Microsoft has come out fighting in Asia, telling governments in the
region that adopting open-source software will damage their own
economies and is a "waste of money".
...
Sharp, who used to work for Red Hat before joining Microsoft, said
building open-source software is a "waste of money" and that a company
was in effect giving away its intellectual property, preventing it
from getting future benefits. "If you are compelled to give back to
the community, then you don't have the opportunity to benefit from
that knowledge," he stressed.
So MSFT is trying to have it both ways:
drinking this "milk" thing is stupid, because no one wants milk,
and it's bad for you
selling "milk" is stupid, because there's no way to make money at
it.
therefore everytime some sells milk to some else, they're both
STUPID
why doesn't everyone just drink Microsoft Cola (tm), which is good
for you, strengthens teeth, cures rheumatism, and helps our stock
price?
And Also: if you don't...you're stupid.
Economics 101 teaches "The Principle of Revealed Preference": you may not understand why people are choosing A over B, but the fact that they are means that they prefer A over B. It's darn-near tautological, but it's not actually 100% trivial. Real world observation beats ivory tower speculation 10 out of 10 times.
An acquaintance criticized spreadsheets and praised pencil and paper
forms because mathematical errors can crop up in either one, but with
paper there is a double-entry system, running totals, and review by
brains and eyeballs.
My argument is that paper is a big step backwards:
it's not FTP-able; can not make arbitrary backups
it's not mailable
one can insert arbitrary figures with out validation
line 1 (paying customers): 10
line 2 (non-paying customers): 10
line 3 (all customers; add 1+2): 400
...and yet, I understand my acquaintance's points. However, I think he
has identified a defective coding style (yes, I'm arguing that filling
in a spreadsheet is equivalent to writing a program), and that
defective spreadsheet coding styles is encouraged by the fact that
spreadsheets are a "language" that don't give the right mix of features.
I use a decently large spreadsheet to run Technical Video Rental, and I've certainly
found bugs in it, but I've noted that the bugs are denser, and harder
to find in those areas where the computation appears with more
intermediate values hidden.
I think that a more confident spreadsheet programmer tends to hide
more variables in complex cell formula; as I am not a confident
spreadsheet programmer, I've - in many places - spread formula across
multiple cells...and this has helped me figure out bugs.
This points out running totals as one example of good practice. Nothing
could be simpler in a spreadsheet, yet we almost never see it.
So: why do spreadsheet programmers not do these things?
One reason that occurs to me is that spreadsheets conflate calculation
with presentation. Intermediate values use up screen real estate, and
look ugly.
Yes, there are tools that *allow* one to separate calculation from
presentation: one could have two separate tabs, for example.
Yet these tools allow for disambiguation of calculation and
presentation in the same way that assembly programming allows for
object oriented design.
Or, to rephrase it: "Hidden steps considered harmful".
I don't even like C/C++ code that puts too much computation on a
single line: I want intermediate values that I can step through with a
debugger.
Perhaps what's needed are much higher level tools with in the
spreadsheet that let one select cells of interest on one tab, then
create a presentation tab based on these? I've got visions of cool
Mac-Aqua-like greying out of 90% of cells, while one drags and drops
the still-crisp cells around...
Another/alternate idea: it might be nice if instead of the heavyweight
tabs that most spreadsheets support, one could open zoom in on a
single presentation cell and investigate little "pocket tabs" which
might have ~10 x ~10 cells in them. The equivalent in C/C++ would be
a complex expression on one line that decomposed itself into multiple
lines with intermediate values only when you walk it with a debugger.
Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not arguing for fancy presentation
layers, or dancing pie-charts; I'm arguing for the ability to take a
huge page of calculations and tie the some of the inputs, intermediate
steps, and output to a much smaller summary page, or, conversely, I'm
arguing for the ability to take spreadsheets as they are currently
written, and expand them into a debuggable format.
This, I argue, would make spreadsheets more useful, and decrease the
number of bugs that crop up in them.
Reader's digest condensed version of the post
on
Melting Europa
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
After having contaminated Earth's Oceans, it seems that there are plans to send a probe drilling through Europa's ice sheet and explore the purported ocean below the crust. The plan seems to be to find Life there. But I wonder how long the time lag will be between the probe finding life, and a leak in the radioactive heater wiping all of it out. What next? Drill Sedna for oil?"
After we remove the irrelevant ("after having contaminated..."), the admission of insufficient research ("the plan seems to be"), the speculative and hysterical ("a leak in the radioactive heater wiping out all [ life ]"), and the lame attempt at humor ("drill Sedna"?), we're left with the following condensed version of the post:
there are plans to send a probe drilling through Europa's ice
Just out of interest, does the media in the USA
cover space news from other countries? For instance, was the launching of the European "Rosetta" probe today covered?
