Tools that are simple to use are complicated to develop and enhance.
The simpler the tools are to use, the more complex the projects are that they are used to create.
In addition, simple tools become more complex over time as new features are added and they are used to solve more complex problems. Whole sub-systems are reduced to a tool, which makes the resulting systems simpler at the expense of more complex development tools.
I don't see any way to avoid complexity. It just gets moved to a different level where different developers have to deal with it.
The future of software tools could be an endless cycle of moving complexity from systems to development tools and then back again to systems.
By contrast in other projects I managed to divorce the business requirements from the actual work, and I could step back and instead of addressing the business requirements create tools and facilities that I could then use to address the business requirements.
The article appears to be saying the same thing or something similar:
As we use the current generation of tools in this context we are seeing the emergence of new roles, usage scenarios, and support needs. The lessons from this work are leading to a complete refactoring of tooling capabilities
"complete refactoring of tooling capabilities" seems to where you both agree.
The problem is that whatever he is saying is so vague and jargon-laden that it is hard to tell. When you write about "front-loading the solving of meta-problems that can speed up later work because solving the meta-problem doesn't provide any immediate advantages for the problem immediately to hand," I'm not sure you're adding a lot of clarity.
When you go on to say, "all too often the process becomes the goal and a shield against actually being judged on the end results" one could easily point out that solving meta-problems can all too often become the goal rather than being judged on the end result, which is how well the project ultimately solves the business problems.
When he writes in the auditability section, "Were the processes used to develop the software audited for quality? How were software designs analyzed and validated before they were put into production?", he seems to be addressing your concern about solving meta-problems by focusing on the components rather than the end results.
At any rate, he's supposed to be talking about "The Future of Software Tools" but mostly he talks about processes. Solving meta-problems and auditability don't meet the usual definition of a tool. They're a good thing to do regardless of what tool you're using and should have been done all along.
Re:Actually I just read this too...
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Joel On Software
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· Score: 1
If I ever tried to get a customer to write the functional specification, they would laugh at me and tell me that's my job, which it is.
In one sense, it's your job if they're willing to pay you to do it. However, the question is, who is best able to determine the client's needs, you or the client?
Having the contractor who is going to implement the project create the specs puts the contractor in a conflict of interest. If he's paid by the hour, he naturally wants as large a project as possible. In that case, the spec document becomes more like a catalogue that the client picks and chooses from. If the contractor is under cost constraints, he naturally wants as few features to implement as possible. In that case, the spec document doesn't take into account the benefits of the features to the client.
If customers understood how much of the cost and success of the project depended on the spec document, I'd expect them to want to take a lead role in its development. The fact that many clients don't has its counterpart in the fact that many IT departments start projects without specs. They're not thinking very hard about their jobs.
Re:Actually I just read this too...
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Joel On Software
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· Score: 1
You still get clients trying to "backdoor" extra features...
Sometime before the spec-writing stage, the customer should have made up a business case for the project in which he describes the revenue or cost savings from each feature of the project.
The contractor or IT department can help at the business case stage by estimating the effort needed to implement each feature so that the client can compare the cost to the benefit.
The list of features that survive the cost-benefit analysis is the basis for the specifications. If the customer wants to add extra features later on, it should be because he can cost-justify them and thus be willing to pay for them.
Similarly, contractors will try to push all sorts of bells and whistles into the project to boost the billable hours. A reference to the business case is the customer's best guide.
Re:Actually I just read this too...
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Joel On Software
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· Score: 1
I particularly appreciated his essay about how to write functional specifications, and after reading that online, I decided to go out and purchase his book.
His essay on functional specs misses the mark in a number of areas.
He starts out wrong:
Why won't people write specs? People claim that it's because they're saving time by skipping the spec-writing phase.
Nobody who's managed more than one project makes that claim twice and for most managers, the need for specs is obvious. The usual reason projects begin without specs is because the managers are lazy, incompetent or the project is so poorly defined that it is doomed to failure. The absence of specs is a symptom of a deeper problem, not a error that can be corrected simply by pointing it out.
His advice on spec writing has a number of flaws, in particular:
Pick your product's audiences and imagine a fictitious, totally imaginary but totally stereotypical user from each audience who uses the product in a totally typical way.
Imagining how a user uses the software is no substitute for actually observing how users interact with an existing system, even if it's a manual or inefficient system. The world almost always behaves differently from what you imagine and if you have direct observation, you don't need the imaginary scenarios.
I detect in this bit of advice, as well as in much of his writing, the mind of a frustrated writer who wants to use the opportunity of a specifications document to amuse the reader with his cleverness.
