You are really going to hate my language when it comes out: Mandatory meaningful 3-space no-tabs indentation. Tab characters, given the random configuration state that any given editor program on any random programmer's computer is in, are completely untenable for the reliable production of collectively readable code.
You can't think about a programming language only from the perspective of a single programmer. You have to think of the entire body of code that is going to develop in that language, and how readable it is, on average, as practiced by programmers of "typical" carefulness.
So if it's not too much trouble for the programmer (and you'd have to be pretty lazy to think it was), then enforced indenting is a very GOOD IDEA(tm) in programming language design. Python has other weaknesses, but that ain't one of them.
Fitts' law (often cited as Fitts's law) is a model of human movement primarily used in human–computer interaction and ergonomics that predicts that the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target. Fitts's law is used to model the act of pointing, either by physically touching an object with a hand or finger, or virtually, by pointing to an object on a computer monitor using a pointing device. It was proposed by Paul Fitts in 1954.
(See wikipedia article for equation.)
From the equation, we see a speed–accuracy trade off associated with pointing, whereby targets that are smaller and/or further away require more time to acquire.
In a single menu at top of screen, each menu column can be activated by a quick careless mouse/pointer move to the menu word, without the need to use fine motor control to slow the pointer to hit a vertically narrow menu word. At top of screen, the menu word's active region effectively extends arbitrarily up off the top of the screen, so the menu word is a big, easy to hit object on screen. Faster to get to, requires less (ultimately tendon-destroying) fine motor movement to finish the movement. Depending on the app you're using, you might be able to leave the pointer near the single top menu, also helping with Fitts' law optimization of the movement to the control.
I noticed you said "contributing supervisor" by which I take to mean that you will also do a share of the "grunt" work. I've had several roles managing / team leading from 2 to 25 people, but in all of them have felt compelled to design and code somewhat as well. Beware, doing both of these in the same job is incredibly stressful, because real tech work takes lots of time, and it is incredibly difficult to do a quality job of both roles at once, and other managers will not recognize the difference in your workload compared to theirs, so won't understand when you might skip/half-ass a few commitments.
I've tried to make the break. I have a yellow sticky on my monitor frame that says "DNC" (do not code).
But that's easy to say, hard to do unless you are surrounded by rockstar hero-coders/software engineers (or in your case IT wizards) who really excel up to the standards you'd like to see or think are needed. Not a situation you often find.
And of course don't forget to store all your unique passwords that you have no hope of remembering in a plain-text file on your laptop and your smartphone, as well as on that piece of lined paper in the top drawer of your dresser.
Ok so DARPA through in some funding, but the Internet was invented at a bunch of Universities, by, you know engineers and boffins.
I humbly suggest that we let a collegial group of senior engineers and boffins (from around the world) govern the Internet, nominated by a vote of an association of qualified computer professionals.
Anyone that would poison a bunch of young women for having the audacity to want to get educated has clearly already been infected themselves by a toxic mind-virus. (in this case some hopelessly perverted sub-cult of islam presumably.)
Seriously, can we just stop navel-gazing about slashdot rules and acknowledge that there is some seriously f*cked up behavior going on here by some maladjusted maniacs, who are probably just miffed that educated women would never consider dating them.
The most common monetization strategy these days starts with "be the most popular ___ on the planet, and attract hundreds of millions of users".
Then think of something, anything, that will bring in a dollar or two from the exploitation of knowledge about those peoples' habits and predilections.
After Google, Facebook is the recent master of this game, and recognized a competitor that might steal some facetime (read: content pattern analysis time) of users if they didn't buy it.
In Canada, it is illegal for public agencies or IT companies serving them to store customer/member data on US-operated servers because the Patriot Act contravenes Canadian privacy laws. Many other Canadian associations and businesses have similar policies, because Patriot Act searches would violate their infomration privacy policy.
1. Make hybrids whose styling evokes the steroidal puffiness of a Dodge Ram tru_u_u_ck, because we know that most males buy vehicles to increase their chances of having offspring, not to save the planet. But if they can save a few bucks in gas while still getting the muscled exoskeleton look to compensate for their shortcomings, so much the better.
