The argument from incredulity is often applied to science by the layperson. You don't need an opponent or a debate to use a logical fallacy. The fact that the Kitzmiller vs. Dover case had to happen proves that people question science regardless of it's validity.
Exactly. There has never been, nor ought their be, an automatic trust of anything, including science. By definition of "layperson", we do not know and are not read-up on, the exact arguments for an against any particular theory. It has long been the case that unscrupulous individuals will try to sell a product or an idea "because science says so". This is behind every diet fad, every exercise machine, every crackpot "business methodology", that we've been exposed to for centuries (see: snake oil salesman).
The reason that climate change has been resisted and argued by so many, for so long, is exactly this. We do not trust the people interpreting this for us at the national level. We see a group of people who have financial motivation to resist, a group of people who have financial motivation to sell green-wash products, and a group of people who advocate shucking technology and returning to some insane, idealized view of nature, where man and animal and nature all get along, and don't eat or kill each other. All "climategate" has done, is confuse us further. We still lack faith in science, we still do not trust any of the people arguing, and we have good reason for this lack of trust.
People use the word "gay" now to mean "stupid/dumb/lame/idiotic", on just about anything that happens that they don't like. It has morphed from the original meaning of happy, to the newer meaning of homosexual, to the pejorative term used generally on heterosexual males, to it's current form. All of those meanings still apply, context is everything. The word is going to eventually subsume all possible meanings and become the one word to rule all others.
What few homosexual men I know, refer to themselves as "gay", so I don't know why it's necessarily assumed that its always pejorative, although certainly it moved from it's first meaning to the second based upon a stereotype of homosexuals as being Richard Simmons-like. While our understanding of homosexuality has changed, the word stuck around and just doesn't seem very offensive in the proper environment.
I think you can turn any word into an insult if you use it in that context. "The filthy MARBLES are ruining our great nation, death to MARBLES!" "Dammit, MS released another broken operating system, that's so fucking MARBLE!"
He's just one guy who did something amazing, but there was a trend behind him, and plenty of other examples. Ultimately it was in our best interests to stop being Britain's hunter/gatherers. By this point Britain was long past being able to stop us. China already realizes being our contract manufacturer isn't good for them, and already makes deals requiring we transfer some amount of our R&D work along with manufacturing. I daresay we can't really stop them either.
IP doesn't historically have a lot of strength behind it. It's easy to steal, it "doesn't hurt anyone" when it's stolen (sure it hurts some guy we don't know or care about!), and it's hard to put a price on it. The military might of planet earth isn't going to get raised in arms because someone stole the plans for the iPhone 4G, or even a semiconductor fab. Too abstract, why do I care, let them eat cake? Blah blah blah.
More to the point, are we willing to wage war on countries who "steal" our IP, and unbalance our trade/cause economic strife for us? If China decides to stop playing the "IP" game, what are we going to do about it, send over some lawyers and subpoena the hell out of them? IP exists by fiat, and without manufacturing and scientific R&D behind that fiat, it's an academic concept.
I'd rather we based our economy around manufacturing AND IP, not just one or the other. Vertical integration seems like a much better way of staying independent, and avoiding watching the western world turn into a bunch of suit wearing no-nothing middle managers.
Atheism does not imply predestination. You can elect not to believe in magical men in the sky, but believe you are in control of your own actions.
Either way, it's not about blame. If you release a killer automaton into society, and you know he's pre-programmed to maim and kill, isn't in your best interest to take him out of society? It's the Windows Me scenario: Remove and destroy the harmful program before it hurts again. Whether he's possessed of a despicable character flaw where he just enjoys killing, or whether he's programmed to do it and helpless to stop himself, the result ought to be the same: get him out of society. I don't know the science behind the "aggression gene", but if anything it should have increased his sentence, not decreased it.
You're right, I don't care about Indians or Chinese, nor do I think we ought to be supporting their welfare unless they want to become the 51st and 52nd states.