Instead of putting in us the burden of disproving that we ignorant provincials, look at news.google. It's the top Sci/Tech story.
Every American space enthusiast I know is quite interested in Russian, ESA, Chinese, Indian, etc. space programs.
The thing *I* most want is to be able to pay my mortgage, get a few new books every month, and keep my dogs supplied with kibble and toys.
Somewhere else on the list (high up, I suppose, but certainly not number one) is to have my code used.
If I could choose between losing my house and having to sleep under a desk in some academic department (I raise this not as hyperbole, but as an example of some more-extreme free-software behavior), or moving into some other field, I'd move into some other field.
I've got lots of other interests, and there are livings to be made in any of those fields.
Re:Oh for christ's sake
on
Singularity Sky
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
Hey, this isn't a politically correct undergraduate liberal arts school love-fest, where diversity is the first and only good, where all opinions are wonderful, except those opinions that make other people feel bad.
The fact of the matter is that different artists are better or worse at what they do, and bending over backwards to molly coddle folks who still like creampuff science fiction does a disservice to them, and to anyone else who might read a review.
I'm not exactly sorry to say that Gene Wolfe and Michael Swanwick's work is radically different (and, yes, *better*) than _Xanth 49: More Puns about Panties and Ogres_.
I, for one, thank the original reviewer for a spot-on accurate review, which not only explains what's so right about _Singularity Sky_, but attempts to educate the reading public about what's wrong with most of the pulp that's published.
If you don't want to have your tastes developed to appreciate something a bit more sophisticated, fine: but don't call down the wrath of/. on someone who's trying to help you better yourself.
There are already two language extensions, each of which is aging and getting brittle, and the solution is to add a third language extension?
Isn't this like saying "the cook at my favorite restaurant can't remember how to cook the four dozen dishes on the menu...I think the solution is to add my mom's home cooked lasagne to the offerings?"
The ironically named _Quicksilver_ is the most disappointingly leaden
book it has been my displeasure to read in recent years.
After _Cryptonomicon_ my expectations were high. Early on in
_Quicksilver_ I realized that there was no way this book could be as
good as the earlier one, so I adjusted my hopes downward
accordingly...and even then, I was disappointed.
The flaws are numerous.
The one thing that everyone knows about the book is that it contains a
frantic pile of trivia. I was actually looking forward to this aspect
of the book, given that I enjoy random learning opportunities as much
as the next geek, and given that this is one part of _Cryptonomicon_
that I was enthused about. _QS_ disappoints in this regard. To my
mind there are two main bins that trivia are sorted in to: (1) those
random items that are capable of clicking in an interesting way into
the knowledge structure I already have; and (2) utterly random
tidbits. NS delivered a few of the former, and a few truck-loads of
the latter. In so far as the trivia was interesting, I already knew
it (Germanic witch trials, etymology of the word "dollar", the broad
outlines and purposes of the various 16th century political
structures), and in so far as the trivia was not something I already
knew, I found it dreadfully boring (hail-storms of random names of
royalty, many of them playing minimal roles in the plot, etc.).
Ah. I used the word "plot", so I've segued onto the next region of
disappointment. _QS_ does not have a plot, in the conventional sense.
Sure, in a 900 page novel (or a 2,700 page novel, really), one
wouldn't expect the broad sweep of the action to be clear by page 50,
or 100...but by page 500 or so, one would hope to have an idea of
where things might be going. The book has Theme aplenty.
The Theme, however ("Things Really Changed a Whole Lot, Religiously,
Economically, Politically, and Scientifically"), is big, but too
insubstantial and too vague to construct a huge novel like this on.
_A Winter's Tale_ managed to work very well with out a real plot - it
could hang off of the Theme that "New York changes a lot, and is
magical through the ages". Then again, _A Winter's Tale_ was about
1/9th the length of Stephenson's Inflated Series.
Speaking of inflation, this book needed an editor, badly. Dialogue
and exposition are clunky in many many places. For that matter,
dialogue and exposition are poorly differentiated. There's a joke about
1950's science fiction that 3/4 of the plot and background information
are revealed in "As you know, Bob" asides. The same is true of _QS_.
There's some minor variation on a theme: there's "As you know", there
is "I need not mention the fact that X...< 1,000 words
elided >...because you already know that", and there is "as everyone in
the town knew...".
