"In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely."
No, but there are pressures of time and resources. Two of those books (Lord and Chronicles) will blow through an entire semester's time for students given reading, reviewing, discussion and testing. Honestly, the students will skip the books and watch the wildly popular movies while carefully reading the wikipedia entries for "differences between the book and movie".
Throw lots of short stories at them, peppered with a few choice novels of longer length but with themes that can be discussed together. (Ender's Game/Starship Troopers [interplanetary war] or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress/Dune [economics of scarcity]) Some students will take the more challenging books, others will opt for the easier ones.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a great conversation book for students, it tends to come at economic problems from a perspective that many of them haven't seen: the economics of scarcity. TANSTAAFL would be a good counter-counter-cultural notion for the Obama generation. As much as I like Stranger, I think TMiaHM is much more useful.
If you're going to approach this as an evolving genre, then Wells and Verne. The list needs Asimov as required reading even if it's a few short stories. The notion of the "Three Laws" in an age when people expected to be replaced by (and feared) the "electronic brain" is a powerful one. An early working galaxy-wide empire need to be explored too.
Niven and Pournelle's "hard" SF tend to be well thought out and self-consistent -- a problem a lot of writers have. The annoyances surrounding Ringworld were simply because it was so *close* to being right. At least he fixed the shortcomings in the sequels.
The core flaws are the that Windows does not clearly provide the user with appropriate information on who is providing a given application and if that is a reputable source or an anonymous provider.
And that's a problem for a lot of users. Is Yahoo reputable? Adobe? Apple? They all install hard-to-remove adware and crashware as a side effect of installing something you want. Sony? You've heard the name, now install the rootkit.
We've been three years in our combined household (teenager, gamers, and a developer) without any kind of infection. No virus scanners at all, just trivial network management and everyone knows what they're doing. Nobody runs as Administrator unless they have to.
I would note, UAC isn't a bad concept, just a terrible, terrible implementation with a user interface and default settings that make it unusable.
This is why I responded. I left UAC on my development machine at home and on my netbook just to give it a chance. And you know what? Once the initial wave of software installs are over with, it's really not that bad. I've had alerts pop up when I really didn't expect them ("I guess that/is/ an admin operation") and there's a couple of older programs that I have to "Run as Administrator" but otherwise it's pretty sane.
Starting up though with lots of installs it's really intrusive. Granted. Perhaps a "grant Admin rights for 5 minutes" feature might be helpful. And it also helps to know that if X isn't working, try it as administrator and see if it works then. (Notably, Visual Studio remote debugging.) But for day-to-day use? It's fine.*
* Disclaimer: I'm an old Unix administrator, and working day-to-day in a lower-privileged sandbox is second nature. Putting on the red pajamas for a just a few minutes seems natural.
A mechanism to vent gas introduces a rather tragic possible failure vector: equilibrium. Your balloon floats along until it's out of reach of the chase team and you don't get your payload back. (Which might be fine if you're using telemetry.)
At least with this method you're guaranteed that the payload will come back sooner rather than much, much later.
1. You've just opened the door to a police state. No thanks. Besides, the crime isn't "excused" but evidence that might be used to convict is ruled inadmissible. Use different evidence, that's all.
2. The rub is this: "officers who..." For an illegal wiretap, who's culpable? The technician who installed it? The officer who listened? The commanding officer who ordered the tap? The judge who signed the warrant that was later invalidated? Who gets charged?
And then what jury would convict them? If an officer is charged with illegally obtaining evidence that catches a serial child rapist murderer, can you honestly see a panel of jurors sending him to prison? Really? They'd set him free or slap him on the wrist.
This is why there are rules of evidence and defendants have the rights they do, to prevent decay into a lawless police state.
And isn't starting at the Sun and aiming for a point in the Oort cloud
Not really.
You missed the point. Hitting any part of the Oort cloud is easy. Trying to hit any particular point in space without course corrections is unbelievably hard, unless it's a really deep and small gravity well....
