Oh, I wouldn't worry about the Data Protection Act. They're openly saying that they will exempt the relevant authorities from its provisions for the purposes of doing this.
It's a bit like the Human Rights Act: the government guarantees you these important rights and freedoms, until they become politically inconvenient, at which point you don't get them any more.
I am quite willing to consider alternatives to my own viewpoint. I just think that the argument you make is a very dangerous one.
You focus on one side of the debate: the potential benefits of using cameras in this way. In fact, I would state the case for this more strongly than you do:
Well someone, in fact a whole committee, has sat down and used common sense. They accept that widespread use of the cameras for all crime prevention would be against the public interest.
That clearly isn't true: use of cameras for crime prevention unquestionably is in the public interest.
The danger, which you gloss over in making your case, is that in allowing the use of cameras in ways that might prevent crimes, you also open the door to deliberate abuse and accidental mistakes.
For example, take your opening comment:
The police have been criticised during recent cases because it has become apparent that the individuals concerned were known to the police before they conducted whatever attack they are accused of but the police had insufficient resources to maintain 24 hour surveillance on each individual it has in its database. The known individuals have associated data linked to them which includes any vehicle that they own or are known to be associated with.
Did you know that one of the recent leaks suggested that simply driving along in front of or behind a suspect's vehicle could put your own car on a watch list?
Fortunately, we have a system of due process that guards against the dangers of guilt by association. But then in your very next paragraph, you attempt to undermine this:
Having a name on a database is not the same as having sufficient evidence to persuade a judge that a warrant for surveillance should be granted. Now, what a dilemma. We have the information available but we cannot give it to the police because they haven't got a warrant until someone gets killed. But how do we protect people and try to prevent them from getting killed?
You make the flawed assumption that in such cases, someone will die if there is no time to convince a judge to award a warrant. Clearly this is not always the case. You also make the implicit assumption that if a judge declined to award a warrant in these circumstances, that would be a bad thing, rather than effectively protecting an innocent person from unreasonable persecution. This also is not necessarily true.
We live in a society where the government is increasingly taking your line, to the point that an innocent citizen can now have their freedoms abruptly curtailed just for being a suspect in an investigation. Freedoms that can be removed so easily are just illusions.
Of course, it's easy to rationalise this away. There's no smoke without fire, right? And anyway, it only applies to Bad People:
They are NOT tracking everybody.
Unfortunately, this is simply not true. They are deliberately tracking everybody, and as the statistics released under a Freedom of Information request earlier this week demonstrated, more than half of the people arrested in recent terrorism investigations have later been released without charge, so obviously the authorities do make mistakes, and often.
So I'm afraid I don't agree with you when you say this:
This is just about as measured a response as is possible taking into account everyone's rights and interests.
There will be some, perhaps even yourself, who will scoff and claim that this is a useless measure. If so, please enlighten us all as to your preferred solution to the problem.
If the anti-terror Police officers in London are anything like the anti-terror officers in the States, I would suspect that public acknowledgment means it's been going on for a decade, minimum.
Considering that the London congestion charge has only been in operation itself for a little over four years, that is unlikely.
Perhaps instead of inventing scare stories during these discussions, it would be best to focus on the real dangers posed by the real actions of real people?
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said the change was needed to deal with the "enduring vehicle-borne terrorist threat to London".
That "enduring threat" seems to consist of two recent attempts, both bungled by incompetent notscaryists, to let off car bombs in central London using previously unknown vehicles. Remind me how tracking everyone everywhere is going to do anything whatsoever to prevent that happening again?
Personally, I stopped reading computer magazines when I knew for a fact that the articles in areas where I was well-informed were Just Plain Wrong, or at least presenting an over-simplified, naive explanation. How, then, could I trust that I was being properly informed about those subjects I did not already know about?
Well, that and the fact that by the time the comparison reviews and ad mini-brochures were printed, all the prices were so out-of-date that you might make a completely different decision anyway.
