We have to accomodate our users and unknown environments. When a reasonable user makes your program do something bad, that's either a user training problem or a software bug. You didn't check input data carefully enough, or you didn't provide a good user interface, or your requirements were bad, etc. All of those are software bugs.
The Pentium bug, I'll agree with. Florida voting, I'll agree with. DDOS is software bug. Software run in an environment like the web has to accomodate malicious users. Wall Street Crash, software bug. There was a set of conditions in which the software did bad things.
In Larry Niven's Puppeteer novels (also the Ringworld novels) there is a race of cowards, called the puppeteers (it is possible I am conflating a couple of concepts here, but I don't think so). They have all built into their bodies a remote control device that stimulates the pleasure center for a wide variety of brain structures. They use this exactly as you have described (albeit rarely; they try to keep the existence of the tasp a secret).
That's so funny, I was thinking just the same thing! With the karma cap, and since I seem to be able to pop off a 4 or 5 pretty regularly, there's no reason not to post a few dogs at 2.
If I had mod points, I'd go mod us all down, but I don't.:(
But then that side rolls on around to the low side again, and the falling accumulates on the original side until it falls over. Prove that wrong without mathematics.
That's a great explanation, but without mathematics you can come up with multiple conflicting explanations of a phenomenon, and until you quantify it, you have no idea which, if any, is right.
That did not explain how to quicksort. You assert that some belong before P, some after, and some are equal, but you never did anything with them, or said that you iterated through all members to find which belong to what set. Asserting that one can sort the elements does not sort the elements.
I can explain Special Relativity without going into serious math, too, but I suspect that wouldn't be good enough for people with the mindset he seemed to have.
Explain quicksort without math. Explain the behavior of gyroscopes. Explain TV.
Wow, man, if you happen to be math challenged, that's OK. But when virtually all of our modern advances require math to explain, your lack of understanding of it doesn't mean that it doesn't work.
And I agree with the other reply... the distinction between science and esp is that I can write down what I observed, explain it with math, and send it to someone across the world who can duplicate my experiments, and get the same answers from that math. If you could do that with ESP, we would use it instead of telecommunications satellites. Oh yeah, explain orbits without math. Details matter.
You're right, I was assuming that you were using a specific meaning for the word that matched mine. I should have referred to source code, or something of the like. Nonetheless, I stand by my points, with the correction that where I say code, I should say source code.
That's object files, not code. Code is what a developer writes. If a developer doesn't write it, it's not code; it's a build product.
Having a larger build product can be problematic, but it is nowhere near as problematic as having to write more code. The trade-off you make with Java collection classes, trading compile time safety for a smaller build product, is in almost all cases a bad one. A smaller build product means that you can run on a machine with fewer resources, but compiled code is almost always only a small fraction of the resources needed in an application. Usually, an application uses nowhere near as many resources as are available anyway. However, compile time safety translates to fewer developer hours spent debugging, and can often lead to faster code. It is almost always better to opt for the compile time safety.
That said, I develop almost exclusively in Java right now. Java is a great development kit, but it will be a much better one when we get templates in JDK 1.5.
STL's performance is fantastic! PhDs have optimized the hell out of the algorithms, and with template and inline functions (and no virtual functions), often all of the overhead of even the function calls will be compiled away, leaving pure screaming op-codes after compilation is done. This tendency to expand calls out into their op-codes instead of using calls to functions is responsible for much of the code bloat that comes with templates.
But it is a tradeoff between having more code or having better type checking.
You mean it is a trade off between having a larger binary or having better type checking. Using the STL and templates, you will tend to have less code, not more. But binary bloat can be a real issue.
No, the primary problem here is that his thinking is completely confined within the narrow box that seems so common. How in the hell can one believe that it's better for us to waste effort building the same product over and over again, to restrict viewing source code from which others can learn, and to make the number of useful products one can have be limited by one's funds when it doesn't have to be?
If every piece of software that was useful for large numbers of people was open sourced, guess what would happen: those currently wasted development hours and dollars would be spent on research, or technical support, or, god forbid, charity. The world would be a better place.
