You went beyond critical and went to ad hominems; that makes the question legitimate.
No, that was someone else. People act as if personality doesn't matter, but the reality is it does. Whether his ideas are great are not is really beside the point. Having great ideas means nothing if you can't convince others they're great ideas. Being a blow-hard makes that a bit tougher. Pointing out how this guy has gone about advocacy for his own product is extremely relevant to the conversation. Something that's really not relevant would be something like how he cheated on his wife, or is a huge Barbara Streisand fan (both of which I just made up). In short, leadership matters. Second, his criticism really is valid: C++ and Java are objectively bad designs
Compared to what? Compared to what's actually produced good solutions, they're great designs. Compared to some ideal of perfection.. well everything is a bad design in that case. All designs are flawed, including this guys designs. Pointing that out isn't terribly interesting. Making it your main driving point is beyond stupid. Knocking a technology based on their flaws misses the point. It's like saying "cement technology sucks rocks because it's so damn heavy and you can't build airplanes out of it!" but ignore the fact that cement works quite well for the past couple thousands years in building construction.
Third, technically, what he has developed to replace them does measure up; it is certainly quite a bit better.
Too often people think that their ideas should just stand on their own, in a vacuum where everyone judges them on some idealized matrix that the technology creator came up with. Where the actions of the community at large aren't a major factor in the success or failure of a technology. If you really think Go, or Plan 9, or whatever is so much greater than the alternatives, then you need to convince others of that. If it really solves peoples problems, people will start using it. If you REALLY believe in Go, you should try to shut this guy up, because he does a disservice to the technology. He's nothing but a boat anchor that can actively drive people away from it.
The point being, why should I pay attention to someone with a poor track record for creating anything interesting? I really know nothing if Go is the end-all-be-all of super coolness in some pure technological way. But you know what? It doesn't matter. Technology is never really about the technology, it's about people. Until now, I've really heard nothing bad about Go except that nobody really uses it. Now that the blow-hard has started a fire-storm, I get a lot of negative opinions about it from people who like Java or C++.
It's the same argument used against putting GMO labels on food. If it's something the consumer wants to know about, even if misguided, who are we to tell them "it's not important". Yes it can be used to spread FUD and yes it has adverse effects, but in general giving the consumer more information about a product is a good thing for the market.
Only if the information is not misleading, or misrepresenting the facts. In this case it seems very clear to me that putting labels on cell phones that tell people the emissions levels of the phone is extremely misleading. It conveys the idea that radio emissions are somehow harmful, which they aren't. Consumers in general are very poorly informed, and DON'T know anything about the actual studies which have shown no even correlation between cell phones and disease. So this idea that's out their that people can "make their own decision!" is just plain wrong, since the vast vast majority of consumers don't have the required knowledge or background to start making those informed decisions.
Remember, information and labels exist in a context, not an information vacuum. How many products tell you about how they have "more fiber" or "less sodium" or simply the required nutrition labels? All those labels are regulated by the FDA and have to have some scientific backing for health effects. The point being, people have come to expect that labeling the product itself has backing, ESPECIALLY if it's a government mandate like in SF.
There's really no science behind it at all. This isn't about science, it's about ignorance and fear. It's nothing new, really.
In a very real sense all these crazy "OMG CELL PHONES! POWER LINES! VACCINE!" hysterics reflects the high rate of change in our society and peoples inability to keep up with it all. The average person has NO idea what the electro-magnetic spectrum is or about the nature of knowledge. The cliche's tossed about are along the lines of "well.. they just don't know everything about these things! What if it turns out the thing DOES cause cancer! Better safe than sorry!" and then pull some random fact like how nobody knew smoking was bad for you 100 years ago (which isn't exactly true).
That's maybe a better attitude than we used to have that "oh it's all perfectly safe, that asbestos, agent orange, and DDT won't hurt anyone!", but not by much. People are very very bad at understanding the everyday risks around them and at understanding the nature of knowledge and the nature of scientific inquiry.
Just out of curiosity: what have you accomplished?
So the only people that can be critical of anyone are people that have some big publicly recognized accomplishments? That's a pretty small list.