While I agree with almost everything that has been said by posters in this thread, no-one has yet commented on the round that was lethal. Most tech news sites are indeed full of ad-ridden republished press releases edited by people who are technically incompetent. Most tech blogs are indeed full of poorly written "commentary" with no original research. However, with so many blogs around, there are bound to be a few really good ones, which do offer thoughtful commentary, deep understanding of the issues covered, previously hard-to-find information, and/or original research.
Such blogs also tend to link to other worthwhile source material by their nature. In addition, blogs typically support comments, or more usefully full-blown web forums, mailing lists or Usenet groups. The combination means informed people can share knowledge and ideas once the scene has been set by the good bloggers, and I imagine that most discerning geeks, having found a few such blogs as starting points, simply have no need to bother with the numerous low-quality sites any more. I know I don't...
For me, choosing any CPU that has known security bugs to be used on any connected computer is reason enough to be fired.
Congratulations, you just fired every sysadmin in the world. I hate to break this to you, but all modern processors have lots of bugs. They are usually subtle, and they can usually be worked around in one way or another, but they all have them. Expecting a modern processor, with hugely complicated microcode, to be bug-free is like saying you could write a full-scale, bug-free operating system: the costs of doing so would be astronomical, so pretty much no-one does.
I see no signs of price cuts yet for E6x00 chips, but I also see no-one actually shipping E6x50 chips yet.
However, I just checked several popular UK components web sites, and it's common to find (for example) an E6750 on pre-order at near enough the same price as an E6600 to buy today. Prices for the E6850 pre-order vs. E6700 shipping today are similarly close. To me, that suggests a big price drop for the E6x00 chips is coming.
Just as a point of interest, when I was looking for new components around a fortnight ago, suppliers were were already listing high-end chips in the forthcoming E6x50 series at lower prices than even the mid-range chips from the older E6x00 range. The E6600 has been near the sweet spot on the price/performance curve for quite a while now, so if you're looking for a cheap upgrade, it looks like they'll be practically giving away E6600s and E6700s for as long as they last.
I don't think it's so sad that there are relatively few places that teach the more theoretical forms of CS. Relative to other disciplines, there was an imbalanced excess of programs teaching skills that only a small number of people would need, and the kind of invention you describe will probably be done by people with a graduate education, anyway.
The thing is, I don't think a CS education is something only a small number of people would need. Sure, it provides a deep understanding of some areas that little else does, but it also provides a broad base on which to build anything else you need in less specialised areas.
Put it this way: people who go into writing software without the kind of understanding of database construction and system design that a good CS course would teach are often the reason we get ludicrously slow applications, with ever-increasing hardware requirements, littered with security flaws, and the design behind the code — if it has one at all, instead of misunderstanding the buzzwords and thinking a set of tests is a substitute — is such a mess that no-one can fix it, and you have to either live with it or throw it all away and start from scratch.
(Before anyone replies, please note that I wrote "the kind of understanding... that a good CS course would teach". Studying a formal CS course is certainly not the only way to gain this understanding.)
While you could well be right, the one absolute in university-level computing courses is that everything is relative.
Some places have an old-school CS course that teaches strong theory and is quite mathematical. This is probably good for someone who wants to deal with challenging programming work in the future: the kind of person who wouldn't just be writing a web front-end to use a database, they'd be writing the compiler and the database engine. These courses probably won't teach you to program in this week's greatest programming language or web/DB framework. What it will give you is a solid understanding of the principles and exposure to a broad range of ideas. With that sort of perspective, a CS grad should make short work of getting up to a reasonable level of competence in any industrial languages and technologies.
Sadly, it seems like an increasing number of places now run a "computer science" course that is basically just the latest industrial buzzwords. If you're looking at a course that teaches things like VB, XML, Windows/Linux system administration, business studies, web design, and the like, then IMHO that's not really computer science at all, it's just vocational training.
