I'm pretty sure people said 'bloat' not 'not needing a full-featured OS'. The systems I have mentioned are fully featured.
Well, then maybe you should learn to read, instead of pulling wild assumptions out of the ass. Quoth the message I was answering to, "Most of those applications shouldn't be running Windows, or any other full featured OS, anyways."
At least come up with a realistic implementation that someone would do. Such as implementing medical systems ontop of MontaVista or Lynuxworks and the problems you would have on those compared to doing it on Windows.
He also does mention MS-DOS twice as being enough for the job. That's why it's compared to DOS, lemming.
Right now, your 'argument' is just fluff to me.
No, _your_ arguing out of wild assumptions is fluff. If you have a problem with how the conversation went, fine. But base it on what was actually said, not on what you're "pretty sure" must have been said.
Because, while it might offend your sense of only using the _perfect_ match for the job, the Real World is still driven by money. A cheaper mis-match that works, beats an expensive solution that uses the minimal computer and OS imaginable, just to make a point.
Machines are cheap, people are very expensive. So if you need another half a gigabyte to run Windows there, but you can use existing skills and libraries to make that app, you might actually save millions in the process.
Yeah, you could program most stuff on DOS. And put up with incompatible and glitchy graphics libraries just to have that arrow cursor and some minimal widgets for your app. You could write your own interrupt-based thread simulation, 'cause DOS didn't come with any support for that. And write your own spinlock semaphores at that, and wonder why your app deadlocks. You could still do your own pointer arithmetic to put up with 16 bit addressing in a world of gigabyte-sized data sets, and do your own shitty XMS/EMS block copying just to address more than 640 KB. You could even reimplement most of the network protocols and half the other libraries, because nobody else ported those libraries to DOS. Etc.
Yeah, you could do that, just to willy-wave about your app not needing a full-featured OS at all.
Unfortunately, all that costs money and time. Money and time for your programmers to learn those old, quirky, half-arsed libraries instead of using something they already know and their IDE already supports better. Money and time to debug all the bugs you've introduced in the process. Etc.
And if you think that your reinventing the wheel will be more robust than Windows in the process, well, I can tell you that you might be in for a surprise. Most of the people who rant about how MS should be shot at dawn for having bugs, write far far far worse and less secure code, and some can't or shouldn't write code at all. Which isn't supposed to mean that MS writes good code, but, well, mostly think George Carlin's "Just think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are even dumber." It applies to programmers too, and doubly so to those who get hired just because they're the cheapest retrained burger flippers and someone thinks that's a cost cutting measure. About two thirds don't even know the language they're supposed to program in, according to one study.
At any rate, if any company did that kind of waste of money just for some fucked-up jihad against MS, I hope the shareholders nail the management to a cross. Because that's certainly a breach of the fiduciary responsibility to make money for the shareholders. Companies are there to make money, not to fight OCPD-nerd crusades.
I hope you do realize that that's just the kind of mentality that makes people easy prey for scammers. The idea that OMG, you have to buy immortality somehow, because otherwise you're just dead. So better blow all your money on that nice snake oil. You can't take them with you anyway, right?
Except the way it usually works: both you and the scammer end up just as dead anyway in the end, because so far nobody ever had an immortality potion that actually worked. Oh, they'll have all sorts of cures that they're willing to sell to you. Except you get to live at best just as long with them as without, and at worst a lot shorter. A lot of those cures will end up with you a little poisoned, a little malnourished, or a little executed for murder. (Ask Countess Bathory how her plan for immortality went;) And sometimes as a result you'll live a lot shittier on the way to the inevitable.
Basically what I'm saying is a version of saying that "we have to do something" and "this is something" doesn't add up to "we must do this."
Now I'm not saying that he's necessarily a charlatan, I don't know that. Maybe he's over-optimistic. Or maybe he's even right. Who knows? But we don't know that a priori. I'm just saying: be skeptical, ask to see what he bases his claims on. Which is what the GGGP was doing. Especially when the claims are as wild as "live for 1000 years."
Given the choice of duping people out of their money for hookers and beer or actually putting into life extension research, I would opt with the life extension because there will be plenty of time to do what you please later.
Well, the thing is that it does still happen. A lot of people will figure out, "wth, I have no clue how to solve it anyway, might as well just get paid anyway". Basically they'll still die either way, but they'll die a lot richer.
Plus, while "charlatan" has the implication of premeditated fraud, some people might be well meant, but clueless. Look at all the conspiracy theorists trying to save us from some danger or bring forth some utopia, but who can't really do it anyway. Just believing in something, and even dedicating one's life to something, doesn't mean you're right too.
At any rate, I do see the GP's point. The search for the elixir of life is as old as humanity itself. From tribal stone age hunter-gatherers, to the 20'th century, that's one invariant that's never left us: there'll always be people paying for any snake oil to prolong their life, and people who'll be perfectly happy to sell them snake oil. There's been even at least an Eastern European dictator, the name and place escape me now, who's funded massive research into the already discredited "polymer water" scam... and some "Ph.D." who was more than happy to be paid richly for maintaining that illusion and false hope. But he's not the only one.
The problem with most humans is that they are very short sighted.
Ah, I see you've answered your own objections there.
Note to all the clueless idiots out there: Google got popular quick because they had a search page that would load in under a minute back when most of us were still on dial-up. Having search rankings that worked as well as anybody else's was just icing on the cake. The hardcore techies might have gone nuts over their algorithms, but the rest of us were just happy to get our search results quickly and not wait for ages for a bunch of cruft and advertising to load first.
Not quite true. Yes, dialup load times were a problem, but they _also_ were a problem when clicking a gazillion of bad search results to see if it's the page you want. My time in reading through a gazillion bad results to see which one is the one I want (usually on page 20+) is also an order of magnitude slower than the load time of the search page.
So, yes, good search results were a big huge factor. Yes, you're right that only hardcore techies cared about the exact algorithms used. But everyone else still cared about getting more relevant results. They might not have even known what "algorithm" means, but they did care about whether a relevant result is anywhere on the first page, as opposed to the 100'th page.
Besides, there already were search engines which weren't that much slower on dialup. Hotbot was mostly text too, and very usable on dialup, for example. Trust me, I _have_ used it on dialup.
Plus, frankly, given the _massive_ difference in the quality of the results you'd get back then from various search engines, I find the notion outright laughable that load times were all that mattered. Some were still indexing tagged keywords, FFS, and were still gamed by sites tagged with all words in the dictionary. _That_ bad. So what you're trying to tell me there is just about on par with saying that you don't care whether you eat shit or salmon, whichever is served first wins.
"If nothing is broke, most likely no-one is going to try and "fix it"," is a good principle, but obviously doesn't apply when the whole deal is aimed at fixing it. If nothing were broke, DHL wouldn't "fix it" by pawning off the whole department.
Anyway, the fact is, DHL thinks it can save some money by passing these guys off to HP. Going by your scenario, it means that, basically we have two sums:
X = how much DHL pays for these guys, managing them, computers, electricity, building rent, overhead, etc
Y = how much DHL would pay HP for the same results
Now DHL thinks X > Y, and HP must think that Y includes a profit margin for itself _and_ pay for whatever they bought that department for. (It's not signing this just to subsidize DHL.) It makes no sense for Y to be the exact same old X plus a positive profit. Basically for your scenario, you have simultaneously X > Y, Y = X + P _and_ P > 0. Something doesn't add up, according to the maths as I know it.
One possibility that happens rather often, is that actually HP will end up fleecing DHL. I.e., that (maybe after a short time) actually Y > X. Quite a few companies found themselves at the bad end of that kind of a deal. (Though in the short term HP takes a small loss to sweeten the deal, the new CEO/beancounte/PHB can show some positive financial results in that quarter, and the shareholders cheer.)
The other possibility is that HP _will_ reduce the costs somehow. Maybe they'll force everyone to do more projects in the same time, so it's not going to be really the same job for the same money. Maybe they'll phase some people out after a while and move some of those jobs to Elbonia. Or maybe after a while they figure out that they can't make that much money there, gut the department and keep just some maintenance or service contract with DHL. Or whatever.
There _are_ a few such outsourcing or privatizing deals done just so someone else gets to fire those people, or ask them to take a pay cut.
So basically indeed YMMV. I'm glad it worked out well for you. Sometimes it does. In some other places it doesn't work like that.
Those 'deep differences' are exactly the same as the 'semantics'. GPL vs. BSD is, after all, a battle over what it means to be 'free'. Linguistic, philosophical...it's all the same battle.
Well, that's just what makes me... weary of GPL. Actually, no, of GPL zealots, starting with RMS himself. The semantics games, redefining words, and bullshit propaganda wording.
Note that I'm not against the GPL as a contract. You want my code, I set a price for it. Lemme see you give something back if you want it. Perfectly fair. No arguments there.
What I'm getting sick of is the whole "freedom of speech" and "free as in speech" bullshit. Because, like any such abuse of buzzwords like "freedom", "free speech", "democracy", etc, just to mobilize the masses, it devalues the real human freedoms and ideals that those words were supposed to mean.
"Freedom of speech" just means the government will not send you to Siberia for saying something. (Political.) You can say "Bush is a retard" and Bush can't send the secret police to silence you. Or that's how it was supposed to work. In terms of code, if you see the code as speech (which seems reasonable), it means that you can write that code and publish it, and the secret police won't hunt you down for it. That's it. That's "freedom of speech".
