A non techie should focus on what they do well and hire a programmer.
There is no way a non techie can begin to compete with what a good programmer can do. There brain space is just not big enough.
I am a programmer and I am a businessman. I have one foot in each of two canoes. I have had to remove my foot from the programming canoe. I like it - I wish I could go back to it. But my brains are simply not big enough to do both.
We have doctors who will be doctors. We have microbiologists you will be microbiologists. We have lawyers who will be lawyers. We have micologists who will be micologists. We have poets who will be poets.
Very few are gifted enough to pursue more than one field. But of those who are able to place one foot in each of two canoes - they don't need to ask the question in the title of this story because they already know the answer.
A non-techie is simply a non-techie and they are unsuitable to be programmers because you need to be a techie in order to be a programmer! Its as simple as that!
BTW - I hire accountants too. I'm not an accountant and never want to be one. No successful business is going to have one guy doing everything - that is unless that one guy wants to be a slave to his own business and then who does said guy pass it on to when he is too old to do it anymore. If you can't leave your business to your kids then IMHO you failed.
I usually don't reply to myself... Here is another issue.
If they hit a gas pocket then the gas will form bubbles in the drilling mud and this reduces the density. Reduce the density and the mud blows out of the hole.
It will be a long time before we know what happened. This is if we EVER know what happened. Right now I expect some very brilliant reservoir engineers are trying to figure out what happened.
As I see it, it is OUR responsibility to have some safety equipment on standby.
We can tax the oil and gas industry and we can ask them to partner. But to me it makes no sense to run around pointing fingers and trying to assign blame because they are doing their BEST to produce a product we all need.
I think we have to expect and any actuary in the insurance industry will agree that accidents will happen.
So I agree with people who ask: "why wasn't the containment thingy already built?". An answer of its: "not cost effective" doesn't cut the mustard for me.
When New Orleans was flooded the Army Corps of Engineers tried to fly that excuse as well!
Not cost effective to build a dike so maybe somehow it is cost effective to flood a city? My gawd. What sort of spaghetti logic is this?
I don't care how much it costs to build a competent containment structure. It should have been ON THE SHELF.
There has been a long history of accidents. The failure here is the lack of leadership in those who choose to govern. Everyone knows that a company will do a risk assessment. They answer to their stock holders. Its the governments' job to govern.
I suspect what happened might be the blow out protector tried to do its job but was not able to completely shear off the pipe. I suspect they drilled near a very over pressured zone. I suspect the well operators did everything right. I suspect as the oil and gas column overbalanced the weight of the mud it simply blew the mud from the pipe and this put the rig in a natural gas bubble which lit. There was simply nothing anyone could do about it.
Now what we have is a very erosive fluid probably full of sand and it will eat the production casing away and by the time 2-3 months elapse which is gong to be how long it takes to contain this thing there might be a well bore that is the size of a small culvert.
BP was not planning on putting this field into production for years. Well - its now on production!
Customer walks to the counter and order's a burger. Wendy's business model says the customer should pay and the customer does and enjoys the burger.
Wendy's goes to the BEEF supplier and says: Where's the BEEF? We need more! The Beef supplier complies. Wendy's hands them a bill and tries to walk off with the BEEF. Wendy's figures they are just providing a BEEF distribution service.
What most people don't know is that this happened to my Grandfather during the Great Depression. He was a Saskatchewan farmer and shipped a calf to Toronto. They sent him a bill because the calf didn't fetch enough to cover the transportation costs.
My Grandfather shipped no more calves to Toronto. Maybe some people in Toronto went to bed hungry.
In fact the telecommunications industry has been double dipping for YEARS. Google may well be able to negotiate a peering arrangement. The VAST MAJORITY of companies that provide internet content are NOT in a position to peer. So they pay for the privilege of providing free content for the telecommunications industry and clients who are often mum and pop ISP's.
Google might have enough clout to fight this. Most content suppliers have no chance. This is a very unfair business model. The ones who pay the price are the consumers who might be missing out on websites created by some very talented people. Then we have web masters and graphics artists many of whom spend a great deal of time and money one school and tuition while learning their craft. They are looking for careers that might not materialize.
How many people remember the Dot.Com Bubble? For those interested in economics I'll provide this link to Eric Janszen's website: http://www.itulip.com/ Eric writes of the technology bubble in a number of articles.
Eric writes that the action of the FED after the technology bubble burst leads directly to the housing bubble and the present recession. The issue is that a lot of the reason the tech bubble burst is _because_ there was no workable business model. Companies that tried to create internet content went bankrupt.
How many billions of dollars were lost by investors as the internet unfolded and the dream of "if we build it they will come" unfolded? Well - we did come. Unfortunately there was no money in it for those who were living the dream!
I say the greed of the telecommunications oligopoly had a lot to do with this.
Customer walks to the counter and order's a burger. Wendy's business model says the customer should pay and the customer does and enjoys the burger.
Wendy's goes to the BEEF supplier and says: Where's the BEEF? We need more! The Beef supplier complies. Wendy's hands them a bill and tries to walk off with the BEEF. Wendy's figures they are just providing a BEEF distribution service.
What most people don't know is that this happened to my Grandfather during the Great Depression. He was a Saskatchewan farmer and shipped a calf to Toronto. They sent him a bill because the calf didn't fetch enough to cover the transportation costs.
My Grandfather shipped no more calves to Toronto. Maybe some people in Toronto went to bed hungry.
In fact the telecommunications industry has been double dipping for YEARS. Google may well be able to negotiate a peering arrangement. The VAST MAJORITY of companies that provide internet content are NOT in a position to peer. So they pay for the privilege of providing free content for the telecommunications industry and clients who are often mum and pop ISP's.
Google might have enough clout to fight this. Most content suppliers have no chance. This is a very unfair business model. The ones who pay the price are the consumers who might be missing out on websites created by some very talented people. Then we have web masters and graphics artists many of whom spend a great deal of time and money one school and tuition while learning their craft. They are looking for careers that might not materialize.
How many people remember the Dot.Com Bubble? For those interested in economics I'll provide this link to Eric Janszen's website: http://www.itulip.com/ Eric writes of the technology bubble in a number of articles.
Eric writes that the action of the FED after the technology bubble burst leads directly to the housing bubble and the present recession. The issue is that a lot of the reason the tech bubble burst is _because_ there was no workable business model. Companies that tried to create internet content went bankrupt.
How many billions of dollars were lost by investors as the internet unfolded and the dream of "if we build it they will come" unfolded? Well - we did come. Unfortunately there was no money in it for those who were living the dream!
I say the greed of the telecommunications oligopoly had a lot to do with this.
