Really? When you're objectively trying to find something such as a temperature signal it's common to fudge this way and that?
Well, as usual the problem here is the imputations of *motives*.
It is not common when "you're objectively trying to find something such as a temperature signal". It is common when you are trying to figure out how your code behaves. I should think *anybody* with any non-trivial programming experience has done things to code with no intention of putting those changes into production (e.g. stripping out an input check and putting bad data through it).
Of course, most of us have gone beyond such crude methods of testing, because we have things like unit testing libraries and other techniques that allow us to factor assumptions out of code. I get the impression that scientific programmers are not big into software architecture; they still use Fortran, for chrissakes.
What matters in science is what gets published. If the published results are not supportable by data, then you publish a paper that takes them down. If you could disprove AGW it'd make your career.
Asses aside, comparing electrical heating to electrical vehicles is kind of silly.
In a vehicle, most of the heat is waste; in a furnace it is a product. This especially comes into play when you talk about city driving where the energy spent idling and lost to braking can't be recovered.
As the cost of oil goes up, electric vehicles which may be ultimately powered by *other* sources (such as coal, nuclear, hydro, wind) will become more economical, but not for every kind of driver at the same time. Currently I work at home and take maybe one sub two-mile trip a day -- but I *do* need the car for that (otherwise I walk and take public transit). For me an electric car would be economical *today*, just based on the wear and tear on the ICE driving it that way.
Likewise, I suspect that electric house heating will begin to overtake oil (which is predominant here in New England to) on a region by region basis, and within a region on a case by case basis. The ability to heat each room in the house differently with electricity may be an early win for some.
Well, I think of this way. Suppose I needed a size 22 shoe and there is no such thing manufactured. I might decide to buy two pairs of size 11, but I'd still have to go barefoot despite having enough shoe *in total*.
The experience you speak of is not held by *countries*, but by individuals.
Remember, India is a very populous country. It has a larger middle class than the US. It has comparable numbers of engineers to the US.
Now how many of those engineers would have to work on cutting edge design teams, and how long, before enough of them would have the skills to form the core of an all Indian team capable of doing something nobody had tried before? Especially if that wasn't coming up with a new processor design, but rather a way of interconnecting more cores than people thought was practical? That kind of creative work isn't the kind of thing you can parse out to a giant army of engineers. The key insights are probably the product of a small number of engineers, maybe even a single individual.
How hard is maintaining a database? Especially one that doesn't get updated that often? I'd guess the trick would be distributing the right information to the right devices.
It seems to me that this is *exactly* the kind of thing that should be run by government bureaucrats. It could be designed and operated by a private organization like BB&N, but I certainly don't want to see for-profit companies that might have agendas *other* than accuracy. Crafting creative public policy is not something you want a for-profit entity to do, either directly or through front groups.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I fail to see any economic mystery here. They're just creating a new, flexible class of license which allows manufacturers to sell, and consumers to buy and operate, devices that adjust to the local allocation of spectrum. Invest the money in the system so it gets done fairly, then tax the devices enough so the database becomes self-supporting.
Right. Same guy. Random number input into his program produced a hockey stick.
Right. According to another guy who was hand picked by a pair of politicians to come up with that result, and who "peer reviewed" it by emailing it to a couple of his friends.
This, by the way, is *not* what science is about. In case you haven't noticed, this has become about how Mann is evil and Wegman is good. In truth, the politicians got some statistics Nazi to write a criticism of Mann's report and -- big surprise -- the statistician found statistical practices he could criticize. That's true of *all* scientific papers. None of them are unassailable. When the effects of the flaws Wegman pointed out were factored in in the peer reviewed literature, the results were not significantly changed. So ironically, by bypassing the peer review process, Wegman himself ended up overstating *his* results.
It is significant that Wegman, whose paper you are referring to, later presented *his* findings in a talk entitled, "Method Wrong + Answer Correct = Bad Science". Which shows that when you push a scholar, he doesn't back down, he *clarifies his position*.
That's true. But what are the chances they pay the market salaries for *competent* sysadmins, even scaled for the vacation time? How much money to do they spend on career development? Do they listen to the staff when the staff says something is needed?
I'm not saying it wasn't unprofessional. But *if* the guy did a competent job for peanuts, and perks like running SETI@Home were part of what kept him happy doing his job competently at below market wages, I'd say that was a good deal. If he disobeyed a direct order to remove it and lied about it, that's certainly cause for disciplinary action.
It sounds to me like the county school system's IT department and infrastructure is in terrible shape. That's not *this* guy's fault. His part of the problem, if it can be quantified at all, is tiny.
When there is a huge problem that's taken years to develop, and the big shots go apeshit over some relatively small thing that a lowish level, expendable drone did, there's a word for that: *scapegoating*.
