I think the use of the term is accurate. Consider a graph of "AI vs. time." Once the singularity occurs, we will no longer be responsible for advancing the state of computing-- computers will advance themselve. Since they aren't bound by the constraints we are (sleep, usually one great idea per lifetime, etc) I would expect the slope of that "AI vs time" graph to have a discontinuity.
While Moore's law is related in that more computing power will allow us to do the things we already know how to do faster, I don't think it applies directly when it comes to AI. Better algorithms will make the big leaps forward for us, not necessarily more complex hardware.
Once the law is in place and spammers are allowed to let fly with impunity without fear of prosecution (because, as one person pointed out, it's free for them to use the resources of others in order to do so), then someone will get the bright idea of making it cost money to send spam.
And viola`-- they will have conned us into begging them to "tax the internet", which is something they have been trying to figure out ever since it showed up on their radar screen. Sure it's neat, but how can we TAX it?
so you want to change photons into some other kind of matter?
that would be a neat trick, but I am not sure how you would go about it.
i don't think it would be worth it, though. you are getting your propulsion by ejecting mass. it shouldn't matter if that mass is comprised of photons, gas molecules, or old socks... what matters is how much mass you have to throw out.
i think changing photons to a gas would only work if you got more mass, which is not physically possible. so just take the photons, chunk them out the back, and be done with it.
hope this helps...
let me know if i haven't grokked what you were trying to say.
If you powered your spacecraft by expelling hot gas, then what you would have would essentially be a rocket.
There's nothing wrong with rockets, but the problem here is that you can't take enough propellant (gas, in your case) with you to make the trip. You would need a pretty big tank to hold all that gas.
The cool thing about solar sails is not so much that you get energy from the sun (solar panels do an OK job of that) but that you don't need to bring any fuel. These craft are going to take *years* to get where they are going, and you just can't take enough fuel with you to get there.
If I read it correctly (dubious as I am still a little groggy this morning) he is not disallowing SMTP traffic, he is only saying that it all has to go through his mail host.
I did something similar here-- all port 25 traffic that originates from behind our firewall must be bound for our mail server. This stops a lot of crappy ad ware and email viruses that pack their own SMTP engine.
I don't see a similar set up for a hosting provider as being unneccessarily restrictive. It might not do anything to keep your customers from spamming from your net block, but at least it would all be routed through your server, greatly increasing the chances you would detect it and stomp the perpetrator's guts out-- or whatever action you feel is appropriate.
Sometimes when I am fishing I wonder if fish sometimes bite knowing they are going to encounter a hook. Anyway, I get tired of the "give us news, stuff that matters" rants.
There is an awful lot of information out here on the net. It is your job to sift through it all, determine what is of interest to you, and IGNORE THE REST. Along the way, if you feel you have something to contribute, please share.
Really, if this story is of no interest to you, move on to the next one. I think, as I'm sure many other people think, that announcing releases on a site with a high geek population is a good way to recruit quality beta testers who will fill out useful bug reports and help to drive the software development process forward. This means you get your free software faster and with less bugs. It's fine if you don't feel like taking the time to help out yourself, but give us the few tenths of a second it should take you to read the headline and decide to skip the story. Think of it as your way of helping to keep free software moving forward.
If you take the time to click on the headline, scan down to the bottom of the comments, and compose a mini rant about how you didn't feel you needed to know the information the story provides, people might get the impression that you just felt like whining.
It seems a bit hypocritical to rant about wanting stuff that matters within a post that almost everyone will consider noise, not signal.
I am sure that there will be a lawsuit to follow if the defense is successful.
The thought that this girl's father might be willing to unleash this kid on someone else in order to open the door to benefitting from litigation is what sickens me the most. Four years, indeed. It may be that this critter can be rehabilitated, but the adult legal system is better equipped to deal with him than the juvenile system, if only because they can keep him long enough to treat and retrain him.
"The market, with its greedy corporations and frugal consumers, will take care of the "oil problem" just fine by itself."
I wish we could believe that. In theory, rising prices should create an opportunity for other players with newer technology to compete and drive progress forward. In practice, Enron has shown us that in some cases a powerful corporation can hide information about how poorly a company is doing from the usual sources of information, and the management may be willing to go down with the ship as long as the golden parachute remains intact.
