In 1914 General Joffre, commander of the French forces, refused to use the telephone...
There are numerous references to Joffre using the telephone, such as this one about the Battle of the Marne in 1914:
In contrast to these difficulties, Joffre remained in close contact with his subordinates. An advantage for the French came from their falling back on their lines of communications and their relying on the telephone. While Moltke issued no orders from September 5 to 9 and received no reports from his First and Second Army commanders from September 7 to 9, Joffre maintained contact with his army commanders via telephone (even though he preferred written messages). The French also gained very valuable information from intercepted wireless transmissions.
One can understand that written messages have an advantage over orders issued verbally since they are less likely to be confused when they are relayed or remembered. For a similar reason, email messages today have an advantage over the telephone calls.
Lenin never said it. See the discussion at Google answers.
It's puzzling why this quote is so widely circulated by non-Communists who presumably would not normally give anything else Lenin said any special credence. The quote also is obviously not true in any general sense because the capitalist countries won the Cold War and capitalism has thus far not been metaphorially hanged by anyone.
So, the quote is a fabrication, the alleged source in any case has no credibility and it is false on the face of it.
Can it be that one of capitalism's strengths is that it provokes some of its critics to use the weakest imaginable arguments against it?
The reason people use general databases is not because they think it's the ultimate in performance, it's because it's already written, already debugged, and -- most importantly -- programmer time is expensive, and hardware is cheap.
The article deals with that issue:
For the purpose of this paper, we define "dramatically outperform"
to mean at least a factor of 10 advantage on the same (or
comparable) hardware.... Although one can argue about whether a
factor of 10 is too high a fence for a new architecture to
clear, the number is clearly not a factor of 2 or 3. In the
latter case, one merely waits a year or two for the next
hardware advance or increases the hardware budget. A
factor of 10, in contrast, makes such tactics unworkable.
It then says that "The premise of this paper is that there are at least four
markets where this factor of 10 (or higher) threshold
currently exists."
The point is that there are certain markets where changing the database design and the retrieval strategies will outperform hardware upgrades. Among several examples, it mentions the data warehouse market which "is dominated by RDBMS vendors selling systems that use the traditional row-oriented architecture" and usually responds to the trade off between programmer time and hardware costs. A different architecture (column-oriented) gives a dramatic improvement.
The result is that the reason people use a general database is not "because it's already written, already debugged" but because they aren't aware of the huge benefits that thinking a little harder can bring.
we didn't worry about losing data in crashes since these were prototypes
You highlight a critical point in evaluating databases, namely, performance is not necessarily the most important consideration, even in high demand environments.
Databases also
have to recover from system crashes,
have to be backed up while running,
have to be handle both reads and writes,
have to be replicated,
have to scale, and
have to be supported.
Customized systems that are optimized for performance often sacrifice one or more of the other requirements. In a medical environment, all of these would be more important than performance regardless of high the demand was.
A typical example is using caching strategies to reduce access times. Every effort to deal with crashes and backups degrades the advantages of caching.
If you have relatively static content with a predictable growth rate then you can generally concentrate on performance to the exclusion of all other factors. When all the other factors are critical, the best way to deal with performance is through hardware. In my experience, the effort to squeeze more performance out of an application is regularly overtaken by improvements in the performance of the underlying hardware. Performance is often a problem that solves itself just by waiting.
What is the "schedule" for such work, or for taking it to a near-production state?
Could there be a class of problems that benefits from procrastination?
These would include problems that require knowing something fundamental that one does not already know. In the course of pursuing lower priority objectives, which is one hallmark of procrastination, one may encounter the critical piece of knowledge that allows tackling the main project much more efficiently. One often has a feeling when confronting this type of problem that one should tackle some other problem first, one that may appear irrelevant but includes learning something basic to the solution of the first problem.
These problems make it is hard for an observer to know when someone is procrastinating and when he is attacking a problem indirectly. It may even be hard to tell yourself whether you are goofing off by avoiding a hard problem or following a sound instinct that a direct assault will be a failure.
If we make a distinction here between procrastinating and being lazy, that is, lethargic or inactive, then for people doing research and tackling hard problems, procrastination may be a necessary phase, even a tool. What one has to look for is periods of intense activity following a period of creative procrastination although such periods of activity may be relatively brief.