2. Increase international penalties for invading small, oil-laden countries rather than living with the higher gas prices that are inevitably on their way as more countries get richer and demand more oil.
3. Set up a global trust fund for future generations to use to fight global warming impacts. Make countries contribute to it based on their per-capita GHG emissions, or face international trade sanctions.
An environmentalist or (ecology-centric) view does not necessarily ask us to "revert back".
It simply demands that we direct some of our individual and collective energies and intelligence to recognizing and respecting ecological complexity and services and physical reality on this planet, as we go about our business.
to liberate and openly publish scientific research articles, wherever you find them.
Science is a joint co-operative human activity with its main goal the creation of new knowledge for the benefit of all, and its intellectual products by all rights belong in the public domain by their very nature. If you want to charge me money for binding and a glossy cover, so be it, but as to the raw content, you don't own it. A huge tree of giants standing on each others shoulders created it and humanity owns it jointly.
I'm going out on a limb here, not having had the time to study this stuff enough, but my intuition says that the unification of information theory and physics will yield a great breakthrough in physics.
I take the view that thermodynamics and Shannon information theory are literally about the same thing exactly, not just by weak analogy.
Related factoids: 1. All information is embodied mutual information. a. It must be embodied in some local configuration of matter/energy. b. It must be mutual in that the information in some clump of matter/energy is either about itself (the various parts/bits that comprise itself) or the information must be about some other configuration of matter/energy and spacetime somewhere else. Those things somewhere else also got information about the clump during the interaction.
2. clumps of matter/energy gain information about external parts of the universe only by interacting with them (during which bits of (mutual) information are transferred).
3. Light speed (and planck length) places a limit on the rate of mutual information transfer across a boundary (of a certain area) in spacetime. (Holographic cosmology stuff?) Q: What is that limit, in bits/second/m^2 ?
4. It is not just special things like human/slug brains and computers that have information about their surroundings. Every clump of matter/energy i.e. every non uniform local configuration of spacetime has (embodies) such information, which is some function of the interactions that clump has had.
5. Complexity of sequence of interactions over time as clump evolves through spacetime means that the information a clump has about any particular past interaction (or past encountered other thing) is necessarily always decreasing/dissipated/radiated into a larger space over time.
6. Such information about specific past/far off things is also necessarily intermingled (within the clump's boundary) with more and more noise (information about other things). This may be saying the same thing as the "local information" dissipation statement.
7. The second law of thermodynamics is explained by 5. and 6.
8. Information (the amount of local embodied mutual information) is what fundamentally characterizes configurations of matter/energy, space, and time. Other laws of thermodynamics are implied by this. And 1st law, conservation of energy, is the same exactly as saying conservation of (the amount of embodied, mutual ) information in the universe.
The replacement of in-house IT by storage and apps in the cloud has been predictable and predicted for about 15 years now. Enough time to have gotten some retraining. I used to say that the conventional wisdom that your data was safest on a disk or tape in your basement would be inverted when it was realized that redundant internet server based storage run by specialists in IT would be superior in reliability. This was well before it was called the cloud. The kind of reliabilty Google was getting out of massive redundancy and some smarts in management s/w and hardware operations should have been enough of a clue over the last decade or so.
1. Voting servers in massively distributed cloud (avoids likelihood of DDOS or particular routers affecting outcome.) Perhaps even a peer-to-peer cloud. Of course the actual data would be encrypted, fragmented, fragments re-encrypted, and redundantly distributed. With a peer-to-peer cloud storing fragments of ballots at random, ddos'ing affects all ballots from everywhere equally.
2. Election made 1 month long. Try keeping up your DDOS attack undetected all month long.
How hard is storage compared to how hard building the current grid was? 100s of times harder? I think not.
Secondly, efficient long-distance transmission (HVDC? Super-conducting?) and smart switching can be combined with storage to provide a comprehensive solution to intermittent power leveling. Intermittent sources and demand response negawatts can become a large part of the "new base load". We have computers and digital communications network nowadays. May as well use them.
Ok. Maybe one person to be an adviser on which services to use and how to configure them, (and which Mac models to buy heh heh) but that's about it.
