I heard there was a murder in your country once. That's why I stay away!
The U.S. is a big place with lots of people. Bad things are bound to happen no matter how carefully you 'watch the watchers'. Who watches the watcher-watchers?
I have an acquaintance (good friend of my brother) who did a 6-month stint there as a firefighter. He said the main thing was dealing with the boredom.
You might laugh thinking about firefighters in a place like Antarctica, but this is one of those places that, when you need emergency services, you really NEED them. IIRC, there's actually a water sprinkler system there; a bit of a feat of engineering.
Our company president (I work for a large multinational publisher) told us yesterday that this will be a color e-reader (he said "four-color", but I think he's thinking in terms of a 4-color process, not a 4-color display) capable of playing video. He knows this because Apple has spent the last two weeks getting publishers on board. Interestingly, Apple sat down to hammer out details on content distribution, but still refused to let content producers even see a picture of the device! Publishers are, of course, so eager to get good footing on this platform that they're apparently giving Apple the benefit of the doubt now. Amazing how things have changed since iTunes and the iPhone came out.
I still use a wooden stick. Then again, the flexibility of the stick is a factor in how I play. You can get a lot of power out of the spring return of a hockey stick with certain kinds of shots. Of course, we didn't have composite sticks when I was a kid, so this is how I learned.
Aluminum sticks were the new thing when I was growing up. The advantage is that they rarely break (I think the blade is replaceable wood). I broke a LOT of wooden sticks growing up. Carbon fibre... never tried it. They're probably great. From what I understand, carbon gives the manufacturer a lot more control over the flexibility.
Since when does it cost anyone anything to write software? The whole lesson of the computer industry is that developing (most) software has reasonable finite fixed costs and relatively small on-going costs and (if its any good) has perpetual returns (for as long as you can sell it; funding your development costs for upgrades.)
Sounds like you work for the part of the "software development" culture that I dislike: the ones who declare a product "finished", warts and all, slap a price on it, and then move on. If FOSS software has demonstrated anything, it's that high-quality software is best achieved by allowing the development process to go on indefinitely. In my opinion, development and support should be the same thing. Now that FOSS has raised the bar for quality, I think commercial developers are going to have to change the way that they charge if they want to stay competitive.
We write a fair amount of software for internal consumption only. This has proved to be a very good way of getting the software that we want, but it's make clear that the cost is not "fixed". It never really was anyway.
I hate to be a spoil sport, but unless you cost the person sending the spam in exact proportion to the amount they send, you fundamentally are not addressing the cost structure of SPAM.
You don't need parity here-- you just need to make it expensive enough. Statistically, this will affect some spammer's bottom line. Maybe it won't stop the big, organized spammers that hire professional programmers, but it will stop the little guys. Complaining that a countermeasure isn't in exact proportion doesn't exactly get you very far. Imagine if the guys a Thermopylae has thought that way...
Ha, I was in the ER in CAMBRIDGE, MA a couple weeks ago (don't drink and wrestle with friends, kids), and I had zero AT&T signal there as well. Cambridge might as well be Boston, so even in Boston, they're not so hot. Although I've noticed that I get AT&T in a few subway tunnels now. New Yorkers snidely tell me that they've been able to do this for ages.
It's funny that you mention 20 minutes, because my brother and I starting calling this the "20 minute rule". When I was living in Boston (Fenway), this would happen regularly. It hasn't happened, though, since I moved out to Watertown.
I have AT&T, and I'll probably stick with it-- because my company pays for it. One of the downsides of being a network engineer... always on call. But as long as I don't cost them any extra minutes, I get free service. Since our plan is geared toward sales reps... that's a lot of minutes to use up each month.
I can confirm this. I was winter backpacking with my father last weekend in the White Mountains of NH. Normally, with AT&T, I get no cellphone reception whatsoever there (with the one odd occurrence of 5 bars near Wildcat-- but I suspect that both Mt. Washington and Wildcat have antennas on them), so upon reaching the parking spot in Franconia Notch and confirming that I had no signal, I just left the phone in my Jeep. However, that night at our campsite at Kinsman Pond, my father realized that he had forgotten to leave his phone in the car. For fun, he flipped it on, and, hey-- three bars! My mom was treated to a MMS picture of a deep woods winter wonderland. My dad has Verizon.
When you consider that the trees around us were covered in nearly a foot of ice and snow, and we were sleeping in a shelter with several feet of snow on top of it, we really were in a cave. Amazing.
