I would say that the length of time it takes is about 50% dependent on who you know, and 50% on how desperate companies are for your skills. A person on my Clinic project team at Harvey Mudd went for three days of interviews in San Jose after his job that he thought was certain fell through. On the morning of the second day, he was offered a position with a startup, on the spot. The salary negotiation consisted of them asking him to name a figure sufficient for him to cancel the remainder of his interviews and work for them once he left school. He named that figure, the recruiter added some stock options to the offer, and that was that. Now, this is person from a prestigious tech school with a degree in CS, so he's going to be in demand. In any case, by your formula this would have been an 8 week search...
I chose to spend a lot longer on my search (and could afford to, being in school and all), and it ended up taking in the range of time that you're talking about. However, this was to do real research, fly up for a week of interviews, and do protracted salary negotiations (one of the parties was a government contractor).
I'd say that this has a lot to do with the skill set of your average tech support callcenter person.
I would equate the hysteria towards video games as similar to the Temperance movement. These were people who talked about "Demon Rum" with straight faces, and they were convinced that alcohol was destroying the moral structure of the country. In a frenzy they managed to get Prohibition enacted, which did exactly the opposite of what was intended.
Neither games nor alcohol by themselves cause any harm. However, when one reaches the point where one is dependent on games or alcohol for one's sense of well-being, there is a problem. If you turn down invitations to spend time with your (non-drinking / non-gaming) friends because you won't be able to (drink / game) with them, then there's a problem. I could go on analogizing, but you get the point. I like video games, and I think progressively more immersive games are indeed the future of entertainment. The reason this hysteria is so ridiculous is that if one simply follows the maxim, "All things in moderation, nothing to excess," everything will be fine.
Walt
P.S. [OT] Does anyone remember the IBM PC game that had CGA graphics and was called DONKEY? There was a road and a race car that could be in either of the two lanes. Donkeys would come randomly in one lane or the other, and you would have to press the space bar to switch lanes and avoid the donkey if it was in your lane. The car moved progressively closer to the top of the screen, making it more difficult to avoid the donkeys. I once left it on all night to see how often all the donkeys would be in the other lane, and thus allow you to win without doing anything. I recall it only happened once in ten hours of letting it run.
Well, if you look at it from a pure rendering power standpoint, yes, the PS2 is nearly as powerful. Yes, there are $140,000 graphics cards used to drive 6 screen "powerwalls" but these really aren't that much faster than the PS2.
Yeah, I thought I was pretty neutral too. I'm actually a laissez-faire capitalist, and was simply stating what you managed to say more eloquently: It's not charity, it's a business practice. My sole problem with the business practice is that people look at it and think it's charity when it's really something else. For someone who calls himself Christ-O-Geek, you'd think he would be familiar with 1 Corinthians 13 verse 3. "though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing" (Taken from http://www.htmlbible.com/kjv30/B46C013.htm). In other words, for a Christian there is clearly a big difference between giving something away to someone else and doing it for charity. I'm an staunch atheist, but I have to agree with the Bible here, there's a big difference.
An example of something that I actually have a severe beef about is the way companies advertise to little kids. Four-year-olds don't have the capacity to know when someone is lying to them, and companies take advantage of that by bombarding them with ads. "You will have more friends if you buy this toy!" Yeah, right! That's fraud, especially since you're feeding this to people who are unable to tell the difference without a lot of help. I find that practice much more objectionable than the relatively harmless attempt to convince students that Company X's software is the one true computing platform.
And Microsoft also is willing to cheapyly site-license this stuff to colleges and universities that have the money to pay full price. This is not charity. Most colleges are not so strapped for cash that they couldn't pay for MS Office just like a regular corporation. They could afford to go to a Unix based solution like Framemaker, but MS wants itself to be established as the standard computing platform everywhere. So, MS offers site-licenses really cheap in order to indoctrinate the students into thinking that everyone uses MS.
This is the same policy that Apple uses, so I am not singling MS out as particularly bad. No company does this as charity.
Well, yes and no. The "Big Cheese" has managed to get (so he claims) 300,000 guillible people to pony up US$30 each for worthless pieces of paper describing a location on the moon, so he's probably wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. I doubt the alternate.biz people, who have to run actual DNS servers and are charging a lot less, are doing as well as the crazy moon guy. As embarrassing as this is, I have to admit that I'm really tempted by the fact that after 26 December he's going to only sell single acres instead of 2000 acre sites for the same price. It's just sooo hard to remember that 2,000 times nothing in exchange for something is still a bad deal. And no, I'm not going to link to the shop, because frankly his claims about having ownership really are fraudulent. Even if he's not kidding, the odds of that claim holding up are about the same as the odds of winning the lottery. Come to think of it, the lottery and the moon plots are about the same in terms of relieving people who don't know that TANSTAAFL of their money...