In that context, cloud storage makes eminent sense because for the cloud service provider, providing reliable storage, or apps, or whatever, is their core competency. It is not your company's core competency. They will do it better than you. Period.
Such storage would make even more sense if it was properly fragmented, onion-routed, multiply encryption-wrapped, encryption-upgradable-in-place etc etc etc but that will all come, as will, one hopes, open standards so that cloud storage is not vendor-locked.
Because that term is far too anthropocentric (it's all about me me me and MY environment, which surrounds and exists for me me me.)
But my sense of ethics (and my theory of wise action) does extend to eco-systems, and runs along the lines of: It is almost certainly wise, and probably ethically sound and morally advanced, to allow a good number of the complex eco-systems on Earth of all scales to evolve in a context which is not dominated by human intervention.
And no, that view cannot be equated to the world being in a static state. It should however be in a complex nested homeostatic state, one which reaches many sustainable equilibria at many levels, due to the action of complex eco-systems.
Right now, I've read we're burning about 400 years worth of laid-down plant carbohydrate per year, in the form of fossil fuels. That's right. To obtain the equivalent amount of energy from non-fossil biofuels as we're currently getting from fossil fuels, we'd have to increase the amount of plant material being grown on Earth by a factor of 400 times current production, and use all of that for biofuels. (Assuming various conversion factors work out roughly equivalently for the two processes.)
Second, people need food more than cars, and forests need trees (and the Earth ecosystem needs robust biodiversity as opposed to massive tracts of mono-culture biofuel tree-farms).
Slashdot Mirror
You are really going to hate my language when it comes out: Mandatory meaningful 3-space no-tabs indentation. Tab characters, given the random configuration state that any given editor program on any random programmer's computer is in, are completely untenable for the reliable production of collectively readable code.
You can't think about a programming language only from the perspective of a single programmer.
You have to think of the entire body of code that is going to develop in that language, and how readable it is, on average, as practiced by programmers of "typical" carefulness.
So if it's not too much trouble for the programmer (and you'd have to be pretty lazy to think it was),
then enforced indenting is a very GOOD IDEA(tm) in programming language design. Python has other weaknesses, but that ain't one of them.
Fitts' law (often cited as Fitts's law) is a model of human movement primarily used in human–computer interaction and ergonomics that predicts that the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target. Fitts's law is used to model the act of pointing, either by physically touching an object with a hand or finger, or virtually, by pointing to an object on a computer monitor using a pointing device. It was proposed by Paul Fitts in 1954.
(See wikipedia article for equation.)
From the equation, we see a speed–accuracy trade off associated with pointing, whereby targets that are smaller and/or further away require more time to acquire.
In a single menu at top of screen, each menu column can be activated by a quick careless mouse/pointer move to the menu word, without the need to use fine motor control to slow the pointer to hit a vertically narrow menu word. At top of screen, the menu word's active region effectively extends arbitrarily up off the top of the screen, so the menu word is a big, easy to hit object on screen. Faster to get to, requires less (ultimately tendon-destroying) fine motor movement to finish the movement. Depending on the app you're using, you might be able to leave the pointer near the single top menu, also helping with Fitts' law optimization of the movement to the control.
I noticed you said "contributing supervisor" by which I take to mean that you will also do a share of the "grunt" work.
I've had several roles managing / team leading from 2 to 25 people, but in all of them have felt compelled to design and code somewhat as well. Beware, doing both of these in the same job is incredibly stressful, because real tech work takes lots of time, and it is incredibly difficult to do a quality job of both roles at once, and other managers will not recognize the difference in your workload compared to theirs, so won't understand when you might skip/half-ass a few commitments.
I've tried to make the break. I have a yellow sticky on my monitor frame that says "DNC" (do not code).
But that's easy to say, hard to do unless you are surrounded by rockstar hero-coders/software engineers (or in your case IT wizards) who really excel up to the standards you'd like to see or think are needed. Not a situation you often find.
Still, my advice is choose one, not both.
And of course don't forget to store all your unique passwords that you have no hope of remembering in a plain-text file on your laptop and your smartphone, as well as on that piece of lined paper in the top drawer of your dresser.