His advice on who should write the spec is also poorly thought out. He recommends that someone with the title of "program manager" write the functional specs. He says: "All program managers need to be very technical, but they don't have to be good coders."
The functional specs have to come from the users. A program manager may write them down but it is the users that decide the UI, the workflow and the deliverables, not the program manager. If this program manager has anything to contribute it is because of his broader experience with other systems and projects, not because of his technical expertise.
His advice on how to write a spec is generic and self-evident, e.g., "write as simply as possible", "review and reread several times". The functional specification document should be vetted and approved by the manager of the business unit that is going to use it. The objective is to make him happy with it. If he's a good manager, he'll make sure the document is usable. If he's not a good manager, it probably doesn't matter what the document says.
It is somewhat surprising that in spite of over 30 years of research in the areas of empirical studies of programmers (ESP) and human-computer interaction (HCI), the designs of new programming languages and debugging tools have generally not taken advantage of what has been discovered.
People have been programming computers in human languages for decades (possibly since the invention of the the first machine) but the language has been body language rather than spoken language.
The most obvious recent effort is the windows-icon-mouse interface that supposedly is the most intuitive way to get the computer to do something useful. However, most widely-used machines like cars and toasters use controls that work more-or-less the way people expect them to.
Body language has a smaller vocabulary than spoken language, the range of outcomes of the commands is limited, and machines gives simple and direct feedback as to whether they understand the commands.
Perhaps the researchers should think of a steering wheel, accelerator, brakes and turn signals as input devices to write programs instead of keyboards. You could write programs the way you play Grand Theft Auto.
What depresses me is that I had been pouring my heart and soul into something so ephemeral...
Make sure you learn something important or useful from every project. That way, no matter what happens to the project later on, you carry some benefit with you forever.
Sometime what you learn is only something not to do in the future or that something you were sure was true was in fact completely wrong.
One thing I've learned is don't work 60-hour weeks unless you get paid for overtime. If you do get paid for overtime, work as many 60-hour weeks as you can because there may be many 0-hour weeks in the future.
Re:Already started in 15th century!
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Exploring Antarctica
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· Score: 2, Informative
Any one care to explain how a 15th century map details the coastline of Antartica...
The modern interest in the Piri Reis map comes from its description in Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age
by, Charles H. Hapgood, which was published in 1979. Hapgood was a professor with good academic credentials and his book describes a number of 16th century maps, all assembled from earlier maps, that showed a knowledge of the globe beyond what one would have expected at the time.
As this analysis points out, Hapgood was very selective in which details of the maps he said corresponded to Antarctica, ignored the details that didn't fit and never considered other plausible explanations for the maps. In particular, cartographic theory at the time posited the existence of a large southern continent for no other reason than that it would balanced the land mass in the known world above the equator.
Even if Hapgood goes well beyond the evidence, the ancient maps still seem anomalous and suggest that there are vast gaps in our knowledge of the ancient world.
This dictum is often applied to decision-making systems with the assumption that it is self-evident. However, there are many systems where it is not true including garbage processing systems.
All input is influenced by bias (conscious or unconscious), measurement errors, sampling errors, and human frailty.
As a result, every system should test the validity of its input for consistency and completeness. There are statistical adjustments that can correct non-random data and draw conclusion within bounds of certainty of the accuracy of the input. This process accounts, in part, for why polls and surveys express their results within a margin of error.
Garbage in, garbage out applies to a garbage can, but for a garbage processing system, the rule is garbage in, composte out. One can consider Slashdot as such a system.
2 + 2 > 4 for sufficiently large values of 2 or sufficiently small values of 4
or, put another way:
a + a = 2a + b for sufficiently large values of a or small values of b
or, skipping some steps:
a = a + b for sufficiently large values of a or small values of b.
Note the similarity of a = a + b to the Mandelbrot iterative equation Z = Z^2 + C, suggesting that if the precision of a is bad or that every a is an approximation of a + b, then a straight line is a special case of the Mandelbrot set (a fractal) or, more generally, all smooth curves are an approximation of a fractal.
"2+2=5 for extremely large values of 2" is sometimes called "Fermat's next-to-last theorem" and is said to be the occasion for a duel with sabers between Tycho Brahe and Manderup Parsbjerg in 1566.
You can read about the grisly outcome here as part of the discussion "Did Tycho Brahe really have a silver nose?".
As you know, notation has helped the progress of mathematics. Consider, for
example, the limitations of the Roman number system, the importance of the
invention of a symbol for zero, etc.