I think we have a responsibility to exert pressure on the corporations to take a longer term view. We can no longer rely on profitability as the sole governing factor.
It's not subtext-- the author plainly states, "We would have preferred to have Apple use Gecko or collaborate with us on the development of the Camino browser...", but goes on to say that the larger goal of providing alternative, standards-compliant browser platforms is still being met.
I read the whole thing as, "we would love to have Apple as part of our team, but are still happy that there is another team out there doing The Right Thing."
While the Aqua user interface elements necessitate a binary end product for the time being, it is reasonable to expect two-way traffic between the Apple folks and the folks responsible for the care and feeding of the KHTML widget. As I understand it, some of this has already happened. Apple's decision to base Safari on KHTML is good for both Apple and KDE, and represents a departure in the right direction from a completely closed development model.
It may even be ideal-- all the standards based parts are out in the open for access by the community, and Apple is free to add their own proprietary icing on top of that foundation.
It does take a leap of faith that Apple will release their changes to the KHTML base, but it is most likely in their best interest to do this.
Lately I have been considering using PGP for all email. If a message arrives that is not encrypted, it can be bounced with a note explaining why or simply dropped.
My thinking is that it would be prohibitively expensive for the spammer to collect all of the necessary public keys and encrypt the "message" separately for each recipient.
I realize it may be hard to get users to embrace this idea, but if we came up with a more or less standardized way to publish public keys and made the use of encryption transparent enough in the email client we could at least slow the spammers down a bit.
On the other hand, I guess if it were too easy to get the public key for a given email address then the spammers would adapt in short order.
OODB is clearly better for the conversion process you describe, but what are you doing with this collection of objects after you have built it?
Maybe it's because I have never used an OO database, but I always think I am going to be asking it to "give me all the objects with property X" ala a SELECT query. It seems that many of the commercial object databases out there map relational functionality onto their object stores, which would seem to lose the speed race with a relational database. Are they giving us this capability because we need it, or because they think we want it?
Is traversing the object store checking properties as expensive as I think it would be, or is there no problem with it?
Constructing objects from several tables most likely is painful, although I would suspect that the damage could be mitigated somewhat through normalization, indexing, and key relationships. It does seem like an object database would be much less sensitve performance-wise to the object equivalent of schema changes.
The best fit I can see for an object database would be where the vast majority of the time you are selecting one and only one record (object) rather than a collection. Hmmm... I think I just repeated what you were already telling me.
The concept is not new. The most obvious way to serialize an object was to store all the properties of a single object together-- so that's what was done.
But it was soon realized that when you have large groups of objects the relationships between them were more interesting most of the time than cataloguing all the properties of a single object. And then relational databases were born, which allowed us to group objects according to what they have (or don't have) in common. The most efficient way to do that was to store single properties of all objects together-- RDBMS, as you pointed out.
Ever since object databases were rediscovered, it seems like we have been chasing the most efficient way to implement an inherently inefficient solution. That is way I have trouble seeing it as anything other than a step backwards.
An object database is a different paradigm from a relational database, and it has to be thought about in a different way. The problem is that the RDBMS paradigm is very well suited for its purpose. I am not sure what the purpose of an object database will be, but I am fairly sure that for it to work we will have to use it for something very different from what we use relational databases for.
Thanks for posting a link to this information. Based on what is here, I see no reason to panic. First, it doesn't appear that any information is sent which would identify the machine the information came from. All they get is, "There is a macine somewhere with a Lite-On CDR in it."
Windows Update has offered me updated device drivers in the past, so I think the inclusion of hardware info could be defended on that basis.
If a person takes a job for which he or she is overqualified, then the likelihood that he will be "happy" in that position, making less than he did previously, having less responsibility and fewer challenges, is very small. Also, there is a tendency to think that this person is just looking for a temporary solution until a better job comes along.
I understand this on some level, but then I also feel like a potential employer has no business second-guessing my motivations. If I apply for the job, and I am qualified, interview me. Ask me what me intentions are, and trust me to tell you honestly. It doesn't do me any good to lie my way into a job I don't want.