Oracle shipped their database ported to Dos. I don't use their products anymore. This is what they did.
In SQL*FORMS one could define a field and indicate that is its numeric. One should not be able to type in "ABCDE" in an numeric field. Indeed if you did then SQL*FORMS trapped the error. However SQL*FORMS also allowed a trigger to be set for the field. If the trigger was set they disabled the error trap! That software was so buggy it was almost impossible to use! In the next version they had the error trap enabled but they changed so much other stuff that I had to re-write the code. It does not feel good having to go to the client and advise that after months of work the product cannot be delivered and that they will have to wait months longer for the next version and hope for the best!
Borland shipped C++ for OS/2. Again - a system full of crap.
IBM had so many problems with OS/2 that there were many things that could not be made to work! One was networking between windows NT and IBM OS/2. FTP transfers would just fail. No errors and no warnings.
Then IBM had the great "feature" in OS/2 that on a dual monitor system one could open a "DOS" window on on the VGA side. The other side was 8514. If the focus was in DOS then OS/2 windows on the 8514 ran. If the focus was in an OS/2 window then the DOS window not only froze - they blanked it out too!
When Microsoft brought out NT 4.0 OS/2 got the boot! Funny - OS/2 didn't make it in the market place. I had a tech support contract with IBM back then as well! Another thing that was funny is that NT ran command line OS/2 code better than OS/2 did. So how did IBM benefit from their buggy code?
Here's one Microsoft pulled off. In their Fortran for Dos compiler we found a serious bug. I don't know what triggered it but the compiler would remove certain "if" statements. I managed to find it by looking specifically at the machine code and sure enough the instructions were not emitted. I submitted a report to Microsoft and went to the client and fortunately I was dealing with engineers who did know something about programming. I showed them via the debugger that the code was not there! We figured out a way to get that specific "if" statement working... but we were dealing with 100's of 1000's of lines of code! How does one check what other "if" statements might have been discarded by that crappy compiler?
So over the next year I checked up with Microsoft every few months. Eventually they told me to buy the new version. I did and when it arrived the first thing I did was to check to see if the bug had been fixed. It wasn't! They never did fix it that I know of. Eventually we got to move off DOS into windows. So I ordered that version. I found the package actually contained two (2) compliers. One was for 16 bit DOS mode. The other was for windows mode. They were incompatible with each other. I gave up. I have never programmed windows in my life! I do not use it! I did run NT for a while but never wrote any "windows" code. I use Linux today and OpenBSD and that stuff works!
It is much cheaper to write software to do the job right the first time. This makes later debugging much easier to do because the rest of the system can be trusted.
So here is a story on one of my programmers. The company was under tight deadlines. That was their own damn fault because the previous 6 consultants couldn't figure out how to write a single line of code on their watch. Of course they didn't tell us when they hired us! Go figure?
I told my project team: Check every error code - without exception! I don't care how tight the deadlines are - I'll buy you guys the time and I want tight code! We were building a major database and I didn't want it full of garbage because of crappy code!
Everyone agreed.
A month later one of my programmers was having trouble getting some code to work. She just couldn't find the problem! So she brought the code to my office and we started going through it. Return codes were not tested! I asked why? She said she didn't have time. I told her she did have time and told her in the project meeting the month before I specifically said we do have time. I asked her to put in the code to test the return codes and run the program and come back to me.
Off she went.
2 hours later she was back and said she couldn't understand why her program was saying the database could not be opened. I looked at the call to open the database. It was correct. So then I looked at how the variable that held the name of the database had been set up. There was a typo. She went off to fix it and had it done in about 15 minutes and the program had been re-run and tested by then and it worked. We were able to complete testing in a day or so and it went into production.
My point is this. It was less than 2 hours work to test the return codes but because she was cutting corners we lost more than a month of project time! Not only this the company was expected to pay her salary while she spun her wheels pointed in the wrong direction due to her shoddy code.
It simply does not save project time to write sloppy code. I've seen a lot of sloppy code in my day too!
When I first started programming they liked to compare programming to building a house. I had to point out that its not like building a house. With programming you can start from the top and go down and you can start at the bottom and go up and you can start at the east, west, north and south too. You can build the parts in any order.
However there is an aspect of programming which is akin to house building and this is the idea of the framing carpenters and the finishing carpenters.
Who here wants to use a framing carpenter and his techniques of chopping off a 2x4 with a hand help skill saw to the techniques of a finishing carpenter laying a hardwood floor who uses a $1000 sliding compound miter saw?
You see every one of those cracks and bad cuts cannot be fixed later. The whole floor has to be torn out and done right.
In house building the miss-cuts behind the drywall often won't be seen unless the job is so badly done that main support beams are left out - and I've actually seen this done!
In programming the cracks will become apparent. These will be things like error codes not checked and code to handle unlikely cases not being tested. In windows 95 for instance we found that one could shut a SCSI disc drive off while the operating system was accessing it and there were no errors or warnings... it just went to normal end of job! Now that is crappy coding if anyone asks me!
It is much cheaper to write software to do the job right the first time. This makes later debugging much easier to do because the rest of the system can be trusted.
This was with a skill saw. I got the saw for $25 bux. I was screaming at the top of my lungs for him to stop!
A safety device like this will come down in price and frankly its worth the price!
Besides he was asking for something like 8% according to the article.
Maybe the next new invention will be a computer eye that watches the operators hands. How about something can can detect metal going into the blade? There are lots of ways more safety can be built into equipment.
Furthermore in the situation that went to trial apparently the guy was in a professional shop and lost the use of his hand.
So with a skill saw for instance... would it be possible to put a depth sensor on it so if the blade extends more than say 1/8" past the wood that it won't work? One would need an over-ride I suppose but I've seem more than a few contractors set the blade at maximum depth and this is just asking for an accident.
But then I did have a friend chop the end off his thumb and why? There was no wood in the saw. He was done. He forgot the blade was still on and reached over for the board! He only took 1/2 the nail off. It took over a year to heal. And why did the accident happen? Because he took the guard off and chucked it - that is why.
I think the answer is a manufacturer can only accomplish so much but they should still do what they can. In this case it looks like they are hiding behind legal arguments motivated by money.
I learned to drive using both feet! I learned to drive using the left foot for the left brake and the right foot for the right brake. I used my left hand for the clutch and used the right hand for the throttle! I could hit either or both brakes with the throttle fully engaged. Usually I had the throttle fully engaged.
When I had to turn a corner I would spin the steering wheel usually with my left hand and if the front wheels were not biting enough I'd hit a brake. I usually drove only with the left hand on the steering wheel and usually in the 6:00 position and never at 10:00 and 2:00! I usually drove looking in the opposite direction where I was going. I knew the route pretty well so I had a pretty good gut feel when a turn was coming up and I did look forward for the turns.