The potential scopes of other courses, such as "Information Technology", "Information Systems", "Software Engineering", are similarly wide-ranging, so it's hard to give advice about which course is best for someone without being able to see the details of what each really covers.
One of my local MEPs (I'm in the UK) actually seemed pretty clued up about this debate. He considered at least one of the proposed versions of European software patent legislation to have a genuine benefit, in that it would standardise what was and wasn't patentable, and fix the problem with the EPO and a few national patent authorities granting things that others wouldn't recognise and that were dubious under the current system anyway. I'm pretty sure he voted against that specific proposal in the end, because of opposition to the general principle of introducing software patents, but at least he'd thought about it, and we can rest assured that at least some of our elected representatives don't just vote with the most expensive lobbyists on issues like this.
“Most people, I think, don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?” — Thomas Hesse, President, Global Digital Business, Sony BMG Music Entertainment
Well, Tom, I think you’re about to find out. Have a nice day, now!
You think Microsoft is giving Dell kickbacks worth around $200 to gain an extra sale of an OS probably worth well under $100 at trade rates? Interesting logic you've got there, but I don't recommend management as a career path!
The fact of the matter is that blogging and search technologies probably have a few generations of morphing to do yet.
No doubt they do, and I'm sure that in time the pool of available blog posts will become more useful.
What I think is regrettable is that organisations with a lot of information to share about their products — and Microsoft is just a single, high-profile example — already seem to be giving up on maintaining high quality, comprehensive reference sites, as if the trend to allow staff to write their own blogs somehow provides an adequate replacement.
Ah, I see you have read MSDN then! Perhaps they need dates and commentary on it
Sure, I think that's a great idea. Reference material isn't worth much unless it's kept up to date. The PHP manual, to give one example, seems to do this pretty well for the most part.
The internet could potentially return us to lengthier, more reasoned discourse as it is (at least partially) a "print" medium, but the blogosphere has (for the most part) taken up the sound-bite model instead of the reasoned-discourse model of media. Again, I suspect this is more due to the present internet advertisement model than to anything else.
This is sad, but true, I agree. Right now, the best way to get funding for relatively minor sites is by hosting advertising, and generating the page hits by writing little more than sound-bite cover articles that link to someone else's material. I don't think this will last, for two reasons.
The first is that I don't think purely ad-supported sites have a great future. You can't force people to see your ads on the web, and a significant number of people will actively avoid it by installing ad-blocking software. Right now, the number of people doing that isn't a huge proportion, but imagine if IE9 came with ad blocking enabled by default.
The other thing is that I think the web will involve a scheme for simple micropayments before too long, providing an alternative means of funding but only to those sites good enough to get people to read their material. Things like PayPal have started us down that road. In due course, I expect browsers to support a routine "Do you wish to pay 0.1 cents to view the linked page?" sort of concept. If and when that happens, I would expect people who write worthwhile content to start structuring their sites with introductions on the public site, and charging micropayments to read the rest. No-one is going to pay micropayments very often to sites that mostly just link to someone else's work, so there will cease to be much market for such sites. Meanwhile, those who produce genuinely interesting or entertaining material will carry on, funded by the large numbers of small payments they receive from their large readership.
None of this means that the good writers will only write long articles, of course. It's just that the short ones will still have to be worth reading and not vapour built on someone else's material, or they won't earn any money.
A lot of lengthy articles are boring, but that's just because constructing a detailed, compelling argument or giving a clear, informative explanation of a complex subject is hard.
Anyone can write a couple of sound-bites without losing a reader. Crafting a decent article, however, requires both an excellent understanding the subject matter, and the style, creativity and command of the written word to convey your meaning effectively to others. Most people have neither, and that is why most long articles suck. A talented writer will hold your attention for the length of an article without your even noticing where the time went as you read it.
I've always thought of reading material in two simple categories: one-off and long-term. One-offs are things like tutorials or thought-provoking opinion pieces. Long-term tends to be reference material, but might also be something entertaining or profound enough to be worth revisiting once in a while.
