinese cities bordering Russia. They probably have a money laundering scheme that converts that credit into something anonymously negotiable bought from accomplices over the border. By the time you've noticed what's happened, the money has changed hands so many times its in the hands of numerous legitimate businesses and has been for quite a few transactions.
So what you've got to do is trace that chain of transactions back until you find the frauds. Supposing you manage to get the law enforcement agencies of three (or more) different countries to look into this, the bogus "businesses" on the front end of the chain have shut down. The people behind those fraudulent businesses are still there, but they have a new set of businesses and victims. Since they're operating in a country with endemic official corruption and weak business regulation, they'll never get caught unless they're so greedy they do something stupid. Like still doing this when the Chinese government decides it needs to make a show of throwing some corrupt people under the bus.
I hate to be a grammar nazi, but you just modified a noun referring to Barack Obama with an adjective with unambiguously positive connotations. You should write instead, "So, did Obama manage to pull the wool over our eyes?" or possibly, "So, was Obama less wrong than he usually is?"
They're not about sitting around and deciding I am "an X" and comparing my lifestyle etc to "the Ys" in order to find differences, feel that I'm superior, blah blah
Well said. You're supposed to *know* you're better, and "conceal" that knowledge behind a condescending smirk.
But I like complaining about what a bunch of pathetic, ignorant dupes people who disagree with me are, you insensitive clod.
Granted, but I had the exact same problem crop up yesterday *immediately after upgrading the kernel*. It could be coincidence but if enough people suddenly discover they have to clean out their fan heatsink then there's probably an additional factor at work.
... and now they hate the Internet.
Citation?
From what I can tell from the article summary, they're saying the Internet pollutes more than it has to. How does that translate into "hating the Internet"?
I've got a Honda Accord that, the way I drive it, gets about 30mpg. I'd be delighted if it got 40mpg, and I'm sure that an equivalent car (for my purposes) that does that is technologically possible. That I'd prefer such a car doesn't mean I *hate* my Accord. I actually like it. I chose it over, say a mini-van or SUV, as a relatively clean car that enabled me to haul my kids around.
But one of the motivations for the huge job of terraforming Mars would be to create a second, long term home for humanity. If that home had only a several thousand year lifespan it would be much less attractive.
In any case, a nearly entirely CO2 atmosphere wouldn't be what you wanted in a terraforming operation. You'd need a lot more Nitrogen, which is critical in terrestrial biochemstry. Earth's atmosphere is almost 80% N2. Mars' atmosphere is 95% CO2 and 3% N2. If you vaporized some reservoir of dry ice, the proportion of N2 would drop, making it much harder to support life.
It would make much more sense to build very large pressurized enclosures in which you gradually built up N2 concentrations until plant life could thrive. CO2 is abundant in the atmosphere, so what you'd really want to find is a large reservoir of water.
So true. I kept waiting for the "Django Reinhardt/Duke Ellington US Tour Edition".
On the other hand, there are those who can't review a tablet without gushing over the iPad in every other paragraph. Now the iPad is obviously a very good device, but I suspect these reviewers as using it as a *benchmark*, as if the only viable path for other tablet developers is to clone the iPad as closely as possible.
The Playbook is obviously a different product concept from the iPad. That does not automatically make it a bad one, although I suspect the concept was motivated by the classic high tech business mistake of fearing to cannibalize sales of one's existing products. The PlayBook is a *companion* product for Blackberry phones. It's an *accessory*. Right from there most reviewers seem eager to write the device off because it has limited appeal to non-Blackberry users, but that's simply not reasonable. Just because a device is not useful to *you* doesn't mean it's not useful to *anyone*. Provided that such a companion product is executed and marketed well, it *could* meet the needs of *some* users and generate profits for RIM. That's a big proviso, though, because launching such a product in the wake of the iPad2 and the first of a wave of highly capable Android tablets could well be the marketing equivalent of spitting into the wind. The standards for successful marketing and execution in this scenario are very high. A good case can be made that RIM missed the mark, for example by failing to ensure the PlayBook could be tethered to Blackberry phones on all carriers that sell them. That's a major marketing (not technical) failure.
Still, I think reviewers should erect a firewall between their critique of the product concept from a business standpoint, and their critique of the execution. That would make their review more informative and credible. I think they should say, "I think RIM's attempt to avoid cannibalizing sales of the Blackberry by marketing a companion device is a bad idea. They should produce something more like an iPad clone with Blackberry functionality, even though that will encourage many users to buy a different phone and use the PlayBook for email. That said, if you are a Blackberry user looking for a companion device, here's what you need to know." It's fine if they go on to conclude the device is a piece of crap and would be too expensive even if it weren't, but they should show a little more critical rigor in reaching that conclusion.
Nah. It shows that when you buy a product or service you need to understand what you are paying for, not extrapolate from a buzzword like "cloud".
You can't make a blanket statement one way or another about using something like EC2 without considering the user's needs and capabilities. There may be users who'd find the recent outage intolerable ;they probably shouldn't be using EC2. But if they have good reasons to consider EC2 chances are they are goig to spend more money.