I've been on the rc5 mailing list for distrbuted.net since fairly early in the rc5-56 contest, and this topic seems to come up every few months or so. If you look at the load on a single user linux machine, it's pretty low,.1 or something even for pretty heavy users. So almost all of the time it sits idle, meaning that it doesn't have to consume any power. The stuff for dnet is almost entirely CPU, so the power consumption from the disk, etc. is almost nil (neglecting the face that hard drives won't spin down due to checkpointing). So a naive calculation would be 30W * 24 hours * 365.25 days = 262980 W*h or 262 kWh. At ten or so cents per kWh, that's US$26 for a year of CPU time. Now, we can argue that the power supply isn't 100% efficient, or maybe you have a 1GhZ Athlon drawing 68 W, so it could be up to US$100 for power.
But look at it from the purchasing company's point of view: when you factor in the cost of maintaining all those computers, the fact that a US$2000 computer is worthless in 4 years, and multiply it all by 100-200% overhead, a year of CPU time is worth a lot. US$1000? It's worth even more in the context of a big computer. Look at the per-CPU price on the supercomputers on the top500 list! 10,000 CPUS for US$110M! Despite the fact that they're slower and one generation out of date, they're expensive in aggregate. Yes, a lot of what you pay for is communication between nodes or clusters, but the raw CPUs aren't cheap. I bet this sort of sale becomes very lucrative, although I am not entirely comfortable with dnet being the ones to do it.
Office for the Mac does in fact have an Exchange compatible mail client. It's not Outlook, but it will work. Now, the Unix people are still stuck with web-based mail, so I don't think this is a solution. Besides, isn't being able to check one's mail via SSH a fundamental design requirement?
Well, if you want a convenient package with Java, SSL support, and plenty of useful common plugins, Netscape provides a lot. I'm on Solaris, so I don't have a choice right now, but if Netscape 6 is more convenient to use than Mozilla, I'll use Netscape.
Actually, needing "another month" to fix the most glaring bugs is not "true for every project". What is true for every project is the appearance that another month would be enough to fix all the bugs. Brooks (of the Mythical Man Month) called this the 90% problem. In reality, it takes approximately as long in calendar months (not programmer months) to do the last 10% of a project as it does to do the first 90%. When you take into account that the "fantasy factor" (the multiple of the actual versus predicted time to finish a project) is probably 2x or 3x, it can take a really long time to do the last 10%. I'm willing to bet it will take six months or more to get a dot release of Netscape 6 out the door with most of the outstanding defects fixed.
I voted in Alameda county in California, where we have punch card voting. The punch card slides into a holder, and there are two pegs on which it sits to make sure it is in the correct position. Each ~1x2mm rectangular hole on the card is covered by a circular metal hole. The puncher is a slim metal cylinder about the same width as a paperclip. The puncher clearly goes through the card, and there is an audible "pop" as it does. Interestingly, nowhere does it say that you should check your ballot to make sure all of the holes are completely punched. I certainly didn't check, and none of the polling place workers told me to either. Of course, there were maybe 6 oor 7 people in line the whole time I was there, so possibly they were trying not to slow down the process too much.
I would also point out that US Treasury debt has long been rated as being free from all possiblity of default. Thus it pays the lowest possible interest rate, and is even more cost effective than commercial lines of credit. However, the rate of return on government spending is quite different. A 1% increase in spending might prevent the economy from tanking completely and reducing tax revenues by 75%. Thus it really is cost-effective both for the economy and also the government if that extra money is borrowed rather than saving the interest cost.
Well, if Unitarianism has been waggishly referred to as the belief in "at most one God", why not start Nonatarianism, the belief in no god. Someone I know put this religion down when he was forced to indicate one by the registrar at MIT. This was in the late sixties.
I guess I should have been a little more clear. I agree that equity investment is by far more benficial to the economy than any individual person laboring. I'm not a fan of Nader's politics, I was just trying to illustrate the bias in our tax code towards "things we like", although I suppose I should have used a different example, like marraige or owning a house where it's a little more cut and dried.
Spoken like a true market neophyte. Capital gains are taxed at less than the rate income is taxed, encouraging people to make money in the stock market rather than working for it. I will soon be in the 31% federal bracket, plus 6.5% Social Security, plus 9.3% state tax bracket. I can pay 31+6.5+9.3=47% of each dollar I earn to the government, or I can pay capital gains taxes of around 20%. Which is the better deal? Am I going to work hard to increase my salary or to increase the returns on my portfolio? That is what Nader is referring to when he says we shouldn't tax things we like.
Allow me to repeat: The FBI does not trust you, does not like you, and has little interest in protecting your rights.
This guy was involved in some suspicious activity after the commission of a crime. The FBI thus wants him to incriminate himself so they can close the case and go home. They are used to being lied to, so they do not trust you.
