And when everyone buys YOUR product because it is better than the others, the other businesses suffer and go out of business. They end up "hurting".
This is only true for a short term perspective.
Ideally, other businesses learn from their mistakes, compete and eventually make a better product than yours. You need to do the same, the market grows and, on average, everybody wins.
Some "businesses" compete by explicitly trying to bring either customer or competitor down. Those are parasites and the law tries very hard to stop them. It's not a perfect world though and there are still plenty of parasites around that try to slip through complex, modern society's cracks.
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You're a fool if you think advertising pays for anything at all.
"Hurting" the competition is a part of Capitalism, which is by definition competitive.
No it isn't. You can compete positively by improving your product. You can compete negatively by damaging your competitor's product. The first benefits the consumer. The second doesn't. Laws try to block the latter while allowing the former. Parasites of course try to avoid this.
There is always a winner and a loser in Capitalism.
No there isn't. When companies compete to create better products they add value for their customers, ideally growing the market because more consumers will be interested in the improved products so that all can benefit.
The whole point of doing a deal is to be win-win. When buy a product from you I benefit because the product is worth more to me than the money and you benefit because the money is worth more to you than the product. Win-win, the world is enriched and the economy/market grows in value. It's only with market failures such as monopolies where it is win-lose.
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You're a fool if you think advertising pays for anything at all.
Product placement is, at best, a necessary evil to fund content that is expensive to produce.
No, it's an unnecessary evil, just a primitive form of micropayment that hides the true cost of a product from the consumer. Advertising pays for nothing. Who do you think pays marketer's salaries? You do.
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"Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
And I don't mind product placement in shows as long as it's subtle.
Sucker. Unless you take subliminal advertising seriously the whole point of an ad is to be noticed. The only subtle ad is one that isn't working, and that's unsustainable.
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"Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
Enough with the nonsense. Unsolicited marketing is stealing ever more of the time of our lives and the time of our life is the most precious thing we have.
Modern unsolicited mass marketers are scum. It's no accident that marketers rate very low in respect surveys. Most unsolicited marketers should be in jail for fraud - almost all ad's on hot media like network TV are fraudulent, not to mention the fact that puerile consumerism crowds out much more important concerns like intelligent government or responsible parenting - too much noise can destroy free speech just as much as too little message.
You have a hatred of the market,
No, he has a hatred of unsolicited mass marketing. One of the evil things that marketing parasites have managed to do is to conflate unsolicited and solicited mass marketing drivel and also conflated a free market with unlimited, unsolicited advertising.
which generally just exists to fulfill wants and needs.
If only. The vast majority of unsolicited marketing is purely to create unnecessary, artificial needs. Everything from stupidly overpriced gym shoes to polluting 4WD's to massively overpriced cosmetic products.
My fix? They should start actually enforcing anti-fraud laws on the individual marketers. Not companies. That and "mind share" advertising should be very heavily taxed. Unsolicited marketing is a form of mental pollution and they should pay through the nose for polluting our mental environment or be forced to clean up the mess.
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Some people believe with great fervor preposterous things that just happen to coincide with their self-interest.
-- Judge Frank Easterbrook, Coleman v. CIR (7th Cir 1986) 791 F2d 68 at 69 [and quoted in several subsequent court decisions]
I'm getting tired of this nonsense being propagated. Almost all real world problems parallelize just fine, and to a scale sufficient to solve the problem with linear speedup. It's only when people look at a narrow class of toy problems and artificial restrictions that parallelism "doesn't apply". e.g. Look at google; it searches the entire web in milliseconds using a large array of boxes. Even machine instructions are being processed in parallel these days (out of order execution etc.).
Name a single real world problem that doesn't parallelize. I've asked this question on slashdot on several occasions and I've never received a positive reply. Real world problems like search, FEA, neural nets, compilation, database queries and weather simulation all parallelize well. Problems like orbital mechanics don't parallelize as easily but then they don't need parallelism to achieve bounded answers in faster than real time.
Note: I'm not talking about some problems being intrinsically hard (NP complete etc.), many programmers seem to conflate "problem is hard" with "problem cannot be parallelized". Some mediocre programmers also seem to regard parallel programming as voodoo and are oblivious to the fact that they are typically programming a box with dozens of processors in it (keyboard, disk, graphics, printer, monitor etc.). Some mediocre programmers also claim that because a serial programming language cannot be automatically parallelized that means parallelism is hard. Until we can program in a natural language that just means they're not using a parallel programming language appropriate for their target.