Which were, in your opinion, the notations that have permitted the greatest
advances in mathematics?
Apropos to the current discussion was this response:
the interest of the question:
> Which were, in your opinion, the notations that have permitted the
> greatest advances in mathematics?
(which is very different from any question concerning the history of math.
notations) is very close to the interest of the question: who has been the
greatest mathematician in the history, e.g. near zero.
In the working world, it's ok to cheat, even desireable. You use existing libraries and modules and avoid re-inventing the wheel even when you think you can invent a better wheel. You can usually learn more from reading the code of a master than you can from figuring it out yourself. Time is money and scalping code saves time.
Cheating in the sense of using someone else's code without understanding it is the basis of higher-level languages. Most people use the print statement without knowing how it works and don't feel guilty. In professional programming, one of the hardest things to decide is when to cheat and when not to.
Knowing about various things will come in handy at some point.
They probably won't but as you get older you find that you derive the most enjoyment from the useless information you have. The pleasures of useless information are so great that you constantly have to make a difficult choice between learning things that are useful and learning things that aren't.
The possibilities are endless and you may invent the next big thing.
More realistically, you'll be lucky if you even get hired to work on the next big thing. The trick is to take every project and make it into a Big Thing. After you retire, your colleagues should say, "The guy that used to sit over there, he was one hell of a programmer."
Re:We need to keep re-inventing the browser
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Netscape Turns 10
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· Score: 1
But having a good integrated text editor for things like wikis or even this form into which I'm typing into right now makes life a lot easier for the average user.
The probem here is illustrated by the fact that there are practically no text editors in the space between Notepad and Word. Once you get past a basic set of editing features, users' requirements become both highly sophisticated and highly specialized. In fact, users' deem even sophisticated word processors insufficient. They want their word processor to be part of an integrated office suite where each component is loaded with features.
Variations of this problem affect all of the enhancements you suggest. A few of the required features is not sufficient to get people to use them for real-world problems. The argument that "it's better than nothing" doesn't seem to fly.
The solution at one time was Java applets. When they were introduced back in the days of 486s, they were bloated and slow and haven't been seen much since. However, now with lots of bandwidth, fast processors and cheap RAM, the times are propitious for their return. However, there's no sign anywhere of a resurgence of applets.
Other possible approaches include specialized plug-ins, enhancing Javascript, adding whole programming languages like Tcl or Perl or browsers designed for one specialized task like content management. The problem here is that none of them offer the range of programmings options that Java does or have the base of programmers. Thus they have all the problems of Java applets without offering a better solution.
Applets seem like the most general solution but as long as they remain ahead of their time, specialized built-in enhancements to the browser are likely to remain underpowered and ignored by the users.
Newton's phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants" was a veiled insult to Robert Hooke...
This allegation is made almost every time Newton is mentioned on Slashdot but it has no historical basis.
As this analysis points out, when Newton uses the phrase he is refering to both Descarte and Hook. The most obvious interpretation is that he is complementing Hook by comparing him to Descarte and referring to them both as giants.
Furthermore, Hook was not especially short and in other cases where Newton engaged in scientific debate he specifically avoided what he called "oblique and
glancing expressions".
There is thus every reason to suppose that when Newton said he stood on the shoulders of giants, he was acknowledging his debt to Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes and Hook, who was at the time England's most eminent scientist.
Are there any passages in the Bible describing the people satan killed?
Consider the book of Job.
And the LORD said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand. (1:12)
Satan subsequently kills most of Job's family and servants. Even here, Satan is acting with God's tacit approval, which Job understood when he responds, "the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away." (1:21).
In Biblical morality death is bad but not necessarily the greatest evil. The people God kills are sort of collateral damage. Their deaths serve a higher purpose although what that purpose might be is the real question.
Google to the rescue. In a review of the 2003 film, The Recruit:
This film is a must-see for Kurt Vonnegut fans. Vonnegut references are abound, including allusions to "Slaughterhouse Five" and "Breakfast of Champions" as well as a plot point concept (Ice-9) borrowed from "Cat's Cradle." In "The Recruit," Ice-9 isn't a crystal of ice that will freeze the world overnight. Instead, Ice-9 is a virus that will infect and disable any electrical equipment that is interconnected - which is everything.
The true pedant appreciates being corrected as much he enjoys doing the correcting. The worst are those pseudo-pedants who can dish it out but can't take it.
they also need to present their browser as having something that neither firefox nor IE have.
By virtue of its huge central storage capacity and search engine, Google can add features that no other browser easily can.