And isn't starting at the Sun and aiming for a point in the Oort cloud complicated by the N-body problem anyway? Course corrections will have to be done for the entire trip because of all of those large chunks of rock and gas floating around. Gravity's a bitch, man.
This is good to ask during a 1-on-1 interview, or when the interviewers are nearly peers. (i.e. bad to ask when the CEO and some flunky are in the room)
"What do you like least about working here?"
It's a good judge of character of the person interviewing you. I usually deflect answers that involve "commuting" or something external and re-ask the question. The answers tend to fall into three categories. 1. Bullshit/uninformed ("nothing! I love it here!") 2. What the boss/policy wants them to say ("we care about our customers *too much*!") or 3. Honesty.
People like talking about themselves, their opinions, and their likes and dislikes and will do it for hours. It's far easier to get them to open up about what's right (or wrong) with the company when you start with their gripes. Make the question about them and make them feel informed and important. At least it gives you some leverage in follow-up questions.
---
And for the record, at my current job I answer this as "That it feels slow to get software to market. Testing and management approval can seemingly take forever, but I realize it's a deliberate effort to maintain quality." It's honest and a personal gripe of mine.
I'll give you that the author may be mistaken for linking Paint.Net with FOSS.
But for some of us "free-as-in-beer" is still free, it works, and for what it does it does well. In my experience GIMP for Windows doesn't belong on any/Best.*Free.*Software/ list; it speaks more to GIMP's serious stability and annoying UI problems and lack of competition in the "free graphics editing" market.
What's wrong with re-using a Universe? It saves time doing exposition and background, and let's you frame a new story in a familiar setting.
Admittedly, sometimes it works (Hobbit->LoTR, SW->ESB->RotJ, Discworld, Dune->DM->CoD) and sometimes it doesn't (SW ep IV-VI -> SW I-III, Matrix->Matrix R/R). If the storytelling is any good, the setting is just secondary.
Companies that are successful in this field have UI experts -- and the management to back them up -- to say
"Yes, this works adequately, but it looks awful. Sorry, you can't ship it." "Yes, this works adequately, but it doesn't blend well with the rest of our product line. Sorry, you can't ship it." "Yes, this works adequately, but it's hard to use. Sorry, you can't ship it." "Yes, this works adequately, but there's too many extraneous features. Sorry, you can't ship it."
(And of course, the ever popular "It was a nice product, but we're abandoning it for something simpler, prettier, and not overburdened with legacy.")
UI guidelines give everyone a place to start talking about the problems (looks/blend/hard/extraneous) and give the development teams a starting point. If there truly is an earth-shattering eye-popping UI feature (a widget) that the guidelines don't allow, then you alter the guidelines after buy in. This *then* requires re-engineering the rest of the applications to account for that great widget and use it where applicable to maintain consistency.
It's expensive and it may seems pointless, but no app is an island when you're trying to engineer a great user-experience.
Linux generally tries to compensate by providing standard frameworks for UI. But there's the I-Love-Standards-There's-So-Many-To-Choose-From problem and that there'll always be the cowboy that turns out a useful app that looks and works different from everything else.
On our dev team the youngest programmer is 36. No one has worked here less than 9 years, and some of us have been programming for 20+ years. That's one of the shiny things about working here: the programmers are seasoned, settled professionals. There are no "death marches" or heroic coding sessions: new systems are designed competently, testing and release are well-regulated and the egos are under control. We don't have to use 'cutting edge' because it's neat and that's what the college kids are using, but we're not coding Payroll in COBOL '59 either (Windows/.Net shop, using all of 3.5's goodies).
The economy is really lousy here (Detroit area), but we're keeping the lights on, and still turning out product that people are buying.
First of all, assume for the moment that the various States managed to tax Amazon. It won't be long before the localities followed. The number of taxing jurisdictions would skyrocket. Now consider:
* Sales taxes can be assessed at the state, county, or city level. Oftentimes a postal address doesn't tell you that it's actually in another taxing jurisdiction. (Specifics of the law might require that the 'burbs be taxed as well.)
