My entire original point was that we can't just ignore what could potentially be an enormous
Here's what you said, completely without evidence:
arguably, because the danger is greater if we're wrong
The danger of being wrong in either direction is great. How do you know one is greater than the other?
And in the case of not reducing CO2 output, the costs could be even bigger.
Or smaller, which was my point.
based on looking selectively at the science
This is not a simple problem where science provides easy guidance. It's a huge, complex system -- not just the climate, but the economy as well.
Before I vote for anything drastic, I really need to see a compelling case that takes into account a variety of factors including the cost of doing something.
Would we have been better off if we'd done nothing? Certainly not better off, although possibly about the same. But also possibly in a much, much worse situation.
Can you tell me more about this free lunch?
Give me a break. You are explicitly ignoring the costs and proclaiming that only benefits exist.
You picked a case where the costs were relatively minor. Fixing Y2K bugs is a small, one-time cost. And the cost/benefit analysis can be carried out on a per-system basis (air traffic control systems should probably be checked out, but perhaps not an outdated video game).
But we're not talking about small costs here. In the case of drastic reductions in CO2 output, the costs could be huge. You can't just brush those costs under the rug and expect me to take you seriously.
it is not an attempt to "do something" it's a call to STOP "doing something".
This is ridiculous. If you tell someone that they can't use fossil fuels to transport themselves to work or light their home, then you are causing harm for sure.
Drastic is drastic. To "stop doing things" is a drastic cessation of modern society. Will it hurt the planet? No. Will it do more harm than good to people? Probably.
So how many things should we stop doing? The answer depends on two things:
1. Our certainty that a problem will exist.
2. Our understanding of the complex system we're trying to save.
Well, it would work for the application itself, if you totally ignore any business need to access the collected data in a useful way.
Key/Value stores are usually a poor attempt to reinvent a persistent virtual memory system. That's all a VM system is: give it a pointer and you get a word of data back.
So, if you really like hopping from pointer to pointer (or "reference" as it's called in an OOP language), which some people obviously do, a key/value store will suffice to finish the application in the most useless way possible (i.e. all of the data is trapped in a web of pointers).
they aren't ideal for the simple persistent data stores most apps call for
Most applications collect some kind of data that is valuable to the decision makers.
You are thinking about what it takes to get an application "done" without considering what the business really needs. The application might find it most convenient to collect information per-customer (for obvious reasons), but the decision makers might need a more global sense about what's going on.
Re:I am afraid, there is lack of direction for Rub
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Ruby 1.9.1 Released
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We're not talking about poor algorithm selection. We're talking about using a slower language rather than a faster language.
You assume that the same algorithm used in two languages will have the same big-O characteristics for CPU and memory consumption. That is not true.
For instance, some languages can optimize tail recursion into a loop, and some cannot. For those that can, the memory consumption for a given algorithm may be constant. For those that cannot, the memory consumption may be O(n).
I was asking if looking at the market capitalization really said more about how the company was doing than its sales numbers?
It's easy to get high revenue -- just sell stuff at or below cost. You won't make a profit, but you'll have a lot of sales.
Do we now judge the success of tech companies by looking at what non-technical financial people think the company might be worth in the very short term?
There are many ways of evaluating a business as a whole, some are subjective, e.g. something "only a technical person can understand why this is good", and some are objective, e.g. something that any financial expert can understand.
You may like to think that you have a lot of insight about the value of a company because you know something about the technologies they use or produce. And that's true, to some degree.
But your ignoring the numbers outright. And the numbers mean a lot. If Sun continues to lose money, and never turns a profit, then its value is precisely the liquidation value of its assets. I'm not saying that's what will happen, but profit is clearly important to the value of a business.
And you're also ignoring all the subjective aspects that you have no ability to evaluate. How well are they targeting their value proposition in the latest advertising campaign? How competent are the executives? Are they using the right pricing model?
I don't buy for one second the idea that non-technical people are clueless about the technology business.
And I also don't buy for one second this "very short term" mentality. Investors choose investments that have some intrinsic value that they believe will hold in the long term. If they don't, they know they might be caught holding the bag, and lose everything.
There are exceptions, "irrational exuberance", etc. But most money is tied up in things with intrinsic value. Those investments may go up or down, but they generally won't go to zero.
to cheat the government and broader base of taxpayers by setting up operations in tax shelter...