As far as they are concerned, you are a suspect in a crime, one which if they do not solve will look bad on their records. You, as a person who is not admitting to the crime, are standing between them and solving the case. Thus, they do not like you.
Their goal is to solve the case, and it makes it easier for them if you do not defend or otherwise demand your rights. Thus they are not interested in protecting them. A lawyer, hired by you, is interested in protecting your rights. The law is so unbelievably complicated that you need all the help you can get. Someone below here linked to an online pamphlet called "When an Agent Knocks" that seems to be a good start.
I realize that it may feel like you are "acting guilty" by refusing to answer any questions. It may also feel like you are being impolite in the extreme. Let's put this in perspective: the FBI wants to find someone to convict of this crime, and they think it might be you. If you didn't commit the crime, there will be no or little evidence linking you to it. If you talk to them "informally" you could inadvertenly tell them something that appears to be incriminating. Any FBI agents out there care to make a guess at how many people demand a lawyer right off? I'm willing to bet it's a lot. The agent's suspicion level is already high. Merely demanding your rights won't change it.
The moral of this story should be: it doesn't matter that you have nothing to hide. The FBI does not trust you, does not like you, and has little interest in protecting your rights. The evidence presented in order to get the warrant seems extraordinarily flimsy, in my non-lawyerly opinion. At minimum you should have requested that a lawyer be present immediately. Yeah, it costs money that you don't have, but as I say, the FBI is more than happy to have you give up your rights.
In the "justice" system, one must play to win. Look at Eric Wiesstein, the Encylocpedia of Math guy who is involved in a suit with CRC Press. He compliments the judge's "well-reasoned opinion" in granting the injunction against him! You may think it's well reasoned, but if you want to win, you don't say things like that. The other side isn't undermining their own case like that.
If you truly have nothing to hide, you have everything to lose by talking to the FBI without a lawyer. You have nothing to gain by giving them potential ammunition to use against you.
And of course you won't get your computer back until they catch someone and convict them and they exhaust all you appeals. My fiancee's sister had her car stereo stolen and recovered, and the local police are keeping it as *evidence* until they convict the guy. Just remember, the government is *not* your friend.
I think it is key to have different parties in Congress and the White House. Have you noticed that they've been squabbling a lot these past few years, and haven't managed to pass any huge budget-sucking new programs or make any major tax cuts? The only reason Republicans are suddenly able to push US$40 billion worth of pork through is the pending election and Clinton's unwillingness to shut down the government. Up till now, the Dems haven't been able to get anything passed, and the GOP hasn't been able to get anything signed. Life is less bad than it could have been.
Frankly, I believe our current government is *too* efficient, and perhaps more efficient than the founders intended. They regarded political parties as "faction" and something to be avoided. Competing interests are fine, but having only two dominant sets of competing interests was not the intent at all. Imagine a situation where the President was not a member of either of the parties fighting over congress. Congress would be forced to be more bipartisan. Or maybe quadpartisan!
I'm in the awkward position of agreeing with your point that technical professionals often do things without thinking, while believing your specific example to be crap. The number of hours of labor required to produce, say, a pair of socks has declined dramatically over the last few hundred years. Do you really think that people worked shorter hours and had a higher standard of living two hundred years ago? No, they had two pairs of socks instead of the 12 that I have, and they worked 12-16 hour days 6 days a week, instead of 40 hours like I do. A pair of socks is what, US$1? For a professional, 2 minutes of work, for someone earning minimum wage, 12 minutes. A person in pre-industrial times would have to shear the sheep, card the wool, spin the yarn, and knit it into a sock. Just carding the wool for one sock takes more than 15 minutes! Now, cotton is harvested by machines, carded by machines (remember the cotton 'gin?), spun by machines, and the sock is made by machine. Result: you get a sock for a tenth the labor it would otherwise have taken. Now, we like having luxuries such as multiple pairs of socks, so we buy a ten times as many socks, cancelling out the labor savings. Fine, if that's your choice. But don't complain that you haven't gotten anything. If you wanted, you could get by on a couple of pairs of socks and work only a few hours a week as a freelancer. Sure, the people who used to make socks by hand lose their jobs, but they also get the benefit of cheap socks.
My great-grandfather was a cooper. I'm only in my early twenties, so this was not that long ago, perhaps in 1900 or so. He made barrels for a living, back when people put flour and things like that in barrels. Guess what, there are more efficient ways of storing things than putting them in hand-made barrels with hand-bent slats and hand-hammered hoops. So eventually manufacturers started putting things in plastic drums and cardboard boxes, which reduced the cost of the items. My great-grandfather no longer had enough business to keep on making barrels, so he became a farmer. And I believe lost a bundle speculating on the price of wheat during WWII, but that's another story.