It's also worth pointing out that the first amendment was about your relation with the government. It's even spelled out clearly. You know, what with those guys having just had to take up arms against good ol' Mad George to make their point. But that's it. It says that the government can't forbid you to say something. It does not say that someone else has to carry your speech, or help you spread it, or contribute to it, or anything. Applied to code, it just means the government won't try to stop it. It doesn't mean and wasn't supposed to mean that you can make a corporation do anything for your speech or your code. The related concept of "freedom of press" applies to whoever owns the press, btw.
Bullshit speeches about immoral corporations stealing your code from you and locking it away from you, are equally bullshit. Once you've published that code, and assuming it doesn't infringe on anyone else's IP, nobody can take it away and make it disappear. It can stay there for ever on some FTP server with your name on it. And it's trivial to prove that you published it first, should some copyright or patent troll try to use that to steal your code. But at any rate, even the GPL doesn't prevent that: if someone were to claim that you copied his copyrighted code and slapped a GPL on it, you're back to square one, they have to prove that your code contains a substantial amount of code they wrote first.
What SCO tried to do, that's basically that kind of theft. They tried to claim that a bunch of code in Linux is really theirs. The GPL did jack squat to prevent that. With any kind of license whatsoever, from closed source to BSD to a freeware "just take it and do whatever you wish with it" license, the same would have happened: SCO could still sue just as well, and they'd still have to show a judge the lines of code they claim ownership to.
What someone might do is use it without contributing something back. You know, as in really free. All the GPL does is put some conditions on it. You know, as in _less_ free.
Again, I'm not against the principle. You can ask for whatever you wish in exchange for your product, and the market should decide whether they want to pay the price. You want code in return for your code? Fine. Seems fair enough.
I'm just saying let's just have an _honest_ discussion for a change. Drop the bullshit "freedom of speech" slogans. Present your license as what it really is.
Cue the Reaganites claiming nothing is wrong with this practice in 3... 2.. 1..
Or how about cue some common sense? If I'm on your private property, I have no fucking rights over you or your property. It's your private property. You have the right to control who can be on it, or use it. Otherwise it's not really yours. It's that simple.
If I happened to be over at your house and started spewing stuff that you find offensive, you're well within your rights to ask me to leave or not to let me in in the first place. Or are you saying that I can drop by your house at any time I wish, and start telling obscene jokes to your wife? I mean, if you don't, you're censoring my free speech, right? You wouldn't want to sound like a "reaganite", would you?
I'm not even a "reaganite", I'm a western european socialist, if you must put a label on me, but even I'm... amazed at the idiots who think that screaming "first amendment" gives them essentially rights over someone else or their private property. Get this: freedom of speech doesn't mean that anyone else is forced to listen to you, nor that anyone else must help you spread it. Freedom of press applies to whoever owns the press. That's it. It means that if you have a newspaper (or in modern days a server), the government can't come tell you to remove an anti-Bush column. No more.
It does _not_ mean that you can force anyone to listen. It does _not_ mean you have rights over someone else's newspaper. It does _not_ mean that they must give you a page to spew your speech on.
In short, it doesn't grant you power over anyone. It just says that the government can't have certain powers over you.
In other words, it does _not_ mean I can come over and tell you, "OK, I wrote this rant, you must put it on your blog."
Or if you don't find anything wrong with that, then put your wallet where your mouth is, and provide such an uncensored server for others. That's freedom of the press. You're free to do that. But just demanding that someone _else_ has some duty to provide you with free stuff, is just lame.
Let's say I'm named Joe Random and even register www.joerandom.com, blog under that name on a site or two, I'm on Twitter under that name, on Slashdot, etc. Basically that I make myself very visible on the net. Ok.
Now suppose someone puts my name on a few dating sites, posts other crap in my name, maybe even make a few posts on usenet groups (which by now are fully searchable) in my name. Maybe send some spam in my name too. So someone googling for me, finds those too.
How's my already having a web presence prevent the damage there? How's my blogging, which would probably be along the same lines of "I'm a disillusioned programmer who's seen far too many incompetents" and "look how smart I can sound about <random topic>" as on Slashdot, going to prevent my SO getting horrified by finding my name (faked) on Adult Friend Finder or the like? Do you think she'll go, basically, "nah, he can't possibly be interested in blogging about PHBs _and_ in fucking other women, at the same time. No one has room in his head for both," or what?:P
Or maybe she'll think, "nah, if he were looking for other women, he'd put it on the front of his web page that he told me about, instead of going through those sites.":P
It seems to me that even if my existing web presence spells out exactly what I believe and do, on any given topic (which is already way too much effort, _and_ forfeiting any privacy I might enjoy), how many people do you think it would prevent from jumping to conclusions anyway, when such an account generated by someone else seems "proof" to the contrary? E.g., let's say I put in big bold letters on my web site that I'm strictly monogamous and love my SO. Then someone finds my name (faked) on Adult Friend Finder or whatnot. Want to bet that more than half will bet that the text on my official web site is just a bullshit smokescreen, and the faked one is the real me unveiled?
So it seems to me like having my own web presence, by itself, really wouldn't do that much.
Maybe if I spent time googling for myself, and posting a lengthy disclaimer for every such occurence... well, it might do a little, but at the expense of (A) more effort than I'm arsed to do, and (B) sounding like an insecure sack of complexes, who's probably having the ego-google on auto-refresh just to see what anyone might ever say about him. Plus, once a couple of people get the B impression, then they can DDOS me by just posting enough crap everywhere in my name to fill all my free time and then some.
Well, they also built airplanes out of steel later. The Mig 25 was built out of mostly nickel alloy steel. It worried the West enough at the time, and was an official factor in why, say, the F15 got developed.
But the Soviets aren't the only ones. The XB-70 Valkyrie was built of steel too, with titanium only for the hottest areas like nose and engine intakes. What made the Valkyrie obsolete quickly wasn't the steel body, but simply that Soviet SA missiles got too good for a high-speed high-altitude bomber.
Consider this, actually: the pharma corporations have _already_ developed and patented _cures_ for a lot of diseases. Roll the time back a century or two, and stuff like tuberculosis or cholera or pneumonia or typhus killed people by the dozen. We now have antibiotics against those. Bacterial infections used to be the number one reason to die after surgery. Now they stuff you full of antibiotics instead.
Get this: the bulk of the wealth of those pharma corps is built on selling _cures_.
What people don't get is that there's more than one kind of disease.
- bacteria: we're quite good at killing those, because they're different from your own cells. E.g., the whole beta-lactam (penicilin) group works because bacteria have some different proteins than you do in the cell wall, and the beta-lactam ring can cause the whole cell wall to collapse. E.g., Streptomycin and the like attack the bacterial ribosome, which luckily enough is different from the human one, so things can exist that react with one but not the other.
At any rate, that's antibiotics. And basically that's the only thing we're really good at curing: bacterial infections.
- viruses. These slightly modify your own cells to produce more viruses. But otherwise it's the same f-ing cell, the same ribosome, and the same proteins in the cell walls.
The best luck we've had with these is vaccines. We pre-train your own immune system to deal with certain viruses. But that's not as much a medicine, as some dead viruses for it to play with. Downside: for some viruses it doesn't seem to work. Others mutate so fast that it's hit and miss, e.g., flu.
We have some anti-virals, which are very different from anti-biotics. They tend to be very limited in effectiveness, and very toxic to your own body. Which is what's prescribed for HIV. (Hence, any antibiotics you get for a flu are pure placebo, btw. Nobody prescribes antivirals for a flu, unless it's something deadly like the bird flu, because the cure tends to be worse than a normal flu.)
But, at any rate, we're still pretty bad at curing viruses.
- cancer. This one is even weirder, because it _is_ your normal cells, with some safety mechanisms broken. Essentially for a cell to become cancerous:
A) the proteins regulating divisions must break. (Human papillomavirus does this by adding the code to a broken protein to your cells, so hopefully it binds with the DNA instead of the real thing.) But even that then hits the maximum division counter and stops. That's why warts don't kill you. So
B) the cell must start regenerating its telomeres, i.e., reset the maximum division counter. That sounds like doing something extra, but remember that every cell has the DNA for all other cells, it's just inhibited or not expressed. The body already has the code to reset the telomeres of, say, sperm. (So your kids start with a full counter, and not with your remaining life expectancy.) A broken cell can start doing the same by mistake.
When you get both in the same cell, it's cancer.
At any rate, these _are_ your normal cells, with as little as some wrong aminoacid in a protein or two. Even your own immune system has trouble recognizing a lot of them, and since they still mostly work like the rest of the body, they can even send the right signals to get more blood vessels to support their growth and other fun stuff.
And btw, there are a lot of types of cancer, depending on exactly what was broken and in what type of cell. So one cure-all medicine is highly unlikely.
Nobody knows how to treat the vast majority of these, because there isn't some vital _and_ different protein you can attack, like we do for bacteria. Chemotherapy and radiotherapy actually break the DNA of all cells, and hope that it kills more cancerous cells than good ones. Because (I) cells currently dividing are more vulnerable than cells who have their DNA nicely spooled, and (II) cancerous cells often have broken DNA-repair proteins, so some breaks would be repaired by a normal cell, but
Well, VW has already been selling cars like the Lupo 3L, named for the fact that it needs 3 litres of fuel per hundred kilometres. (I.e., three times as much as this one, or 3 times less MPG, but still pretty much half the fuel use of a normal car. And by "normal" I don't mean SUV;) It already makes heavy use of aluminium, btw.
