You're talking to someone who has done a fair bit of simulation and listened to others describe their own simulations. The simulation the Wall Street Journal bought into was wildly beyond naive. I told the author to ask an oceanographer, and he did. A later article, without simulation pictures, gave a much more accurate assessment of the unknowns. I'm not an oceanographer, but I've done ocean simulation, and I'm very familiar with the computational techniques employed. As a predictive tool for that situation, what NCAR and the DoE did was absurdly naive. People often have things wildly wrong and keep cranking out wrong results and briefing to them for years. I've seen it. I've been through it.
Yes, simulations can be an aid to the imagination, sometimes a powerful aid, but the simulation itself is not science, and it's the confusion of pictures with science that bothers me. It's not a question of models being sometimes less than perfect. Sometimes, they are just WRONG. In the case of the Wall St Journal simulation, the results were complete misdirection. Not a useful clue to anything. The simulation assumes that dye injected into the mixed layer, and that is neutrally buoyant and passively follows the surface currents is a good proxy for the oil in the Gulf. None of that is remotely true for the Deepwater Horizon situation. The oil had complicated behavior that is different in so many ways from a passive dye tracer that it is hard to enumerate them. The "scientists" who cranked up the $100 Million code should have been smart enough to know that without even turning a computer on. As so often happens, though, they got a picture and could make up a good story to go with the picture, so the fact that it was a total waste of time and money is lost in the shuffle.
I will concede one lesson learned: the DoE had no useful tools for predicting the fate of the oil in a catastrophic spill.
For the problem presented for the Slashdot article at hand, there are not just the usual difficulties of fluid mechanics, but exotic physics that are, at this point, completely speculative. Those calculations are *expensive*, Asrophysics is awash in data. Maybe complicated, expensive simulations of unknowable accuracy are the only way to get a handle on the data, but it's pretty desperate science, and, with so much data out there, I wonder about the level of effort and credibility that is given to simulation. I certainly think that, "Oh, wow" is unjustified.
The DoE recently published a "prediction" that showed the oil from Deepwater Horizon racing up the east coast. As far as I'm concerned, the assumptions and methodology of the simulation were indefensible, but that didn't stop the Wall Street Journal from picking it up. While the DoE's *official* position was that the simulation wasn't necessarily credible as a "prediction," one of the NCAR scientists involved was quoted as saying that they realized that they had "the perfect model" for predicting the fate of the oil. The "prediction," of course, as compared to reality, was complete nonsense. As it stands, we still don't really know what happened to all that oil, but a picture in the Wall Street Journal left the impression that, not only did the DoE know exactly what was going to happen, but that what was going to happen was likely catastrophic. That's not science. That's not even defensible. Flow visualization has a long, important, and honorable history in fluid mechanics, but, in the past, you actually had to make some actual fluid flow to get a visualization. Now all you have to do is turn a computer on, and, if the results don't look completely crazy, people are led to believe that the science is credible. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't.
The Department of Energy totally loves this kind of publicity. They want you looking at their pretty pictures and saying "Oh, wow!" The bureaucrat with whom I constantly spar over this science (and computer budgets) by pictures denies that the pictures are all that important, but we are constantly bombarded by them. The science and the numerics here may be great or they may be garbage. It doesn't matter all that much, I claim, because the people who vote on budgets and write the checks would never know the difference. Might as well turn it all over to Pixar for all anyone could prove one way or the other.
The guy was caught red-handed on numerous grounds that would get most non-management employees walked to the door without further discussion. Misuse of company property or funds is grounds for immediate termination. If I were a union rep, I could *probably* get this guy his job back, but no guarantees, and it would probably take a credible threat of arbitration to make it happen. If it did go to arbitration, I'd hate to bank on winning. The only credible defense would be to demonstrate that the behavior is not unusual for employees in a position like that (and it probably isn't), that the company has knowledge or should have knowledge of such behavior (and, given the investigatory tactics, the company would have a hard time showing that it couldn't know lots of things), and that the company is singling this employee out for discriminatory treatment. It's not a pretty defense, but, with enough evidence, it would work. I'd put the company on trial and make it look hypocritical (which it probably is). For managers, of course, there are no real rules.