ROI takes time. Google's been around for just about 10 years. In that time, they have amassed enough cultural clout to virtually ensure their dominance for a long time. If you don't think GMail, Google Docs, etc are making money, then consider these things advertising for the brand. By that reckoning, they have been remarkably effective.
FWIW, a lot of people said that IBM's System R was going to be an investment with "shit ROI", but we can see how that turned out. Relational databases and declarative query languages have been hugely important innovations in computing. Oracle owes it's entire existence on the concept.
Ten, twenty years from now... that's when we can say whether Google's projects have had "shit ROI" or not. Considering that Google's success largely comes from having proven the practicality of MapReduce, and thus providing a great deal of fuel for language research again, I'd say no, their investment is absolutely not shit. Maybe their ROI is low on their own balance sheet, but for CS in general-- no way.
Seriously, right now we are spending record peacetime levels on defense
I assume you're in the U.S., so I have to say... wha? We're in two wars right now! Maybe you mean that, in our current state of war, we're spending many multiples of peacetime levels?
Of course, your point is still valid-- military spending is extremely high even in peacetime. Sadly, that is the cost of being the first to do something. There's a very good account of this phenomena in the book Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age. Eisenhower was keenly aware of and attempted to avoid the problems of a large and influential military-industrial complex, and yet, he is largely responsible for getting it off the ground. In the end, pressure from both the American people and his own military forced his hand.
Like any good programmer, I myself have Libertarian learnings. I mean-- who doesn't like the idea that a simple and elegant system of governance will produce the best outcome? It's a principle that has served me well in my years of building reliable software.
But there are a couple blind spots in the Libertarian philosophy. One is that, even in cases where government intervention is undesirable, merely having their presence ads a great deal of stability. E.g., fundamental science research would be largely stagnant without organizations such as the NSF, NIH, NIST, and NASA (among many others). Becoming an expert (i.e., PhD) in something like physics or computer science takes a great deal of time and personal sacrifice. Making it risky as well would largely kill those fields; and having experts of that kind are a matter of national importance. These organizations keep the flow of money steady so that, for the most part, when you get your degree, you can find employment. Likewise, we really want a stable, enduring organization to ensure that we have roads, bridges, railways, etc. The presence and overall reliability of these things means that commerce can move ahead unimpeded. The cost of maintaining, e.g., the route from California's orchards to Massachusetts' supermarkets is largely externalized from the cost of growing and selling produce.
And that brings me to the other blind spot: global competition. Sadly, we cannot be a nation unto itself anymore. We are a player in a global marketplace-- there's no going back. When you have to compete against nations like China, which artificially manipulates its currency value to stay competitive, which engages in human rights abuses to keep labor costs low, which ignores costly pollution controls (at the expense of the rest of the world) to keep their products cheap-- you cannot compete unless you have a big player that can even the odds a little. Modern statehood is a very complicated thing, and I think that most Libertarians really are living in the past to some degree, evidenced largely by their frequent calls to "Constitutionality". Hey, the world's changed in the last 230 years! It's a good document, but it was also expected to be a living document.
As you suggest, we should indeed clarify the purpose of regulation. E.g., as we've now discovered, the Glass-Steagall act was an essential bit of market regulation-- it kept the markets from being so volatile that people lost their trust in the system. If putting your money into a bank is the same thing as putting your money on a gambling table, well, you're going to put your money under your mattress instead. Given that a safe lending system is a major source of entrepreneurship and upward mobility, having lending dry up is a major problem for an economy that wants to keep growing. We just need to make sure that "re-examining" our legislation is not the same thing as throwing it all out. I'd gladly switch to a simple flat tax if there was some assurance that wealthy people and corporations actually paid up. As it is, those people and their companies use the national infrastructure that is paid for with the hard work of the rest of us.
I don't know about most software companies, but some certainly could. As someone who works in enterprise IT, we ensure that all code done for hire comes with (and we are Free to use) the deliverable. For us, having the code, and being able to do with it what we will, is extremely valuable. In the past, we were burned repeatedly by vendors who would build something for us and then abandon it-- or jack up their fees knowing that the more we paid to maintain it, the more we were invested in keeping it around. We will pay extra for this insurance.
We often pay for Free software (OpenBSD in particular, on a schedule), because this software is so critical to our central services, we want to keep the original developers around and producing good things for us. The fact that other people are doing this as well only serves us better, and we keep programmers employed full-time doing what they like to do.