If I tell you I want the job and intend to stick around for a timeframe that matches your requirements, you have no business deciding that I don't really want it for me.
I really think a lot of hiring managers just accept the "an overqualified candidate will never work out long term" argument as fact and operate on that basis.
If you are applying for a job for which you are over qualified you might consider addressing that in your cover letter-- but it might be hard to do that without tripping the arrogance alarm.
that focusing on producing legible code can reduce the number of bugs you have to begin with.
I have seen programmers (myself included) be a "victim of their own cleverness" too many times. These days I spend a lot of time thinking about how to make the overall structure of my code clear and directed for a long time before I start pounding the keyboard. It has made all the difference in the world, both in the quality of my code and my stress level as deadlines loom.
I have become a big fan of simplicity and clarity.
The funny thing is, my pursuit of these things has taught me more about unravelling needless complexity than just "hacking away until it does what I want" ever did.
The Sims series has always been an impressive piece of work. Evolutionary computing is a powerful tool, and you can learn about it in part by playing the game. It's a great way for kids (and adults) to learn a little about computers and also how nature works.
So if a corporation can pony up some $$$ and perturb the rules in order to favor a particular outcome (buying hamburgers == good && selling hamburgers == better) then the value of the game as is reduced from both an entertainment and from a learning standpoint.
I don't think the rules should be tweaked for anything unless it is absolutely necessary to make the game playable, and corporate sponsorship has to be the worst reason to do it.
The customer doesn't understand the technology well enough to best determine how it meets their needs. We get into big trouble around here when our "power users" get ideas about how things should be done, sell them to management and their peers, and then come to us to "implement".
It is vital that we understand the businees of the people we support, so we can determine how best to spend their limited resources. I find that people here sometimes understand how technology can be used, but they don't understand its limitations well enough to determine how best to use it. A recent example would be a construction manager here who tried to email a 37 MB word document to someone. He knows how to make complex documents, insert photos, and compose his message-- but he doesn't know he should compress his jpg images before he inserts them, and he doesn't know what a "reasonable" file size is.
To narrow down the list of things that are possible to solutions that are practical and efficient, you have to know both the technology and the business it supports.
If you want to look at it from the "What are they trying to say to the world?" angle, Then I think it boils down to two things:
1. We can launch satellites for you at an attractive price, let's do some business.
-and-
2. We can afford to play the ICBM game, too, so don't mess with us.
It seems a shame that joining the ICBM club is kind of a prerequisite for having a voice in the global market place, but that seems to be how it is for now.
The problem is, your clients have absolutely no idea what the product they are buying SHOULD cost. You can look at it and tell, with a little thought: it should take me X hours of development, I can use these pieces of previous work to save time, my hourly rate is Y, so the total is $4,200-- lets add a 20% contingency and call it about $5,000. And you're right-- I have no doubt you could do the job at that price and be happy with the $5,000 you received in exchange. But I can only say that because I am fairly familiar with what the type of service you are providing-- Your potential client does not have that advantage. So he has to let the market tell him what the project is worth.
Some firms routinely reject bids that deviate too far either way from the average given a sufficient number of responsive bids. It's easy to reject a high bid, because no one wants to hire someone who is trying to make all his money on one project, but why would you ever reject a low bid if you believe the person can do the work?
You would reject it because companies who consistently do work for less (or more) than it is worth cannot stay in business. Given that they are eventually going to go out of business, you don't want to risk them going under in the middle of your project and leaving you with nothing.
You and I both know that you can safely outbid your competition because you have much less overhead, and you really aren't doing the work for less than it is worth-- but your potential client doesn't know that. He doesn't know how much of that extra money is going for benefits, office space, secretaries, yadda yadda.
The only way out, as crazy as it seems, is to jack up your rates for bigger clients and smile all the way to the bank... Then you will know that you have a safety net, and if you really did underestimate the amount of work involved you can afford to hire some subs to help get the job done. If you're not comfortable with the idea of bidding two to three times your "normal" rate for bigger clients, then you are going to have to be content to pursue less sophisticated clients. After they have seen what you can do, you can cut them a really nice deal on future work-- but it is vital that you "right price" your first few jobs for them. Honestly, when I was contracting I avoided clients who only sought out the lowest bidder-- they usually turned out to not understand how a project is typically run and almost always wanted expand the scope without paying for additional work.