Fire the guy, if you must, but go all the way up the chain of command and keep firing until you reach somebody who did everything he was supposed to. Too disruptive? Well then fire from the top down until you can't afford to fire any more. Don't start at the bottom. That's just BS.
I agree there is no difference in *principle* between a hardware patent and a software patent. There is a difference in *practice* and patents are a *practical* matter. As a mechanical engineer friend of mine likes to say, "In principle there is no difference between principle and practice but in practice there is."
Patents aren't real property, they are a social bargain designed to maximize utility. Judged that way, most software patents are a failure.
Goetz makes a good point about the need for research and investment in *some* software projects, and he almost puts his finger right on the problem:
There is six phases in the life cycle of software products: Definition, Design, Implementation, Delivery, Maintenance, and Enhancements. Let’s look a little closely at these phases and you will see how closely they resemble characteristics common to all manufacturing companies.
So why don't we reward companies that put effort into maintenance and enhancements with a monopoly? That would be even better -- in the software world. You see, software *is* different; it has the same topology, but not at all the same shape.
Patents are supposed to reward originality. What is originality? Well a patent is supposed to be non-obvious. Well what does that mean? Well, I suppose that means the patent must demonstrate fresh insight. But what does "fresh insight" mean? It's just another way of saying "originality".
I think what it all comes down to is that invention is about *Definition*. A real invention doesn't just restate known solutions; it restates the problem. The example I like to use is the mechanical watch. Before the use of the balance wheel (in essence a wheel shaped pendulum), the problem of making a compact timepiece more accurate could be stated this way: "How do balance friction and force more precisely in order to obtain more precise performance?" After you hit on the notion of the balance wheel you *still* have this problem, but you've just got much further down the precision road by briefly considering an entirely *different* problem: "How do I get the benefits of a pendulum in something compact that does not require the timepiece to be held in the same orientation relative to gravity?" By setting aside the problem everyone else is working on, you can arrive at the essence of what a pendulum does: balancing the acceleration of a known mass around a pivot (a wheel instead of a lever) against a known force (a spring of known elasticity instead of gravity).
The majority of the trade-offs you choose in making a timepiece more mechanically precise aren't like this. They're just different *designs*, not inventions, because they take a different stab at optimizing a problem with no perfect solution (which probably would require a largely frictionless device driven by an endless source of energy).
The process of definition is *different* for software than hardware, because computers are *general purpose data transformation engines*. In software engineering, our lever or the inclined plane is the Turing equivalent language. With this one machine we can literally do *anything* that is computationally possible. It *defines* computationally possible. This shows right off the bat the far greater flexibility the intellectual tools of the software designer are over the mechanical designer or civil engineer.
If you want an analogy for the relationship of hardware invention to software invention, think of the relationship of civil engineering to building architecture. In civil engineering, innovation is highly risky and very, very rare. A civil engineer prefers to be able to adapt a known and trusted design pattern to a problem. Where there is invention, it is driven by necessity. When there is no *room* to put conventional bridge piers on the site, he'll be forced to come up with a cable stay bridge.
Now what about architects? They design useful things all the time. Why can't *they* claim patents on th
Well you could have called me King of Computing; Lord Protector of Communication Infrastructure; Suzerein of Anything That Might Break; and Keeper of the Secret of Setting Digital Watches.
I'd have answered to Patron Saint of Lost Files or The Last Best Hope of the Desperate Cubicle Dwellers.
I don't play that role any longer, but when I did, I had no doubt I was important to *other* people. They turned to me when they were in doubt or trouble, and I and I sent them away feeling like they had some control over their lives. I kept things running smoothly, and when somebody did something really stupid I helped them get back on track.
Now doing those things made me feel pretty damned important. I could be proud, sometimes even arrogant, but I knew my business and took it seriously. I made the people I worked with see my job as important too, *and that made them happier customers.*
Any young guy in the business who does his job well is entitled to pat himself on the back, because people don't give the IT guy respect just because he deserves it as a human being. Oh, no. Left to their own devices, they'll see him as an extension of the machines they work with and treat him accordingly. You've got to understand for most people that means abusing the machinery.
You've got to establish a zone of respect around yourself so you can do your job. You've got to be mentally tough. You deal with a lot of angry, pissed off people, and beneath that anger is the customer's fear of failure, guilt over lousy planning, and shame over not knowing how everything works. You've got to project confidence and self-respect, otherwise when you need the people you work with to act rationally, they won't.
And you've got to exact respect from people. When you *do* not only *you* will be happier, your *customers* are happier too. Nobody wants to rely on somebody they don't respect.