It's not cheating, it's allowed by the rules. If you don't like it, change the rules. Don't blame a company for following the rules in the way that makes the most money for their investors.
If you really really really must prevent hoarding...
What's really wrong with hoarding? I just don't understand this. They make money, i.e. they produce something that society thinks is valuable, and whoever controls the money decides not to extract anything from society for a while. How is that bad?
To drive the economy, you want the people with the LEAST money to spend MORE money.
First you're talking about driving the entire economy.
The VELOCITY of the money is what drives our tax system.
But your example is entirely about taxes.
Many taxes are somewhat consumption-based, directly or indirectly. So it's no surprise that getting people to consume more increases tax revenue. Perhaps that's why the government always wants people to consume.
But what really drives the economy? Ultimately, an economy needs to produce more than it consumes. The only thing left of an economy after a fiscal year are the things that got produced and not consumed. These things could be as concrete as a road or factory; or as abstract as a business relationship or knowledge in someone's head.
Progress is made primarily by encouraging production and discouraging consumption.
If someone buys a pizza (as opposed to some cheaper form of food, like a bowl of rice or something), that helps the government tax base, but it's a net loss for the economy as a whole.
I have yet to receive an explanation as to why some VP somewhere gets to make ten times as much myself.
Nobody else owes you an explanation for how they spend their money. Investors are making that choice with their investment indirectly through the board.
You have a few obvious choices here: 1. Refuse to work for the salary you're currently getting, and hold out for 10X that amount 2. Make a career change and try to become an executive or finance professional 3. Start your own business and adjust the salary offers as you see fit. With your streamlined and cheap executives, you'll be able to undercut the competition.
But you're too caught up being completely passive to do any of those things. Maybe they are scary, maybe you took on a lot of responsibilities (family, mortgage, etc.) and you can't risk even the most temporary failure. Or maybe you secretly know that running a business is a big challenge, and only when the incentives become great enough will people actually do it.
See, the thing about business is that you can't just do well. You can't just deliver a working product for a reasonable price, because a customer will never choose the second-best value. You have to do better than everyone else, at least in some part of the market.
You have to have great business people to even give yourself a fighting chance. Most business ideas fail, so the fact that the company you're working for is able to make payroll and maybe turn a profit for the investors means the executives just might be doing a good job. Maybe not. Maybe they're all idiots and you have a few cushy contracts for some reason, and it just doesn't matter. I don't know.
I don't take Wikipedia citations seriously in debates.
OK, then perhaps our only real difference is in the definition of "agile". Whoever wrote the wikipedia article apparently defines it differently from you (using words like "rapid" and "minimal planning").
You can enlighten me with your definition of "agile development". However, I suspect you're defining it in a way that can't possibly be bad -- adequate design time with prudent use of feedback as work progresses. Of course, a definition like that can't meaningfully be differentiated from any other development methodology.
I asked for a quote that suggested that there's no design in agile development.
You think "minimal planning" (as I cited in my follow-up comment) and "rapid, continuous delivery" can be compatible with adequate design for a major platform?
each iteration should be self-contained and complete enough that its design is complete
But how do you know that the small thing you produce actually fits into a coherent overall design, if no such overall design has been completed?
I am arguing that there are some problems for which nothing useful can be delivered for an extended period of time -- time which is needed for complete, coherent design. That extended period of time during which nothing is delivered does not look like "agile development" to me, and it does not appear compatible with the wikipedia definition.
And here's the smoking gun, right on the same referenced wikipedia article:
"Agile chooses to do things in small increments with minimal planning, rather than long-term planning. Iterations are short time frames (known as 'timeboxes') which typically last from one to four weeks." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_development
"Minimal planning" is not well-suited to the development of a new platform of any kind. Case closed.
Sometimes design work takes a long time. If you deliver a platform (be it a bridge or a programming language) before the design is complete, than the delivered product might be counterproductive due to some misdesign.
In this specific case, the above property (cited from wikipedia) is impossible to meet, because it's impossible to deliver useful software rapidly (just like with a bridge). Thus, in this specific case, agile development may not be a wise approach.
Of course, in many cases, it's very possible to deliver useful software rapidly. For those cases, agile development may be great.
There's a huge difference.
