Value is a measure of how much we want or like something.
Value is clearly more complicated than that. For example, Marx diffentiated value into social value, "use value", "exchange value", and price. This is much closer to the modern economic idea of value. Economists come up with metrics for use-value all the time-- and the idea is to facilitate proper calculation of exchange-value so that decisions can be made purely on a utilitarian basis. This is how we come to have figures like the economic value of human life.
Speaking of HTML. I spent a half hour the other day trying to convince a marketing person that HTML = good. She wanted to put some text up on the web, and her idea was to make a PDF from the Word file, and then convert that PDF into Flash so it could be viewed inline, and there was this great $3k program that would do this AND make it searchable. This is from a person who claims to have taken a course in HTML. I swear, the web is becoming totally perverse.
I dunno. Monoculture is only bad when all of the alternatives are also bad. Then when badness hits, it's limited to one particular installation for architectural reasons. Since you deploy large numbers of identical/similar machines, you also know how much easier it is to minimize attack surfaces when your software set is uniform.
People like you are truly evil and immensely twisted and warped if you can defend any of the violent activities the went on during the "protests" (read: riots). And if you were a participant, you deserve to be thrown in jail, or better yet, exiled to a place like Pakistan, Iran, or Syria. Your kind have no place in a free and peaceful democracy.
Not moderating myself here, because I feel that something needs to be said about this. How does this shit get modded Informative? The world is a complicated place, you know. It is entirely possible that both violent protesters and overzealous police exist. Both you and the OP make vast oversimplifications.
Are you not aware that protest is a protected form of speech that is essential to democracy?
Just kidding. But I do commute to work on a bicycle, and, besides the fact that I've lost 10 lbs in the last three months, it really is so much more relaxing and enjoyable than either waiting in traffic or cramming yourself onto a crowded bus/subway. In fact-- that was my primary motivation in getting the bike-- escaping from the drunk a-holes who flood the subway system before and after every Red Sox game.
But even simple cost comparisons are not necessarily rational for the end-user. You really _do_ need to think about it. For example: in 1999, gasoline was about $1/gal where I lived, and the cost trend looked quite favorable for continued use of gasoline in the near future. Now, in 1999, it was no mystery that combustion engines were dirty and inefficient, but they _were_ reliable and cheap.
Fast forward to the past couple of years, and we're seen some extreme volatility in oil-- and thus gasoline-- prices. The degree of that volatility was unexpected to almost everybody except the very few people who were intimately familiar with the oil market.
And then there are the secondary effects of oil prices. Oil's steep prices almost certainly have a hand in the current global recession. While it was clear that the price of gasoline would affect the cost of goods as relating to the cost of shipping, it was less clear that cost-cutting on the part of consumers would cause enough of a market contraction to weaken _financial_ markets to their breaking point.
Beside that-- some people do care about the impact they make on their planet. While this may be an inconvenience to many who don't care, and may seem irrational from a cost perspective, I still think this is a valid reason for purchasing a fuel-efficient or alternative-fuel vehicle. Surely it is at least as rational (and probably more), as, say, buying a ticket to see your favorite sports team, or pursuing your video game hobby. My opinion is that the only reason earth-conscious products are not seen as cost-effective is because Earth is actually, itself, undervalued. Were the full cost of buying/using environmentally-unfriendly goods really revealed, I think we're have far more of them available to us. As it is, those costs (that we know of) are largely externalized.
We _know_ that we are going to pay a large future price for continued use of gasoline. It makes sense to wean ourselves off NOW. As for which one is the _best_, I can't honestly say. But we almost certainly know which ones are _better_.
I think the main mechanism for aging is slow oxidation. Therefore aging in a bottle only happens due to air moving through a cork. This is enough to subtly change the character of some wines; but I don't know a whole lot about whiskey chemistry. Also-- while aging in a cask imparts some 'vanilla' flavors/aromas, because of the oils/tannins in the oak, I do not think that whiskey spends a lot of time in an oak cask. Again, I'm ignorant about whiskey production in general, but I have made several oak-aged beers, and the flavor imparted by the wood happens fairly quickly. Actually, I completely spoiled a batch of cider this way-- I oak aged it for a month, which was enough to give it an intense 'whiskey' flavor. And from what I've seen wrt whiskey production, every new batch gets new wood, so they're not likely to leave it sitting around in oak for long enough to try to get flavors out of 'old' wood.