One example is Richard Feynman's explanation for why he taught freshman physics. He said that brilliant insights were relatively rare and teaching a freshman course kept him focused on the fundamentals of physics between them. On the surface, a Nobel Prize winner teaching freshman looks like he is doing something easy instead of something hard.
Procrastination, as distinct from laziness, may not even be a problem to solve but something to be cultivated and refined. There could be a right way to procrastinate and a wrong way. Many of us have simply been procrastinating the wrong way all our lives and thinking the problem was procrastination itself.
2 a (1) : a remark intended to start a conversation or make a telling point
(2) : TOPIC b : a calculated move : STRATAGEM
Gambit comes from Spanish (gambito) or Italian (gambetto), where it means the act of tripping someone.
There are other words in English from chess terminology that mean something slightly different, e.g. stalemate, checkmate, and endgame. For some reason, zugzwang hasn't made the transition.
It raises the question of whether any other game has supplied English with as many words, or at least, as many words that have lost their original connection to the game. The fact chess terms have so many counterparts in life may be a reflection of the extent that chess resembles life.
never ever ever ever let someone learn perl as their first langauge
Simon Cozens makes a good case for Perl as a first language:
There's nothing about Perl that is difficult to understand if presented appropriately; the difficulty is presenting some of the concepts in an appropriate way, and that's a question about how good the teacher is, not the language
If you want the students to be able to start managing and manipulating data quickly, then Perl is a plausible way to go. Even if you want to teach the fundamentals of computer science, Perl is at least as suitable as any language to illustrate the concepts.
For students who don't go on to do CS degrees, the language they learn in high school may also be the last language they learn. For non-professional programmers, Perl is the only language they'll ever need. The same is probably equally true about Python, Tcl and other real-world languages so the question may simply be which one does the teacher know the best.
There are probably no bad languages to learn first, just bad teachers. If the teacher were bad, C would probably not be the first language you would want the students to encounter.
The evidence just isn't there currently to say why most of the dinosaur lineages died out
The evidence will probably never be conclusive. It is not the sort of question that can ever be answered with the same certainty as laboratory science where the results can be replicated.
Because new evidence could emerge at any time to support some other hypothesis, there will always be doubt as to what really happened. Given that doubt, the question of what really happened isn't even a meaningful question since the answer is fundamentally unknowable.
If there was an impact on the Yucatan Peninsula of the size indicated by the evidence, then it is reasonable to say, as the article does, that the impact "likely caused massive earthquakes and tsunamis. Dust from the impact entered the atmosphere and blocked sunlight, causing plants to die and animals to lose important sources of food. Temperatures probably cooled significantly around the globe before warming in the following centuries, wildfires on an unprecedented scale may have burned and acid rain might have poured down." If the impact occurred with those consequences, mass extinctions are a plausible outcome and it correlates with the extinction of the dinosaurs.
One could postulate that some new virus coincidentally emerged that wiped out reptiles but spared mammals. The virus would probably leave no trace and so it will never be counted as explanation. The most one can ever say is the sort of conclusion that this study reached: "The samples we found strongly support the single impact hypothesis". It is remarkable that one can say anything about what happened 65 million years ago with any degree of certainty.
The Mythical Man Month - Fred Brookes
The truth about project management. Written in 1975 and we still haven't learnt.
If you like the The Mythical Man Month, you'll love the 20th Anniversay Edition, in which Brooks candidly reports where he was wrong in the original.
He sticks with his thesis that there's no "silver bullet" to speed up software development but he admits his project planning advice has been largely superceded.
The book is still indespensable but I would add one other revision to his thesis that large projects are fundamentally different from small projects. For those of us who are only involved in small projects, it is interesting how much of what he describes applies to writing a 10-line shell script.
Speaking of combining two things inappropriately...
I think you are right that "labors to be born" is a genuine demi-entendre. "Labors to do something" is a common expression and readily confounded with another catchphrase.
At its worst, the demi-entendre reveals a profound state of confusion where one doesn't understand what one is saying. I've often thought in the past that Gilder was trying to sound intelligent rather than be intelligent.
However, in this case, it could just be bad writing or bad editing. It should serve as a reminder to us all to labour to avoid clichés.
"what kind of machine labors to be born" is presumably a mangled allusion to Yeats' poem The Second Coming, that ends with the lines:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The writer is trying to reference the poem's apocalyptic theme but his version of the image makes no sense. Mothers labour, not the thing being born.
