Physicists working with General Relativity frequently use units where c=1. This makes a lot more sense, as in GR c is more the aspect ratio of spacetime than it is a speed. Richard Feynman pointed out that in E=mc^2, c is just there to make the units work out. The problem is that we went on for hundreds of years thinking that energy and matter were different things, but it turns out they are related in a somewhat similar way that space is related to time. It's much prettier when you look at momentum (a 3-vector) and energy (a scalar). If you put these together, they make something that isn't really a 4-vector (but physicists don't use quaternions for this) but sort of works like that, if you imagine that the scalar is imaginary. The neat thing is that this 4-whatever transforms exactly the 4-whatever for spacetime.
Anyway, 1 lightyear/year is a fine, pure unit that is quite appropriate for working at galactic scale, at least.
The other nice coincidence is that the amount light travels in a naosecond is a little bit less than a foot, so about the length of a shoe.
I wasn't a molecular biologist, but I did some work on bioinformatics and the human genome back in 1991-1993. I also got to experience the entire life cycle of a scientific research institute, from before its birth to its death (the Supercomputer Computations Research Institute at FSU.
The 1980's and early 1990's were pretty good. We did a lot of good work and released all of it, gratis. Then a couple of years after the turn of the decade, everything started to go to hell, and funding dried up. This is not to mean that there was a lot of funding in the first place. Academia has always been a life of genteel poverty. When I left academia and went into industry, they started paying me at more than double the amount that I had to work myself up to for 13 years in academia. But there are satisfactions to the purity of unclassified, public research that many people in days of yore considered to make up for the lack.
All the administrators started to talk in basso profundo tones about how research in the future was going to be like Business to succeed. Of course, none of them were actually interested in doing any of the things that business did to succeed. They just wanted it to be more, sorta, kinda, you know, businesslike. So they quite predictably floundered around for a little while, and everything fell apart. There is still public research being done, but way less of it, and actual businesses who knew how to run businesses took over.
Part of the trouble is that all those clowns who say "if I pay a dime for it, I want it" aren't willing to pay any more than a dime, and you'd better believe they're going to stick their tongues straight down the cracks of any politicians who promise to drop it to a nickle or a penny. They still want it, though, because, By God It's Their Tax Pennies!
Of course, they always have a justification for that, like Look How Much I'm Paying in Taxes, or Maybe Universities Would Get More Money If They Didn't Have Football and Taught Better. None of the justifications will pay the piper.
Nietzsche hated anti-Semitism pretty violently. He also suggested that European culture would be nothing without Jewish culture. He also had a lot of contempt for Germany. He did suggest that 19th century European Judaism was then the most prominent form of ressentiment, which might annoy some people, but was probably true. (Today I'd say that feminism held that slot. For him to make that claim about European Judaism doesn't make him hate Jews any more than making such a claim about feminism makes me hate women.)
However, his sister Elizabeth was a German nationalist. She heavily edited and controlled the publication of his later works, when he was pretty much a helpless invalid. She also got an imprimatur on releases of some of his earlier works. I once saw an edition of Zarathustra from the teens in which she had an "explanatory" preface, most of which was nonsense. Nietzsche himself didn't publish part 4 of Zarathustra, except in a very limited edition for his friends, for fear that he would be tried for blasphemy.
The best example of this is The Will to Power. Nietzsche never wrote a book with that title. He wanted to write one with that title and wrote down a whole lot of notes. After madness or tertiaty syphilis or whatever took hold, Elizabeth essentially assembled an original work cut-and-pasted from the notes.
By the way, what's Ecce Humo? "Behold the Smoke" or "Behold the Chick Pea Dip"?
Don't conflate schizophrenia with sociopathy
on
A Beautiful Mind
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· Score: 3, Informative
I don't know if the author of the book got this confusion, but it doesn't help to promulgate it.
Sociopathy (nowadays usually called Antisocial Personality Disorder, which I think is too euphemistic) and schizophrenia are completely different things. Schizophrenia is a thought disorder, diagnosed on Axis I. Sociopathy is a personality disorder, diagnosed on Axis II.
Sociopathy doesn't seem to be related to genius at all, except that sociopaths tend to be pretty intelligent. Schizophrenia, or at least schizoaffective disorder, and manic depression (which often has schizoaffective features in manic and mixed states), on the other hand, do appear to be related to genius.
I would go so far as to say that the cluster B personality disorders, of which sociopathy is one, aren't mental illnesses at all, but rather styles of dealing with others. It is certainly possible that someone could develop sociopathy as a result of being tormented for being schizophrenic, but it could happen for boatloads of other reasons as well.
I really have a low tolerance for this sort of thing. I'm not going to talk about my own diagnosis, because that comes across as whiny. However, in 1999 my ex-wife and I started what was only the second program in the United States to teach English to residents who were not native speakers of English. Most of these were schizophrenics.
Our success was phenomenal, at least prima facie. The discharge rate amongst our students was twice the discharge rate of the hospital at large. Most of these were long-term residents. All students who attended more than one class achieved dramatically improved functioning. One woman had a chronic undifferentiated schizophrenic who also had a seizure disorder, had been there for four years, and was understandable neither in English nor in her native Spanish came to one lesson, and after that, we recieved reports that she was much more understandable. It was a very simple class, with a simple "Hi, how are you" dialogue. She went out and enlisted other residents to practice the dialog with her.
Now, of course, this remains at the anecdotal level. The program was effectively killed by administration after a couple of months, though this was after we had gotten the Florida Department of Children and Families volunteer of the year award.
It could also be said that I'm biased. We did, of course, recieve reports from other people who weren't part of the program, but as someone who was a research scientist for 13 years and has been active in the skeptic movement, I am aware of those dangers. On the other hand, there is also a danger of dismissing something casually. In any event, I don't think it can be rationally said that it isn't at least promising.