The government has spent way too much money wiring up huge quantities of commercial off-the-shelf processors and issuing press releases about its great accomplishments, which mostly reflect having money and being willing to spend it with a minimum of imagination, insight, and risk. I'd love to know where they got these goals. I sense a briefing from IBM about three-dimensional chips and microfluidic cooling, and all the wonderful things they could do if only the heavens started pouring forth money. I hope someone else is in the game, but it's hard for me to imagine who.
Your comment is funny, except that it isn't. Coders who understand really very little about the history and how hard really smart people have tried and failed think they are smarter than everyone else, including their managers, who are interested in stupid things like maintainability--even at the expense of the egos of cosmically all-knowing coders.
That's interesting, but all you need is an appropriate Nicholas Carr reference, like "IT Doesn't Matter" by the same author in the Harvard Business Review. This guy is making a career out of dissing technology. He's got to be laughing at us. I can't believe he's getting a serious hearing from slashdot. People who edit and write for the Atlantic Monthly are technophobes? I'm shocked, shocked I tell you.
I had exactly the same thought. The comment was moderated as funny, but, as far as Microsoft is concerned, I've completely lost my sense of humor.
Vista is such a grotesque imposition that one wonders if Bill Gates has simply gone mad (the way that anyone with so much power goes mad), or if there's a part of him that realizes that no sane person could say the things he says.
I've tolerated Windows boxes because I more or less have no choice. Vista, though, is just one step too far. When you think about it, it's no wonder that Gates is getting a little bit hysterical.
I haven't yet seen it mentioned in this discussion anywhere, but digital photography and internet pornographic exchange of images of children have with a fair degree of certainty increased the exploitation of children for sexual purposes.
To get into many (most?) of the groups that exchange material, you have to supply new material, and that almost certainly means finding someone to victimize and victimizing him or her in some way.
Experts say that, before the internet and digital cameras, the same victims were seen over and over. Now there are who knows how many new images of children posed in provocative or sexual ways.
The practice of collecting or trading those images gives them value and thus encourages further exploitation of children.
In general, I'm opposed to demonization and criminalization of victimless crimes, but, in the case of child pornography on the internet, there almost always is a victim. It's too bad that the connection is rarely made clear.
It would take a whole lot more than reading that patent, and a whole lot more than reading Hennessey and Patterson, to know if Wisconsin had something it could collect on. That is to say, you'd have to know a detailed history of work in the field. That would mean being familiar with dozens of IEEE and ACM journal articles, something a patent examiner in Washington would never have time to do. That is to say, aggressive schemes for instruction parallelism is a huge body of work, and the patentability of the idea as a matter of fact is surely to be in dispute. The fact that Hennessey and Patterson attributes the idea to Wisconsin, Madison is a big piece of evidence, but not necessarily dispositive. Wisconsin has been a big player in this kind of work, and they (obviously) have graduates at Intel. In any case, the authors Hennessey and Patterson would be in a fairly select group of people who could offer authoritative comment.
Then there is the question of whether the Intel design actually infringes.
Finally, it's worth noting that many patent disputes likes this one are settled by cross-licensing. Without such practices, Intel, IBM, and AMD and who knows who else would probably be in court endlessly. Companies collect patents as a way of fending off lawsuits like this one. That tactic doesn't work, though, with organizations that don't make anything, in which respect, a university is disturbingly similar to a patent troll. That is to say, whether universities are good guys or not, they can have the same kind of disruptive effect as patent trolls, because they have no incentive not to sue, other than the cost of lawyers. The lawyers take the case on contingency fee and the lawyers are the patent trolls. The fact that the patent belongs to a university in the end means very little.
I find the Windows XP file search to be so slow and obtuse that I usually use cygwin to find files under XP. Being able to grep (sometimes more than once) on the result of the search is a big deal to me. Not only that, it's quick and easy to update the locate database frequently, so I usually use locate, which is quick as lightning.
So I'm surprised that no one else has complained: "You like windows because of its ability to find files?!?"
Of course, a user who can't be bothered to learn "find" or "locate" will never learn to use "grep." In fact, it's apparent that the poster can't be bothered to use "google" or "google groups," either.