NUMBERS, wow, great idea! After that, we'll need some kind of DIRECTORY to figure out what the numbers map to.
Ironically, current telephone architecture is better than current Internet technology (any telephone number, anywhere, can be portable; IPs-- NOT!), and they want to "marry telephone numbers to the Internet"? Why not marry the Internet to telephone numbers instead?
People, numbers are ADDRESSES. They're supposed to imply location, otherwise, why not use a more intuitive identifier, like [your name]? This is a terrible idea.
Even for IT shops that do write their own code (like mine), sometimes you live with or work around bugs because you don't have a great deal of extra time/extra money.
My main responsibilities are keeping our network up and running smoothly, but when I have time, I write and maintain a number of our intranet apps. I work with C/C++/Perl/PHP and a few toolkits. But we have.NET and Java apps as well (not by our own choice... corporate overlords), and maintaining those is outside my expertise. I'd love to take a crack at them, but I don't have the time to gear up and work on them. I have to trust other people to do it. That means, if I see them dragging their feet, I get very conservative, or very paranoid with network policy. There's not much else I can do.
If you're lucky, IT is about 50% technical, 50% political. If you're unlucky (e.g., department head), it's almost entirely a political job.
Ah, I see, some attempt at reductio ad absurdum. No, those things do not bother me.
But your proposed-absurd solution is also not cost-effective. So far, the incidence of people trying to smuggle bombs in their body cavities is nil, so we have no idea what the risk is. It's probably low. Requiring everyone to shit in public is excessively costly.
No, that's silly. What I'm saying is that religion is itself flawed reasoning, and therefore has no merit in rational discourse. I said nothing about people. Note that I have consistently referred to viewpoints, not people. As I said before, civil society needs to respect people, but not necessarily their views.
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I heard there was a murder in your country once. That's why I stay away!
The U.S. is a big place with lots of people. Bad things are bound to happen no matter how carefully you 'watch the watchers'. Who watches the watcher-watchers?
Do all the windows on both screens change?
Yes, using GNOME and the NVidia driver.
I have an acquaintance (good friend of my brother) who did a 6-month stint there as a firefighter. He said the main thing was dealing with the boredom.
You might laugh thinking about firefighters in a place like Antarctica, but this is one of those places that, when you need emergency services, you really NEED them. IIRC, there's actually a water sprinkler system there; a bit of a feat of engineering.
Our company president (I work for a large multinational publisher) told us yesterday that this will be a color e-reader (he said "four-color", but I think he's thinking in terms of a 4-color process, not a 4-color display) capable of playing video. He knows this because Apple has spent the last two weeks getting publishers on board. Interestingly, Apple sat down to hammer out details on content distribution, but still refused to let content producers even see a picture of the device! Publishers are, of course, so eager to get good footing on this platform that they're apparently giving Apple the benefit of the doubt now. Amazing how things have changed since iTunes and the iPhone came out.
I still use a wooden stick. Then again, the flexibility of the stick is a factor in how I play. You can get a lot of power out of the spring return of a hockey stick with certain kinds of shots. Of course, we didn't have composite sticks when I was a kid, so this is how I learned.
Aluminum sticks were the new thing when I was growing up. The advantage is that they rarely break (I think the blade is replaceable wood). I broke a LOT of wooden sticks growing up. Carbon fibre... never tried it. They're probably great. From what I understand, carbon gives the manufacturer a lot more control over the flexibility.
Since when does it cost anyone anything to write software? The whole lesson of the computer industry is that developing (most) software has reasonable finite fixed costs and relatively small on-going costs and (if its any good) has perpetual returns (for as long as you can sell it; funding your development costs for upgrades.)
Sounds like you work for the part of the "software development" culture that I dislike: the ones who declare a product "finished", warts and all, slap a price on it, and then move on. If FOSS software has demonstrated anything, it's that high-quality software is best achieved by allowing the development process to go on indefinitely. In my opinion, development and support should be the same thing. Now that FOSS has raised the bar for quality, I think commercial developers are going to have to change the way that they charge if they want to stay competitive.
We write a fair amount of software for internal consumption only. This has proved to be a very good way of getting the software that we want, but it's make clear that the cost is not "fixed". It never really was anyway.
I hate to be a spoil sport, but unless you cost the person sending the spam in exact proportion to the amount they send, you fundamentally are not addressing the cost structure of SPAM.