One would, ideally, try this sort of thing at a larger scale, doing extensive followups to test the long-term effects if any and also trying to find out just what it was about the teaching that was effective if it was. What we did was a mixture of the European Direct method, in which both my ex and I got trained and certified, and the Dartmouth method, in which I had taught German some years earlier. Both methods belong to the class of "intensive" methods, and perhaps subjecting a schizophrenic to that kind of highly social rigor has unexpected side-effects. I don't know, but it would be interesting to study.
My best guess is that we could do a hell of a lot better than we're doing. As the administrative reaction highlights, people don't want this. They want to look at the "green monkey" and go eeeew and put him into a warehouse run by sadists. (Up until 1991, at this hospital, any resident who tried to bite a staff member had all their teeth extracted as punishment. If anything, Ken Kesey pulled his punches. The reality is way worse.)
To talk about the dangers of giving people "false hope" seems to me a rationalization. Sure, Hollywood isn't realistic. The guy in Awakenings, in real life, didn't do much but masturbate. OK. But still, the danger of squelching real hope which spurs real effort that sometimes works is much greater.
As usual, this is ancient. Back at FSU, we had a CDC Cyber 205, a vector pipeline supercomputer, back in 1985. Any process could be crashed for a shutdown, and it produced a file that worked exactly like an executable and resumed computation from the time it was crashed.
I am paraphrasing here what Philip K. Dick said about the movie from memory:
I have just seen the rough cut of Blade Runner. It is terrific! It has nothing to do with the book. What my book will become is a futuristic alien shoot-em-up. This is just as well, because my book would have made a terrible movie. It is full of Deckard's introspection and wondering about humanity. But a book is something to be read, and a movie is an experience that moves.
IMO, the book is excellent. I came to reading Dick as a result of seeing Blade Runner. The book isn't much like the movie. There is Deckard, and there are Replicants (called Andys in the book), and Deckard kills them, and there's a Rachel who's a borderline, and both book and movie approach the question of what is humanity, though from complementary directions. The main plot set of the book (A post-apocalyptic world, Mercerism, the ethic of taking care of animals and artificial animals as fakes, Sydney's catalogue with the E for extinct species, the attempt by the Andys who control the media to discredit Mercerism, the schism between the thought processes of the Andys who cannot understand empathy and cannot take part in polycephalic fusion, the Ezekiel-like tomb world) is almost completely absent from the movie, except for some bits about manufactured animals. Also absent are many subplots (the phantom police agency, the concept of fake fakes, Deckard's wife and the Penfield mood organ, and the [shudder] scene with the spider). Nevertheless, the book is excellent if you don't expect it to be like the movie.
The problem is that an alarmingly large number of people cannot distinguish between the following:
Security
Words about security
What has happened to the software industry in general is exactly what has happened to the American political process. If you make promises and then cash the check, it doesn't really matter if you deliver. The reason is that people are gullible.
So you think, "gosh, wouldn't it be great if they've finally decided to do it right." But they haven't done it; they've just said that they are going to do it. Any support for mere words on the hope that it might come to pass will remove any incentive for actually doing it.
Most people get off so much on the hope and the promises that they don't realize how they're encouraging integrity-challenged behavior with their actions. It takes a real cynical bastard not to get caught up in this, and then we get told, "Oh, you Microsoft Bad Religious Types."
Yes, it is dangerous. It's also unidirectional and pointed up, more or less. Don't get in the way of the dish when it's on. People who can manage to avoid putting their hands in switched-on blenders or putting their heads in fireplaces should have little trouble with the concept.
I don't think The Fool's Errand ever made it to the PC. Neither did System's Twilight
As far as extant Mac companies, I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Freeverse. Most of what they've produced is card games, but they've been branching out into arcade and strategy games as well. Also, I don't know too many other game companies with a character that was used on a Blockbuster commercial.
Also remember that Myst was originally not only Mac only by Hypercard, and, what was it, Quake 3 arena came out on beta first for the Mac just a couple of years ago?
So you do the best with what you can, and it either works or it doesn't, and you make money or you don't, or you stay in business or go out of business.
If you want to talk about business reality, that's business reality. The dot com boom and the dot com bust are business reality. Incredible hype about Enron followed by its bankruptcy are business reality. The recession is business reality, and so is prosperity. And sometimes business reality is producing crap software that is full of holes.
You have your compromise already. You work like hell and design well and find out that for all that people in business talk about profit for the company, it all turns out to be the color of their parachute. Then you figure this out and either cheat like all the rest or else you get into a position where you are allowed to write good software, which is almost never software that is sold, unless it's a game or industrial control software. What other kind of compromise were you expecting?
You can do things properly, or you can do them improperly. When you do them improperly they fail more often. You can pile up good, solid business reasons why you have to do things improperly, and I don't care what color your power tie or how earnest and "forward-looking" you are, or how many inspirational posters you have, doing things improperly leads to failure.
Any veteran of business software development would know these things and, if honest, would have to write about them. Then people wouldn't like it, and they'd mod it down or not buy the book or tell the author he's an asshole because they want to hear that there's a magic incantation that turns mediocrity into gold. They want to hear about Extreme Programming or The Latest New Buzzword that Embraces Change! The newer the better. Old ideas are annoying, because you've already had time to find out that they don't magically work, while there's always the chance that the latest and greatest will make everything OK and nobody will have to get nailed to a tree.
Surely you mean where is the parent. Most of the country thinks that for a child to have parents (plural) is an outmoded concept. You can't disagree with that, because then you're a horrible person who doesn't think that single parents are perfect saints/victims who never go to the toilet. For a variety of reasons, California is at the forefront of parental minimization.
To the average person, Microsoft is what there is.