China you can argue is a country that is going to at least make good on the money we give it, an investment there is an investment in someone's future. However it stands for pretty much the exact opposite ideals that we stand for in the USA (and that Europeans generally want to believe in). They haven't met a civil liberty that they wouldn't trample. Their commitment to communism equals only their commitment to capitalism: the people may suffer as long as the status quo marches on. India? Replace evil ideals with poverty and corruption. Investing there is like flushing money down the toilet. How does that help anyone?
So in the process of impoverishing that American, you're also hurting his country, and also hurting the ideals that enable the free world to be free. You don't have to like America, but you would be a complete moron to not understand that the free world is safe, as long as we're here doing whatever we do. It doesn't matter if we're fighting a war that doesn't need to be fought in Iraq, or if we're late to show for world wars you do happen to care about, the key point is top to bottom we do value what we have and we will help protect it, as long as we have the resources and know how to do so. That doesn't mean that a few very short sighted people will not sell us out to make a quick buck, and then wake up one day wondering why the villagers are lined up outside their castle with pitchforks and torches.
It doesn't matter if you end up with a cheaper power tool if you lose the jobs required to pay for it, or you lose the edge on technology required to build more and better tools. Talking about "unskilled factory jobs" moving offshore was 30 years ago, we're losing science and engineering jobs at record rates. The only thing we're keeping are service jobs and managerial jobs, none of which is going to keep us in a position of power for very long. I don't know how many managers it takes to invent a light bulb, but I suspect it will get lost in committee before we find an answer.
...the problems with heart trouble may have not been quite so much of a problem ten generations ago, when most humans did a lot more physical exercise just to stay alive...
Or something else killed them long before they were old enough to have a heart attack.
These are the people who (amongst other things) think offshoring technology is a good idea. They don't see the danger, and they don't worry about the implications. Money is money.
No, that's not what they want. That's what they will get. The most well thought libertarians just have lost track that creating a profitable business is not the only form of contribution to society, much less one of the least justifiable reasons for being rewarded. Businesses are essentially resource managers, the more you have the less actual productivity that occurs. It's not really desirable to have very many, certainly as many as would have to exist for a truly free market economy to work.
The less well thought libertarians completely don't understand that yesterday's libertarian ideals come true, are today's evil government control and restricted trade practices. The free market isn't free for long, anarchy isn't a very stable system, someone with the biggest gun or the biggest wallet always comes along to take control.
Yet during the time when we did do that, they were upgrading, consumers were getting more options and more services, and costs were competitive. Since they closed out that requirement, we've receded back to the point where we're only able to get the service the telco chooses to offer, and they have absolutely no incentive to upgrade because there's no reason to.
No, approach this rationally. Your objective is to get one or more cool features. You are the victim of an offensive statement by someone who matters on the project (such as the owner/maintainer). He is running a FOSS project because he wants community support and new features, but he's offending you and compelling you to leave.
- He's competent and capable believes in your feature but doesn't like you. Chances are, he'll get the feature done. You get what you really want and don't have to use your time here. - He's competent and capable, but doesn't believe in your feature. You fork his design, others will follow you if they believe in your feature, if not your fork dies. You get what you really want. - He's incompetent and thriving on the work of others. You fork his design and run your own show. You get what you want. - No one is interested in your feature, you don't believe in it enough to fork. You move on. You don't get what you want, but you don't waste a lot of time in so doing.
That's how to be grown up about it. Don't expect anyone to ride in to save you because someone called you a bad name. Cliques, politics, developer poaching, drama... this is going to turn off people who might agree with you, but who fundamentally are there to get a tool they need, not be part of a community they don't. This isn't a democracy, it's a collective. It works by contribution and common interests. Do anything to hurt one or the other, and it falls apart and that is annoying to everyone. It's great when everyone gets along, but it isn't essential as a number of projects have shown.
Code or don't, but don't pollute the environment with politics.
I've never been involved in a project where "mens locker room bullshit" has ever come up, much less been central to forward progress on any project. I'm sure I have no interest in any of it, whatever it really means. Ignore it and code, or don't and be put off by anyone who thinks or works differently than you. You're not getting paid to do this, so if you don't enjoy it, don't do it.