I took all the turns at full throttle and usually at full speed!
I also judged my position in the lane by looking at the ditch. This meant that while I was looking backwards really I had one eye on where I was and one eye on the ditch. I never hit the ditch once! I never got too far from the ditch either! I was always dead center in the sweet spot of the lane.
So that folks is how I learned to drive! I figure what they teach in Drivers Ed is for sissies!
Also I got my drivers license when I was 16. There was a box on the application form where I had to indicate how many years of driving experience I had. I put down "4". I learned to drive when I was 12. When I was 13 I was driving 8+ hours a day sometimes. I figured I'm not going to lie on this thing. If I have 4 years experience then I say I have 4 years experience! I got my driver's license on the first try. I had not taken any driver's training.
The next step is for the ISP's of the world to pull he damn plug.
Look, I know it might inconvenience the owners of the bots. However it is their negligence which is enabling this and as such they are accessories to criminal activity. They may be an unwitting accessory but they are still an accessory and this is no different than a bar tender who keeps pouring drinks for a patron and then watches the drunk head out to the parking lot and drive away.
The bar tender in a case like this can claim all the innocence he wants to claim but as I see it a considerable amount of blame should be assigned if said drunk goes off and kills people.
Its not different than handing a can of gasoline and a package of matches and a blow torch to an arsonist.
When people buy a computer and plug it into the net then they have to accept some responsibility for it just as they have to accept some responsibility for their cars. In the past when they got themselves a horse they needed to accept some responsibility and today when people go get themselves a viscous dog they are ALSO expected to accept some responsibility.
I say this principle needs to apply to our ISP's as well.
It is usually simple to determine if they are hosting a bot. Pull the damn plug.
Certainly now that the botnet has been exposed those who have been hosting these bots should be able to pull the damn plug.
Then we have the situation with guess what company supplied the software! If Toyota should be held accountable for problems in the software that might be controlling the cars they sell then why should software vendors not be held accountable? The simple answer is that if it isn't ready for market tell them to withdraw it and fix it!
At the bottom of what we are facing with these botnets are a lot of people who are shirking their responsibilities.
It is to be EXPECTED that there are criminals in the world. There are lots of criminals and many try to masquerade as honest folks. Check the history of the Opium trade and China and the British Empire. Check the history of the Spanish and their quest for gold in America. Crime has been going on for centuries.
I'm scared too. By birth I am an American Citizen born in Canada. But I'm now afraid to travel to the USA and I've counseled my kids on this issue. Don't take a lap top in. Don't take a CD or DVD in. Don't wear clothes.
There are something like 270 million people in the USA. If we assume 1% of them are paranoid in some way or otherwise limited in common sense and intelligence... then it seems these are the people who will be willing to be the low cost bidders! Are these the people manning the halls of government?
Up here in Canada here in Calgary I see car parts scattered on my street. Why? We get a big snow dump and we are told by our mayor that because of red tape they can't remove the snow which is now ice and the ruts are 1/2 way up to my knees in places. My tax dollars are spent in the creation of red tape. So I've been asking my neighbors - Does anyone want to run? I'll be the first to contribute to the campaign! I have not found one who wants the job.
How is this different than the idjots who called 911 and claimed their kid had been lofted above in a beautiful silver balloon? They are doing time. So should this jerk. Its public mischief.
Of course up here in Canada we try to laugh this stuff off.
Years ago we were in the news. One of our people took a handful of flour and tossed it on the bottom of a power pole. This is something we've been doing around the world for something like 60+ years. Its pretty innocent.
Along come the authorities. They test this "white powder". It test positive. Why? Because THEY contaminated their sample with the power pole. This hits the 12:00 news! Panic in the streets.
Was there an explanation given to the public - Nooooo. Not on your life.
Mod parent up! I've got mod points but I've already posted!
This is a damn good idea. But probably one should think of using a plane for longer trips and just let the semi truck do the work!
But how about this idea:
A park it and leave it system. In a system like this you walk down the street until you see a vehicle you like. You stick in your park it and leave it card and it processes a rental Contract for you and away you go. When you get to where you want to go you pull over and park it and pull out the card and the car is there for the next guy!
With a properly designed system one could use a browser to find and reserve a car!
This is not really any different than walking into any car rental firm. Its just that the cars get spread around a bit. Of course some rules will need to apply but a server with GPS information can do most of that sort of administration!
With a decently priced system I would probably be one of the first to lose my car. Now this might not work well for commuters but I do happen to live in a city with a pretty good Light Rail Transit line. The trains run every 10 minutes and cost $2.50. I can't drive my car downtown every day and pay parking at a rate of $5.00*20 days = 100 bux/month.
Mind you a couple years ago I had an infection and had to see the community nurses who were 3 stops away. My car was in the shop getting fixed. I found I could walk the 2-3 miles within about 10 minutes of the time required to take the train. The station where I live is 4 blocks away. The station where I was going was 3 blocks away. So I walked! Why pay them $5.00 bux when I can get some good excersise.
The issue is that we need to really boost convenience and I think we can do it! BTW that route I walked down? It was the number #10 bus route. I rarely saw a bus! To me it makes little sense to be hauling around tons of metal and meanwhile suggesting this might save fuel! In this city I do happen to see the buses driving around empty for hours per day!
Ya I've seen this too. It was just North of North Battleford Saskatchewan and there was this car pulling a trailer and behind this was a nice boat. The problem is the car was in the ditch. Their road train started to fish tail. They were going down a hill. The trailer swung around and wiped out both back fenders of the car before it tore the hitch off. Then it headed into the ditched and did a couple summersaults. Since the boat was hooked to the trailer it also did a summersault as it broke the tie downs and left the trailer.
I would say the mess was something like 250-500 feet. The driver and his wife were sitting in the ditch with their heads in their hands. There was stuff like pillows and bedding and dishes scattered all over the place!
Too bad I didn't have my camera! BTW I was also towing my brand new boat but I knew better than to try to run a road train. I think to do this successfully you actually have to have brakes on the trailers.
I mean, it'd basically be a packet-switched network, but with cars instead of pieces of data. It's a relatively benign IT problem.
What a great idea! Why not simply have Mr Speedy Pants organized into a packet that gets lost in transmission? The one that gets resent after the NAK can look alike but its still a new packet but perhaps without the hidden corruption!
One thing I do worry about is energy availability. When I saw Oil above $145 per barrel I thought Oh No! But for the short term I think we need to head at break neck speeds into synthetics. I'd love to see a lift system like alluded to in the article but I do figure its a long long ways off and at this point little more than a daydream.