But you're right about the blended vs. single malt-- that's a crazy claim. For starters, blended scotch often lacks some of the odd character that comes with single malts, because it's been obscured by blending different batches. So this machine suddenly adds 'character' now? Sounds like magic.
Actually-- Apple used to use focus groups. I don't know if they do this anymore-- they do seem to design for The Steve's taste-- but the original user testing was very influential in developing the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines. There's one story about it here at folklore.org. Unfortunately, Apple seems to have completely discarded the HIG for Mac OS X.
I think we could justifiably counter that if you really care so much, you should use Kelvin. Celsius is not an SI base unit, even though its use has been tolerated somewhat in scientific literature.
Good review
on
Clean Code
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Wow, good review. I usually skip over the reviews, because I find that they're filled with inside jokes and wandering monologues, but in this case, the review was well-written, thoughtful, and the book seems interesting. I'll probably pick it up. If this was a Slashvertisement, well, it worked.
But the real issue is that you should have researched Linux compatibility of your hardware BEFORE buying!
This is actually harder than it seems. Take the Intel PRO Wireless 3945ABG chipset. Pretty common at the moment. There's even an OSS driver, and Hey!, the project is even supported by Intel. Sounds like it works great, right? Unfortunately, closer inspection reveals that lots of people are still doing workarounds using NDISwrapper.
The only OS that I've been able to reasonably do the pre-research with is OpenBSD. This is probably because there's ONE OpenBSD, so if they say it works, it probably does on your actual install.
Oh, I totally agree with you. But if my peers (programmers) are any indication of the state of the average programmer, well, it ain't happening anytime soon. Not that I'm a fabulous programmer myself, but I do consider myself _interested_ in programming, and I try to learn from my mistakes. I can't say the same for some other people around here.
I think the real problem with Haskell is that you're required to use your brain to make any use of it. I.e., you have to be one of those people who, upon opening a Knuth book, goes "Wow!" If you were a mediocre CS student, or you have no formal CS or mathematics training, Haskell is going to be very hard for you to wrap your head around.
I feel your pain. I think that the long variable name convention, while expressive, ends up being harder to work with, and as a result, makes code harder to maintain in the end.
Fortunately, I don't work with languages where that kind of convention is required, so I just don't do it. Even member variables of moderate length I have a tendency to make references to. Actually, in general, I've found that judicious use of typedefs and also appropriate modularization (with short local variable names) helps with this a bunch, too.
K&R style, maybe. But it's still useful to have your code wrap to some consistent length-- there's nothing worse than reading someone else's shitty 200-column-wide code in a terminal. There are LOTS of terminals still in use. Not to mention (I don't remember where I heard this-- Oualline's book?), if you can't fit a function call in 80 columns, you might want to rethink about what you're doing. There's probably a better, simpler way.
But style aside, the content of the book is classic, especially when you start getting into systems programming. These guys had the logical structure of a good computer system worked out a long time ago! Considering that the UNIX C API was basically the first draft of POSIX, reading this book is a must if you ever want to play with the low-level (aka, fun) parts of your operating system. This book almost never leaves my desk, even though I do most of my work in Perl and PHP nowadays.
I love C because it is a sparse programming language that is very expressive, mainly due to pointers. That has a big influence on my code in other languages, for better or worse. But I find C to be very readable, and I try to do the same for other programs. A lot of "modern" languages just look like barf to me, but I'm probably biased.