The writer also asks, "And how soon will it, in its inevitable turn, become a dinosaur?". However, he answered this question at the beginning of the same paragraph: "...every decade a new class of computer emerges..."
He thus conflates two unrelated cycles: the cyclical nature of history implied in the poem's title and the cycle of obsolescence inherent in technology.
One can only hope his thoughts on the future of computing are not so confused.
I feel that my programming skills haven't really progressed to the next level as I had hoped
One poster suggested facetiously to try going down a level. However, there is merit in this suggestion. Try going back to something more basic than programming. Go deeper into the math, the algorithms, the machine architecture. These are the things that a CS degrees prepares you do and they should give you insights into problem solving that programming cannot.
For most programmers, progress is quantitative. The more they know, the more they can do. They may not be better programmers but they are better employees. Many of us understand that while there is no limit to how much we can learn, there is a limit to how good we can get. You may have simply reached that limit. Now, you have to settle in for a lifetime of typing code (not as bad a fate as you might think), or take a step back and revisit the fundamentals.
If you don't find inspiration there, maybe you should be looking outside the profession altogether.
You assume that business interests are a subset of national interests
I don't assume it but many countries do. Certainly the old Soviet Union did and there is reason to think that China currently does as well.
In times past, people in power in the U.S. assumed an identity between American interest and business interests. Witness U.S. President Coolidge's statement "The business of America is business" and the statement by the president of General Motors thirty years later "What's good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice versa."
This president of GM, Charles Wilson, later became Secretary of Defense. He and President Coolidge may have had their ontologies wrong but they were in a position to act as if they were true.
Business-as-war is just a metaphor, and like many metaphors, it doesn't always fit.
The business-as-war metaphor is certainly less apt for competition as practiced in free markets. However, when national governments take a hand in using competition to pursue national interests then business begins to look like war by other means.
One common example is that governments often use subsidies to lower the price of their products in order to sell more exports in the U.S. with the objective of getting U.S. dollars to strengthen their own currencies.
When governments engage in industrial espionage and ignore patent infringements to benefit their domestic industries, then the business starts to look even more like war than business.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, western nations regularly used their armies to the open up and protect markets in the Far East and Africa for their domestic industry. Wars were fought over trading rights. Some countries in the Far East may have learned a lesson from that national experience in how business is conducted.
Armies crossing international boundries may be outdated because free markets provided a cheaper and easier way of establishing a foreign presence behind an enemy's lines.
Re:Formal study vs. Hard Work
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The Expert Mind
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· Score: 1
Bush looks like a dummy, and his policies might be completely terrible, but he knows his stuff, and he has worked hard to get to where he is.
According to this article in the Washington Post from August, 2005:
The August getaway is Bush's 49th trip to his cherished ranch since taking office and the 319th day that Bush has spent, entirely or partially, in Crawford -- nearly 20 percent of his presidency to date, according to Mark Knoller, a CBS Radio reporter known for keeping better records of the president's travel than the White House itself. Weekends and holidays at Camp David or at his parents' compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, bump up the proportion of Bush's time away from Washington even further.
Until now, probably no modern president was a more famous vacationer than Ronald Reagan, who loved spending time at his ranch in Santa Barbara, Calif. According to an Associated Press count, Reagan spent all or part of 335 days in Santa Barbara over his eight-year presidency -- a total that Bush will surpass this month in Crawford with 3 1/2 years left in his second term.
Whether after all his work, hard or otherwise, he can call his presidency a success, history has yet to decide.
I'm talking about "success" as "being the best at what you want to do."
By that definition, most of us are doomed to failure since there is always someone better as what we do, usually a lot better. And depending on what you set your goals to be, they can be easy or hard to achieve, or impossible. Some people even prefer an honourable failure to an easy success. Failure itself is not a sign of lack of hard work any more than success is proof of it.
Re:Formal study vs. Hard Work
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The Expert Mind
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· Score: 1
Can you succeed without working hard? No.
The current President of the U.S. would dispute that statement. In fact, most working people, in IT or otherwise, see numerous examples around them of people rising through the ranks based on things other than hard work. Success, in the sense of getting promotions, is more often a matter of guile and craft than merit.
The flip side of the question is, will working hard guarantee success? You can see that if everyone worked hard, everyone could not succeed, there being only so many places at the top.