Online storage of favourites and groups
Notification when selected favourites pages or sites change
Central storage of combined favourites of communities (with notification when favourites are added)
Google alerts for communities and online storage of results
It could also, perhaps for a fee, extend blogger.com with additional security features to allow mutli-user creation and editing of documents on line. For this purpose Amaya, an open source browser to create and update documents directly on the Web, might be the browser to emulate or extend.
Google is now spidering and indexing the whole Web. With content management features added to the browser, some of the Web could simply move to Google and cut out all the spidering.
...you can use will with a subject in the first person and shall with a subject in the second or third person to express determination, promise, obligation, or permission, depending on the context. Thus I will leave tomorrow indicates that the speaker is determined to leave. You shall leave tomorrow has the ring of a command. The sentence You shall have your money expresses a promise ("I will see that you get your money"), whereas You will have your money makes a simple prediction.
Presumably, Churchill was using "will" with a subject in the first person to express determination.
The popularity of fantasy novels over sci-fi could be a product of the second industrial revolution we are undergoing.
If the Romantic poets wrote of a pre-industrial time in response to the industrial revolution, you'd expect the reaction to the "second industrial revolution we are undergoing" would be to write about the first industrial revolution.
However, the difference between this "second industrial revolution" and the original one are not nearly as striking as the transition from rural, agricultural society to urban, industrial society. I would bet most people are at best only dimly aware that there is any change at all.
In addition, while the Romantics could argue that the pastoral past was superior to the "dark, satanic mills", the current state of the industrial revolution is a vast improvement over sweat shops, tenements and child labour.
If people are looking for relief from "a normal 21st century life", I'd suggest they count their blessings instead. Modern society certainly has its problems and threats, which one need not recount on this day of all days. However, good literature should get people to think harder about their lives, not escape from them. If fantasy fiction is primarily offering relief, it is doing its readers a disservice.
The U.S. dollars outside the U.S. are generally converted into local currencies. The local countries then use the dollars to back their own currencies so that they can be used for trade.
If the local currencies were backed by their own goods and services, they would not need to use the U.S. dollar. What makes the U.S. dollar useful to back other currencies is that it represents real value somewhere, namely in the U.S.A.
International currency exchange is complex and sometimes it appears to be completely detached from any underlying commodity. However, note that the value of U.S. money on foreign exchange markets rises and falls with the strength of the U.S. economy. Oversimplifying a bit, if the U.S. dollar did not ultimately represent real value, the U.S. could simply print as many as it wanted to and buy everything it needed overseas.
Re-industrialisation would do nothing to save the US economy.
Nothing? I've never seen any scenario that showed that the service economy and cultural products like movies, although highly profitable for a few, would generate anywhere near the number of well-paid jobs that manufacturing does. At best they generate lots of low-paying jobs in the service sector where each worker adds very little value to the product he handles.
The information sector of the economy can indeed produce high-paying jobs but current trends suggest they are harder to find and the salaries are falling.
The question is whether re-industrialization is even possible given globalization and other market forces. The only other alternative I've heard of is simply accepting a lower standard of living and the resulting social consequences.
Markets tend to promote what is called a speculative bubble.
The question is what can you do about it and is the cure worse than the disease.
Price controls tend to distort markets like speculation does but with different and often subtle symptoms. Price controls discourage investment in the controled area and make investment flow to uncontroled areas. For example, rent controls cause a decrease in constructing rental units and landlords convert rental units to condominiums. The result is a loss of affordable apartments. The shortage results in various subterfuges, bribes and other illegal ways to obtain housing.
In general, the way to deal with speculation is to ensure there is an excess supply. The U.S. economy is very good at supplying cheap food and clothing because efficient manufacturing and distribution ensure an abundant supply. However, because the amount of land is fixed and the cost of land is a large component of the cost of housing, the cost of housing is a victim of land speculation not matter how low the actual construction cost is.
One solution is to treat housing like a regulated utility. Companies that build houses and apartments are allowed to make a reasonable rate of return on their investment and subsidized during market downturns to achieve that rate of return. These subsidies (including perhaps public ownership of the land) may result in higher taxes on those who benefit from the lower housing costs.
Utilities and other regulated industries (for example airlines and telecom) have their own problems and often eventually lead to demands for deregulation and increased competition.
No matter what the solution, orderly markets require regulation and the judicious use of taxation to stifle speculation. They also requires some consensus that the public good, however defined, outweighs private accumulation of wealth.
At the moment the U.S. does not have a consensus on what constitutes the public good. There is not even a consensus there is a public good beyond private wealth.
The money my boss pays me gets spent in this country...