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Advertising pays for nothing. Who do you think pays marketer's salaries? You do via higher cost products.
There is a general impression on Slashdot among the more ignorant that humanities classes are a joke.
What a lot of people forget is that in every area of competitive human endeavor, and university is just as competitive as anywhere else, the difficulty is set by the average participant competing to the limit of their abilities. Because of this every area is, subject to the people participating, equally difficult.
Whether it's stick insects or stocks, people compete to their limits, though the difficulty may be expressed in different ways. Engineering is hard but it is also rewarding in a way that mathphobes may have trouble understanding, meaning on balance it is not as bad as it might appear.
As you say the humanities may be easier at introductory levels but as soon as people start competing hard it will be just as difficult as engineering.
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Advertising pays for nothing. Who do you think pays marketer's salaries? You do via higher cost products.
Yeah, but when you're talking about 5 milliseconds vs 2 for something that runs once in a blue moon, who gives a fuck?
The problem is that when every programmer does this, and every program is just lots of little operations combined into big ones, then the program as a whole takes seconds to respond instead of milliseconds and likely fails requirements.
Performance is always under consideration, but making it work it approximately infinitely more important.
It is not either-or as you imply. Frequently, just a few minutes careful thought at design time can save massive amounts of development time, run time and user time. All at the same time. And time is money.
Anyone on my teams who goes off on unwarranted performance rants is fired.
Yes, it's possible to spend too much time optimizing code, like premature peephole optimization, but it's also possible to spend to little time optimizing and large projects frequently fail because of performance problems. Fixing it at that point can be very expensive compared to spending a few minutes getting the design right.
Time is money and programs always have performance criteria, even if they're only implied, and assuming that the tooth fairy will make sure that a program will pass performance requirements is a great way to fail.
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Large, slow code is slower to debug. It costs development time. Those who claim there's a development/code performance tradeoff are blowing hot air.
No, it isn't meant for a new little guy to enter the market easily... but he *can* do it if he really really wants to.
Patents are just a weapon and make little difference to the balance of power when every player has them in proportion to their financial resources. "Patents protect the little guy" is a PTO myth.
So what is the problem?
The problem is that patents are a drag on progress, discouraging the dissemination and use of ideas, with little evidence they encourage innovation in quite large areas of technology including software, ideas whose "time has come" and standards. Unfortunately the PTO and their supporters are suffering badly from the "when all you've got is hammer, everything looks like a nail" syndrome.
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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
Wrong. Premature peephole optimization is the devil.
At the design stage choosing a good algorithm that scales is entirely appropriate. This is particularly true when you don't know how much data you'll be working with. Like any scripting language.
Performance criteria are always part of a design and cruddy programmers who hide their incompetence with the above mantra should be fired. See dailywtf for examples.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
It's probably not worth the cost and risk for most companies. If someone wants or needs something on their system, just having them ask first is a reasonable approach.
No it isn't. You've just created a catch-22. How the hell is a user able to know whether an application is useful to them without installing and testing it?
I've worked in far too many places where people didn't install what would have been useful and productive software because it was just not worth the hassle. That by itself is an indication that system admin regards their control as more important than the needs of the company and the individual users. An admin does not know what is useful to each user and the company and they are arrogant to automatically assume they do.
The correct approach is to provide a sandpit so that users can test what they need in a safe environment, or even allowing controlled installs in the regular environment, make sure they know what they are responsible for (e.g. keeping licenses legal and not wasting anybody's time) and provide simple tools to rollback as needed. If it turns out to be useful and worthwhile then allowing limited hassle while installing it in the regular environment to limit impact on other users may be justified.
I've administered this way on 1000+ station LAN's and it works very well. Work smart, not hard. Not only did the users like the environment a lot (I was perpetually getting positive feedback) I learned from my users a lot about the huge variety of software out there and business processes as well.
More succinctly; helping users to help themselves is a far more productive use of an admin's time than treating the average user as the enemy.
But that's embarrassingly parallelizable, it's why hard disks have multiple heads and multiple platters to read/write in parallel and up the throughput. RAID's make it even more parallel. Within limits and for normal volumes of hard disk data, which are much larger than a sector size, (small data is held in memory+caches) this will increase throughput proportional to the number of heads.
In any case that's a hardware limitation, nothing to do with an algorithm as such.