Does this mean I should buy Microsoft or sell RedHat?
Robert.
Oh, good heavens. The significance of the GUI is not how useful it is for people who are comfortable with a CLI. The GUI is what made computers accessible to the vast unwashed masses who never have and never will write so much as "Hello, World."
Re:Google is the real thin client innovator
on
Gates on Google
·
· Score: 1
Well, sure, and it isn't just Microsoft that's in Google's sights. Thin clients don't need virus protection software, for example.
google wants to be the portal that everybody wanted to be ten years ago and nobody ever quite got to be, except that I think google might do it. Everything gets delivered through through google to a browser on a thin client. No more hard disks, no more viruses, no more funky maintenance,... all handled by google, which has turned into a monopolist gates could only ever dream of being.
The message here is: don't try to piggyback your closed source project on an open source project by "donating" it. How hard is that?
Good for Andrew Tridgell. How important would Linux be without Samba, anyway? Samba is what makes Microsoft go ballistic.
As for Linus, I hereby sentence him to a week of being lectured about open source by RMS.
"The Department of Defense responded to the Code Red worm by disconnecting its unclassified network (NIPRnet) from the Internet to protect it from infection. This protective measure disabled the Army Corps of Engineers' control of the locks on the Mississippi River, since the NIPRnet
was used to transmit commands to the locks through the Internet."
What kind of a proof of concept do you require, exactly, before it's okay to disturb your day with planning for cyber-terrorism?
Who does DARPA think they're kidding, anyway?
Add a zero or two, and you'll have the kind of money the DoD would hand to a defense contractor just to work on a problem like this, never mind with a deliverable that had to work. No sane defense contractor would promise such a thing, anyway.
Finger-pointing by bystanders is not only unattractive, it's also useless.
Once we get past the finger-pointing, is there anything to be done other than handwringing?
The basic subject here is decision-making in the face of uncertainty, and it's something that we, as human beings, know a great deal about.
You could spend the entire GDP and _still_ miss something that seems obvious in retrospect, or you could scrape everything to the bone, get lucky, and brag about your management technique.
In place of the ad hoc opinionating and after the fact handwringing, there has to be a systematic way of managing risk in situations where there is almost no experience. NASA thought it had such a systematic approach with fault-tree analysis, which turned out to have fundamental logical flaws.
NASA is still crashing and burning--probably no way around that--but its explanations suggest the absence even of movement toward a better systematic approach.
The problem is not outsourcing, and the problem is not cheap overseas labor. You can force people to wait on hold without any human intervention whatsoever. The strategy is called rationing by inconvenience, and Dell was using it long before offshoring became trendy.
Nothing secret about it. I use both, and I'm up at 4am to be able to get access to the #%@*& Microsoft update servers and they are slow as molasses.
Gates and Ballmer are narcissistic, sociopathic boobs who are a threat to national security, and I want one of those other narcissistic, sociopathic boobs in Washington who are a threat to national security to do something about them.
And you let them do it!
When they don't volunteer for the job, you go to the web and ask.
You do whatever the you think is the best thing for you to do, based on *your* needs and *your* values.
My advice to you is to figure out for yourself what those needs and values are and act upon them.
To hell with your former employer, to hell with all the people who are telling you what to do, and to hell with whoever got you thinking this way in the first place.
Here's the real problem with the TCO of proprietary software: when the company that wrote it stops supporting it or goes out of business, your TCO goes up without limit.
What will you do then? Disassemble the binary? Good luck to ya.
Not worried about M$ going out of business? You're probably right, but when they hang you out to dry with outdated software and want you to pay a fortune to make it work on their latest release of Windows Megabucks, what *will* you do? Oh, that's right, I forgot: you're a consultant and you'll be long gone with your share of the proceeds of a scam.
I don't understand why people don't talk about this more. A floppy disk is more durable than data accessible only with proprietary software.
Netscape 6 Calendar server apparently complies with this protocol. Maybe they could be persuaded to get smart with the open source community again.
Maybe there are other candidates? Just look at what OS has done for Star Office and vice versa.