Getting rid of work is mostly what software is all about. We equate getting rid of work too much with getting rid of jobs. They are not the same. All human progress comes from getting rid of work. And we either find more work to do, that makes everyone's lives a little bit better, or we slow down on how much of our lives we spend doing work. Or should we still all be out building houses with our bare hands, adding numbers with pencil and paper, and plowing our fields with mules? After all, power tools, computers, and tractors have eliminated lots of work. Astonishingly, we have found more to do and lead better lives for it.
Re:stronger and smarter - but how to get wiser?
on
The Next Generation
·
· Score: 2
In fact, wiser is fairly easy with advanced technology. Pattern recognition software could tell you when you are getting yourself into a situation that other people have gotten into and didn't like, and warn you before-hand. Biofeedback mechanisms with hormonal and neurochemical controls could make unthinking rage and depression just go away.
Endowing wisdom is very much within the reach of technology. I just hope we are wise enough to apply technology that way before we destroy ourselves with all of the other ways we can use it.
Umm, Flint misses the whole point of boycotting someone, in my opinion. For me to boycott Wagner, or Dostoyevski, etc. can't change their behavior -- they're dead! Enough people boycotting Harlan Ellison could change his behavior, or act as an incentive to others who might be thinking of taking the same stance he does regarding copying.
Of course, I can't boycott Ellison, since I don't buy his books anyway. I think he's a pompous bastard with nothing whatsoever interesting to say.
It seems bad to lots of people other than you, but you're all wrong.
Imagine that the device you're talking about did exist, and that no one made futile laws to attempt to circumvent it.
Anything that you could produce one of, you could produce as many as you like. Most everyone would stop working. Everyone in the world would have the same (very high) standard of living. Even if it stopped there, that would be an incredibly good thing, not a bad thing.
However, it won't stop there. The people who were really interested in developing new products, who also tend to be the ones who are best at it, could do so without having to waste time working on other things, and without wasting time producing competing products and attempting to profit by lying about how their product is better than the others, and without any restrictions on how much equipment they have available to them. Even if only 1% of the people kept working (and I think it would be much higher), they would still advance the state of the art even faster than it advances now. And everyone would have the state of the art in their home. Every single thing that you own would essentially be hand-crafted and of the best quality possible.
You would have a ton of freeloaders, but they wouldn't be hurting the doers. You would have a bunch of doers who would get nothing other than fame and any associated perks, and the same lifestyle the freeloaders get. This lifestyle would be radically better than anything we can even imagine now.
I think I missed the downside somewhere, unless you think it's better to have a shitty life that is better than the shitty life a freeloader gets than for both of you to have a great life. If you believe that, your ethics are busted somewhere.
Hilary Rosen reminds me of a dog that pisses on the food that's left over after it's done eating.
"I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?'"
Well, disregarding the fact that taking the paper and getting an A devalues As and punishes the person who is doing the cheating (neither of which is pertinent to this discussion), my answer is "No, that wouldn't bother me at all. I would be glad to have helped someone."
If I get an apple and Johnny gets an apple too, that's a good thing, not a bad thing. For me to get an apple then burn the tree so Johnny can't get one is not helpful, it's not wise, and it's not right. It's also not terribly important right now while the apples are pop-music, but when we're talking about medical software that could save someone's life, or, in the not so distant future, code for a nanofactory that makes food or housing, it becomes very important.
The day is not so far away when these laws, which we make to satisfy piss-ant small-minded corporate drones who imagine that they have a right to profit by punishing others, will affect how many children in the world die of hunger and exposure, or how many people live in squalor and die of malaria.
That we should treat their arguments as anything other than the temper tantrums one would expect of a two year old is inexpressibly infuriating. Have we really learned nothing from millenia of two-bit dictators suppressing the masses for no reason other than it makes them feel important?
I watch 1 - 1.5 hours of TV each day since getting my Tivo. It does require some willpower to walk away from it sometimes, but as long as you don't have too many shows that you "have to see", you should be OK.
Thanks. I have seen the unlimited nights and weekends, but they seem to define night as starting at 9pm or 11pm. I make evening calls after 6pm. 7pm would be OK, but waiting until 9 to start my calls just doesn't work for me.
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We have to accomodate our users and unknown environments. When a reasonable user makes your program do something bad, that's either a user training problem or a software bug. You didn't check input data carefully enough, or you didn't provide a good user interface, or your requirements were bad, etc. All of those are software bugs.