I do agree that if you drill down far enough you get to atomic operations that can't be parallelized however I'm not aware of any atomic operation in real world programming that takes any more than a tiny fraction of second and thus cause real world impact. Even machine instructions are done in parallel these days.
(Correction to previous post:... Maybe you meant to say automatically parallelizable however that's much the same as saying that you hobble yourself by using a non-parallel programming language; the programming language must be appropriate for the target, whether serial or parallel. We can't program in a natural language yet...)
Additionally, many algorithms cannot be parallelized.
Conventional wisdom but it's just not true. Maybe you meant to say automatically parallelizable however that's much the same as saying that it is necessary to
I work in parallel programming and I have never seen a real world problem/algorithm that was not parallelizable. Maybe there's a few obscure ones out there but I've never seen them. Anybody want to suggest even one?
In any case almost all PC's these days are already highly parallel; display cards, monitors, keyboards, USB devices, disks, printers, network cards, you name it, all have their own CPU's and memory.
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You're a fool if you think advertising pays for anything at all.
Either you use the gun (ala Stalin) or you have to offer people incentives and conservation is all stick and no carrot.
Competition would be so much easier if I could shoot my competitor or blatantly lie to my potential customers.
For some strange reason the government doesn't let me do that.
Conservation is exactly the same.
Governments try to stop people from competing negatively (pulling the competitor/customer down e.g. some forms of copying, standover tactics, printing money) while allowing positive competition (bringing themselves up e.g. improving product, reducing price, informing consumer). Negative competition is a tragedy of the commons. The only question is what constitutes negative competition, what the government can/should efficiently regulate.
Conservation in various forms is very definitely an area where regulation may have a net positive effect. e.g. mandating high efficiency and long life light bulbs. I never purchased high efficiency and long life light bulbs because I had no way of knowing whether these higher priced light bulbs really would last longer and be higher efficiency to outweigh the higher price. Now that the government has modified the market I can buy with more confidence.
This has nothing to do with socialism and your labeling of it as such is naive. Both "socialism" and "communism", the big bad bogey men of many conservatives are often simply a way to short-circuit intelligent debate about what is appropriate regulation and what isn't.
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Every new patent is another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community.
that a lot of things seem obvious after-the-fact that were in fact fairly innovative
This is PTO self-serving nonsense. People are perfectly capable of assessing whether something is obvious after the fact. They don't mystically lose their intelligence when they have more facts at their disposal.
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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
Yes, it's tragicomically wasteful. I don't understand why they can't design a cargo/supply ship that STAYS IN ORBIT. I mean, sure, let's go ahead and de-orbit the ISS trash in some kind of disposable carrying module -- but leave the ship itself in orbit, and design it so it can potentially be refueled from the station later. Then just "park" it in orbit a few miles from the Station, and leave it there. At some point in time, we could probably think of something useful to do in space with a handful of these -- and we would finally have the "pickup truck in space" that NASA wanted a few years ago. The whole concept of multi-million-dollar disposable rockets is just ludicrous!
It is strange. It is insanely expensive to put mass, any mass, into orbit. It is surprising that they deliberately de-orbit it after investing all that money in it.
I hope somebody really has done the numbers on disposal in detail and they're not just doing some bureaucratic default.
I would expect that station keeping fuel would be comparatively small compared to lift fuel and even shit+organics could be useful for a future orbital greenhouse in addition to recycling metals etc. in a solar furnace.
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Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
Giving the computer bad instructions != the computer misunderstanding those instructions.
True but with the proviso that a bad user interface not designed for the target audience that causes or allows unnecessary user error or delay is just as much a bug as a coding problem.
or more precisely, the spending of the money of others
Fruitcakes like you really need to grow up.
Your taxes being spent on something you don't like is much the same as you being a minority shareholder in a company and the majority shareholders deciding to take the company in a direction you don't like.
Except in the case of a democratic government it's one man, one vote, not one dollar, one vote.
In both cases you can try to get sufficient votes to change the direction of the organization. In both cases you can sell out and leave. In both cases you can adjust your shareholding by voting for tax increases/decreases or buying/selling your shares. In both cases you can vote for changes in the structure and rules of the organization.
The anti-tax fixation that many people have just shows they're shallow thinkers. Many people think that government and taxes are sometimes a more efficient way of solving some country-wide problems. In particular, one-man, one-vote is very important to limit the excessive dominance of the rich, even if it can lead to sub-Pareto optimal outcomes.
