Competition (academic and free market) makes big jumps unlikely.
Most of the improvements that any one company is trying to do to get 2X or more performance has already been done, by the time they get to market, by other companies trying to beat them to market. Only a percentage of things they manage to do differently (perhaps things that other companies didn't think were worth doing) differentiate the performance of any one company's product.
I mean, why should you be protected if you're a criminal? What's the reasoning. Stop committing crimes.
The laws currently on the books are past the size and complexity level for any human to be able to determine whether they've broken any laws while just going about their normal daily lives. Even just the FDA regulations alone causes pharmaceutical companies to hire teams of regulatory specialists and lawyers to keep up with the required paperwork for their products to be legal.
We are all paying the taxes necessary for you to have a road to your home. So get over it.
Not necessarily. Several neighborhoods in several cities around my region have petitioned and gotten the city to actually complete block-off a smaller neighborhood street, or turn the street into one-way against the normal commute flow direction. "traffic-perverters". Make everyone have to go around a public-tax-paid-for blockage of a previous public-paid-for passageway.
There is no such thing as a terrorist, as a legal distinction.... We call them mobsters.
The significant difference is that mobsters often try to hide the body (concrete overshoes, etc.) to lower the chances of getting caught. They might want a rival mob to know, but not the general public. And they usually don't blow themselves up trying. Terrorists usually want the body (before/after the beheading, et.al.) to be seen by millions on network news and youtube for some anticipated psychological effect on the general public.
There are those who just want the loot, and don't care about the effect on the general public (and its economic and political repercussions), and those who do.
The number of thousands that die per annum due to motor vehicle accidents and domestic violence is a tiny fraction of the population that no one expects to double next year. Thus these risks to you are not systemic. You confuse these highly predictable risks with systemic risks that cannot be so easily bounded. The Chernobal dead zone is larger than many countries, and similar events do not have good consistent per-annum statistics.
I have a better chance of winning the lottery than dieing at the hands of a terrorist. Why would I want to lose my privacy over those odds.
One of those odds is an individual risk. The other is a systemic risk that can also end up in the death of many of your family, friends, coworkers and bystanders. So relating the two odds sounds statistically intelligent, but is really a form of systemic risk blindness.
U.S. websites will lose US$21.8 billion in ad revenue this year due to ad blockers
Advertisers saved US$21.8 billion by not advertising to unreceptive customers
It's likely that some percentage of these customers are receptive, whether they think they are or not, or there wouldn't be any payback for the advertising cost that shows up in analytic or A/B market test data.
Woz's design of the Apple II was nothing like what was described in the MOS Technology 6502 app notes or the KIM-1 SBC. The Apple II was based on a unified memory sub-system capable of time-division-multiplexed color video refresh and 6502 R/W. It also had decoded slots and an Integer BASIC interpreter. All Woz's unique design, and very different from most typical computer logic designs of that era.
Of course there are serious risks to engineering... to be traded off against the huge risks of the planetary science experiment ongoing since the dawn of agriculture and the industrial revolution, the risks of modifying that science experiment and waiting to see what happens, or of potentially fighting over the enforcement of planetary carbon, water, pollution, and etc. rights inferred by those modifications.
Next, they figure out a way for all the cows, pigs, chickens and turkeys to sue over their confinement and death sentences before being sent to your local grocer.
After that all the indoor cat people will be forced to let fluffy out in the street to get run over, or killed by raccoons.
In the end the ants, termites and cockroaches will re-take the planet for themselves. Death to all human slavers.
Restaurant sites are what usability pros show onscreen when they want to get a belly laugh from the audience.
The reason is that restaurants are focused on looks before usability. This leads them to use pictures of text, PDFs, and the hated Flash.
Those technologies range from poor to complete fail when it comes to searchability, mobile adaptability, accessibility, and ability to select and copy/paste text.
So instead the site designer creates a solution supposedly more far more "usable", and rides off into the sunset with a new slide for her presentation. But since no one actually working at the restaurant day-to-day is computer savy or has any time for keyboarding stuff while cooking or waiting on tables, the menu gets way out of date (until some waiter's kid who knows how to use the computer comes by), and the highly usable accessible searchable search result returns a bogus menu from last month.
With a camera feed, the cooks hurriedly wipes 3-eyed fish off the board with his sleeve after throwing the last one on the grill, and no blind person walks over to order one. She calls first.