Face it, the guy goes out of his was to be a blow-hard. Being a blow-hard might be acceptable to many if you've also done some incredible thing to earn respect. But in reality, he really hasn't. UTF-8? Plan 9? Not really terribly important contributions. More than I've done.. but then I'm not a giant blow-hard trying to malign myself against some of the most successful technologies, in favor of MY personally invented technologies (that later really went nowhere).
The point the GP was trying to make wasn't "I'm great, this guy sucks". But merely "This guy thinks he's better and smarter than everyone else... but his actual accomplishments in what HE'S developed to replace those technologies in no way measure up the his fanatical criticism of them"
He sounds like he's a bright guy, with some very deep personality flaws that've held him back.
Looking though his quotes and the article it's quite obvious that he seems to think the way to build something new and great is to malign yourself against "the enemy technology" (i.e. C++, Java, UNIX, X-Windows, Object oriented, etc). At first I thought he was just a dumb kid, or maybe just an immature adult that might learn some day. At 54 he sounds like he's just a fool who can't see.
Defining yourself as not something else never works. It's just so incredibly limiting that you wind up painted in a corner with no wiggle room because you're Oh so afraid you might be The Bad Guy (Those big bad C++ writing, Java loving, Unix using, X-windows creating, OO programmers!)
The hurricane lantern effect is an interesting read. The story involves the master trying to teach the student by the student merely imitating the actions of the master. This is where the problem lies. GOOD teachers teach people WHY they do things the way they do them, not simply to just do it that way and get off my lawn. This particular story maybe there's not enough time to actually do that, but that's not really the point here, is it?
The point being, imitation merely leads to poor understanding and rigidity in thought and action. While I do think the "distinguished engineer" in question here is really quite naive in his approach, progress is usually made by people once considered naive fools. I don't know much about Go, so I can't really tell you if it's the "new hotness" or it's just another Forth.
I'm a Java developer, though I have nothing against C++ and think it's a great language. Attacking language X in favor of Go really does zero for me.
No, what he should be doing if he really wants to promote Go is MAKE IT LIVE.
You'd think someone who advocates for a language called Go would understand the concept, since that's one of the basic tenants of the game Go. I've often seen parallels in technology with the game of Go which is primarily about creating something and making it survive, in contrast to Chess, a game about destroying your opponent.
If Go is going to... uh, go anywhere, the developers of it need to make it useful. Useful things survive, useless things die. Going after this language or that doesn't make Go useful in any way. Most people are attracted to things that make their life easier, not to some dumb religious war against one thing or another.
Exactly. This is yet another reason why crowdsourcing both can't scale, and isn't sustainable. The people who dismiss this as just "the market at work" and an inevitable turn in the market aren't thinking it through well enough and considering all parties interests. It may work great in 10% unemployment for a few companies, but how can it go anywhere beyond that?
In other words, it's an industry bitching about the internet killing their business model. Yawn.
I think it's a bit more than that. When any idiot with a copy of photoshop can submit a design, how difficult of a task does it become to wade through all the garbage? Lets say it works, and you get some great design from JimJohnson48. You love the design, give Jim his 40K. A year goes by and you want a similar design for a different product. JimJohnson48 got a job and signed a non-compete clause. So now you're back at square one and still need a talented designer that can do work at least similar to JimJohnson48. So you have to have another contest?
Unless the needs are very short, or they want something radically different, most businesses like working with people or a company for the long-term. They don't want to constantly go out and find new talent.
So in short, I think "crowdsourcing" is an interesting solution with a limited market.
Didn't think we would start running behind on the Americans with our liberal drugs laws, then again the Christian democrats have been in government for quite a while.
America is a big place. California is actually so big in itself it really becomes at least a region of its own. Over the years I've come to realize that many (most?) Europeans don't really appreciate just how big and diverse the United States is. The analogy is far from perfect, but I'd say the differences of opinion within the US is somewhere on the same scale of the differences of opinion inside Europe. As an example, most Americans wouldn't think anything of driving 4 hours in a car somewhere on a relatively regular basis. In many states you can drive 4 hours and are still in the same state! In Europe, you can drive 4 hours and you've crossed 2 borders and driven in 3 countries.
