Someone mentioned Raskin, here's one of his core principles from Wikipedia:
Monotony of design - there should be only one way to accomplish a certain atomic task in an application.
I'm not so hung up as that. I'd be equally satisfied to kick, punch, or pull his hair out.
If we're on that track, why don't we standardize the ideal user, and certify products for use by standardized users only. This kind of sentiment makes Raskin a pompous ass in my books. If I smack Raskin hard enough, perhaps he'll spend the rest of his life wheeling around in a power chair. I sure hope he gets one of universal design making no concession to his special needs. Sorry buddy, joy stick and blow stick put up their dukes in the OK Corral and the blow stick lost. One control only, you know.
I wonder how many kitchen knives this guy has? Just one, for the single task of cutting? Is peeling just a slightly different cutting task?
Is cut and paste a single task or multiple tasks? Is it the same task when I'm writing source code as when I'm posting on Slashdot? I might use the keyboard in one case and the mouse in the other, the same way I switch chef knives for chopping soft vegetables or hard vegetables (my chef knives have a pronounced wedge profile, which makes them useless on turnip, unless approached as an axe and maul).
In Japan, I bet most people would concede it takes decades to develop precision knife skills across all kitchen tasks. Walk into a high-end sushi kitchen and start randomly upgrading the knives to Gnome 3 and see if you make it out alive. On what I've read, there's more difference between Gnome 2 and Unity than there is between a German and a Japanese chef knife. What's the problem, you stubborn old goats?
While we're at it, just grab some guy's bike from the Tour de France and inform him that his shifter location needs to move before his next race because of some new development in the mountain bike market and, oh, here's your bike back as modified, no charge special occasion, you can thank me after the race.
I didn't particularly like Gnome 2 when I first installed it. It wasn't initially a comfortable garment. Over time with some perseverance, I mastered a desktop configuration and workflow that together are well adapted to what I'm trying to accomplish. There's a substantial amount of personal equity invested in making Gnome 2 home. I still don't like Gnome 2 in particular, I only like what I've managed to make of it.
When you get into developmental psychology, what you learn is that no two human beings are exactly the same. We have very different cognitive approaches, and even a single person will use different cognitive modes from one task to another.
Ebert sums it up nicely modulo s/movie/Raskin's monotony/g:
I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.
On my present desktop, my panels have the same pixel size but the right panel is a bit deeper and wider than the other as it is newer and has greater resolution. I use the extra depth on the right screen for my task bar. This is my primary screen, since the left screen suffers more glare from the window beside me. If Unity slams a vertical menu bar onto my desktop, where do I put it? On the left side of my right monitor? Making it pretty much useless to stretch windows across my two screens when I wish to do this? Well, I make one change for that, then it impacts something else I liked, so I make another change for that...
And for what gain do I sacrifice my many small hard-won accommodations? So that I can become sooner compatible with twenty-something world when I have yet to purchase my first ce
Erdos carried a suitcase from one city to another, arrived at the doorstep of any living mathematician, and declared "My brain is open!" Are you advocating that I carry my home directory with me from one distribution to another and declare "My desktop is open!" as a model of good living?
Every wife in the village instantly knows when a man other than her husband has cheated, but does not know when her own husband has.
It's not a common knowledge problem until you state that every woman knows that every other woman knows this. If the women have philosophy degrees, nothing much happens. If they don't, they will charge ahead on the assumption that "every other woman is just like me" as all logicians sans philosophy will do. In that case: on the third full moon, all the men depart on a very long hunting trip after several months of heightened debauchery. Assuming they know whether their women have philosophy degrees and what they assume about whether the women also know this. Or perhaps there's a hasty shotgun marriage before this all plays out with suitable supervision to constrain what A knows about what B doesn't know.
At my ripe age, I personally find it more entertaining to conduct a code review on the statement of problem than to actually solve it.
The pirate problem contains a misleading plural of unreliable plurality:
But the others get to vote on his plan, and if fewer than half agree with him, he gets killed.
How does the lowest ranked pirate reliably defeat his immediate superior in a knife fight while folding his ballot slip? I think you need a set of complex interlocking manacles to implement the problem as stated. Interesting. At first it doesn't look like a crypto problem.
This whole hiring thing devolves into a common judgement problem. Good judgement is the way to hire good people. But how do you know the person doing the hiring has good judgement? Because you hired him or her in the first place, supposing you implemented this policy on day one. But no, you're saying you don't trust long inference chains after all, and you'd rather I just completed the problem set?