Unless you use the same credit card you use for iTunes. Then they already have your credit card data. If you want additional privacy, use separate cards for iTunes and Apple Pay.
Absolutely. If only the natives had been more disease resistant and put up a better fight, the area might have developed more on the European model, farms down on some of the best agricultural land in the world, with civilization up in hilltop fortifications to better keep out the looters and marauders. The gold rush might have still brought in a critical mass of crazies though. Silicon castles.
The planet changes sea level up and down by over 100 meters all by itself (and the solar cycles). Humans have migrated miles back and forth with the sea level changes though at least a few ice ages already. They'll just have to figure out how to keep on doing that.
HP tried this during the tech (real estate and traffic) boom of the mid 1980's. Moved a whole bunch of R&D and operations to Roseville and other environs near Sacto. Pretty much for the same reasons.
A failed experiment.
The SF/Silicon Valley area occasionally succeeds because of pure critical mass, it's density of top research universities, tech talent, and crazy people with more money than sense. Very few other "corridors" continue to put that much money into crazy people's ventures.
Where's the Conservative movement's boycott of Mozilla for oppressing an employee's exercise of their U.S. 1st Amendment rights, including freedom of political association, freedom of religion, freedom to petition, and freedom of speech (even, or especially, if not "politically correct")... and done on their own private time?
Show me a great artist or architect, and you'll probably also find someone who as a kid made some very primitive and stupid looking (except to parents) scribbles. Take away all their drawing and painting (etc.) implements until someone is old enough for Structured Programming and Algorithms 101, and probably a huge portion of the great artists in the world would have never picked up an interest in the subject during their formative years, or ever after.
Programming at a professional competancy might be out of reach. But programming badly isn't that hard. As in:
10 print "my sister is ugly" : goto 10
Back in the days of the TRS-80, Commodore Pet, Apple II and BBC personal computers (et.al.), millions of kids could turn on their personal computer and start typing in Basic right away, usually using stuff copied off of a magazine article... at first. But then they could modify their programs and crash them in a million different ways. That caused learning, and very likely ending up producing a generation of people with much higher basic computer literacy than in the general population than today (not including professional techies).
Don't confuse a professional level of understanding with computer literacy. No one confuses the kid who could (back in the day) (mis)use their chemistry sets to blow things up in their backyard and singe their eyebrows off, with National Medal of Technology prize winners. (Or could you?).
Nowhere did you say the old guys code didn't work, had serious bugs that weren't being fixed, or was noticeably behind the rest of the team according to the project schedules. Until that happens, and as long as the old guy is solving problems with his skill set, management may well consider your "good coding" criteria to be bad for the company, thus making you, not the old guy, the troublemaker for suggesting changing what works. Businessmen have been burned by too many trendy sounding academic fads, such as all the good coding practices recommended here.
Wait till you can out-code him, solve major problems he can't, and get promoted above him (or he dies or retires). Even if his smelly pile of code crashes and burns, if he can tape it back together faster (running) than you can rewrite it (feature complete), he's the hero, and you're the troublemaker.
I don't see how tablets are any different from netbooks. They're semi-useful devices that have a limited place but are outclassed by more capable machines which have been around for a long time..
Didn't someone at DEC say the same thing about PCs? Those desktop toys must have been just an outclassed passing fad, and real businesses still buy far more capable minicomputers from DEC, Data General, Prime, Tandem, and...
Age isn't the problem. It's just an easy to find excuse.
I know several engineers in their mid to late 50's who completely retrained in the latest mobile development technology (Objective C and iOS or Java and Android or both) and ended up with new jobs or fairly lucrative consulting gigs. It's actually easier for some of the older ones, since they were used to writing code for big complex computers that had a fraction of the memory and were over 100X slower than any recent smartphone, and the kids are already grown and out of the house.
Nowadays, a usable map database has gotten so big and complex that it can made decent only by putting something in the hands of millions of users, letting them (forcing them to) find errors that can only be found by actual field usage, and using that volume of feedback to scale up a competent team; a team that might eventually be able fix a healthy portion of the problems so found. Apple may have put this half-baked map app out now, where millions of people will be stuck using it because they want the exciting new iPhone 5, and are too lazy to use any other map app. Using the feedback contained within millions of complaints deriving from actual mass volume field usage, Apple's map database will eventually evolve to something closer to a Google maps competitor, maybe over the next year or three.
They can't say they are doing this because not enough users want to be unpaid beta testers and/or usage analytics data sources. And it's hard to build a good database without knowing what data is bad.