Both can be valuable in their own way. Both can also be a waste of time and space. You need a different approach to write each well. And the scary thing is that most people — even those who write as part of their job — really suck at working out what kind of material is actually useful, and writing accordingly.
By its nature, ideal reference material is easy to find. That typically means that there are only a few places to look, and it's easy to search for what you need in those places. Once you get there, the material needs to be comprehensive and authoritative. No-one likes looking around for the same bit of information all day, and winding up with three half-baked, semi-contradictory versions of it in the end.
Blogs are the very antithesis of this ideal. There are a zillion of them. In any given field, there are typically a few really good ones, but the average quality is usually quite poor. The most organised search facilities you'll find are tagging (fine for locating related content within the same blog, but generally not much use for searching across blogs) and web search engines (which I use less and less as certain types of page get ever better at gaming the system and getting their stuff up-top when I don't really want to see it). This makes the recent push by many companies, Microsoft prominently among them, to disseminate technical reference information via blogs a pretty bad idea.
What blogs are really good at is conveying interesting nuggets of information. A blog post can be long enough to introduce a useful idea, or to draw attention to something newsworthy. Blogs lend themselves to being scanned by those looking for something interesting but unsure of what.
Bottom line: if these businesses really want to help people find the useful information, they should go back to maintaining a small number (ideally one!) of comprehensive, authoritative reference sites, and use blogs and newsfeeds as introductory material: highlight a useful new development or draw attention to a handy technique, direct the reader to the appropriate reference material if they want to know the details, and make sure the user never has to come back to that particular blog post again.
OK, I give up. You persist in failing to read what I and others have written. You claim to have studied things, though you admit you didn't get much use out of university other than in the library.
You clearly haven't got a clue when it comes to program analysis and automated parallelisation, because according to you, it's impossible to do things a research group based less than a mile from where I work have already documented doing. There are even published papers and videos of lectures you can download that describe how they've done it and when the techniques they've got so far are applicable — a Google search for "automated parallelisation" returns more than 70,000 results, many of the first ones being directly relevant.
Optimizing a code for a processor is an entirely different task from making non-threaded code run on multiple processors.
No, it isn't. It's a closely related problem, and amenable to solution with much the same techniques. Fortunately, the fact that you choose not to believe this won't stop real computer scientists from doing it.
So why didn't they just hire a mathematician to do that job? Programmers write programs, mathematicians do the math.
It may surprise you to learn that the two are not mutually exclusive. The fact that our problem domain is mathematical just means we tend to have people around who can also think in terms of things like graph theory and numerical methods, which is handy because those happen to be areas where we develop a lot of our algorithms.
Ok, let me clarify. The article is talking about maths in undergraduate CS degrees.
I didn't see any reference to that in TFA. Where does it say anything about degrees, undergraduate or otherwise?
In any case, by your argument people should stop doing science and mathematical degrees altogether unless they intend to go on to doctoral research, because most people will never use the advanced mathematics, physics, chemistry, or whatever they learn in an undergrad degree otherwise. Of course, this completely ignores the benefits of studying a subject at undergraduate level beyond rote learning, such as understanding different approaches to solving problems in the field and learning different ways to think about things.
So tell me again the theory of how to get a compiler to automatically subdivide work and hand out chunks to different threads
There isn't one and only a "computer scientist" thinks there is going to be. To take proper advantage of multiple processors, you need good software engineering practices of proper design, good abstractions, and solid structures, none of which require higher maths do to. The so-called multithreaded algorithms are little more than hot air.
What a very sad, narrow-minded view. Maybe if you studied a little more about the formal models underlying programming, you'd realise why what you wrote there isn't true, and you'd know that several of the smartest people in the field are working on ways for compilers to do this automatically.