Perhaps the real point of the Blood Queen of Bath problem is to prove you know enough about what logic implies to never assume it holds sway in the real world.
The Firefox makelink plugin is great for pasting links with actual link text. It will use the page title by default, or a text selection as the link text if you make one. You can customize it for any forum or BB syntax in under 60 seconds.
At a casino, no one considers a call of the big pot to be a failure if got your chips in with 70% odds and then got burned on the river. Likewise, if it costs you $100 to participate in a $1000 pot and you got in at well better than 10% odds, how does that count as a failure? Real failures are small companies that burn through a ton on money on an idea that never could have worked. True failure is when people foolishly misallocate capital on blind hope or to bilk the investment base. Far from failure is when you come out on the wrong side of a well-judged risk.
At the same time, it's becoming a very common business model to create a forum for ambitious aspirants and profit from the vast majority who go away empty handed.
Of those 30,000 [Ontario players], just 232 were eventually drafted by an OHL team in their mid-teens, the first major cutoff for players hoping to stream towards the NHL. Less than half of those players, 105, actually played in an OHL game. Another 42 played in the top tier of U.S. college, which is another viable route to the NHL.
Overall, just 47 wound up with NHL contracts after being drafted in 1993 or 1994, or signing later as a free agent.
They then continue to summarize in their own words:
Ultimately, the sum total of players with more than one NHL season ends up being just 15, and only six had played 400 NHL games nine years later. Jason Allison and Todd Bertuzzi were the only names of note among the 30,000.
And this was considered to be a particularly strong crop.
The restart speed becomes annoying when you're fighting with wonky plugins and need to make frequent restarts. The worst start speed problem was under XP with anti-virus scanner from hell. I usually have three or four different Eclipse workspaces open on different desktops with a mixture of R and C++ code. Start up isn't much of an issue.
I feel that CDT has lost some momentum lately. It's usable, so it's OK on that front. However, the managed build system is long overdue for a rewrite and I don't see much evidence that this is on the horizon any time soon. Managed build limps along about as well as the C++ indexer prior to its rewrite by CDT Doug. But then he lost religion.
Actually, no, I'm not ready to drink the Ubuntu Kool-Aid to the power of infinity.
But [Windows 8] confirms for me a trend that's going to change the way we interact with the desktop applications we use daily, including Eclipse. Yes, a UI Revolution is coming. And we need to make sure we're ready, or Eclipse is going to look old very quickly.
I'd feel half my age right now if the Clang/LLVM Eclipse plugin I tried a month ago hadn't made my Eclipse too unstable to use until I removed it again.
It took me a long time to discover a reasonable work flow around Eclipse, mostly because interface discovery is overwhelming at first. But pretty much everything I needed proved to be possible.
Right now the feature causing me the most pain is console management. I have R consoles and R graphic output consoles and Sweave consoles and C++ build consoles and Java error consoles and never the right console on top. The little drop-down doohicky for switching consoles is like having a 5x5 pixel start menu placed at some obscure mid-screen location amid a white-out blizzard of window cruft.
Go ahead, Doug, throw me a new skin and solve all my problems. Make my day without actually fixing anything. I'll be the loudest person cheering if this pans out. It could be that most of my pain radiates from being imprisoned in an unfashionable box. But then, I'm a guy who went directly from MSDOS to Windows NT. The intervening steps were not on my menu. I wanted to move to a real OS, not a lipstick pig of consumer sentiment.
Thinking about this from the higher level, I'm probably not making as much use of custom perspectives as my work flow now requires. It wasn't until adding Sweave documents and installing the newest release of StatET that I really started to drown.
However, unless you believe in God, you are an atheist.
You're a word bully, aren't you? Here's another stripe of aWTFism: I have no clue what God is, so it's impossible to judge whether any of my beliefs are congruent.
I guess you'll argue that I don't really believe if I'm not willing to manufacture a mental representation of the emperor's clothes, of what the "god" word entails. Cognitive psychology tells us that we're normally fast and loose about said manufacture. We're also pretty good at manufacturing an excess of objective certainty if we swing the other direction.
What do we call ourselves who are content to navigate the uncertainty of life, the universe, and everything without recourse to belief steroids?
