While it's popular to focus on code metrics (defect count, test-based metrics, etc.), when it comes to how to improve software quality, don't forget that it's strongly related to organizational characteristics. Whether you look at it via Conway's Law, via Fred Brooks's analysis, or via recent empirical research [pdf], it's pretty clear that software developed in an organization isn't independent of the organization itself, and sometimes the way the company is structured/managed is the problem.
It's never really been much different, though. For the most part, a "person of the year" has always been shorthand for a larger group of people, their organizations, etc., who did some noteworthy thing that year. Only a small handful have been for what you might call truly individual accomplishments.
For example, the dual award to Bill Clinton and Kenn Starr in 1998 was basically "the Clinton impeachment saga". The 1999 award to Jeff Bezos was a stand-in for "the rise of e-commerce". The 1979 award to Ayatollah Khomeini was a stand-in for "the Iranian revolution". In 1947 to George Marshall, a stand-in for the Marshall Plan (which was hardly his single-handed doing). Etc.
Given how angry wealthy people and politicians seem to be about them, and how ambivalent most other people I know are, that doesn't seem to be what's happening.
The whining about cleanup/policing bill is particularly unconvincing. Most cities spend more money policing and cleaning up after their local NFL team's fans (and that's not even counting the millions in subsidies for the stadium). If we want to save money on policing and cleanup, there are a lot more obvious places to start than some people in a park.
You could just edit in less controversial areas. Over the last few months, I've created a bunch of articles about Greek archaeological cites, 1980s music groups, and 19th-century physicians, and have run into zero problems. I do include good citations though (mostly to offline history books), which helps.
Eh, it's a tricky issue, because there is also considerable complaining in the other direction: a well-respected group of experts in a field will expend considerable effort improving an article collaboratively, sometimes in response to specific attempts to recruit them to help (this happens in medicine and physics), and then if nobody is vigilant, the article just sort of rots over the next few months, as a bunch of minor changes are made that collectively decrease the quality of the article, sometimes even introducing errors. This makes people less willing to invest considerable time in writing good articles, if they're going to be subject to death by a thousand cuts. One of the proposed responses is to be much more vigilant in allowing changes to "good" articles, especially those on scientific topics where the change isn't accompanied by a citation to the scientific literature.
One thing favoring the big plants is that neighbors' opinion about nuclear power, at least in the U.S., often follows a pattern where initially putting one in is very unpopular, but once one is put in, as it brings jobs, seems to be safe, and unlike traditional industry doesn't pollute or produce bad odors, local popularity goes up. In fact when you poll people living near a major nuclear plant about the possibility of putting in a new unit, results are usually quite positive. So from a political perspective at least, that favors putting in a bunch of power generation in the same place: it's not worth going through the trouble of convincing the local population in each place only to generate 600 megawatts there.
For these to work, I think we'd need a more widespread change where the default attitude towards being near a nuclear generating facility is positive or at least neutral. Then you could just scatter then around without much worry.
That is indeed a problem; another source is leakage from temporary storage pits from the fluid, which appears to have been the contamination source in a recent Pennsylvania incident.
The best case for fracking would be that the process itself is safe, but the waste fluid is currently being disposed of unsafely, in which case a solution could be to mandate safer disposal methods. The safety of the process itself is still pretty inconclusive, though.
Size of the Firefox codebase is one factor of course, but the amount of RAM needed by Visual Studio to compile code with all optimizations turned on (especially PGO, which is extra RAM-intensive at the compilation stage) is also a major factor. Notice that this only happens in the 32-bit Visual Studio builds specifically.
Despite the phrase "open-source", there seems to be a distinct lack of information about whether this is a "source is now available for inspection" type release, or actually under an open-source license, and if so, which one.
Except for the company's own data, of course: then they manage to remember how to really delete data, e.g. old emails after N days, so that no future nosey prosecutor can dig it out of the database.
I suppose the first question to ask would be where the moisture would've fallen otherwise. Unless they're creating new evaporation/condensation into clouds, which it doesn't sound like since they're discussing seeding rockets, they're just causing it to fall somewhere instead of somewhere else. Maybe that harms somewhere else, or maybe it doesn't; would need more information to say.
They appear not to get this, or not want to acknowledge it, though, with the quote: "Because clouds are boundless, weather control is boundless". Clouds might be boundless if you're doing isolated cloud-seeding operations, but on a massive industrial scale, clouds aren't really boundless...