It's no panacea but in the real world neither is any other form of social organization.
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WGA. Guilty until proven innocent. For millions. Again and again.
Research in to negligence cases shows that people are far more likely to rate something as obvious when they've seen the outcome.
All this demonstrates is that when people have more facts at their disposal they make a different, more informed decision. This is a surprise?
And why are you automatically assuming that the decision where they haven't seen the outcome is the correct one?
I can't remember who defined genius as "The ability to see the obvious things that others miss.", but it's sometimes useful to remember.
And also irrelevant. Genius involves finding simple solutions to complex problems. People are perfectly capable of distinguishing simple solutions from obvious ones. The phrase "that's pure genius" springs to mind.
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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
Actually, around 1998, a DNS server that returned a different IP address for a lookup based on who the request is for was not only novel, it was considered WRONG.
It's just caching at a different network layer. Big deal.
Geographical load balancing was your typical dot-com boom idea.
No it was not. "Geographical load balancing" is just an obfuscated name for "caching", something that had been known about for decades. One of the big problems with the PTO is that they are endlessly confusing invented terminology with inventions. Not surprising the shifting sands of semantics their entire operation is based, on made worse by the amorphousness of software: What is *significantly* different? what is *significantly* innovative? When is a blob of software different? It's all hand waving.
plus the address rewriting rules in popular servers like Apache.
Evidence that you didn't even read the patent..
I read all the claims, which you said yourself is the meat. What evidence? I was referring to the fact that URL rewriting in general was well understood.
and you have the audacity to call the PTO incompetent.
Not a problem given their consistent track record, particularly in software.
Not saying they're not, just saying that you shouldn't be throwing stones here.
Whatever. I, like most people, do not have the time to wade through all the verbiage generated by all the fruitcakes on the planet. Yet another problem with the PTO; the idea that it's reasonable to do a detailed review of thousands of patents to check for infringement every time you try to do something creative.
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A neurotic is the man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent. - Jerome Lawrence
In fact, though, I can tell you that in the pre-Windows days, electricity had outages, television had outages, telephone service had outages, gas service had outages...
Please don't be like a lot of M$ apologists who "accidentally" confuse something failing frequently with something almost never failing. They are not the same.
There were and are orders of magnitude difference in the reliability of M$Windows and other common services.
Not unlike mediocre programmers who like to claim something will never happen when if they were honest they'd admit that something happens rarely but not never.
people aren't willing to accept the economic and aesthetic costs of providing those services at the level of reliability you and the author are demanding.
Nonsense, it was just M$ monopoly profit maximization in an industry where economic network effects and naive customers meant they had no effective competition. If M$ actually cared about the customer they would've spent a small fraction of their enormous profit on improving their product reliability. They chose not to.
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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
No it is not, and your hand waving is not helping. The PTO loves to push this self-serving nonsense as if it were fact. People are perfectly capable of evaluating whether something is obvious or not after the fact. They don't mystically lose their intelligence simply because they have more facts at their disposal.
This is obvious, if for no other reason than the HTTP/HTML protocols have built in the ability to get different elements of the one the page from different servers and to URL redirect a client from one server to another plus the address rewriting rules in popular servers like Apache. All of these capabilities existed for years before this "patent". Not to mention DNS referral, caching, network throttling etc. which existed for decades before this "patent". Don't be fooled by patent "claims" which list standard techniques together and then claim the assembly is somehow "different".
Face it, this "patent" is blindingly obvious to anybody with even basic training in networking. The fact that this got through just shows how incompetent the PTO is. Not surprising, given the chutzpah of claiming that the bureaucrats in a small government department can assess against all of human knowledge for whether an idea is original or not. Only a scientist working a life time in a very narrow area can do that and even then they make mistakes.
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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
Irrelevant. The more memory a program uses the slower it is. Quite apart from the simple raw slowdown of accessing more bytes, memory caches can make up to an order of magnitude difference to the speed of a program and memory hogs are slow because they overflow the cache.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Slashdot Mirror
And when everyone buys YOUR product because it is better than the others, the other businesses suffer and go out of business. They end up "hurting".
This is only true for a short term perspective.
Ideally, other businesses learn from their mistakes, compete and eventually make a better product than yours. You need to do the same, the market grows and, on average, everybody wins.