Unfortunately, the softening of the metal in the Twin Towers have absolutely nothing to do with the subject of the article. It's just attention-grabbing. The mechanisms for deformation of steel suspected in the WTC collapse were already well-known (thermoplasticity), and evidence of some heating was confirmed in NIST's final report on the WTC tower collapses in 2005. Interestingly, NIST says that primary event causing the deformation is unknown:
Throughout this report, it should be recognized that while the physical damage and failure mechanisms
observed were reported in their present condition, in most cases it was difficult or impossible to conclude
which extreme loading event may have led to the damage. In other words, the damage may have been a
result of the aircraft impact, the subsequent fires, the ensuing collapse of the buildings, or the subsequent
handling related to the recovery efforts. It should also be recognized that in many cases it was difficult or
impossible to conclude when fire exposure occurred, that is, whether the fire exposure transpired prior to
collapse or during the time period that the piece was in the debris pile at the WTC site (for some samples,
possibly up to 4 months).
(NIST NCSTAR 1-3C, WTC Investigation, p. 2)
(Disclaimer: my brother works for NIST, in this department, although he did not participate in this investigation)
Re:you can't stop the doomsayers
on
LHC Success!
·
· Score: 1
Apparently you missed the part about not knowing how naive you are until you aren't anymore. Have you even ever taken a philosophy class?
Maybe you're just trying to feel better about your own shitty life, whatever, but here's a piece of unsolicited advice: belittling people in a public forum makes you look like an asshole, not funny or cool.
Re:you can't stop the doomsayers
on
LHC Success!
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Well, in defense of people who use "brain dead reasoning", it's very hard to know how naive you are until you aren't naive anymore. When I got my first bachelor's degree, in philosophy, I thought I understood this well. But when I went back to school to become a scientist, I found out, well, I was completely naive. Things that seemed obvious and logical to me really were not at all logical once I had some training in mathematics. And the math I'm talking about-- calculus, statistics, set theory-- that's all pretty basic stuff for scientists and engineers. But for a layperson? Waaay over their heads. Take the Monty Hall problem. The solution is completely counterintuitive, but the problem is so damned simple. This is why people like my contractor friend thinks us academic types are so full of shit. Most people have no idea how hard it is to actually _prove_ something.
May be iffy. I can get Parallels Desktop (v3) for Mac to work with SecuROM discs but not Parallels Workstation (v2) for Linux. I can't speak for other VM environments.
Is that, even with the chief maintainer gone, not all is lost. Now, I don't know what the present status of support or development is, but if it's working for you, why stop using it? It's not like the software is imbued with evil now that its namesake is in jail. Plenty of people worked on ReiserFS-- Hans Reiser employed many programmers-- and presumably, those people will still be out there working on it in some capacity.
The name, of course, is an unpleasant reminder of Hans Reiser's disturbing actions, but good software speaks for itself, as you yourself have found.
Slashdot Mirror
Value is a measure of how much we want or like something.
Value is clearly more complicated than that. For example, Marx diffentiated value into social value, "use value", "exchange value", and price. This is much closer to the modern economic idea of value. Economists come up with metrics for use-value all the time-- and the idea is to facilitate proper calculation of exchange-value so that decisions can be made purely on a utilitarian basis. This is how we come to have figures like the economic value of human life.
Speaking of HTML. I spent a half hour the other day trying to convince a marketing person that HTML = good. She wanted to put some text up on the web, and her idea was to make a PDF from the Word file, and then convert that PDF into Flash so it could be viewed inline, and there was this great $3k program that would do this AND make it searchable. This is from a person who claims to have taken a course in HTML. I swear, the web is becoming totally perverse.
Actually-- that's kind of the point. A better stereotype. I don't think anybody actually thinks these things are 100% accurate.
I agree. It is *much* harder to integrate Apple's stuff into a heterogeneous network than Linux, despite all of Apple's claims.
I dunno. Monoculture is only bad when all of the alternatives are also bad. Then when badness hits, it's limited to one particular installation for architectural reasons. Since you deploy large numbers of identical/similar machines, you also know how much easier it is to minimize attack surfaces when your software set is uniform.
And which part of the AC's post condones violent protest?
People like you are truly evil and immensely twisted and warped if you can defend any of the violent activities the went on during the "protests" (read: riots). And if you were a participant, you deserve to be thrown in jail, or better yet, exiled to a place like Pakistan, Iran, or Syria. Your kind have no place in a free and peaceful democracy.
Not moderating myself here, because I feel that something needs to be said about this. How does this shit get modded Informative? The world is a complicated place, you know. It is entirely possible that both violent protesters and overzealous police exist. Both you and the OP make vast oversimplifications.