We don't need a solution for a world of 5, 6 or 7 billion people, with maybe half of them living in the developed nations. We need an adaptable, scalable solution for at least 9 billion humans, with at least 7 billion of them living in the developing nations.
Or perhaps we need a way to reduce the human population to the longer term carrying capacity of the planet, which might just be far far below 5 billion... or nature will surely figure out a way to accomplish that for us.
Read about the major mass extinctions, and then ponder the question whether humans would have been able to rise above the environmental pressures that destroyed more than 90% of species in the time of the dinosaurs. And even if we weren't to go extinct, consider what it would look like of 90% of us were to die. Not just 90% of those in some far away desert, but 90% of the people in your own country. Consider what such a world would look like.
That's pretty much what's theorized to have happened to the population in large regions of North American just after Europeans introduce their various "Old World" diseases. A lot of land became largely reforested, but the small population remainders still had plenty enough fight left in them to generate lots of cowboys vs. Indian folklore.
The answer is simple, isn't it? The seller is not making just one mug of coffee and keep selling clones of it at 4$ a mug.
Actually, they are, or pretty close. The cost making that very first mug of coffee can require a good fraction of a million bucks for the site lease, permits, construction costs, restaurant equipment, employee hiring, training, advertising, and etc. That doesn't even include millions of dollars in research to standardize franchise operations. Once the store is inspected and staffed and opens the door and sells that very 1st mug, after spending many thousands of $$$, that day's marginal cost of making a 2nd mug is pennies.
Nothing the driver in front of you does should result in you crashing into him.
If I am the driver behind: Sure.
If I am the driver in front, and the light timing allows, there's plenty I can do to reduce the likelihood of the sleepy, the housewife distracted by screaming toddlers, elderly-dementia-candidates, race-driver-wannabes 3 centimeters off my bumper, hungover/drunk/stoned dudes, or people texting while trying not to be seen, (etc.etc.), idiots who are following behind me from potentially wrecking my car, causing me back/neck injuries, having me waste days/months dealing with insurance agents+lawyers, and etc.
Even if it's not legally my fault. It's called defensive driving.
Slashdot Mirror
Competition (academic and free market) makes big jumps unlikely.
Most of the improvements that any one company is trying to do to get 2X or more performance has already been done, by the time they get to market, by other companies trying to beat them to market. Only a percentage of things they manage to do differently (perhaps things that other companies didn't think were worth doing) differentiate the performance of any one company's product.
I mean, why should you be protected if you're a criminal? What's the reasoning. Stop committing crimes.
The laws currently on the books are past the size and complexity level for any human to be able to determine whether they've broken any laws while just going about their normal daily lives. Even just the FDA regulations alone causes pharmaceutical companies to hire teams of regulatory specialists and lawyers to keep up with the required paperwork for their products to be legal.
We are all paying the taxes necessary for you to have a road to your home. So get over it.
Not necessarily. Several neighborhoods in several cities around my region have petitioned and gotten the city to actually complete block-off a smaller neighborhood street, or turn the street into one-way against the normal commute flow direction. "traffic-perverters". Make everyone have to go around a public-tax-paid-for blockage of a previous public-paid-for passageway.
There is no such thing as a terrorist, as a legal distinction. ... We call them mobsters.
The significant difference is that mobsters often try to hide the body (concrete overshoes, etc.) to lower the chances of getting caught. They might want a rival mob to know, but not the general public. And they usually don't blow themselves up trying. Terrorists usually want the body (before/after the beheading, et.al.) to be seen by millions on network news and youtube for some anticipated psychological effect on the general public.
There are those who just want the loot, and don't care about the effect on the general public (and its economic and political repercussions), and those who do.
The number of thousands that die per annum due to motor vehicle accidents and domestic violence is a tiny fraction of the population that no one expects to double next year. Thus these risks to you are not systemic. You confuse these highly predictable risks with systemic risks that cannot be so easily bounded. The Chernobal dead zone is larger than many countries, and similar events do not have good consistent per-annum statistics.
I have a better chance of winning the lottery than dieing at the hands of a terrorist. Why would I want to lose my privacy over those odds.
One of those odds is an individual risk. The other is a systemic risk that can also end up in the death of many of your family, friends, coworkers and bystanders. So relating the two odds sounds statistically intelligent, but is really a form of systemic risk blindness.