Some "businesses" compete by explicitly trying to bring either customer or competitor down. Those are parasites and the law tries very hard to stop them. It's not a perfect world though and there are still plenty of parasites around that try to slip through complex, modern society's cracks.
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You're a fool if you think advertising pays for anything at all.
"Hurting" the competition is a part of Capitalism, which is by definition competitive.
No it isn't. You can compete positively by improving your product. You can compete negatively by damaging your competitor's product. The first benefits the consumer. The second doesn't. Laws try to block the latter while allowing the former. Parasites of course try to avoid this.
There is always a winner and a loser in Capitalism.
No there isn't. When companies compete to create better products they add value for their customers, ideally growing the market because more consumers will be interested in the improved products so that all can benefit.
The whole point of doing a deal is to be win-win. When buy a product from you I benefit because the product is worth more to me than the money and you benefit because the money is worth more to you than the product. Win-win, the world is enriched and the economy/market grows in value. It's only with market failures such as monopolies where it is win-lose.
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You're a fool if you think advertising pays for anything at all.
Product placement is, at best, a necessary evil to fund content that is expensive to produce.
No, it's an unnecessary evil, just a primitive form of micropayment that hides the true cost of a product from the consumer. Advertising pays for nothing. Who do you think pays marketer's salaries? You do.
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"Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
And I don't mind product placement in shows as long as it's subtle.
Sucker. Unless you take subliminal advertising seriously the whole point of an ad is to be noticed. The only subtle ad is one that isn't working, and that's unsustainable.
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"Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
Stop bitching about marketing
Enough with the nonsense. Unsolicited marketing is stealing ever more of the time of our lives and the time of our life is the most precious thing we have.
Modern unsolicited mass marketers are scum. It's no accident that marketers rate very low in respect surveys. Most unsolicited marketers should be in jail for fraud - almost all ad's on hot media like network TV are fraudulent, not to mention the fact that puerile consumerism crowds out much more important concerns like intelligent government or responsible parenting - too much noise can destroy free speech just as much as too little message.
You have a hatred of the market,
No, he has a hatred of unsolicited mass marketing. One of the evil things that marketing parasites have managed to do is to conflate unsolicited and solicited mass marketing drivel and also conflated a free market with unlimited, unsolicited advertising.
which generally just exists to fulfill wants and needs.
If only. The vast majority of unsolicited marketing is purely to create unnecessary, artificial needs. Everything from stupidly overpriced gym shoes to polluting 4WD's to massively overpriced cosmetic products.
My fix? They should start actually enforcing anti-fraud laws on the individual marketers. Not companies. That and "mind share" advertising should be very heavily taxed. Unsolicited marketing is a form of mental pollution and they should pay through the nose for polluting our mental environment or be forced to clean up the mess.
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Some people believe with great fervor preposterous things that just happen to coincide with their self-interest.
-- Judge Frank Easterbrook, Coleman v. CIR (7th Cir 1986) 791 F2d 68 at 69 [and quoted in several subsequent court decisions]
I work in parallel programming too.
Most problems do not parallelize to large scales.
I'm getting tired of this nonsense being propagated. Almost all real world problems parallelize just fine, and to a scale sufficient to solve the problem with linear speedup. It's only when people look at a narrow class of toy problems and artificial restrictions that parallelism "doesn't apply". e.g. Look at google; it searches the entire web in milliseconds using a large array of boxes. Even machine instructions are being processed in parallel these days (out of order execution etc.).
Name a single real world problem that doesn't parallelize. I've asked this question on slashdot on several occasions and I've never received a positive reply. Real world problems like search, FEA, neural nets, compilation, database queries and weather simulation all parallelize well. Problems like orbital mechanics don't parallelize as easily but then they don't need parallelism to achieve bounded answers in faster than real time.
Note: I'm not talking about some problems being intrinsically hard (NP complete etc.), many programmers seem to conflate "problem is hard" with "problem cannot be parallelized". Some mediocre programmers also seem to regard parallel programming as voodoo and are oblivious to the fact that they are typically programming a box with dozens of processors in it (keyboard, disk, graphics, printer, monitor etc.). Some mediocre programmers also claim that because a serial programming language cannot be automatically parallelized that means parallelism is hard. Until we can program in a natural language that just means they're not using a parallel programming language appropriate for their target.
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Advertising pays for nothing. Who do you think pays marketer's salaries? You do via higher cost products.
There is a general impression on Slashdot among the more ignorant that humanities classes are a joke.