I won't say that you aren't right -- because there's no disproof of the concept. Nor is there proof. The one thing that is clear is that our current system gets worse outcomes for greater outlays than other systems that go in the *other* direction than you suggest. It is quite possible to believe that we could do even *better* by going further in the direction we have, but there is no empirical proof.
What would we need to do to have a pure free market as you suggest in this country? Get rid of medicare and medicaid. Aside from those programs, pretty much we have market driven health insurance and health care today -- in fact more than any time in our past, as non-profit health hospitals (which have a public service mandate) are being replaced by for-profit institutions. It is probable that shifting the demand curve by removing public health insurance would make health insurance and care cheaper for many. This means that some who can only afford health care through public assistance will be able to afford to pay for it themselves. Whether this would result in a net improvement in life expectancy and infant mortality among the poorest quintile is doubtful.
It's possible to make the packing/interconnecting process a lot more convenient than you are imagining. The whole thing could snap together into a carrying case without disconnecting any cables. You already pack your brick; so why couldn't the brick contain your computer? Why couldn't the keyboard lift out of the base of the monitor and connect wirelessly?
By the time you are twenty years older, years of typing on notebook computers is going to do a number on your back.
Well, perhaps. But it seems to me that what you describe also happens when people have different *conceptions* of a problem.
Looked at dispassionately, the idea that as editorial standards are imposed, the number of contributors would be reduced seems *obvious*. If one imposed the requirement that firefighter recruits were able to bench press 80% of their body weight, you'd expect the number of applicants who enter the training stage to drop. It is quite possible for that to happen, while the number of *competent new firefighters increases*.
Arguably, saying that people left after editorial standards tighten is an "exodus" is just as, if not *more* misleading than quoting statistics that show the project remains healthy. Editorial standards *naturally* mean that fewer people will contribute. The sky *might* be falling, but in order to address *that* question, you need to something more like a study of average article quality. That's not easy to do.
Well, one must be careful when choosing a base for comparisons.
Why the 1890s, other than it supports your conclusion? Wouldn't the 1990s be a better choice for a comparison if we are talking about the impact of Chinese industrialization?
It's also very important to (a) choose the basket of goods you use for comparing the standard of living and (b) measure their usage accurately. Going by access to air conditioning, I am richer than Andrew Carnegie. Likewise there may be lots of cars parked outside those tenements, but there are lots of *people* in those tenements.
If you focus on things like TVs, you will get a certain view of "wealth" that is somewhat skewed. An iPod is ridiculously cheap relative to food, shelter, medical care or education. That is not to say we aren't all in a sense "richer" by the availability of cheap iPods. It's just not realistic to say that I'm richer than Andrew Carnegie, who could afford to have musicians on his staff if he wanted music.
As far as life expectancy is concerned, we naturally are all better off than we'd be in the 1890s. However in the poor counties of the US (the best stand in we have for the poor as a class), life expectancy began to *decline* in the 1980s. Low birth weights and lack of pre-natal care for the poor drive the very high US infant mortality rates as compared to the EU.
Which is not to say we aren't better off than we were 120 years ago. It's to say we could be doing a lot better than we are.
In my view, that's the right benchmark for success. We should not measure ourselves against how well we were doing as a nation 120 years ago; but against how well we could be doing *today*. We could be doing a lot better for a lot less cost on those key health measures.
of the basic notebook design, why connect the screen to the keyboard with a hinge at all? It's not a very good ergonomic design.
Why not have three pieces connected by cables like a desktop, but each part designed to pack for travel? You'd have the CPU and battery in a brick, a keyboard/pointing device, and a separate monitor (or monitors) with its own stand. Then you could leave behind one of the monitors if you wanted to save weight; your could face them in different directions to do demos. You could upgrade each piece independently.
It'd have to be easier and cheaper to do it that way than to build a mechanically elaborate chassis like that.
Well, I think it's a bit simplistic to say that good and evil don't come into it. Clearly Machiavelli thinks of stability as "good", in fact a higher good than conventional rules of morality. If the stability of the state requires that some individual be wronged, then that is preferable to anarchy where all suffer.
I don't think Old Nick is as amoral as he is considered to be by many. He simply does not proceed from the axiom that doing the most right overall comes from doing the most right for each individual the state's actions affect.
Actually, "*unarmed*" vacuum manufacturer would make more sense than "unnamed". I mean, if you were *unnamed*, what would your distributors write on the check they send to pay you for your product? Anybody would be able to fill their name in and cash it.
19th century America was extremely active at coining latin-y neologisms like "absquatulate".
Exfluncticate means (if I recall correctly) to destroy something by taking it apart into little pieces. Quite a useful word, it's a wonder it didn't catch on.