This does seem to follow the format for posts from "The Onion":
Headline: [unknown name x] says, "[something random and mildly offensive to someone]".
Summary: [Introductory sentence explaining the position of X]. [Funny in a "wtf" sort of way support sentence]. [Another random and probably offensive quote, if the preceding statements didn't reveal it as satire]
The article vaguely said "temperature plays little role" which doesn't help, and the supporting PDF in figure 7 paints a slightly different picture. Quite clearly increasing temperature increases error rate on every single system. However as you will note, motherboard variance had a far more significant contribution on the bottom line. In other words, compared to variable x, variable y is irrelevant. That's not the same as saying variable y is not a factor.
I work on server design, specifically motherboards. ECC is a feature, it helps prevent bit errors from passing through undetected. It is not a method for preventing errors from happening in the first place, nor does it influence the number of bit errors. That is a property of the motherboard design, the chipset, the DIMM PCB and the DRAM. Second, just because you provide a spec for a mobo, does not mean that it is all inclusive. Generally people specify form factor, power, features. They don't specify quality and in most cases don't give a criteria for what it means for a feature to "work". In fact most customers I've talked to don't really understand what quality means from hardware (and sometimes in general). Hardware management, much like software, is designed with similar principles of impact/effort: if customers don't care, we don't test. In other words if it ain't listed on the box, or the salesman won't write it down, just assume it wasn't done.
In spite of the fact that computer motherboards are digital electronics, there is in fact anything but a binary determination of "work" and "not work". Digital signals are an engineering approximation, one which falls apart at high speeds, dense routing and inexpensive design. Well designed and tested motherboards have a well known bit error rate, and reliable companies will not ship a new design until they meet their target. I do this on systems I design, but they aren't cheap, not by a lot. It is a very expensive, time consuming process, one which most companies really want to get rid of. Not all systems are so thoroughly tested, in fact the vast majority of boards out there, server or otherwise, aren't tested much at all.
Forking money for ECC is very similar to paying the mob to protect you. Yes, it will give you more peace of mind, but what you really want is to not be having these problems to begin with. For people who care about data integrity, you should be asking what the bit error rate is and how they know. If they don't know, then you don't want it, ECC or no ECC. Don't assume "the industry" is equal, and don't assume that because a vendor's product X is really good that their product Y is really good too: you WILL be wrong, particularly on computers.
Our tax dollars primarily fund a welfare system known as civil service. We don't know what they do, but it requires a lot of them and a whole lot of time to do it.
Because nice people that are always wrong aren't necessarily doormats. They champion their opinions to whoever makes decisions, and that becomes the plan of record. Anyone not supporting the plan of record has a lot to answer for come end-of-year review time. Even if what he was doing turned out to be correct. Most organizations get very upset with engineers/developers/"IT Pros"/geeks who decouple from the hive mind, even if they are correct. Management will wonder why, if you knew it was wrong, you didn't bring this up and save a lot of time and money doing it right in the first place. When teamwork counts, one person can't do all the work, thus it's critical to support the people that know their shit.
My current team has a belief that if we keep around one or two nice dummies that the team is more cohesive and works better, even though they are always ignored. But that doesn't work either, they're usually plenty smart enough to know they're being ignored and they tend to leave. Management attempts to correct for this by lecturing us on proper social behavior, which of course no one gets. So at the end of the day the painfully right person ends up "in control" (i.e. in a place where he can do real harm to morale) while the nice people tend to go somewhere they are wanted, often marketing.
Most of us would like to be paid to ditch the crap implementations we worked on and write a new one from scratch. Using the old one to make money while you make the new one is not new in the software world.
Slashdot Mirror
The argument from incredulity is often applied to science by the layperson. You don't need an opponent or a debate to use a logical fallacy. The fact that the Kitzmiller vs. Dover case had to happen proves that people question science regardless of it's validity.