Are you not aware that protest is a protected form of speech that is essential to democracy?
Mods: shame on you.
Funny, I converted my motorcycle to pedal-power.
Just kidding. But I do commute to work on a bicycle, and, besides the fact that I've lost 10 lbs in the last three months, it really is so much more relaxing and enjoyable than either waiting in traffic or cramming yourself onto a crowded bus/subway. In fact-- that was my primary motivation in getting the bike-- escaping from the drunk a-holes who flood the subway system before and after every Red Sox game.
But even simple cost comparisons are not necessarily rational for the end-user. You really _do_ need to think about it. For example: in 1999, gasoline was about $1/gal where I lived, and the cost trend looked quite favorable for continued use of gasoline in the near future. Now, in 1999, it was no mystery that combustion engines were dirty and inefficient, but they _were_ reliable and cheap.
Fast forward to the past couple of years, and we're seen some extreme volatility in oil-- and thus gasoline-- prices. The degree of that volatility was unexpected to almost everybody except the very few people who were intimately familiar with the oil market.
And then there are the secondary effects of oil prices. Oil's steep prices almost certainly have a hand in the current global recession. While it was clear that the price of gasoline would affect the cost of goods as relating to the cost of shipping, it was less clear that cost-cutting on the part of consumers would cause enough of a market contraction to weaken _financial_ markets to their breaking point.
Beside that-- some people do care about the impact they make on their planet. While this may be an inconvenience to many who don't care, and may seem irrational from a cost perspective, I still think this is a valid reason for purchasing a fuel-efficient or alternative-fuel vehicle. Surely it is at least as rational (and probably more), as, say, buying a ticket to see your favorite sports team, or pursuing your video game hobby. My opinion is that the only reason earth-conscious products are not seen as cost-effective is because Earth is actually, itself, undervalued. Were the full cost of buying/using environmentally-unfriendly goods really revealed, I think we're have far more of them available to us. As it is, those costs (that we know of) are largely externalized.
We _know_ that we are going to pay a large future price for continued use of gasoline. It makes sense to wean ourselves off NOW. As for which one is the _best_, I can't honestly say. But we almost certainly know which ones are _better_.
I think the main mechanism for aging is slow oxidation. Therefore aging in a bottle only happens due to air moving through a cork. This is enough to subtly change the character of some wines; but I don't know a whole lot about whiskey chemistry. Also-- while aging in a cask imparts some 'vanilla' flavors/aromas, because of the oils/tannins in the oak, I do not think that whiskey spends a lot of time in an oak cask. Again, I'm ignorant about whiskey production in general, but I have made several oak-aged beers, and the flavor imparted by the wood happens fairly quickly. Actually, I completely spoiled a batch of cider this way-- I oak aged it for a month, which was enough to give it an intense 'whiskey' flavor. And from what I've seen wrt whiskey production, every new batch gets new wood, so they're not likely to leave it sitting around in oak for long enough to try to get flavors out of 'old' wood.
But you're right about the blended vs. single malt-- that's a crazy claim. For starters, blended scotch often lacks some of the odd character that comes with single malts, because it's been obscured by blending different batches. So this machine suddenly adds 'character' now? Sounds like magic.
Actually-- Apple used to use focus groups. I don't know if they do this anymore-- they do seem to design for The Steve's taste-- but the original user testing was very influential in developing the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines. There's one story about it here at folklore.org. Unfortunately, Apple seems to have completely discarded the HIG for Mac OS X.
I think we could justifiably counter that if you really care so much, you should use Kelvin. Celsius is not an SI base unit, even though its use has been tolerated somewhat in scientific literature.
Wow, good review. I usually skip over the reviews, because I find that they're filled with inside jokes and wandering monologues, but in this case, the review was well-written, thoughtful, and the book seems interesting. I'll probably pick it up. If this was a Slashvertisement, well, it worked.
European microbots play nanofutbol. Different game.
But the real issue is that you should have researched Linux compatibility of your hardware BEFORE buying!