You don't need parity here-- you just need to make it expensive enough. Statistically, this will affect some spammer's bottom line. Maybe it won't stop the big, organized spammers that hire professional programmers, but it will stop the little guys. Complaining that a countermeasure isn't in exact proportion doesn't exactly get you very far. Imagine if the guys a Thermopylae has thought that way...
If you read carefully, it wasn't a comparison. I didn't say that my AT&T phone didn't work there. I just said that my father's Verizon phone did.
That said, given my experience with AT&T up there, I think it is unlikely that it would work.
Ha, I was in the ER in CAMBRIDGE, MA a couple weeks ago (don't drink and wrestle with friends, kids), and I had zero AT&T signal there as well. Cambridge might as well be Boston, so even in Boston, they're not so hot. Although I've noticed that I get AT&T in a few subway tunnels now. New Yorkers snidely tell me that they've been able to do this for ages.
It's funny that you mention 20 minutes, because my brother and I starting calling this the "20 minute rule". When I was living in Boston (Fenway), this would happen regularly. It hasn't happened, though, since I moved out to Watertown.
I have AT&T, and I'll probably stick with it-- because my company pays for it. One of the downsides of being a network engineer... always on call. But as long as I don't cost them any extra minutes, I get free service. Since our plan is geared toward sales reps... that's a lot of minutes to use up each month.
I can confirm this. I was winter backpacking with my father last weekend in the White Mountains of NH. Normally, with AT&T, I get no cellphone reception whatsoever there (with the one odd occurrence of 5 bars near Wildcat-- but I suspect that both Mt. Washington and Wildcat have antennas on them), so upon reaching the parking spot in Franconia Notch and confirming that I had no signal, I just left the phone in my Jeep. However, that night at our campsite at Kinsman Pond, my father realized that he had forgotten to leave his phone in the car. For fun, he flipped it on, and, hey-- three bars! My mom was treated to a MMS picture of a deep woods winter wonderland. My dad has Verizon.
When you consider that the trees around us were covered in nearly a foot of ice and snow, and we were sleeping in a shelter with several feet of snow on top of it, we really were in a cave. Amazing.
IBM is not a for-profit corporation? Ha ha ha!
ROI takes time. Google's been around for just about 10 years. In that time, they have amassed enough cultural clout to virtually ensure their dominance for a long time. If you don't think GMail, Google Docs, etc are making money, then consider these things advertising for the brand. By that reckoning, they have been remarkably effective.
FWIW, a lot of people said that IBM's System R was going to be an investment with "shit ROI", but we can see how that turned out. Relational databases and declarative query languages have been hugely important innovations in computing. Oracle owes it's entire existence on the concept.
Ten, twenty years from now... that's when we can say whether Google's projects have had "shit ROI" or not. Considering that Google's success largely comes from having proven the practicality of MapReduce, and thus providing a great deal of fuel for language research again, I'd say no, their investment is absolutely not shit. Maybe their ROI is low on their own balance sheet, but for CS in general-- no way.
Seriously, right now we are spending record peacetime levels on defense
I assume you're in the U.S., so I have to say... wha? We're in two wars right now! Maybe you mean that, in our current state of war, we're spending many multiples of peacetime levels?
Of course, your point is still valid-- military spending is extremely high even in peacetime. Sadly, that is the cost of being the first to do something. There's a very good account of this phenomena in the book Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age. Eisenhower was keenly aware of and attempted to avoid the problems of a large and influential military-industrial complex, and yet, he is largely responsible for getting it off the ground. In the end, pressure from both the American people and his own military forced his hand.
Like any good programmer, I myself have Libertarian learnings. I mean-- who doesn't like the idea that a simple and elegant system of governance will produce the best outcome? It's a principle that has served me well in my years of building reliable software.
But there are a couple blind spots in the Libertarian philosophy. One is that, even in cases where government intervention is undesirable, merely having their presence ads a great deal of stability. E.g., fundamental science research would be largely stagnant without organizations such as the NSF, NIH, NIST, and NASA (among many others). Becoming an expert (i.e., PhD) in something like physics or computer science takes a great deal of time and personal sacrifice. Making it risky as well would largely kill those fields; and having experts of that kind are a matter of national importance. These organizations keep the flow of money steady so that, for the most part, when you get your degree, you can find employment. Likewise, we really want a stable, enduring organization to ensure that we have roads, bridges, railways, etc. The presence and overall reliability of these things means that commerce can move ahead unimpeded. The cost of maintaining, e.g., the route from California's orchards to Massachusetts' supermarkets is largely externalized from the cost of growing and selling produce.