Or, since VW owns Audi, it's probably no wonder that Audi sells the Audi A2 which isn't far off, but has even better (i.e., lower) drag factor. And costs more since it's, you know, an Audi. It's got an aluminium body too, but then Audi uses that extensively for their bigger cars too.
Not everybody buys one, to be sure, but you see a few around at least in Germany. And I see they're still being manufacturing the A2, so it can't be too bad.
Well, you have to also bear in mind that fuel taxes are rather heavy down here, so the price of a tank of gas is higher than in the USA. There always was a healthy market for small cars and diesel cars, and a lot less of a market for SUVs. (Though you see a few of those around too.)
As an assembly programmer, I find it not even vaguely similar, at least in spirit and purpose.
A breakpoint is essentially a one-byte CALL. No more.
It's used by debuggers as a makeshift COME FROM, yes, but there's no way to use it in assembly code as an invisible COME FROM. (Except if you do self-modifying code, but then in that case you can do anything whatsoever, not just COME FROM.) If you actually wrote that instruction in an assembly program, it would work as a CALL, and it would be visible right there, at the position you break from. It doesn't confuse the poor maintenance sod even remotely as much as a COME FROM that's in another file entirely and makes his method do extra (or less!) stuff that he can't see anywhere in the actual code of that method.
AOP creates that extra oportunity to make someone cry when they try to understand your code. Make a seemingly benign getter method alter the variables in a whole other class? Sure. Why not? Change a classloader so everything becomes public in loaded classes, and another module so it changes what you thought was a constant? Make a method call a whole unrelated module and cause all sorts of side-effects? Go ahead. The world is your bitch when you can use a COME FROM in any place you wish, and have it hidden in a whole other source file, and inserted in a whole different pass of the build.
The maintenance engineer sees your program like through a narrow cardboard tube. He doesn't know the big picture, and usually isn't given the time or budget to learn it. He just sees one screen at a time. And expects that if he sees no calls, there are no calls made from there, or none that he should be aware of. Make his day interesting by adding all sorts of aspects, so the method does more than what the source code says, or something else entirely.;)
Which I guess is why most people only use it to insert extra debug or timing log messages.
Doesn't it seem reasonable to assume that if dark energy and dark matter remain undetectable, that cosmic redshift is NOT being caused by the expansion of the universe? Hubble always doubted that connection. Redshift likely correlates with distance, but not necessarily with recessional motion. JL
Hmm, well, _some_ neutrinos have been detected, so _some_ dark matter has been detected and is known to exist. I'm guessing you mean more like "Dark Energy", which is the one conjectured based on red-shift.
According to physics as we know it, there are only two things that can cause red shift, and we know about, and both boil down to "1nm here isn't the same as 1nm there." So you can say "it moves away from us at X percent of the light speed" or "the space itself has expanded by Y percent." Well, ok, so the current theory is that it's a combination of both.
In the end, it boils down to the following choice:
1. Light behaves as we know, the laws of the universe don't do perverse things at large distances, but there's a weird force actually pushing the galaxies apart.
2. There's something doing weird things to light, and doing what shouldn't even be possible unless our whole understanding of physics is broken. E.g., if light can just change frequency over time like that, without space expansion or Doppler effect being involved, then the energy of a photon varies over time, i.e., some energy is being removed in an analog way. Basically then it's not acting like a quantum at all, because it sheds energy in a decidedly non-quantum way over time.
Both involve some dark forces/energies that we don't understand, but #1 is more palatable according to Occam's Razor. Basically the extra entity "dark energy" as it's imagined today, is less of a tweak than #2, which requires rewriting two thirds of physics. So until someone can prove what it is, we're basically better off with #1.
Of course, it doesn't mean that #2 is impossible. I guess it would be a laugh if it turns out that it was #2 after all.
Well, that's how science works. If someone comes up with a better theory that doesn't involve "ether", we'll go with that one.
There are several hypotheses to that effect already. One is for example the Modified Newtonian dynamics, which pretty much just messes with the F=ma to explain galaxy rotation.
Another possibility would be to mess with gravity itself. For small distances it would be as usual inversely proportional to the square of the distance, but then it would gradually turn into just 1/r instead.
If you want to explain away dark energy too, it gets funnier, since past a point it must actually become negative.
That said, it's not just hypothesized "ether", though.
We _know_ for example that any star, including our sun, produces immense quantities of neutrinos. Which are just that: totally transparent matter. They have an almost zero (not exactly zero, but very very very very close) probability to interact with ordinary matter, and a bunch of them passed right through you as you read this message. The only real interaction between neutrinos and the rest of the universe (or each other) is that they both create gravity and are subject to gravity.
That's one kind of "dark matter" that we already know exists, and have been detected. They're not just hypothesized.
Now whether they're _all_ the missing matter or not, that's another question.
We also have one famous photo in which two galaxies collide, and the bulk of the gravity lensing "fields", i.e., the gravity wells, actually moved ahead of the actual galaxy. It's as if the galaxies were braked by friction with each other's dust and interstelar atoms, but whatever creates the bulk of the gravity well moved ahead.
That's somewhat incorrect, and makes a hash of two unrelated things too:
1. Dark matter. Unlike what its name might imply, it isn't dark as in "light absorbing". It's dark as in, it doesn't interact with light at all, except through gravity.
It's only "dark" in the same way as a sheet of glass is dark against the night sky.
But even that metaphor is misleading. "Dark matter" is just a name for a lot of mass that should be there according to calculations (or our understanding of gravity is completely broken at large scales), but hadn't been observed. It's just a funky name. It doesn't mean it's actually dark in any form or shape.
The best example of a scale where this is visible is inside a galaxy. With just gravity determining the speed of rotation around the centre, the stars closer to the centre should rotate faster than those on the edges. (In the same way as Mercury rotates around the sun once every 0.24 years, Earth in a year, and Pluto in 248 years.) But galaxies don't seem to rotate that way. They rotate more like a solid texture, so to speak. So there must be some mass distributed through the disc, in addition to what we see.
But again, the whole point is that we can't see it. If it were just a cloud of pitch-black baryonic matter, that would actually be easy and comfortable. We'd just do what you said: look at what happens to the light of stars behind it. Since it's plenty of it inside a galaxy, we have plenty of stars to look at and notice if something like that was between us and them. But all we can see is some extra gravity, with all that involves for both star movement and gravitational lensing.
A much more accurate name would be "completely transparent matter."
2. Dark energy.
This is an even funnier concept. With all that mass in the universe, there's gravity all around. Duly noted, the gravity pull of a hideously distant galaxy is really tiny, but it's there. The universe expansion should slow down as gravity pulls everything towards the centre. The funny thing is: it doesn't. It's actually accelerating, and weirdly enough, the farther something is, the faster it seems to accelerate away.
There is _something_ that pushes stuff away from the centre, and it's not like any force we already know.
It's also something we'd be hard pressed to reproduce in a lab. Whatever it is, it's insignificantly weak at small ranges, and only starts to matter at very very very large distances. Even at galactic scales (hundreds of thousands at light years) it seems to do practically nothing at all, but move a few _billion_ light years away, and you start seeing whole galaxies accelerating away. It's not something you can reproduce in a lab.
It's also weird in that a normal energy (e.g., the potential energy in a compressed spring) would get used up, or rather converted into work, as it pushes stuff away. So the force would logically diminish. This one only seems to grow stronger.
So basically this big "WTF?" is what's called "dark energy". There's some energy that's pushing the universe apart, but we don't know what it is, and how to detect it.
Since they explicitly mention Amazon, heh, my experience with Amazon's user reviews has been pretty bad to start with. Caveat: it's not about electronics, but I do buy games and the occasional DVD movie off Amazon.
My impression is that the amount of fanboyism, astroturfing and bullshit is... epic. Monumental.
E.g., read some reviews for a game that's not released yet. My favourite example was Gothic 3, when it wasn't even in beta yet, or even alpha. The only thing anyone had were some screenshots of what the graphics engine can do. That's it. Nobody had anything playable yet, probably not even the devs.
Well, people were already writing reviews in which it's the greatest game ever, and the gameplay rules, the graphics are the best since Michelangelo, etc.
When released, the game was a buggy mess that didn't even vaguely resemble those "reviews". The graphics had some major glitches. Quests could be broken because the NPC had fucked off, and I know someone who encountered that right in the freaking intro. The game had a nasty memory leak, where eventually it would start to barely crawl and eventually crash... often while saving, leaving you with a corrupt and unusable saved game. Gameplay too was a broken fuckup: e.g., combat was a broken whoever-hit-first-wins affair, because then the other would be continuously interrupted and unable to hit back or change weapons or whatever. Even a flea could probably kill you, if it hit first. Etc.
Most of that stuff _still_ hasn't been fixed, after more than a dozen patches and the publisher giving up on it.
But, of course, going by the user reviews, you'd think it's the greatest game ever.
Now as a human, you can filter out the blatant bullshit, see which reviewers better reflect your taste and didn't post too much bullshit before, etc. I'm skeptical that a program can be too good at doing the same.
But I have an even worse fear: that once people figure out that they only need to game a program, and how, we'll see even more fanboyism, astroturfing and bullshit. Plus an army of sock-puppets to mod each other up, if the bot takes that into account. Basically, think about all the link farms and link spam on the net to game Google's page rank. Now think the same for a bot aggregating reviews. I find that scary.
So, no, I don't want it on Slashdot too. Basically, would you really want 300 goatse links, just so the bot includes it in the digested version?