Slashdot Mirror
You're talking to someone who has done a fair bit of simulation and listened to others describe their own simulations. The simulation the Wall Street Journal bought into was wildly beyond naive. I told the author to ask an oceanographer, and he did. A later article, without simulation pictures, gave a much more accurate assessment of the unknowns. I'm not an oceanographer, but I've done ocean simulation, and I'm very familiar with the computational techniques employed. As a predictive tool for that situation, what NCAR and the DoE did was absurdly naive. People often have things wildly wrong and keep cranking out wrong results and briefing to them for years. I've seen it. I've been through it. Yes, simulations can be an aid to the imagination, sometimes a powerful aid, but the simulation itself is not science, and it's the confusion of pictures with science that bothers me. It's not a question of models being sometimes less than perfect. Sometimes, they are just WRONG. In the case of the Wall St Journal simulation, the results were complete misdirection. Not a useful clue to anything. The simulation assumes that dye injected into the mixed layer, and that is neutrally buoyant and passively follows the surface currents is a good proxy for the oil in the Gulf. None of that is remotely true for the Deepwater Horizon situation. The oil had complicated behavior that is different in so many ways from a passive dye tracer that it is hard to enumerate them. The "scientists" who cranked up the $100 Million code should have been smart enough to know that without even turning a computer on. As so often happens, though, they got a picture and could make up a good story to go with the picture, so the fact that it was a total waste of time and money is lost in the shuffle. I will concede one lesson learned: the DoE had no useful tools for predicting the fate of the oil in a catastrophic spill. For the problem presented for the Slashdot article at hand, there are not just the usual difficulties of fluid mechanics, but exotic physics that are, at this point, completely speculative. Those calculations are *expensive*, Asrophysics is awash in data. Maybe complicated, expensive simulations of unknowable accuracy are the only way to get a handle on the data, but it's pretty desperate science, and, with so much data out there, I wonder about the level of effort and credibility that is given to simulation. I certainly think that, "Oh, wow" is unjustified.
The DoE recently published a "prediction" that showed the oil from Deepwater Horizon racing up the east coast. As far as I'm concerned, the assumptions and methodology of the simulation were indefensible, but that didn't stop the Wall Street Journal from picking it up. While the DoE's *official* position was that the simulation wasn't necessarily credible as a "prediction," one of the NCAR scientists involved was quoted as saying that they realized that they had "the perfect model" for predicting the fate of the oil. The "prediction," of course, as compared to reality, was complete nonsense. As it stands, we still don't really know what happened to all that oil, but a picture in the Wall Street Journal left the impression that, not only did the DoE know exactly what was going to happen, but that what was going to happen was likely catastrophic. That's not science. That's not even defensible. Flow visualization has a long, important, and honorable history in fluid mechanics, but, in the past, you actually had to make some actual fluid flow to get a visualization. Now all you have to do is turn a computer on, and, if the results don't look completely crazy, people are led to believe that the science is credible. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't.
The Department of Energy totally loves this kind of publicity. They want you looking at their pretty pictures and saying "Oh, wow!" The bureaucrat with whom I constantly spar over this science (and computer budgets) by pictures denies that the pictures are all that important, but we are constantly bombarded by them. The science and the numerics here may be great or they may be garbage. It doesn't matter all that much, I claim, because the people who vote on budgets and write the checks would never know the difference. Might as well turn it all over to Pixar for all anyone could prove one way or the other.
The guy was caught red-handed on numerous grounds that would get most non-management employees walked to the door without further discussion. Misuse of company property or funds is grounds for immediate termination. If I were a union rep, I could *probably* get this guy his job back, but no guarantees, and it would probably take a credible threat of arbitration to make it happen. If it did go to arbitration, I'd hate to bank on winning. The only credible defense would be to demonstrate that the behavior is not unusual for employees in a position like that (and it probably isn't), that the company has knowledge or should have knowledge of such behavior (and, given the investigatory tactics, the company would have a hard time showing that it couldn't know lots of things), and that the company is singling this employee out for discriminatory treatment. It's not a pretty defense, but, with enough evidence, it would work. I'd put the company on trial and make it look hypocritical (which it probably is). For managers, of course, there are no real rules.