The point being, while MJ laws are by and large becoming more liberal in a few states, the rest of the states are still a long ways away. The current economic crisis may change that a little, but this isn't a major change across the entire US just yet.
I don't know, man, it's a slippery slope here. A second seat is a resource just like added fuel is a resource; if a plane full of 105 pounders costs 75% as much as a plan full of 200 pounders
Except it doesn't. The airplane itself takes up the vast majority of the weight. You're also ignoring the costs of the crew, aircraft maintenance, airport fees, advertising, and everything else it takes to run an airline. Assuming that passenger weight is the primary driving force behind cost is demonstratively false with only a few minutes of thought.
Your analogy flies flat on its face because airlines sell seats on flights, not weight. If I weight 175, and you weight 100, we both take up 1 seat on the airplane, not 1.75 and 1. My additional weight burns up a little more fuel than you, but because the aircraft weighs so much, it's nowhere near 1.75 times.
Seats on an airline are NOTHING like buying a 2x4 at Home Despot. For one thing, airline seats vary in price based on when you buy the ticket. Airlines figured out long ago that people are willing to pay different prices based upon how urgent their need to travel is. Is that "fair"? Probably not. But it also has NOTHING to do with how commodities like a 2x4 are sold and priced.
The point being, charging based on someones weight would both be extremely stupid because it has little to do with costs, and simply a bad business decision for the airlines. Whether it's "discriminatory" I really couldn't say, but I will say it'd be a stupid thing to do.
What the article actually talks about is mostly things like smoking, diet, and increased lifespan increasing cancer rates. All of those are more present in industrial nations than they are in non-industrial nations. Two of those are directly under peoples control, and have been known for quite some time. It really shouldn't be surprising cancer rates are going up, since smoking has been on the rise in developing nations for many years. Cancer has a 20-30 year lag with smoking, so we should be starting to see the increased lung cancer now from the rise in smoking.
Heh. Most games are lighting merely because they play a lot of games because of the short length of a game.
Most PEOPLE are actually NOT playing lightning games, and most games in progress are not lightning games. The percentage of people playing lighting games would tell you a hell of a lot more about the popularity of lighting games than the number of games.
I hope you are reading all of those tapes on a 5 year cycle, and writing new ones with the recovered data. I also hope you are making sure that the humidity and temperature are strictly controlled at all times in the tape storage room.
Not everyone has the same standards as to data retention. Believe it or not, some people actually couldn't care less if a 6 year old version of a document they last touched 5 years ago can't be recovered!
In my experience, this kind of extreme level of data retention has more to do with the tendency of IT folks to think they can create "the perfect system" than it has to do with actual business requirements. Sometimes laws and auditing come into play, but even that is partially influenced by the IT perfection syndrome.
Why did "we squander so much money by not thinking this way until now"? Because "we" are savages/infants who refuse to retain experience.
Or.. maybe because when a resource expands at exponential rates it's cheaper to just get more resources than try to conserve resources.
The article seeks to vastly over simplify a complex problem. Spitting out figures like 90% and then going down the road of making a huge number of hidden assumptions about the rest of the unanswered questions is just as stupid as not remembering the past.
People always bitch that they have to pay for Microsoft (or whatver) Office's features because they only use 5% of its functionality. But you buy all those features at once because you don't know which you will need in the future.
Heh. Individuals use about 5% of Office's features. 80% (as a group) use 20% of offices features. 50% of Offices features are never or rarely used by anyone, and exist solely as marketing and justification to buy the thing again. (Numbers all made up on the spot to illustrate a point).
MS Office reached "good enough" status about 10 years ago. The additional crap they've packed in over the last 10 years is simply gold plating and whiz-bang marketing to get enough people to buy the product again so everyone else has to buy the product again when MS changes the file format to be incompatible with the previous version. But what is really wanted is a way to cluster the database servers, with old data automatically cycled to the slowest, most remote nodes, and with the most frequently-altered data heavily replicated and aggressively synchronized.
Maybe. There's still a lot of cost considerations, since that's what this is ultimately about. Is it cheaper to implement this relatively complex strategy than it is to just buy more fast storage? Does the long term maintenance of a more complicated solution east up any savings in cheaper storage? Does past history of usage indicate future data access?