There's a persistent and pernicious meme in the art world that to
truly convey some situations you need to recreate those situations for
the audience. Thus, the only way to convey tedium is through a four
hour movie, etc. NS seemed to be held by this meme: to convey the
intellectual ferment and vast scope of the 17th century he felt the
need write a book that was adrift in a ferment and vast in scope.
Certainly he could not have conveyed these things in a novella, but
that does not mean that he could not have pruned perhaps a third of
what he wrote.
The book is large enough that there's a Dramatis Personae at the end,
which was somewhat useful...but it didn't work wonderfully well for
me, because the entries were fairly short and defined the characters
(well, historical figures) mostly in terms of descriptors and events
that did not take place inside the book. If I come across a character
who I know was present 500 pages earlier, but I'm trying to remember
whether that character was a alchemist or a merchant, it helps little
to learn that the character was a friend of the Duke of Wessex (or
what have you). This is not a huge departure from how Dramatis
Personae are usu
I like the way you quantify things, but one thing you miss: market share is determined at least partially by how early you get into the market. Thus "productLifetimeProfit" is not the same term in both equations.
One mistaken supposition is that the system is not hackable. GPS is just a system of beamed signals. There have been attacks against "hard" random number generators that use background radiation...when someone realized that they could put a radiation source next to the receiver and guarantee that all "random" bytes were MAXINT.
Similarly, this system is hackable by anyone who creates a few GPS transmitters that are broadcasting more loudly than the real sattelites (not hard to do locally). The plane above Manhattan suddenly thinks that it's in Kansas and has no problem landing in the "corn field" which is, in fact, the NY financial district.
I've got _Google Hacks_. It's pretty good: (1) lots of basic stuff, like the "site:" search term, information about the fact that google will rate search terms more heavilly if they appear multiple times in a query, the 10 word limit on queries; (2) info on the Google API; (3) a lot of perl code to do useful things.
You say that a person has a problem if he feels that he can't control your his own actions and wants help.
I think that most people who feel that they need help would agree with that - they *know* they have problems, and want to engineer (social) tools to help them achieve their longer term goals, instead of giving in to shorter term desires.
Do you think the idea of two friends going on a diet together is "sick"? How about an alcaholic who goes to AA and has a "sponsor" whom he can call if the craving for a drink gets bad?
What, exactly, is wrong with someone trying to build social structures to help them achieve their longer term goals?
You're not arguing that/. is just a crutch for open source folks, are you?;)
Do you think that the intelligence agencies are only now realizing that this is a useful idea? This article isn't about the black archives - you can assume that they've existed for years and have no such funding constraints.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what
is for.Sharp, who used to work for Red Hat before joining Microsoft, said building open-source software is a "waste of money" and that a company was in effect giving away its intellectual property, preventing it from getting future benefits. "If you are compelled to give back to the community, then you don't have the opportunity to benefit from that knowledge," he stressed.
So MSFT is trying to have it both ways:
- drinking this "milk" thing is stupid, because no one wants milk,
and it's bad for you
- selling "milk" is stupid, because there's no way to make money at
it.
- therefore everytime some sells milk to some else, they're both
STUPID
- why doesn't everyone just drink Microsoft Cola (tm), which is good
for you, strengthens teeth, cures rheumatism, and helps our stock
price?
- And Also: if you don't...you're stupid.
Economics 101 teaches "The Principle of Revealed Preference": you may not understand why people are choosing A over B, but the fact that they are means that they prefer A over B. It's darn-near tautological, but it's not actually 100% trivial. Real world observation beats ivory tower speculation 10 out of 10 times.Actually, guns prevent more deaths than they cause.
See _More Guns, Less Crime_
An acquaintance criticized spreadsheets and praised pencil and paper forms because mathematical errors can crop up in either one, but with paper there is a double-entry system, running totals, and review by brains and eyeballs.
My argument is that paper is a big step backwards:
line 2 (non-paying customers): 10
line 3 (all customers; add 1+2): 400
I use a decently large spreadsheet to run Technical Video Rental, and I've certainly found bugs in it, but I've noted that the bugs are denser, and harder to find in those areas where the computation appears with more intermediate values hidden.
I think that a more confident spreadsheet programmer tends to hide more variables in complex cell formula; as I am not a confident spreadsheet programmer, I've - in many places - spread formula across multiple cells...and this has helped me figure out bugs.
This points out running totals as one example of good practice. Nothing could be simpler in a spreadsheet, yet we almost never see it.
So: why do spreadsheet programmers not do these things?
One reason that occurs to me is that spreadsheets conflate calculation with presentation. Intermediate values use up screen real estate, and look ugly.