As for a more contemporary example of misapplied technology, one need look no further than the US Interstate Highway System. It was designed by civil engineers who made decisions based solely on the most rigid engineering principles: Build the least expensive highway through a given area. If that meant hacking a black neighborhood in two because it was the cheapest right of way, so be it. If it meant building a highway right on the flat area next to a river, separating the residents of a city from its natural beauty, fine. And if it meant building 70 feet away from homes, shaking them apart and driving their occupants crazy with the noise and vibration, that was fine too if it was the cheapest way to build the highway. The engineers didn't stop for one second to think beyond the blueprints to the effects on the community. They thought that good highways would *stop* the flow of people out of the cities, for pete's sake! Just goes to show that "can" is not at all the same as "should".
Walt
P.S. For a great, very readable book on the building of the Interstate Highways, see _Divided Highways_, by Tom Lewis. BestBookBuys.com has a great price search here. This book is a must for any technical person who wants to consider their impact on the world around them.
A military quality satellite actually has a lot to do with a high-quality ground based telescope. The best ground-based scopes have approximately 1 micro-degree resolution, right? IIRC, that works out to about 1cm resolution from low-earth orbit. So, given that these things cost US$100 million on the ground, how much do you think it would cost to put up a satellite with the same capabilities? I'm thinking a cool US$1 billion or so. That's why the military is the only one who can afford satellites that can tell the difference between sneakers and wingtips from 100 miles us. Be happy that you've got a company with enough guts to put a commercial telescope of any kind up there.
A television ad, like a magazine ad, is guaranteed a certain viewership. The Super Bowl has such expensive ads because it has a huge rating, and you get lots of unique impressions that are impossible to get otherwise. Four ads on a 15 share program like the Olympics aren't worth anywhere close to one ad on a 60 share program. That's because TV ad buyers would rather have 60 million people see their ad than 15 million people see it four times. So a banner ad served to 4 million unique people is worth more than a banner ad shown twice to 2 million people.
I agree with two of your points: the extreme warmth of the sun, and the high energy of particles in space. I was more thinking of a situation where the CPU was outside in a vacuum in the Earth's shadow. Now, I'm not sure how much heat a processor will radiate, but the amount of energy being added to the processor from space is very low. There are of course plenty of very high energy particles whizzing about, most of them, as you point out, very close to the speed of light. But since they are so low density, they won't add a lot of energy either. Heck, most of the really high energy ones probably pass right through even if their "path" went straight through a P4 heatsink.
I'm not so sure that space is as warm as you think. Sure, there's no matter to dissapate heat into. but there is and almost unlimited deficit of radiant heat. That kind of heat is mostly infrared photons, so they will fly off with no problems. Since the sun (and reflected rays therof) provide the only appreciable source of rays, there is very little radiant heat coming in. Even if I were in a vacuum right now, I would still be comfortable in terms of temperature because I would be radiating heat away approximately fast as I was absorbing it. Besides, if space is so warm, why do the astronauts have heating devices in the suits they wear for EVMs?
It's a poor workman who blames his tools. If there is a way for an air-traffic to be controlled by a system, and your air-traffic control system doesn't do it, the reason is not inherent in the "limits of software"--there's some problem with your design/implementation.
I believe this misses the point of the book, at least judging from the quote by Prof. Noble. The point is, it's a poor workman who assumes his tools are all-powerful and not subject to normal criteria like cost/benefit analyses. The engineers who built cathedrals (no ESR metaphors intended here) used secret design principles painstakingly determined by trial and error through the centuries. If the building stayed up for hundreds of years, it was a Good Thing. Software is a young discipline, largely without solid rules, and yet is widely acknowledged to be changing the world. Software will drastically change the next generation of children, whose parents will prbably all have to use a computer at some point. There are what, a hundred million computers in the US? And yet the primary operating system on them is actively bad. Even Linux is often klunky, and despite better stability isn't even as easy to use as that mass of inconsistency, Windows. Why is this? Because the culture of software believes "good enough" really is good enough. Most people who become programmers are lucky if they get a few semesters of training learning different languages. They get no training at all in controlling the number of defects in their code. This results in lots of software of average quality, that is to say, shit.
A lot of this is driven by the fact that many people believe it is okay to admire software as math. It's not. Software is meant to accomplish something, and to do it better or faster or cheaper than however it was done before. It has absolutely nothing to do with pretty math, or purity, or any of those things you say are worthy of awe. If I designed a bridge with a novel way of laying out the supports that was really neat, but the bridge fell over because the supports interfered with the arches, no one would complement me on my support placement algorithm. They'd think I was an idiot who couldn't design a bridge to save his life. And yet I see all the time, "Wow, this code is really cool, it doesn't all work yet but isn't it neat?" because as long as it's software no one cares.