Everything is a little bit the same as everything else, and a little bit different. I was making an analogy between bridge building and designing a language. Both are platforms, and both require up-front design. I think my analogy is apt.
"release early and release often" is something I happen to agree with
Really? What about other design projects, like building a bridge? Should they release early and say "tell us if it collapses, and we'll fix the design"?
With all this talk about agile programming -- in which you just keep adjusting things until someone says "good enough for me" -- sometimes people forget that design is important, too. Agile development is certainly a valuable tool for many kinds of development projects. But it is not the answer to everything. Design is still required.
The reason? If perl6 did something wrong, you might have no idea that it's wrong, and use the feature. Now it will probably lead you down a bad path somehow, and even if you don't care, they have to support it. Just like if you start driving on a bridge -- everything seems great to you, and once you are on the bridge you expect it to not fall down.
Some things you design carefully, like interfaces that will need to be supported for a long time, languages, anything that you rely on to hold or process important data, performance-critical algorithms, etc. In other words, any kind of platform needs a lot of design work.
No. The implications of piling regulations and duties on people for offering free services would be far-reaching.
"Online services that keep data" is such a vague concept that it could apply to almost any website. Anyone with a forum, user comments, display preferences, etc. If your site gets shut down (maybe because you don't care about it any more), then the users could sue you because you didn't give them notice.
And what about mistakes, errors, bugs, or break-ins? As we see in the journalspace fiasco they might not intend to "evict" anyone, but it might just sort of happen.
Slashdot Mirror
My entire original point was that we can't just ignore what could potentially be an enormous
Here's what you said, completely without evidence:
arguably, because the danger is greater if we're wrong
The danger of being wrong in either direction is great. How do you know one is greater than the other?
And in the case of not reducing CO2 output, the costs could be even bigger.
Or smaller, which was my point.
based on looking selectively at the science
This is not a simple problem where science provides easy guidance. It's a huge, complex system -- not just the climate, but the economy as well.
Before I vote for anything drastic, I really need to see a compelling case that takes into account a variety of factors including the cost of doing something.
Would we have been better off if we'd done nothing? Certainly not better off, although possibly about the same. But also possibly in a much, much worse situation.
Can you tell me more about this free lunch?
Give me a break. You are explicitly ignoring the costs and proclaiming that only benefits exist.
You picked a case where the costs were relatively minor. Fixing Y2K bugs is a small, one-time cost. And the cost/benefit analysis can be carried out on a per-system basis (air traffic control systems should probably be checked out, but perhaps not an outdated video game).
But we're not talking about small costs here. In the case of drastic reductions in CO2 output, the costs could be huge. You can't just brush those costs under the rug and expect me to take you seriously.
it is not an attempt to "do something" it's a call to STOP "doing something".
This is ridiculous. If you tell someone that they can't use fossil fuels to transport themselves to work or light their home, then you are causing harm for sure.
Drastic is drastic. To "stop doing things" is a drastic cessation of modern society. Will it hurt the planet? No. Will it do more harm than good to people? Probably.
So how many things should we stop doing? The answer depends on two things:
1. Our certainty that a problem will exist.
2. Our understanding of the complex system we're trying to save.
I think it's weak on both points.
because the danger is greater if we're wrong
That is far from certain. Our attempts to fix something we don't really understand could cause far more damage.
This is how ideas like blood letting became fashionable in medicine.
1. Someone is sick.
2. We only vaguely understand how people work.
3. We have to "do something".
4. Conclusion: let's drain their blood.
Then, if they don't die, then the doctor must have saved their life.
This reminds me of the stimulus bill.
Well, it would work for the application itself, if you totally ignore any business need to access the collected data in a useful way.
Key/Value stores are usually a poor attempt to reinvent a persistent virtual memory system. That's all a VM system is: give it a pointer and you get a word of data back.
So, if you really like hopping from pointer to pointer (or "reference" as it's called in an OOP language), which some people obviously do, a key/value store will suffice to finish the application in the most useless way possible (i.e. all of the data is trapped in a web of pointers).
We need to stop referencing data by where it is and start referencing it by what it is.
You say that without any explanation of your apparent position that the relational model requires you to reference data by "where it is".
You seem to think that the semantics of your system are somehow richer -- providing "information" rather than "data".
Do you even know what a relation is?
they aren't ideal for the simple persistent data stores most apps call for
Most applications collect some kind of data that is valuable to the decision makers.