More farmable land is actually one of the predictions: some models show America's "wheat belt" migrating northwards, so the plains of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba will become productive in the way that Iowa, the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas currently are for the U.S.: here's a map
The general in-house versus outsource vs commodity question here is a bit inextricably tied up in the more specific "enterprise software sucks" problem. I've seen moving from in-house solutions to third-party stuff work well, when it's good third-party stuff. For example, near the end of my time there, my university switched from an aging home-rolled email setup to a Zimbra installation, which, while not perfect, was generally better and more reliable. On the other hand, there is certainly plenty of crap that they pay Oracle and Microsoft $$$ to run that doesn't serve anyone's needs very well, or integrate with anything else.
Interesting that they've settled on this approach, which in some ways is much more traditional: developing a high-performance JIT for a dynamic language instead of trying to statically compile a subset. Basically the approach taken by StrongTalk, V8, PyPy, Rubinius, etc.
1. You can't link to a specific page in the archive, which makes sharing a bit tricky; and
2. You can't download full-resolution pages.
Still a useful resource to have, but it's a bit unfortunate that these kinds of digitization projects seem to always want to roll-their-own slightly opaque interface.
The other reason is that there are a lot more SWAT teams than they used to be, so the threshold for calling them out is a lot lower. Gotta justify that taxpayer money spent on fancy equipment somehow...
Heck, even if I was the rancher, I'd rather lobby for taxpayer reimbursement through some sort of "cattle-rustlin' loss fund" or something, rather than going all-out with militarized law enforcement. By the standards of ag. subsidies, it'd be pretty small, too. Plus, that way it wouldn't run the risk that they'd also find my weed patch, as you say.
I'll take some cattle rustlers over militarized police chasing cattle rustlers any day, thanks. Much like the cure/disease metaphor, not every policing measure targeting every crime improves society, even if successful...
Wikipedia's actually pretty good at sci-fi currently imo. It doesn't go into the level of fan detail on specific works as something like WookiePedia does, but it has pretty good coverage of the authors, novels, and general literary landscape. If anything, its sci-fi coverage is considerably better than its coverage of most other areas of fiction.
This is where I try to type something like, "ugh, this kind of shoddy editing job would never have happened back when CmdrTaco was in charge!" while trying to suppress chuckles...
Slashdot Mirror
While it's popular to focus on code metrics (defect count, test-based metrics, etc.), when it comes to how to improve software quality, don't forget that it's strongly related to organizational characteristics. Whether you look at it via Conway's Law, via Fred Brooks's analysis, or via recent empirical research [pdf], it's pretty clear that software developed in an organization isn't independent of the organization itself, and sometimes the way the company is structured/managed is the problem.
If my anthropology textbook is correct, "Chinese" is a specific subgroup of the "mongoloid" or "yellow" race, actually.
I'll need to verify at the library, though; I'm a bit poor so I haven't been able to update my textbook since the 1883 edition.
45% people opposed doesn't seem particularly solid "disapproval" to me...
It's never really been much different, though. For the most part, a "person of the year" has always been shorthand for a larger group of people, their organizations, etc., who did some noteworthy thing that year. Only a small handful have been for what you might call truly individual accomplishments.
For example, the dual award to Bill Clinton and Kenn Starr in 1998 was basically "the Clinton impeachment saga". The 1999 award to Jeff Bezos was a stand-in for "the rise of e-commerce". The 1979 award to Ayatollah Khomeini was a stand-in for "the Iranian revolution". In 1947 to George Marshall, a stand-in for the Marshall Plan (which was hardly his single-handed doing). Etc.
Given how angry wealthy people and politicians seem to be about them, and how ambivalent most other people I know are, that doesn't seem to be what's happening.
The whining about cleanup/policing bill is particularly unconvincing. Most cities spend more money policing and cleaning up after their local NFL team's fans (and that's not even counting the millions in subsidies for the stadium). If we want to save money on policing and cleanup, there are a lot more obvious places to start than some people in a park.
You could just edit in less controversial areas. Over the last few months, I've created a bunch of articles about Greek archaeological cites, 1980s music groups, and 19th-century physicians, and have run into zero problems. I do include good citations though (mostly to offline history books), which helps.
Eh, it's a tricky issue, because there is also considerable complaining in the other direction: a well-respected group of experts in a field will expend considerable effort improving an article collaboratively, sometimes in response to specific attempts to recruit them to help (this happens in medicine and physics), and then if nobody is vigilant, the article just sort of rots over the next few months, as a bunch of minor changes are made that collectively decrease the quality of the article, sometimes even introducing errors. This makes people less willing to invest considerable time in writing good articles, if they're going to be subject to death by a thousand cuts. One of the proposed responses is to be much more vigilant in allowing changes to "good" articles, especially those on scientific topics where the change isn't accompanied by a citation to the scientific literature.