I always find it odd when people take your view of studying the construction of compilers. No-one questions the usefulness of optimising compilers, and programmers in many languages take things like garbage collection, type systems, or lazy evaluation for granted. Yet all of these things come from much the same basic idea: somewhere in the compiler or run-time system, the program is evaluated according to certain criteria, and based on the results of that evaluation, the executable code is transformed so that it preserves the programmer's intent but carries out its work in a different way without the programmer's explicit control. Why would you think automatic parallelisation was any different?
Having written a software renderer myself, I am very well aware how such libraries work, and I can tell you that very little higher math is involved in making them, and all that math has already been done.
But that wasn't what I was talking about, as I thought was pretty clear from my previous comment. Sure, the rendering itself is fairly straightforward, but how do you decide what to render? And yes, I do do this for a living, and the maths and algorithms involved in serious CAD (for example) are not trivial.
No, we are talking about Software Engineering, which is what most people here do.
You might be. The rest of us are talking about Computer Science. The clue is in the title of the discussion.
Bullshit. Nobody has developed anything useful in the field of computer science in more than a decade. All the higher-level theory has been done already.
Sure. So tell me again the theory of how to get a compiler to automatically subdivide work and hand out chunks to different threads, so we can take advantage of all this wholesome multi-core goodness the chip vendors are providing us with these days?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I wouldn't worry about the Data Protection Act. They're openly saying that they will exempt the relevant authorities from its provisions for the purposes of doing this.
It's a bit like the Human Rights Act: the government guarantees you these important rights and freedoms, until they become politically inconvenient, at which point you don't get them any more.
I am quite willing to consider alternatives to my own viewpoint. I just think that the argument you make is a very dangerous one.
You focus on one side of the debate: the potential benefits of using cameras in this way. In fact, I would state the case for this more strongly than you do:
That clearly isn't true: use of cameras for crime prevention unquestionably is in the public interest.
The danger, which you gloss over in making your case, is that in allowing the use of cameras in ways that might prevent crimes, you also open the door to deliberate abuse and accidental mistakes.
For example, take your opening comment:
Did you know that one of the recent leaks suggested that simply driving along in front of or behind a suspect's vehicle could put your own car on a watch list?
Fortunately, we have a system of due process that guards against the dangers of guilt by association. But then in your very next paragraph, you attempt to undermine this:
You make the flawed assumption that in such cases, someone will die if there is no time to convince a judge to award a warrant. Clearly this is not always the case. You also make the implicit assumption that if a judge declined to award a warrant in these circumstances, that would be a bad thing, rather than effectively protecting an innocent person from unreasonable persecution. This also is not necessarily true.
We live in a society where the government is increasingly taking your line, to the point that an innocent citizen can now have their freedoms abruptly curtailed just for being a suspect in an investigation. Freedoms that can be removed so easily are just illusions.
Of course, it's easy to rationalise this away. There's no smoke without fire, right? And anyway, it only applies to Bad People:
Unfortunately, this is simply not true. They are deliberately tracking everybody, and as the statistics released under a Freedom of Information request earlier this week demonstrated, more than half of the people arrested in recent terrorism investigations have later been released without charge, so obviously the authorities do make mistakes, and often.
So I'm afraid I don't agree with you when you say this:
Considering that the London congestion charge has only been in operation itself for a little over four years, that is unlikely.
Perhaps instead of inventing scare stories during these discussions, it would be best to focus on the real dangers posed by the real actions of real people?
That "enduring threat" seems to consist of two recent attempts, both bungled by incompetent notscaryists, to let off car bombs in central London using previously unknown vehicles. Remind me how tracking everyone everywhere is going to do anything whatsoever to prevent that happening again?
Damn you! You're supposed to put SPOILER in big letters or ROT13 your post when you give away the ending like that, you insensitive clod!
Personally, I stopped reading computer magazines when I knew for a fact that the articles in areas where I was well-informed were Just Plain Wrong, or at least presenting an over-simplified, naive explanation. How, then, could I trust that I was being properly informed about those subjects I did not already know about?