The average person does not experience OS crashes.
The first idea is correct. The second idea is incorrect and is completely superfluous given the first idea. It doesn't matter how flaky the Microsoft OS is, the average person is not going to consider it a problem with the operating system.
Consider the following fictional scenario. Toyota makes cars, and they use engines manufactured by Matsushita. (Not saying they really do, but let's assume they do.) The brand name of these engines is "Engine(TM)." Those in the know call them "Matsushita Engine," but most people just call them "Engine." They come in models like "4-Cylinder Engine(TM)" and "6-Cylinder Engine(TM)" People buy the cars. If the engine blows a head gasket, they're not going to get angry at Matsushita; they're going to get angry at Toyota. Even if they are aware that there are different engines, they are going to think that they need to upgrade to "6-Cylinder Engine XP(TM)."
Similarly, even if average people experience a lot of Windows crashes (which they do), they're not going to get mad at Microsoft, but rather with Dell or Compaq or something. If they are aware that they need a different operating system, it's going to be a different version of Windows.
I love archaic technology. However, I think that you overestimate the case for microprocessors, though. Much of the hardware in early video games was either simple digital or even analog.
Consider the venerable "paddle." Take an RC-based timer, reset on the vertical retrace. Use the potentiometer on the console as the R part of the circuit. When the timer fires, have it trigger a one-shot timer for a short period of time. Feed the ouput of that time to the gun of the CRT. Voila, a horizontal bar that you can move up and down the screen with the knob.
Take another shorter RC timer, triggered by the horizontal retrace. Have a fixed timing, so that it fires when the beam is about an inch from the left of the screen. Have it fire another timer that will stay on for a few pixels' trace. Take this output and the ouput of the timer in the previous paragraph, run them through an AND gate, and you have a paddle for the left of the screen.
Of course, eventually you are going to have to have some counters in there, but it's amazing how much you can do with very simple circuitry.
I haven't done exactly what the original poster is asking for, but I have done a lot of trade shows and various demos.
You do not want a CRT in a mobile van. Ever. You do not want to pack them all up before you move ten feet because the guy who told you where you could park didn't have that authority. You do not want to deal with the even trivial cases of the socket getting flaky with the CRT, let alone with the cases where something will break in spite of your best efforts. No matter what you do, you will eventually have to deal with union guys and, unless you watch them like a hawk, there will be cases where the CRT's are packed improperly. You do not want to have a bunch of CRT's running in summer. Ever.
For the same reason and for the walking-away problem, you do not want to have laptops or separate LCD screens, because some union guy is going to think it's a great idea to stack them up to save space.
You could conceivably build everything into a set of consoles so that they didn't have to be stored. Then when they broke, which they would because nobody ever puts in enough shock protection, you could have dead machines sitting there until you got around to crawling behind and fixing them, which you will be a lot less likely to do than you think now.
Something like the new iMac would be good. Fairly durable, light, and bottom-heavy, but most important, you can put it in a box. Most of the volume will be air, and the screen will not be flat on a box side, so it's inherently resistant to packing problems.
My answer is "no," the U.S. should not prevent the exportation of encryption (as if it were so difficult for someone to smuggle a CD out of the country). It's a silly, feel-good measure, as nobody who is going to use encryption for nefarious purposes will be even mildly troubled by it.
However, the U.S. has traditionally prevented the exportation of encryption and only now permit it when it is wimpy enough to be easily breakable. So, is it really all that surprising that this happened?
None of the revelations about XP surprise me. I've known them for a year or more. So has every reasonably intelligent person who has paid attention.
The problem is that an awful lot of people played "what if." They saw the promises that said that XP would be great and secure. They wanted it to be so, and as a result they believed the promises. Since the promises worked and ensured sales, they didn't actually need to do it.
Microsoft seems obviously in love with their own PR. The problem is when people go along with the gag, which they've been doing for far too long. Now you want to play some more. As long as you play, get used to bending over.
I also have a hard time understanding the idea of "middle ground." What, like Microsoft gets to abuse its monopoly on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays? Being a monopoly is legal. Abusing monopoly power is. The government wants them to stop but won't do anything to make them stop. So, what exactly do you want?
I'm also getting more than a little tired of this Linux As Religion stuff. Sure, there are zealots, but this is mostly a Beavis-and-Butthead-style dismissal. Most geeks like cool stuff. I've been a computer geek for about 30 years, and Microsoft used to be cool. Nobody cared that they monopolized the microcomputer languages field, because Microsoft BASIC was good. RTF and SYLK were good. The first version of Excel was good. Even MS-DOS, for all its primitiveness, basically worked. It isn't some sort of religious conversion that makes me dislike what Microsoft has been doing over the past decade; it's the fact that they've been doing bad.
(2 points) Given a cheating detection program with a probability of generating a false positive p for any pairwise match of programs and a class size of n students, compute stochastically the expected number of false positives.
(3 points) Assign values for the probability of false positives and false negatives to the appeals process based on an interview with the Dean. Using these values and records of appeals over the past five years from Georgia Tech, calibrate minimum and maximum values of p to within a 5% confidence level. Note that simple division is not sufficient, as the number of false positives varies nonlinearly with class size. Extra credit: Factor in program size (1 point)
(3 points) Graph the probability that a student will be marked with a false positive as a function of class size.
(2 points) Calculate the probability that this program you wrote is cheating.
A lot of people have been saying "this is news?" The news is that 187 people were "caught" with this program, not that the program was written. The story appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution today; I presume it went out on the wire services, too.
Frankly, I'm skeptical. I'm sure this program is more sophisticated than diff, which means more likely to get false positives. It was in two introductory programming courses. I'm not sure that there are 187 different ways of writing substantially different programs for that kind of assignment, especially by people who have only seen the style of the teacher and that of the textbooks.