So in the mean time I figure we've got to figure out what our real problems are and come up with practical solutions. One problem I see as being a major problem is liquid fuels. But nuclear is a key to solving this problem and we do have reactor designs sitting on the shelf such as the IFR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor) and molten Salt Reactor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor) and using this we do already have enough uranium mined to provide all the power we need for 6,000 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Integral_Fast_Reactor see fuel efficiency! Quote: "Quite literally only about 0.2% of the starting uranium ends up being burned and of course most of this is the U235 fraction". The point is that newer reactor designs can get 300x to 1000x the mileage from the uranium we mine. And they will burn all the actinides.
The short and curlies is there is no reason for us to be in an energy crisis and ruin our economies. Maybe 100 years from now we'll have a cheap earth to orbit lift system and then we won't need nuclear. In the mean time I don't think a tether will work but it could maybe get us close enough to use another system which we also have not figured out.
The issue is this. There is a lot of atmosphere near sea level. However one can use a jet in order to get above 2/3 of the atmosphere. One can use a balloon to get much higher than this:
The thing is that if we can get high enough then I see little reason why we can't use space based lasers in order to beam power to a ship. The issue is that one has to get enough kinetic energy into the ship in order for it to go into orbit. In space it still has to be a rocket. But along the way it can be a hybrid.
The high cost of attaining orbit is not the high elevation. Its the kinetic energy and the fact that if we want to use rocket fuel then we need to start out with so damn much of it near ground in order to have a small amount left over when we get to orbit.
Most of that fuel is an oxidizer! The atmosphere is full of an oxidizer.
So as I see it - once we gain enough altitude using oxygen from the atmosphere - or a balloon - or a tether from a balloon - or some other system... then if we can get a space based laser system going to supply energy then we should be able to use what little atmosphere is up there as a reaction mass and one should be able to use that to gain orbit.
It would be a pretty expensive system mind you. However it might be worth it. If we can get a cheap enough lift system then maybe we could carry raw materials into space to be processed into say fuel! That has HUGE potential to create an industry worthy of the investments. Mind you we've been able to use nuclear for over 50 years! There are a number of options here.
1) we can use nuclear to split water and then use the hydrogen to combine with carbon to make synthetic fuels.
2) we can just use methane as a source of hydrogen.
3) if we can develop a good enough battery system then we won't need liquid fuels. But if we want use electricity to power our cars then we need to generate it from something. I rather think this comes back to nuclear. But I know many people are optimistic that solar and wind and other emerging technologies can do it.
If we don't want to use nuclear and the other technologies don't pan out then I suppose a workable lift system might do the job.
This still leaves us with the problem that even if we can get into orbit where there are vast amounts of cheap energy... how would be transport it back to earth?
So here is an example from Elementary Numerical analysis, S.D, Conte and Carl de BOOR circa 1965, 1972 ISBN (library of congress card number?) 73-174612:
Calculate the roots of the following equation:
x^2 + 111.11x + 1.2121 = 0
use base-10 5 digit floats for this.
one can use x = (-b (+/-) SQRT( b^2 - 4ac)) / 2a in order to do this.
Consider that book was written in 1972. I was programming computers in 1972. I actually did a course in numerical analysis in 1972 and just re-read the first 10 pages or so. I happen to have read a masters thesis that came out of the Colorado School of Mines where the author stated Meadows' Runge Kutta Numerical Integrations did not converge.
Yet that book is still often quoted. Its been flawed from the get go. So consider something else! How fast were the machines that Meadows used? How big? What would be the MOST SOPHISTICATED model he could use at the time. How could _anyone_ take seriously predictions made by a primitive model run on such a machine?
Witness: The current discussion about Global Warming and Climate Change. The change in CO2 over the last 100 years is about 100 ppm if you can believe the data. This is 100/1,000,000 = 0.0001. Now the thing is this. A 32 bit float holds about 6.9 digits of precision. Lets call it 7 digits. If one were to add a whole number of some kind to the fractional change of the CO2 as measured relative to the total gases in the atmosphere then one has 7-4 = 3 digits or less to work with.
Of course one can use a double precision float. That isn't my point. One has to be an EXPERT in order to avoid huge problems with propagating rounding errors.
Its not just about pretending computers use base 10 when they don't, its about knowing the actual properties of a number of type float and what the consequences are when we use it.
In the case of that rocket I suspect the rounding error can be solved by normalizing everything so the time line is not in seconds but is actually in clock ticks... as accurately as they can be determined of course.
But in my career I have seen so few programmers who can do this that I've never even needed to look at a finger or a toe for something to count on. Nada - never met one.
I'll give another example. More than one project team that I worked with had no idea how floats even work! To sit there and try to use floats for their Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable and then say they can't understand why nothing will balance? Arrghh! IMHO its downright incompetence. They needed to use comp which COBOL supported which is base 10 or normalize all their money into pennies and handle the decimal when the data was read in and printed.
This has NOTHING to do with P2P. They might not even be able to show P2P software had anything to do with it. The issue is that ANYONE who is stupid enough to hook a machine dealing with confidential information to the net is a bleeding fool and this includes all my lawyers' secretaries who had their word processing machines on the net - the lawyer who sent me his complete client list, a certain accountant who dropped off at a pawn shop (for $25 bux) all her clients income tax returns along with her DLT7000 (70 GB folks & the tape was in the $3500++ drive!). She used it to backup what ultimately would fit on a couple CD's! She _could_ have simply copied each years tax return to a floppy disk for the specific client! The list also includes a company that had their accounting staff re-input months of work because they picked up a virus in their key machines.
Computers are so cheap that it makes no sense what so ever to take chances like this.
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A non techie should focus on what they do well and hire a programmer.
There is no way a non techie can begin to compete with what a good programmer can do. There brain space is just not big enough.
I am a programmer and I am a businessman. I have one foot in each of two canoes. I have had to remove my foot from the programming canoe. I like it - I wish I could go back to it. But my brains are simply not big enough to do both.
We have doctors who will be doctors. We have microbiologists you will be microbiologists. We have lawyers who will be lawyers. We have micologists who will be micologists. We have poets who will be poets.
Very few are gifted enough to pursue more than one field. But of those who are able to place one foot in each of two canoes - they don't need to ask the question in the title of this story because they already know the answer.
A non-techie is simply a non-techie and they are unsuitable to be programmers because you need to be a techie in order to be a programmer! Its as simple as that!
BTW - I hire accountants too. I'm not an accountant and never want to be one. No successful business is going to have one guy doing everything - that is unless that one guy wants to be a slave to his own business and then who does said guy pass it on to when he is too old to do it anymore. If you can't leave your business to your kids then IMHO you failed.