And that brings me to the other blind spot: global competition. Sadly, we cannot be a nation unto itself anymore. We are a player in a global marketplace-- there's no going back. When you have to compete against nations like China, which artificially manipulates its currency value to stay competitive, which engages in human rights abuses to keep labor costs low, which ignores costly pollution controls (at the expense of the rest of the world) to keep their products cheap-- you cannot compete unless you have a big player that can even the odds a little. Modern statehood is a very complicated thing, and I think that most Libertarians really are living in the past to some degree, evidenced largely by their frequent calls to "Constitutionality". Hey, the world's changed in the last 230 years! It's a good document, but it was also expected to be a living document.
As you suggest, we should indeed clarify the purpose of regulation. E.g., as we've now discovered, the Glass-Steagall act was an essential bit of market regulation-- it kept the markets from being so volatile that people lost their trust in the system. If putting your money into a bank is the same thing as putting your money on a gambling table, well, you're going to put your money under your mattress instead. Given that a safe lending system is a major source of entrepreneurship and upward mobility, having lending dry up is a major problem for an economy that wants to keep growing. We just need to make sure that "re-examining" our legislation is not the same thing as throwing it all out. I'd gladly switch to a simple flat tax if there was some assurance that wealthy people and corporations actually paid up. As it is, those people and their companies use the national infrastructure that is paid for with the hard work of the rest of us.
I think TFA meant without a machine to propel you on the way down. At that point, it's just you and gravity.
I don't know about most software companies, but some certainly could. As someone who works in enterprise IT, we ensure that all code done for hire comes with (and we are Free to use) the deliverable. For us, having the code, and being able to do with it what we will, is extremely valuable. In the past, we were burned repeatedly by vendors who would build something for us and then abandon it-- or jack up their fees knowing that the more we paid to maintain it, the more we were invested in keeping it around. We will pay extra for this insurance.
We often pay for Free software (OpenBSD in particular, on a schedule), because this software is so critical to our central services, we want to keep the original developers around and producing good things for us. The fact that other people are doing this as well only serves us better, and we keep programmers employed full-time doing what they like to do.
There's an interesting idea: Pat Robertson is actually a shrewd atheist. Wild!
This is why Massachusetts now has Scott Brown as a senator. Me, me, me.
Hey, there's a prize if you RTFA this time! And here you are, talking about Apple's next shiny gadget. What a bunch of nerds.
NUMBERS, wow, great idea! After that, we'll need some kind of DIRECTORY to figure out what the numbers map to.
Ironically, current telephone architecture is better than current Internet technology (any telephone number, anywhere, can be portable; IPs-- NOT!), and they want to "marry telephone numbers to the Internet"? Why not marry the Internet to telephone numbers instead?
People, numbers are ADDRESSES. They're supposed to imply location, otherwise, why not use a more intuitive identifier, like [your name]? This is a terrible idea.
Even for IT shops that do write their own code (like mine), sometimes you live with or work around bugs because you don't have a great deal of extra time/extra money.
.NET and Java apps as well (not by our own choice... corporate overlords), and maintaining those is outside my expertise. I'd love to take a crack at them, but I don't have the time to gear up and work on them. I have to trust other people to do it. That means, if I see them dragging their feet, I get very conservative, or very paranoid with network policy. There's not much else I can do.
My main responsibilities are keeping our network up and running smoothly, but when I have time, I write and maintain a number of our intranet apps. I work with C/C++/Perl/PHP and a few toolkits. But we have
If you're lucky, IT is about 50% technical, 50% political. If you're unlucky (e.g., department head), it's almost entirely a political job.
Yeah, I kinda wonder how that works.
"This'un feels good boys. Ship 'er out!"
Ick.
Ah, I see, some attempt at reductio ad absurdum. No, those things do not bother me.
But your proposed-absurd solution is also not cost-effective. So far, the incidence of people trying to smuggle bombs in their body cavities is nil, so we have no idea what the risk is. It's probably low. Requiring everyone to shit in public is excessively costly.
And your riposte also cites nothing. However, I offer this which provides many citations about nudity in the pre-modern world.
No, that's silly. What I'm saying is that religion is itself flawed reasoning, and therefore has no merit in rational discourse. I said nothing about people. Note that I have consistently referred to viewpoints, not people. As I said before, civil society needs to respect people, but not necessarily their views.