The vast majority of language preferences reduce to religion, and of those the vast majority are dilettantes who know a dozen languages or fewer.
In reality, LISP isn't slow, and it really never was, compared to the alternatives. About 20 years ago, some deluded souls converted some heavily numerical FORTRAN code to LISP and found out it ran about 20% faster on LISP. I call them deluded because they were under the false impression that any of the detractors of LISP would care. They don't.
People prefer languages primarily for cultural reasons. LISP fits certain cultures and doesn't fit others. You can say the same about FORTRAN, C++, Java, Visual Basic, or any other language you like.
Pseudo-quantitative arguments come later as justifications to be used in arguments.
Beyond that, different languages are good for different things, but it's almost impossible to have a discussion about it. If we were to have such a discussion, I would say that LISP is a great choice for anything involving graph theory, which a reservation system obviously does.
Me, I'm in the middle of writing a game engine and editor that's built in C and C++, does the plotting in an embedded Scheme, uses a Postscript-like code for run-time, interfaced with the Scheme, and under OSX uses Objective C for the user interface layer. So, what do I know anyway?
I know the answer to this, because I spent a lot of time at a university. It's because the public funding that universities get is a pittance compared to what it costs to operate them.
This is because the citizens want guaranteed state university systems with ridiculously low tuition and high teacher/student ratio, but they don't want to pay any taxes. Somebody else should do it, and they'd better well damned do it. This absolutely requires universities and the like to make money elsewhere. They sell football tickets, and they sometimes sell software.
I don't like it, either. But if you don't like it, stop complaining about how high your taxes are and stop voting for politicians that promise to lower your taxes.
I've done that, pretty much. Back in the mid-1980's, I worked on a HASP bisynchronous communications package called HASTE. Hardly anyone uses HASP anymore, but it was a bit like telnet and FTP with guaranteed delivery, error correction, and compression, over bisynchronous communications lines. The program ran at first on CP/M machines and later on MS/DOS machines. It provided redirection to console, printer, and disk file, and redirection from console, disk file, and "reader." It had full on-screen help, a built-in text editor. It was menu- and event-loop driven. Not the most sophisticated program ever, but not too shabby.
We were very concerned about making it bug-free, even to the point of including patches to operating systems and working with developers of many new computers to make sure their software and hardware could run it. We used to give demonstrations of the running program where a member of the audience would be invited to cut the cable during a transfer of a lengthy file. Then we installed a new cable, and the transfer finished.
Even though we had a No Warranty sticker to keep the lawyers away, we offered a deal. The first person to find a bug got a free dinner at any restaurant. We had to pay off exactly once--at the restaurant in the Alexandria Hotel in San Francisco. We fixed the bug, of course. It was a cheap way to learn something about our program.
Things were pretty good for five years or so. We got excited about what was happening in the field. Most other companies seemed to share our ethic. Then things got depressing. We started to see people go out of their way to buy crap and get rid of good stuff that worked seamlessly. We saw companies throw away X terminals that worked, forbid their graphics designers from using Macs, and institute All-Microsoft policies, resulting in most cases in a loss of productivity and endless headaches. We watched a new generation of people materialize with a Beavis and Butthead uh-huh all software has bugs mentality.
I think I'm the only one of the group that does any serious sofware development any more. I have gotten way better as a developer. I am even vaguely embarrassed about that first bug-free success. But, two years ago, I was unemployed for more than a year. It was a bad time, and I lost my wife and just about everything else, including big chunks of my emotional capacity. I finally did make it back and am doing very nicely financially, but I'm not doing anything important, and I keep myself sane with Open Source side projects.
I know from reading TechRepublic and similar boards that about 90% of all IT-type managers and hiring people would never consider hiring me. They have the blue-collar Beavis and Butthead mentality, too.
What's the moral of the story? I think it's that developers aren't the problem. Nor is a lack of enough lawyers. The real problem is the business of the marketplace and the ethic that drives it. There are still some good development houses out there that make stuff that works. Macromedia is, I think, one. Adobe is another, their idiocy with Dmitry notwithstanding. But they are all either games houses, industrial control shops, and companies that established themselves when the marketplace still permitted the production of quality.
Nowadays, people might bitch about poor quality or demand that some lawyers do something about it, but they still make their decisions in such a way as to encourage and reward crap.
If MS loses the appeal of the popular press - promoting every new release as stable and secure - then they're screwed,
even without the class action suits and liability claims.
I just have to laugh when I see stuff like this. Ooh, Microsoft's gonna get in trouble! No they aren't.
The vast majority of people who buy a copy of XP aren't even aware that they are buying a copy of XP. They buy a computer. To them, if they even know the words "operating system," it has no meaning to them beyond what it is they see on the screen. They certainly don't choose an operating system. They go down to Circuit City and buy a computer because all their friends have a computer, and they want one too. Or else they need one because they have a computer at work, and they want to work at home.
Is there any evidence that Compaq, Dell, Gateway etc. are particularly concerned about security flaws in the bundled OS? No. They want to sell boxes, and they have to sell as many as possible, because their margins are low. Are people going to complain to Compaq, Dell, Gateway etc. about the OS? Sure, but they're going to complain to them about anything whether it's related to the machine or not, and at least there may be the option of foisting those calls off on Microsoft. Are Compaq, Dell, Gateway etc. going to complain to Microsoft? Maybe, but Microsoft has them by the short hairs, and they know it.
What's going to happen with some bad press? Not a damned thing. People might become irritable and insist that Somebody Do Something, but they're going to keep shoveling money into Microsoft's maw anyway, and they're not going to slow down.
Mumble mumble class action lawsuits? Yeah, right. The DOJ spend a whole lot of taxpayers' money to do nothing over several years. Half the states capitulated to a non-settlement. Microsoft isn't going to run out of lawyers any time soon.