Working hard, as a professional strategy, might lead to a promotion in organizations that value hard work. However, in an organization where everyone works hard, you might be better off trying to distinguish yourself with guile and craft, particularly if your co-workers are a lot smarter than you as well.
Working hard as a defensive strategy is a little more plausible. I've noticed that during periods of cutbacks and layoffs, the slackers are usually the first to go.
The US and Canada joined together to defend North American from attack from the USSR and China.
On 9/11 all air traffic in the U.S. and Canada was grounded simultaneously. The next day the Prime Minister of Canada was asked by a reporter how soon flights in Canada would resume. He answered simply, "I don't know. The air space belongs to Norad."
Under joint North American defense treaties, Canadian military officers participated in the second Gulf War even though the same Prime Minister had explicitly refused to join the coalition. At the time, the U.S. ambassador to Canada observed that more Canadians participated in the war than 90% of the countries that formally supported it.
There was even a treaty signed recently that allows U.S. and Canadian forces to cross into each other's countries without any formal invitation under certain emergency conditions.
It appears that behind the public posturing about sovereignty and national identity, the defense of North America takes priority over everything. Some people will find that fact comforting and others find it alarming.
But I still think Fred Brooks's advice in The Mythical Man-Month is correct: plan to build the first version to throw away.
That advice was one of several recommendations that Brooks modified or abandoned in the 20th anniversary edition
Oversimplifying at bit, he now recommends an incremental, iterative approach to development where the design is modified by feedback from users.
He stands by his original insights that adding programmers to a project during development increases the time it takes and that there is no silver bullet to solve that problem. However, in the four new chapters added to the original edition, he acknowledges that a lot has been learned about software development in the last 20 years and as a result, it is much easier to get it right the first time.
There may be a better case for learning assembly as a first language than there is for learning any other language first if you are going to pursue a career in programming.
There's no other single place where you encounter all the fundmentals of programming and machine architecture in order to write the simplest program.
I've forgotten the syntax of assembly years ago and couldn't write anything in it today. Yet, I think it was the most valuable single course I ever took.
In fact, if you take a course in assembly and wind up hating it, you might question whether you ought to be a professional programmer all. Consider network administration.
You can't trust that your buddy won't get killed tomorrow, but you can trust the fact that your M-16 will work as advertised.
That comments reminds me of the advice Conan's father gives him about his sword at the beginning of Conan the Barbarian:
The secret of steel has always carried with it a mystery. You must learn its riddle, Conan you must learn its discipline. For no one, no one in this world can you trust, not men, not women, not beasts. This you can trust.
Later in the movie Conan gets tied to the Tree of Woe and has to be rescued by his friends, who proved more dependable than a piece of steel. Conan's nemisis Thulsa Doom might have been closer to the truth when he said:
Steel isn't strong, boy, flesh is stronger!... What is steel compared to the hand that wields it?
Thulsa Doom eventually gets decapitated by the relentless Conan, which both proves and disproves his point.
When physicists try and get some idea of the shape of spacetime they find that it "narrows to a point in the time direction" - the big bang.
That point is 14 billion years ago if you posit only 4 dimensions. If you posit more, you apparently get a more distant point.
The history of science suggests that as theories and instruments become more powerful, the realm of discovery becomes larger. As telescopes became more powerful, they discovered more and more galaxies farther away. Similarly, as microscopes became more powerful, they found new realms of tiny things. As far as I know, no new instrument or theory has revealed that reality was smaller than expected
You would therefore expect that as scientists focus new attention on time, they will discover more of it than they had previously thought was there.
At the moment, we have to measure the past indirectly by, for instance, calculating how long it would take light to travel from a distant object. As yet we have no instruments to observe or measure the distant past directly as we measure distant objects in three dimensions.
However, one can imagine some trans-dimensional substance that has been decaying since the literal beginning of time that would pin point the origin of reality with the precision that we measure the speed of light. The Big Bang itself may be an instance of that decay.
It just requires you to break out of the standard intuitions about how space and time fit together.
back in the civil war, he wasn't considered good at all. He was considered to be a miserable speaker, and had almost no influence. He was widely regarded as a joke.
In fact, Lincoln was re-elected in 1864 with 55% of the popular vote and the overwhelming support of the Union soldiers. Sherman, in his memoirs, said "Of all the men I ever met, he seemed to possess more of the elements of greatness, combined with goodness, than any other."