Slashdot Mirror
I would say that the length of time it takes is about 50% dependent on who you know, and 50% on how desperate companies are for your skills. A person on my Clinic project team at Harvey Mudd went for three days of interviews in San Jose after his job that he thought was certain fell through. On the morning of the second day, he was offered a position with a startup, on the spot. The salary negotiation consisted of them asking him to name a figure sufficient for him to cancel the remainder of his interviews and work for them once he left school. He named that figure, the recruiter added some stock options to the offer, and that was that. Now, this is person from a prestigious tech school with a degree in CS, so he's going to be in demand. In any case, by your formula this would have been an 8 week search...
I chose to spend a lot longer on my search (and could afford to, being in school and all), and it ended up taking in the range of time that you're talking about. However, this was to do real research, fly up for a week of interviews, and do protracted salary negotiations (one of the parties was a government contractor).
I'd say that this has a lot to do with the skill set of your average tech support callcenter person.
Walt
I would equate the hysteria towards video games as similar to the Temperance movement. These were people who talked about "Demon Rum" with straight faces, and they were convinced that alcohol was destroying the moral structure of the country. In a frenzy they managed to get Prohibition enacted, which did exactly the opposite of what was intended.
Neither games nor alcohol by themselves cause any harm. However, when one reaches the point where one is dependent on games or alcohol for one's sense of well-being, there is a problem. If you turn down invitations to spend time with your (non-drinking / non-gaming) friends because you won't be able to (drink / game) with them, then there's a problem. I could go on analogizing, but you get the point. I like video games, and I think progressively more immersive games are indeed the future of entertainment. The reason this hysteria is so ridiculous is that if one simply follows the maxim, "All things in moderation, nothing to excess," everything will be fine.
Walt
P.S. [OT] Does anyone remember the IBM PC game that had CGA graphics and was called DONKEY? There was a road and a race car that could be in either of the two lanes. Donkeys would come randomly in one lane or the other, and you would have to press the space bar to switch lanes and avoid the donkey if it was in your lane. The car moved progressively closer to the top of the screen, making it more difficult to avoid the donkeys. I once left it on all night to see how often all the donkeys would be in the other lane, and thus allow you to win without doing anything. I recall it only happened once in ten hours of letting it run.
Well, if you look at it from a pure rendering power standpoint, yes, the PS2 is nearly as powerful. Yes, there are $140,000 graphics cards used to drive 6 screen "powerwalls" but these really aren't that much faster than the PS2.
Walt
Yeah, I thought I was pretty neutral too. I'm actually a laissez-faire capitalist, and was simply stating what you managed to say more eloquently: It's not charity, it's a business practice. My sole problem with the business practice is that people look at it and think it's charity when it's really something else. For someone who calls himself Christ-O-Geek, you'd think he would be familiar with 1 Corinthians 13 verse 3. "though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing" (Taken from http://www.htmlbible.com/kjv30/B46C013.htm). In other words, for a Christian there is clearly a big difference between giving something away to someone else and doing it for charity. I'm an staunch atheist, but I have to agree with the Bible here, there's a big difference.
An example of something that I actually have a severe beef about is the way companies advertise to little kids. Four-year-olds don't have the capacity to know when someone is lying to them, and companies take advantage of that by bombarding them with ads. "You will have more friends if you buy this toy!" Yeah, right! That's fraud, especially since you're feeding this to people who are unable to tell the difference without a lot of help. I find that practice much more objectionable than the relatively harmless attempt to convince students that Company X's software is the one true computing platform.
Walt
And Microsoft also is willing to cheapyly site-license this stuff to colleges and universities that have the money to pay full price. This is not charity. Most colleges are not so strapped for cash that they couldn't pay for MS Office just like a regular corporation. They could afford to go to a Unix based solution like Framemaker, but MS wants itself to be established as the standard computing platform everywhere. So, MS offers site-licenses really cheap in order to indoctrinate the students into thinking that everyone uses MS.
This is the same policy that Apple uses, so I am not singling MS out as particularly bad. No company does this as charity.
Walt
Well, yes and no. The "Big Cheese" has managed to get (so he claims) 300,000 guillible people to pony up US$30 each for worthless pieces of paper describing a location on the moon, so he's probably wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. I doubt the alternate .biz people, who have to run actual DNS servers and are charging a lot less, are doing as well as the crazy moon guy. As embarrassing as this is, I have to admit that I'm really tempted by the fact that after 26 December he's going to only sell single acres instead of 2000 acre sites for the same price. It's just sooo hard to remember that 2,000 times nothing in exchange for something is still a bad deal. And no, I'm not going to link to the shop, because frankly his claims about having ownership really are fraudulent. Even if he's not kidding, the odds of that claim holding up are about the same as the odds of winning the lottery. Come to think of it, the lottery and the moon plots are about the same in terms of relieving people who don't know that TANSTAAFL of their money...