And what about belief algebra? Does it lessen one's belief in God to also believe in alien abduction? What do you call someone with promiscuous belief targets where only one is labelled as a god?
Here's something else I can choose to believe in or not. On the question of understanding it, I have fewer options.
I was always partial to the views of Wittgenstein on metaphor. Do you have any feeling of ethereal awesomeness in search of a good word? Excellent, you're one of us! Or if you won't say so, it turns into "are you going to play nice with our little in-group ritual, or stand out there in the cold?" And if that doesn't work "Not even at risk of burning for all eternity?"
If God functions merely as a shibboleth for an in-group ritual, I guess you could say I'm functionally atheist. If I wasn't going to tell the truth in the first place, putting a bible under my hand isn't going to change my story. Lying as lifestyle is often associated with people with an exaggerated sense of personal autonomy. I think often the real question behind god is whether you're willing to concede anything bigger than yourself. I view myself as a pattern in an information space where boundaries are far less black and white. Instead of using the word "god" as a pipe brush for linguistically unattached sentiments pertaining to human collectivity, I have other modes of expression available, after digesting some equations explaining "you can't get there from here" concerning many woolly sentiments (courtesy Cantor, Turing, Godel, Kolmogorov/Chaitin).
So perhaps atheist means "exactly the same mental things that everyone else experiences attached to different words". I suspect J. L. Austin would be fine with viewing "I am atheist" or "I am agnostic" as a performative utterance rather than expressing a truth value. By that token, your harsh declamation is justified, with one small correction: Unless you proclaim, you're atheist; a theist being anyone in performative garb.
Personally, I'm not rushing to engage in any of the available performatives in this sphere. Here's one that I will accept: I'm aperformative. (Don't tell the girls.) I have no tattoos, either.
On first read, I thought you meant the patient system. That's also broken. Isn't the significance here the increased utilization of these expensive machines?
Seems like the GPGPU is one of the enabling technologies. If someone looked at this ten years ago, likely they would have pulled up short on the computational barrier.
The only unary suffix operators in C are operator[] for array subscript and operator() for function call, not counting the side-effect post-increment/post-decrement.
For consistency as a computing language, the subscript operator should have been a prefix operator. Then *[10]A and [10]*A would have no ambiguity.
Rather than trying to convince mathematicians to reverse two thousand years of convention, C incorporates those four unary suffix operators and gives them all the very highest level of precedence.
Do tell me how you were planning to handle: (long lvalue expression) *= 2;
Why? So that you can stand there raising and lowering the bar with your brain on dial-tone while everyone else does the heavy lifting?
I'm sure it costs tens of millions of dollars to prove that any system is secure, and the proof won't even be correct. Does OpenBSD say "provably secure" on its web site? I didn't think so.
You want proof? You can't afford the proof!
In the real world, this is actually a matter of judgement and prudence. Your assertion that no-one tries to attack OpenBSD falls under [citation needed].
OpenSSH for certain is among the juiciest targets out there for a zero-day. If portable SSH falls, you can bet that the native OpenBSD SSH would be scoured for the same vulnerability. There's no reason to regard OpenBSD itself is any less secure than OpenSSH on public information about how the project operates. While other projects are busy adding features, OpenBSD is busy adding chroot jails and stack guards.
I will concede that in many ways it's legendary host-based security matters a lot less than it once did, because the attack vectors on what people care about (credentials) are mostly application specific.
No one secures the social network.
That's the number one sad-sack reason why OpenBSD is fading in relevance. Technical arguments have nothing to do with it.
FTFY. And the answer would be: post-war Japan in the 1960s.
I've read before that conception to commission is a ten year process for a nuclear power plant, so much of the initial design would be early 1960s. I'd guess contracts for specialized machinery are being tendered by the mid 1960s. By then, procurement wheels in motion combined with slide rules and manual blueprints and uninvented fax machines put a big crimp on safety rethink. The logistics for this kind of project back then were immense.
By the mid 1970s there's no way a plant is designed like this. We're now forty years downstream from what the 1970s considered to be a good idea. TEPCO had subsequently reassessed with modern engineering resources, but dragged their feet deploying the required mitigation (some of the work had been completed and more was scheduled).
We pretty much kissed New Orleans good-bye because the Americans were just as stupid/stubborn. It was known that the levees were not adequate.
When the cars are all moving at different speeds, they flow past each other and you get more throughput for the same road.