Although reaction to the Gettyburg Address was divided along partisan lines, The New York Times report of the event noted that it was frequently interrupted by applause and followed by "long continued applause". The Chicago Tribune wrote "The dedicatory remarks by President Lincoln will live among the annals of man."
Re:Don't they know anything about SHARING?
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On Apple vs Apple
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Its more entertaining than a dry old book written in a very dated dialect
The first Book of Kings, from which the Soloman story is taken, is a pretty good read. You can go with the one of the modern translations if Elizabethan English puts you off. It begins:
1 When King David was very old, he could not keep warm even when they put covers over him. 2 So his attendants said to him, "Let us look for a young virgin to serve the king and take care of him. She can lie beside him so that our lord the king may keep warm."
3 Then they searched throughout Israel for a beautiful girl and found Abishag, a Shunammite, and brought her to the king. 4 The girl was very beautiful; she took care of the king and waited on him, but the king had no sexual relations with her.
[1] Now king David was old and stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat.
[2] Wherefore his servants said unto him, Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin: and let her stand before the king, and let her cherish him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat.
[3] So they sought for a fair damsel throughout all the coasts of Israel, and found Abishag a Shunammite, and brought her to the king.
[4] And the damsel was very fair, and cherished the king, and ministered to him: but the king knew her not.
Slashdot Mirror
In 1914 General Joffre, commander of the French forces, refused to use the telephone...
There are numerous references to Joffre using the telephone, such as this one about the Battle of the Marne in 1914:
One can understand that written messages have an advantage over orders issued verbally since they are less likely to be confused when they are relayed or remembered. For a similar reason, email messages today have an advantage over the telephone calls.
A capitalist will sell you the rope...
Lenin never said it. See the discussion at Google answers.
It's puzzling why this quote is so widely circulated by non-Communists who presumably would not normally give anything else Lenin said any special credence. The quote also is obviously not true in any general sense because the capitalist countries won the Cold War and capitalism has thus far not been metaphorially hanged by anyone.
So, the quote is a fabrication, the alleged source in any case has no credibility and it is false on the face of it.
Can it be that one of capitalism's strengths is that it provokes some of its critics to use the weakest imaginable arguments against it?
The reason people use general databases is not because they think it's the ultimate in performance, it's because it's already written, already debugged, and -- most importantly -- programmer time is expensive, and hardware is cheap.
The article deals with that issue:
It then says that "The premise of this paper is that there are at least four markets where this factor of 10 (or higher) threshold currently exists."
The point is that there are certain markets where changing the database design and the retrieval strategies will outperform hardware upgrades. Among several examples, it mentions the data warehouse market which "is dominated by RDBMS vendors selling systems that use the traditional row-oriented architecture" and usually responds to the trade off between programmer time and hardware costs. A different architecture (column-oriented) gives a dramatic improvement.
The result is that the reason people use a general database is not "because it's already written, already debugged" but because they aren't aware of the huge benefits that thinking a little harder can bring.
we didn't worry about losing data in crashes since these were prototypes
You highlight a critical point in evaluating databases, namely, performance is not necessarily the most important consideration, even in high demand environments.
Databases also
Customized systems that are optimized for performance often sacrifice one or more of the other requirements. In a medical environment, all of these would be more important than performance regardless of high the demand was.
A typical example is using caching strategies to reduce access times. Every effort to deal with crashes and backups degrades the advantages of caching.
If you have relatively static content with a predictable growth rate then you can generally concentrate on performance to the exclusion of all other factors. When all the other factors are critical, the best way to deal with performance is through hardware. In my experience, the effort to squeeze more performance out of an application is regularly overtaken by improvements in the performance of the underlying hardware. Performance is often a problem that solves itself just by waiting.
What is the "schedule" for such work, or for taking it to a near-production state?
Could there be a class of problems that benefits from procrastination?
These would include problems that require knowing something fundamental that one does not already know. In the course of pursuing lower priority objectives, which is one hallmark of procrastination, one may encounter the critical piece of knowledge that allows tackling the main project much more efficiently. One often has a feeling when confronting this type of problem that one should tackle some other problem first, one that may appear irrelevant but includes learning something basic to the solution of the first problem.