* There are places where brick-and-mortar sales taxes can get complex because of nearby borders. In these places (WA & OR for instance) it may be possible to provide proof-of-residency to get excluded from a sales tax, even though you're purchasing it in a taxable area.
* Sales taxes are computed differently depending on the kinds of items purchased, depending on locality. A pair of shoes might be taxable in one jurisdiction, but not in another.
* Sales tax holidays. Some jurisdictions have holidays for some taxable items. For example, clothing purchased in August isn't taxable in some jurisdictions to allow families with children to buy back-to-school clothes without the tax burden.
* Compliance changes. Those laws and rates change irregularly -- you have to have staff on had to cull through all kinds of documentation. There are tens of thousands of petty bureaucrats whose job it is to make this more difficult.
* Reporting timelines can be vastly different. Some jurisdictions require a quarterly reporting for sales taxes, others annual. Still others have an even shorter window based on volume of sales (i.e. if you owe more than $50k in sales taxes over a 1 month period, you'll have 10 days to remit to the state regardless of when the next Quarter End falls).
* Reporting *methods* can be vastly different. Some allow electronic filing, others require paper and pencil. And electronic filing doesn't always mean something as straightforward as FTP or EDI, sometimes that means that you'll need to send (often vintage) magnetic media or use their application to file the information.
Most brick-and-mortar operations don't have some of these problems because they don't sell everywhere to everyone. Some have a glimpse of this (i.e. Wal Mart) but don't have locations at every possible shipping address in the United States. When they put up a new store, there's a whole process to get Compliance with local taxing regulations. Amazon would have to do this with every shipping address.
I'm behind Amazon on this one. Going about this piecemeal is a recipe for disaster.
I tend to scratch my own itches, or those of my employers.
For personal use last Halloween I wrote a distributed, synchronized display system for the house. The server running the show was a Linux system (debian). The clients were all netbook/notebook class Windows systems running XP and Vista. All of it written in C#/Mono and written (almost) exclusively with Visual Studio.
It's useful and cross-platform. Just because you didn't need it, want it, or know about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist or isn't useful. A lot more software is unseen than seen.
I develop on both Windows and other OS's. (25+ years of writing for Unix and Windows.)
Mono's great for the occasions that I need to write code that work fine on Linux and Windows. The tools are fine, the porting is seamless, and it just works. If MS decides to submarine-patent Mono somehow (which still hasn't been specified *how*...) then I'll move my tools to something else. In the meantime it works and its easy to use.
These FUD sessions are unproductive for everyone. Go write some code.
Trying to get a new water, sewer, or electric hookup can be an exercise in frustration because of the bureaucracy and safeguards in the system.
Phone and cable have gotten better in the past 30 years. Landline phone and cable companies are so desperate for business that they're oftentimes pretty damned quick about getting a line out to you. (Unless you want something fancy like a business line or a T3, then welcome back to the Bad Old Days.)
I invoke the ghost of Lilly Tomlin: "We don't care, we don't have to. We're the phone company."
And if you think that usage on Utilities isn't capped, you're naive. If you didn't have those teeny-tiny water pipes and electric lines to your house you'd find out real quick there are all kinds of regulations and arbitrary rules about water and electric usage. For industry -- which have much larger access to electric and water -- there are often "monthy maximums" for water use, and obscenely high electric rates for peak usage.
Slashdot Mirror
The same thing that any vendor gets when everyone runs the "latest and greatest" product: uniformity, complicity, and control.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy also applies:
"In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely."
No, but there are pressures of time and resources. Two of those books (Lord and Chronicles) will blow through an entire semester's time for students given reading, reviewing, discussion and testing. Honestly, the students will skip the books and watch the wildly popular movies while carefully reading the wikipedia entries for "differences between the book and movie".