Larger clients expect a certain cost of doing business based on what they think the market is telling them. If they don't see the numbers line up the way they expect them to, they assume something is horribly wrong. A contract that is priced too low has all the appeal to them of a person in a singles bar who seems "too desperate" to get a date.
You might consider researching the winning bidder and seeing what their presentation and "look and feel" is like (not to mention their hourly programming rates, if that information is available). After all, they did enough of a sell job to secure this contract at three times what it is worth-- maybe they will be going out of business soon. Also, keep in touch with this client-- they are already comfortable enough with you to tell you "inside information" like how much the winning bid was. A lot of people would kill for that kind of business intelligence. Keep calling to check on these guys, and be sure to let them check out some of your other work-- especially work completed after they rejected your bid. Let them know what you can do and about how much it costs so that they will make a smarter choice next time...
I hope this helps take some of the sting out of it.
Actually, they both share a very important concept-- the idea of resonance.
It's just that the Telsa Coil uses electrical resonance while the earthquake machine sought to take advantage of mechanical resonance.
It has always fascinated me how similar the math is for LCR electrical circuits and spring damped oscillating masses. (I guess we could throw heat loss equations in there as well.) I dont have a strong enough math background to speculate, but I have always wondered if it is because these things are fundamentally the same or if we have just developed a generic differential equation that can be wrapped around almost any process.
I am not sure the original version still is available for everyone.
Consider someone (sure, this is rare these days) who doesn't have internet access or mail order, and is forced to accept whatever the local video store offers.
I am uncomfortable with the idea that someone can decide to profit from someone else's work while at the same time altering his or her message to suit their own biases.
Everyone should be free to express his or her message in his own way, and I think these people are effectively creating local markets where the artists cannot express their opinions without being censored.
It can be hard for all of us "globally connected" types to see it, but consider the situation of the internet "have-nots".
how is altering the artist's/writers message and rereleasing it without their permission anything other than censorship?
i don't buy the "consumer right" spiel. instead, i am picturing people in areas where businesses are controlled by these religious zealots who are unable to see films and other art in the way the creators intended.
going a step further, (and i am sure i will lose a lot of suport here) it really bothers me when radio stations alter music they play to remove words they consider objectionable. if they feel the material is decent and worthwhile enough to want to make advertising money playing it, then they should support the artist enough to play it the way the creators of the music intended. besides, it is easy enough to understand the INTENT, which cannot be censored, even over the bleeps, pauses and lyric changes which ruin the sound.
Several people have mentioned that blindly following the recommmendations of the software could lead to a lawsuit, but few if any have mentioned how it might save you from one.
I work in the engineering profession, and one of the first things that happens when we get sued is the attorneys spend a lot of time and energy trying to figure out how what we did might be different from what engineers typically do. It's part of what stifles innovation in our profession-- no one wants to be "on the stand" explaining why they thought it might be better to do something in a "new" way when there is a long history of doing X and X has been shown to mostly work.
Similarly, it seems to me that an accused doctor's best defense would be to find 500 other doctors who would have handled a given case in the same way. Assuming the expert system does its job, the likelihood of finding those 500 doctors should be increased, and in the event that it isn't, the authors of the software will have some explaining to do. If my experience is any indicator, the lawyers will focus on whoever has the most money (or highest insurance coverage), with (it seems to me) little regard for who is actually "right" or "wrong".
One of the beautiful things about Louisiana law (yes I am being fecetious) is that someone can be held responsible for all of the debt associated with a case if they are the only one who can afford it. So if a jury finds you 5% at fault and the other defendant 95% at fault but he can't afford the multi-million dollar judgement, you get to pay it. That's why when a bus driver fell asleep at the wheel and killed a lot of people here a couple of years ago Goodyear was named as one of the defendants. If they can be found to even have a tiny little portion of the responsibility (did the tire pop too soon and contribute to a loss of control?) then they can be stuck with the whole bill once the bus line is tapped out. And believe me, there are a lot of grieving family members who think that someone should pay.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the use of the term is accurate. Consider a graph of "AI vs. time." Once the singularity occurs, we will no longer be responsible for advancing the state of computing-- computers will advance themselve. Since they aren't bound by the constraints we are (sleep, usually one great idea per lifetime, etc) I would expect the slope of that "AI vs time" graph to have a discontinuity.
