I am a scientist. You should be sceptical of all science - that's how science *works*.
However, as the GP points out, 'being sceptical' does not mean simply disagreeing and arguing your point with made up evidence or ignorance of the facts which is almost always the case with politically sensitive science issues (climate change, stem cell research, nuclear energy etc).
That's exactly the reason why people call them anthropogenic global warming denialists, and not skeptics. They aren't skeptical, because if you're skeptical there's a chance you'll change your mind if presented with appropriate evidence; AGW denialists do no such thing, and seem to just deny deny deny.
Re:IBM = Innovator? Not in my lifetime.
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IBM Turns 100
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There is a reason that there were basically 2 PC architectures - Apple, and (wait for it) 'IBM PC Compatible'. One of those completely swamped the other.
It's even better now that even Apple has switched over to the 'IBM PC Compatible' architecture.
I'm not sure that programming really does a better job of teaching 'problem solving' than many other things. Procedural programming, particularly at an introductory level, doesn't seem like it would do a good job
Oh god it does. You're just speaking from the perspective of someone who already knows how to program, and probably hasn't tried to help someone else struggle through the process.
Look, fundamentally, in order to program in a procedural language, you must be able to come up with a procedure. In order to accomplish A, you must do things B C and then D.
Sounds simple, right? But you would be surprised at the number of people who just don't get it. I've seen people execute printf("%d", x); before x = 5, and wonder why they get zero (you've got a nice compiler, that's why).
You would think it ought to come naturally, but to a lot of people it just doesn't. It's like to them, the order in which things happen is set in stone by some unknowable force, and they are utterly helpless to understand why. Why can't we have candy after we brush our teeth before bed? Because, that's why. There is no causal connection between the two events, it's just the immutable will of the Universe that you not do so.
And then, when it comes time for them to create their own causal chains, when it comes time for them to put 5 into x and then print it out on the screen, they are utterly lost - they have no idea what the immutable will of the Universe is in this case, so they just guess. And then sometimes it works, hallelujah amen, and sometimes it doesn't and they'll never know why.
So yeah, I think programming does teach an ancillary skill better than pretty much anything; it teaches you that the order in which things happen matters, but even more than that it teaches you that you can figure out the order in which things should happen. For some reason a lot of people never really seem to realize this.
(They're the sort of people who are deathly afraid to deviate from a recipe (even if it's something as minor as using a different brand of chocolate chips), because they might somehow offend the immutable will of the Universe)
Of course, wind power is not exactly environmentally neutral if you consider constructional, maintenance, and impact on bats, birds and weather patterns.
Just FYI, spreading FUD about wind power killing birds and bats is just as bad as spreading FUD about how nuclear will kill us all. Altamont Pass was built with bad technology (small, fast turbines instead of large, slow ones), but that doesn't mean modern wind farms pose a danger to birds. Pretending that every wind farm kills as many birds as Altamont Pass is like pretending every nuclear power plant will melt down like Chernobyl.
Wow, 10,000? Why don't they use chains or something to hold those bad boys down in choppy waters? Or, I don't know, built steel railings along the perimeters? Or inter-locking Lego-like attachments between containers?
Wow, you have no sense of the scale of modern commerce, do you?
Probably millions of these shipping containers are tossed around the world each year. If you do the math, I'm sure that 10,000 losses per year works out to be something much less than 1% of the total number of shipping containers that set out from port.
Test driven design does not prevent or catch logical errors. It only helps prevent errors that come about from code not adhering to spec. If the specification itself is logically incorrect, then there is no way to write a test suite that will catch that.
For instance, if the spec says "When A and B are both true, do essential function C" but in reality A implies ~B, it doesn't matter how awesome your test suite is, or how much coverage it has - your code will pass whatever tests you want to throw at it, but in practice C will never be executed.
Ideally, while writing the tests (or the code itself) you would catch that the spec says one thing and reality says another thing, but that's not test driven development - that's more like reality driven development, which is something we really should see more of:)
Google Kids already exists - it's called "spending time with your kids on the computer". It works perfectly, they'll never see anything you don't want them to and as a bonus you'll develop that precious parent-child relationship.
However, it sounds like what the author really wants is a product that would be named "Google Parent", where you plonk them down in front of a computer at age three and then fifteen years later an adult magically emerges. Sadly, that's still in beta.