It would be good to have a visualization of forest cover on Earth gong back a couple of thousand years, to get some perspective on the issue.
Couldnt be done with sat imagery of course, but from what is known of the historical record.
Crap. That should be "threw in some funding". Never post after 15 hours of work.
Ok so DARPA through in some funding, but the Internet was invented at a bunch of Universities, by, you know engineers and boffins.
I humbly suggest that we let a collegial group of senior engineers and boffins (from around the world) govern the Internet, nominated by a vote of an association of qualified computer professionals.
Anyone that would poison a bunch of young women for having the audacity to want to get educated has clearly already been infected themselves by a toxic mind-virus. (in this case some hopelessly perverted sub-cult of islam presumably.)
Seriously, can we just stop navel-gazing about slashdot rules and acknowledge that there is some seriously f*cked up behavior going on here by some maladjusted maniacs, who are probably just miffed that educated women would never consider dating them.
Monetization strategy?
The most common monetization strategy these days starts with "be the most popular ___ on the planet, and attract hundreds of millions of users".
Then think of something, anything, that will bring in a dollar or two from the exploitation of knowledge about those peoples' habits and predilections.
After Google, Facebook is the recent master of this game, and recognized a competitor that might steal some facetime (read: content pattern analysis time)
of users if they didn't buy it.
In Canada, it is illegal for public agencies or IT companies serving them to store customer/member data on US-operated servers because the Patriot Act contravenes Canadian privacy laws. Many other Canadian associations and businesses have similar policies, because Patriot Act searches would violate their infomration privacy policy.
1. Make hybrids whose styling evokes the steroidal puffiness of a Dodge Ram tru_u_u_ck, because we know that most males buy vehicles to increase their chances of having offspring, not to save the planet. But if they can save a few bucks in gas while still getting the muscled exoskeleton look to compensate for their shortcomings, so much the better.
2. Increase international penalties for invading small, oil-laden countries rather than living with the higher gas prices that are inevitably on their way as more countries get richer and demand more oil.
3. Set up a global trust fund for future generations to use to fight global warming impacts. Make countries contribute to it based on their per-capita GHG emissions, or face international trade sanctions.
An environmentalist or (ecology-centric) view does not necessarily ask us to "revert back".
It simply demands that we direct some of our individual and collective energies and intelligence to
recognizing and respecting ecological complexity and services and physical reality on this planet, as we go about our business.
to liberate and openly publish scientific research articles, wherever you find them.
Science is a joint co-operative human activity with its main goal the creation of new knowledge for the benefit of all, and its intellectual products by all rights belong in the public domain by their very nature. If you want to charge me money for binding and a glossy cover, so be it, but as to the raw content, you don't own it. A huge tree of giants standing on each others shoulders created it and humanity owns it jointly.
I'm going out on a limb here, not having had the time to study this stuff enough,
but my intuition says that the unification of information theory and physics will yield a great breakthrough in physics.
I take the view that thermodynamics and Shannon information theory are literally about the same thing exactly, not just by weak analogy.
Related factoids:
1. All information is embodied mutual information.
a. It must be embodied in some local configuration of matter/energy.
b. It must be mutual in that the information in some clump of matter/energy is either about itself (the various parts/bits that comprise itself) or the information must be about some other configuration of matter/energy and spacetime somewhere else. Those things somewhere else also got information about the clump during the interaction.
2. clumps of matter/energy gain information about external parts of the universe only by interacting with them (during which bits of (mutual) information are transferred).
3. Light speed (and planck length) places a limit on the rate of mutual information transfer across a boundary (of a certain area) in spacetime. (Holographic cosmology stuff?) Q: What is that limit, in bits/second/m^2 ?
4. It is not just special things like human/slug brains and computers that have information about their surroundings. Every clump of matter/energy i.e. every non uniform local configuration of spacetime has (embodies) such information, which is some function of the interactions that clump has had.
5. Complexity of sequence of interactions over time as clump evolves through spacetime means that the information a clump has about any particular past interaction (or past encountered other thing) is necessarily always decreasing/dissipated/radiated into a larger space over time.