I think you are partly right, but for the wrong reasons. If you talk to people who lived through the Great Depression and WW2, it was sacrifice and suffering, but people felt like they had a purpose. In the 1950s, things got economically better, but there was a sense that we'd been put on the Earth to face down communism.
As far as writing and the arts are concerned, you're way off base. People are *still* doing the kind of art they did back then. It's just not avante garde. If don't like the art at the snobby local gallery, head down to the flea market.
As far as drugs are concerned, they had most of the biggies like heroin, cocaine, weed, tobacco and of course alcohol. And speaking of sex, the baby boom came from *somewhere*. As far as people out of wedlock are concerned, the teen pregnancy rate in the 1950s was *higher* than today.
During lunch at school you would say "Meet at the pool around 4:00 and we'll figure something out."
OK, speaking as an old-timer of 48, I have to second this. That was how we did did "meet-ups" back in the day. Of course, it was "the cracker barrel at the general store", not "the pool". And what we usually settled on doing was some variation of rolling the an old barrel hoop down the dirt road with a stick. But that was mainly to take our minds of the folksy banjo music that accompanied us wherever we went.
Still, we were happy although we didn't have much. Folks weren't so jaded back then. People had solid *values*, like patriotism, racism and exflunctication.
is a definitive software engineering treatise on the history of IE security exploits.
It is certainly true that there is a kind of economic network effect going here. For many years we saw so many web sites that only worked properly with IE because IE was so dominant. The same factor naturally attracts black hats looking for systems to exploit. Once we factor that out, what can we learn from how IE was conceived and maintained?
Did clumsy code-reuse and maintenance play a significant role? That is did they stretch existing code to do things it hadn't been designed to do because it was close enough to pass the demo test on time? That's a decision we all face; we'd all *like* to rewrite things better when we take a look at them, but in the real world we've got to ship good enough code on a deadline to justify our salary. I think MS might be particularly vulnerable to the "killer demo" imperative. They are a business that is dependent on organizations choosing entire MS product stacks because they *anticipate* something they're going to need in the future will be dependent on something else in that stack.
Did "business strategy" considerations confuse priorities for system requirements? E.g., The decision to make IE a fundamental part of the OS allowed MS to gain control of (destroy) the browser market while evading anti-trust regulation. Did that result in undesirable coupling of IE to the underlying system? Did the desire to leverage browser market dominance to give other MS products a competitive advantage create confusion in requirements or priorities?
Were there cultural attitudes that made security and quality secondary? E.g. Did MS value having shiny new features soon before doing a quality implementation? Did their success at achieving effective control of the browser market cause them to under-invest in maintenance because they had no competition worth worrying about?
These are the kinds of things I'd like to know. It's almost past the point where any individual security flaw in IE is interesting to me, because there have been so many and will be so many more. It's time for a really first rate summing up by somebody who knows what he's talking about.
Oh, just think how much worse it would be if it were cancer.
I'm not getting you down am I? I'd hate to think I was getting you down.
I'm careful about calling this kind of thing "evil" because people think of evil as something inexplicable and alien. In this case it's easy to imagine a scenario where a well meaning person makes an "evil" decision: he just has to work in an environment where the customer is more of an abstraction to him than some numbers on a spreadsheet he has to balance. We all think this way, and there's a time in making a decision where it is appropriate to consider people as abstractions that are weighed against things like quarterly profits. That in itself doesn't rise to "evil" unless you go ahead and take action without remembering that it is a human life you are dealing with. That's a very easy thing to overlook, especially under pressure, and suddenly what had been a component of a responsible decision making process becomes evil.
I should point out we don't know the full details of the decision. Some people *do* after all commit insurance fraud. The insurance company's statement (at least) gets it right: "We would not deny or terminate a valid claim solely based on information published on websites such as Facebook." I have no problem with them taking a closer look at this woman based on her Facebook postings; the question is what *other* information they used to make the decision. If it were "we need to cut payouts by 5% to meet our quarterly goals," that would be evil plain and simple. If it were, "After reviewing her photos, we went over her records and found she does not meet the clinical criteria for disabling depression" that would be a different.
Since we have a lawsuit in this case, those'll be the pictures each side paints. If this woman has any kind of case, it'll be settled because it's cheaper and less damaging for the company to give her her benefits and a modest pot of money for her and her lawyers to pay for their trouble than to have her win a high profile case. That would get everyone denied a claim would be thinking about punitive damages.
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Really? When you're objectively trying to find something such as a temperature signal it's common to fudge this way and that?
Well, as usual the problem here is the imputations of *motives*.