While Moore's law is related in that more computing power will allow us to do the things we already know how to do faster, I don't think it applies directly when it comes to AI. Better algorithms will make the big leaps forward for us, not necessarily more complex hardware.
Once the law is in place and spammers are allowed to let fly with impunity without fear of prosecution (because, as one person pointed out, it's free for them to use the resources of others in order to do so), then someone will get the bright idea of making it cost money to send spam.
And viola`-- they will have conned us into begging them to "tax the internet", which is something they have been trying to figure out ever since it showed up on their radar screen. Sure it's neat, but how can we TAX it?
so you want to change photons into some other kind of matter?
that would be a neat trick, but I am not sure how you would go about it.
i don't think it would be worth it, though. you are getting your propulsion by ejecting mass. it shouldn't matter if that mass is comprised of photons, gas molecules, or old socks... what matters is how much mass you have to throw out.
i think changing photons to a gas would only work if you got more mass, which is not physically possible. so just take the photons, chunk them out the back, and be done with it.
hope this helps...
let me know if i haven't grokked what you were trying to say.
If you powered your spacecraft by expelling hot gas, then what you would have would essentially be a rocket.
There's nothing wrong with rockets, but the problem here is that you can't take enough propellant (gas, in your case) with you to make the trip. You would need a pretty big tank to hold all that gas.
The cool thing about solar sails is not so much that you get energy from the sun (solar panels do an OK job of that) but that you don't need to bring any fuel. These craft are going to take *years* to get where they are going, and you just can't take enough fuel with you to get there.
If I read it correctly (dubious as I am still a little groggy this morning) he is not disallowing SMTP traffic, he is only saying that it all has to go through his mail host.
I did something similar here-- all port 25 traffic that originates from behind our firewall must be bound for our mail server. This stops a lot of crappy ad ware and email viruses that pack their own SMTP engine.
I don't see a similar set up for a hosting provider as being unneccessarily restrictive. It might not do anything to keep your customers from spamming from your net block, but at least it would all be routed through your server, greatly increasing the chances you would detect it and stomp the perpetrator's guts out-- or whatever action you feel is appropriate.
Sometimes when I am fishing I wonder if fish sometimes bite knowing they are going to encounter a hook. Anyway, I get tired of the "give us news, stuff that matters" rants.
There is an awful lot of information out here on the net. It is your job to sift through it all, determine what is of interest to you, and IGNORE THE REST. Along the way, if you feel you have something to contribute, please share.
Really, if this story is of no interest to you, move on to the next one. I think, as I'm sure many other people think, that announcing releases on a site with a high geek population is a good way to recruit quality beta testers who will fill out useful bug reports and help to drive the software development process forward. This means you get your free software faster and with less bugs. It's fine if you don't feel like taking the time to help out yourself, but give us the few tenths of a second it should take you to read the headline and decide to skip the story. Think of it as your way of helping to keep free software moving forward.
If you take the time to click on the headline, scan down to the bottom of the comments, and compose a mini rant about how you didn't feel you needed to know the information the story provides, people might get the impression that you just felt like whining.
It seems a bit hypocritical to rant about wanting stuff that matters within a post that almost everyone will consider noise, not signal.
Have a nice day.
I am sure that there will be a lawsuit to follow if the defense is successful.
The thought that this girl's father might be willing to unleash this kid on someone else in order to open the door to benefitting from litigation is what sickens me the most. Four years, indeed. It may be that this critter can be rehabilitated, but the adult legal system is better equipped to deal with him than the juvenile system, if only because they can keep him long enough to treat and retrain him.
You said:
"The market, with its greedy corporations and frugal consumers, will take care of the "oil problem" just fine by itself."
I wish we could believe that. In theory, rising prices should create an opportunity for other players with newer technology to compete and drive progress forward. In practice, Enron has shown us that in some cases a powerful corporation can hide information about how poorly a company is doing from the usual sources of information, and the management may be willing to go down with the ship as long as the golden parachute remains intact.