No matter how hard you protest, you will never get to every idiot out there.
You seem to misunderstand both the nature of boycotts, and business.
Business makes decisions almost purely on money. Boycotts are an attempt to cost the company money. Even losing 10% market share is a significant revenue hit to a company. So no, you don't need anywhere even near every idiot out there. You don't even need > 50%. You just need enough percentage for the leaders of the business to decide it's cheaper to just give in to the boycott.
Yes.. and one of the better ways to learn something is through someone that already knows it. Books can help, but having access to a real person in a environment that's geared towards that is helpful. This isn't about fear, it's about humility.
I couldn't agree more. Database design isn't something you should learn from a book. You CAN of course, and it might work out, but you'd be much smarter to just take a class.
Let me put it this way. Programming is really mostly about data structures. Database structure tends to live for DECADES. Screw up the initial design, and you'll be hurting the business for decades to come. This isn't something to be taken lightly. A good DB design can pay off huge returns in the future when you have to add feature X. A bad design can be extremely expensive when you either can't implement whatever the new feature they want is, or to do so would be so difficult and compromise so much of the design and capabilities as to be useless.
This is something worthy of debate, sure. But, this concerns me less than what was implied via the headline.
Huh? What's implied by the headline "TSA Internally Blocking Websites With 'Controversial Opinions'"? Looking through the discussion, it seems you're essentially manufacturing this confusion, since nobody is actually confused by the headline.
Which would be great - except that the people preparing the newspaper want to prepare a newspaper. They don't want to go to all the time and trouble of preparing a newspaper and on top of that meeting with developers to discuss changes to their toolchain, figuring out how their workflow has changed this week versus last week and figure out how they're going to make a profit now they've had to hire extra help to get the damn thing out.
Uhh.. obviously this newspaper did much of what you're describing, minus meeting with a developer. So it seems to me that for whatever reason, they're motivated to do exactly what you're describing.
Believe it or not, people that are reliant on a set of tools are generally VERY interested in making those tools work for them, not the other way around. Proprietary software exists to re-invent itself constantly and force you to re-buy the thing every few years. If you think proprietary software doesn't have its own flaws, you haven't used much proprietary software. when did you last see someone get really excited about a hammer?
Maybe a carpenter? I'm sure as hell not going to get excited about a hammer as I'm not a carpenter, I'm a software developer. I'd say most people involved in creating things are very interested in their tools and making them work as well as possible.
These guys have been using their proprietary software for decades, they're used to every single button. Then they switch over to radicaly different software interface (hi Gimp!) for a single day... of course they're way less efficient.
I had the same thought. After a bit more thought I concluded that the fact that they COULD do this (even if it took more effort) for just a single day is really a huge win for OSS. Think about what they had to do for a minute:
Get everyone on board (18 newspapers!) enough for the idea to fly. Get enough people trained for it to work. Get enough infra-structure in place for it to work. Actually have it work without some unforeseen difficulties.
If they can get through all that and the worst complaint is "we weren't as efficient with a system we used for a day compared to one we used for years", then that's an enormous accomplishment. The fact that the newspaper even went and tried to do this speaks volumes about how they must be dissatisfied with the proprietary solutions. This is a series of regular printed newspapers, not a nerd tech journal. The front page stories are about Navy Wives and parades. Not the kind of people you normally think of when you think of OSS advocates.
In other words, our desire for things cheap and shiny has made us vulnerable yet again. Its the lead-paint-on-toys problem, but this time the victims are not children.
Who are the victims? People giving presentations? And they're victims to people being jackasses?
Sorry, I just don't see that as comparable to children (or anyone) being poisoned by lead. Security is always about risk. There's a million ways to be a dumb ass during a presentation, be it the tv b gone or something about equally as childish but low-tech as a whoopee cushion.
The exploit is interesting, and a good hack. It's not particularly a large problem that ranks up their as one of the security problems of our times however. For the amount of work required to build one of these things and the minor amount of annoyance possible from it, I find it hard to blame the designers for not making this more secure.
Your referenced article talks about mg/kilogram in the fish, which is parts per million. The article doesn't reference any concentration of arsenic. Where does your quoted figure of ppb come from?