Walt
I've been on the rc5 mailing list for distrbuted.net since fairly early in the rc5-56 contest, and this topic seems to come up every few months or so. If you look at the load on a single user linux machine, it's pretty low, .1 or something even for pretty heavy users. So almost all of the time it sits idle, meaning that it doesn't have to consume any power. The stuff for dnet is almost entirely CPU, so the power consumption from the disk, etc. is almost nil (neglecting the face that hard drives won't spin down due to checkpointing). So a naive calculation would be 30W * 24 hours * 365.25 days = 262980 W*h or 262 kWh. At ten or so cents per kWh, that's US$26 for a year of CPU time. Now, we can argue that the power supply isn't 100% efficient, or maybe you have a 1GhZ Athlon drawing 68 W, so it could be up to US$100 for power.
But look at it from the purchasing company's point of view: when you factor in the cost of maintaining all those computers, the fact that a US$2000 computer is worthless in 4 years, and multiply it all by 100-200% overhead, a year of CPU time is worth a lot. US$1000? It's worth even more in the context of a big computer. Look at the per-CPU price on the supercomputers on the top500 list! 10,000 CPUS for US$110M! Despite the fact that they're slower and one generation out of date, they're expensive in aggregate. Yes, a lot of what you pay for is communication between nodes or clusters, but the raw CPUs aren't cheap. I bet this sort of sale becomes very lucrative, although I am not entirely comfortable with dnet being the ones to do it.
Walt
Office for the Mac does in fact have an Exchange compatible mail client. It's not Outlook, but it will work. Now, the Unix people are still stuck with web-based mail, so I don't think this is a solution. Besides, isn't being able to check one's mail via SSH a fundamental design requirement?
Walt
Well, if you want a convenient package with Java, SSL support, and plenty of useful common plugins, Netscape provides a lot. I'm on Solaris, so I don't have a choice right now, but if Netscape 6 is more convenient to use than Mozilla, I'll use Netscape.
Walt
Actually, needing "another month" to fix the most glaring bugs is not "true for every project". What is true for every project is the appearance that another month would be enough to fix all the bugs. Brooks (of the Mythical Man Month) called this the 90% problem. In reality, it takes approximately as long in calendar months (not programmer months) to do the last 10% of a project as it does to do the first 90%. When you take into account that the "fantasy factor" (the multiple of the actual versus predicted time to finish a project) is probably 2x or 3x, it can take a really long time to do the last 10%. I'm willing to bet it will take six months or more to get a dot release of Netscape 6 out the door with most of the outstanding defects fixed.
Walt
I voted in Alameda county in California, where we have punch card voting. The punch card slides into a holder, and there are two pegs on which it sits to make sure it is in the correct position. Each ~1x2mm rectangular hole on the card is covered by a circular metal hole. The puncher is a slim metal cylinder about the same width as a paperclip. The puncher clearly goes through the card, and there is an audible "pop" as it does. Interestingly, nowhere does it say that you should check your ballot to make sure all of the holes are completely punched. I certainly didn't check, and none of the polling place workers told me to either. Of course, there were maybe 6 oor 7 people in line the whole time I was there, so possibly they were trying not to slow down the process too much.
Walt
The joke is that even though Reagan and Bush were in office, abortion stayed legal. --Walt
I would also point out that US Treasury debt has long been rated as being free from all possiblity of default. Thus it pays the lowest possible interest rate, and is even more cost effective than commercial lines of credit. However, the rate of return on government spending is quite different. A 1% increase in spending might prevent the economy from tanking completely and reducing tax revenues by 75%. Thus it really is cost-effective both for the economy and also the government if that extra money is borrowed rather than saving the interest cost.
Walt
Well, if Unitarianism has been waggishly referred to as the belief in "at most one God", why not start Nonatarianism, the belief in no god. Someone I know put this religion down when he was forced to indicate one by the registrar at MIT. This was in the late sixties.
Walt
I guess I should have been a little more clear. I agree that equity investment is by far more benficial to the economy than any individual person laboring. I'm not a fan of Nader's politics, I was just trying to illustrate the bias in our tax code towards "things we like", although I suppose I should have used a different example, like marraige or owning a house where it's a little more cut and dried.
Walt
Spoken like a true market neophyte. Capital gains are taxed at less than the rate income is taxed, encouraging people to make money in the stock market rather than working for it. I will soon be in the 31% federal bracket, plus 6.5% Social Security, plus 9.3% state tax bracket. I can pay 31+6.5+9.3=47% of each dollar I earn to the government, or I can pay capital gains taxes of around 20%. Which is the better deal? Am I going to work hard to increase my salary or to increase the returns on my portfolio? That is what Nader is referring to when he says we shouldn't tax things we like.
Walt
Allow me to repeat: The FBI does not trust you, does not like you, and has little interest in protecting your rights.
This guy was involved in some suspicious activity after the commission of a crime. The FBI thus wants him to incriminate himself so they can close the case and go home. They are used to being lied to, so they do not trust you.