I think we have a responsibility to exert pressure on the corporations to take a longer term view. We can no longer rely on profitability as the sole governing factor.
It's not subtext-- the author plainly states, "We would have preferred to have Apple use Gecko or collaborate with us on the development of the Camino browser...", but goes on to say that the larger goal of providing alternative, standards-compliant browser platforms is still being met.
I read the whole thing as, "we would love to have Apple as part of our team, but are still happy that there is another team out there doing The Right Thing."
While the Aqua user interface elements necessitate a binary end product for the time being, it is reasonable to expect two-way traffic between the Apple folks and the folks responsible for the care and feeding of the KHTML widget. As I understand it, some of this has already happened. Apple's decision to base Safari on KHTML is good for both Apple and KDE, and represents a departure in the right direction from a completely closed development model.
It may even be ideal-- all the standards based parts are out in the open for access by the community, and Apple is free to add their own proprietary icing on top of that foundation.
It does take a leap of faith that Apple will release their changes to the KHTML base, but it is most likely in their best interest to do this.
Lately I have been considering using PGP for all email. If a message arrives that is not encrypted, it can be bounced with a note explaining why or simply dropped.
My thinking is that it would be prohibitively expensive for the spammer to collect all of the necessary public keys and encrypt the "message" separately for each recipient.
I realize it may be hard to get users to embrace this idea, but if we came up with a more or less standardized way to publish public keys and made the use of encryption transparent enough in the email client we could at least slow the spammers down a bit.
On the other hand, I guess if it were too easy to get the public key for a given email address then the spammers would adapt in short order.
[sigh]
OODB is clearly better for the conversion process you describe, but what are you doing with this collection of objects after you have built it?
Maybe it's because I have never used an OO database, but I always think I am going to be asking it to "give me all the objects with property X" ala a SELECT query. It seems that many of the commercial object databases out there map relational functionality onto their object stores, which would seem to lose the speed race with a relational database. Are they giving us this capability because we need it, or because they think we want it?
Is traversing the object store checking properties as expensive as I think it would be, or is there no problem with it?
Constructing objects from several tables most likely is painful, although I would suspect that the damage could be mitigated somewhat through normalization, indexing, and key relationships. It does seem like an object database would be much less sensitve performance-wise to the object equivalent of schema changes.
The best fit I can see for an object database would be where the vast majority of the time you are selecting one and only one record (object) rather than a collection. Hmmm... I think I just repeated what you were already telling me.
The concept is not new. The most obvious way to serialize an object was to store all the properties of a single object together-- so that's what was done.
But it was soon realized that when you have large groups of objects the relationships between them were more interesting most of the time than cataloguing all the properties of a single object. And then relational databases were born, which allowed us to group objects according to what they have (or don't have) in common. The most efficient way to do that was to store single properties of all objects together-- RDBMS, as you pointed out.
Ever since object databases were rediscovered, it seems like we have been chasing the most efficient way to implement an inherently inefficient solution. That is way I have trouble seeing it as anything other than a step backwards.
An object database is a different paradigm from a relational database, and it has to be thought about in a different way. The problem is that the RDBMS paradigm is very well suited for its purpose. I am not sure what the purpose of an object database will be, but I am fairly sure that for it to work we will have to use it for something very different from what we use relational databases for.
Thanks for posting a link to this information. Based on what is here, I see no reason to panic. First, it doesn't appear that any information is sent which would identify the machine the information came from. All they get is, "There is a macine somewhere with a Lite-On CDR in it."
Windows Update has offered me updated device drivers in the past, so I think the inclusion of hardware info could be defended on that basis.
you get to the meat of the article, where you will be asked to pay to keep playing.
Premature End of Script Headers
If a person takes a job for which he or she is overqualified, then the likelihood that he will be "happy" in that position, making less than he did previously, having less responsibility and fewer challenges, is very small. Also, there is a tendency to think that this person is just looking for a temporary solution until a better job comes along.
I understand this on some level, but then I also feel like a potential employer has no business second-guessing my motivations. If I apply for the job, and I am qualified, interview me. Ask me what me intentions are, and trust me to tell you honestly. It doesn't do me any good to lie my way into a job I don't want.