So since when did Elisabeth Shue make a trip to North Korea?
I usually don't reply to myself... Here is another issue.
If they hit a gas pocket then the gas will form bubbles in the drilling mud and this reduces the density. Reduce the density and the mud blows out of the hole.
It will be a long time before we know what happened. This is if we EVER know what happened. Right now I expect some very brilliant reservoir engineers are trying to figure out what happened.
As I see it, it is OUR responsibility to have some safety equipment on standby.
We can tax the oil and gas industry and we can ask them to partner. But to me it makes no sense to run around pointing fingers and trying to assign blame because they are doing their BEST to produce a product we all need.
I think we have to expect and any actuary in the insurance industry will agree that accidents will happen.
So I agree with people who ask: "why wasn't the containment thingy already built?". An answer of its: "not cost effective" doesn't cut the mustard for me.
When New Orleans was flooded the Army Corps of Engineers tried to fly that excuse as well!
Not cost effective to build a dike so maybe somehow it is cost effective to flood a city? My gawd. What sort of spaghetti logic is this?
I don't care how much it costs to build a competent containment structure. It should have been ON THE SHELF.
There has been a long history of accidents. The failure here is the lack of leadership in those who choose to govern. Everyone knows that a company will do a risk assessment. They answer to their stock holders. Its the governments' job to govern.
I suspect what happened might be the blow out protector tried to do its job but was not able to completely shear off the pipe. I suspect they drilled near a very over pressured zone. I suspect the well operators did everything right. I suspect as the oil and gas column overbalanced the weight of the mud it simply blew the mud from the pipe and this put the rig in a natural gas bubble which lit. There was simply nothing anyone could do about it.
Now what we have is a very erosive fluid probably full of sand and it will eat the production casing away and by the time 2-3 months elapse which is gong to be how long it takes to contain this thing there might be a well bore that is the size of a small culvert.
BP was not planning on putting this field into production for years. Well - its now on production!
Scene from Wendy's:
Customer walks to the counter and order's a burger. Wendy's business model says the customer should pay and the customer does and enjoys the burger.
Wendy's goes to the BEEF supplier and says: Where's the BEEF? We need more! The Beef supplier complies. Wendy's hands them a bill and tries to walk off with the BEEF. Wendy's figures they are just providing a BEEF distribution service.
What most people don't know is that this happened to my Grandfather during the Great Depression. He was a Saskatchewan farmer and shipped a calf to Toronto. They sent him a bill because the calf didn't fetch enough to cover the transportation costs.
My Grandfather shipped no more calves to Toronto. Maybe some people in Toronto went to bed hungry.
In fact the telecommunications industry has been double dipping for YEARS. Google may well be able to negotiate a peering arrangement. The VAST MAJORITY of companies that provide internet content are NOT in a position to peer. So they pay for the privilege of providing free content for the telecommunications industry and clients who are often mum and pop ISP's.
Google might have enough clout to fight this. Most content suppliers have no chance. This is a very unfair business model. The ones who pay the price are the consumers who might be missing out on websites created by some very talented people. Then we have web masters and graphics artists many of whom spend a great deal of time and money one school and tuition while learning their craft. They are looking for careers that might not materialize.
How many people remember the Dot.Com Bubble? For those interested in economics I'll provide this link to Eric Janszen's website: http://www.itulip.com/ Eric writes of the technology bubble in a number of articles.
Eric writes that the action of the FED after the technology bubble burst leads directly to the housing bubble and the present recession. The issue is that a lot of the reason the tech bubble burst is _because_ there was no workable business model. Companies that tried to create internet content went bankrupt.
Look here: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/02/0081908
How many billions of dollars were lost by investors as the internet unfolded and the dream of "if we build it they will come" unfolded? Well - we did come. Unfortunately there was no money in it for those who were living the dream!
I say the greed of the telecommunications oligopoly had a lot to do with this.
Scene from Wendy's:
Customer walks to the counter and order's a burger. Wendy's business model says the customer should pay and the customer does and enjoys the burger.
Wendy's goes to the BEEF supplier and says: Where's the BEEF? We need more! The Beef supplier complies. Wendy's hands them a bill and tries to walk off with the BEEF. Wendy's figures they are just providing a BEEF distribution service.
What most people don't know is that this happened to my Grandfather during the Great Depression. He was a Saskatchewan farmer and shipped a calf to Toronto. They sent him a bill because the calf didn't fetch enough to cover the transportation costs.
My Grandfather shipped no more calves to Toronto. Maybe some people in Toronto went to bed hungry.
In fact the telecommunications industry has been double dipping for YEARS. Google may well be able to negotiate a peering arrangement. The VAST MAJORITY of companies that provide internet content are NOT in a position to peer. So they pay for the privilege of providing free content for the telecommunications industry and clients who are often mum and pop ISP's.
Google might have enough clout to fight this. Most content suppliers have no chance. This is a very unfair business model. The ones who pay the price are the consumers who might be missing out on websites created by some very talented people. Then we have web masters and graphics artists many of whom spend a great deal of time and money one school and tuition while learning their craft. They are looking for careers that might not materialize.
How many people remember the Dot.Com Bubble? For those interested in economics I'll provide this link to Eric Janszen's website: http://www.itulip.com/ Eric writes of the technology bubble in a number of articles.
Eric writes that the action of the FED after the technology bubble burst leads directly to the housing bubble and the present recession. The issue is that a lot of the reason the tech bubble burst is _because_ there was no workable business model. Companies that tried to create internet content went bankrupt.
Look here: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/02/0081908
How many billions of dollars were lost by investors as the internet unfolded and the dream of "if we build it they will come" unfolded? Well - we did come. Unfortunately there was no money in it for those who were living the dream!
I say the greed of the telecommunications oligopoly had a lot to do with this.
Oracle shipped their database ported to Dos. I don't use their products anymore. This is what they did.
In SQL*FORMS one could define a field and indicate that is its numeric. One should not be able to type in "ABCDE" in an numeric field. Indeed if you did then SQL*FORMS trapped the error. However SQL*FORMS also allowed a trigger to be set for the field. If the trigger was set they disabled the error trap! That software was so buggy it was almost impossible to use! In the next version they had the error trap enabled but they changed so much other stuff that I had to re-write the code. It does not feel good having to go to the client and advise that after months of work the product cannot be delivered and that they will have to wait months longer for the next version and hope for the best!
Borland shipped C++ for OS/2. Again - a system full of crap.