It is not common when "you're objectively trying to find something such as a temperature signal". It is common when you are trying to figure out how your code behaves. I should think *anybody* with any non-trivial programming experience has done things to code with no intention of putting those changes into production (e.g. stripping out an input check and putting bad data through it).
Of course, most of us have gone beyond such crude methods of testing, because we have things like unit testing libraries and other techniques that allow us to factor assumptions out of code. I get the impression that scientific programmers are not big into software architecture; they still use Fortran, for chrissakes.
What matters in science is what gets published. If the published results are not supportable by data, then you publish a paper that takes them down. If you could disprove AGW it'd make your career.
Asses aside, comparing electrical heating to electrical vehicles is kind of silly.
In a vehicle, most of the heat is waste; in a furnace it is a product. This especially comes into play when you talk about city driving where the energy spent idling and lost to braking can't be recovered.
As the cost of oil goes up, electric vehicles which may be ultimately powered by *other* sources (such as coal, nuclear, hydro, wind) will become more economical, but not for every kind of driver at the same time. Currently I work at home and take maybe one sub two-mile trip a day -- but I *do* need the car for that (otherwise I walk and take public transit). For me an electric car would be economical *today*, just based on the wear and tear on the ICE driving it that way.
Likewise, I suspect that electric house heating will begin to overtake oil (which is predominant here in New England to) on a region by region basis, and within a region on a case by case basis. The ability to heat each room in the house differently with electricity may be an early win for some.
Well, I think of this way. Suppose I needed a size 22 shoe and there is no such thing manufactured. I might decide to buy two pairs of size 11, but I'd still have to go barefoot despite having enough shoe *in total*.
The experience you speak of is not held by *countries*, but by individuals.
Remember, India is a very populous country. It has a larger middle class than the US. It has comparable numbers of engineers to the US.
Now how many of those engineers would have to work on cutting edge design teams, and how long, before enough of them would have the skills to form the core of an all Indian team capable of doing something nobody had tried before? Especially if that wasn't coming up with a new processor design, but rather a way of interconnecting more cores than people thought was practical? That kind of creative work isn't the kind of thing you can parse out to a giant army of engineers. The key insights are probably the product of a small number of engineers, maybe even a single individual.
I dunno.
How hard is maintaining a database? Especially one that doesn't get updated that often? I'd guess the trick would be distributing the right information to the right devices.
It seems to me that this is *exactly* the kind of thing that should be run by government bureaucrats. It could be designed and operated by a private organization like BB&N, but I certainly don't want to see for-profit companies that might have agendas *other* than accuracy. Crafting creative public policy is not something you want a for-profit entity to do, either directly or through front groups.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I fail to see any economic mystery here. They're just creating a new, flexible class of license which allows manufacturers to sell, and consumers to buy and operate, devices that adjust to the local allocation of spectrum. Invest the money in the system so it gets done fairly, then tax the devices enough so the database becomes self-supporting.
Right. Same guy. Random number input into his program produced a hockey stick.
Right. According to another guy who was hand picked by a pair of politicians to come up with that result, and who "peer reviewed" it by emailing it to a couple of his friends.
This, by the way, is *not* what science is about. In case you haven't noticed, this has become about how Mann is evil and Wegman is good. In truth, the politicians got some statistics Nazi to write a criticism of Mann's report and -- big surprise -- the statistician found statistical practices he could criticize. That's true of *all* scientific papers. None of them are unassailable. When the effects of the flaws Wegman pointed out were factored in in the peer reviewed literature, the results were not significantly changed. So ironically, by bypassing the peer review process, Wegman himself ended up overstating *his* results.
It is significant that Wegman, whose paper you are referring to, later presented *his* findings in a talk entitled, "Method Wrong + Answer Correct = Bad Science". Which shows that when you push a scholar, he doesn't back down, he *clarifies his position*.
That's true. But what are the chances they pay the market salaries for *competent* sysadmins, even scaled for the vacation time? How much money to do they spend on career development? Do they listen to the staff when the staff says something is needed?
I'm not saying it wasn't unprofessional. But *if* the guy did a competent job for peanuts, and perks like running SETI@Home were part of what kept him happy doing his job competently at below market wages, I'd say that was a good deal. If he disobeyed a direct order to remove it and lied about it, that's certainly cause for disciplinary action.
It sounds to me like the county school system's IT department and infrastructure is in terrible shape. That's not *this* guy's fault. His part of the problem, if it can be quantified at all, is tiny.
When there is a huge problem that's taken years to develop, and the big shots go apeshit over some relatively small thing that a lowish level, expendable drone did, there's a word for that: *scapegoating*.
Fire the guy, if you must, but go all the way up the chain of command and keep firing until you reach somebody who did everything he was supposed to. Too disruptive? Well then fire from the top down until you can't afford to fire any more. Don't start at the bottom. That's just BS.