Exactly. There has never been, nor ought their be, an automatic trust of anything, including science. By definition of "layperson", we do not know and are not read-up on, the exact arguments for an against any particular theory. It has long been the case that unscrupulous individuals will try to sell a product or an idea "because science says so". This is behind every diet fad, every exercise machine, every crackpot "business methodology", that we've been exposed to for centuries (see: snake oil salesman).
The reason that climate change has been resisted and argued by so many, for so long, is exactly this. We do not trust the people interpreting this for us at the national level. We see a group of people who have financial motivation to resist, a group of people who have financial motivation to sell green-wash products, and a group of people who advocate shucking technology and returning to some insane, idealized view of nature, where man and animal and nature all get along, and don't eat or kill each other. All "climategate" has done, is confuse us further. We still lack faith in science, we still do not trust any of the people arguing, and we have good reason for this lack of trust.
People use the word "gay" now to mean "stupid/dumb/lame/idiotic", on just about anything that happens that they don't like. It has morphed from the original meaning of happy, to the newer meaning of homosexual, to the pejorative term used generally on heterosexual males, to it's current form. All of those meanings still apply, context is everything. The word is going to eventually subsume all possible meanings and become the one word to rule all others.
What few homosexual men I know, refer to themselves as "gay", so I don't know why it's necessarily assumed that its always pejorative, although certainly it moved from it's first meaning to the second based upon a stereotype of homosexuals as being Richard Simmons-like. While our understanding of homosexuality has changed, the word stuck around and just doesn't seem very offensive in the proper environment.
I think you can turn any word into an insult if you use it in that context. "The filthy MARBLES are ruining our great nation, death to MARBLES !" "Dammit, MS released another broken operating system, that's so fucking MARBLE !"
It's precisely statements like these that will set back the sexual revolution at least 100 years. Please try to be less judgemental in the future.
didn't the US gladly turn a blind eye to infringers when it was to their benefit ?
In fact historically we basically stole British manufacturing and business capabilities from them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater
He's just one guy who did something amazing, but there was a trend behind him, and plenty of other examples. Ultimately it was in our best interests to stop being Britain's hunter/gatherers. By this point Britain was long past being able to stop us. China already realizes being our contract manufacturer isn't good for them, and already makes deals requiring we transfer some amount of our R&D work along with manufacturing. I daresay we can't really stop them either.
IP doesn't historically have a lot of strength behind it. It's easy to steal, it "doesn't hurt anyone" when it's stolen (sure it hurts some guy we don't know or care about!), and it's hard to put a price on it. The military might of planet earth isn't going to get raised in arms because someone stole the plans for the iPhone 4G, or even a semiconductor fab. Too abstract, why do I care, let them eat cake? Blah blah blah.
More to the point, are we willing to wage war on countries who "steal" our IP, and unbalance our trade/cause economic strife for us? If China decides to stop playing the "IP" game, what are we going to do about it, send over some lawyers and subpoena the hell out of them? IP exists by fiat, and without manufacturing and scientific R&D behind that fiat, it's an academic concept.
I'd rather we based our economy around manufacturing AND IP, not just one or the other. Vertical integration seems like a much better way of staying independent, and avoiding watching the western world turn into a bunch of suit wearing no-nothing middle managers.
I don't know, but 6 sigma has gone retro here. Here's to 2020 being late 90's dot com chaos!
Atheism does not imply predestination. You can elect not to believe in magical men in the sky, but believe you are in control of your own actions.
Either way, it's not about blame. If you release a killer automaton into society, and you know he's pre-programmed to maim and kill, isn't in your best interest to take him out of society? It's the Windows Me scenario: Remove and destroy the harmful program before it hurts again. Whether he's possessed of a despicable character flaw where he just enjoys killing, or whether he's programmed to do it and helpless to stop himself, the result ought to be the same: get him out of society. I don't know the science behind the "aggression gene", but if anything it should have increased his sentence, not decreased it.
Clearly this is a coverup, everyone knows there are 99 red balloons.
You're right, I don't care about Indians or Chinese, nor do I think we ought to be supporting their welfare unless they want to become the 51st and 52nd states.