IBM had so many problems with OS/2 that there were many things that could not be made to work! One was networking between windows NT and IBM OS/2. FTP transfers would just fail. No errors and no warnings.
Then IBM had the great "feature" in OS/2 that on a dual monitor system one could open a "DOS" window on on the VGA side. The other side was 8514. If the focus was in DOS then OS/2 windows on the 8514 ran. If the focus was in an OS/2 window then the DOS window not only froze - they blanked it out too!
When Microsoft brought out NT 4.0 OS/2 got the boot! Funny - OS/2 didn't make it in the market place. I had a tech support contract with IBM back then as well! Another thing that was funny is that NT ran command line OS/2 code better than OS/2 did. So how did IBM benefit from their buggy code?
Here's one Microsoft pulled off. In their Fortran for Dos compiler we found a serious bug. I don't know what triggered it but the compiler would remove certain "if" statements. I managed to find it by looking specifically at the machine code and sure enough the instructions were not emitted. I submitted a report to Microsoft and went to the client and fortunately I was dealing with engineers who did know something about programming. I showed them via the debugger that the code was not there! We figured out a way to get that specific "if" statement working... but we were dealing with 100's of 1000's of lines of code! How does one check what other "if" statements might have been discarded by that crappy compiler?
So over the next year I checked up with Microsoft every few months. Eventually they told me to buy the new version. I did and when it arrived the first thing I did was to check to see if the bug had been fixed. It wasn't! They never did fix it that I know of. Eventually we got to move off DOS into windows. So I ordered that version. I found the package actually contained two (2) compliers. One was for 16 bit DOS mode. The other was for windows mode. They were incompatible with each other. I gave up. I have never programmed windows in my life! I do not use it! I did run NT for a while but never wrote any "windows" code. I use Linux today and OpenBSD and that stuff works!
It is much cheaper to write software to do the job right the first time. This makes later debugging much easier to do because the rest of the system can be trusted.
So here is a story on one of my programmers. The company was under tight deadlines. That was their own damn fault because the previous 6 consultants couldn't figure out how to write a single line of code on their watch. Of course they didn't tell us when they hired us! Go figure?
I told my project team: Check every error code - without exception! I don't care how tight the deadlines are - I'll buy you guys the time and I want tight code! We were building a major database and I didn't want it full of garbage because of crappy code!
Everyone agreed.
A month later one of my programmers was having trouble getting some code to work. She just couldn't find the problem! So she brought the code to my office and we started going through it. Return codes were not tested! I asked why? She said she didn't have time. I told her she did have time and told her in the project meeting the month before I specifically said we do have time. I asked her to put in the code to test the return codes and run the program and come back to me.
Off she went.
2 hours later she was back and said she couldn't understand why her program was saying the database could not be opened. I looked at the call to open the database. It was correct. So then I looked at how the variable that held the name of the database had been set up. There was a typo. She went off to fix it and had it done in about 15 minutes and the program had been re-run and tested by then and it worked. We were able to complete testing in a day or so and it went into production.
My point is this. It was less than 2 hours work to test the return codes but because she was cutting corners we lost more than a month of project time! Not only this the company was expected to pay her salary while she spun her wheels pointed in the wrong direction due to her shoddy code.
It simply does not save project time to write sloppy code. I've seen a lot of sloppy code in my day too!
When I first started programming they liked to compare programming to building a house. I had to point out that its not like building a house. With programming you can start from the top and go down and you can start at the bottom and go up and you can start at the east, west, north and south too. You can build the parts in any order.
However there is an aspect of programming which is akin to house building and this is the idea of the framing carpenters and the finishing carpenters.
Who here wants to use a framing carpenter and his techniques of chopping off a 2x4 with a hand help skill saw to the techniques of a finishing carpenter laying a hardwood floor who uses a $1000 sliding compound miter saw?
You see every one of those cracks and bad cuts cannot be fixed later. The whole floor has to be torn out and done right.
In house building the miss-cuts behind the drywall often won't be seen unless the job is so badly done that main support beams are left out - and I've actually seen this done!
In programming the cracks will become apparent. These will be things like error codes not checked and code to handle unlikely cases not being tested. In windows 95 for instance we found that one could shut a SCSI disc drive off while the operating system was accessing it and there were no errors or warnings... it just went to normal end of job! Now that is crappy coding if anyone asks me!
It is much cheaper to write software to do the job right the first time. This makes later debugging much easier to do because the rest of the system can be trusted.
Is she available for a date?
This was with a skill saw. I got the saw for $25 bux. I was screaming at the top of my lungs for him to stop!
A safety device like this will come down in price and frankly its worth the price!
Besides he was asking for something like 8% according to the article.
Maybe the next new invention will be a computer eye that watches the operators hands. How about something can can detect metal going into the blade? There are lots of ways more safety can be built into equipment.
Furthermore in the situation that went to trial apparently the guy was in a professional shop and lost the use of his hand.
So with a skill saw for instance... would it be possible to put a depth sensor on it so if the blade extends more than say 1/8" past the wood that it won't work? One would need an over-ride I suppose but I've seem more than a few contractors set the blade at maximum depth and this is just asking for an accident.
But then I did have a friend chop the end off his thumb and why? There was no wood in the saw. He was done. He forgot the blade was still on and reached over for the board! He only took 1/2 the nail off. It took over a year to heal. And why did the accident happen? Because he took the guard off and chucked it - that is why.
I think the answer is a manufacturer can only accomplish so much but they should still do what they can. In this case it looks like they are hiding behind legal arguments motivated by money.
I learned to drive using both feet! I learned to drive using the left foot for the left brake and the right foot for the right brake. I used my left hand for the clutch and used the right hand for the throttle! I could hit either or both brakes with the throttle fully engaged. Usually I had the throttle fully engaged.
When I had to turn a corner I would spin the steering wheel usually with my left hand and if the front wheels were not biting enough I'd hit a brake. I usually drove only with the left hand on the steering wheel and usually in the 6:00 position and never at 10:00 and 2:00! I usually drove looking in the opposite direction where I was going. I knew the route pretty well so I had a pretty good gut feel when a turn was coming up and I did look forward for the turns.
I took all the turns at full throttle and usually at full speed!
I also judged my position in the lane by looking at the ditch. This meant that while I was looking backwards really I had one eye on where I was and one eye on the ditch. I never hit the ditch once! I never got too far from the ditch either! I was always dead center in the sweet spot of the lane.
So that folks is how I learned to drive! I figure what they teach in Drivers Ed is for sissies!
Also I got my drivers license when I was 16. There was a box on the application form where I had to indicate how many years of driving experience I had. I put down "4". I learned to drive when I was 12. When I was 13 I was driving 8+ hours a day sometimes. I figured I'm not going to lie on this thing. If I have 4 years experience then I say I have 4 years experience! I got my driver's license on the first try. I had not taken any driver's training.