You are thinking about what it takes to get an application "done" without considering what the business really needs. The application might find it most convenient to collect information per-customer (for obvious reasons), but the decision makers might need a more global sense about what's going on.
Remember that MySQL AB was a profitable company
They were? Can you provide a link?
We're not talking about poor algorithm selection. We're talking about using a slower language rather than a faster language.
You assume that the same algorithm used in two languages will have the same big-O characteristics for CPU and memory consumption. That is not true.
For instance, some languages can optimize tail recursion into a loop, and some cannot. For those that can, the memory consumption for a given algorithm may be constant. For those that cannot, the memory consumption may be O(n).
I was asking if looking at the market capitalization really said more about how the company was doing than its sales numbers?
It's easy to get high revenue -- just sell stuff at or below cost. You won't make a profit, but you'll have a lot of sales.
Do we now judge the success of tech companies by looking at what non-technical financial people think the company might be worth in the very short term?
There are many ways of evaluating a business as a whole, some are subjective, e.g. something "only a technical person can understand why this is good", and some are objective, e.g. something that any financial expert can understand.
You may like to think that you have a lot of insight about the value of a company because you know something about the technologies they use or produce. And that's true, to some degree.
But your ignoring the numbers outright. And the numbers mean a lot. If Sun continues to lose money, and never turns a profit, then its value is precisely the liquidation value of its assets. I'm not saying that's what will happen, but profit is clearly important to the value of a business.
And you're also ignoring all the subjective aspects that you have no ability to evaluate. How well are they targeting their value proposition in the latest advertising campaign? How competent are the executives? Are they using the right pricing model?
I don't buy for one second the idea that non-technical people are clueless about the technology business.
And I also don't buy for one second this "very short term" mentality. Investors choose investments that have some intrinsic value that they believe will hold in the long term. If they don't, they know they might be caught holding the bag, and lose everything.
There are exceptions, "irrational exuberance", etc. But most money is tied up in things with intrinsic value. Those investments may go up or down, but they generally won't go to zero.
to cheat the government and broader base of taxpayers by setting up operations in tax shelter...
It's not cheating, it's allowed by the rules. If you don't like it, change the rules. Don't blame a company for following the rules in the way that makes the most money for their investors.
If you really really really must prevent hoarding...
What's really wrong with hoarding? I just don't understand this. They make money, i.e. they produce something that society thinks is valuable, and whoever controls the money decides not to extract anything from society for a while. How is that bad?
To drive the economy, you want the people with the LEAST money to spend MORE money.
First you're talking about driving the entire economy.
The VELOCITY of the money is what drives our tax system.
But your example is entirely about taxes.
Many taxes are somewhat consumption-based, directly or indirectly. So it's no surprise that getting people to consume more increases tax revenue. Perhaps that's why the government always wants people to consume.
But what really drives the economy? Ultimately, an economy needs to produce more than it consumes. The only thing left of an economy after a fiscal year are the things that got produced and not consumed. These things could be as concrete as a road or factory; or as abstract as a business relationship or knowledge in someone's head.
Progress is made primarily by encouraging production and discouraging consumption.
If someone buys a pizza (as opposed to some cheaper form of food, like a bowl of rice or something), that helps the government tax base, but it's a net loss for the economy as a whole.
doing the same thing we executed Japanese commanders for after WWII.
That is not a Constitutional argument. We don't execute war criminals because they violated the freedom of speech rights of someone.
I have yet to receive an explanation as to why some VP somewhere gets to make ten times as much myself.
Nobody else owes you an explanation for how they spend their money. Investors are making that choice with their investment indirectly through the board.
You have a few obvious choices here:
1. Refuse to work for the salary you're currently getting, and hold out for 10X that amount
2. Make a career change and try to become an executive or finance professional
3. Start your own business and adjust the salary offers as you see fit. With your streamlined and cheap executives, you'll be able to undercut the competition.
But you're too caught up being completely passive to do any of those things. Maybe they are scary, maybe you took on a lot of responsibilities (family, mortgage, etc.) and you can't risk even the most temporary failure. Or maybe you secretly know that running a business is a big challenge, and only when the incentives become great enough will people actually do it.
See, the thing about business is that you can't just do well. You can't just deliver a working product for a reasonable price, because a customer will never choose the second-best value. You have to do better than everyone else, at least in some part of the market.