Truth, Justice, and the American Way? It was the American Consumer (who is always right, and don't you forget it buddy) who made things this way by their choices. It isn't going to change.
Slashdot Mirror
In some of Sam Delaney's books, people do just that. Especially prized is the meat from celebtrities' DNA.
Physicists working with General Relativity frequently use units where c=1. This makes a lot more sense, as in GR c is more the aspect ratio of spacetime than it is a speed. Richard Feynman pointed out that in E=mc^2, c is just there to make the units work out. The problem is that we went on for hundreds of years thinking that energy and matter were different things, but it turns out they are related in a somewhat similar way that space is related to time. It's much prettier when you look at momentum (a 3-vector) and energy (a scalar). If you put these together, they make something that isn't really a 4-vector (but physicists don't use quaternions for this) but sort of works like that, if you imagine that the scalar is imaginary. The neat thing is that this 4-whatever transforms exactly the 4-whatever for spacetime.
Anyway, 1 lightyear/year is a fine, pure unit that is quite appropriate for working at galactic scale, at least.
The other nice coincidence is that the amount light travels in a naosecond is a little bit less than a foot, so about the length of a shoe.
I wasn't a molecular biologist, but I did some work on bioinformatics and the human genome back in 1991-1993. I also got to experience the entire life cycle of a scientific research institute, from before its birth to its death (the Supercomputer Computations Research Institute at FSU.
The 1980's and early 1990's were pretty good. We did a lot of good work and released all of it, gratis. Then a couple of years after the turn of the decade, everything started to go to hell, and funding dried up. This is not to mean that there was a lot of funding in the first place. Academia has always been a life of genteel poverty. When I left academia and went into industry, they started paying me at more than double the amount that I had to work myself up to for 13 years in academia. But there are satisfactions to the purity of unclassified, public research that many people in days of yore considered to make up for the lack.
All the administrators started to talk in basso profundo tones about how research in the future was going to be like Business to succeed. Of course, none of them were actually interested in doing any of the things that business did to succeed. They just wanted it to be more, sorta, kinda, you know, businesslike. So they quite predictably floundered around for a little while, and everything fell apart. There is still public research being done, but way less of it, and actual businesses who knew how to run businesses took over.
Part of the trouble is that all those clowns who say "if I pay a dime for it, I want it" aren't willing to pay any more than a dime, and you'd better believe they're going to stick their tongues straight down the cracks of any politicians who promise to drop it to a nickle or a penny. They still want it, though, because, By God It's Their Tax Pennies!
Of course, they always have a justification for that, like Look How Much I'm Paying in Taxes, or Maybe Universities Would Get More Money If They Didn't Have Football and Taught Better. None of the justifications will pay the piper.
Nietzsche hated anti-Semitism pretty violently. He also suggested that European culture would be nothing without Jewish culture. He also had a lot of contempt for Germany. He did suggest that 19th century European Judaism was then the most prominent form of ressentiment, which might annoy some people, but was probably true. (Today I'd say that feminism held that slot. For him to make that claim about European Judaism doesn't make him hate Jews any more than making such a claim about feminism makes me hate women.)
However, his sister Elizabeth was a German nationalist. She heavily edited and controlled the publication of his later works, when he was pretty much a helpless invalid. She also got an imprimatur on releases of some of his earlier works. I once saw an edition of Zarathustra from the teens in which she had an "explanatory" preface, most of which was nonsense. Nietzsche himself didn't publish part 4 of Zarathustra, except in a very limited edition for his friends, for fear that he would be tried for blasphemy.
The best example of this is The Will to Power. Nietzsche never wrote a book with that title. He wanted to write one with that title and wrote down a whole lot of notes. After madness or tertiaty syphilis or whatever took hold, Elizabeth essentially assembled an original work cut-and-pasted from the notes.
By the way, what's Ecce Humo? "Behold the Smoke" or "Behold the Chick Pea Dip"?
I don't know if the author of the book got this confusion, but it doesn't help to promulgate it.
Sociopathy (nowadays usually called Antisocial Personality Disorder, which I think is too euphemistic) and schizophrenia are completely different things. Schizophrenia is a thought disorder, diagnosed on Axis I. Sociopathy is a personality disorder, diagnosed on Axis II.
Sociopathy doesn't seem to be related to genius at all, except that sociopaths tend to be pretty intelligent. Schizophrenia, or at least schizoaffective disorder, and manic depression (which often has schizoaffective features in manic and mixed states), on the other hand, do appear to be related to genius.
I would go so far as to say that the cluster B personality disorders, of which sociopathy is one, aren't mental illnesses at all, but rather styles of dealing with others. It is certainly possible that someone could develop sociopathy as a result of being tormented for being schizophrenic, but it could happen for boatloads of other reasons as well.
I really have a low tolerance for this sort of thing. I'm not going to talk about my own diagnosis, because that comes across as whiny. However, in 1999 my ex-wife and I started what was only the second program in the United States to teach English to residents who were not native speakers of English. Most of these were schizophrenics.
Our success was phenomenal, at least prima facie. The discharge rate amongst our students was twice the discharge rate of the hospital at large. Most of these were long-term residents. All students who attended more than one class achieved dramatically improved functioning. One woman had a chronic undifferentiated schizophrenic who also had a seizure disorder, had been there for four years, and was understandable neither in English nor in her native Spanish came to one lesson, and after that, we recieved reports that she was much more understandable. It was a very simple class, with a simple "Hi, how are you" dialogue. She went out and enlisted other residents to practice the dialog with her.
Now, of course, this remains at the anecdotal level. The program was effectively killed by administration after a couple of months, though this was after we had gotten the Florida Department of Children and Families volunteer of the year award.