Throw lots of short stories at them, peppered with a few choice novels of longer length but with themes that can be discussed together. (Ender's Game/Starship Troopers [interplanetary war] or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress/Dune [economics of scarcity]) Some students will take the more challenging books, others will opt for the easier ones.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a great conversation book for students, it tends to come at economic problems from a perspective that many of them haven't seen: the economics of scarcity. TANSTAAFL would be a good counter-counter-cultural notion for the Obama generation. As much as I like Stranger, I think TMiaHM is much more useful.
If you're going to approach this as an evolving genre, then Wells and Verne. The list needs Asimov as required reading even if it's a few short stories. The notion of the "Three Laws" in an age when people expected to be replaced by (and feared) the "electronic brain" is a powerful one. An early working galaxy-wide empire need to be explored too.
Niven and Pournelle's "hard" SF tend to be well thought out and self-consistent -- a problem a lot of writers have. The annoyances surrounding Ringworld were simply because it was so *close* to being right. At least he fixed the shortcomings in the sequels.
The core flaws are the that Windows does not clearly provide the user with appropriate information on who is providing a given application and if that is a reputable source or an anonymous provider.
And that's a problem for a lot of users. Is Yahoo reputable? Adobe? Apple? They all install hard-to-remove adware and crashware as a side effect of installing something you want. Sony? You've heard the name, now install the rootkit.
We've been three years in our combined household (teenager, gamers, and a developer) without any kind of infection. No virus scanners at all, just trivial network management and everyone knows what they're doing. Nobody runs as Administrator unless they have to.
I would note, UAC isn't a bad concept, just a terrible, terrible implementation with a user interface and default settings that make it unusable.
This is why I responded. I left UAC on my development machine at home and on my netbook just to give it a chance. And you know what? Once the initial wave of software installs are over with, it's really not that bad. I've had alerts pop up when I really didn't expect them ("I guess that /is/ an admin operation") and there's a couple of older programs that I have to "Run as Administrator" but otherwise it's pretty sane.
Starting up though with lots of installs it's really intrusive. Granted. Perhaps a "grant Admin rights for 5 minutes" feature might be helpful. And it also helps to know that if X isn't working, try it as administrator and see if it works then. (Notably, Visual Studio remote debugging.) But for day-to-day use? It's fine.*
* Disclaimer: I'm an old Unix administrator, and working day-to-day in a lower-privileged sandbox is second nature. Putting on the red pajamas for a just a few minutes seems natural.
A mechanism to vent gas introduces a rather tragic possible failure vector: equilibrium. Your balloon floats along until it's out of reach of the chase team and you don't get your payload back. (Which might be fine if you're using telemetry.)
At least with this method you're guaranteed that the payload will come back sooner rather than much, much later.
1. You've just opened the door to a police state. No thanks. Besides, the crime isn't "excused" but evidence that might be used to convict is ruled inadmissible. Use different evidence, that's all.
2. The rub is this: "officers who..." For an illegal wiretap, who's culpable? The technician who installed it? The officer who listened? The commanding officer who ordered the tap? The judge who signed the warrant that was later invalidated? Who gets charged?
And then what jury would convict them? If an officer is charged with illegally obtaining evidence that catches a serial child rapist murderer, can you honestly see a panel of jurors sending him to prison? Really? They'd set him free or slap him on the wrist.
This is why there are rules of evidence and defendants have the rights they do, to prevent decay into a lawless police state.
You missed the point. Hitting any part of the Oort cloud is easy. Trying to hit any particular point in space without course corrections is unbelievably hard, unless it's a really deep and small gravity well....
And isn't starting at the Sun and aiming for a point in the Oort cloud complicated by the N-body problem anyway? Course corrections will have to be done for the entire trip because of all of those large chunks of rock and gas floating around. Gravity's a bitch, man.
"some collegiate body"
Just wait till Londoners see what the IOC does to their twittering and texting during the 2012 Olympics.