Actually, more chips at a lower clock frequency saves you on power directly: in general, cutting the clock frequency in half lets you cut the voltage in half (down to certain limits). If you ignore loss, power consumption varies with the square of voltage which means that by halving the clock rate you cut the power consumption to 1/4th.
This means that two 1.8 GHz cores will use roughly 1/2 the power of a single 3.6 GHz chip, and assuming that your tasks are fully parallelisable will be just as fast.
There are, of course, a lot of assumptions in this model (no task is fully paralleisable, loss does happen, you don't quite get 1/2 vdd for 1/2 clock frequency) but presumably if tablet and smartphone manufacturers are putting dual core chips into their products, they've run more detailed simulations and figured out that it works better like this.
Did have an interesting traffic stop once though. I didn't know why it was taking so long until the cop came back asking whether or not I had any narcotics charges on my record. After that processed for a second and realizing he wasn't just messing with me we got it cleared up. He was close to calling for backup as my "evil twin" (as I've come to refer to him:)) was supposed to be incarcerated at that time.
You know, he's probably evil because most of the shit he does gets half-blamed on you. I mean, if you could pull things that get most people in trouble but for some reason nothing bad ever happens to you, wouldn't you do it sometimes?
You know, this is in part your fault. If you'd written a more interesting blog post than this and submitted it, it might have been posted instead of this article. Instead, you didn't and they posted this.
The way the vast majority of nuclear engineers and supporters ignore the negatives and focusing solely on the positives gives me the impression that the industry has a far too narrow focus on certain technical issues and are blissfully unaware of the real and perceived impacts of nuclear technology on the economy and society generally.
I would argue that they have a very good handle on the real impacts of nuclear energy, and are still proponents of it because despite all of those things you mentioned, nuclear still has a better overall effect on public health than pretty much any other power generating scheme.
Yes, it is possible for things to fail. And it's possible for people to still support a thing that fails, because that thing is still better than all the alternatives. Funny how that works, isn't it?
Programming? Its iffy honestly. Most places would hire someone with 5 years XP over some college kid with 1 year.
Why do people think that college and work are mutually exclusive? Most campuses have some sort of computer infrastructure, and obviously they will hire students - and the best part is that in those jobs, since you're just a student, there's a lot of latitude for side projects and whatnot since nobody expects you to actually be competent, on-time or even sober. Then, when you apply for summer internships at real companies, you can list impressive sounding projects on your resume under the heading of "Campus IT, Student Assistant" - and those summer internships will lead to a full-time job wherever you move after college.
Believe me, companies will hire a college kid with five years of part-time work experience who can handle both graph theory and practical application development over someone with five years work experience who doesn't know what the difference is between a vertex and a node in a graph*.
*I've been asked that before in an interview (as a trick question).
Any what is the definition? Are you saying that someone who spends all his time sitting in a library and reading every book about insects is not a geek? On the other hand, if you spend all your money and free time trying to build your own wind turbine then you're also a geek.
What is the conclusion? Either there is no definition, or any definition is broad enough to be useless. One thing is clear: Chuck Norris is not a geek.
Sounds like you've stumbled on a definition: geeks are people who get deeply obsessed about at least one topic.
That's the one I use, at least. It does mean that most people are geeks about something, but hey - we've all got a little jock in us too:)
Imagine the average "I always top off my tank" bone head at a "gas pump" spilling what is basically the first practical, room temprature binary explosive all over the outside of his Jetta.
Do you really think that will be possible? The nozzle is already going to have to be different (since it's a binary compound) so they're going to have to redesign refueling anyway; if this goes commercial, they would build in safeguards against that, along with safeguards against accidentally putting some in your gas tank (or putting gas in this tank).
The problem happens when you hit things that just aren't on Google; I took a networking lab class at one point, and when I encountered problems with configuring the Cisco routers and tried my usual routine of Googling around the problem until I found a solution, only to find that, for whatever reason, people who have trouble with Cisco equipment don't seem to bitch about it on the Internet (presumably they just call Cisco support? I have no idea).
This also tends to happen with relatively new problems, like just after Microsoft released a killbit update that disabled the free Visio viewer that's an ActiveX thingamajigger in Explorer. Google had no idea what was going on there for a week or so.