I don't see them as mutually exclusive, you know? It's not like I can only worry about one issue at a time.
Yes, all the stuff you mention _are_ still problems. Additionally, I do also have contempt for shallow people who invent funny titles to sound more important, and/or funny pseudo-jargon to sound smart.
Actually, no offense, but I found that companion article to be far worse advice. Unless it was meant to be just funny mis-advice, and the joke went right over my head.
E.g., trusting developers and not managing them too much... Well, there's more than one kind of person. In fact, there's a whole continuum of them. At one end, there _are_ indeed people who are perfectly capable of managing themselves and who can be given the big picture and left to their own devices to finish that big chunk. At the other end, there are people who really need to be coaxed to do anything whatsoever.
As an example of the latter extreme, my ex-coleague Wally once asked for some weeks to estimate the effort to fix a trivial bug. You read it right: not time to actually fix it, but that much time to estimate how much time he'd need to fix it. He actually got it, btw. Sometimes just trusting every developer is a bad idea.
Almost all of us think we're at the former end of the spectrum, so, yes, if you ask us, every single one will say he's perfectly capable of managing himself and needs no stinking manager checking on his progress. Reality is often a whole other thing.
The right thing to do, and at that the _hard_ thing, is recognizing the right amount of management each one needs. (And if you're willing to dedicate more effort on your part to coax someone, than it would be to fire him and write the damn module yourself, I guess.) Applying the wrong amount in either direction can get bad results fast.
But at the very least, the best advice I've ever read on the topic, is, "beware the guy in the room." You know, the idea that we have this super-programmer in his own little (metaphorical) room, we're leaving him to his own devices, noone knows what he's doing, but we're confident that at the exact deadline he'll come out screaming "Eureka!" and they all lived happily ever after. Even for the guys who are capable of managing themselves and usually deliver results, do have some indication of progress being made and do track it. That way at least you'll know if he hit some hurdle right before the deadline and is too proud to ask for help.
The thing about needing to be shielded from the rest of the company... well, we would indeed very much like to be left alone with the computer and to ignore the rest of the humanity, not just the rest of the company. Whether that's also good for business, that's a whole other issue. Being isolated in your own ivory tower can lead to some very bad design decisions, based on what you _think_ the outside world needs. Plus, it's good for the morale to know at least that someone else in the company is using our programs, and we're not just moving a pile of sand from here to there, for no other purpose than to stay busy.
So basically do filter out the unneeded crap and politics, but make sure not to filter out stuff that is actually needed for those guys to understand what they're doing and why.
And finally, ok, I know that an analogy isn't supposed to be 100% equivalent to the thing it represents. But the analogy with the cat, much as I do like cats, is IMHO rather mis-leading. You don't expect the cat to do anything whatsoever, except keep you company and not damage your furniture. That's it. You just want it to like you, basically. If you need employees which just like you and don't do outright damage, yeah, take the cat analogy. If you need employees which actually finish a task by a deadline, you might need a bit more effort.
First of all, thanks for that link. I had observed something vaguely similar some years ago, it's very nice to know that someone actually made a study to prove it and put it in better words than I did. Cheers.
That said, oh, of course they can be incompetent or stupid too.
I still find that if they just operate on wrong data, or over-estimate their knowledge, you can still follow the logic. E.g., let's say I were the stupid PHB and went, "GPUs are faster than CPUs nowadays, and can do the same things anyway, so we'll build our web servers with quad SLI 9800GX2 graphics cards", it's clueless, of course, but you can still recognize a major and minor premise and the conclusion, and the logic in there is solid. There's an implied extra step in there, but even that doesn't contain any fundamental flaw. It's one of the premises that's false, but the logic from there is solid. And if nothing else is in the way, you can simply point out the flawed premise.
The problem I was describing, and probably not well enough, is when the logic itself seems broken and/or one resists any attempts to attack a premise, or introduces other bogus premises and logical fallacies that arrive suspiciously at the same conclusion. That's what tells me that they decided the solution before building a flawed path to it.
Basically I'll admit that there are very stupid people and very smart people, and some six billion shades in between. But very few people are as ilogical as they sometimes seem. Anyone over an IQ of, say, 70, should be capable of following an elementary logic chain forwards. If they were physiologically incapable of elementary logical inferences and solving basic problems, they'd never learn to unzip their pants before they piss. There are people like that. We call them retards. They don't end up CIOs. Everyone else has no trouble with following logic forwards.
It's when they attempt to build a chain backwards from a pre-decided conclusion, that the effects are amplified dramatically. Someone very very smart will explore more of that tree of possible ways to his solution, and find some chain that you can nod through on your way to his/her conclusion. Someone dumb, well, will come up with a blatantly flawed one.
Also note that when I'm saying they're solving a different problem, or they have a different agenda, I don't necessarily mean some complex Pinky-and-The-Brain master-plan. It can be something as simple as "I want to sound smart", or "I'm insecure and I want to show someone who's the boss", or "I want a promotion", "I have to take _some_ bold visionary-like decision, or the CEO will start wondering why he hired me." They too can at least throw extra constraints and hurdles into the official problem, and turn it into something slightly different than the one he's officially solving.
E.g., if someone's agenda is simply, "I have to take _some_ bold visionary-like decision, or the CEO will start wondering why he hired me," then he _has_ to come up with something overblown like the ""massively distributed MVC, ROR, multicore Web 2.0 social applications"" in the original poster's example, because that's the kind of solution that really fits that secret problem. And will resist any objections because your solution doesn't solve _his_ problem.
Of course, seen from outside, it's still clueless anyway. And some Dunning-Kruger effect (as per your link) may be involved too. In fact, it probably works the same in both directions, not just when using the logic forwards. Someone over-estimating their expertise, will fuck-up when working backwards from a pre-decided conclusion too, and come up with an even more hare-brained justification.
Well, on the topic of forcing people to upgrade... maybe if the newer software wasn't so retarded, more people would upgrade. Just a thought.
Admittedly my anecdote isn't comprehensive marketing data and isn't that new either, but just to illustrate a point. So at one point I wanted to communicate with someone who supposedly had only ICQ.
The last version I had used before was, IIRC, 2002a. Or something. At any rate, it was a relatively clean interface, with just the two text-fields needed, and the minimum of buttons that one might need. All in the Windows configured colours, and with sensible icons that are there, but don't scream for attention and don't look like someone flew an airplane into a clown makeup factory. I'm not necessarily a fan of ICQ or AOL, but I could respect that interface.
Well, I figured, wth, let's get the newest version. You know, what with potential security holes and whatnot in older versions. I think the version at the moment was ICQ 4. "With Xtraz!" The l33t (ok, SMS-speak) spelling in a product name should have been warning enough. It was everything that the old version wasn't: retarded and annoying and looking like a desperate scream for attention. IIRC with an ad banner thrown in for good measure too.
I actually went "oh, fuck the security holes, that's why I have an anti-virus and data execution check turned on." I actually uninstalled it and dug through old backup CD-R's to find my trusted old version.
Well, I uninstalled it completely after a few days and never looked back. So I wouldn't know if the even newer versions fixed that or continued down that slope towards software-Alzheimer's.
But just saying... if you find that you have to _force_ people to give up their old versions and use the newer one, even when it's for free (as in beer;)... there may be some subtle hint in there.
And yeah, I know there are other programs one can use instead of the official client. They're just kinda irrelevant for the point I was trying to make, which is about AOL making the users of its official client upgrade.
No, I mean anisotropic. As in, depending from which direction you measure your light bulb, the amound of background radiation won't be the same.
Damn, I miss the time when slashdot was actually for geeks!
Dunno about missing some particular point in time, but I _wish_ it was actually for geeks, and not for retards trolling with "OMG, you got a word wrong." But I guess some people really have no other claim to glory, than "look, I can handwave that there's someone between me and absolute zero." Says something about where they see themselves on that scale, eh?
While online dating may be a luxury for you (to use your weakest counterpoint), for someone who would otherwise not be able to meet people, it can be a life saver. People do die of loneliness. No, that's not a medical term, but it's true the same way it's true that people die of old age.
Uh... _if_ you're dying of loneliness, here's a crazy idea: go out. Go to a pub. Talk to people.
I realize that this is basically the disparaging "go out and get a life" comment, but I'm not saying this to everyone. If you're perfectly comfortable with sitting alone in a dark room with a computer, fine. I'm not gonna tell you to stop doing that. It would be hypocritical anyway.
But, ffs, if you've already decided that you're lonely and that meeting people would save your life, i.e., that lack thereof would literally kill you one way or another, then solve your own problem already. Evolution, or God, or whatever you believe in, gave you that big brain, use it. If you're thirsty, you go drink some water. If you're hungry, you go eat. If you're _that_ terminally lonely, go out and meed some people.
And on the subject of the internet, we had ways to satisfy all those needs, long before the internet. When people were hungry, they just went and ate something, even if ordering pizza by Internet wasn't yet an option. Ditto for dating. Long before internet chat and internet dating, people already had perfectly good ways to avoid being lonely. They'd just go out and talk to someone.
That's what makes it a luxury, and not a basic need. Food is a basic need. Ordering pizza per internet is just a luxury: it spares you some effort and time, but that's all. Talking to someone, well, if you're that terminally lonely and lack of it would literally kill you, I guess it would count as a basic need. Finding them by Internet is a luxury. Again, it spares you some effort and time, but that's all.