OMG, that OMG has a an acronym for everything!
So what is PONIES?
Peer Oriented Network for Interconnecting Enterprise Systems?
Public Object Nomenclature for Integrating Engineering Specifications?
I agree there is no difference in *principle* between a hardware patent and a software patent. There is a difference in *practice* and patents are a *practical* matter. As a mechanical engineer friend of mine likes to say, "In principle there is no difference between principle and practice but in practice there is."
Patents aren't real property, they are a social bargain designed to maximize utility. Judged that way, most software patents are a failure.
Goetz makes a good point about the need for research and investment in *some* software projects, and he almost puts his finger right on the problem:
There is six phases in the life cycle of software products: Definition, Design, Implementation, Delivery, Maintenance, and Enhancements. Let’s look a little closely at these phases and you will see how closely they resemble characteristics common to all manufacturing companies.
So why don't we reward companies that put effort into maintenance and enhancements with a monopoly? That would be even better -- in the software world. You see, software *is* different; it has the same topology, but not at all the same shape.
Patents are supposed to reward originality. What is originality? Well a patent is supposed to be non-obvious. Well what does that mean? Well, I suppose that means the patent must demonstrate fresh insight. But what does "fresh insight" mean? It's just another way of saying "originality".
I think what it all comes down to is that invention is about *Definition*. A real invention doesn't just restate known solutions; it restates the problem. The example I like to use is the mechanical watch. Before the use of the balance wheel (in essence a wheel shaped pendulum), the problem of making a compact timepiece more accurate could be stated this way: "How do balance friction and force more precisely in order to obtain more precise performance?" After you hit on the notion of the balance wheel you *still* have this problem, but you've just got much further down the precision road by briefly considering an entirely *different* problem: "How do I get the benefits of a pendulum in something compact that does not require the timepiece to be held in the same orientation relative to gravity?" By setting aside the problem everyone else is working on, you can arrive at the essence of what a pendulum does: balancing the acceleration of a known mass around a pivot (a wheel instead of a lever) against a known force (a spring of known elasticity instead of gravity).
The majority of the trade-offs you choose in making a timepiece more mechanically precise aren't like this. They're just different *designs*, not inventions, because they take a different stab at optimizing a problem with no perfect solution (which probably would require a largely frictionless device driven by an endless source of energy).
The process of definition is *different* for software than hardware, because computers are *general purpose data transformation engines*. In software engineering, our lever or the inclined plane is the Turing equivalent language. With this one machine we can literally do *anything* that is computationally possible. It *defines* computationally possible. This shows right off the bat the far greater flexibility the intellectual tools of the software designer are over the mechanical designer or civil engineer.
If you want an analogy for the relationship of hardware invention to software invention, think of the relationship of civil engineering to building architecture. In civil engineering, innovation is highly risky and very, very rare. A civil engineer prefers to be able to adapt a known and trusted design pattern to a problem. Where there is invention, it is driven by necessity. When there is no *room* to put conventional bridge piers on the site, he'll be forced to come up with a cable stay bridge.
Now what about architects? They design useful things all the time. Why can't *they* claim patents on th
Ha! You call *him* self-important?
Well you could have called me King of Computing; Lord Protector of Communication Infrastructure; Suzerein of Anything That Might Break; and Keeper of the Secret of Setting Digital Watches.
I'd have answered to Patron Saint of Lost Files or The Last Best Hope of the Desperate Cubicle Dwellers.
I don't play that role any longer, but when I did, I had no doubt I was important to *other* people. They turned to me when they were in doubt or trouble, and I and I sent them away feeling like they had some control over their lives. I kept things running smoothly, and when somebody did something really stupid I helped them get back on track.
Now doing those things made me feel pretty damned important. I could be proud, sometimes even arrogant, but I knew my business and took it seriously. I made the people I worked with see my job as important too, *and that made them happier customers.*
Any young guy in the business who does his job well is entitled to pat himself on the back, because people don't give the IT guy respect just because he deserves it as a human being. Oh, no. Left to their own devices, they'll see him as an extension of the machines they work with and treat him accordingly. You've got to understand for most people that means abusing the machinery.
You've got to establish a zone of respect around yourself so you can do your job. You've got to be mentally tough. You deal with a lot of angry, pissed off people, and beneath that anger is the customer's fear of failure, guilt over lousy planning, and shame over not knowing how everything works. You've got to project confidence and self-respect, otherwise when you need the people you work with to act rationally, they won't.
And you've got to exact respect from people. When you *do* not only *you* will be happier, your *customers* are happier too. Nobody wants to rely on somebody they don't respect.