As far as they are concerned, you are a suspect in a crime, one which if they do not solve will look bad on their records. You, as a person who is not admitting to the crime, are standing between them and solving the case. Thus, they do not like you.
Their goal is to solve the case, and it makes it easier for them if you do not defend or otherwise demand your rights. Thus they are not interested in protecting them. A lawyer, hired by you, is interested in protecting your rights. The law is so unbelievably complicated that you need all the help you can get. Someone below here linked to an online pamphlet called "When an Agent Knocks" that seems to be a good start.
I realize that it may feel like you are "acting guilty" by refusing to answer any questions. It may also feel like you are being impolite in the extreme. Let's put this in perspective: the FBI wants to find someone to convict of this crime, and they think it might be you. If you didn't commit the crime, there will be no or little evidence linking you to it. If you talk to them "informally" you could inadvertenly tell them something that appears to be incriminating. Any FBI agents out there care to make a guess at how many people demand a lawyer right off? I'm willing to bet it's a lot. The agent's suspicion level is already high. Merely demanding your rights won't change it.
Walt
The moral of this story should be: it doesn't matter that you have nothing to hide. The FBI does not trust you, does not like you, and has little interest in protecting your rights. The evidence presented in order to get the warrant seems extraordinarily flimsy, in my non-lawyerly opinion. At minimum you should have requested that a lawyer be present immediately. Yeah, it costs money that you don't have, but as I say, the FBI is more than happy to have you give up your rights.
In the "justice" system, one must play to win. Look at Eric Wiesstein, the Encylocpedia of Math guy who is involved in a suit with CRC Press. He compliments the judge's "well-reasoned opinion" in granting the injunction against him! You may think it's well reasoned, but if you want to win, you don't say things like that. The other side isn't undermining their own case like that.
If you truly have nothing to hide, you have everything to lose by talking to the FBI without a lawyer. You have nothing to gain by giving them potential ammunition to use against you.
And of course you won't get your computer back until they catch someone and convict them and they exhaust all you appeals. My fiancee's sister had her car stereo stolen and recovered, and the local police are keeping it as *evidence* until they convict the guy. Just remember, the government is *not* your friend.
Walt
I think it is key to have different parties in Congress and the White House. Have you noticed that they've been squabbling a lot these past few years, and haven't managed to pass any huge budget-sucking new programs or make any major tax cuts? The only reason Republicans are suddenly able to push US$40 billion worth of pork through is the pending election and Clinton's unwillingness to shut down the government. Up till now, the Dems haven't been able to get anything passed, and the GOP hasn't been able to get anything signed. Life is less bad than it could have been.
Frankly, I believe our current government is *too* efficient, and perhaps more efficient than the founders intended. They regarded political parties as "faction" and something to be avoided. Competing interests are fine, but having only two dominant sets of competing interests was not the intent at all. Imagine a situation where the President was not a member of either of the parties fighting over congress. Congress would be forced to be more bipartisan. Or maybe quadpartisan!
Walt
I'm in the awkward position of agreeing with your point that technical professionals often do things without thinking, while believing your specific example to be crap. The number of hours of labor required to produce, say, a pair of socks has declined dramatically over the last few hundred years. Do you really think that people worked shorter hours and had a higher standard of living two hundred years ago? No, they had two pairs of socks instead of the 12 that I have, and they worked 12-16 hour days 6 days a week, instead of 40 hours like I do. A pair of socks is what, US$1? For a professional, 2 minutes of work, for someone earning minimum wage, 12 minutes. A person in pre-industrial times would have to shear the sheep, card the wool, spin the yarn, and knit it into a sock. Just carding the wool for one sock takes more than 15 minutes! Now, cotton is harvested by machines, carded by machines (remember the cotton 'gin?), spun by machines, and the sock is made by machine. Result: you get a sock for a tenth the labor it would otherwise have taken. Now, we like having luxuries such as multiple pairs of socks, so we buy a ten times as many socks, cancelling out the labor savings. Fine, if that's your choice. But don't complain that you haven't gotten anything. If you wanted, you could get by on a couple of pairs of socks and work only a few hours a week as a freelancer. Sure, the people who used to make socks by hand lose their jobs, but they also get the benefit of cheap socks.
My great-grandfather was a cooper. I'm only in my early twenties, so this was not that long ago, perhaps in 1900 or so. He made barrels for a living, back when people put flour and things like that in barrels. Guess what, there are more efficient ways of storing things than putting them in hand-made barrels with hand-bent slats and hand-hammered hoops. So eventually manufacturers started putting things in plastic drums and cardboard boxes, which reduced the cost of the items. My great-grandfather no longer had enough business to keep on making barrels, so he became a farmer. And I believe lost a bundle speculating on the price of wheat during WWII, but that's another story.