The Pentium bug, I'll agree with. Florida voting, I'll agree with. DDOS is software bug. Software run in an environment like the web has to accomodate malicious users. Wall Street Crash, software bug. There was a set of conditions in which the software did bad things.
Spoiler follows...
In Larry Niven's Puppeteer novels (also the Ringworld novels) there is a race of cowards, called the puppeteers (it is possible I am conflating a couple of concepts here, but I don't think so). They have all built into their bodies a remote control device that stimulates the pleasure center for a wide variety of brain structures. They use this exactly as you have described (albeit rarely; they try to keep the existence of the tasp a secret).
Cool stuff.
BTW, your sig sucks. You should put a space before the -, and you have too many capital letters.
That's so funny, I was thinking just the same thing! With the karma cap, and since I seem to be able to pop off a 4 or 5 pretty regularly, there's no reason not to post a few dogs at 2.
:(
If I had mod points, I'd go mod us all down, but I don't.
But then that side rolls on around to the low side again, and the falling accumulates on the original side until it falls over. Prove that wrong without mathematics.
That's a great explanation, but without mathematics you can come up with multiple conflicting explanations of a phenomenon, and until you quantify it, you have no idea which, if any, is right.
satisfy the lameness filter, blah blah blah
Ah, oops, sorry. Obviously I need to work on my reading skills...
That did not explain how to quicksort. You assert that some belong before P, some after, and some are equal, but you never did anything with them, or said that you iterated through all members to find which belong to what set. Asserting that one can sort the elements does not sort the elements.
Handwaving.
I can explain Special Relativity without going into serious math, too, but I suspect that wouldn't be good enough for people with the mindset he seemed to have.
Dude, antibiotics kill bacteria, not viruses.
Wow, please tell me that's a troll. Please.
Explain quicksort without math. Explain the behavior of gyroscopes. Explain TV.
Wow, man, if you happen to be math challenged, that's OK. But when virtually all of our modern advances require math to explain, your lack of understanding of it doesn't mean that it doesn't work.
And I agree with the other reply... the distinction between science and esp is that I can write down what I observed, explain it with math, and send it to someone across the world who can duplicate my experiments, and get the same answers from that math. If you could do that with ESP, we would use it instead of telecommunications satellites. Oh yeah, explain orbits without math. Details matter.
You're right, I was assuming that you were using a specific meaning for the word that matched mine. I should have referred to source code, or something of the like. Nonetheless, I stand by my points, with the correction that where I say code, I should say source code.
That's object files, not code. Code is what a developer writes. If a developer doesn't write it, it's not code; it's a build product.
Having a larger build product can be problematic, but it is nowhere near as problematic as having to write more code. The trade-off you make with Java collection classes, trading compile time safety for a smaller build product, is in almost all cases a bad one. A smaller build product means that you can run on a machine with fewer resources, but compiled code is almost always only a small fraction of the resources needed in an application. Usually, an application uses nowhere near as many resources as are available anyway. However, compile time safety translates to fewer developer hours spent debugging, and can often lead to faster code. It is almost always better to opt for the compile time safety.
That said, I develop almost exclusively in Java right now. Java is a great development kit, but it will be a much better one when we get templates in JDK 1.5.
Yeah, I figured you probably knew what you were talking about, but was not at all certain that everyone else would.
;)
No need to check for clarity, that's what I'm here for
STL's performance is fantastic! PhDs have optimized the hell out of the algorithms, and with template and inline functions (and no virtual functions), often all of the overhead of even the function calls will be compiled away, leaving pure screaming op-codes after compilation is done. This tendency to expand calls out into their op-codes instead of using calls to functions is responsible for much of the code bloat that comes with templates.
You mean it is a trade off between having a larger binary or having better type checking. Using the STL and templates, you will tend to have less code, not more. But binary bloat can be a real issue.
No, the primary problem here is that his thinking is completely confined within the narrow box that seems so common. How in the hell can one believe that it's better for us to waste effort building the same product over and over again, to restrict viewing source code from which others can learn, and to make the number of useful products one can have be limited by one's funds when it doesn't have to be?
If every piece of software that was useful for large numbers of people was open sourced, guess what would happen: those currently wasted development hours and dollars would be spent on research, or technical support, or, god forbid, charity. The world would be a better place.