U.S. websites will lose US$21.8 billion in ad revenue this year due to ad blockers
Advertisers saved US$21.8 billion by not advertising to unreceptive customers
It's likely that some percentage of these customers are receptive, whether they think they are or not, or there wouldn't be any payback for the advertising cost that shows up in analytic or A/B market test data.
Woz's design of the Apple II was nothing like what was described in the MOS Technology 6502 app notes or the KIM-1 SBC. The Apple II was based on a unified memory sub-system capable of time-division-multiplexed color video refresh and 6502 R/W. It also had decoded slots and an Integer BASIC interpreter. All Woz's unique design, and very different from most typical computer logic designs of that era.
Of course there are serious risks to engineering... to be traded off against the huge risks of the planetary science experiment ongoing since the dawn of agriculture and the industrial revolution, the risks of modifying that science experiment and waiting to see what happens, or of potentially fighting over the enforcement of planetary carbon, water, pollution, and etc. rights inferred by those modifications.
Next, they figure out a way for all the cows, pigs, chickens and turkeys to sue over their confinement and death sentences before being sent to your local grocer.
After that all the indoor cat people will be forced to let fluffy out in the street to get run over, or killed by raccoons.
In the end the ants, termites and cockroaches will re-take the planet for themselves. Death to all human slavers.
Restaurant sites are what usability pros show onscreen when they want to get a belly laugh from the audience.
The reason is that restaurants are focused on looks before usability. This leads them to use pictures of text, PDFs, and the hated Flash.
Those technologies range from poor to complete fail when it comes to searchability, mobile adaptability, accessibility, and ability to select and copy/paste text.
So instead the site designer creates a solution supposedly more far more "usable", and rides off into the sunset with a new slide for her presentation. But since no one actually working at the restaurant day-to-day is computer savy or has any time for keyboarding stuff while cooking or waiting on tables, the menu gets way out of date (until some waiter's kid who knows how to use the computer comes by), and the highly usable accessible searchable search result returns a bogus menu from last month.
With a camera feed, the cooks hurriedly wipes 3-eyed fish off the board with his sleeve after throwing the last one on the grill, and no blind person walks over to order one. She calls first.
Apple never stores your credit card.
Unless you use the same credit card you use for iTunes. Then they already have your credit card data. If you want additional privacy, use separate cards for iTunes and Apple Pay.
Absolutely. If only the natives had been more disease resistant and put up a better fight, the area might have developed more on the European model, farms down on some of the best agricultural land in the world, with civilization up in hilltop fortifications to better keep out the looters and marauders. The gold rush might have still brought in a critical mass of crazies though. Silicon castles.
The planet changes sea level up and down by over 100 meters all by itself (and the solar cycles). Humans have migrated miles back and forth with the sea level changes though at least a few ice ages already. They'll just have to figure out how to keep on doing that.
HP tried this during the tech (real estate and traffic) boom of the mid 1980's. Moved a whole bunch of R&D and operations to Roseville and other environs near Sacto. Pretty much for the same reasons.
A failed experiment.
The SF/Silicon Valley area occasionally succeeds because of pure critical mass, it's density of top research universities, tech talent, and crazy people with more money than sense. Very few other "corridors" continue to put that much money into crazy people's ventures.
Where's the Conservative movement's boycott of Mozilla for oppressing an employee's exercise of their U.S. 1st Amendment rights, including freedom of political association, freedom of religion, freedom to petition, and freedom of speech (even, or especially, if not "politically correct")... and done on their own private time?
Show me a great artist or architect, and you'll probably also find someone who as a kid made some very primitive and stupid looking (except to parents) scribbles. Take away all their drawing and painting (etc.) implements until someone is old enough for Structured Programming and Algorithms 101, and probably a huge portion of the great artists in the world would have never picked up an interest in the subject during their formative years, or ever after.
Programming at a professional competancy might be out of reach. But programming badly isn't that hard. As in:
10 print "my sister is ugly" : goto 10
Back in the days of the TRS-80, Commodore Pet, Apple II and BBC personal computers (et.al.), millions of kids could turn on their personal computer and start typing in Basic right away, usually using stuff copied off of a magazine article... at first. But then they could modify their programs and crash them in a million different ways. That caused learning, and very likely ending up producing a generation of people with much higher basic computer literacy than in the general population than today (not including professional techies).