What a lot of people forget is that in every area of competitive human endeavor, and university is just as competitive as anywhere else, the difficulty is set by the average participant competing to the limit of their abilities. Because of this every area is, subject to the people participating, equally difficult.
Whether it's stick insects or stocks, people compete to their limits, though the difficulty may be expressed in different ways. Engineering is hard but it is also rewarding in a way that mathphobes may have trouble understanding, meaning on balance it is not as bad as it might appear.
As you say the humanities may be easier at introductory levels but as soon as people start competing hard it will be just as difficult as engineering.
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Advertising pays for nothing. Who do you think pays marketer's salaries? You do via higher cost products.
Yeah, but when you're talking about 5 milliseconds vs 2 for something that runs once in a blue moon, who gives a fuck?
The problem is that when every programmer does this, and every program is just lots of little operations combined into big ones, then the program as a whole takes seconds to respond instead of milliseconds and likely fails requirements.
Performance is always under consideration, but making it work it approximately infinitely more important.
It is not either-or as you imply. Frequently, just a few minutes careful thought at design time can save massive amounts of development time, run time and user time. All at the same time. And time is money.
Anyone on my teams who goes off on unwarranted performance rants is fired.
Yes, it's possible to spend too much time optimizing code, like premature peephole optimization, but it's also possible to spend to little time optimizing and large projects frequently fail because of performance problems. Fixing it at that point can be very expensive compared to spending a few minutes getting the design right.
Time is money and programs always have performance criteria, even if they're only implied, and assuming that the tooth fairy will make sure that a program will pass performance requirements is a great way to fail.
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Large, slow code is slower to debug. It costs development time. Those who claim there's a development/code performance tradeoff are blowing hot air.
No, it isn't meant for a new little guy to enter the market easily... but he *can* do it if he really really wants to.
Patents are just a weapon and make little difference to the balance of power when every player has them in proportion to their financial resources. "Patents protect the little guy" is a PTO myth.
So what is the problem?
The problem is that patents are a drag on progress, discouraging the dissemination and use of ideas, with little evidence they encourage innovation in quite large areas of technology including software, ideas whose "time has come" and standards. Unfortunately the PTO and their supporters are suffering badly from the "when all you've got is hammer, everything looks like a nail" syndrome.
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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
Premature optimization is the devil.
Wrong. Premature peephole optimization is the devil.
At the design stage choosing a good algorithm that scales is entirely appropriate. This is particularly true when you don't know how much data you'll be working with. Like any scripting language.
Performance criteria are always part of a design and cruddy programmers who hide their incompetence with the above mantra should be fired. See dailywtf for examples.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
It's probably not worth the cost and risk for most companies. If someone wants or needs something on their system, just having them ask first is a reasonable approach.
No it isn't. You've just created a catch-22. How the hell is a user able to know whether an application is useful to them without installing and testing it?
I've worked in far too many places where people didn't install what would have been useful and productive software because it was just not worth the hassle. That by itself is an indication that system admin regards their control as more important than the needs of the company and the individual users. An admin does not know what is useful to each user and the company and they are arrogant to automatically assume they do.
The correct approach is to provide a sandpit so that users can test what they need in a safe environment, or even allowing controlled installs in the regular environment, make sure they know what they are responsible for (e.g. keeping licenses legal and not wasting anybody's time) and provide simple tools to rollback as needed. If it turns out to be useful and worthwhile then allowing limited hassle while installing it in the regular environment to limit impact on other users may be justified.
I've administered this way on 1000+ station LAN's and it works very well. Work smart, not hard. Not only did the users like the environment a lot (I was perpetually getting positive feedback) I learned from my users a lot about the huge variety of software out there and business processes as well.
More succinctly; helping users to help themselves is a far more productive use of an admin's time than treating the average user as the enemy.
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DRM. You don't control it means you don't own it.
Reading a sector of data from a hard disk.
But that's embarrassingly parallelizable, it's why hard disks have multiple heads and multiple platters to read/write in parallel and up the throughput. RAID's make it even more parallel. Within limits and for normal volumes of hard disk data, which are much larger than a sector size, (small data is held in memory+caches) this will increase throughput proportional to the number of heads.
In any case that's a hardware limitation, nothing to do with an algorithm as such.
I do agree that if you drill down far enough you get to atomic operations that can't be parallelized however I'm not aware of any atomic operation in real world programming that takes any more than a tiny fraction of second and thus cause real world impact. Even machine instructions are done in parallel these days.