When there's a bit of a speed delta between adjacent lanes, it makes lane changes easier and you have less concern about someone taking up residence in your blind spots, so you can get away with less severe shoulder checks, taking your attention away from the car in front of you, in case it does something abrupt.
As the enforcement system becomes more sophisticated, so too does the opportunity arise to determine that we're enforcing the wrong parameter. It's about time we started busting drivers for inattentiveness, unsafe following, poor situational awareness, and refusal to adapt to road conditions.
The main reason we say speed causes accidents is that at speed zero you have no accidents. Otherwise the party line would be that incompetence causes accidents. The technology now exists to prove this, if we bother to apply it.
If Red Hat can't hack it in the presence of competition from CentOS then Red Hat needs to die, because it's not providing a service anyone values enough to actually pay for.
There's a big difference between price as determined by market dynamics and willingness to pay. Red Hat is doing work people are willing to pay for, but parasitic market dynamics create a condition where people don't have to. It's a parameter in the Red Hat business model whether enough people can tell the difference.
The same dynamic exists with second hand bike parts. Let's suppose a pawn shop has a bit of both. If I make a point of purchasing only those parts where I have fair confidence that the parts aren't stolen property, other scumbags will show up and buy whatever remains asking fewer questions. The few bucks I saved will soon need to be invested in even larger and more pointless bike locks.
I know that Canada used to sell (and might continue to do so) tritium for non-weapons use only. This only makes it easier for the entire supply of American produced tritium to be consumed internally. Net effect: more tritium available for warheads.
Mother Nature seems to have pointed the species toward figuring out where your bread is buttered, at least some of the time.
It's pretty sad with the size of the human brain that the best most people can manage is asshole calculus. Mother nature doesn't cluck half so approvingly as you wish to believe.
It says a lot about PCB distribution and signal strength if multiple species have evolved responses over sub-century time frames.
It was convenient while it lasted for the fish who ingested our industrial waste stream to grow carbuncles and remove themselves from the human menu by simple visual inspection. But I guess we're heading back to the days where the host takes a brave first bite, and all the guests applaud if dinner proceeds. We'll all be double checking the Russian royal penumbra to ensure our host doesn't carry any midichlorians of Rasputin lineage.
Canaries in the coal mine all the way up the food chain. Tag, you're it.
I thought the whole idea of the scientific method was that the method was above and beyond whether any individual scientist was right or wrong either by good luck or good management. If Phil Jones puts being right above the rough and tumble of surviving criticism, he's not doing what I recognize as science. My version of science does not limit criticism to authorized lab coats.
Richard Mueller, doing science, out in the open under scrutiny from all comers, came up with the same answer, and did the entire debate a huge favour. If Jones turns out to be as brilliant as Srinivasa Ramanujan (and as lacking in mainstream convention), I might cut him more slack. Hardy nearly had a coronary demanding proofs from Ramanujan that he couldn't supply in the form Hardy desired. Nevertheless, Ramanujan risked everything to join Hardy in collaboration to bridge the divide.
What was Jones' excuse? He's hardly the first scientist faced with the prospect that nearly 100% of his peers (to say nothing of the gadfly rabble) are mainly motivated by the finding of fault. He should have a brief conversation with Daniel Shechtman about the reality of his chosen profession.
Contrary to Hollywood, these qualities don't always play well together. The personal risk involved in getting to the top of this pyramid is insanely high. A certain kind of smart person settles into a comfortable and infinitely less risky niche. Ruthless animal smarts describes the guys who can't figure out how to become Hesh Rabkin.
The prisoner they have, if he's not already dead, is getting worked over pretty good right now, and they will get him to talk. Then they'll kill him.
Information extracted under torture is hard to bet your life on. There... Are... Four... Lights! Pretty soon the subject regards the truth as whichever answer has the least perceived repercussion. You can perform some Skinner maximization, but only if you known enough of the truth already. Every kingpin just loves to employ the shrewd and sadistic lieutenant who approaches the whole thing as a day in the office. Install the ambition restraining bolt very carefully. What could possibly go wrong? I think in reality savagery is carefully metered. The few insanely charismatic despots who run their regimes with complete disregard become the subjects of Hollywood motion pictures.
Anonymous is in over their heads.
Not until their heads are found. The whole premise rests on the A in anonymous. For double the fun, get the suits in Baltimore mad enough to conspire with the despots in Managua.