Yes, there are tools that *allow* one to separate calculation from presentation: one could have two separate tabs, for example.
Yet these tools allow for disambiguation of calculation and presentation in the same way that assembly programming allows for object oriented design.
Or, to rephrase it: "Hidden steps considered harmful".
I don't even like C/C++ code that puts too much computation on a single line: I want intermediate values that I can step through with a debugger.
Perhaps what's needed are much higher level tools with in the spreadsheet that let one select cells of interest on one tab, then create a presentation tab based on these? I've got visions of cool Mac-Aqua-like greying out of 90% of cells, while one drags and drops the still-crisp cells around... Another/alternate idea: it might be nice if instead of the heavyweight tabs that most spreadsheets support, one could open zoom in on a single presentation cell and investigate little "pocket tabs" which might have ~10 x ~10 cells in them. The equivalent in C/C++ would be a complex expression on one line that decomposed itself into multiple lines with intermediate values only when you walk it with a debugger.
Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not arguing for fancy presentation layers, or dancing pie-charts; I'm arguing for the ability to take a huge page of calculations and tie the some of the inputs, intermediate steps, and output to a much smaller summary page, or, conversely, I'm arguing for the ability to take spreadsheets as they are currently written, and expand them into a debuggable format.
This, I argue, would make spreadsheets more useful, and decrease the number of bugs that crop up in them.
After we remove the irrelevant ("after having contaminated..."), the admission of insufficient research ("the plan seems to be"), the speculative and hysterical ("a leak in the radioactive heater wiping out all [ life ]"), and the lame attempt at humor ("drill Sedna"?), we're left with the following condensed version of the post:
there are plans to send a probe drilling through Europa's ice
to which I respond:
"yes, that's old news".
Instead of putting in us the burden of disproving that we ignorant provincials, look at news.google. It's the top Sci/Tech story.
Every American space enthusiast I know is quite interested in Russian, ESA, Chinese, Indian, etc. space programs.
Somewhere else on the list (high up, I suppose, but certainly not number one) is to have my code used.
If I could choose between losing my house and having to sleep under a desk in some academic department (I raise this not as hyperbole, but as an example of some more-extreme free-software behavior), or moving into some other field, I'd move into some other field.
I've got lots of other interests, and there are livings to be made in any of those fields.
TJIC - technicalvideorental.com
Hey, this isn't a politically correct undergraduate liberal arts school love-fest, where diversity is the first and only good, where all opinions are wonderful, except those opinions that make other people feel bad.
/. on someone who's trying to help you better yourself.
The fact of the matter is that different artists are better or worse at what they do, and bending over backwards to molly coddle folks who still like creampuff science fiction does a disservice to them, and to anyone else who might read a review.
I'm not exactly sorry to say that Gene Wolfe and Michael Swanwick's work is radically different (and, yes, *better*) than _Xanth 49: More Puns about Panties and Ogres_.
I, for one, thank the original reviewer for a spot-on accurate review, which not only explains what's so right about _Singularity Sky_, but attempts to educate the reading public about what's wrong with most of the pulp that's published.
If you don't want to have your tastes developed to appreciate something a bit more sophisticated, fine: but don't call down the wrath of
There are already two language extensions, each of which is aging and getting brittle, and the solution is to add a third language extension?
Isn't this like saying "the cook at my favorite restaurant can't remember how to cook the four dozen dishes on the menu...I think the solution is to add my mom's home cooked lasagne to the offerings?"
After _Cryptonomicon_ my expectations were high. Early on in _Quicksilver_ I realized that there was no way this book could be as good as the earlier one, so I adjusted my hopes downward accordingly...and even then, I was disappointed.
The flaws are numerous.
The one thing that everyone knows about the book is that it contains a frantic pile of trivia. I was actually looking forward to this aspect of the book, given that I enjoy random learning opportunities as much as the next geek, and given that this is one part of _Cryptonomicon_ that I was enthused about. _QS_ disappoints in this regard. To my mind there are two main bins that trivia are sorted in to: (1) those random items that are capable of clicking in an interesting way into the knowledge structure I already have; and (2) utterly random tidbits. NS delivered a few of the former, and a few truck-loads of the latter. In so far as the trivia was interesting, I already knew it (Germanic witch trials, etymology of the word "dollar", the broad outlines and purposes of the various 16th century political structures), and in so far as the trivia was not something I already knew, I found it dreadfully boring (hail-storms of random names of royalty, many of them playing minimal roles in the plot, etc.).