Well, that and the fact that by the time the comparison reviews and ad mini-brochures were printed, all the prices were so out-of-date that you might make a completely different decision anyway.
Hmm... So for those of us on our lunch break... Is that a NSFW site, or just a pun on LaTeX?
While I agree with almost everything that has been said by posters in this thread, no-one has yet commented on the round that was lethal. Most tech news sites are indeed full of ad-ridden republished press releases edited by people who are technically incompetent. Most tech blogs are indeed full of poorly written "commentary" with no original research. However, with so many blogs around, there are bound to be a few really good ones, which do offer thoughtful commentary, deep understanding of the issues covered, previously hard-to-find information, and/or original research.
Such blogs also tend to link to other worthwhile source material by their nature. In addition, blogs typically support comments, or more usefully full-blown web forums, mailing lists or Usenet groups. The combination means informed people can share knowledge and ideas once the scene has been set by the good bloggers, and I imagine that most discerning geeks, having found a few such blogs as starting points, simply have no need to bother with the numerous low-quality sites any more. I know I don't...
Congratulations, you just fired every sysadmin in the world. I hate to break this to you, but all modern processors have lots of bugs. They are usually subtle, and they can usually be worked around in one way or another, but they all have them. Expecting a modern processor, with hugely complicated microcode, to be bug-free is like saying you could write a full-scale, bug-free operating system: the costs of doing so would be astronomical, so pretty much no-one does.
I see no signs of price cuts yet for E6x00 chips, but I also see no-one actually shipping E6x50 chips yet.
However, I just checked several popular UK components web sites, and it's common to find (for example) an E6750 on pre-order at near enough the same price as an E6600 to buy today. Prices for the E6850 pre-order vs. E6700 shipping today are similarly close. To me, that suggests a big price drop for the E6x00 chips is coming.
Just as a point of interest, when I was looking for new components around a fortnight ago, suppliers were were already listing high-end chips in the forthcoming E6x50 series at lower prices than even the mid-range chips from the older E6x00 range. The E6600 has been near the sweet spot on the price/performance curve for quite a while now, so if you're looking for a cheap upgrade, it looks like they'll be practically giving away E6600s and E6700s for as long as they last.
The thing is, I don't think a CS education is something only a small number of people would need. Sure, it provides a deep understanding of some areas that little else does, but it also provides a broad base on which to build anything else you need in less specialised areas.
Put it this way: people who go into writing software without the kind of understanding of database construction and system design that a good CS course would teach are often the reason we get ludicrously slow applications, with ever-increasing hardware requirements, littered with security flaws, and the design behind the code — if it has one at all, instead of misunderstanding the buzzwords and thinking a set of tests is a substitute — is such a mess that no-one can fix it, and you have to either live with it or throw it all away and start from scratch.
(Before anyone replies, please note that I wrote "the kind of understanding ... that a good CS course would teach". Studying a formal CS course is certainly not the only way to gain this understanding.)
While you could well be right, the one absolute in university-level computing courses is that everything is relative.
Some places have an old-school CS course that teaches strong theory and is quite mathematical. This is probably good for someone who wants to deal with challenging programming work in the future: the kind of person who wouldn't just be writing a web front-end to use a database, they'd be writing the compiler and the database engine. These courses probably won't teach you to program in this week's greatest programming language or web/DB framework. What it will give you is a solid understanding of the principles and exposure to a broad range of ideas. With that sort of perspective, a CS grad should make short work of getting up to a reasonable level of competence in any industrial languages and technologies.
Sadly, it seems like an increasing number of places now run a "computer science" course that is basically just the latest industrial buzzwords. If you're looking at a course that teaches things like VB, XML, Windows/Linux system administration, business studies, web design, and the like, then IMHO that's not really computer science at all, it's just vocational training.