The NFL/NCAA are pansy-ass pushovers compared to the Nazi's at the IOC.
This is good to ask during a 1-on-1 interview, or when the interviewers are nearly peers. (i.e. bad to ask when the CEO and some flunky are in the room)
"What do you like least about working here?"
It's a good judge of character of the person interviewing you. I usually deflect answers that involve "commuting" or something external and re-ask the question. The answers tend to fall into three categories. 1. Bullshit/uninformed ("nothing! I love it here!") 2. What the boss/policy wants them to say ("we care about our customers *too much*!") or 3. Honesty.
People like talking about themselves, their opinions, and their likes and dislikes and will do it for hours. It's far easier to get them to open up about what's right (or wrong) with the company when you start with their gripes. Make the question about them and make them feel informed and important. At least it gives you some leverage in follow-up questions.
---
And for the record, at my current job I answer this as "That it feels slow to get software to market. Testing and management approval can seemingly take forever, but I realize it's a deliberate effort to maintain quality." It's honest and a personal gripe of mine.
I'll give you that the author may be mistaken for linking Paint.Net with FOSS.
But for some of us "free-as-in-beer" is still free, it works, and for what it does it does well. In my experience GIMP for Windows doesn't belong on any /Best.*Free.*Software/ list; it speaks more to GIMP's serious stability and annoying UI problems and lack of competition in the "free graphics editing" market.
What's wrong with re-using a Universe? It saves time doing exposition and background, and let's you frame a new story in a familiar setting.
Admittedly, sometimes it works (Hobbit->LoTR, SW->ESB->RotJ, Discworld, Dune->DM->CoD) and sometimes it doesn't (SW ep IV-VI -> SW I-III, Matrix->Matrix R/R). If the storytelling is any good, the setting is just secondary.
No worries. C++1x will still be out before Perl 6.
Companies that are successful in this field have UI experts -- and the management to back them up -- to say
"Yes, this works adequately, but it looks awful. Sorry, you can't ship it."
"Yes, this works adequately, but it doesn't blend well with the rest of our product line. Sorry, you can't ship it."
"Yes, this works adequately, but it's hard to use. Sorry, you can't ship it."
"Yes, this works adequately, but there's too many extraneous features. Sorry, you can't ship it."
(And of course, the ever popular "It was a nice product, but we're abandoning it for something simpler, prettier, and not overburdened with legacy.")
UI guidelines give everyone a place to start talking about the problems (looks/blend/hard/extraneous) and give the development teams a starting point. If there truly is an earth-shattering eye-popping UI feature (a widget) that the guidelines don't allow, then you alter the guidelines after buy in. This *then* requires re-engineering the rest of the applications to account for that great widget and use it where applicable to maintain consistency.
It's expensive and it may seems pointless, but no app is an island when you're trying to engineer a great user-experience.
Linux generally tries to compensate by providing standard frameworks for UI. But there's the I-Love-Standards-There's-So-Many-To-Choose-From problem and that there'll always be the cowboy that turns out a useful app that looks and works different from everything else.
Where's my mod points when I need them!?! Dammit. And I misplaced my dentures too.
+1 Truthyness
I do too, thankfully.
On our dev team the youngest programmer is 36. No one has worked here less than 9 years, and some of us have been programming for 20+ years. That's one of the shiny things about working here: the programmers are seasoned, settled professionals. There are no "death marches" or heroic coding sessions: new systems are designed competently, testing and release are well-regulated and the egos are under control. We don't have to use 'cutting edge' because it's neat and that's what the college kids are using, but we're not coding Payroll in COBOL '59 either (Windows/.Net shop, using all of 3.5's goodies).
The economy is really lousy here (Detroit area), but we're keeping the lights on, and still turning out product that people are buying.
Computing power is easy. Taxes are hard.