Don't confuse a professional level of understanding with computer literacy. No one confuses the kid who could (back in the day) (mis)use their chemistry sets to blow things up in their backyard and singe their eyebrows off, with National Medal of Technology prize winners. (Or could you?).
Nowhere did you say the old guys code didn't work, had serious bugs that weren't being fixed, or was noticeably behind the rest of the team according to the project schedules. Until that happens, and as long as the old guy is solving problems with his skill set, management may well consider your "good coding" criteria to be bad for the company, thus making you, not the old guy, the troublemaker for suggesting changing what works. Businessmen have been burned by too many trendy sounding academic fads, such as all the good coding practices recommended here.
Wait till you can out-code him, solve major problems he can't, and get promoted above him (or he dies or retires). Even if his smelly pile of code crashes and burns, if he can tape it back together faster (running) than you can rewrite it (feature complete), he's the hero, and you're the troublemaker.
I don't see how tablets are any different from netbooks. They're semi-useful devices that have a limited place but are outclassed by more capable machines which have been around for a long time..
Didn't someone at DEC say the same thing about PCs? Those desktop toys must have been just an outclassed passing fad, and real businesses still buy far more capable minicomputers from DEC, Data General, Prime, Tandem, and ...
Oh wait.
Age isn't the problem. It's just an easy to find excuse.
I know several engineers in their mid to late 50's who completely retrained in the latest mobile development technology (Objective C and iOS or Java and Android or both) and ended up with new jobs or fairly lucrative consulting gigs. It's actually easier for some of the older ones, since they were used to writing code for big complex computers that had a fraction of the memory and were over 100X slower than any recent smartphone, and the kids are already grown and out of the house.
Nowadays, a usable map database has gotten so big and complex that it can made decent only by putting something in the hands of millions of users, letting them (forcing them to) find errors that can only be found by actual field usage, and using that volume of feedback to scale up a competent team; a team that might eventually be able fix a healthy portion of the problems so found. Apple may have put this half-baked map app out now, where millions of people will be stuck using it because they want the exciting new iPhone 5, and are too lazy to use any other map app. Using the feedback contained within millions of complaints deriving from actual mass volume field usage, Apple's map database will eventually evolve to something closer to a Google maps competitor, maybe over the next year or three.
They can't say they are doing this because not enough users want to be unpaid beta testers and/or usage analytics data sources. And it's hard to build a good database without knowing what data is bad.
We don't need a solution for a world of 5, 6 or 7 billion people, with maybe half of them living in the developed nations.
We need an adaptable, scalable solution for at least 9 billion humans, with at least 7 billion of them living in the developing nations.
Or perhaps we need a way to reduce the human population to the longer term carrying capacity of the planet, which might just be far far below 5 billion... or nature will surely figure out a way to accomplish that for us.
Read about the major mass extinctions, and then ponder the question whether humans would have been able to rise above the environmental pressures that destroyed more than 90% of species in the time of the dinosaurs. And even if we weren't to go extinct, consider what it would look like of 90% of us were to die. Not just 90% of those in some far away desert, but 90% of the people in your own country. Consider what such a world would look like.
That's pretty much what's theorized to have happened to the population in large regions of North American just after Europeans introduce their various "Old World" diseases. A lot of land became largely reforested, but the small population remainders still had plenty enough fight left in them to generate lots of cowboys vs. Indian folklore.
The answer is simple, isn't it? The seller is not making just one mug of coffee and keep selling clones of it at 4$ a mug.
Actually, they are, or pretty close. The cost making that very first mug of coffee can require a good fraction of a million bucks for the site lease, permits, construction costs, restaurant equipment, employee hiring, training, advertising, and etc. That doesn't even include millions of dollars in research to standardize franchise operations. Once the store is inspected and staffed and opens the door and sells that very 1st mug, after spending many thousands of $$$, that day's marginal cost of making a 2nd mug is pennies.
Nothing the driver in front of you does should result in you crashing into him.
If I am the driver behind: Sure.
If I am the driver in front, and the light timing allows, there's plenty I can do to reduce the likelihood of the sleepy, the housewife distracted by screaming toddlers, elderly-dementia-candidates, race-driver-wannabes 3 centimeters off my bumper, hungover/drunk/stoned dudes, or people texting while trying not to be seen, (etc.etc.), idiots who are following behind me from potentially wrecking my car, causing me back/neck injuries, having me waste days/months dealing with insurance agents+lawyers, and etc.
Even if it's not legally my fault. It's called defensive driving.