The potential scopes of other courses, such as "Information Technology", "Information Systems", "Software Engineering", are similarly wide-ranging, so it's hard to give advice about which course is best for someone without being able to see the details of what each really covers.
One of my local MEPs (I'm in the UK) actually seemed pretty clued up about this debate. He considered at least one of the proposed versions of European software patent legislation to have a genuine benefit, in that it would standardise what was and wasn't patentable, and fix the problem with the EPO and a few national patent authorities granting things that others wouldn't recognise and that were dubious under the current system anyway. I'm pretty sure he voted against that specific proposal in the end, because of opposition to the general principle of introducing software patents, but at least he'd thought about it, and we can rest assured that at least some of our elected representatives don't just vote with the most expensive lobbyists on issues like this.
“Most people, I think, don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?” — Thomas Hesse, President, Global Digital Business, Sony BMG Music Entertainment
Well, Tom, I think you’re about to find out. Have a nice day, now!
You think Microsoft is giving Dell kickbacks worth around $200 to gain an extra sale of an OS probably worth well under $100 at trade rates? Interesting logic you've got there, but I don't recommend management as a career path!
Don't worry, no-one dupes stories faster than Slashdot, so the repeat offer at Dell will be along just in time. :-)
No doubt they do, and I'm sure that in time the pool of available blog posts will become more useful.
What I think is regrettable is that organisations with a lot of information to share about their products — and Microsoft is just a single, high-profile example — already seem to be giving up on maintaining high quality, comprehensive reference sites, as if the trend to allow staff to write their own blogs somehow provides an adequate replacement.
Blockquoth the AC:
Sure, I think that's a great idea. Reference material isn't worth much unless it's kept up to date. The PHP manual, to give one example, seems to do this pretty well for the most part.
This is sad, but true, I agree. Right now, the best way to get funding for relatively minor sites is by hosting advertising, and generating the page hits by writing little more than sound-bite cover articles that link to someone else's material. I don't think this will last, for two reasons.
The first is that I don't think purely ad-supported sites have a great future. You can't force people to see your ads on the web, and a significant number of people will actively avoid it by installing ad-blocking software. Right now, the number of people doing that isn't a huge proportion, but imagine if IE9 came with ad blocking enabled by default.
The other thing is that I think the web will involve a scheme for simple micropayments before too long, providing an alternative means of funding but only to those sites good enough to get people to read their material. Things like PayPal have started us down that road. In due course, I expect browsers to support a routine "Do you wish to pay 0.1 cents to view the linked page?" sort of concept. If and when that happens, I would expect people who write worthwhile content to start structuring their sites with introductions on the public site, and charging micropayments to read the rest. No-one is going to pay micropayments very often to sites that mostly just link to someone else's work, so there will cease to be much market for such sites. Meanwhile, those who produce genuinely interesting or entertaining material will carry on, funded by the large numbers of small payments they receive from their large readership.
None of this means that the good writers will only write long articles, of course. It's just that the short ones will still have to be worth reading and not vapour built on someone else's material, or they won't earn any money.
A lot of lengthy articles are boring, but that's just because constructing a detailed, compelling argument or giving a clear, informative explanation of a complex subject is hard.
Anyone can write a couple of sound-bites without losing a reader. Crafting a decent article, however, requires both an excellent understanding the subject matter, and the style, creativity and command of the written word to convey your meaning effectively to others. Most people have neither, and that is why most long articles suck. A talented writer will hold your attention for the length of an article without your even noticing where the time went as you read it.
I've always thought of reading material in two simple categories: one-off and long-term. One-offs are things like tutorials or thought-provoking opinion pieces. Long-term tends to be reference material, but might also be something entertaining or profound enough to be worth revisiting once in a while.
Both can be valuable in their own way. Both can also be a waste of time and space. You need a different approach to write each well. And the scary thing is that most people — even those who write as part of their job — really suck at working out what kind of material is actually useful, and writing accordingly.