As for a more contemporary example of misapplied technology, one need look no further than the US Interstate Highway System. It was designed by civil engineers who made decisions based solely on the most rigid engineering principles: Build the least expensive highway through a given area. If that meant hacking a black neighborhood in two because it was the cheapest right of way, so be it. If it meant building a highway right on the flat area next to a river, separating the residents of a city from its natural beauty, fine. And if it meant building 70 feet away from homes, shaking them apart and driving their occupants crazy with the noise and vibration, that was fine too if it was the cheapest way to build the highway. The engineers didn't stop for one second to think beyond the blueprints to the effects on the community. They thought that good highways would *stop* the flow of people out of the cities, for pete's sake! Just goes to show that "can" is not at all the same as "should".
Walt
P.S. For a great, very readable book on the building of the Interstate Highways, see _Divided Highways_, by Tom Lewis. BestBookBuys.com has a great price search here. This book is a must for any technical person who wants to consider their impact on the world around them.
A military quality satellite actually has a lot to do with a high-quality ground based telescope. The best ground-based scopes have approximately 1 micro-degree resolution, right? IIRC, that works out to about 1cm resolution from low-earth orbit. So, given that these things cost US$100 million on the ground, how much do you think it would cost to put up a satellite with the same capabilities? I'm thinking a cool US$1 billion or so. That's why the military is the only one who can afford satellites that can tell the difference between sneakers and wingtips from 100 miles us. Be happy that you've got a company with enough guts to put a commercial telescope of any kind up there.
Walt
A television ad, like a magazine ad, is guaranteed a certain viewership. The Super Bowl has such expensive ads because it has a huge rating, and you get lots of unique impressions that are impossible to get otherwise. Four ads on a 15 share program like the Olympics aren't worth anywhere close to one ad on a 60 share program. That's because TV ad buyers would rather have 60 million people see their ad than 15 million people see it four times. So a banner ad served to 4 million unique people is worth more than a banner ad shown twice to 2 million people.
Walt
I agree with two of your points: the extreme warmth of the sun, and the high energy of particles in space. I was more thinking of a situation where the CPU was outside in a vacuum in the Earth's shadow. Now, I'm not sure how much heat a processor will radiate, but the amount of energy being added to the processor from space is very low. There are of course plenty of very high energy particles whizzing about, most of them, as you point out, very close to the speed of light. But since they are so low density, they won't add a lot of energy either. Heck, most of the really high energy ones probably pass right through even if their "path" went straight through a P4 heatsink.
Walt
I'm not so sure that space is as warm as you think. Sure, there's no matter to dissapate heat into. but there is and almost unlimited deficit of radiant heat. That kind of heat is mostly infrared photons, so they will fly off with no problems. Since the sun (and reflected rays therof) provide the only appreciable source of rays, there is very little radiant heat coming in. Even if I were in a vacuum right now, I would still be comfortable in terms of temperature because I would be radiating heat away approximately fast as I was absorbing it. Besides, if space is so warm, why do the astronauts have heating devices in the suits they wear for EVMs?
Walt
It's a poor workman who blames his tools. If there is a way for an air-traffic to be controlled by a system, and your air-traffic control system doesn't do it, the reason is not inherent in the "limits of software"--there's some problem with your design/implementation.
I believe this misses the point of the book, at least judging from the quote by Prof. Noble. The point is, it's a poor workman who assumes his tools are all-powerful and not subject to normal criteria like cost/benefit analyses. The engineers who built cathedrals (no ESR metaphors intended here) used secret design principles painstakingly determined by trial and error through the centuries. If the building stayed up for hundreds of years, it was a Good Thing. Software is a young discipline, largely without solid rules, and yet is widely acknowledged to be changing the world. Software will drastically change the next generation of children, whose parents will prbably all have to use a computer at some point. There are what, a hundred million computers in the US? And yet the primary operating system on them is actively bad. Even Linux is often klunky, and despite better stability isn't even as easy to use as that mass of inconsistency, Windows. Why is this? Because the culture of software believes "good enough" really is good enough. Most people who become programmers are lucky if they get a few semesters of training learning different languages. They get no training at all in controlling the number of defects in their code. This results in lots of software of average quality, that is to say, shit.
A lot of this is driven by the fact that many people believe it is okay to admire software as math. It's not. Software is meant to accomplish something, and to do it better or faster or cheaper than however it was done before. It has absolutely nothing to do with pretty math, or purity, or any of those things you say are worthy of awe. If I designed a bridge with a novel way of laying out the supports that was really neat, but the bridge fell over because the supports interfered with the arches, no one would complement me on my support placement algorithm. They'd think I was an idiot who couldn't design a bridge to save his life. And yet I see all the time, "Wow, this code is really cool, it doesn't all work yet but isn't it neat?" because as long as it's software no one cares.
Walt