It could also be said that I'm biased. We did, of course, recieve reports from other people who weren't part of the program, but as someone who was a research scientist for 13 years and has been active in the skeptic movement, I am aware of those dangers. On the other hand, there is also a danger of dismissing something casually. In any event, I don't think it can be rationally said that it isn't at least promising.
One would, ideally, try this sort of thing at a larger scale, doing extensive followups to test the long-term effects if any and also trying to find out just what it was about the teaching that was effective if it was. What we did was a mixture of the European Direct method, in which both my ex and I got trained and certified, and the Dartmouth method, in which I had taught German some years earlier. Both methods belong to the class of "intensive" methods, and perhaps subjecting a schizophrenic to that kind of highly social rigor has unexpected side-effects. I don't know, but it would be interesting to study.
My best guess is that we could do a hell of a lot better than we're doing. As the administrative reaction highlights, people don't want this. They want to look at the "green monkey" and go eeeew and put him into a warehouse run by sadists. (Up until 1991, at this hospital, any resident who tried to bite a staff member had all their teeth extracted as punishment. If anything, Ken Kesey pulled his punches. The reality is way worse.)
To talk about the dangers of giving people "false hope" seems to me a rationalization. Sure, Hollywood isn't realistic. The guy in Awakenings, in real life, didn't do much but masturbate. OK. But still, the danger of squelching real hope which spurs real effort that sometimes works is much greater.
As usual, this is ancient. Back at FSU, we had a CDC Cyber 205, a vector pipeline supercomputer, back in 1985. Any process could be crashed for a shutdown, and it produced a file that worked exactly like an executable and resumed computation from the time it was crashed.
Some spoilers follow, but not many.
I am paraphrasing here what Philip K. Dick said about the movie from memory:
I have just seen the rough cut of Blade Runner. It is terrific! It has nothing to do with the book. What my book will become is a futuristic alien shoot-em-up. This is just as well, because my book would have made a terrible movie. It is full of Deckard's introspection and wondering about humanity. But a book is something to be read, and a movie is an experience that moves.
IMO, the book is excellent. I came to reading Dick as a result of seeing Blade Runner. The book isn't much like the movie. There is Deckard, and there are Replicants (called Andys in the book), and Deckard kills them, and there's a Rachel who's a borderline, and both book and movie approach the question of what is humanity, though from complementary directions. The main plot set of the book (A post-apocalyptic world, Mercerism, the ethic of taking care of animals and artificial animals as fakes, Sydney's catalogue with the E for extinct species, the attempt by the Andys who control the media to discredit Mercerism, the schism between the thought processes of the Andys who cannot understand empathy and cannot take part in polycephalic fusion, the Ezekiel-like tomb world) is almost completely absent from the movie, except for some bits about manufactured animals. Also absent are many subplots (the phantom police agency, the concept of fake fakes, Deckard's wife and the Penfield mood organ, and the [shudder] scene with the spider). Nevertheless, the book is excellent if you don't expect it to be like the movie.
The problem is that an alarmingly large number of people cannot distinguish between the following:
What has happened to the software industry in general is exactly what has happened to the American political process. If you make promises and then cash the check, it doesn't really matter if you deliver. The reason is that people are gullible.
So you think, "gosh, wouldn't it be great if they've finally decided to do it right." But they haven't done it; they've just said that they are going to do it. Any support for mere words on the hope that it might come to pass will remove any incentive for actually doing it.
Most people get off so much on the hope and the promises that they don't realize how they're encouraging integrity-challenged behavior with their actions. It takes a real cynical bastard not to get caught up in this, and then we get told, "Oh, you Microsoft Bad Religious Types."
Yes, it is dangerous. It's also unidirectional and pointed up, more or less. Don't get in the way of the dish when it's on. People who can manage to avoid putting their hands in switched-on blenders or putting their heads in fireplaces should have little trouble with the concept.
I don't think The Fool's Errand ever made it to the PC. Neither did System's Twilight
As far as extant Mac companies, I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Freeverse. Most of what they've produced is card games, but they've been branching out into arcade and strategy games as well. Also, I don't know too many other game companies with a character that was used on a Blockbuster commercial.
Also remember that Myst was originally not only Mac only by Hypercard, and, what was it, Quake 3 arena came out on beta first for the Mac just a couple of years ago?
OK, what can you really say about these issues?
So you do the best with what you can, and it either works or it doesn't, and you make money or you don't, or you stay in business or go out of business.
If you want to talk about business reality, that's business reality. The dot com boom and the dot com bust are business reality. Incredible hype about Enron followed by its bankruptcy are business reality. The recession is business reality, and so is prosperity. And sometimes business reality is producing crap software that is full of holes.
You have your compromise already. You work like hell and design well and find out that for all that people in business talk about profit for the company, it all turns out to be the color of their parachute. Then you figure this out and either cheat like all the rest or else you get into a position where you are allowed to write good software, which is almost never software that is sold, unless it's a game or industrial control software. What other kind of compromise were you expecting?
You can do things properly, or you can do them improperly. When you do them improperly they fail more often. You can pile up good, solid business reasons why you have to do things improperly, and I don't care what color your power tie or how earnest and "forward-looking" you are, or how many inspirational posters you have, doing things improperly leads to failure.
Any veteran of business software development would know these things and, if honest, would have to write about them. Then people wouldn't like it, and they'd mod it down or not buy the book or tell the author he's an asshole because they want to hear that there's a magic incantation that turns mediocrity into gold. They want to hear about Extreme Programming or The Latest New Buzzword that Embraces Change! The newer the better. Old ideas are annoying, because you've already had time to find out that they don't magically work, while there's always the chance that the latest and greatest will make everything OK and nobody will have to get nailed to a tree.
where are the parents?