By its nature, ideal reference material is easy to find. That typically means that there are only a few places to look, and it's easy to search for what you need in those places. Once you get there, the material needs to be comprehensive and authoritative. No-one likes looking around for the same bit of information all day, and winding up with three half-baked, semi-contradictory versions of it in the end.
Blogs are the very antithesis of this ideal. There are a zillion of them. In any given field, there are typically a few really good ones, but the average quality is usually quite poor. The most organised search facilities you'll find are tagging (fine for locating related content within the same blog, but generally not much use for searching across blogs) and web search engines (which I use less and less as certain types of page get ever better at gaming the system and getting their stuff up-top when I don't really want to see it). This makes the recent push by many companies, Microsoft prominently among them, to disseminate technical reference information via blogs a pretty bad idea.
What blogs are really good at is conveying interesting nuggets of information. A blog post can be long enough to introduce a useful idea, or to draw attention to something newsworthy. Blogs lend themselves to being scanned by those looking for something interesting but unsure of what.
Bottom line: if these businesses really want to help people find the useful information, they should go back to maintaining a small number (ideally one!) of comprehensive, authoritative reference sites, and use blogs and newsfeeds as introductory material: highlight a useful new development or draw attention to a handy technique, direct the reader to the appropriate reference material if they want to know the details, and make sure the user never has to come back to that particular blog post again.
OK, I give up. You persist in failing to read what I and others have written. You claim to have studied things, though you admit you didn't get much use out of university other than in the library.
You clearly haven't got a clue when it comes to program analysis and automated parallelisation, because according to you, it's impossible to do things a research group based less than a mile from where I work have already documented doing. There are even published papers and videos of lectures you can download that describe how they've done it and when the techniques they've got so far are applicable — a Google search for "automated parallelisation" returns more than 70,000 results, many of the first ones being directly relevant.
No, it isn't. It's a closely related problem, and amenable to solution with much the same techniques. Fortunately, the fact that you choose not to believe this won't stop real computer scientists from doing it.
It may surprise you to learn that the two are not mutually exclusive. The fact that our problem domain is mathematical just means we tend to have people around who can also think in terms of things like graph theory and numerical methods, which is handy because those happen to be areas where we develop a lot of our algorithms.
I didn't see any reference to that in TFA. Where does it say anything about degrees, undergraduate or otherwise?
In any case, by your argument people should stop doing science and mathematical degrees altogether unless they intend to go on to doctoral research, because most people will never use the advanced mathematics, physics, chemistry, or whatever they learn in an undergrad degree otherwise. Of course, this completely ignores the benefits of studying a subject at undergraduate level beyond rote learning, such as understanding different approaches to solving problems in the field and learning different ways to think about things.
What a very sad, narrow-minded view. Maybe if you studied a little more about the formal models underlying programming, you'd realise why what you wrote there isn't true, and you'd know that several of the smartest people in the field are working on ways for compilers to do this automatically.
I always find it odd when people take your view of studying the construction of compilers. No-one questions the usefulness of optimising compilers, and programmers in many languages take things like garbage collection, type systems, or lazy evaluation for granted. Yet all of these things come from much the same basic idea: somewhere in the compiler or run-time system, the program is evaluated according to certain criteria, and based on the results of that evaluation, the executable code is transformed so that it preserves the programmer's intent but carries out its work in a different way without the programmer's explicit control. Why would you think automatic parallelisation was any different?
But that wasn't what I was talking about, as I thought was pretty clear from my previous comment. Sure, the rendering itself is fairly straightforward, but how do you decide what to render? And yes, I do do this for a living, and the maths and algorithms involved in serious CAD (for example) are not trivial.
You might be. The rest of us are talking about Computer Science. The clue is in the title of the discussion.
Sure. So tell me again the theory of how to get a compiler to automatically subdivide work and hand out chunks to different threads, so we can take advantage of all this wholesome multi-core goodness the chip vendors are providing us with these days?