The money your boss pays overseas workers gets spent in this country as well.
If the U.S. could just give foreign workers paper money and get foreign goods and labour in return, it would be laughing. However, at some point those paper dollars have to come back to the U.S. in exchange for U.S. goods and services. U.S. dollars have no other value than their ability to purchase U.S. goods.
What makes foreigner companies willing to accept U.S. dollars is the fact that the U.S. has things they want or things their suppliers want.
The problem is that as U.S. manufacturing moves offshore, increasingly what the U.S. has to offer is raw materials. Unprocessed raw materials, like ore or timber, or lightly processed raw materials, like refined ore or 2x4s, inherently provide fewer jobs and lower wages than manufacturing. To the extent that the raw materials are non-renewable, the economy will be in a downward spiral.
The solution is re-industrialization. Either through innovative products or streamlined manufacturing processes, the U.S. has to make products that can't easily be obtained offshore.
If nothing else, foreign corporations could increasingly buy up U.S. manufacturers. You may then see the kind of innovation in manufacturing that made the U.S. lose its lead. One can easily imagine foreign workers complaining some day that so many of their jobs are moving to the U.S.A.
Slashdot Mirror
Tools that are simple to use are complicated to develop and enhance.
The simpler the tools are to use, the more complex the projects are that they are used to create.
In addition, simple tools become more complex over time as new features are added and they are used to solve more complex problems. Whole sub-systems are reduced to a tool, which makes the resulting systems simpler at the expense of more complex development tools.
I don't see any way to avoid complexity. It just gets moved to a different level where different developers have to deal with it.
The future of software tools could be an endless cycle of moving complexity from systems to development tools and then back again to systems.
By contrast in other projects I managed to divorce the business requirements from the actual work, and I could step back and instead of addressing the business requirements create tools and facilities that I could then use to address the business requirements.
The article appears to be saying the same thing or something similar:
"complete refactoring of tooling capabilities" seems to where you both agree.
The problem is that whatever he is saying is so vague and jargon-laden that it is hard to tell. When you write about "front-loading the solving of meta-problems that can speed up later work because solving the meta-problem doesn't provide any immediate advantages for the problem immediately to hand," I'm not sure you're adding a lot of clarity.
When you go on to say, "all too often the process becomes the goal and a shield against actually being judged on the end results" one could easily point out that solving meta-problems can all too often become the goal rather than being judged on the end result, which is how well the project ultimately solves the business problems.
When he writes in the auditability section, "Were the processes used to develop the software audited for quality? How were software designs analyzed and validated before they were put into production?", he seems to be addressing your concern about solving meta-problems by focusing on the components rather than the end results.
At any rate, he's supposed to be talking about "The Future of Software Tools" but mostly he talks about processes. Solving meta-problems and auditability don't meet the usual definition of a tool. They're a good thing to do regardless of what tool you're using and should have been done all along.
If I ever tried to get a customer to write the functional specification, they would laugh at me and tell me that's my job, which it is.
In one sense, it's your job if they're willing to pay you to do it. However, the question is, who is best able to determine the client's needs, you or the client?
Having the contractor who is going to implement the project create the specs puts the contractor in a conflict of interest. If he's paid by the hour, he naturally wants as large a project as possible. In that case, the spec document becomes more like a catalogue that the client picks and chooses from. If the contractor is under cost constraints, he naturally wants as few features to implement as possible. In that case, the spec document doesn't take into account the benefits of the features to the client.
If customers understood how much of the cost and success of the project depended on the spec document, I'd expect them to want to take a lead role in its development. The fact that many clients don't has its counterpart in the fact that many IT departments start projects without specs. They're not thinking very hard about their jobs.
You still get clients trying to "backdoor" extra features...
Sometime before the spec-writing stage, the customer should have made up a business case for the project in which he describes the revenue or cost savings from each feature of the project.
The contractor or IT department can help at the business case stage by estimating the effort needed to implement each feature so that the client can compare the cost to the benefit.
The list of features that survive the cost-benefit analysis is the basis for the specifications. If the customer wants to add extra features later on, it should be because he can cost-justify them and thus be willing to pay for them.
Similarly, contractors will try to push all sorts of bells and whistles into the project to boost the billable hours. A reference to the business case is the customer's best guide.
I particularly appreciated his essay about how to write functional specifications, and after reading that online, I decided to go out and purchase his book.
His essay on functional specs misses the mark in a number of areas.