China you can argue is a country that is going to at least make good on the money we give it, an investment there is an investment in someone's future. However it stands for pretty much the exact opposite ideals that we stand for in the USA (and that Europeans generally want to believe in). They haven't met a civil liberty that they wouldn't trample. Their commitment to communism equals only their commitment to capitalism: the people may suffer as long as the status quo marches on. India? Replace evil ideals with poverty and corruption. Investing there is like flushing money down the toilet. How does that help anyone?
So in the process of impoverishing that American, you're also hurting his country, and also hurting the ideals that enable the free world to be free. You don't have to like America, but you would be a complete moron to not understand that the free world is safe, as long as we're here doing whatever we do. It doesn't matter if we're fighting a war that doesn't need to be fought in Iraq, or if we're late to show for world wars you do happen to care about, the key point is top to bottom we do value what we have and we will help protect it, as long as we have the resources and know how to do so. That doesn't mean that a few very short sighted people will not sell us out to make a quick buck, and then wake up one day wondering why the villagers are lined up outside their castle with pitchforks and torches.
It doesn't matter if you end up with a cheaper power tool if you lose the jobs required to pay for it, or you lose the edge on technology required to build more and better tools. Talking about "unskilled factory jobs" moving offshore was 30 years ago, we're losing science and engineering jobs at record rates. The only thing we're keeping are service jobs and managerial jobs, none of which is going to keep us in a position of power for very long. I don't know how many managers it takes to invent a light bulb, but I suspect it will get lost in committee before we find an answer.
...the problems with heart trouble may have not been quite so much of a problem ten generations ago, when most humans did a lot more physical exercise just to stay alive...
Or something else killed them long before they were old enough to have a heart attack.
I've heard a rumor that tall women have trouble finding mates. A lot of men are put off by it.
These are the people who (amongst other things) think offshoring technology is a good idea. They don't see the danger, and they don't worry about the implications. Money is money.
It's news that affects nerds at least.
No, that's not what they want. That's what they will get. The most well thought libertarians just have lost track that creating a profitable business is not the only form of contribution to society, much less one of the least justifiable reasons for being rewarded. Businesses are essentially resource managers, the more you have the less actual productivity that occurs. It's not really desirable to have very many, certainly as many as would have to exist for a truly free market economy to work.
The less well thought libertarians completely don't understand that yesterday's libertarian ideals come true, are today's evil government control and restricted trade practices. The free market isn't free for long, anarchy isn't a very stable system, someone with the biggest gun or the biggest wallet always comes along to take control.
Yet during the time when we did do that, they were upgrading, consumers were getting more options and more services, and costs were competitive. Since they closed out that requirement, we've receded back to the point where we're only able to get the service the telco chooses to offer, and they have absolutely no incentive to upgrade because there's no reason to.
No, approach this rationally. Your objective is to get one or more cool features. You are the victim of an offensive statement by someone who matters on the project (such as the owner/maintainer). He is running a FOSS project because he wants community support and new features, but he's offending you and compelling you to leave.
- He's competent and capable believes in your feature but doesn't like you. Chances are, he'll get the feature done. You get what you really want and don't have to use your time here.
- He's competent and capable, but doesn't believe in your feature. You fork his design, others will follow you if they believe in your feature, if not your fork dies. You get what you really want.
- He's incompetent and thriving on the work of others. You fork his design and run your own show. You get what you want.
- No one is interested in your feature, you don't believe in it enough to fork. You move on. You don't get what you want, but you don't waste a lot of time in so doing.
That's how to be grown up about it. Don't expect anyone to ride in to save you because someone called you a bad name. Cliques, politics, developer poaching, drama... this is going to turn off people who might agree with you, but who fundamentally are there to get a tool they need, not be part of a community they don't. This isn't a democracy, it's a collective. It works by contribution and common interests. Do anything to hurt one or the other, and it falls apart and that is annoying to everyone. It's great when everyone gets along, but it isn't essential as a number of projects have shown.
Code or don't, but don't pollute the environment with politics.
Folie a deux, menage a trois.