Getting rid of work is mostly what software is all about. We equate getting rid of work too much with getting rid of jobs. They are not the same. All human progress comes from getting rid of work. And we either find more work to do, that makes everyone's lives a little bit better, or we slow down on how much of our lives we spend doing work. Or should we still all be out building houses with our bare hands, adding numbers with pencil and paper, and plowing our fields with mules? After all, power tools, computers, and tractors have eliminated lots of work. Astonishingly, we have found more to do and lead better lives for it.
In fact, wiser is fairly easy with advanced technology. Pattern recognition software could tell you when you are getting yourself into a situation that other people have gotten into and didn't like, and warn you before-hand. Biofeedback mechanisms with hormonal and neurochemical controls could make unthinking rage and depression just go away.
Endowing wisdom is very much within the reach of technology. I just hope we are wise enough to apply technology that way before we destroy ourselves with all of the other ways we can use it.
Umm, Flint misses the whole point of boycotting someone, in my opinion. For me to boycott Wagner, or Dostoyevski, etc. can't change their behavior -- they're dead! Enough people boycotting Harlan Ellison could change his behavior, or act as an incentive to others who might be thinking of taking the same stance he does regarding copying.
Of course, I can't boycott Ellison, since I don't buy his books anyway. I think he's a pompous bastard with nothing whatsoever interesting to say.
It seems bad to lots of people other than you, but you're all wrong.
Imagine that the device you're talking about did exist, and that no one made futile laws to attempt to circumvent it.
Anything that you could produce one of, you could produce as many as you like. Most everyone would stop working. Everyone in the world would have the same (very high) standard of living. Even if it stopped there, that would be an incredibly good thing, not a bad thing.
However, it won't stop there. The people who were really interested in developing new products, who also tend to be the ones who are best at it, could do so without having to waste time working on other things, and without wasting time producing competing products and attempting to profit by lying about how their product is better than the others, and without any restrictions on how much equipment they have available to them. Even if only 1% of the people kept working (and I think it would be much higher), they would still advance the state of the art even faster than it advances now. And everyone would have the state of the art in their home. Every single thing that you own would essentially be hand-crafted and of the best quality possible.
You would have a ton of freeloaders, but they wouldn't be hurting the doers. You would have a bunch of doers who would get nothing other than fame and any associated perks, and the same lifestyle the freeloaders get. This lifestyle would be radically better than anything we can even imagine now.
I think I missed the downside somewhere, unless you think it's better to have a shitty life that is better than the shitty life a freeloader gets than for both of you to have a great life. If you believe that, your ethics are busted somewhere.
I think.
Hilary Rosen reminds me of a dog that pisses on the food that's left over after it's done eating.
"I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?'"
Well, disregarding the fact that taking the paper and getting an A devalues As and punishes the person who is doing the cheating (neither of which is pertinent to this discussion), my answer is "No, that wouldn't bother me at all. I would be glad to have helped someone."
If I get an apple and Johnny gets an apple too, that's a good thing, not a bad thing. For me to get an apple then burn the tree so Johnny can't get one is not helpful, it's not wise, and it's not right. It's also not terribly important right now while the apples are pop-music, but when we're talking about medical software that could save someone's life, or, in the not so distant future, code for a nanofactory that makes food or housing, it becomes very important.
The day is not so far away when these laws, which we make to satisfy piss-ant small-minded corporate drones who imagine that they have a right to profit by punishing others, will affect how many children in the world die of hunger and exposure, or how many people live in squalor and die of malaria.
That we should treat their arguments as anything other than the temper tantrums one would expect of a two year old is inexpressibly infuriating. Have we really learned nothing from millenia of two-bit dictators suppressing the masses for no reason other than it makes them feel important?
I watch 1 - 1.5 hours of TV each day since getting my Tivo. It does require some willpower to walk away from it sometimes, but as long as you don't have too many shows that you "have to see", you should be OK.
40 * .5 = 20 hours of sleep normally
20 - 9 = 11 hours that you would have slept but didn't
What am I missing?
Thanks. I have seen the unlimited nights and weekends, but they seem to define night as starting at 9pm or 11pm. I make evening calls after 6pm. 7pm would be OK, but waiting until 9 to start my calls just doesn't work for me.