6. Such information about specific past/far off things is also necessarily intermingled (within the clump's boundary) with more and more noise (information about other things). This may be saying the same thing as the "local information" dissipation statement.
7. The second law of thermodynamics is explained by 5. and 6.
8. Information (the amount of local embodied mutual information) is what fundamentally characterizes configurations of matter/energy, space, and time. Other laws of thermodynamics are implied by this. And 1st law, conservation of energy, is the same exactly as saying conservation of (the amount of embodied, mutual ) information in the universe.
The replacement of in-house IT by storage and apps in the cloud has been predictable and predicted for about 15 years now. Enough time to have gotten some retraining.
I used to say that the conventional wisdom that your data was safest on a disk or tape in your basement would be inverted when it was realized that redundant internet server based storage run by specialists in IT would be superior in reliability. This was well before it was called the cloud. The kind of reliabilty Google was getting out of massive redundancy and some smarts in management s/w and hardware operations should have been enough of a clue over the last decade or so.
1. Voting servers in massively distributed cloud (avoids likelihood of DDOS or particular routers affecting outcome.)
Perhaps even a peer-to-peer cloud. Of course the actual data would be encrypted, fragmented, fragments re-encrypted,
and redundantly distributed. With a peer-to-peer cloud storing fragments of ballots at random, ddos'ing affects all ballots from
everywhere equally.
2. Election made 1 month long. Try keeping up your DDOS attack undetected all month long.
Optimistic much?...
How hard is storage compared to how hard building the current grid was? 100s of times harder? I think not.
Secondly, efficient long-distance transmission (HVDC? Super-conducting?) and smart switching can be combined with storage to provide a comprehensive solution to intermittent power leveling. Intermittent sources and demand response negawatts can become a large part of the "new base load". We have computers and digital communications network nowadays. May as well use them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5whVyDoLLc&feature=related
Java is now somewhat bloated, but has not reached C++'s level of fat rolls and pustulence.
It's just more like cirrocumulus than cumulonimbus.
Right you are. My bad.
Ok. Maybe one person to be an adviser on which services to use and how to configure them, (and which Mac models to buy heh heh) but that's about it.
In that context, cloud storage makes eminent sense because for the cloud service provider, providing reliable storage, or apps, or whatever, is their core competency.
It is not your company's core competency. They will do it better than you. Period.
Such storage would make even more sense if it was properly fragmented, onion-routed, multiply encryption-wrapped, encryption-upgradable-in-place etc etc etc but that will all come, as will, one hopes, open standards so that cloud storage is not vendor-locked.
Because that term is far too anthropocentric (it's all about me me me and MY environment, which surrounds and exists for me me me.)
But my sense of ethics (and my theory of wise action) does extend to eco-systems, and runs along the lines of:
It is almost certainly wise, and probably ethically sound and morally advanced, to allow a good number of the complex eco-systems on Earth of all scales to evolve in a context which is not dominated by human intervention.
And no, that view cannot be equated to the world being in a static state. It should however be in a complex nested homeostatic state, one which reaches many sustainable equilibria at many levels, due to the action of complex eco-systems.
Right now, I've read we're burning about 400 years worth of laid-down plant carbohydrate per year, in the form of fossil fuels.
That's right. To obtain the equivalent amount of energy from non-fossil biofuels as we're currently getting from fossil fuels, we'd have to increase the amount of plant material being grown on Earth by a factor of 400 times current production, and use all of that for biofuels. (Assuming various conversion factors work out roughly equivalently for the two processes.)
Second, people need food more than cars, and forests need trees (and the Earth ecosystem needs robust biodiversity as opposed to massive tracts of mono-culture biofuel tree-farms).
are equally ridiculous.
I don't discriminate.
Sorry slashdot. I guess you and me are going to be on a list somewhere.
That are highest common denominator.
The mantra should be:
No WTO World Trade Organization (with teeth) without a WLO World Labor rights and Regulations Organization (with teeth)
If you knee-jerk call me a communist for saying that, I'll knee-jerk call you out as a wannabe slave-owner.