Seriously though, can we please get over this idea that Bill Gates was a computer genius. That's the perspective of non-techies, where basically anyone that understands computers or programming is a genius and can come over and de-louse your PC or get your wi-fi working.
Gates was/is not a good programmer. I know this because he permitted an egregiously badly designed (non-orthogonal instruction set, perverse memory addressing scheme) chip architecture and operating system (CP/M was much better designed. Unix already existed, pointing the way to generality and cleanliness of design) to be his core offering since day one, and and also because he completely failed to see the import of the world wide web for like at least 3 years after it became well known.
I know this because permitted horrible usability bugs in his core office software products to exist for decades without, apparently, doing a design or code review. Anyone who understands the utterance: "Crap! My document formatting sproinged again" or "Crap! I dragged the background of my whole diagram out of place again when trying to select that object" knows what I'm talking about. Oh, and free tip: It might be time to fix Excel on Macs so it doesn't save in circa-1995 old MacOSX text file line-ending format. Good programmer with self-respect about software they release? I don't think so.
Gates was very good at business. Ruthless, and smarter than the average business competitor, both in tactics of competition and about what people want. He knew intuitively that people in the 80s did not want well-designed computers and well-crafted software. They didn't know any of that stuff (the finer distinctions) and he knew it. People just wanted *A* computer (better than no computer) and they wanted it cheap and they needed to have the same software and data formats as everyone else who was using a computer for business or writing things. That's all they thought they needed. That's all he provided. Finer points of quality? Fuggedaboudit.
"In 2012, National Science Board member James Lawrence Powell investigated peer-reviewed literature published about climate change and found that out of 13,950 articles, 13,926 supported the reality of global warming. Despite a lot of sound and fury from the denial machine, deniers have not really been able to come up with a coherent argument against a consensus."
The kind of status-quo-maintaining garbage you are spouting is nothing short of deliberate evil, given what a careful read of the relevant scientific literature would tell you. If we check back in 2025 and find the warming continuing, do you give us permission to banish you to the island of Vanuatu, where you can sink or swim on the strength of your convictions?
I had a programming job in a startup where not only was it open plan but the sales team was in the same space (so you could hear in real time the lies about the product you hadn't finished building yet, and the laughter, oh god the vacuous fake forced jocular hilarity!!!! shudder) , and also, the CEO would come to ask a question about 5 times a day, and would redirect the each programmer's work at least twice a day. Hint ADHD and programming are not a productive mix.
Needless to say, I was more productive hacking in 30 minute blocks in the back seat of the crowded bus on the way to and from work. It's too bad for the company that that hacking was for my own different product. We were underpaid and no equity so there was no way I was going to hack on the bus for the company.
Bad scene altogether. Happens when anti-programmers try to lead programmers.
In fairness, the libraries aren't being closed. They're being re-purposed as public relations offices responsible for such things as communicating the need to move forward with new forms of multimodal multimedia information dissemination, on a go forward basis.
Also, the books are not being dumped, they're being converted into bio-fuel (burned in very efficient co-generation waste incinerators).
Yes, theoretically, according to Turing, you could get by with enough gates to make a couple of registers, a goto/jump instruction and a branch if is-zero test, as long as you have some read-write memory somewhere else.
Without breaking any laws except hunting out of season, lighting a fire in forest-fire-ban season, construction of an unpermitted permanent structure, and mischief and negligence for causing an unnecessary search-and-rescue operation.
Should have thought of that, when you actually had a say.
Non-voter whiners are beyond lame.
That is, unless you can articulate a superior method of picking leadership of a very large group. I'd respect you if you are saying you won't vote until the voting method is improved to e.g. mixed member proportional rep or single-transferable vote. But if you're just one of those "all politicians are the same" non-voters or lazy-ass non-voters, then STFU about politics.
In the current system, if you don't express your opinion on policy at the ballot box, you don't have the right to get your number counted in the political policy opinion statistics.
The fact that scientific knowledge, in the form of scientific articles, is locked behind exorbitant journal paywalls is what is preventing amateur science the most, not to mention would be professional science in places that can't afford the outlandish subscription fees.
It's a crime against humanity preventing what is often publicly funded scientific knowledge from being shared far and wide, as it could be with virtually no cost on the Internet.
This is a shameful state of affairs that needs to be fixed one way or the other. Long live Aaron!