(Correction to previous post: ... Maybe you meant to say automatically parallelizable however that's much the same as saying that you hobble yourself by using a non-parallel programming language; the programming language must be appropriate for the target, whether serial or parallel. We can't program in a natural language yet...)
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Has your software been deliberately crippled?
Additionally, many algorithms cannot be parallelized.
Conventional wisdom but it's just not true. Maybe you meant to say automatically parallelizable however that's much the same as saying that it is necessary to
I work in parallel programming and I have never seen a real world problem/algorithm that was not parallelizable. Maybe there's a few obscure ones out there but I've never seen them. Anybody want to suggest even one?
In any case almost all PC's these days are already highly parallel; display cards, monitors, keyboards, USB devices, disks, printers, network cards, you name it, all have their own CPU's and memory.
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You're a fool if you think advertising pays for anything at all.
Indeed, descending order of significance is the only order that makes sense. All other systems are local perversions.
It's also the ISO standard. Like metric, it just makes sense and I wish more people would use it.
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You're a fool if you think advertising pays for anything at all.
Either you use the gun (ala Stalin) or you have to offer people incentives and conservation is all stick and no carrot.
Competition would be so much easier if I could shoot my competitor or blatantly lie to my potential customers.
For some strange reason the government doesn't let me do that.
Conservation is exactly the same.
Governments try to stop people from competing negatively (pulling the competitor/customer down e.g. some forms of copying, standover tactics, printing money) while allowing positive competition (bringing themselves up e.g. improving product, reducing price, informing consumer). Negative competition is a tragedy of the commons. The only question is what constitutes negative competition, what the government can/should efficiently regulate.
Conservation in various forms is very definitely an area where regulation may have a net positive effect. e.g. mandating high efficiency and long life light bulbs. I never purchased high efficiency and long life light bulbs because I had no way of knowing whether these higher priced light bulbs really would last longer and be higher efficiency to outweigh the higher price. Now that the government has modified the market I can buy with more confidence.
This has nothing to do with socialism and your labeling of it as such is naive. Both "socialism" and "communism", the big bad bogey men of many conservatives are often simply a way to short-circuit intelligent debate about what is appropriate regulation and what isn't.
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Every new patent is another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community.
that a lot of things seem obvious after-the-fact that were in fact fairly innovative
This is PTO self-serving nonsense. People are perfectly capable of assessing whether something is obvious after the fact. They don't mystically lose their intelligence when they have more facts at their disposal.
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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
Yes, it's tragicomically wasteful. I don't understand why they can't design a cargo/supply ship that STAYS IN ORBIT. I mean, sure, let's go ahead and de-orbit the ISS trash in some kind of disposable carrying module -- but leave the ship itself in orbit, and design it so it can potentially be refueled from the station later. Then just "park" it in orbit a few miles from the Station, and leave it there. At some point in time, we could probably think of something useful to do in space with a handful of these -- and we would finally have the "pickup truck in space" that NASA wanted a few years ago. The whole concept of multi-million-dollar disposable rockets is just ludicrous!
It is strange. It is insanely expensive to put mass, any mass, into orbit. It is surprising that they deliberately de-orbit it after investing all that money in it.
I hope somebody really has done the numbers on disposal in detail and they're not just doing some bureaucratic default.
I would expect that station keeping fuel would be comparatively small compared to lift fuel and even shit+organics could be useful for a future orbital greenhouse in addition to recycling metals etc. in a solar furnace.
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Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
Giving the computer bad instructions != the computer misunderstanding those instructions.
True but with the proviso that a bad user interface not designed for the target audience that causes or allows unnecessary user error or delay is just as much a bug as a coding problem.
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DRM. You don't control it means you don't own it.
or more precisely, the spending of the money of others
Fruitcakes like you really need to grow up.
Your taxes being spent on something you don't like is much the same as you being a minority shareholder in a company and the majority shareholders deciding to take the company in a direction you don't like.
Except in the case of a democratic government it's one man, one vote, not one dollar, one vote.
In both cases you can try to get sufficient votes to change the direction of the organization. In both cases you can sell out and leave. In both cases you can adjust your shareholding by voting for tax increases/decreases or buying/selling your shares. In both cases you can vote for changes in the structure and rules of the organization.