First of all, assume for the moment that the various States managed to tax Amazon. It won't be long before the localities followed. The number of taxing jurisdictions would skyrocket. Now consider:
* Sales taxes can be assessed at the state, county, or city level. Oftentimes a postal address doesn't tell you that it's actually in another taxing jurisdiction. (Specifics of the law might require that the 'burbs be taxed as well.)
* There are places where brick-and-mortar sales taxes can get complex because of nearby borders. In these places (WA & OR for instance) it may be possible to provide proof-of-residency to get excluded from a sales tax, even though you're purchasing it in a taxable area.
* Sales taxes are computed differently depending on the kinds of items purchased, depending on locality. A pair of shoes might be taxable in one jurisdiction, but not in another.
* Sales tax holidays. Some jurisdictions have holidays for some taxable items. For example, clothing purchased in August isn't taxable in some jurisdictions to allow families with children to buy back-to-school clothes without the tax burden.
* Compliance changes. Those laws and rates change irregularly -- you have to have staff on had to cull through all kinds of documentation. There are tens of thousands of petty bureaucrats whose job it is to make this more difficult.
* Reporting timelines can be vastly different. Some jurisdictions require a quarterly reporting for sales taxes, others annual. Still others have an even shorter window based on volume of sales (i.e. if you owe more than $50k in sales taxes over a 1 month period, you'll have 10 days to remit to the state regardless of when the next Quarter End falls).
* Reporting *methods* can be vastly different. Some allow electronic filing, others require paper and pencil. And electronic filing doesn't always mean something as straightforward as FTP or EDI, sometimes that means that you'll need to send (often vintage) magnetic media or use their application to file the information.
Most brick-and-mortar operations don't have some of these problems because they don't sell everywhere to everyone. Some have a glimpse of this (i.e. Wal Mart) but don't have locations at every possible shipping address in the United States. When they put up a new store, there's a whole process to get Compliance with local taxing regulations. Amazon would have to do this with every shipping address.
I'm behind Amazon on this one. Going about this piecemeal is a recipe for disaster.
Or they could just cut back. If you can't afford it, don't buy it. This is just as important for States as individuals.
I tend to scratch my own itches, or those of my employers.
For personal use last Halloween I wrote a distributed, synchronized display system for the house. The server running the show was a Linux system (debian). The clients were all netbook/notebook class Windows systems running XP and Vista. All of it written in C#/Mono and written (almost) exclusively with Visual Studio.
It's useful and cross-platform. Just because you didn't need it, want it, or know about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist or isn't useful. A lot more software is unseen than seen.
I develop on both Windows and other OS's. (25+ years of writing for Unix and Windows.)
Mono's great for the occasions that I need to write code that work fine on Linux and Windows. The tools are fine, the porting is seamless, and it just works. If MS decides to submarine-patent Mono somehow (which still hasn't been specified *how*...) then I'll move my tools to something else. In the meantime it works and its easy to use.
These FUD sessions are unproductive for everyone. Go write some code.
RMS has always had a case of monomania.
I'm with you on this one. Occam is too.
It seems like the researchers are overreaching a bit here for a complex explanation, when a simpler one will do nicely.
And fumes as well. Those won't be healthy for the window or the nearby surfaces.
Trying to get a new water, sewer, or electric hookup can be an exercise in frustration because of the bureaucracy and safeguards in the system.
Phone and cable have gotten better in the past 30 years. Landline phone and cable companies are so desperate for business that they're oftentimes pretty damned quick about getting a line out to you. (Unless you want something fancy like a business line or a T3, then welcome back to the Bad Old Days.)
I invoke the ghost of Lilly Tomlin: "We don't care, we don't have to. We're the phone company."
And if you think that usage on Utilities isn't capped, you're naive. If you didn't have those teeny-tiny water pipes and electric lines to your house you'd find out real quick there are all kinds of regulations and arbitrary rules about water and electric usage. For industry -- which have much larger access to electric and water -- there are often "monthy maximums" for water use, and obscenely high electric rates for peak usage.