It's crystal claro that we have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions rapidly and getting the coal plants off the grid is one of the most efficient ways to do that. Technologies have been designed for large-scale grid storage to balance intermittent renewables. There is underground hydroelectric, underground compressed air, underwater compressed air bags, molten salt heat storage, electric trains on slopes, sodium-sulfur batteries.
Oh, and much more use could be made of high-voltage DC long distance transmission (e.g. of what's possible now: 2300km at 800kV) to shunt power from where it's being produced to where it is needed, and to, for example, time-shift PV across longitudes, and flatten out wind intermittency (it's always windy somewhere). And that doesn't even scratch the surface (pun intended) of new superconducting transmission lines technologies that could boost long distance transmission efficiency even further.
We are at the baby steps (no, the crawling) phase of this transition now. Governments should simply across the board legislate that utilities MUST accommodate ALL new zero-carbon electricity generation with no additional fees. Period. Full stop. Any other policy is suicidally backwards.
Ok, so some projects, as has been pointed out, are doomed from the very first bad architectural decision (or lack of architectural decision.)
But regardless of that factor, the most common thing I've seen is management/corporate promising a particular release date, in a contract, say, and eventually getting around to telling development/engineering, who say, if they're brave, um, that's not possible. If they are less brave, they smile and get on with faking it, all the while knowing it's impossible in the time given. If they're highly skilled and properly whipped, they'll get something that looks superficially ok out the door on schedule, but don't ever, ever, try to use it.
You've got to ask yourself, who's building and deploying reliable, performant, extremely scaled apps these days? Who has been doing that successfully for over a decade? Why don't we ask them to build our big app? Or if they're busy, ask them who they would recommend.
So let me guess, you're one of those "IT bridge trolls" who build and hide in indecipherable structures and hoard troves of secret passwords, holding their organization for ransom, and mumbling and grumbling to themselves. While thinking they're pretty damn good at their job, they are actually a worst nightmare scenario waiting to happen.
The term "atheist" is embedded in a language framework that considers theism normative and thus "a"theism as aberrant. (Theism: noun: belief in the existence of a god or gods, esp. belief in one god as creator of the universe, intervening in it and sustaining a personal relation to his creatures.)
I reject this entire language framework, and its framing of theism (belief in god) as normative.
I would prefer to think of myself as someone aspiring to be a rational, appropriately skeptical realist. While I agree with a right to freedom of thought, I take a dim view of the prevailing "irrational supernaturalist" (theist) mindset.
Followers in organized "irrational supernaturalist" religions should wake up and realize that the top leaders in their hierarchies don't actually believe in god. They believe that maintaining the pretense is a great way to maintain inordinate amounts of social and economic power. These leaders, if intelligent, are clearly manipulative cynics of the highest order.
"A Bitcoin address, or simply address, is an identifier of 27-34 alphanumeric characters, beginning with the number 1 or 3, that represents a possible destination for a Bitcoin payment. Addresses can be generated at no cost by any user of Bitcoin. For example, using Bitcoin-Qt, one can click "New Address" and be assigned an address. It is also possible to get a Bitcoin address using an account at an exchange or online wallet service."
> "Now, the interesting question is why, specifically, we would consider that the GMO is riskier than a wild conventional crop"
We are coming to a point in genetic engineering technology where entirely custom organism genomes will be able to be created with four bottles of chemicals: (A)denine, (C)ytosine, (T)hymine and (G)uanine, a computer code specifying the desired sequence, and a computerized melecular assembly machine. Limited examples of this have already been carried out, and its general application is not far off.
The appropriate term then becomes "synthetic biology" not the more limited "genetic modification".
We already see genes from distant species spliced in to other species (fish genes into tomatoes etc).
The answer to the "why more risk" question is that the combinatoric possibilities for novelty of genome and novelty of effect are much greater in genetic engineering than in evolutionarily selected natural mutation.
Ordinary mutation has characteristics like that it is usually only an incremental change (genetic-informationally) from the pre-mutated genome. It is true that even incremental informational change in the genome can lead to large effects in the phenotype (the organism), but with current day and near future genetic engineering, there is no longer a restriction to incremental informational change to the genome.
Most variations will, as usual, not be viable, but if one is by chance or design, it could easily be very different than anything seen in earth life so far, because its synthetic genome can be arbitrarily different.
Direct health effects of GMO foods are IMHO only the third most important potential concern with GMOs.