The government has spent way too much money wiring up huge quantities of commercial off-the-shelf processors and issuing press releases about its great accomplishments, which mostly reflect having money and being willing to spend it with a minimum of imagination, insight, and risk. I'd love to know where they got these goals. I sense a briefing from IBM about three-dimensional chips and microfluidic cooling, and all the wonderful things they could do if only the heavens started pouring forth money. I hope someone else is in the game, but it's hard for me to imagine who.
If c++ caught on, anything can catch on. Well, maybe not ada.
We overeat because of our deep sense of shame at not having a better (that is to say, more European) sense of beauty and design.
Your comment is funny, except that it isn't. Coders who understand really very little about the history and how hard really smart people have tried and failed think they are smarter than everyone else, including their managers, who are interested in stupid things like maintainability--even at the expense of the egos of cosmically all-knowing coders.
That's interesting, but all you need is an appropriate Nicholas Carr reference, like "IT Doesn't Matter" by the same author in the Harvard Business Review. This guy is making a career out of dissing technology. He's got to be laughing at us. I can't believe he's getting a serious hearing from slashdot. People who edit and write for the Atlantic Monthly are technophobes? I'm shocked, shocked I tell you.
I had exactly the same thought. The comment was moderated as funny, but, as far as Microsoft is concerned, I've completely lost my sense of humor. Vista is such a grotesque imposition that one wonders if Bill Gates has simply gone mad (the way that anyone with so much power goes mad), or if there's a part of him that realizes that no sane person could say the things he says. I've tolerated Windows boxes because I more or less have no choice. Vista, though, is just one step too far. When you think about it, it's no wonder that Gates is getting a little bit hysterical.
I haven't yet seen it mentioned in this discussion anywhere, but digital photography and internet pornographic exchange of images of children have with a fair degree of certainty increased the exploitation of children for sexual purposes.
To get into many (most?) of the groups that exchange material, you have to supply new material, and that almost certainly means finding someone to victimize and victimizing him or her in some way.
Experts say that, before the internet and digital cameras, the same victims were seen over and over. Now there are who knows how many new images of children posed in provocative or sexual ways.
The practice of collecting or trading those images gives them value and thus encourages further exploitation of children.
In general, I'm opposed to demonization and criminalization of victimless crimes, but, in the case of child pornography on the internet, there almost always is a victim. It's too bad that the connection is rarely made clear.
It would take a whole lot more than reading that patent, and a whole lot more than reading Hennessey and Patterson, to know if Wisconsin had something it could collect on. That is to say, you'd have to know a detailed history of work in the field. That would mean being familiar with dozens of IEEE and ACM journal articles, something a patent examiner in Washington would never have time to do. That is to say, aggressive schemes for instruction parallelism is a huge body of work, and the patentability of the idea as a matter of fact is surely to be in dispute. The fact that Hennessey and Patterson attributes the idea to Wisconsin, Madison is a big piece of evidence, but not necessarily dispositive. Wisconsin has been a big player in this kind of work, and they (obviously) have graduates at Intel. In any case, the authors Hennessey and Patterson would be in a fairly select group of people who could offer authoritative comment. Then there is the question of whether the Intel design actually infringes. Finally, it's worth noting that many patent disputes likes this one are settled by cross-licensing. Without such practices, Intel, IBM, and AMD and who knows who else would probably be in court endlessly. Companies collect patents as a way of fending off lawsuits like this one. That tactic doesn't work, though, with organizations that don't make anything, in which respect, a university is disturbingly similar to a patent troll. That is to say, whether universities are good guys or not, they can have the same kind of disruptive effect as patent trolls, because they have no incentive not to sue, other than the cost of lawyers. The lawyers take the case on contingency fee and the lawyers are the patent trolls. The fact that the patent belongs to a university in the end means very little.
I find the Windows XP file search to be so slow and obtuse that I usually use cygwin to find files under XP. Being able to grep (sometimes more than once) on the result of the search is a big deal to me. Not only that, it's quick and easy to update the locate database frequently, so I usually use locate, which is quick as lightning. So I'm surprised that no one else has complained: "You like windows because of its ability to find files?!?" Of course, a user who can't be bothered to learn "find" or "locate" will never learn to use "grep." In fact, it's apparent that the poster can't be bothered to use "google" or "google groups," either. Does this mean I should buy Microsoft or sell RedHat? Robert.