He starts out wrong:
Nobody who's managed more than one project makes that claim twice and for most managers, the need for specs is obvious. The usual reason projects begin without specs is because the managers are lazy, incompetent or the project is so poorly defined that it is doomed to failure. The absence of specs is a symptom of a deeper problem, not a error that can be corrected simply by pointing it out.
His advice on spec writing has a number of flaws, in particular:
Imagining how a user uses the software is no substitute for actually observing how users interact with an existing system, even if it's a manual or inefficient system. The world almost always behaves differently from what you imagine and if you have direct observation, you don't need the imaginary scenarios.
I detect in this bit of advice, as well as in much of his writing, the mind of a frustrated writer who wants to use the opportunity of a specifications document to amuse the reader with his cleverness.
His advice on who should write the spec is also poorly thought out. He recommends that someone with the title of "program manager" write the functional specs. He says: "All program managers need to be very technical, but they don't have to be good coders."
The functional specs have to come from the users. A program manager may write them down but it is the users that decide the UI, the workflow and the deliverables, not the program manager. If this program manager has anything to contribute it is because of his broader experience with other systems and projects, not because of his technical expertise.
His advice on how to write a spec is generic and self-evident, e.g., "write as simply as possible", "review and reread several times". The functional specification document should be vetted and approved by the manager of the business unit that is going to use it. The objective is to make him happy with it. If he's a good manager, he'll make sure the document is usable. If he's not a good manager, it probably doesn't matter what the document says.
The article says:
People have been programming computers in human languages for decades (possibly since the invention of the the first machine) but the language has been body language rather than spoken language.
The most obvious recent effort is the windows-icon-mouse interface that supposedly is the most intuitive way to get the computer to do something useful. However, most widely-used machines like cars and toasters use controls that work more-or-less the way people expect them to.
Body language has a smaller vocabulary than spoken language, the range of outcomes of the commands is limited, and machines gives simple and direct feedback as to whether they understand the commands.
Perhaps the researchers should think of a steering wheel, accelerator, brakes and turn signals as input devices to write programs instead of keyboards. You could write programs the way you play Grand Theft Auto.
What depresses me is that I had been pouring my heart and soul into something so ephemeral...
Make sure you learn something important or useful from every project. That way, no matter what happens to the project later on, you carry some benefit with you forever.
Sometime what you learn is only something not to do in the future or that something you were sure was true was in fact completely wrong.
One thing I've learned is don't work 60-hour weeks unless you get paid for overtime. If you do get paid for overtime, work as many 60-hour weeks as you can because there may be many 0-hour weeks in the future.
Any one care to explain how a 15th century map details the coastline of Antartica...
The modern interest in the Piri Reis map comes from its description in Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age by, Charles H. Hapgood, which was published in 1979. Hapgood was a professor with good academic credentials and his book describes a number of 16th century maps, all assembled from earlier maps, that showed a knowledge of the globe beyond what one would have expected at the time.
As this analysis points out, Hapgood was very selective in which details of the maps he said corresponded to Antarctica, ignored the details that didn't fit and never considered other plausible explanations for the maps. In particular, cartographic theory at the time posited the existence of a large southern continent for no other reason than that it would balanced the land mass in the known world above the equator.
Even if Hapgood goes well beyond the evidence, the ancient maps still seem anomalous and suggest that there are vast gaps in our knowledge of the ancient world.
This dictum is often applied to decision-making systems with the assumption that it is self-evident. However, there are many systems where it is not true including garbage processing systems.
All input is influenced by bias (conscious or unconscious), measurement errors, sampling errors, and human frailty.
As a result, every system should test the validity of its input for consistency and completeness. There are statistical adjustments that can correct non-random data and draw conclusion within bounds of certainty of the accuracy of the input. This process accounts, in part, for why polls and surveys express their results within a margin of error.
Garbage in, garbage out applies to a garbage can, but for a garbage processing system, the rule is garbage in, composte out. One can consider Slashdot as such a system.
or, put another way:
or, skipping some steps:
Note the similarity of a = a + b to the Mandelbrot iterative equation Z = Z^2 + C, suggesting that if the precision of a is bad or that every a is an approximation of a + b, then a straight line is a special case of the Mandelbrot set (a fractal) or, more generally, all smooth curves are an approximation of a fractal.
"2+2=5 for extremely large values of 2" is sometimes called "Fermat's next-to-last theorem" and is said to be the occasion for a duel with sabers between Tycho Brahe and Manderup Parsbjerg in 1566.
You can read about the grisly outcome here as part of the discussion "Did Tycho Brahe really have a silver nose?".
Apropos to the current discussion was this response:
Do not cheat on code assignments.