If anything, the Internet created the problem it supposedly solves. Before the Internet and people being glued to their computer for days, there would be more of them out at the pub or the park, for you to meet. So for each hour you spend browsing potential dates on the Internet and planning a date next months, guess what? Previously you'd be outside actually talking to someone in person, right now.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the Internet is evil. Anyone who wants to butt in with, "OMG, but I'd rather stay on the internet than go to the pub and get bored talking about the weather," fine! If you don't want to meet people, don't. Nobody's telling you to, if you're comfortable with what you're doing. But anyone claiming they'd die of loneliness with it, has already excluded themselves from the "OMG, I'd rather stay here and read tech stuff than meet people." They already claimed they'd rather meet people. So they can jolly well go out and actually meet people. Lots of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, then maybe you should learn to read, instead of pulling wild assumptions out of the ass. Quoth the message I was answering to, "Most of those applications shouldn't be running Windows, or any other full featured OS, anyways."
He also does mention MS-DOS twice as being enough for the job. That's why it's compared to DOS, lemming.
No, _your_ arguing out of wild assumptions is fluff. If you have a problem with how the conversation went, fine. But base it on what was actually said, not on what you're "pretty sure" must have been said.
Nah, that would make Slashdot outright unusable. I mean, half the headlines would be identical then. Can you imagine trying to find anything? ;)
Because, while it might offend your sense of only using the _perfect_ match for the job, the Real World is still driven by money. A cheaper mis-match that works, beats an expensive solution that uses the minimal computer and OS imaginable, just to make a point.
Machines are cheap, people are very expensive. So if you need another half a gigabyte to run Windows there, but you can use existing skills and libraries to make that app, you might actually save millions in the process.
Yeah, you could program most stuff on DOS. And put up with incompatible and glitchy graphics libraries just to have that arrow cursor and some minimal widgets for your app. You could write your own interrupt-based thread simulation, 'cause DOS didn't come with any support for that. And write your own spinlock semaphores at that, and wonder why your app deadlocks. You could still do your own pointer arithmetic to put up with 16 bit addressing in a world of gigabyte-sized data sets, and do your own shitty XMS/EMS block copying just to address more than 640 KB. You could even reimplement most of the network protocols and half the other libraries, because nobody else ported those libraries to DOS. Etc.
Yeah, you could do that, just to willy-wave about your app not needing a full-featured OS at all.
Unfortunately, all that costs money and time. Money and time for your programmers to learn those old, quirky, half-arsed libraries instead of using something they already know and their IDE already supports better. Money and time to debug all the bugs you've introduced in the process. Etc.
And if you think that your reinventing the wheel will be more robust than Windows in the process, well, I can tell you that you might be in for a surprise. Most of the people who rant about how MS should be shot at dawn for having bugs, write far far far worse and less secure code, and some can't or shouldn't write code at all. Which isn't supposed to mean that MS writes good code, but, well, mostly think George Carlin's "Just think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are even dumber." It applies to programmers too, and doubly so to those who get hired just because they're the cheapest retrained burger flippers and someone thinks that's a cost cutting measure. About two thirds don't even know the language they're supposed to program in, according to one study.
At any rate, if any company did that kind of waste of money just for some fucked-up jihad against MS, I hope the shareholders nail the management to a cross. Because that's certainly a breach of the fiduciary responsibility to make money for the shareholders. Companies are there to make money, not to fight OCPD-nerd crusades.
I hope you do realize that that's just the kind of mentality that makes people easy prey for scammers. The idea that OMG, you have to buy immortality somehow, because otherwise you're just dead. So better blow all your money on that nice snake oil. You can't take them with you anyway, right?
Except the way it usually works: both you and the scammer end up just as dead anyway in the end, because so far nobody ever had an immortality potion that actually worked. Oh, they'll have all sorts of cures that they're willing to sell to you. Except you get to live at best just as long with them as without, and at worst a lot shorter. A lot of those cures will end up with you a little poisoned, a little malnourished, or a little executed for murder. (Ask Countess Bathory how her plan for immortality went;) And sometimes as a result you'll live a lot shittier on the way to the inevitable.
Basically what I'm saying is a version of saying that "we have to do something" and "this is something" doesn't add up to "we must do this."
Now I'm not saying that he's necessarily a charlatan, I don't know that. Maybe he's over-optimistic. Or maybe he's even right. Who knows? But we don't know that a priori. I'm just saying: be skeptical, ask to see what he bases his claims on. Which is what the GGGP was doing. Especially when the claims are as wild as "live for 1000 years."
Well, the thing is that it does still happen. A lot of people will figure out, "wth, I have no clue how to solve it anyway, might as well just get paid anyway". Basically they'll still die either way, but they'll die a lot richer.
Plus, while "charlatan" has the implication of premeditated fraud, some people might be well meant, but clueless. Look at all the conspiracy theorists trying to save us from some danger or bring forth some utopia, but who can't really do it anyway. Just believing in something, and even dedicating one's life to something, doesn't mean you're right too.
At any rate, I do see the GP's point. The search for the elixir of life is as old as humanity itself. From tribal stone age hunter-gatherers, to the 20'th century, that's one invariant that's never left us: there'll always be people paying for any snake oil to prolong their life, and people who'll be perfectly happy to sell them snake oil. There's been even at least an Eastern European dictator, the name and place escape me now, who's funded massive research into the already discredited "polymer water" scam... and some "Ph.D." who was more than happy to be paid richly for maintaining that illusion and false hope. But he's not the only one.
Ah, I see you've answered your own objections there.
Not quite true. Yes, dialup load times were a problem, but they _also_ were a problem when clicking a gazillion of bad search results to see if it's the page you want. My time in reading through a gazillion bad results to see which one is the one I want (usually on page 20+) is also an order of magnitude slower than the load time of the search page.
So, yes, good search results were a big huge factor. Yes, you're right that only hardcore techies cared about the exact algorithms used. But everyone else still cared about getting more relevant results. They might not have even known what "algorithm" means, but they did care about whether a relevant result is anywhere on the first page, as opposed to the 100'th page.
Besides, there already were search engines which weren't that much slower on dialup. Hotbot was mostly text too, and very usable on dialup, for example. Trust me, I _have_ used it on dialup.
Plus, frankly, given the _massive_ difference in the quality of the results you'd get back then from various search engines, I find the notion outright laughable that load times were all that mattered. Some were still indexing tagged keywords, FFS, and were still gamed by sites tagged with all words in the dictionary. _That_ bad. So what you're trying to tell me there is just about on par with saying that you don't care whether you eat shit or salmon, whichever is served first wins.
"If nothing is broke, most likely no-one is going to try and "fix it"," is a good principle, but obviously doesn't apply when the whole deal is aimed at fixing it. If nothing were broke, DHL wouldn't "fix it" by pawning off the whole department.
Anyway, the fact is, DHL thinks it can save some money by passing these guys off to HP. Going by your scenario, it means that, basically we have two sums:
X = how much DHL pays for these guys, managing them, computers, electricity, building rent, overhead, etc
Y = how much DHL would pay HP for the same results
Now DHL thinks X > Y, and HP must think that Y includes a profit margin for itself _and_ pay for whatever they bought that department for. (It's not signing this just to subsidize DHL.) It makes no sense for Y to be the exact same old X plus a positive profit. Basically for your scenario, you have simultaneously X > Y, Y = X + P _and_ P > 0. Something doesn't add up, according to the maths as I know it.
One possibility that happens rather often, is that actually HP will end up fleecing DHL. I.e., that (maybe after a short time) actually Y > X. Quite a few companies found themselves at the bad end of that kind of a deal. (Though in the short term HP takes a small loss to sweeten the deal, the new CEO/beancounte/PHB can show some positive financial results in that quarter, and the shareholders cheer.)
The other possibility is that HP _will_ reduce the costs somehow. Maybe they'll force everyone to do more projects in the same time, so it's not going to be really the same job for the same money. Maybe they'll phase some people out after a while and move some of those jobs to Elbonia. Or maybe after a while they figure out that they can't make that much money there, gut the department and keep just some maintenance or service contract with DHL. Or whatever.
There _are_ a few such outsourcing or privatizing deals done just so someone else gets to fire those people, or ask them to take a pay cut.
So basically indeed YMMV. I'm glad it worked out well for you. Sometimes it does. In some other places it doesn't work like that.
Well, that's just what makes me... weary of GPL. Actually, no, of GPL zealots, starting with RMS himself. The semantics games, redefining words, and bullshit propaganda wording.
Note that I'm not against the GPL as a contract. You want my code, I set a price for it. Lemme see you give something back if you want it. Perfectly fair. No arguments there.
What I'm getting sick of is the whole "freedom of speech" and "free as in speech" bullshit. Because, like any such abuse of buzzwords like "freedom", "free speech", "democracy", etc, just to mobilize the masses, it devalues the real human freedoms and ideals that those words were supposed to mean.
"Freedom of speech" just means the government will not send you to Siberia for saying something. (Political.) You can say "Bush is a retard" and Bush can't send the secret police to silence you. Or that's how it was supposed to work. In terms of code, if you see the code as speech (which seems reasonable), it means that you can write that code and publish it, and the secret police won't hunt you down for it. That's it. That's "freedom of speech".
It's also worth pointing out that the first amendment was about your relation with the government. It's even spelled out clearly. You know, what with those guys having just had to take up arms against good ol' Mad George to make their point. But that's it. It says that the government can't forbid you to say something. It does not say that someone else has to carry your speech, or help you spread it, or contribute to it, or anything. Applied to code, it just means the government won't try to stop it. It doesn't mean and wasn't supposed to mean that you can make a corporation do anything for your speech or your code. The related concept of "freedom of press" applies to whoever owns the press, btw.