Basically, Googling is great if it's an already solved problem, or if it's similar to one, or if it's a problem in a domain where people tend to be vocal on the Internet. If it's at all novel or specific, you're probably going to have to do some real work.
Pretty much. I've seen people using Tux iconography in totally non-computer related areas, and half of the time they don't even seem to realize that it's a mascot for something - it's just this cute picture of a penguin they found online.
Hooray, you can crack an NTLM password in like five seconds! Too bad Windows has preferentially used Kerberos since Win2K, which means that pretty much any in-practice Windows network you'd like to hack in to is using a real security scheme.
I mean, really. This article isn't about how much faster a GPU is than a CPU for hash cracking (after all, four days to reverse a hash is still unacceptable, and that's brute forcing it and not using one of the widely available NTLM rainbow tables), it's about how much NTLM sucks and Microsoft should have never contravened the first rule of cryptography and tried to roll their own.
Not only that, but a lot of prisons are beginning to force prisoners to work at menial jobs while they are in prison; in principle this is something I approve of, but when you realize that the prisoners don't need to be paid real wages, it gets bad.
What happens is this: 1. The state contracts out prison management to some private company, paying them per prisoner. 2. The private company turns around and signs contracts to have its prisoners do menial labor at some unbeatable price since not only is their workforce's housing subsidized by the state, but also legally exempt from normal minimum wage laws and subject to significantly stricter disciplinary action than normal laborers.
This is exceptionally problematic; it is, essentially, a return to slave labor (except a slave was worth 3/5ths of a vote, and some criminals are worth 0 votes).
Right, so in order to combat this, a student has to either:
a) Work extra hard in his free time to study the topic enough to understand them b) Fail miserably and have to resit/restudy or waste a year.
Both of which are punishments.
Except you're missing two things:
1. The students who normally get suspended are the kind who don't give a shit. If you're the sort of kid who actually cares enough about classes to study harder after being suspended, you're the sort of kid who doesn't get suspended in the first place; detention maybe, but not suspension. If the faculty does accidentally suspend a kid who cares about academics (this doesn't happen, because usually the faculty isn't that stupid), then they've just fucked over one of the kids who actually cares about school, and potentially turned them into one of the kids who doesn't give a shit.
2. They can't keep you in school after you turn 18. The kids all know this, which means that, for the ones who don't care about academics, holding them back a grade ends up being nothing more than a game of chicken that the kids will win.
Basically, suspension is the stupidest disciplinary measure possible. At best it is ineffective, at worst it is actively harmful to the child's learning.
A few decades ago you had the "Communists". Up until recently you had the "Terrorists". In a decade you'll have the "Hackers". Since they do not really exist in any tangible or organized way they can not be beaten and they are no real threat, but they are useful for scaring the population.
Ah, but see - the difference between "Communists", "Terrorists" and "Hackers" is that the first two didn't really speak English, and they didn't ridicule their targets. If, instead of flying planes into the WTC on 9/11, the terrorists had just made the airplanes do loop-de-loops to show how useless airline security was, you can bet that our response would have been significantly different.
The outcome of ridicule, which seems to be the future, is much different than the outcome of direct confrontation.
Slashdot Mirror
That's exactly the reason why people call them anthropogenic global warming denialists, and not skeptics. They aren't skeptical, because if you're skeptical there's a chance you'll change your mind if presented with appropriate evidence; AGW denialists do no such thing, and seem to just deny deny deny.
It's even better now that even Apple has switched over to the 'IBM PC Compatible' architecture.
Oh god it does. You're just speaking from the perspective of someone who already knows how to program, and probably hasn't tried to help someone else struggle through the process.
Look, fundamentally, in order to program in a procedural language, you must be able to come up with a procedure. In order to accomplish A, you must do things B C and then D.
Sounds simple, right? But you would be surprised at the number of people who just don't get it. I've seen people execute printf("%d", x); before x = 5, and wonder why they get zero (you've got a nice compiler, that's why).
You would think it ought to come naturally, but to a lot of people it just doesn't. It's like to them, the order in which things happen is set in stone by some unknowable force, and they are utterly helpless to understand why. Why can't we have candy after we brush our teeth before bed? Because, that's why. There is no causal connection between the two events, it's just the immutable will of the Universe that you not do so.