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You went beyond critical and went to ad hominems; that makes the question legitimate.
No, that was someone else. People act as if personality doesn't matter, but the reality is it does. Whether his ideas are great are not is really beside the point. Having great ideas means nothing if you can't convince others they're great ideas. Being a blow-hard makes that a bit tougher. Pointing out how this guy has gone about advocacy for his own product is extremely relevant to the conversation. Something that's really not relevant would be something like how he cheated on his wife, or is a huge Barbara Streisand fan (both of which I just made up). In short, leadership matters.
Second, his criticism really is valid: C++ and Java are objectively bad designs
Compared to what? Compared to what's actually produced good solutions, they're great designs. Compared to some ideal of perfection.. well everything is a bad design in that case. All designs are flawed, including this guys designs. Pointing that out isn't terribly interesting. Making it your main driving point is beyond stupid. Knocking a technology based on their flaws misses the point. It's like saying "cement technology sucks rocks because it's so damn heavy and you can't build airplanes out of it!" but ignore the fact that cement works quite well for the past couple thousands years in building construction.
Third, technically, what he has developed to replace them does measure up; it is certainly quite a bit better.
Too often people think that their ideas should just stand on their own, in a vacuum where everyone judges them on some idealized matrix that the technology creator came up with. Where the actions of the community at large aren't a major factor in the success or failure of a technology. If you really think Go, or Plan 9, or whatever is so much greater than the alternatives, then you need to convince others of that. If it really solves peoples problems, people will start using it. If you REALLY believe in Go, you should try to shut this guy up, because he does a disservice to the technology. He's nothing but a boat anchor that can actively drive people away from it.
The point being, why should I pay attention to someone with a poor track record for creating anything interesting? I really know nothing if Go is the end-all-be-all of super coolness in some pure technological way. But you know what? It doesn't matter. Technology is never really about the technology, it's about people. Until now, I've really heard nothing bad about Go except that nobody really uses it. Now that the blow-hard has started a fire-storm, I get a lot of negative opinions about it from people who like Java or C++.
It's the same argument used against putting GMO labels on food. If it's something the consumer wants to know about, even if misguided, who are we to tell them "it's not important". Yes it can be used to spread FUD and yes it has adverse effects, but in general giving the consumer more information about a product is a good thing for the market.
Only if the information is not misleading, or misrepresenting the facts. In this case it seems very clear to me that putting labels on cell phones that tell people the emissions levels of the phone is extremely misleading. It conveys the idea that radio emissions are somehow harmful, which they aren't. Consumers in general are very poorly informed, and DON'T know anything about the actual studies which have shown no even correlation between cell phones and disease. So this idea that's out their that people can "make their own decision!" is just plain wrong, since the vast vast majority of consumers don't have the required knowledge or background to start making those informed decisions.
Remember, information and labels exist in a context, not an information vacuum. How many products tell you about how they have "more fiber" or "less sodium" or simply the required nutrition labels? All those labels are regulated by the FDA and have to have some scientific backing for health effects. The point being, people have come to expect that labeling the product itself has backing, ESPECIALLY if it's a government mandate like in SF.
There's really no science behind it at all. This isn't about science, it's about ignorance and fear. It's nothing new, really.
In a very real sense all these crazy "OMG CELL PHONES! POWER LINES! VACCINE!" hysterics reflects the high rate of change in our society and peoples inability to keep up with it all. The average person has NO idea what the electro-magnetic spectrum is or about the nature of knowledge. The cliche's tossed about are along the lines of "well.. they just don't know everything about these things! What if it turns out the thing DOES cause cancer! Better safe than sorry!" and then pull some random fact like how nobody knew smoking was bad for you 100 years ago (which isn't exactly true).
That's maybe a better attitude than we used to have that "oh it's all perfectly safe, that asbestos, agent orange, and DDT won't hurt anyone!", but not by much. People are very very bad at understanding the everyday risks around them and at understanding the nature of knowledge and the nature of scientific inquiry.
Just out of curiosity: what have you accomplished?
So the only people that can be critical of anyone are people that have some big publicly recognized accomplishments? That's a pretty small list.