Bullshit speeches about immoral corporations stealing your code from you and locking it away from you, are equally bullshit. Once you've published that code, and assuming it doesn't infringe on anyone else's IP, nobody can take it away and make it disappear. It can stay there for ever on some FTP server with your name on it. And it's trivial to prove that you published it first, should some copyright or patent troll try to use that to steal your code. But at any rate, even the GPL doesn't prevent that: if someone were to claim that you copied his copyrighted code and slapped a GPL on it, you're back to square one, they have to prove that your code contains a substantial amount of code they wrote first.
What SCO tried to do, that's basically that kind of theft. They tried to claim that a bunch of code in Linux is really theirs. The GPL did jack squat to prevent that. With any kind of license whatsoever, from closed source to BSD to a freeware "just take it and do whatever you wish with it" license, the same would have happened: SCO could still sue just as well, and they'd still have to show a judge the lines of code they claim ownership to.
What someone might do is use it without contributing something back. You know, as in really free. All the GPL does is put some conditions on it. You know, as in _less_ free.
Again, I'm not against the principle. You can ask for whatever you wish in exchange for your product, and the market should decide whether they want to pay the price. You want code in return for your code? Fine. Seems fair enough.
I'm just saying let's just have an _honest_ discussion for a change. Drop the bullshit "freedom of speech" slogans. Present your license as what it really is.
Or how about cue some common sense? If I'm on your private property, I have no fucking rights over you or your property. It's your private property. You have the right to control who can be on it, or use it. Otherwise it's not really yours. It's that simple.
If I happened to be over at your house and started spewing stuff that you find offensive, you're well within your rights to ask me to leave or not to let me in in the first place. Or are you saying that I can drop by your house at any time I wish, and start telling obscene jokes to your wife? I mean, if you don't, you're censoring my free speech, right? You wouldn't want to sound like a "reaganite", would you?
I'm not even a "reaganite", I'm a western european socialist, if you must put a label on me, but even I'm... amazed at the idiots who think that screaming "first amendment" gives them essentially rights over someone else or their private property. Get this: freedom of speech doesn't mean that anyone else is forced to listen to you, nor that anyone else must help you spread it. Freedom of press applies to whoever owns the press. That's it. It means that if you have a newspaper (or in modern days a server), the government can't come tell you to remove an anti-Bush column. No more.
It does _not_ mean that you can force anyone to listen. It does _not_ mean you have rights over someone else's newspaper. It does _not_ mean that they must give you a page to spew your speech on.
In short, it doesn't grant you power over anyone. It just says that the government can't have certain powers over you.
In other words, it does _not_ mean I can come over and tell you, "OK, I wrote this rant, you must put it on your blog."
Or if you don't find anything wrong with that, then put your wallet where your mouth is, and provide such an uncensored server for others. That's freedom of the press. You're free to do that. But just demanding that someone _else_ has some duty to provide you with free stuff, is just lame.
Well, how does that help?
Let's say I'm named Joe Random and even register www.joerandom.com, blog under that name on a site or two, I'm on Twitter under that name, on Slashdot, etc. Basically that I make myself very visible on the net. Ok.
Now suppose someone puts my name on a few dating sites, posts other crap in my name, maybe even make a few posts on usenet groups (which by now are fully searchable) in my name. Maybe send some spam in my name too. So someone googling for me, finds those too.
How's my already having a web presence prevent the damage there? How's my blogging, which would probably be along the same lines of "I'm a disillusioned programmer who's seen far too many incompetents" and "look how smart I can sound about <random topic>" as on Slashdot, going to prevent my SO getting horrified by finding my name (faked) on Adult Friend Finder or the like? Do you think she'll go, basically, "nah, he can't possibly be interested in blogging about PHBs _and_ in fucking other women, at the same time. No one has room in his head for both," or what? :P
Or maybe she'll think, "nah, if he were looking for other women, he'd put it on the front of his web page that he told me about, instead of going through those sites." :P
It seems to me that even if my existing web presence spells out exactly what I believe and do, on any given topic (which is already way too much effort, _and_ forfeiting any privacy I might enjoy), how many people do you think it would prevent from jumping to conclusions anyway, when such an account generated by someone else seems "proof" to the contrary? E.g., let's say I put in big bold letters on my web site that I'm strictly monogamous and love my SO. Then someone finds my name (faked) on Adult Friend Finder or whatnot. Want to bet that more than half will bet that the text on my official web site is just a bullshit smokescreen, and the faked one is the real me unveiled?
So it seems to me like having my own web presence, by itself, really wouldn't do that much.
Maybe if I spent time googling for myself, and posting a lengthy disclaimer for every such occurence... well, it might do a little, but at the expense of (A) more effort than I'm arsed to do, and (B) sounding like an insecure sack of complexes, who's probably having the ego-google on auto-refresh just to see what anyone might ever say about him. Plus, once a couple of people get the B impression, then they can DDOS me by just posting enough crap everywhere in my name to fill all my free time and then some.
Well, they also built airplanes out of steel later. The Mig 25 was built out of mostly nickel alloy steel. It worried the West enough at the time, and was an official factor in why, say, the F15 got developed.
But the Soviets aren't the only ones. The XB-70 Valkyrie was built of steel too, with titanium only for the hottest areas like nose and engine intakes. What made the Valkyrie obsolete quickly wasn't the steel body, but simply that Soviet SA missiles got too good for a high-speed high-altitude bomber.
Consider this, actually: the pharma corporations have _already_ developed and patented _cures_ for a lot of diseases. Roll the time back a century or two, and stuff like tuberculosis or cholera or pneumonia or typhus killed people by the dozen. We now have antibiotics against those. Bacterial infections used to be the number one reason to die after surgery. Now they stuff you full of antibiotics instead.
Get this: the bulk of the wealth of those pharma corps is built on selling _cures_.
What people don't get is that there's more than one kind of disease.
- bacteria: we're quite good at killing those, because they're different from your own cells. E.g., the whole beta-lactam (penicilin) group works because bacteria have some different proteins than you do in the cell wall, and the beta-lactam ring can cause the whole cell wall to collapse. E.g., Streptomycin and the like attack the bacterial ribosome, which luckily enough is different from the human one, so things can exist that react with one but not the other.
At any rate, that's antibiotics. And basically that's the only thing we're really good at curing: bacterial infections.
- viruses. These slightly modify your own cells to produce more viruses. But otherwise it's the same f-ing cell, the same ribosome, and the same proteins in the cell walls.
The best luck we've had with these is vaccines. We pre-train your own immune system to deal with certain viruses. But that's not as much a medicine, as some dead viruses for it to play with. Downside: for some viruses it doesn't seem to work. Others mutate so fast that it's hit and miss, e.g., flu.
We have some anti-virals, which are very different from anti-biotics. They tend to be very limited in effectiveness, and very toxic to your own body. Which is what's prescribed for HIV. (Hence, any antibiotics you get for a flu are pure placebo, btw. Nobody prescribes antivirals for a flu, unless it's something deadly like the bird flu, because the cure tends to be worse than a normal flu.)
But, at any rate, we're still pretty bad at curing viruses.
- cancer. This one is even weirder, because it _is_ your normal cells, with some safety mechanisms broken. Essentially for a cell to become cancerous:
A) the proteins regulating divisions must break. (Human papillomavirus does this by adding the code to a broken protein to your cells, so hopefully it binds with the DNA instead of the real thing.) But even that then hits the maximum division counter and stops. That's why warts don't kill you. So
B) the cell must start regenerating its telomeres, i.e., reset the maximum division counter. That sounds like doing something extra, but remember that every cell has the DNA for all other cells, it's just inhibited or not expressed. The body already has the code to reset the telomeres of, say, sperm. (So your kids start with a full counter, and not with your remaining life expectancy.) A broken cell can start doing the same by mistake.
When you get both in the same cell, it's cancer.
At any rate, these _are_ your normal cells, with as little as some wrong aminoacid in a protein or two. Even your own immune system has trouble recognizing a lot of them, and since they still mostly work like the rest of the body, they can even send the right signals to get more blood vessels to support their growth and other fun stuff.
And btw, there are a lot of types of cancer, depending on exactly what was broken and in what type of cell. So one cure-all medicine is highly unlikely.
Nobody knows how to treat the vast majority of these, because there isn't some vital _and_ different protein you can attack, like we do for bacteria. Chemotherapy and radiotherapy actually break the DNA of all cells, and hope that it kills more cancerous cells than good ones. Because (I) cells currently dividing are more vulnerable than cells who have their DNA nicely spooled, and (II) cancerous cells often have broken DNA-repair proteins, so some breaks would be repaired by a normal cell, but
Well, VW has already been selling cars like the Lupo 3L, named for the fact that it needs 3 litres of fuel per hundred kilometres. (I.e., three times as much as this one, or 3 times less MPG, but still pretty much half the fuel use of a normal car. And by "normal" I don't mean SUV;) It already makes heavy use of aluminium, btw.
Or, since VW owns Audi, it's probably no wonder that Audi sells the Audi A2 which isn't far off, but has even better (i.e., lower) drag factor. And costs more since it's, you know, an Audi. It's got an aluminium body too, but then Audi uses that extensively for their bigger cars too.