Surely you mean where is the parent. Most of the country thinks that for a child to have parents (plural) is an outmoded concept. You can't disagree with that, because then you're a horrible person who doesn't think that single parents are perfect saints/victims who never go to the toilet. For a variety of reasons, California is at the forefront of parental minimization.
Your article contains two ideas:
The first idea is correct. The second idea is incorrect and is completely superfluous given the first idea. It doesn't matter how flaky the Microsoft OS is, the average person is not going to consider it a problem with the operating system.
Consider the following fictional scenario. Toyota makes cars, and they use engines manufactured by Matsushita. (Not saying they really do, but let's assume they do.) The brand name of these engines is "Engine(TM)." Those in the know call them "Matsushita Engine," but most people just call them "Engine." They come in models like "4-Cylinder Engine(TM)" and "6-Cylinder Engine(TM)" People buy the cars. If the engine blows a head gasket, they're not going to get angry at Matsushita; they're going to get angry at Toyota. Even if they are aware that there are different engines, they are going to think that they need to upgrade to "6-Cylinder Engine XP(TM)."
Similarly, even if average people experience a lot of Windows crashes (which they do), they're not going to get mad at Microsoft, but rather with Dell or Compaq or something. If they are aware that they need a different operating system, it's going to be a different version of Windows.
I love archaic technology. However, I think that you overestimate the case for microprocessors, though. Much of the hardware in early video games was either simple digital or even analog.
Consider the venerable "paddle." Take an RC-based timer, reset on the vertical retrace. Use the potentiometer on the console as the R part of the circuit. When the timer fires, have it trigger a one-shot timer for a short period of time. Feed the ouput of that time to the gun of the CRT. Voila, a horizontal bar that you can move up and down the screen with the knob.
Take another shorter RC timer, triggered by the horizontal retrace. Have a fixed timing, so that it fires when the beam is about an inch from the left of the screen. Have it fire another timer that will stay on for a few pixels' trace. Take this output and the ouput of the timer in the previous paragraph, run them through an AND gate, and you have a paddle for the left of the screen.
Of course, eventually you are going to have to have some counters in there, but it's amazing how much you can do with very simple circuitry.
The most successful Go programs primarily use pattern-matching, cellular automata, and neural networks. None of them are really very good.
I haven't done exactly what the original poster is asking for, but I have done a lot of trade shows and various demos.
You do not want a CRT in a mobile van. Ever. You do not want to pack them all up before you move ten feet because the guy who told you where you could park didn't have that authority. You do not want to deal with the even trivial cases of the socket getting flaky with the CRT, let alone with the cases where something will break in spite of your best efforts. No matter what you do, you will eventually have to deal with union guys and, unless you watch them like a hawk, there will be cases where the CRT's are packed improperly. You do not want to have a bunch of CRT's running in summer. Ever.
For the same reason and for the walking-away problem, you do not want to have laptops or separate LCD screens, because some union guy is going to think it's a great idea to stack them up to save space.
You could conceivably build everything into a set of consoles so that they didn't have to be stored. Then when they broke, which they would because nobody ever puts in enough shock protection, you could have dead machines sitting there until you got around to crawling behind and fixing them, which you will be a lot less likely to do than you think now.
Something like the new iMac would be good. Fairly durable, light, and bottom-heavy, but most important, you can put it in a box. Most of the volume will be air, and the screen will not be flat on a box side, so it's inherently resistant to packing problems.
My answer is "no," the U.S. should not prevent the exportation of encryption (as if it were so difficult for someone to smuggle a CD out of the country). It's a silly, feel-good measure, as nobody who is going to use encryption for nefarious purposes will be even mildly troubled by it.
However, the U.S. has traditionally prevented the exportation of encryption and only now permit it when it is wimpy enough to be easily breakable. So, is it really all that surprising that this happened?
None of the revelations about XP surprise me. I've known them for a year or more. So has every reasonably intelligent person who has paid attention.
The problem is that an awful lot of people played "what if." They saw the promises that said that XP would be great and secure. They wanted it to be so, and as a result they believed the promises. Since the promises worked and ensured sales, they didn't actually need to do it.
Microsoft seems obviously in love with their own PR. The problem is when people go along with the gag, which they've been doing for far too long. Now you want to play some more. As long as you play, get used to bending over.
I also have a hard time understanding the idea of "middle ground." What, like Microsoft gets to abuse its monopoly on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays? Being a monopoly is legal. Abusing monopoly power is. The government wants them to stop but won't do anything to make them stop. So, what exactly do you want?
I'm also getting more than a little tired of this Linux As Religion stuff. Sure, there are zealots, but this is mostly a Beavis-and-Butthead-style dismissal. Most geeks like cool stuff. I've been a computer geek for about 30 years, and Microsoft used to be cool. Nobody cared that they monopolized the microcomputer languages field, because Microsoft BASIC was good. RTF and SYLK were good. The first version of Excel was good. Even MS-DOS, for all its primitiveness, basically worked. It isn't some sort of religious conversion that makes me dislike what Microsoft has been doing over the past decade; it's the fact that they've been doing bad.
Total: 10 points
A lot of people have been saying "this is news?" The news is that 187 people were "caught" with this program, not that the program was written. The story appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution today; I presume it went out on the wire services, too.
Frankly, I'm skeptical. I'm sure this program is more sophisticated than diff, which means more likely to get false positives. It was in two introductory programming courses. I'm not sure that there are 187 different ways of writing substantially different programs for that kind of assignment, especially by people who have only seen the style of the teacher and that of the textbooks.
The vast majority of language preferences reduce to religion, and of those the vast majority are dilettantes who know a dozen languages or fewer.