Ah. I used the word "plot", so I've segued onto the next region of disappointment. _QS_ does not have a plot, in the conventional sense. Sure, in a 900 page novel (or a 2,700 page novel, really), one wouldn't expect the broad sweep of the action to be clear by page 50, or 100...but by page 500 or so, one would hope to have an idea of where things might be going. The book has Theme aplenty.
The Theme, however ("Things Really Changed a Whole Lot, Religiously, Economically, Politically, and Scientifically"), is big, but too insubstantial and too vague to construct a huge novel like this on. _A Winter's Tale_ managed to work very well with out a real plot - it could hang off of the Theme that "New York changes a lot, and is magical through the ages". Then again, _A Winter's Tale_ was about 1/9th the length of Stephenson's Inflated Series.
Speaking of inflation, this book needed an editor, badly. Dialogue and exposition are clunky in many many places. For that matter, dialogue and exposition are poorly differentiated. There's a joke about 1950's science fiction that 3/4 of the plot and background information are revealed in "As you know, Bob" asides. The same is true of _QS_. There's some minor variation on a theme: there's "As you know", there is "I need not mention the fact that X ...< 1,000 words
elided >...because you already know that", and there is "as everyone in
the town knew...".
There's a persistent and pernicious meme in the art world that to truly convey some situations you need to recreate those situations for the audience. Thus, the only way to convey tedium is through a four hour movie, etc. NS seemed to be held by this meme: to convey the intellectual ferment and vast scope of the 17th century he felt the need write a book that was adrift in a ferment and vast in scope. Certainly he could not have conveyed these things in a novella, but that does not mean that he could not have pruned perhaps a third of what he wrote.
The book is large enough that there's a Dramatis Personae at the end, which was somewhat useful...but it didn't work wonderfully well for me, because the entries were fairly short and defined the characters (well, historical figures) mostly in terms of descriptors and events that did not take place inside the book. If I come across a character who I know was present 500 pages earlier, but I'm trying to remember whether that character was a alchemist or a merchant, it helps little to learn that the character was a friend of the Duke of Wessex (or what have you). This is not a huge departure from how Dramatis Personae are usu
By this logic fire insurance is morbid.
I like the way you quantify things, but one thing you miss: market share is determined at least partially by how early you get into the market. Thus "productLifetimeProfit" is not the same term in both equations.
Even Apple has a fair degree of Quick and Dirty.
For "Done Right", check out Lisp Machines, NeXT, and other dead companies with beautiful products.
What percent of Dijkstra's career was spent in the private sector, and what percent was spent as a tenured prof?
Not *all* the cyborg parts were destroyed in T2.
Recall that Arnold's arm gets caught in a big gear and ripped off.
That arm never got dealt with.
I've been wondering for years wether that was a plot
hole or if it was going to come back in a later movie...
...of course, one way to harden the system against that is to use laser ring gyro for inertial navigation...
One mistaken supposition is that the system is not
hackable. GPS is just a system of beamed signals. There have been attacks against "hard" random number generators that use background radiation...when someone realized that they could put a radiation source next to the receiver and guarantee that all "random" bytes were MAXINT.
Similarly, this system is hackable by anyone who creates a few GPS transmitters that are broadcasting more loudly than the real sattelites (not hard to do locally). The plane above Manhattan suddenly thinks that it's in Kansas and has no problem landing in the "corn field" which is, in fact, the NY financial district.
People don't use chisels?
Shit.
Someone should of told me earlier.
I helped build a timber frame house a few weeks ago, and we were all using big chisels. Too bad we didn't think to read slashdot.
I've got _Google Hacks_. It's pretty good: (1) lots of basic stuff, like the "site:" search term, information about the fact that google will rate search terms more heavilly if they appear multiple times in a query, the 10 word limit on queries; (2) info on the Google API; (3) a lot of perl code to do useful things.
Recommended
You say that a person has a problem if he feels that he can't control your his own actions and wants help.
/. is just a crutch for open source folks, are you? ;)
I think that most people who feel that they need help would agree with that - they *know* they have problems, and want to engineer (social) tools to help them achieve their longer term goals, instead of giving in to shorter term desires.
Do you think the idea of two friends going on a diet together is "sick"? How about an alcaholic who goes to AA and has a "sponsor" whom he can call if the craving for a drink gets bad?
What, exactly, is wrong with someone trying to build social structures to help them achieve their longer term goals?
You're not arguing that
Do you think that the intelligence agencies are only
now realizing that this is a useful idea? This article isn't about the black archives - you can assume that they've existed for years and have no such funding constraints.