Face it, the guy goes out of his was to be a blow-hard. Being a blow-hard might be acceptable to many if you've also done some incredible thing to earn respect. But in reality, he really hasn't. UTF-8? Plan 9? Not really terribly important contributions. More than I've done.. but then I'm not a giant blow-hard trying to malign myself against some of the most successful technologies, in favor of MY personally invented technologies (that later really went nowhere).
The point the GP was trying to make wasn't "I'm great, this guy sucks". But merely "This guy thinks he's better and smarter than everyone else... but his actual accomplishments in what HE'S developed to replace those technologies in no way measure up the his fanatical criticism of them"
He sounds like he's a bright guy, with some very deep personality flaws that've held him back.
Looking though his quotes and the article it's quite obvious that he seems to think the way to build something new and great is to malign yourself against "the enemy technology" (i.e. C++, Java, UNIX, X-Windows, Object oriented, etc). At first I thought he was just a dumb kid, or maybe just an immature adult that might learn some day. At 54 he sounds like he's just a fool who can't see.
Defining yourself as not something else never works. It's just so incredibly limiting that you wind up painted in a corner with no wiggle room because you're Oh so afraid you might be The Bad Guy (Those big bad C++ writing, Java loving, Unix using, X-windows creating, OO programmers!)
The hurricane lantern effect is an interesting read. The story involves the master trying to teach the student by the student merely imitating the actions of the master. This is where the problem lies. GOOD teachers teach people WHY they do things the way they do them, not simply to just do it that way and get off my lawn. This particular story maybe there's not enough time to actually do that, but that's not really the point here, is it?
The point being, imitation merely leads to poor understanding and rigidity in thought and action. While I do think the "distinguished engineer" in question here is really quite naive in his approach, progress is usually made by people once considered naive fools. I don't know much about Go, so I can't really tell you if it's the "new hotness" or it's just another Forth.
I'm a Java developer, though I have nothing against C++ and think it's a great language. Attacking language X in favor of Go really does zero for me.
No, what he should be doing if he really wants to promote Go is MAKE IT LIVE.
You'd think someone who advocates for a language called Go would understand the concept, since that's one of the basic tenants of the game Go. I've often seen parallels in technology with the game of Go which is primarily about creating something and making it survive, in contrast to Chess, a game about destroying your opponent.
If Go is going to... uh, go anywhere, the developers of it need to make it useful. Useful things survive, useless things die. Going after this language or that doesn't make Go useful in any way. Most people are attracted to things that make their life easier, not to some dumb religious war against one thing or another.
Exactly. This is yet another reason why crowdsourcing both can't scale, and isn't sustainable. The people who dismiss this as just "the market at work" and an inevitable turn in the market aren't thinking it through well enough and considering all parties interests. It may work great in 10% unemployment for a few companies, but how can it go anywhere beyond that?
In other words, it's an industry bitching about the internet killing their business model. Yawn.
I think it's a bit more than that. When any idiot with a copy of photoshop can submit a design, how difficult of a task does it become to wade through all the garbage? Lets say it works, and you get some great design from JimJohnson48. You love the design, give Jim his 40K. A year goes by and you want a similar design for a different product. JimJohnson48 got a job and signed a non-compete clause. So now you're back at square one and still need a talented designer that can do work at least similar to JimJohnson48. So you have to have another contest?
Unless the needs are very short, or they want something radically different, most businesses like working with people or a company for the long-term. They don't want to constantly go out and find new talent.
So in short, I think "crowdsourcing" is an interesting solution with a limited market.
Didn't think we would start running behind on the Americans with our liberal drugs laws, then again the Christian democrats have been in government for quite a while.
America is a big place. California is actually so big in itself it really becomes at least a region of its own. Over the years I've come to realize that many (most?) Europeans don't really appreciate just how big and diverse the United States is. The analogy is far from perfect, but I'd say the differences of opinion within the US is somewhere on the same scale of the differences of opinion inside Europe. As an example, most Americans wouldn't think anything of driving 4 hours in a car somewhere on a relatively regular basis. In many states you can drive 4 hours and are still in the same state! In Europe, you can drive 4 hours and you've crossed 2 borders and driven in 3 countries.