The first concern is that whatever you have engineered, it is self-reproducing and could potentially take over a niche in a whole ecosystem, displacing other species or naturually adapted varieties, and you in general could not stop this if it happened. So eco-systems then become fully the responsibility of human biology tweakers. This seems generally unwise. The consequences of such ecosystem shifts is too complex to be predicted.
A second concern is that each genetic engineering modification needs to be fully assessed separately from all others, due to the complexity of the systems into which they are being inserted. Or at least, very narrow equivalence classes of modifications need each to be individually, and in combination, re-tested for long term effects, viability, viability and effects of likely mutations of the tweak etc, each time they are tweaked. The cost of such repeated and long term safety testing is well beyond the capability of the companies producing the products, so we can be sure that such rigorous, long term, and repeated (when product is varied) testing is not being done. Instead, smaller numbers of specific tests on a subset of engineered varieties are generalized in alleged applicability and conclusion, to save money.
So there is still a lot of know unknown and unknown unknown out there, and it is the kind of product that in general, self-reproduces and also expands in range.
If you think that way, rather than: The purpose of conversation is to tell people what I'm thinking, then you will be a better communicator. Listen, process what the other person's motives and needs are, and take the opportunity to learn something from them or their perspective.
It you think you know it all already, you are already done, in any business or endeavour. If you think you know it all and can only pass on information, you are not really that valuable a contributor, because you are probably working hard and cleverly on the wrong problem altogether.
There is always something to learn by active listening. You get more out of conversation that way; appreciation, and knowledge, cumulatively.
I wasn't referring to any particular party, although the genious mods who modded my post flamebait must have a pretty clear idea which party fits my description.
Slashdot Mirror
Except for the saying sorry part?
Seriously though, can we please get over this idea that Bill Gates was a computer genius. That's the perspective of non-techies, where basically anyone that understands computers or programming is a genius and can come over and de-louse your PC or get your wi-fi working.
Gates was/is not a good programmer. I know this because he permitted an egregiously badly designed (non-orthogonal instruction set, perverse memory addressing scheme) chip architecture and operating system (CP/M was much better designed. Unix already existed, pointing the way to generality and cleanliness of design) to be his core offering since day one, and and also because he completely failed to see the import of the world wide web for like at least 3 years after it became well known.
I know this because permitted horrible usability bugs in his core office software products to exist for decades without, apparently, doing a design or code review. Anyone who understands the utterance: "Crap! My document formatting sproinged again" or "Crap! I dragged the background of my whole diagram out of place again when trying to select that object" knows what I'm talking about. Oh, and free tip: It might be time to fix Excel on Macs so it doesn't save in circa-1995 old MacOSX text file line-ending format. Good programmer with self-respect about software they release? I don't think so.
Gates was very good at business. Ruthless, and smarter than the average business competitor, both in tactics of competition and about what people want. He knew intuitively that people in the 80s did not want well-designed computers and well-crafted software. They didn't know any of that stuff (the finer distinctions) and he knew it. People just wanted *A* computer (better than no computer) and they wanted it cheap and they needed to have the same software and data formats as everyone else who was using a computer for business or writing things. That's all they thought they needed. That's all he provided. Finer points of quality? Fuggedaboudit.
Correct. That's not energy density. They need to state it in Watt hours per kilogram, or state the voltage they are assuming.
"In 2012, National Science Board member James Lawrence Powell investigated peer-reviewed literature published about climate change and found that out of 13,950 articles, 13,926 supported the reality of global warming. Despite a lot of sound and fury from the denial machine, deniers have not really been able to come up with a coherent argument against a consensus."
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad...
The kind of status-quo-maintaining garbage you are spouting is nothing short of deliberate evil, given what a careful read of the relevant scientific literature would tell you. If we check back in 2025 and find the warming continuing, do you give us permission to banish you to the island of Vanuatu, where you can sink or swim on the strength of your convictions?
I had a programming job in a startup where not only was it open plan but the sales team was in the same space (so you could hear in real time the lies about the product you hadn't finished building yet, and the laughter, oh god the vacuous fake forced jocular hilarity!!!! shudder) , and also, the CEO would come to ask a question about 5 times a day, and would redirect the each programmer's work at least twice a day. Hint ADHD and programming are not a productive mix.
Needless to say, I was more productive hacking in 30 minute blocks in the back seat of the crowded bus on the way to and from work. It's too bad for the company that that hacking was for my own different product. We were underpaid and no equity so there was no way I was going to hack on the bus for the company.
Bad scene altogether. Happens when anti-programmers try to lead programmers.