This is actually harder than it seems. Take the Intel PRO Wireless 3945ABG chipset. Pretty common at the moment. There's even an OSS driver, and Hey!, the project is even supported by Intel. Sounds like it works great, right? Unfortunately, closer inspection reveals that lots of people are still doing workarounds using NDISwrapper.
The only OS that I've been able to reasonably do the pre-research with is OpenBSD. This is probably because there's ONE OpenBSD, so if they say it works, it probably does on your actual install.
Oh, I totally agree with you. But if my peers (programmers) are any indication of the state of the average programmer, well, it ain't happening anytime soon. Not that I'm a fabulous programmer myself, but I do consider myself _interested_ in programming, and I try to learn from my mistakes. I can't say the same for some other people around here.
I think the real problem with Haskell is that you're required to use your brain to make any use of it. I.e., you have to be one of those people who, upon opening a Knuth book, goes "Wow!" If you were a mediocre CS student, or you have no formal CS or mathematics training, Haskell is going to be very hard for you to wrap your head around.
I feel your pain. I think that the long variable name convention, while expressive, ends up being harder to work with, and as a result, makes code harder to maintain in the end.
Fortunately, I don't work with languages where that kind of convention is required, so I just don't do it. Even member variables of moderate length I have a tendency to make references to. Actually, in general, I've found that judicious use of typedefs and also appropriate modularization (with short local variable names) helps with this a bunch, too.
K&R style, maybe. But it's still useful to have your code wrap to some consistent length-- there's nothing worse than reading someone else's shitty 200-column-wide code in a terminal. There are LOTS of terminals still in use. Not to mention (I don't remember where I heard this-- Oualline's book?), if you can't fit a function call in 80 columns, you might want to rethink about what you're doing. There's probably a better, simpler way.
But style aside, the content of the book is classic, especially when you start getting into systems programming. These guys had the logical structure of a good computer system worked out a long time ago! Considering that the UNIX C API was basically the first draft of POSIX, reading this book is a must if you ever want to play with the low-level (aka, fun) parts of your operating system. This book almost never leaves my desk, even though I do most of my work in Perl and PHP nowadays.
I love C because it is a sparse programming language that is very expressive, mainly due to pointers. That has a big influence on my code in other languages, for better or worse. But I find C to be very readable, and I try to do the same for other programs. A lot of "modern" languages just look like barf to me, but I'm probably biased.
(Disclaimer: my brother works for NIST, in this department, although he did not participate in this investigation)
Apparently you missed the part about not knowing how naive you are until you aren't anymore. Have you even ever taken a philosophy class?
Maybe you're just trying to feel better about your own shitty life, whatever, but here's a piece of unsolicited advice: belittling people in a public forum makes you look like an asshole, not funny or cool.
Well, in defense of people who use "brain dead reasoning", it's very hard to know how naive you are until you aren't naive anymore. When I got my first bachelor's degree, in philosophy, I thought I understood this well. But when I went back to school to become a scientist, I found out, well, I was completely naive. Things that seemed obvious and logical to me really were not at all logical once I had some training in mathematics. And the math I'm talking about-- calculus, statistics, set theory-- that's all pretty basic stuff for scientists and engineers. But for a layperson? Waaay over their heads. Take the Monty Hall problem. The solution is completely counterintuitive, but the problem is so damned simple. This is why people like my contractor friend thinks us academic types are so full of shit. Most people have no idea how hard it is to actually _prove_ something.
Not to mention, there are some very large NATs out there. IPs are not in 1:1 correspondence with real machines.
May be iffy. I can get Parallels Desktop (v3) for Mac to work with SecuROM discs but not Parallels Workstation (v2) for Linux. I can't speak for other VM environments.
Is that, even with the chief maintainer gone, not all is lost. Now, I don't know what the present status of support or development is, but if it's working for you, why stop using it? It's not like the software is imbued with evil now that its namesake is in jail. Plenty of people worked on ReiserFS-- Hans Reiser employed many programmers-- and presumably, those people will still be out there working on it in some capacity.
The name, of course, is an unpleasant reminder of Hans Reiser's disturbing actions, but good software speaks for itself, as you yourself have found.