The point being, while MJ laws are by and large becoming more liberal in a few states, the rest of the states are still a long ways away. The current economic crisis may change that a little, but this isn't a major change across the entire US just yet.
I don't know, man, it's a slippery slope here. A second seat is a resource just like added fuel is a resource; if a plane full of 105 pounders costs 75% as much as a plan full of 200 pounders
Except it doesn't. The airplane itself takes up the vast majority of the weight. You're also ignoring the costs of the crew, aircraft maintenance, airport fees, advertising, and everything else it takes to run an airline. Assuming that passenger weight is the primary driving force behind cost is demonstratively false with only a few minutes of thought.
Your analogy flies flat on its face because airlines sell seats on flights, not weight. If I weight 175, and you weight 100, we both take up 1 seat on the airplane, not 1.75 and 1. My additional weight burns up a little more fuel than you, but because the aircraft weighs so much, it's nowhere near 1.75 times.
Seats on an airline are NOTHING like buying a 2x4 at Home Despot. For one thing, airline seats vary in price based on when you buy the ticket. Airlines figured out long ago that people are willing to pay different prices based upon how urgent their need to travel is. Is that "fair"? Probably not. But it also has NOTHING to do with how commodities like a 2x4 are sold and priced.
The point being, charging based on someones weight would both be extremely stupid because it has little to do with costs, and simply a bad business decision for the airlines. Whether it's "discriminatory" I really couldn't say, but I will say it'd be a stupid thing to do.
What the article actually talks about is mostly things like smoking, diet, and increased lifespan increasing cancer rates. All of those are more present in industrial nations than they are in non-industrial nations. Two of those are directly under peoples control, and have been known for quite some time. It really shouldn't be surprising cancer rates are going up, since smoking has been on the rise in developing nations for many years. Cancer has a 20-30 year lag with smoking, so we should be starting to see the increased lung cancer now from the rise in smoking.
Heh. Most games are lighting merely because they play a lot of games because of the short length of a game.
Most PEOPLE are actually NOT playing lightning games, and most games in progress are not lightning games. The percentage of people playing lighting games would tell you a hell of a lot more about the popularity of lighting games than the number of games.
I hope you are reading all of those tapes on a 5 year cycle, and writing new ones with the recovered data. I also hope you are making sure that the humidity and temperature are strictly controlled at all times in the tape storage room.
Not everyone has the same standards as to data retention. Believe it or not, some people actually couldn't care less if a 6 year old version of a document they last touched 5 years ago can't be recovered!
In my experience, this kind of extreme level of data retention has more to do with the tendency of IT folks to think they can create "the perfect system" than it has to do with actual business requirements. Sometimes laws and auditing come into play, but even that is partially influenced by the IT perfection syndrome.
Why did "we squander so much money by not thinking this way until now"? Because "we" are savages/infants who refuse to retain experience.
Or.. maybe because when a resource expands at exponential rates it's cheaper to just get more resources than try to conserve resources.
The article seeks to vastly over simplify a complex problem. Spitting out figures like 90% and then going down the road of making a huge number of hidden assumptions about the rest of the unanswered questions is just as stupid as not remembering the past.
People always bitch that they have to pay for Microsoft (or whatver) Office's features because they only use 5% of its functionality. But you buy all those features at once because you don't know which you will need in the future.
Heh. Individuals use about 5% of Office's features. 80% (as a group) use 20% of offices features. 50% of Offices features are never or rarely used by anyone, and exist solely as marketing and justification to buy the thing again. (Numbers all made up on the spot to illustrate a point).
MS Office reached "good enough" status about 10 years ago. The additional crap they've packed in over the last 10 years is simply gold plating and whiz-bang marketing to get enough people to buy the product again so everyone else has to buy the product again when MS changes the file format to be incompatible with the previous version.
But what is really wanted is a way to cluster the database servers, with old data automatically cycled to the slowest, most remote nodes, and with the most frequently-altered data heavily replicated and aggressively synchronized.
Maybe. There's still a lot of cost considerations, since that's what this is ultimately about. Is it cheaper to implement this relatively complex strategy than it is to just buy more fast storage? Does the long term maintenance of a more complicated solution east up any savings in cheaper storage? Does past history of usage indicate future data access?