In fairness, the libraries aren't being closed. They're being re-purposed as public relations offices responsible for such things as communicating the need to move forward with new forms of multimodal multimedia information dissemination, on a go forward basis.
Also, the books are not being dumped, they're being converted into bio-fuel (burned in very efficient co-generation waste incinerators).
Yup. Two months is insane for such a project.
Smacks of decrees from non-technical executives who know nothing about the technology they are "leading".
Isn't this the reason the original project was such a mess? Bizarrebitrary deadlines imposed from the top with no recognition of engineering reality?
At least it will be a quick march to the death (only two months) not a protracted one.
Yes, theoretically, according to Turing, you could get by with enough gates to make a couple of registers, a goto/jump instruction and a branch if is-zero test, as long as you have some read-write memory somewhere else.
Without breaking any laws except hunting out of season, lighting a fire in forest-fire-ban season, construction of an unpermitted permanent structure, and mischief and negligence for causing an unnecessary search-and-rescue operation.
Should have thought of that, when you actually had a say.
Non-voter whiners are beyond lame.
That is, unless you can articulate a superior method of picking leadership of a very large group. I'd respect you if you are saying you won't vote until the voting method is improved to e.g. mixed member proportional rep or single-transferable vote. But if you're just one of those "all politicians are the same" non-voters or lazy-ass non-voters, then STFU about politics.
In the current system, if you don't express your opinion on policy at the ballot box, you don't have the right to get your number counted in the political policy opinion statistics.
Because who would want a company that is managing its development processes or focussed on optimizing them?
The fact that scientific knowledge, in the form of scientific articles, is locked behind exorbitant journal paywalls is what is preventing amateur science the most, not to mention would be professional science in places that can't afford the outlandish subscription fees.
It's a crime against humanity preventing what is often publicly funded scientific knowledge from being shared far and wide, as it could be with virtually no cost on the Internet.
This is a shameful state of affairs that needs to be fixed one way or the other. Long live Aaron!
It's crystal claro that we have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions rapidly and getting the coal plants off the grid is one of the most efficient ways to do that. Technologies have been designed for large-scale grid storage to balance intermittent renewables. There is underground hydroelectric, underground compressed air, underwater compressed air bags, molten salt heat storage, electric trains on slopes, sodium-sulfur batteries.
Oh, and much more use could be made of high-voltage DC long distance transmission (e.g. of what's possible now: 2300km at 800kV) to shunt power from where it's being produced to where it is needed, and to, for example, time-shift PV across longitudes, and flatten out wind intermittency (it's always windy somewhere).
And that doesn't even scratch the surface (pun intended) of new superconducting transmission lines technologies that could boost long distance transmission efficiency even further.
We are at the baby steps (no, the crawling) phase of this transition now. Governments should simply across the board legislate that utilities MUST accommodate ALL new zero-carbon electricity generation with no additional fees. Period. Full stop. Any other policy is suicidally backwards.
Ok, so some projects, as has been pointed out, are doomed from the very first bad architectural decision (or lack of architectural decision.)
But regardless of that factor, the most common thing I've seen is management/corporate promising a particular release date, in a contract, say, and eventually getting around to telling development/engineering, who say, if they're brave, um, that's not possible. If they are less brave, they smile and get on with faking it, all the while knowing it's impossible in the time given. If they're highly skilled and properly whipped, they'll get something that looks superficially ok out the door on schedule, but don't ever, ever, try to use it.
You've got to ask yourself, who's building and deploying reliable, performant, extremely scaled apps these days? Who has been doing that successfully for over a decade? Why don't we ask them to build our big app? Or if they're busy, ask them who they would recommend.
is "G0 FVCK VRSEF!"
No, really.
So let me guess, you're one of those "IT bridge trolls" who build and hide in indecipherable structures and hoard troves of secret passwords, holding their organization for ransom, and mumbling and grumbling to themselves.
While thinking they're pretty damn good at their job, they are actually a worst nightmare scenario waiting to happen.
The solution to data longevity is such things as:
-Redundant storage
-Globally distributed storage
-Fragmentation and reassembly of data (so no host is responsible for content, since it is all just fragments)
-A protocol whereby the network monitors how many copies of a datum there are and creates more copies if it can't find enough.
-A protocol that automatically migrates data fragements to both newer host storage and more reliable host storage gradually over time.