I won't say that you aren't right -- because there's no disproof of the concept. Nor is there proof. The one thing that is clear is that our current system gets worse outcomes for greater outlays than other systems that go in the *other* direction than you suggest. It is quite possible to believe that we could do even *better* by going further in the direction we have, but there is no empirical proof.
What would we need to do to have a pure free market as you suggest in this country? Get rid of medicare and medicaid. Aside from those programs, pretty much we have market driven health insurance and health care today -- in fact more than any time in our past, as non-profit health hospitals (which have a public service mandate) are being replaced by for-profit institutions. It is probable that shifting the demand curve by removing public health insurance would make health insurance and care cheaper for many. This means that some who can only afford health care through public assistance will be able to afford to pay for it themselves. Whether this would result in a net improvement in life expectancy and infant mortality among the poorest quintile is doubtful.
It's possible to make the packing/interconnecting process a lot more convenient than you are imagining. The whole thing could snap together into a carrying case without disconnecting any cables. You already pack your brick; so why couldn't the brick contain your computer? Why couldn't the keyboard lift out of the base of the monitor and connect wirelessly?
By the time you are twenty years older, years of typing on notebook computers is going to do a number on your back.
Well, perhaps. But it seems to me that what you describe also happens when people have different *conceptions* of a problem.
Looked at dispassionately, the idea that as editorial standards are imposed, the number of contributors would be reduced seems *obvious*. If one imposed the requirement that firefighter recruits were able to bench press 80% of their body weight, you'd expect the number of applicants who enter the training stage to drop. It is quite possible for that to happen, while the number of *competent new firefighters increases*.
Arguably, saying that people left after editorial standards tighten is an "exodus" is just as, if not *more* misleading than quoting statistics that show the project remains healthy. Editorial standards *naturally* mean that fewer people will contribute. The sky *might* be falling, but in order to address *that* question, you need to something more like a study of average article quality. That's not easy to do.
Well, one must be careful when choosing a base for comparisons.
Why the 1890s, other than it supports your conclusion? Wouldn't the 1990s be a better choice for a comparison if we are talking about the impact of Chinese industrialization?
It's also very important to (a) choose the basket of goods you use for comparing the standard of living and (b) measure their usage accurately. Going by access to air conditioning, I am richer than Andrew Carnegie. Likewise there may be lots of cars parked outside those tenements, but there are lots of *people* in those tenements.
If you focus on things like TVs, you will get a certain view of "wealth" that is somewhat skewed. An iPod is ridiculously cheap relative to food, shelter, medical care or education. That is not to say we aren't all in a sense "richer" by the availability of cheap iPods. It's just not realistic to say that I'm richer than Andrew Carnegie, who could afford to have musicians on his staff if he wanted music.
As far as life expectancy is concerned, we naturally are all better off than we'd be in the 1890s. However in the poor counties of the US (the best stand in we have for the poor as a class), life expectancy began to *decline* in the 1980s. Low birth weights and lack of pre-natal care for the poor drive the very high US infant mortality rates as compared to the EU.
Which is not to say we aren't better off than we were 120 years ago. It's to say we could be doing a lot better than we are.
In my view, that's the right benchmark for success. We should not measure ourselves against how well we were doing as a nation 120 years ago; but against how well we could be doing *today*. We could be doing a lot better for a lot less cost on those key health measures.
of the basic notebook design, why connect the screen to the keyboard with a hinge at all? It's not a very good ergonomic design.
Why not have three pieces connected by cables like a desktop, but each part designed to pack for travel? You'd have the CPU and battery in a brick, a keyboard/pointing device, and a separate monitor (or monitors) with its own stand. Then you could leave behind one of the monitors if you wanted to save weight; your could face them in different directions to do demos. You could upgrade each piece independently.
It'd have to be easier and cheaper to do it that way than to build a mechanically elaborate chassis like that.
Well, I think it's a bit simplistic to say that good and evil don't come into it. Clearly Machiavelli thinks of stability as "good", in fact a higher good than conventional rules of morality. If the stability of the state requires that some individual be wronged, then that is preferable to anarchy where all suffer.
I don't think Old Nick is as amoral as he is considered to be by many. He simply does not proceed from the axiom that doing the most right overall comes from doing the most right for each individual the state's actions affect.
No, he's saying he can make the southern side of the Panama canal by hopping off only one of his legs from Cancun.
Actually, "*unarmed*" vacuum manufacturer would make more sense than "unnamed". I mean, if you were *unnamed*, what would your distributors write on the check they send to pay you for your product? Anybody would be able to fill their name in and cash it.
19th century America was extremely active at coining latin-y neologisms like "absquatulate".