No matter how hard you protest, you will never get to every idiot out there.
You seem to misunderstand both the nature of boycotts, and business.
Business makes decisions almost purely on money. Boycotts are an attempt to cost the company money. Even losing 10% market share is a significant revenue hit to a company. So no, you don't need anywhere even near every idiot out there. You don't even need > 50%. You just need enough percentage for the leaders of the business to decide it's cheaper to just give in to the boycott.
Yes.. and one of the better ways to learn something is through someone that already knows it. Books can help, but having access to a real person in a environment that's geared towards that is helpful. This isn't about fear, it's about humility.
I couldn't agree more. Database design isn't something you should learn from a book. You CAN of course, and it might work out, but you'd be much smarter to just take a class.
Let me put it this way. Programming is really mostly about data structures. Database structure tends to live for DECADES. Screw up the initial design, and you'll be hurting the business for decades to come. This isn't something to be taken lightly. A good DB design can pay off huge returns in the future when you have to add feature X. A bad design can be extremely expensive when you either can't implement whatever the new feature they want is, or to do so would be so difficult and compromise so much of the design and capabilities as to be useless.
This is something worthy of debate, sure.
But, this concerns me less than what was implied via the headline.
Huh? What's implied by the headline "TSA Internally Blocking Websites With 'Controversial Opinions'"? Looking through the discussion, it seems you're essentially manufacturing this confusion, since nobody is actually confused by the headline.
Which would be great - except that the people preparing the newspaper want to prepare a newspaper. They don't want to go to all the time and trouble of preparing a newspaper and on top of that meeting with developers to discuss changes to their toolchain, figuring out how their workflow has changed this week versus last week and figure out how they're going to make a profit now they've had to hire extra help to get the damn thing out.
Uhh.. obviously this newspaper did much of what you're describing, minus meeting with a developer. So it seems to me that for whatever reason, they're motivated to do exactly what you're describing.
Believe it or not, people that are reliant on a set of tools are generally VERY interested in making those tools work for them, not the other way around. Proprietary software exists to re-invent itself constantly and force you to re-buy the thing every few years. If you think proprietary software doesn't have its own flaws, you haven't used much proprietary software.
when did you last see someone get really excited about a hammer?
Maybe a carpenter? I'm sure as hell not going to get excited about a hammer as I'm not a carpenter, I'm a software developer. I'd say most people involved in creating things are very interested in their tools and making them work as well as possible.
These guys have been using their proprietary software for decades, they're used to every single button.
Then they switch over to radicaly different software interface (hi Gimp!) for a single day... of course they're way less efficient.
I had the same thought. After a bit more thought I concluded that the fact that they COULD do this (even if it took more effort) for just a single day is really a huge win for OSS. Think about what they had to do for a minute:
Get everyone on board (18 newspapers!) enough for the idea to fly.
Get enough people trained for it to work.
Get enough infra-structure in place for it to work.
Actually have it work without some unforeseen difficulties.
If they can get through all that and the worst complaint is "we weren't as efficient with a system we used for a day compared to one we used for years", then that's an enormous accomplishment. The fact that the newspaper even went and tried to do this speaks volumes about how they must be dissatisfied with the proprietary solutions. This is a series of regular printed newspapers, not a nerd tech journal. The front page stories are about Navy Wives and parades. Not the kind of people you normally think of when you think of OSS advocates.
In other words, our desire for things cheap and shiny has made us vulnerable yet again. Its the lead-paint-on-toys problem, but this time the victims are not children.
Who are the victims? People giving presentations? And they're victims to people being jackasses?
Sorry, I just don't see that as comparable to children (or anyone) being poisoned by lead. Security is always about risk. There's a million ways to be a dumb ass during a presentation, be it the tv b gone or something about equally as childish but low-tech as a whoopee cushion.
The exploit is interesting, and a good hack. It's not particularly a large problem that ranks up their as one of the security problems of our times however. For the amount of work required to build one of these things and the minor amount of annoyance possible from it, I find it hard to blame the designers for not making this more secure.
Your referenced article talks about mg/kilogram in the fish, which is parts per million. The article doesn't reference any concentration of arsenic. Where does your quoted figure of ppb come from?