In reality, LISP isn't slow, and it really never was, compared to the alternatives. About 20 years ago, some deluded souls converted some heavily numerical FORTRAN code to LISP and found out it ran about 20% faster on LISP. I call them deluded because they were under the false impression that any of the detractors of LISP would care. They don't.
People prefer languages primarily for cultural reasons. LISP fits certain cultures and doesn't fit others. You can say the same about FORTRAN, C++, Java, Visual Basic, or any other language you like. Pseudo-quantitative arguments come later as justifications to be used in arguments.
Beyond that, different languages are good for different things, but it's almost impossible to have a discussion about it. If we were to have such a discussion, I would say that LISP is a great choice for anything involving graph theory, which a reservation system obviously does.
Me, I'm in the middle of writing a game engine and editor that's built in C and C++, does the plotting in an embedded Scheme, uses a Postscript-like code for run-time, interfaced with the Scheme, and under OSX uses Objective C for the user interface layer. So, what do I know anyway?
I know the answer to this, because I spent a lot of time at a university. It's because the public funding that universities get is a pittance compared to what it costs to operate them.
This is because the citizens want guaranteed state university systems with ridiculously low tuition and high teacher/student ratio, but they don't want to pay any taxes. Somebody else should do it, and they'd better well damned do it. This absolutely requires universities and the like to make money elsewhere. They sell football tickets, and they sometimes sell software.
I don't like it, either. But if you don't like it, stop complaining about how high your taxes are and stop voting for politicians that promise to lower your taxes.
I've done that, pretty much. Back in the mid-1980's, I worked on a HASP bisynchronous communications package called HASTE. Hardly anyone uses HASP anymore, but it was a bit like telnet and FTP with guaranteed delivery, error correction, and compression, over bisynchronous communications lines. The program ran at first on CP/M machines and later on MS/DOS machines. It provided redirection to console, printer, and disk file, and redirection from console, disk file, and "reader." It had full on-screen help, a built-in text editor. It was menu- and event-loop driven. Not the most sophisticated program ever, but not too shabby.
We were very concerned about making it bug-free, even to the point of including patches to operating systems and working with developers of many new computers to make sure their software and hardware could run it. We used to give demonstrations of the running program where a member of the audience would be invited to cut the cable during a transfer of a lengthy file. Then we installed a new cable, and the transfer finished.
Even though we had a No Warranty sticker to keep the lawyers away, we offered a deal. The first person to find a bug got a free dinner at any restaurant. We had to pay off exactly once--at the restaurant in the Alexandria Hotel in San Francisco. We fixed the bug, of course. It was a cheap way to learn something about our program.
Things were pretty good for five years or so. We got excited about what was happening in the field. Most other companies seemed to share our ethic. Then things got depressing. We started to see people go out of their way to buy crap and get rid of good stuff that worked seamlessly. We saw companies throw away X terminals that worked, forbid their graphics designers from using Macs, and institute All-Microsoft policies, resulting in most cases in a loss of productivity and endless headaches. We watched a new generation of people materialize with a Beavis and Butthead uh-huh all software has bugs mentality.
I think I'm the only one of the group that does any serious sofware development any more. I have gotten way better as a developer. I am even vaguely embarrassed about that first bug-free success. But, two years ago, I was unemployed for more than a year. It was a bad time, and I lost my wife and just about everything else, including big chunks of my emotional capacity. I finally did make it back and am doing very nicely financially, but I'm not doing anything important, and I keep myself sane with Open Source side projects.
I know from reading TechRepublic and similar boards that about 90% of all IT-type managers and hiring people would never consider hiring me. They have the blue-collar Beavis and Butthead mentality, too.
What's the moral of the story? I think it's that developers aren't the problem. Nor is a lack of enough lawyers. The real problem is the business of the marketplace and the ethic that drives it. There are still some good development houses out there that make stuff that works. Macromedia is, I think, one. Adobe is another, their idiocy with Dmitry notwithstanding. But they are all either games houses, industrial control shops, and companies that established themselves when the marketplace still permitted the production of quality.
Nowadays, people might bitch about poor quality or demand that some lawyers do something about it, but they still make their decisions in such a way as to encourage and reward crap.
If MS loses the appeal of the popular press - promoting every new release as stable and secure - then they're screwed, even without the class action suits and liability claims.
I just have to laugh when I see stuff like this. Ooh, Microsoft's gonna get in trouble! No they aren't.
The vast majority of people who buy a copy of XP aren't even aware that they are buying a copy of XP. They buy a computer. To them, if they even know the words "operating system," it has no meaning to them beyond what it is they see on the screen. They certainly don't choose an operating system. They go down to Circuit City and buy a computer because all their friends have a computer, and they want one too. Or else they need one because they have a computer at work, and they want to work at home.
Is there any evidence that Compaq, Dell, Gateway etc. are particularly concerned about security flaws in the bundled OS? No. They want to sell boxes, and they have to sell as many as possible, because their margins are low. Are people going to complain to Compaq, Dell, Gateway etc. about the OS? Sure, but they're going to complain to them about anything whether it's related to the machine or not, and at least there may be the option of foisting those calls off on Microsoft. Are Compaq, Dell, Gateway etc. going to complain to Microsoft? Maybe, but Microsoft has them by the short hairs, and they know it.
What's going to happen with some bad press? Not a damned thing. People might become irritable and insist that Somebody Do Something, but they're going to keep shoveling money into Microsoft's maw anyway, and they're not going to slow down.
Mumble mumble class action lawsuits? Yeah, right. The DOJ spend a whole lot of taxpayers' money to do nothing over several years. Half the states capitulated to a non-settlement. Microsoft isn't going to run out of lawyers any time soon.
Truth, Justice, and the American Way? It was the American Consumer (who is always right, and don't you forget it buddy) who made things this way by their choices. It isn't going to change.