The anti-tax fixation that many people have just shows they're shallow thinkers. Many people think that government and taxes are sometimes a more efficient way of solving some country-wide problems. In particular, one-man, one-vote is very important to limit the excessive dominance of the rich, even if it can lead to sub-Pareto optimal outcomes.
It's no panacea but in the real world neither is any other form of social organization.
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WGA. Guilty until proven innocent. For millions. Again and again.
The facts beg to differ.
Wrong.
Research in to negligence cases shows that people are far more likely to rate something as obvious when they've seen the outcome.
All this demonstrates is that when people have more facts at their disposal they make a different, more informed decision. This is a surprise?
And why are you automatically assuming that the decision where they haven't seen the outcome is the correct one?
I can't remember who defined genius as "The ability to see the obvious things that others miss.", but it's sometimes useful to remember.
And also irrelevant. Genius involves finding simple solutions to complex problems. People are perfectly capable of distinguishing simple solutions from obvious ones. The phrase "that's pure genius" springs to mind.
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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
Actually, around 1998, a DNS server that returned a different IP address for a lookup based on who the request is for was not only novel, it was considered WRONG.
It's just caching at a different network layer. Big deal.
Geographical load balancing was your typical dot-com boom idea.
No it was not. "Geographical load balancing" is just an obfuscated name for "caching", something that had been known about for decades. One of the big problems with the PTO is that they are endlessly confusing invented terminology with inventions. Not surprising the shifting sands of semantics their entire operation is based, on made worse by the amorphousness of software: What is *significantly* different? what is *significantly* innovative? When is a blob of software different? It's all hand waving.
plus the address rewriting rules in popular servers like Apache.Evidence that you didn't even read the patent..
I read all the claims, which you said yourself is the meat. What evidence? I was referring to the fact that URL rewriting in general was well understood.
and you have the audacity to call the PTO incompetent.
Not a problem given their consistent track record, particularly in software.
Not saying they're not, just saying that you shouldn't be throwing stones here.
Whatever. I, like most people, do not have the time to wade through all the verbiage generated by all the fruitcakes on the planet. Yet another problem with the PTO; the idea that it's reasonable to do a detailed review of thousands of patents to check for infringement every time you try to do something creative.
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A neurotic is the man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent. - Jerome Lawrence
In fact, though, I can tell you that in the pre-Windows days, electricity had outages, television had outages, telephone service had outages, gas service had outages...
Please don't be like a lot of M$ apologists who "accidentally" confuse something failing frequently with something almost never failing. They are not the same.
There were and are orders of magnitude difference in the reliability of M$Windows and other common services.
Not unlike mediocre programmers who like to claim something will never happen when if they were honest they'd admit that something happens rarely but not never.
people aren't willing to accept the economic and aesthetic costs of providing those services at the level of reliability you and the author are demanding.
Nonsense, it was just M$ monopoly profit maximization in an industry where economic network effects and naive customers meant they had no effective competition. If M$ actually cared about the customer they would've spent a small fraction of their enormous profit on improving their product reliability. They chose not to.
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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
in retrospect.
No it is not, and your hand waving is not helping. The PTO loves to push this self-serving nonsense as if it were fact. People are perfectly capable of evaluating whether something is obvious or not after the fact. They don't mystically lose their intelligence simply because they have more facts at their disposal.
This is obvious, if for no other reason than the HTTP/HTML protocols have built in the ability to get different elements of the one the page from different servers and to URL redirect a client from one server to another plus the address rewriting rules in popular servers like Apache. All of these capabilities existed for years before this "patent". Not to mention DNS referral, caching, network throttling etc. which existed for decades before this "patent". Don't be fooled by patent "claims" which list standard techniques together and then claim the assembly is somehow "different".
Face it, this "patent" is blindingly obvious to anybody with even basic training in networking. The fact that this got through just shows how incompetent the PTO is. Not surprising, given the chutzpah of claiming that the bureaucrats in a small government department can assess against all of human knowledge for whether an idea is original or not. Only a scientist working a life time in a very narrow area can do that and even then they make mistakes.
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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
RAM IS CHEAP, my man!
Irrelevant. The more memory a program uses the slower it is. Quite apart from the simple raw slowdown of accessing more bytes, memory caches can make up to an order of magnitude difference to the speed of a program and memory hogs are slow because they overflow the cache.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
(1) available applications
Depends on what I want to do. If I have what I want the other applications are irrelevant.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.