If I tell you I want the job and intend to stick around for a timeframe that matches your requirements, you have no business deciding that I don't really want it for me.
I really think a lot of hiring managers just accept the "an overqualified candidate will never work out long term" argument as fact and operate on that basis.
If you are applying for a job for which you are over qualified you might consider addressing that in your cover letter-- but it might be hard to do that without tripping the arrogance alarm.
that focusing on producing legible code can reduce the number of bugs you have to begin with.
I have seen programmers (myself included) be a "victim of their own cleverness" too many times. These days I spend a lot of time thinking about how to make the overall structure of my code clear and directed for a long time before I start pounding the keyboard. It has made all the difference in the world, both in the quality of my code and my stress level as deadlines loom.
I have become a big fan of simplicity and clarity.
The funny thing is, my pursuit of these things has taught me more about unravelling needless complexity than just "hacking away until it does what I want" ever did.
The Sims series has always been an impressive piece of work. Evolutionary computing is a powerful tool, and you can learn about it in part by playing the game. It's a great way for kids (and adults) to learn a little about computers and also how nature works.
So if a corporation can pony up some $$$ and perturb the rules in order to favor a particular outcome (buying hamburgers == good && selling hamburgers == better) then the value of the game as is reduced from both an entertainment and from a learning standpoint.
I don't think the rules should be tweaked for anything unless it is absolutely necessary to make the game playable, and corporate sponsorship has to be the worst reason to do it.
Nope.
The customer doesn't understand the technology well enough to best determine how it meets their needs. We get into big trouble around here when our "power users" get ideas about how things should be done, sell them to management and their peers, and then come to us to "implement".
It is vital that we understand the businees of the people we support, so we can determine how best to spend their limited resources. I find that people here sometimes understand how technology can be used, but they don't understand its limitations well enough to determine how best to use it. A recent example would be a construction manager here who tried to email a 37 MB word document to someone. He knows how to make complex documents, insert photos, and compose his message-- but he doesn't know he should compress his jpg images before he inserts them, and he doesn't know what a "reasonable" file size is.
To narrow down the list of things that are possible to solutions that are practical and efficient, you have to know both the technology and the business it supports.
If you want to look at it from the "What are they trying to say to the world?" angle, Then I think it boils down to two things:
1. We can launch satellites for you at an attractive price, let's do some business.
-and-
2. We can afford to play the ICBM game, too, so don't mess with us.
It seems a shame that joining the ICBM club is kind of a prerequisite for having a voice in the global market place, but that seems to be how it is for now.
The problem is, your clients have absolutely no idea what the product they are buying SHOULD cost. You can look at it and tell, with a little thought: it should take me X hours of development, I can use these pieces of previous work to save time, my hourly rate is Y, so the total is $4,200-- lets add a 20% contingency and call it about $5,000. And you're right-- I have no doubt you could do the job at that price and be happy with the $5,000 you received in exchange. But I can only say that because I am fairly familiar with what the type of service you are providing-- Your potential client does not have that advantage. So he has to let the market tell him what the project is worth.
Some firms routinely reject bids that deviate too far either way from the average given a sufficient number of responsive bids. It's easy to reject a high bid, because no one wants to hire someone who is trying to make all his money on one project, but why would you ever reject a low bid if you believe the person can do the work?
You would reject it because companies who consistently do work for less (or more) than it is worth cannot stay in business. Given that they are eventually going to go out of business, you don't want to risk them going under in the middle of your project and leaving you with nothing.
You and I both know that you can safely outbid your competition because you have much less overhead, and you really aren't doing the work for less than it is worth-- but your potential client doesn't know that. He doesn't know how much of that extra money is going for benefits, office space, secretaries, yadda yadda.
The only way out, as crazy as it seems, is to jack up your rates for bigger clients and smile all the way to the bank... Then you will know that you have a safety net, and if you really did underestimate the amount of work involved you can afford to hire some subs to help get the job done. If you're not comfortable with the idea of bidding two to three times your "normal" rate for bigger clients, then you are going to have to be content to pursue less sophisticated clients. After they have seen what you can do, you can cut them a really nice deal on future work-- but it is vital that you "right price" your first few jobs for them. Honestly, when I was contracting I avoided clients who only sought out the lowest bidder-- they usually turned out to not understand how a project is typically run and almost always wanted expand the scope without paying for additional work.