In the working world, it's ok to cheat, even desireable. You use existing libraries and modules and avoid re-inventing the wheel even when you think you can invent a better wheel. You can usually learn more from reading the code of a master than you can from figuring it out yourself. Time is money and scalping code saves time.
Cheating in the sense of using someone else's code without understanding it is the basis of higher-level languages. Most people use the print statement without knowing how it works and don't feel guilty. In professional programming, one of the hardest things to decide is when to cheat and when not to.
Knowing about various things will come in handy at some point.
They probably won't but as you get older you find that you derive the most enjoyment from the useless information you have. The pleasures of useless information are so great that you constantly have to make a difficult choice between learning things that are useful and learning things that aren't.
The possibilities are endless and you may invent the next big thing.
More realistically, you'll be lucky if you even get hired to work on the next big thing. The trick is to take every project and make it into a Big Thing. After you retire, your colleagues should say, "The guy that used to sit over there, he was one hell of a programmer."
But having a good integrated text editor for things like wikis or even this form into which I'm typing into right now makes life a lot easier for the average user.
The probem here is illustrated by the fact that there are practically no text editors in the space between Notepad and Word. Once you get past a basic set of editing features, users' requirements become both highly sophisticated and highly specialized. In fact, users' deem even sophisticated word processors insufficient. They want their word processor to be part of an integrated office suite where each component is loaded with features.
Variations of this problem affect all of the enhancements you suggest. A few of the required features is not sufficient to get people to use them for real-world problems. The argument that "it's better than nothing" doesn't seem to fly.
The solution at one time was Java applets. When they were introduced back in the days of 486s, they were bloated and slow and haven't been seen much since. However, now with lots of bandwidth, fast processors and cheap RAM, the times are propitious for their return. However, there's no sign anywhere of a resurgence of applets.
Other possible approaches include specialized plug-ins, enhancing Javascript, adding whole programming languages like Tcl or Perl or browsers designed for one specialized task like content management. The problem here is that none of them offer the range of programmings options that Java does or have the base of programmers. Thus they have all the problems of Java applets without offering a better solution.
Applets seem like the most general solution but as long as they remain ahead of their time, specialized built-in enhancements to the browser are likely to remain underpowered and ignored by the users.
Newton's phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants" was a veiled insult to Robert Hooke...
This allegation is made almost every time Newton is mentioned on Slashdot but it has no historical basis.
As this analysis points out, when Newton uses the phrase he is refering to both Descarte and Hook. The most obvious interpretation is that he is complementing Hook by comparing him to Descarte and referring to them both as giants.
Furthermore, Hook was not especially short and in other cases where Newton engaged in scientific debate he specifically avoided what he called "oblique and glancing expressions".
There is thus every reason to suppose that when Newton said he stood on the shoulders of giants, he was acknowledging his debt to Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes and Hook, who was at the time England's most eminent scientist.
Are there any passages in the Bible describing the people satan killed?
Consider the book of Job.
Satan subsequently kills most of Job's family and servants. Even here, Satan is acting with God's tacit approval, which Job understood when he responds, "the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away." (1:21).
In Biblical morality death is bad but not necessarily the greatest evil. The people God kills are sort of collateral damage. Their deaths serve a higher purpose although what that purpose might be is the real question.
Google to the rescue. In a review of the 2003 film, The Recruit:
The program most often recommended for preventing modem hijacking appears to be StopItNow. It's shareware.
Both Adware and SpyBot will detect some but not all hijackers.
this is certainly a dubious honor...
The true pedant appreciates being corrected as much he enjoys doing the correcting. The worst are those pseudo-pedants who can dish it out but can't take it.
they also need to present their browser as having something that neither firefox nor IE have.
By virtue of its huge central storage capacity and search engine, Google can add features that no other browser easily can.
It could also, perhaps for a fee, extend blogger.com with additional security features to allow mutli-user creation and editing of documents on line. For this purpose Amaya, an open source browser to create and update documents directly on the Web, might be the browser to emulate or extend.
Google is now spidering and indexing the whole Web. With content management features added to the browser, some of the Web could simply move to Google and cut out all the spidering.
"Shall" is, I believe, still used for the future first person, singular or plural.
From The American Heritage® Book of English Usage:
Presumably, Churchill was using "will" with a subject in the first person to express determination.
The popularity of fantasy novels over sci-fi could be a product of the second industrial revolution we are undergoing.
If the Romantic poets wrote of a pre-industrial time in response to the industrial revolution, you'd expect the reaction to the "second industrial revolution we are undergoing" would be to write about the first industrial revolution.