Not everybody buys one, to be sure, but you see a few around at least in Germany. And I see they're still being manufacturing the A2, so it can't be too bad.
Well, you have to also bear in mind that fuel taxes are rather heavy down here, so the price of a tank of gas is higher than in the USA. There always was a healthy market for small cars and diesel cars, and a lot less of a market for SUVs. (Though you see a few of those around too.)
As an assembly programmer, I find it not even vaguely similar, at least in spirit and purpose.
A breakpoint is essentially a one-byte CALL. No more.
It's used by debuggers as a makeshift COME FROM, yes, but there's no way to use it in assembly code as an invisible COME FROM. (Except if you do self-modifying code, but then in that case you can do anything whatsoever, not just COME FROM.) If you actually wrote that instruction in an assembly program, it would work as a CALL, and it would be visible right there, at the position you break from. It doesn't confuse the poor maintenance sod even remotely as much as a COME FROM that's in another file entirely and makes his method do extra (or less!) stuff that he can't see anywhere in the actual code of that method.
AOP creates that extra oportunity to make someone cry when they try to understand your code. Make a seemingly benign getter method alter the variables in a whole other class? Sure. Why not? Change a classloader so everything becomes public in loaded classes, and another module so it changes what you thought was a constant? Make a method call a whole unrelated module and cause all sorts of side-effects? Go ahead. The world is your bitch when you can use a COME FROM in any place you wish, and have it hidden in a whole other source file, and inserted in a whole different pass of the build.
The maintenance engineer sees your program like through a narrow cardboard tube. He doesn't know the big picture, and usually isn't given the time or budget to learn it. He just sees one screen at a time. And expects that if he sees no calls, there are no calls made from there, or none that he should be aware of. Make his day interesting by adding all sorts of aspects, so the method does more than what the source code says, or something else entirely. ;)
Which I guess is why most people only use it to insert extra debug or timing log messages.
"The problem" means in the context at had, which was the retarded title of the job. You know, look a bit upwards through the thread, and all that.
Hmm, well, _some_ neutrinos have been detected, so _some_ dark matter has been detected and is known to exist. I'm guessing you mean more like "Dark Energy", which is the one conjectured based on red-shift.
According to physics as we know it, there are only two things that can cause red shift, and we know about, and both boil down to "1nm here isn't the same as 1nm there." So you can say "it moves away from us at X percent of the light speed" or "the space itself has expanded by Y percent." Well, ok, so the current theory is that it's a combination of both.
In the end, it boils down to the following choice:
1. Light behaves as we know, the laws of the universe don't do perverse things at large distances, but there's a weird force actually pushing the galaxies apart.
2. There's something doing weird things to light, and doing what shouldn't even be possible unless our whole understanding of physics is broken. E.g., if light can just change frequency over time like that, without space expansion or Doppler effect being involved, then the energy of a photon varies over time, i.e., some energy is being removed in an analog way. Basically then it's not acting like a quantum at all, because it sheds energy in a decidedly non-quantum way over time.
Both involve some dark forces/energies that we don't understand, but #1 is more palatable according to Occam's Razor. Basically the extra entity "dark energy" as it's imagined today, is less of a tweak than #2, which requires rewriting two thirds of physics. So until someone can prove what it is, we're basically better off with #1.
Of course, it doesn't mean that #2 is impossible. I guess it would be a laugh if it turns out that it was #2 after all.
Well, that's how science works. If someone comes up with a better theory that doesn't involve "ether", we'll go with that one.
There are several hypotheses to that effect already. One is for example the Modified Newtonian dynamics, which pretty much just messes with the F=ma to explain galaxy rotation.
Another possibility would be to mess with gravity itself. For small distances it would be as usual inversely proportional to the square of the distance, but then it would gradually turn into just 1/r instead.
If you want to explain away dark energy too, it gets funnier, since past a point it must actually become negative.
That said, it's not just hypothesized "ether", though.
We _know_ for example that any star, including our sun, produces immense quantities of neutrinos. Which are just that: totally transparent matter. They have an almost zero (not exactly zero, but very very very very close) probability to interact with ordinary matter, and a bunch of them passed right through you as you read this message. The only real interaction between neutrinos and the rest of the universe (or each other) is that they both create gravity and are subject to gravity.
That's one kind of "dark matter" that we already know exists, and have been detected. They're not just hypothesized.
Now whether they're _all_ the missing matter or not, that's another question.
We also have one famous photo in which two galaxies collide, and the bulk of the gravity lensing "fields", i.e., the gravity wells, actually moved ahead of the actual galaxy. It's as if the galaxies were braked by friction with each other's dust and interstelar atoms, but whatever creates the bulk of the gravity well moved ahead.
That's somewhat incorrect, and makes a hash of two unrelated things too:
1. Dark matter. Unlike what its name might imply, it isn't dark as in "light absorbing". It's dark as in, it doesn't interact with light at all, except through gravity.
It's only "dark" in the same way as a sheet of glass is dark against the night sky.
But even that metaphor is misleading. "Dark matter" is just a name for a lot of mass that should be there according to calculations (or our understanding of gravity is completely broken at large scales), but hadn't been observed. It's just a funky name. It doesn't mean it's actually dark in any form or shape.
The best example of a scale where this is visible is inside a galaxy. With just gravity determining the speed of rotation around the centre, the stars closer to the centre should rotate faster than those on the edges. (In the same way as Mercury rotates around the sun once every 0.24 years, Earth in a year, and Pluto in 248 years.) But galaxies don't seem to rotate that way. They rotate more like a solid texture, so to speak. So there must be some mass distributed through the disc, in addition to what we see.
But again, the whole point is that we can't see it. If it were just a cloud of pitch-black baryonic matter, that would actually be easy and comfortable. We'd just do what you said: look at what happens to the light of stars behind it. Since it's plenty of it inside a galaxy, we have plenty of stars to look at and notice if something like that was between us and them. But all we can see is some extra gravity, with all that involves for both star movement and gravitational lensing.
A much more accurate name would be "completely transparent matter."
2. Dark energy.
This is an even funnier concept. With all that mass in the universe, there's gravity all around. Duly noted, the gravity pull of a hideously distant galaxy is really tiny, but it's there. The universe expansion should slow down as gravity pulls everything towards the centre. The funny thing is: it doesn't. It's actually accelerating, and weirdly enough, the farther something is, the faster it seems to accelerate away.
There is _something_ that pushes stuff away from the centre, and it's not like any force we already know.
It's also something we'd be hard pressed to reproduce in a lab. Whatever it is, it's insignificantly weak at small ranges, and only starts to matter at very very very large distances. Even at galactic scales (hundreds of thousands at light years) it seems to do practically nothing at all, but move a few _billion_ light years away, and you start seeing whole galaxies accelerating away. It's not something you can reproduce in a lab.
It's also weird in that a normal energy (e.g., the potential energy in a compressed spring) would get used up, or rather converted into work, as it pushes stuff away. So the force would logically diminish. This one only seems to grow stronger.
So basically this big "WTF?" is what's called "dark energy". There's some energy that's pushing the universe apart, but we don't know what it is, and how to detect it.
Since they explicitly mention Amazon, heh, my experience with Amazon's user reviews has been pretty bad to start with. Caveat: it's not about electronics, but I do buy games and the occasional DVD movie off Amazon.
My impression is that the amount of fanboyism, astroturfing and bullshit is... epic. Monumental.
E.g., read some reviews for a game that's not released yet. My favourite example was Gothic 3, when it wasn't even in beta yet, or even alpha. The only thing anyone had were some screenshots of what the graphics engine can do. That's it. Nobody had anything playable yet, probably not even the devs.
Well, people were already writing reviews in which it's the greatest game ever, and the gameplay rules, the graphics are the best since Michelangelo, etc.
When released, the game was a buggy mess that didn't even vaguely resemble those "reviews". The graphics had some major glitches. Quests could be broken because the NPC had fucked off, and I know someone who encountered that right in the freaking intro. The game had a nasty memory leak, where eventually it would start to barely crawl and eventually crash... often while saving, leaving you with a corrupt and unusable saved game. Gameplay too was a broken fuckup: e.g., combat was a broken whoever-hit-first-wins affair, because then the other would be continuously interrupted and unable to hit back or change weapons or whatever. Even a flea could probably kill you, if it hit first. Etc.
Most of that stuff _still_ hasn't been fixed, after more than a dozen patches and the publisher giving up on it.
But, of course, going by the user reviews, you'd think it's the greatest game ever.
Now as a human, you can filter out the blatant bullshit, see which reviewers better reflect your taste and didn't post too much bullshit before, etc. I'm skeptical that a program can be too good at doing the same.
But I have an even worse fear: that once people figure out that they only need to game a program, and how, we'll see even more fanboyism, astroturfing and bullshit. Plus an army of sock-puppets to mod each other up, if the bot takes that into account. Basically, think about all the link farms and link spam on the net to game Google's page rank. Now think the same for a bot aggregating reviews. I find that scary.
So, no, I don't want it on Slashdot too. Basically, would you really want 300 goatse links, just so the bot includes it in the digested version?
I don't see them as mutually exclusive, you know? It's not like I can only worry about one issue at a time.
Yes, all the stuff you mention _are_ still problems. Additionally, I do also have contempt for shallow people who invent funny titles to sound more important, and/or funny pseudo-jargon to sound smart.
Actually, no offense, but I found that companion article to be far worse advice. Unless it was meant to be just funny mis-advice, and the joke went right over my head.