The next step is for the ISP's of the world to pull he damn plug.
Look, I know it might inconvenience the owners of the bots. However it is their negligence which is enabling this and as such they are accessories to criminal activity. They may be an unwitting accessory but they are still an accessory and this is no different than a bar tender who keeps pouring drinks for a patron and then watches the drunk head out to the parking lot and drive away.
The bar tender in a case like this can claim all the innocence he wants to claim but as I see it a considerable amount of blame should be assigned if said drunk goes off and kills people.
Its not different than handing a can of gasoline and a package of matches and a blow torch to an arsonist.
When people buy a computer and plug it into the net then they have to accept some responsibility for it just as they have to accept some responsibility for their cars. In the past when they got themselves a horse they needed to accept some responsibility and today when people go get themselves a viscous dog they are ALSO expected to accept some responsibility.
I say this principle needs to apply to our ISP's as well.
It is usually simple to determine if they are hosting a bot. Pull the damn plug.
Certainly now that the botnet has been exposed those who have been hosting these bots should be able to pull the damn plug.
Then we have the situation with guess what company supplied the software! If Toyota should be held accountable for problems in the software that might be controlling the cars they sell then why should software vendors not be held accountable? The simple answer is that if it isn't ready for market tell them to withdraw it and fix it!
At the bottom of what we are facing with these botnets are a lot of people who are shirking their responsibilities.
It is to be EXPECTED that there are criminals in the world. There are lots of criminals and many try to masquerade as honest folks. Check the history of the Opium trade and China and the British Empire. Check the history of the Spanish and their quest for gold in America. Crime has been going on for centuries.
I'm scared too. By birth I am an American Citizen born in Canada. But I'm now afraid to travel to the USA and I've counseled my kids on this issue. Don't take a lap top in. Don't take a CD or DVD in. Don't wear clothes.
There are something like 270 million people in the USA. If we assume 1% of them are paranoid in some way or otherwise limited in common sense and intelligence... then it seems these are the people who will be willing to be the low cost bidders! Are these the people manning the halls of government?
Up here in Canada here in Calgary I see car parts scattered on my street. Why? We get a big snow dump and we are told by our mayor that because of red tape they can't remove the snow which is now ice and the ruts are 1/2 way up to my knees in places. My tax dollars are spent in the creation of red tape. So I've been asking my neighbors - Does anyone want to run? I'll be the first to contribute to the campaign! I have not found one who wants the job.
It seems to go to the lowest bidder.
Sad and sadder indeed.
How is this different than the idjots who called 911 and claimed their kid had been lofted above in a beautiful silver balloon? They are doing time. So should this jerk. Its public mischief.
Of course up here in Canada we try to laugh this stuff off.
Years ago we were in the news. One of our people took a handful of flour and tossed it on the bottom of a power pole. This is something we've been doing around the world for something like 60+ years. Its pretty innocent.
Along come the authorities. They test this "white powder". It test positive. Why? Because THEY contaminated their sample with the power pole. This hits the 12:00 news! Panic in the streets.
Was there an explanation given to the public - Nooooo. Not on your life.
Poison with U238? A lot of good that will do since its fairly simple to chemically separate the Th from the U before you stuff it into the reactors!
Or are you meaning something else? IE provide a blend of Th and natural U when we make the fuel.
BTW - you are correct about the article. IMHO its pretty bad.
Mod parent up! I've got mod points but I've already posted!
This is a damn good idea. But probably one should think of using a plane for longer trips and just let the semi truck do the work!
But how about this idea:
A park it and leave it system. In a system like this you walk down the street until you see a vehicle you like. You stick in your park it and leave it card and it processes a rental Contract for you and away you go. When you get to where you want to go you pull over and park it and pull out the card and the car is there for the next guy!
With a properly designed system one could use a browser to find and reserve a car!
This is not really any different than walking into any car rental firm. Its just that the cars get spread around a bit. Of course some rules will need to apply but a server with GPS information can do most of that sort of administration!
With a decently priced system I would probably be one of the first to lose my car. Now this might not work well for commuters but I do happen to live in a city with a pretty good Light Rail Transit line. The trains run every 10 minutes and cost $2.50. I can't drive my car downtown every day and pay parking at a rate of $5.00*20 days = 100 bux/month.
Mind you a couple years ago I had an infection and had to see the community nurses who were 3 stops away. My car was in the shop getting fixed. I found I could walk the 2-3 miles within about 10 minutes of the time required to take the train. The station where I live is 4 blocks away. The station where I was going was 3 blocks away. So I walked! Why pay them $5.00 bux when I can get some good excersise.
The issue is that we need to really boost convenience and I think we can do it! BTW that route I walked down? It was the number #10 bus route. I rarely saw a bus! To me it makes little sense to be hauling around tons of metal and meanwhile suggesting this might save fuel! In this city I do happen to see the buses driving around empty for hours per day!
Ya I've seen this too. It was just North of North Battleford Saskatchewan and there was this car pulling a trailer and behind this was a nice boat. The problem is the car was in the ditch. Their road train started to fish tail. They were going down a hill. The trailer swung around and wiped out both back fenders of the car before it tore the hitch off. Then it headed into the ditched and did a couple summersaults. Since the boat was hooked to the trailer it also did a summersault as it broke the tie downs and left the trailer.
I would say the mess was something like 250-500 feet. The driver and his wife were sitting in the ditch with their heads in their hands. There was stuff like pillows and bedding and dishes scattered all over the place!
Too bad I didn't have my camera! BTW I was also towing my brand new boat but I knew better than to try to run a road train. I think to do this successfully you actually have to have brakes on the trailers.
I mean, it'd basically be a packet-switched network, but with cars instead of pieces of data. It's a relatively benign IT problem.
What a great idea! Why not simply have Mr Speedy Pants organized into a packet that gets lost in transmission? The one that gets resent after the NAK can look alike but its still a new packet but perhaps without the hidden corruption!
One thing I do worry about is energy availability. When I saw Oil above $145 per barrel I thought Oh No! But for the short term I think we need to head at break neck speeds into synthetics. I'd love to see a lift system like alluded to in the article but I do figure its a long long ways off and at this point little more than a daydream.