Exfluncticate means (if I recall correctly) to destroy something by taking it apart into little pieces. Quite a useful word, it's a wonder it didn't catch on.
I think you are partly right, but for the wrong reasons. If you talk to people who lived through the Great Depression and WW2, it was sacrifice and suffering, but people felt like they had a purpose. In the 1950s, things got economically better, but there was a sense that we'd been put on the Earth to face down communism.
As far as writing and the arts are concerned, you're way off base. People are *still* doing the kind of art they did back then. It's just not avante garde. If don't like the art at the snobby local gallery, head down to the flea market.
As far as drugs are concerned, they had most of the biggies like heroin, cocaine, weed, tobacco and of course alcohol. And speaking of sex, the baby boom came from *somewhere*. As far as people out of wedlock are concerned, the teen pregnancy rate in the 1950s was *higher* than today.
During lunch at school you would say "Meet at the pool around 4:00 and we'll figure something out."
OK, speaking as an old-timer of 48, I have to second this. That was how we did did "meet-ups" back in the day. Of course, it was "the cracker barrel at the general store", not "the pool". And what we usually settled on doing was some variation of rolling the an old barrel hoop down the dirt road with a stick. But that was mainly to take our minds of the folksy banjo music that accompanied us wherever we went.
Still, we were happy although we didn't have much. Folks weren't so jaded back then. People had solid *values*, like patriotism, racism and exflunctication.
I imagine a therapist might be able to help you with that.
Web 2.0 is still gay.
To quote Mel Brooks' *The Producers*:
is a definitive software engineering treatise on the history of IE security exploits.
It is certainly true that there is a kind of economic network effect going here. For many years we saw so many web sites that only worked properly with IE because IE was so dominant. The same factor naturally attracts black hats looking for systems to exploit. Once we factor that out, what can we learn from how IE was conceived and maintained?
Did clumsy code-reuse and maintenance play a significant role? That is did they stretch existing code to do things it hadn't been designed to do because it was close enough to pass the demo test on time? That's a decision we all face; we'd all *like* to rewrite things better when we take a look at them, but in the real world we've got to ship good enough code on a deadline to justify our salary. I think MS might be particularly vulnerable to the "killer demo" imperative. They are a business that is dependent on organizations choosing entire MS product stacks because they *anticipate* something they're going to need in the future will be dependent on something else in that stack.
Did "business strategy" considerations confuse priorities for system requirements? E.g., The decision to make IE a fundamental part of the OS allowed MS to gain control of (destroy) the browser market while evading anti-trust regulation. Did that result in undesirable coupling of IE to the underlying system? Did the desire to leverage browser market dominance to give other MS products a competitive advantage create confusion in requirements or priorities?
Were there cultural attitudes that made security and quality secondary? E.g. Did MS value having shiny new features soon before doing a quality implementation? Did their success at achieving effective control of the browser market cause them to under-invest in maintenance because they had no competition worth worrying about?
These are the kinds of things I'd like to know. It's almost past the point where any individual security flaw in IE is interesting to me, because there have been so many and will be so many more. It's time for a really first rate summing up by somebody who knows what he's talking about.
Oh, just think how much worse it would be if it were cancer.
I'm not getting you down am I? I'd hate to think I was getting you down.
I'm careful about calling this kind of thing "evil" because people think of evil as something inexplicable and alien. In this case it's easy to imagine a scenario where a well meaning person makes an "evil" decision: he just has to work in an environment where the customer is more of an abstraction to him than some numbers on a spreadsheet he has to balance. We all think this way, and there's a time in making a decision where it is appropriate to consider people as abstractions that are weighed against things like quarterly profits. That in itself doesn't rise to "evil" unless you go ahead and take action without remembering that it is a human life you are dealing with. That's a very easy thing to overlook, especially under pressure, and suddenly what had been a component of a responsible decision making process becomes evil.
I should point out we don't know the full details of the decision. Some people *do* after all commit insurance fraud. The insurance company's statement (at least) gets it right: "We would not deny or terminate a valid claim solely based on information published on websites such as Facebook." I have no problem with them taking a closer look at this woman based on her Facebook postings; the question is what *other* information they used to make the decision. If it were "we need to cut payouts by 5% to meet our quarterly goals," that would be evil plain and simple. If it were, "After reviewing her photos, we went over her records and found she does not meet the clinical criteria for disabling depression" that would be a different.
Since we have a lawsuit in this case, those'll be the pictures each side paints. If this woman has any kind of case, it'll be settled because it's cheaper and less damaging for the company to give her her benefits and a modest pot of money for her and her lawyers to pay for their trouble than to have her win a high profile case. That would get everyone denied a claim would be thinking about punitive damages.