One thing favoring the big plants is that neighbors' opinion about nuclear power, at least in the U.S., often follows a pattern where initially putting one in is very unpopular, but once one is put in, as it brings jobs, seems to be safe, and unlike traditional industry doesn't pollute or produce bad odors, local popularity goes up. In fact when you poll people living near a major nuclear plant about the possibility of putting in a new unit, results are usually quite positive. So from a political perspective at least, that favors putting in a bunch of power generation in the same place: it's not worth going through the trouble of convincing the local population in each place only to generate 600 megawatts there.
For these to work, I think we'd need a more widespread change where the default attitude towards being near a nuclear generating facility is positive or at least neutral. Then you could just scatter then around without much worry.
That is indeed a problem; another source is leakage from temporary storage pits from the fluid, which appears to have been the contamination source in a recent Pennsylvania incident.
The best case for fracking would be that the process itself is safe, but the waste fluid is currently being disposed of unsafely, in which case a solution could be to mandate safer disposal methods. The safety of the process itself is still pretty inconclusive, though.
Size of the Firefox codebase is one factor of course, but the amount of RAM needed by Visual Studio to compile code with all optimizations turned on (especially PGO, which is extra RAM-intensive at the compilation stage) is also a major factor. Notice that this only happens in the 32-bit Visual Studio builds specifically.
Despite the phrase "open-source", there seems to be a distinct lack of information about whether this is a "source is now available for inspection" type release, or actually under an open-source license, and if so, which one.
I kinda hope they do in this case, and turn the whole user-tracking area into a patent minefield that companies are afraid to touch.
Except for the company's own data, of course: then they manage to remember how to really delete data, e.g. old emails after N days, so that no future nosey prosecutor can dig it out of the database.
I suppose the first question to ask would be where the moisture would've fallen otherwise. Unless they're creating new evaporation/condensation into clouds, which it doesn't sound like since they're discussing seeding rockets, they're just causing it to fall somewhere instead of somewhere else. Maybe that harms somewhere else, or maybe it doesn't; would need more information to say.
They appear not to get this, or not want to acknowledge it, though, with the quote: "Because clouds are boundless, weather control is boundless". Clouds might be boundless if you're doing isolated cloud-seeding operations, but on a massive industrial scale, clouds aren't really boundless...
Working for one of the military's private-sector IT contractors isn't exactly the same as enlisting in the military.
More farmable land is actually one of the predictions: some models show America's "wheat belt" migrating northwards, so the plains of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba will become productive in the way that Iowa, the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas currently are for the U.S.: here's a map
The general in-house versus outsource vs commodity question here is a bit inextricably tied up in the more specific "enterprise software sucks" problem. I've seen moving from in-house solutions to third-party stuff work well, when it's good third-party stuff. For example, near the end of my time there, my university switched from an aging home-rolled email setup to a Zimbra installation, which, while not perfect, was generally better and more reliable. On the other hand, there is certainly plenty of crap that they pay Oracle and Microsoft $$$ to run that doesn't serve anyone's needs very well, or integrate with anything else.
Interesting that they've settled on this approach, which in some ways is much more traditional: developing a high-performance JIT for a dynamic language instead of trying to statically compile a subset. Basically the approach taken by StrongTalk, V8, PyPy, Rubinius, etc.
As far as I can tell:
1. You can't link to a specific page in the archive, which makes sharing a bit tricky; and
2. You can't download full-resolution pages.
Still a useful resource to have, but it's a bit unfortunate that these kinds of digitization projects seem to always want to roll-their-own slightly opaque interface.
The other reason is that there are a lot more SWAT teams than they used to be, so the threshold for calling them out is a lot lower. Gotta justify that taxpayer money spent on fancy equipment somehow...
Heck, even if I was the rancher, I'd rather lobby for taxpayer reimbursement through some sort of "cattle-rustlin' loss fund" or something, rather than going all-out with militarized law enforcement. By the standards of ag. subsidies, it'd be pretty small, too. Plus, that way it wouldn't run the risk that they'd also find my weed patch, as you say.
Did I miss the part where the cattle rustlers are using UAVs in their activities?
I'll take some cattle rustlers over militarized police chasing cattle rustlers any day, thanks. Much like the cure/disease metaphor, not every policing measure targeting every crime improves society, even if successful...
Wikipedia's actually pretty good at sci-fi currently imo. It doesn't go into the level of fan detail on specific works as something like WookiePedia does, but it has pretty good coverage of the authors, novels, and general literary landscape. If anything, its sci-fi coverage is considerably better than its coverage of most other areas of fiction.
This is where I try to type something like, "ugh, this kind of shoddy editing job would never have happened back when CmdrTaco was in charge!" while trying to suppress chuckles...