Oh, good heavens. The significance of the GUI is not how useful it is for people who are comfortable with a CLI. The GUI is what made computers accessible to the vast unwashed masses who never have and never will write so much as "Hello, World."
Well, sure, and it isn't just Microsoft that's in Google's sights. Thin clients don't need virus protection software, for example. google wants to be the portal that everybody wanted to be ten years ago and nobody ever quite got to be, except that I think google might do it. Everything gets delivered through through google to a browser on a thin client. No more hard disks, no more viruses, no more funky maintenance,... all handled by google, which has turned into a monopolist gates could only ever dream of being.
The message here is: don't try to piggyback your closed source project on an open source project by "donating" it. How hard is that? Good for Andrew Tridgell. How important would Linux be without Samba, anyway? Samba is what makes Microsoft go ballistic. As for Linus, I hereby sentence him to a week of being lectured about open source by RMS.
"The Department of Defense responded to the Code Red worm by disconnecting its unclassified network (NIPRnet) from the Internet to protect it from infection. This protective measure disabled the Army Corps of Engineers' control of the locks on the Mississippi River, since the NIPRnet was used to transmit commands to the locks through the Internet." What kind of a proof of concept do you require, exactly, before it's okay to disturb your day with planning for cyber-terrorism?
Who does DARPA think they're kidding, anyway? Add a zero or two, and you'll have the kind of money the DoD would hand to a defense contractor just to work on a problem like this, never mind with a deliverable that had to work. No sane defense contractor would promise such a thing, anyway.
Finger-pointing by bystanders is not only unattractive, it's also useless. Once we get past the finger-pointing, is there anything to be done other than handwringing? The basic subject here is decision-making in the face of uncertainty, and it's something that we, as human beings, know a great deal about. You could spend the entire GDP and _still_ miss something that seems obvious in retrospect, or you could scrape everything to the bone, get lucky, and brag about your management technique. In place of the ad hoc opinionating and after the fact handwringing, there has to be a systematic way of managing risk in situations where there is almost no experience. NASA thought it had such a systematic approach with fault-tree analysis, which turned out to have fundamental logical flaws. NASA is still crashing and burning--probably no way around that--but its explanations suggest the absence even of movement toward a better systematic approach.
The problem is not outsourcing, and the problem is not cheap overseas labor. You can force people to wait on hold without any human intervention whatsoever. The strategy is called rationing by inconvenience, and Dell was using it long before offshoring became trendy.
Nothing secret about it. I use both, and I'm up at 4am to be able to get access to the #%@*& Microsoft update servers and they are slow as molasses. Gates and Ballmer are narcissistic, sociopathic boobs who are a threat to national security, and I want one of those other narcissistic, sociopathic boobs in Washington who are a threat to national security to do something about them.
And you let them do it! When they don't volunteer for the job, you go to the web and ask. You do whatever the you think is the best thing for you to do, based on *your* needs and *your* values. My advice to you is to figure out for yourself what those needs and values are and act upon them. To hell with your former employer, to hell with all the people who are telling you what to do, and to hell with whoever got you thinking this way in the first place.
Here's the real problem with the TCO of proprietary software: when the company that wrote it stops supporting it or goes out of business, your TCO goes up without limit. What will you do then? Disassemble the binary? Good luck to ya. Not worried about M$ going out of business? You're probably right, but when they hang you out to dry with outdated software and want you to pay a fortune to make it work on their latest release of Windows Megabucks, what *will* you do? Oh, that's right, I forgot: you're a consultant and you'll be long gone with your share of the proceeds of a scam. I don't understand why people don't talk about this more. A floppy disk is more durable than data accessible only with proprietary software.
Netscape 6 Calendar server apparently complies with this protocol. Maybe they could be persuaded to get smart with the open source community again. Maybe there are other candidates? Just look at what OS has done for Star Office and vice versa.