-Re-wrappable encryption protocol
-Onion routing for access
-An economic model such as quid pro quo storage sharing (you store some of anonymous others' fragments, they store some of yours, no money exchanged.
-Storage of metadata and programming language execution environments and programs (with instructions) along with data
The term "atheist" is embedded in a language framework that considers theism normative and thus "a"theism as aberrant. (Theism: noun: belief in the existence of a god or gods, esp. belief in one god as creator of the universe, intervening in it and sustaining a personal relation to his creatures.)
I reject this entire language framework, and its framing of theism (belief in god) as normative.
I would prefer to think of myself as someone aspiring to be a rational, appropriately skeptical realist.
While I agree with a right to freedom of thought, I take a dim view of the prevailing "irrational supernaturalist" (theist) mindset.
Followers in organized "irrational supernaturalist" religions should wake up and realize that the top leaders in their hierarchies don't actually believe in god. They believe that maintaining the pretense is a great way to maintain inordinate amounts of social and economic power. These leaders, if intelligent, are clearly manipulative cynics of the highest order.
"so it can use anonymized IDs"
kind of like, say, bitcoin addresses:
"A Bitcoin address, or simply address, is an identifier of 27-34 alphanumeric characters, beginning with the number 1 or 3, that represents a possible destination for a Bitcoin payment. Addresses can be generated at no cost by any user of Bitcoin. For example, using Bitcoin-Qt, one can click "New Address" and be assigned an address. It is also possible to get a Bitcoin address using an account at an exchange or online wallet service."
> "Now, the interesting question is why, specifically, we would consider that the GMO is riskier than a wild conventional crop"
We are coming to a point in genetic engineering technology where entirely custom organism genomes will be able to be created with four bottles of chemicals: (A)denine, (C)ytosine, (T)hymine and (G)uanine, a computer code specifying the desired sequence, and a computerized melecular assembly machine. Limited examples of this have already been carried out, and its general application is not far off.
The appropriate term then becomes "synthetic biology" not the more limited "genetic modification".
We already see genes from distant species spliced in to other species (fish genes into tomatoes etc).
The answer to the "why more risk" question is that the combinatoric possibilities for novelty of genome and novelty of effect are much greater in genetic engineering than in evolutionarily selected natural mutation.
Ordinary mutation has characteristics like that it is usually only an incremental change (genetic-informationally) from the pre-mutated genome. It is true that even incremental informational change in the genome can lead to large effects in the phenotype (the organism), but with current day and near future genetic engineering, there is no longer a restriction to incremental informational change to the genome.
Most variations will, as usual, not be viable, but if one is by chance or design, it could easily be very different than anything seen in earth life so far, because its synthetic genome can be arbitrarily different.
Direct health effects of GMO foods are IMHO only the third most important potential concern with GMOs.
The first concern is that whatever you have engineered, it is self-reproducing and could potentially take over a niche in a whole ecosystem, displacing other species or naturually adapted varieties, and you in general could not stop this if it happened. So eco-systems then become fully the responsibility of human biology tweakers.
This seems generally unwise. The consequences of such ecosystem shifts is too complex to be predicted.
A second concern is that each genetic engineering modification needs to be fully assessed separately from all others, due to the complexity of the systems into which they are being inserted. Or at least, very narrow equivalence classes of modifications need each to be individually, and in combination, re-tested for long term effects, viability, viability and effects of likely mutations of the tweak etc, each time they are tweaked.
The cost of such repeated and long term safety testing is well beyond the capability of the companies producing the products, so we can be sure that such rigorous, long term, and repeated (when product is varied) testing is not being done.
Instead, smaller numbers of specific tests on a subset of engineered varieties are generalized in alleged applicability and conclusion, to save money.
So there is still a lot of know unknown and unknown unknown out there, and it is the kind of product that in general, self-reproduces and also expands in range.
Best movie I've ever seen!
Hey, what the hell?
If you think that way, rather than: The purpose of conversation is to tell people what I'm thinking, then you will be a better communicator.
Listen, process what the other person's motives and needs are, and take the opportunity to learn something from them or their perspective.
It you think you know it all already, you are already done, in any business or endeavour.
If you think you know it all and can only pass on information, you are not really that valuable a contributor, because you are probably working hard and cleverly on the wrong problem altogether.
There is always something to learn by active listening. You get more out of conversation that way; appreciation, and knowledge, cumulatively.
I wasn't referring to any particular party, although the genious mods who modded my post flamebait must have a pretty clear idea which party fits my description.
Touchy much?