So in the mean time I figure we've got to figure out what our real problems are and come up with practical solutions. One problem I see as being a major problem is liquid fuels. But nuclear is a key to solving this problem and we do have reactor designs sitting on the shelf such as the IFR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor) and molten Salt Reactor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor) and using this we do already have enough uranium mined to provide all the power we need for 6,000 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Integral_Fast_Reactor see fuel efficiency! Quote: "Quite literally only about 0.2% of the starting uranium ends up being burned and of course most of this is the U235 fraction". The point is that newer reactor designs can get 300x to 1000x the mileage from the uranium we mine. And they will burn all the actinides.
The short and curlies is there is no reason for us to be in an energy crisis and ruin our economies. Maybe 100 years from now we'll have a cheap earth to orbit lift system and then we won't need nuclear. In the mean time I don't think a tether will work but it could maybe get us close enough to use another system which we also have not figured out.
Building the tether is the issue. I don't know if I believe it can be done. However some things about what they did do make sense.
One can use a dual system as was done in the Space Ship One project: http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/
The issue is this. There is a lot of atmosphere near sea level. However one can use a jet in order to get above 2/3 of the atmosphere. One can use a balloon to get much higher than this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Manhigh
In Manhigh they were almost 20 miles up.
The thing is that if we can get high enough then I see little reason why we can't use space based lasers in order to beam power to a ship. The issue is that one has to get enough kinetic energy into the ship in order for it to go into orbit. In space it still has to be a rocket. But along the way it can be a hybrid.
The high cost of attaining orbit is not the high elevation. Its the kinetic energy and the fact that if we want to use rocket fuel then we need to start out with so damn much of it near ground in order to have a small amount left over when we get to orbit.
Most of that fuel is an oxidizer! The atmosphere is full of an oxidizer.
So as I see it - once we gain enough altitude using oxygen from the atmosphere - or a balloon - or a tether from a balloon - or some other system... then if we can get a space based laser system going to supply energy then we should be able to use what little atmosphere is up there as a reaction mass and one should be able to use that to gain orbit.
It would be a pretty expensive system mind you. However it might be worth it. If we can get a cheap enough lift system then maybe we could carry raw materials into space to be processed into say fuel! That has HUGE potential to create an industry worthy of the investments. Mind you we've been able to use nuclear for over 50 years! There are a number of options here.
1) we can use nuclear to split water and then use the hydrogen to combine with carbon to make synthetic fuels.
2) we can just use methane as a source of hydrogen.
3) if we can develop a good enough battery system then we won't need liquid fuels. But if we want use electricity to power our cars then we need to generate it from something. I rather think this comes back to nuclear. But I know many people are optimistic that solar and wind and other emerging technologies can do it.
If we don't want to use nuclear and the other technologies don't pan out then I suppose a workable lift system might do the job.
This still leaves us with the problem that even if we can get into orbit where there are vast amounts of cheap energy... how would be transport it back to earth?
So here is an example from Elementary Numerical analysis, S.D, Conte and Carl de BOOR circa 1965, 1972 ISBN (library of congress card number?) 73-174612:
Calculate the roots of the following equation:
x^2 + 111.11x + 1.2121 = 0
use base-10 5 digit floats for this.
one can use x = (-b (+/-) SQRT( b^2 - 4ac)) / 2a in order to do this.
One will get:
b^2 = 12,345
b^2-4ac = 12,340
SQRT(b^2-4ac) = 111.09
x = (-b + SQRT(b^2-4ac))/2a = -0.010000
The correct answer is -0.010910
Note that we have gone from 5 digits to 2 digits of accuracy. This is on page 12.
One can use this formulation: x = -2c / (b + SQRT(b2-4ac)) which will give the answer to 5 digits precision.
Here is another example:
f(x) = 1-cos(x) for very small x. Lets use 6 digit arithmetic and compute near x=1.0e-6 The error can be as large as 0.5e-7
yet f(x) = 1-cos(x) = (1-cos(x)^2)/(1+cos(x)^2) = sin(x)^2/(1+cos(x)^2) which can be evaluated quite accurately.
Again = GIGO!
Crap like this was alive and well when I was in uni and its still alive and well.
Witness: Limits to Growth written by Meadows et al: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
Consider that book was written in 1972. I was programming computers in 1972. I actually did a course in numerical analysis in 1972 and just re-read the first 10 pages or so. I happen to have read a masters thesis that came out of the Colorado School of Mines where the author stated Meadows' Runge Kutta Numerical Integrations did not converge.
Yet that book is still often quoted. Its been flawed from the get go. So consider something else! How fast were the machines that Meadows used? How big? What would be the MOST SOPHISTICATED model he could use at the time. How could _anyone_ take seriously predictions made by a primitive model run on such a machine?
Witness: The current discussion about Global Warming and Climate Change. The change in CO2 over the last 100 years is about 100 ppm if you can believe the data. This is 100/1,000,000 = 0.0001. Now the thing is this. A 32 bit float holds about 6.9 digits of precision. Lets call it 7 digits. If one were to add a whole number of some kind to the fractional change of the CO2 as measured relative to the total gases in the atmosphere then one has 7-4 = 3 digits or less to work with.
Of course one can use a double precision float. That isn't my point. One has to be an EXPERT in order to avoid huge problems with propagating rounding errors.
Its not just about pretending computers use base 10 when they don't, its about knowing the actual properties of a number of type float and what the consequences are when we use it.
In the case of that rocket I suspect the rounding error can be solved by normalizing everything so the time line is not in seconds but is actually in clock ticks... as accurately as they can be determined of course.
But in my career I have seen so few programmers who can do this that I've never even needed to look at a finger or a toe for something to count on. Nada - never met one.
I'll give another example. More than one project team that I worked with had no idea how floats even work! To sit there and try to use floats for their Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable and then say they can't understand why nothing will balance? Arrghh! IMHO its downright incompetence. They needed to use comp which COBOL supported which is base 10 or normalize all their money into pennies and handle the decimal when the data was read in and printed.
Why do we keep getting this error on this story when trying to reply toe the abstract. its been there for hours.
Error 503 Service Unavailable
Service Unavailable
Guru Meditation:
XID: 1125948833
Varnish
This has NOTHING to do with P2P. They might not even be able to show P2P software had anything to do with it. The issue is that ANYONE who is stupid enough to hook a machine dealing with confidential information to the net is a bleeding fool and this includes all my lawyers' secretaries who had their word processing machines on the net - the lawyer who sent me his complete client list, a certain accountant who dropped off at a pawn shop (for $25 bux) all her clients income tax returns along with her DLT7000 (70 GB folks & the tape was in the $3500++ drive!). She used it to backup what ultimately would fit on a couple CD's! She _could_ have simply copied each years tax return to a floppy disk for the specific client! The list also includes a company that had their accounting staff re-input months of work because they picked up a virus in their key machines.
Computers are so cheap that it makes no sense what so ever to take chances like this.