These problems make it is hard for an observer to know when someone is procrastinating and when he is attacking a problem indirectly. It may even be hard to tell yourself whether you are goofing off by avoiding a hard problem or following a sound instinct that a direct assault will be a failure.
If we make a distinction here between procrastinating and being lazy, that is, lethargic or inactive, then for people doing research and tackling hard problems, procrastination may be a necessary phase, even a tool. What one has to look for is periods of intense activity following a period of creative procrastination although such periods of activity may be relatively brief.
One example is Richard Feynman's explanation for why he taught freshman physics. He said that brilliant insights were relatively rare and teaching a freshman course kept him focused on the fundamentals of physics between them. On the surface, a Nobel Prize winner teaching freshman looks like he is doing something easy instead of something hard.
Procrastination, as distinct from laziness, may not even be a problem to solve but something to be cultivated and refined. There could be a right way to procrastinate and a wrong way. Many of us have simply been procrastinating the wrong way all our lives and thinking the problem was procrastination itself.
It requires a material sacrifice.
Used in chess, you might be right, although even in chess it requires only the risk of a material loss, since a gambit can be declined.
Outside of chess its use is metaphorical and the dictionary definition includes:
Gambit comes from Spanish (gambito) or Italian (gambetto), where it means the act of tripping someone.
There are other words in English from chess terminology that mean something slightly different, e.g. stalemate, checkmate, and endgame. For some reason, zugzwang hasn't made the transition.
It raises the question of whether any other game has supplied English with as many words, or at least, as many words that have lost their original connection to the game. The fact chess terms have so many counterparts in life may be a reflection of the extent that chess resembles life.
never ever ever ever let someone learn perl as their first langauge
Simon Cozens makes a good case for Perl as a first language:
If you want the students to be able to start managing and manipulating data quickly, then Perl is a plausible way to go. Even if you want to teach the fundamentals of computer science, Perl is at least as suitable as any language to illustrate the concepts.
For students who don't go on to do CS degrees, the language they learn in high school may also be the last language they learn. For non-professional programmers, Perl is the only language they'll ever need. The same is probably equally true about Python, Tcl and other real-world languages so the question may simply be which one does the teacher know the best.
There are probably no bad languages to learn first, just bad teachers. If the teacher were bad, C would probably not be the first language you would want the students to encounter.
The evidence just isn't there currently to say why most of the dinosaur lineages died out
The evidence will probably never be conclusive. It is not the sort of question that can ever be answered with the same certainty as laboratory science where the results can be replicated.
Because new evidence could emerge at any time to support some other hypothesis, there will always be doubt as to what really happened. Given that doubt, the question of what really happened isn't even a meaningful question since the answer is fundamentally unknowable.
If there was an impact on the Yucatan Peninsula of the size indicated by the evidence, then it is reasonable to say, as the article does, that the impact "likely caused massive earthquakes and tsunamis. Dust from the impact entered the atmosphere and blocked sunlight, causing plants to die and animals to lose important sources of food. Temperatures probably cooled significantly around the globe before warming in the following centuries, wildfires on an unprecedented scale may have burned and acid rain might have poured down." If the impact occurred with those consequences, mass extinctions are a plausible outcome and it correlates with the extinction of the dinosaurs.
One could postulate that some new virus coincidentally emerged that wiped out reptiles but spared mammals. The virus would probably leave no trace and so it will never be counted as explanation. The most one can ever say is the sort of conclusion that this study reached: "The samples we found strongly support the single impact hypothesis". It is remarkable that one can say anything about what happened 65 million years ago with any degree of certainty.
The Mythical Man Month - Fred Brookes
The truth about project management. Written in 1975 and we still haven't learnt.
If you like the The Mythical Man Month, you'll love the 20th Anniversay Edition, in which Brooks candidly reports where he was wrong in the original.
He sticks with his thesis that there's no "silver bullet" to speed up software development but he admits his project planning advice has been largely superceded.
The book is still indespensable but I would add one other revision to his thesis that large projects are fundamentally different from small projects. For those of us who are only involved in small projects, it is interesting how much of what he describes applies to writing a 10-line shell script.
Speaking of combining two things inappropriately...
I think you are right that "labors to be born" is a genuine demi-entendre. "Labors to do something" is a common expression and readily confounded with another catchphrase.