Larger clients expect a certain cost of doing business based on what they think the market is telling them. If they don't see the numbers line up the way they expect them to, they assume something is horribly wrong. A contract that is priced too low has all the appeal to them of a person in a singles bar who seems "too desperate" to get a date.
You might consider researching the winning bidder and seeing what their presentation and "look and feel" is like (not to mention their hourly programming rates, if that information is available). After all, they did enough of a sell job to secure this contract at three times what it is worth-- maybe they will be going out of business soon. Also, keep in touch with this client-- they are already comfortable enough with you to tell you "inside information" like how much the winning bid was. A lot of people would kill for that kind of business intelligence. Keep calling to check on these guys, and be sure to let them check out some of your other work-- especially work completed after they rejected your bid. Let them know what you can do and about how much it costs so that they will make a smarter choice next time...
I hope this helps take some of the sting out of it.
Actually, they both share a very important concept-- the idea of resonance.
It's just that the Telsa Coil uses electrical resonance while the earthquake machine sought to take advantage of mechanical resonance.
It has always fascinated me how similar the math is for LCR electrical circuits and spring damped oscillating masses. (I guess we could throw heat loss equations in there as well.) I dont have a strong enough math background to speculate, but I have always wondered if it is because these things are fundamentally the same or if we have just developed a generic differential equation that can be wrapped around almost any process.
I am not sure the original version still is available for everyone.
Consider someone (sure, this is rare these days) who doesn't have internet access or mail order, and is forced to accept whatever the local video store offers.
I am uncomfortable with the idea that someone can decide to profit from someone else's work while at the same time altering his or her message to suit their own biases.
Everyone should be free to express his or her message in his own way, and I think these people are effectively creating local markets where the artists cannot express their opinions without being censored.
It can be hard for all of us "globally connected" types to see it, but consider the situation of the internet "have-nots".
how is altering the artist's/writers message and rereleasing it without their permission anything other than censorship?
i don't buy the "consumer right" spiel. instead, i am picturing people in areas where businesses are controlled by these religious zealots who are unable to see films and other art in the way the creators intended.
going a step further, (and i am sure i will lose a lot of suport here) it really bothers me when radio stations alter music they play to remove words they consider objectionable. if they feel the material is decent and worthwhile enough to want to make advertising money playing it, then they should support the artist enough to play it the way the creators of the music intended. besides, it is easy enough to understand the INTENT, which cannot be censored, even over the bleeps, pauses and lyric changes which ruin the sound.
Several people have mentioned that blindly following the recommmendations of the software could lead to a lawsuit, but few if any have mentioned how it might save you from one.
I work in the engineering profession, and one of the first things that happens when we get sued is the attorneys spend a lot of time and energy trying to figure out how what we did might be different from what engineers typically do. It's part of what stifles innovation in our profession-- no one wants to be "on the stand" explaining why they thought it might be better to do something in a "new" way when there is a long history of doing X and X has been shown to mostly work.
Similarly, it seems to me that an accused doctor's best defense would be to find 500 other doctors who would have handled a given case in the same way. Assuming the expert system does its job, the likelihood of finding those 500 doctors should be increased, and in the event that it isn't, the authors of the software will have some explaining to do. If my experience is any indicator, the lawyers will focus on whoever has the most money (or highest insurance coverage), with (it seems to me) little regard for who is actually "right" or "wrong".
One of the beautiful things about Louisiana law (yes I am being fecetious) is that someone can be held responsible for all of the debt associated with a case if they are the only one who can afford it. So if a jury finds you 5% at fault and the other defendant 95% at fault but he can't afford the multi-million dollar judgement, you get to pay it. That's why when a bus driver fell asleep at the wheel and killed a lot of people here a couple of years ago Goodyear was named as one of the defendants. If they can be found to even have a tiny little portion of the responsibility (did the tire pop too soon and contribute to a loss of control?) then they can be stuck with the whole bill once the bus line is tapped out. And believe me, there are a lot of grieving family members who think that someone should pay.
Tort reform anyone?