And then, when it comes time for them to create their own causal chains, when it comes time for them to put 5 into x and then print it out on the screen, they are utterly lost - they have no idea what the immutable will of the Universe is in this case, so they just guess. And then sometimes it works, hallelujah amen, and sometimes it doesn't and they'll never know why.
So yeah, I think programming does teach an ancillary skill better than pretty much anything; it teaches you that the order in which things happen matters, but even more than that it teaches you that you can figure out the order in which things should happen. For some reason a lot of people never really seem to realize this.
(They're the sort of people who are deathly afraid to deviate from a recipe (even if it's something as minor as using a different brand of chocolate chips), because they might somehow offend the immutable will of the Universe)
Killing rape victims is offensive. Full stop.
(you aren't allowed to leave until they're dead, though apparently they will just die eventually)
Just FYI, spreading FUD about wind power killing birds and bats is just as bad as spreading FUD about how nuclear will kill us all. Altamont Pass was built with bad technology (small, fast turbines instead of large, slow ones), but that doesn't mean modern wind farms pose a danger to birds. Pretending that every wind farm kills as many birds as Altamont Pass is like pretending every nuclear power plant will melt down like Chernobyl.
But the rest of your post is basically correct.
Wow, you have no sense of the scale of modern commerce, do you?
Probably millions of these shipping containers are tossed around the world each year. If you do the math, I'm sure that 10,000 losses per year works out to be something much less than 1% of the total number of shipping containers that set out from port.
Test driven design does not prevent or catch logical errors. It only helps prevent errors that come about from code not adhering to spec. If the specification itself is logically incorrect, then there is no way to write a test suite that will catch that.
For instance, if the spec says "When A and B are both true, do essential function C" but in reality A implies ~B, it doesn't matter how awesome your test suite is, or how much coverage it has - your code will pass whatever tests you want to throw at it, but in practice C will never be executed.
Ideally, while writing the tests (or the code itself) you would catch that the spec says one thing and reality says another thing, but that's not test driven development - that's more like reality driven development, which is something we really should see more of :)
Hey, a stopped watch is correct (in a manner of speaking) twice a day.
That doesn't mean you should elect it president.
Google Kids already exists - it's called "spending time with your kids on the computer". It works perfectly, they'll never see anything you don't want them to and as a bonus you'll develop that precious parent-child relationship.
However, it sounds like what the author really wants is a product that would be named "Google Parent", where you plonk them down in front of a computer at age three and then fifteen years later an adult magically emerges. Sadly, that's still in beta.
There's a name for this sort of security - "Wish it was two factor" security.
And now a judge is ruling that it's enough, along with a "device fingerprint" that can be trivially faked? That is complete bullshit.
Actually, more chips at a lower clock frequency saves you on power directly: in general, cutting the clock frequency in half lets you cut the voltage in half (down to certain limits). If you ignore loss, power consumption varies with the square of voltage which means that by halving the clock rate you cut the power consumption to 1/4th.
This means that two 1.8 GHz cores will use roughly 1/2 the power of a single 3.6 GHz chip, and assuming that your tasks are fully parallelisable will be just as fast.
There are, of course, a lot of assumptions in this model (no task is fully paralleisable, loss does happen, you don't quite get 1/2 vdd for 1/2 clock frequency) but presumably if tablet and smartphone manufacturers are putting dual core chips into their products, they've run more detailed simulations and figured out that it works better like this.
You know, he's probably evil because most of the shit he does gets half-blamed on you. I mean, if you could pull things that get most people in trouble but for some reason nothing bad ever happens to you, wouldn't you do it sometimes?
You know, this is in part your fault. If you'd written a more interesting blog post than this and submitted it, it might have been posted instead of this article. Instead, you didn't and they posted this.
I would argue that they have a very good handle on the real impacts of nuclear energy, and are still proponents of it because despite all of those things you mentioned, nuclear still has a better overall effect on public health than pretty much any other power generating scheme.
Yes, it is possible for things to fail. And it's possible for people to still support a thing that fails, because that thing is still better than all the alternatives. Funny how that works, isn't it?
Why do people think that college and work are mutually exclusive? Most campuses have some sort of computer infrastructure, and obviously they will hire students - and the best part is that in those jobs, since you're just a student, there's a lot of latitude for side projects and whatnot since nobody expects you to actually be competent, on-time or even sober. Then, when you apply for summer internships at real companies, you can list impressive sounding projects on your resume under the heading of "Campus IT, Student Assistant" - and those summer internships will lead to a full-time job wherever you move after college.