I've never been involved in a project where "mens locker room bullshit" has ever come up, much less been central to forward progress on any project. I'm sure I have no interest in any of it, whatever it really means. Ignore it and code, or don't and be put off by anyone who thinks or works differently than you. You're not getting paid to do this, so if you don't enjoy it, don't do it.
To paraphrase: keep that political bullshit out of here. Code. Or don't.
This does seem to follow the format for posts from "The Onion":
Headline: [unknown name x] says, "[something random and mildly offensive to someone]".
Summary: [Introductory sentence explaining the position of X]. [Funny in a "wtf" sort of way support sentence]. [Another random and probably offensive quote, if the preceding statements didn't reveal it as satire]
This article ups the ante with a TRIPLE negative!
I bet not every board your company sells is tested equally well.
The article vaguely said "temperature plays little role" which doesn't help, and the supporting PDF in figure 7 paints a slightly different picture. Quite clearly increasing temperature increases error rate on every single system. However as you will note, motherboard variance had a far more significant contribution on the bottom line. In other words, compared to variable x, variable y is irrelevant. That's not the same as saying variable y is not a factor.
I work on server design, specifically motherboards. ECC is a feature, it helps prevent bit errors from passing through undetected. It is not a method for preventing errors from happening in the first place, nor does it influence the number of bit errors. That is a property of the motherboard design, the chipset, the DIMM PCB and the DRAM. Second, just because you provide a spec for a mobo, does not mean that it is all inclusive. Generally people specify form factor, power, features. They don't specify quality and in most cases don't give a criteria for what it means for a feature to "work". In fact most customers I've talked to don't really understand what quality means from hardware (and sometimes in general). Hardware management, much like software, is designed with similar principles of impact/effort: if customers don't care, we don't test. In other words if it ain't listed on the box, or the salesman won't write it down, just assume it wasn't done.
In spite of the fact that computer motherboards are digital electronics, there is in fact anything but a binary determination of "work" and "not work". Digital signals are an engineering approximation, one which falls apart at high speeds, dense routing and inexpensive design. Well designed and tested motherboards have a well known bit error rate, and reliable companies will not ship a new design until they meet their target. I do this on systems I design, but they aren't cheap, not by a lot. It is a very expensive, time consuming process, one which most companies really want to get rid of. Not all systems are so thoroughly tested, in fact the vast majority of boards out there, server or otherwise, aren't tested much at all.
Forking money for ECC is very similar to paying the mob to protect you. Yes, it will give you more peace of mind, but what you really want is to not be having these problems to begin with. For people who care about data integrity, you should be asking what the bit error rate is and how they know. If they don't know, then you don't want it, ECC or no ECC. Don't assume "the industry" is equal, and don't assume that because a vendor's product X is really good that their product Y is really good too: you WILL be wrong, particularly on computers.
Proof that lean living nets profits.
Our tax dollars primarily fund a welfare system known as civil service. We don't know what they do, but it requires a lot of them and a whole lot of time to do it.
Because nice people that are always wrong aren't necessarily doormats. They champion their opinions to whoever makes decisions, and that becomes the plan of record. Anyone not supporting the plan of record has a lot to answer for come end-of-year review time. Even if what he was doing turned out to be correct. Most organizations get very upset with engineers/developers/"IT Pros"/geeks who decouple from the hive mind, even if they are correct. Management will wonder why, if you knew it was wrong, you didn't bring this up and save a lot of time and money doing it right in the first place. When teamwork counts, one person can't do all the work, thus it's critical to support the people that know their shit.
My current team has a belief that if we keep around one or two nice dummies that the team is more cohesive and works better, even though they are always ignored. But that doesn't work either, they're usually plenty smart enough to know they're being ignored and they tend to leave. Management attempts to correct for this by lecturing us on proper social behavior, which of course no one gets. So at the end of the day the painfully right person ends up "in control" (i.e. in a place where he can do real harm to morale) while the nice people tend to go somewhere they are wanted, often marketing.
Most of us would like to be paid to ditch the crap implementations we worked on and write a new one from scratch. Using the old one to make money while you make the new one is not new in the software world.