However, the difference between this "second industrial revolution" and the original one are not nearly as striking as the transition from rural, agricultural society to urban, industrial society. I would bet most people are at best only dimly aware that there is any change at all.
In addition, while the Romantics could argue that the pastoral past was superior to the "dark, satanic mills", the current state of the industrial revolution is a vast improvement over sweat shops, tenements and child labour.
If people are looking for relief from "a normal 21st century life", I'd suggest they count their blessings instead. Modern society certainly has its problems and threats, which one need not recount on this day of all days. However, good literature should get people to think harder about their lives, not escape from them. If fantasy fiction is primarily offering relief, it is doing its readers a disservice.
Most dollar notes live outside the USA.
The U.S. dollars outside the U.S. are generally converted into local currencies. The local countries then use the dollars to back their own currencies so that they can be used for trade.
If the local currencies were backed by their own goods and services, they would not need to use the U.S. dollar. What makes the U.S. dollar useful to back other currencies is that it represents real value somewhere, namely in the U.S.A.
International currency exchange is complex and sometimes it appears to be completely detached from any underlying commodity. However, note that the value of U.S. money on foreign exchange markets rises and falls with the strength of the U.S. economy. Oversimplifying a bit, if the U.S. dollar did not ultimately represent real value, the U.S. could simply print as many as it wanted to and buy everything it needed overseas.
Re-industrialisation would do nothing to save the US economy.
Nothing? I've never seen any scenario that showed that the service economy and cultural products like movies, although highly profitable for a few, would generate anywhere near the number of well-paid jobs that manufacturing does. At best they generate lots of low-paying jobs in the service sector where each worker adds very little value to the product he handles.
The information sector of the economy can indeed produce high-paying jobs but current trends suggest they are harder to find and the salaries are falling.
The question is whether re-industrialization is even possible given globalization and other market forces. The only other alternative I've heard of is simply accepting a lower standard of living and the resulting social consequences.
Markets tend to promote what is called a speculative bubble.
The question is what can you do about it and is the cure worse than the disease.
Price controls tend to distort markets like speculation does but with different and often subtle symptoms. Price controls discourage investment in the controled area and make investment flow to uncontroled areas. For example, rent controls cause a decrease in constructing rental units and landlords convert rental units to condominiums. The result is a loss of affordable apartments. The shortage results in various subterfuges, bribes and other illegal ways to obtain housing.
In general, the way to deal with speculation is to ensure there is an excess supply. The U.S. economy is very good at supplying cheap food and clothing because efficient manufacturing and distribution ensure an abundant supply. However, because the amount of land is fixed and the cost of land is a large component of the cost of housing, the cost of housing is a victim of land speculation not matter how low the actual construction cost is.
One solution is to treat housing like a regulated utility. Companies that build houses and apartments are allowed to make a reasonable rate of return on their investment and subsidized during market downturns to achieve that rate of return. These subsidies (including perhaps public ownership of the land) may result in higher taxes on those who benefit from the lower housing costs.
Utilities and other regulated industries (for example airlines and telecom) have their own problems and often eventually lead to demands for deregulation and increased competition.
No matter what the solution, orderly markets require regulation and the judicious use of taxation to stifle speculation. They also requires some consensus that the public good, however defined, outweighs private accumulation of wealth.
At the moment the U.S. does not have a consensus on what constitutes the public good. There is not even a consensus there is a public good beyond private wealth.
The money my boss pays me gets spent in this country...
The money your boss pays overseas workers gets spent in this country as well.
If the U.S. could just give foreign workers paper money and get foreign goods and labour in return, it would be laughing. However, at some point those paper dollars have to come back to the U.S. in exchange for U.S. goods and services. U.S. dollars have no other value than their ability to purchase U.S. goods.
What makes foreigner companies willing to accept U.S. dollars is the fact that the U.S. has things they want or things their suppliers want.
The problem is that as U.S. manufacturing moves offshore, increasingly what the U.S. has to offer is raw materials. Unprocessed raw materials, like ore or timber, or lightly processed raw materials, like refined ore or 2x4s, inherently provide fewer jobs and lower wages than manufacturing. To the extent that the raw materials are non-renewable, the economy will be in a downward spiral.
The solution is re-industrialization. Either through innovative products or streamlined manufacturing processes, the U.S. has to make products that can't easily be obtained offshore.
If nothing else, foreign corporations could increasingly buy up U.S. manufacturers. You may then see the kind of innovation in manufacturing that made the U.S. lose its lead. One can easily imagine foreign workers complaining some day that so many of their jobs are moving to the U.S.A.