You have to have great business people to even give yourself a fighting chance. Most business ideas fail, so the fact that the company you're working for is able to make payroll and maybe turn a profit for the investors means the executives just might be doing a good job. Maybe not. Maybe they're all idiots and you have a few cushy contracts for some reason, and it just doesn't matter. I don't know.
ANSI SQL is not Turing-complete.
It is if WITH RECURSIVE is implemented.
I don't take Wikipedia citations seriously in debates.
OK, then perhaps our only real difference is in the definition of "agile". Whoever wrote the wikipedia article apparently defines it differently from you (using words like "rapid" and "minimal planning").
You can enlighten me with your definition of "agile development". However, I suspect you're defining it in a way that can't possibly be bad -- adequate design time with prudent use of feedback as work progresses. Of course, a definition like that can't meaningfully be differentiated from any other development methodology.
I asked for a quote that suggested that there's no design in agile development.
You think "minimal planning" (as I cited in my follow-up comment) and "rapid, continuous delivery" can be compatible with adequate design for a major platform?
each iteration should be self-contained and complete enough that its design is complete
But how do you know that the small thing you produce actually fits into a coherent overall design, if no such overall design has been completed?
I am arguing that there are some problems for which nothing useful can be delivered for an extended period of time -- time which is needed for complete, coherent design. That extended period of time during which nothing is delivered does not look like "agile development" to me, and it does not appear compatible with the wikipedia definition.
And here's the smoking gun, right on the same referenced wikipedia article:
"Agile chooses to do things in small increments with minimal planning, rather than long-term planning. Iterations are short time frames (known as 'timeboxes') which typically last from one to four weeks." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_development
"Minimal planning" is not well-suited to the development of a new platform of any kind. Case closed.
Can you name multiple agile advocates who've actually produced software who argue that design is not a part of agile development?
I'm not going to dig through people's blogs, but here's a wikipedia quotation:
"Customer satisfaction by rapid, continuous delivery of useful software" -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_development
Sometimes design work takes a long time. If you deliver a platform (be it a bridge or a programming language) before the design is complete, than the delivered product might be counterproductive due to some misdesign.
In this specific case, the above property (cited from wikipedia) is impossible to meet, because it's impossible to deliver useful software rapidly (just like with a bridge). Thus, in this specific case, agile development may not be a wise approach.
Of course, in many cases, it's very possible to deliver useful software rapidly. For those cases, agile development may be great.
There's a huge difference.
Everything is a little bit the same as everything else, and a little bit different. I was making an analogy between bridge building and designing a language. Both are platforms, and both require up-front design. I think my analogy is apt.
"release early and release often" is something I happen to agree with
Really? What about other design projects, like building a bridge? Should they release early and say "tell us if it collapses, and we'll fix the design"?
With all this talk about agile programming -- in which you just keep adjusting things until someone says "good enough for me" -- sometimes people forget that design is important, too. Agile development is certainly a valuable tool for many kinds of development projects. But it is not the answer to everything. Design is still required.
The reason? If perl6 did something wrong, you might have no idea that it's wrong, and use the feature. Now it will probably lead you down a bad path somehow, and even if you don't care, they have to support it. Just like if you start driving on a bridge -- everything seems great to you, and once you are on the bridge you expect it to not fall down.
Some things you design carefully, like interfaces that will need to be supported for a long time, languages, anything that you rely on to hold or process important data, performance-critical algorithms, etc. In other words, any kind of platform needs a lot of design work.
No. The implications of piling regulations and duties on people for offering free services would be far-reaching.
"Online services that keep data" is such a vague concept that it could apply to almost any website. Anyone with a forum, user comments, display preferences, etc. If your site gets shut down (maybe because you don't care about it any more), then the users could sue you because you didn't give them notice.
And what about mistakes, errors, bugs, or break-ins? As we see in the journalspace fiasco they might not intend to "evict" anyone, but it might just sort of happen.
Money has no place in defending this even.
It takes money to make people care. Granted, this is an extreme case of apathy, but I assume that is at least partially explained by low revenue.
You'd think 17,000 visitors a month would be worth enough to do it right, in add revenue alone.
If it's one dollar per visitor per month, that's only $17000/mo in total revenue. Hardly enough to do anything right, let alone everything.