Believe me, companies will hire a college kid with five years of part-time work experience who can handle both graph theory and practical application development over someone with five years work experience who doesn't know what the difference is between a vertex and a node in a graph*.
*I've been asked that before in an interview (as a trick question).
Can't eat pleasure.
Sounds like you've stumbled on a definition: geeks are people who get deeply obsessed about at least one topic.
That's the one I use, at least. It does mean that most people are geeks about something, but hey - we've all got a little jock in us too :)
Do you really think that will be possible? The nozzle is already going to have to be different (since it's a binary compound) so they're going to have to redesign refueling anyway; if this goes commercial, they would build in safeguards against that, along with safeguards against accidentally putting some in your gas tank (or putting gas in this tank).
The problem happens when you hit things that just aren't on Google; I took a networking lab class at one point, and when I encountered problems with configuring the Cisco routers and tried my usual routine of Googling around the problem until I found a solution, only to find that, for whatever reason, people who have trouble with Cisco equipment don't seem to bitch about it on the Internet (presumably they just call Cisco support? I have no idea).
This also tends to happen with relatively new problems, like just after Microsoft released a killbit update that disabled the free Visio viewer that's an ActiveX thingamajigger in Explorer. Google had no idea what was going on there for a week or so.
Basically, Googling is great if it's an already solved problem, or if it's similar to one, or if it's a problem in a domain where people tend to be vocal on the Internet. If it's at all novel or specific, you're probably going to have to do some real work.
So now we know that your real password contains none of $, ^, & or @? That reduces the search space quite a bit :)
Pretty much. I've seen people using Tux iconography in totally non-computer related areas, and half of the time they don't even seem to realize that it's a mascot for something - it's just this cute picture of a penguin they found online.
Hooray, you can crack an NTLM password in like five seconds! Too bad Windows has preferentially used Kerberos since Win2K, which means that pretty much any in-practice Windows network you'd like to hack in to is using a real security scheme.
I mean, really. This article isn't about how much faster a GPU is than a CPU for hash cracking (after all, four days to reverse a hash is still unacceptable, and that's brute forcing it and not using one of the widely available NTLM rainbow tables), it's about how much NTLM sucks and Microsoft should have never contravened the first rule of cryptography and tried to roll their own.
Not only that, but a lot of prisons are beginning to force prisoners to work at menial jobs while they are in prison; in principle this is something I approve of, but when you realize that the prisoners don't need to be paid real wages, it gets bad.
What happens is this:
1. The state contracts out prison management to some private company, paying them per prisoner.
2. The private company turns around and signs contracts to have its prisoners do menial labor at some unbeatable price since not only is their workforce's housing subsidized by the state, but also legally exempt from normal minimum wage laws and subject to significantly stricter disciplinary action than normal laborers.
This is exceptionally problematic; it is, essentially, a return to slave labor (except a slave was worth 3/5ths of a vote, and some criminals are worth 0 votes).
Except you're missing two things:
1. The students who normally get suspended are the kind who don't give a shit. If you're the sort of kid who actually cares enough about classes to study harder after being suspended, you're the sort of kid who doesn't get suspended in the first place; detention maybe, but not suspension. If the faculty does accidentally suspend a kid who cares about academics (this doesn't happen, because usually the faculty isn't that stupid), then they've just fucked over one of the kids who actually cares about school, and potentially turned them into one of the kids who doesn't give a shit.
2. They can't keep you in school after you turn 18. The kids all know this, which means that, for the ones who don't care about academics, holding them back a grade ends up being nothing more than a game of chicken that the kids will win.
Basically, suspension is the stupidest disciplinary measure possible. At best it is ineffective, at worst it is actively harmful to the child's learning.
Ah, but see - the difference between "Communists", "Terrorists" and "Hackers" is that the first two didn't really speak English, and they didn't ridicule their targets. If, instead of flying planes into the WTC on 9/11, the terrorists had just made the airplanes do loop-de-loops to show how useless airline security was, you can bet that our response would have been significantly different.
The outcome of ridicule, which seems to be the future, is much different than the outcome of direct confrontation.