E.g., trusting developers and not managing them too much... Well, there's more than one kind of person. In fact, there's a whole continuum of them. At one end, there _are_ indeed people who are perfectly capable of managing themselves and who can be given the big picture and left to their own devices to finish that big chunk. At the other end, there are people who really need to be coaxed to do anything whatsoever.
As an example of the latter extreme, my ex-coleague Wally once asked for some weeks to estimate the effort to fix a trivial bug. You read it right: not time to actually fix it, but that much time to estimate how much time he'd need to fix it. He actually got it, btw. Sometimes just trusting every developer is a bad idea.
Almost all of us think we're at the former end of the spectrum, so, yes, if you ask us, every single one will say he's perfectly capable of managing himself and needs no stinking manager checking on his progress. Reality is often a whole other thing.
The right thing to do, and at that the _hard_ thing, is recognizing the right amount of management each one needs. (And if you're willing to dedicate more effort on your part to coax someone, than it would be to fire him and write the damn module yourself, I guess.) Applying the wrong amount in either direction can get bad results fast.
But at the very least, the best advice I've ever read on the topic, is, "beware the guy in the room." You know, the idea that we have this super-programmer in his own little (metaphorical) room, we're leaving him to his own devices, noone knows what he's doing, but we're confident that at the exact deadline he'll come out screaming "Eureka!" and they all lived happily ever after. Even for the guys who are capable of managing themselves and usually deliver results, do have some indication of progress being made and do track it. That way at least you'll know if he hit some hurdle right before the deadline and is too proud to ask for help.
The thing about needing to be shielded from the rest of the company... well, we would indeed very much like to be left alone with the computer and to ignore the rest of the humanity, not just the rest of the company. Whether that's also good for business, that's a whole other issue. Being isolated in your own ivory tower can lead to some very bad design decisions, based on what you _think_ the outside world needs. Plus, it's good for the morale to know at least that someone else in the company is using our programs, and we're not just moving a pile of sand from here to there, for no other purpose than to stay busy.
So basically do filter out the unneeded crap and politics, but make sure not to filter out stuff that is actually needed for those guys to understand what they're doing and why.
And finally, ok, I know that an analogy isn't supposed to be 100% equivalent to the thing it represents. But the analogy with the cat, much as I do like cats, is IMHO rather mis-leading. You don't expect the cat to do anything whatsoever, except keep you company and not damage your furniture. That's it. You just want it to like you, basically. If you need employees which just like you and don't do outright damage, yeah, take the cat analogy. If you need employees which actually finish a task by a deadline, you might need a bit more effort.
First of all, thanks for that link. I had observed something vaguely similar some years ago, it's very nice to know that someone actually made a study to prove it and put it in better words than I did. Cheers.
That said, oh, of course they can be incompetent or stupid too.
I still find that if they just operate on wrong data, or over-estimate their knowledge, you can still follow the logic. E.g., let's say I were the stupid PHB and went, "GPUs are faster than CPUs nowadays, and can do the same things anyway, so we'll build our web servers with quad SLI 9800GX2 graphics cards", it's clueless, of course, but you can still recognize a major and minor premise and the conclusion, and the logic in there is solid. There's an implied extra step in there, but even that doesn't contain any fundamental flaw. It's one of the premises that's false, but the logic from there is solid. And if nothing else is in the way, you can simply point out the flawed premise.
The problem I was describing, and probably not well enough, is when the logic itself seems broken and/or one resists any attempts to attack a premise, or introduces other bogus premises and logical fallacies that arrive suspiciously at the same conclusion. That's what tells me that they decided the solution before building a flawed path to it.
Basically I'll admit that there are very stupid people and very smart people, and some six billion shades in between. But very few people are as ilogical as they sometimes seem. Anyone over an IQ of, say, 70, should be capable of following an elementary logic chain forwards. If they were physiologically incapable of elementary logical inferences and solving basic problems, they'd never learn to unzip their pants before they piss. There are people like that. We call them retards. They don't end up CIOs. Everyone else has no trouble with following logic forwards.
It's when they attempt to build a chain backwards from a pre-decided conclusion, that the effects are amplified dramatically. Someone very very smart will explore more of that tree of possible ways to his solution, and find some chain that you can nod through on your way to his/her conclusion. Someone dumb, well, will come up with a blatantly flawed one.
Also note that when I'm saying they're solving a different problem, or they have a different agenda, I don't necessarily mean some complex Pinky-and-The-Brain master-plan. It can be something as simple as "I want to sound smart", or "I'm insecure and I want to show someone who's the boss", or "I want a promotion", "I have to take _some_ bold visionary-like decision, or the CEO will start wondering why he hired me." They too can at least throw extra constraints and hurdles into the official problem, and turn it into something slightly different than the one he's officially solving.
E.g., if someone's agenda is simply, "I have to take _some_ bold visionary-like decision, or the CEO will start wondering why he hired me," then he _has_ to come up with something overblown like the ""massively distributed MVC, ROR, multicore Web 2.0 social applications"" in the original poster's example, because that's the kind of solution that really fits that secret problem. And will resist any objections because your solution doesn't solve _his_ problem.
Of course, seen from outside, it's still clueless anyway. And some Dunning-Kruger effect (as per your link) may be involved too. In fact, it probably works the same in both directions, not just when using the logic forwards. Someone over-estimating their expertise, will fuck-up when working backwards from a pre-decided conclusion too, and come up with an even more hare-brained justification.
I guess the two effects are really orthogonal.
Well, on the topic of forcing people to upgrade... maybe if the newer software wasn't so retarded, more people would upgrade. Just a thought.
Admittedly my anecdote isn't comprehensive marketing data and isn't that new either, but just to illustrate a point. So at one point I wanted to communicate with someone who supposedly had only ICQ.
The last version I had used before was, IIRC, 2002a. Or something. At any rate, it was a relatively clean interface, with just the two text-fields needed, and the minimum of buttons that one might need. All in the Windows configured colours, and with sensible icons that are there, but don't scream for attention and don't look like someone flew an airplane into a clown makeup factory. I'm not necessarily a fan of ICQ or AOL, but I could respect that interface.
Well, I figured, wth, let's get the newest version. You know, what with potential security holes and whatnot in older versions. I think the version at the moment was ICQ 4. "With Xtraz!" The l33t (ok, SMS-speak) spelling in a product name should have been warning enough. It was everything that the old version wasn't: retarded and annoying and looking like a desperate scream for attention. IIRC with an ad banner thrown in for good measure too.
I actually went "oh, fuck the security holes, that's why I have an anti-virus and data execution check turned on." I actually uninstalled it and dug through old backup CD-R's to find my trusted old version.
Well, I uninstalled it completely after a few days and never looked back. So I wouldn't know if the even newer versions fixed that or continued down that slope towards software-Alzheimer's.
But just saying... if you find that you have to _force_ people to give up their old versions and use the newer one, even when it's for free (as in beer;)... there may be some subtle hint in there.
And yeah, I know there are other programs one can use instead of the official client. They're just kinda irrelevant for the point I was trying to make, which is about AOL making the users of its official client upgrade.
No, I mean anisotropic. As in, depending from which direction you measure your light bulb, the amound of background radiation won't be the same.
Dunno about missing some particular point in time, but I _wish_ it was actually for geeks, and not for retards trolling with "OMG, you got a word wrong." But I guess some people really have no other claim to glory, than "look, I can handwave that there's someone between me and absolute zero." Says something about where they see themselves on that scale, eh?
Uh... _if_ you're dying of loneliness, here's a crazy idea: go out. Go to a pub. Talk to people.
I realize that this is basically the disparaging "go out and get a life" comment, but I'm not saying this to everyone. If you're perfectly comfortable with sitting alone in a dark room with a computer, fine. I'm not gonna tell you to stop doing that. It would be hypocritical anyway.
But, ffs, if you've already decided that you're lonely and that meeting people would save your life, i.e., that lack thereof would literally kill you one way or another, then solve your own problem already. Evolution, or God, or whatever you believe in, gave you that big brain, use it. If you're thirsty, you go drink some water. If you're hungry, you go eat. If you're _that_ terminally lonely, go out and meed some people.
And on the subject of the internet, we had ways to satisfy all those needs, long before the internet. When people were hungry, they just went and ate something, even if ordering pizza by Internet wasn't yet an option. Ditto for dating. Long before internet chat and internet dating, people already had perfectly good ways to avoid being lonely. They'd just go out and talk to someone.
That's what makes it a luxury, and not a basic need. Food is a basic need. Ordering pizza per internet is just a luxury: it spares you some effort and time, but that's all. Talking to someone, well, if you're that terminally lonely and lack of it would literally kill you, I guess it would count as a basic need. Finding them by Internet is a luxury. Again, it spares you some effort and time, but that's all.
If anything, the Internet created the problem it supposedly solves. Before the Internet and people being glued to their computer for days, there would be more of them out at the pub or the park, for you to meet. So for each hour you spend browsing potential dates on the Internet and planning a date next months, guess what? Previously you'd be outside actually talking to someone in person, right now.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the Internet is evil. Anyone who wants to butt in with, "OMG, but I'd rather stay on the internet than go to the pub and get bored talking about the weather," fine! If you don't want to meet people, don't. Nobody's telling you to, if you're comfortable with what you're doing. But anyone claiming they'd die of loneliness with it, has already excluded themselves from the "OMG, I'd rather stay here and read tech stuff than meet people." They already claimed they'd rather meet people. So they can jolly well go out and actually meet people. Lots of them.