At its worst, the demi-entendre reveals a profound state of confusion where one doesn't understand what one is saying. I've often thought in the past that Gilder was trying to sound intelligent rather than be intelligent.
However, in this case, it could just be bad writing or bad editing. It should serve as a reminder to us all to labour to avoid clichés.
"what kind of machine labors to be born" is presumably a mangled allusion to Yeats' poem The Second Coming, that ends with the lines:
The writer is trying to reference the poem's apocalyptic theme but his version of the image makes no sense. Mothers labour, not the thing being born.
The writer also asks, "And how soon will it, in its inevitable turn, become a dinosaur?". However, he answered this question at the beginning of the same paragraph: "...every decade a new class of computer emerges ..."
He thus conflates two unrelated cycles: the cyclical nature of history implied in the poem's title and the cycle of obsolescence inherent in technology.
One can only hope his thoughts on the future of computing are not so confused.
I feel that my programming skills haven't really progressed to the next level as I had hoped
One poster suggested facetiously to try going down a level. However, there is merit in this suggestion. Try going back to something more basic than programming. Go deeper into the math, the algorithms, the machine architecture. These are the things that a CS degrees prepares you do and they should give you insights into problem solving that programming cannot.
For most programmers, progress is quantitative. The more they know, the more they can do. They may not be better programmers but they are better employees. Many of us understand that while there is no limit to how much we can learn, there is a limit to how good we can get. You may have simply reached that limit. Now, you have to settle in for a lifetime of typing code (not as bad a fate as you might think), or take a step back and revisit the fundamentals.
If you don't find inspiration there, maybe you should be looking outside the profession altogether.
And later on:
-- The Quotes
You assume that business interests are a subset of national interests
I don't assume it but many countries do. Certainly the old Soviet Union did and there is reason to think that China currently does as well.
In times past, people in power in the U.S. assumed an identity between American interest and business interests. Witness U.S. President Coolidge's statement "The business of America is business" and the statement by the president of General Motors thirty years later "What's good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice versa."
This president of GM, Charles Wilson, later became Secretary of Defense. He and President Coolidge may have had their ontologies wrong but they were in a position to act as if they were true.
Business-as-war is just a metaphor, and like many metaphors, it doesn't always fit.
The business-as-war metaphor is certainly less apt for competition as practiced in free markets. However, when national governments take a hand in using competition to pursue national interests then business begins to look like war by other means.
One common example is that governments often use subsidies to lower the price of their products in order to sell more exports in the U.S. with the objective of getting U.S. dollars to strengthen their own currencies.
When governments engage in industrial espionage and ignore patent infringements to benefit their domestic industries, then the business starts to look even more like war than business.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, western nations regularly used their armies to the open up and protect markets in the Far East and Africa for their domestic industry. Wars were fought over trading rights. Some countries in the Far East may have learned a lesson from that national experience in how business is conducted.
Armies crossing international boundries may be outdated because free markets provided a cheaper and easier way of establishing a foreign presence behind an enemy's lines.
Bush looks like a dummy, and his policies might be completely terrible, but he knows his stuff, and he has worked hard to get to where he is.
According to this article in the Washington Post from August, 2005:
Whether after all his work, hard or otherwise, he can call his presidency a success, history has yet to decide.
I'm talking about "success" as "being the best at what you want to do."
By that definition, most of us are doomed to failure since there is always someone better as what we do, usually a lot better. And depending on what you set your goals to be, they can be easy or hard to achieve, or impossible. Some people even prefer an honourable failure to an easy success. Failure itself is not a sign of lack of hard work any more than success is proof of it.
Can you succeed without working hard? No.
The current President of the U.S. would dispute that statement. In fact, most working people, in IT or otherwise, see numerous examples around them of people rising through the ranks based on things other than hard work. Success, in the sense of getting promotions, is more often a matter of guile and craft than merit.
The flip side of the question is, will working hard guarantee success? You can see that if everyone worked hard, everyone could not succeed, there being only so many places at the top.
Working hard, as a professional strategy, might lead to a promotion in organizations that value hard work. However, in an organization where everyone works hard, you might be better off trying to distinguish yourself with guile and craft, particularly if your co-workers are a lot smarter than you as well.
Working hard as a defensive strategy is a little more plausible. I've noticed that during periods of cutbacks and layoffs, the slackers are usually the first to go.
A few months back (March-to-May timeframe I think) there was a front-page article...
A Math professor's students are in demand at banks
The US and Canada joined together to defend North American from attack from the USSR and China.
On 9/11 all air traffic in the U.S. and Canada was grounded simultaneously. The next day the Prime Minister of Canada was asked by a reporter how soon flights in Canada would resume. He answered simply, "I don't know. The air space belongs to Norad."
Under joint North American defense treaties, Canadian military officers participated in the second Gulf War even though the same Prime Minister had explicitly refused to join the coalition. At the time, the U.S. ambassador to Canada observed that more Canadians participated in the war than 90% of the countries that formally supported it.
There was even a treaty signed recently that allows U.S. and Canadian forces to cross into each other's countries without any formal invitation under certain emergency conditions.
It appears that behind the public posturing about sovereignty and national identity, the defense of North America takes priority over everything. Some people will find that fact comforting and others find it alarming.
But I still think Fred Brooks's advice in The Mythical Man-Month is correct: plan to build the first version to throw away.
That advice was one of several recommendations that Brooks modified or abandoned in the 20th anniversary edition
Oversimplifying at bit, he now recommends an incremental, iterative approach to development where the design is modified by feedback from users.
He stands by his original insights that adding programmers to a project during development increases the time it takes and that there is no silver bullet to solve that problem. However, in the four new chapters added to the original edition, he acknowledges that a lot has been learned about software development in the last 20 years and as a result, it is much easier to get it right the first time.
There may be a better case for learning assembly as a first language than there is for learning any other language first if you are going to pursue a career in programming.
There's no other single place where you encounter all the fundmentals of programming and machine architecture in order to write the simplest program.
I've forgotten the syntax of assembly years ago and couldn't write anything in it today. Yet, I think it was the most valuable single course I ever took.
In fact, if you take a course in assembly and wind up hating it, you might question whether you ought to be a professional programmer all. Consider network administration.
You can't trust that your buddy won't get killed tomorrow, but you can trust the fact that your M-16 will work as advertised.
That comments reminds me of the advice Conan's father gives him about his sword at the beginning of Conan the Barbarian:
Later in the movie Conan gets tied to the Tree of Woe and has to be rescued by his friends, who proved more dependable than a piece of steel. Conan's nemisis Thulsa Doom might have been closer to the truth when he said:
Thulsa Doom eventually gets decapitated by the relentless Conan, which both proves and disproves his point.
When physicists try and get some idea of the shape of spacetime they find that it "narrows to a point in the time direction" - the big bang.
That point is 14 billion years ago if you posit only 4 dimensions. If you posit more, you apparently get a more distant point.
The history of science suggests that as theories and instruments become more powerful, the realm of discovery becomes larger. As telescopes became more powerful, they discovered more and more galaxies farther away. Similarly, as microscopes became more powerful, they found new realms of tiny things. As far as I know, no new instrument or theory has revealed that reality was smaller than expected
You would therefore expect that as scientists focus new attention on time, they will discover more of it than they had previously thought was there.
At the moment, we have to measure the past indirectly by, for instance, calculating how long it would take light to travel from a distant object. As yet we have no instruments to observe or measure the distant past directly as we measure distant objects in three dimensions.
However, one can imagine some trans-dimensional substance that has been decaying since the literal beginning of time that would pin point the origin of reality with the precision that we measure the speed of light. The Big Bang itself may be an instance of that decay.
It just requires you to break out of the standard intuitions about how space and time fit together.
back in the civil war, he wasn't considered good at all. He was considered to be a miserable speaker, and had almost no influence. He was widely regarded as a joke.
In fact, Lincoln was re-elected in 1864 with 55% of the popular vote and the overwhelming support of the Union soldiers. Sherman, in his memoirs, said "Of all the men I ever met, he seemed to possess more of the elements of greatness, combined with goodness, than any other."
Although reaction to the Gettyburg Address was divided along partisan lines, The New York Times report of the event noted that it was frequently interrupted by applause and followed by "long continued applause". The Chicago Tribune wrote "The dedicatory remarks by President Lincoln will live among the annals of man."
Its more entertaining than a dry old book written in a very dated dialect
The first Book of Kings, from which the Soloman story is taken, is a pretty good read. You can go with the one of the modern translations if Elizabethan English puts you off. It begins:
Compare this passage to the King James Version:
Either way, dry it is not.