It's different to go after a group that is well armed and not restrained by morality and laws.
The amorality meme is increasingly under fire. When you look closer at human behaviour it doesn't break down into Biblical sheep pens.
There's obviously an incentive for cartels of bloodshed to promote their methods as if your depiction is the last word. But as BB Mesquita points out concerning democrats vs autocrats, talk is cheap and is normally excluded from his models. No organization with recourse to violence means fails to promote their intangibles of ruthless omnipotence. On the down side, terror earns a fragile compliance. Hatred runs deep and burns hot when the day finally comes to settle those scores.
I get kind of tired of ruthless + smart being portrayed as a pair of independent D&D character dice. I weary of dramatic tropes where the supervillian picks the least appropriate moment since galactic creation to gape the jaws in celebration immediately prior to retiring the arch nemesis of justice; I weary also of the notion that doing the exact opposite is therefore a faultless and infinitely more cool depiction, though it wears well on a T-1000.
What's wrong with clicking the link and having the PDF launch in the viewer of your choice? This is significantly increasing browser footprint and attack surface for no appreciable benefit.
I've configured the majority of my web clients to use external PDF viewers in the past because there wasn't much benefit to running them inline as opaque applications in affordable housing. There's nothing wrong with being too old for school. However, if PDF behaved more like web content and integrated fully with Zotero, Session Saver, AdBlock, and NoSquint the benefits would be highly appreciable.
I've grown fond of having the ability to remove any image (or logo) from a document I'm reading in Firefox by whichever of my multitudinous plug-ins added "remove this object" to my popup context menu.
Neither am I particularly fond after a system restart of having to rearrange my PDF windows on their habitual desktops, after fighting round one with FF.
Reed Hastings was soaking in a hot tub with a friend last month when he shared a secret [doomed plan]. "That is awful," the friend, who was also a Netflix subscriber, told him under a starry sky in the Bay Area, according to Mr. Hastings. "I don't want to deal with two accounts."
In fact, I've always hated that PDF was a cloistered universe. I'll be much happier when it's demoted to just another www markup language and treated as such.
Speaking out of my Seldon hat, if MS had bought Netscape, the inevitable dust up with the FTC might have taken place over Apple's corpse instead of Netscape's. With a sufficiently large integral, the actual names of the winners and losers are a footnote to the great becoming.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is our closest living Seldonite. Some other political scientists say that if you had the quality of input data his model requires, you could work the same conclusions the hard way. Mesquita himself says that the mathematical formalism mostly prevents ideology from tainting the original model. The equations function as a Tea Party immune system, as I would slant it.
Unfortunately, Amazon book reviews of his recent book bemoan the fact that only with superhuman study does the book lead you to even to a modest replication of his mathematical methods--bemoaning of an unmistakable geek crescendo. How the geeks hunger for psychohistory.
I'm slowly digging into some of his older papers, which are reputed to be quite good, before he went all secret sauce.
I would have preferred AMD to implement hyper threading as it would have greatly simplified things for OS developers. It's getting to a point where kernels have to know about CPU families in order to get the performance they need. They also have to know the workload.
This an architecture designed for a ten year run, much like the original P6, which underwhelmed everyone with (at most) half a brain.
Just how long do you think the OS can remain task agnostic as we head down the road to eight and sixteen core processors? Why plan for the future when we can languish on easy-street for another year or two? When the PC came out, some people complained they "would have preferred" a superior and more reliable electronic typewriter.
I'm quite certain the correct design approach is to resource a CPU regarding TDP as your performance wall. If eight floating point units require more TDP than your chip provides, what point is there in providing eight such units? And even if the math in the first spin from the new architecture could have gone the other way on some of these matters, in no time at all you're up hard against it, if you glance a few weeks further down the roadmap.
They also have to know the workload.
It's a bizarre conceit in any other walk of life that you can get away with not knowing the workload on the path to optimal resource assignment. Half of the human brain is devoted to power management. The glucose demand of the human brain is one of the big reasons why we were a late addition to mother nature's species road map. The brain doesn't operate from a baseline glucose guzzle equally able to handle any task that might come up. Much of what we perceive as quick reaction is only possible because the brain decided to fire up the necessary circuit 400ms beforehand.
They're just pissed off that a company doesn't operate the way they want it to
Infinitely unimpressed by the Mickey Mouse copyright act, pissed off at the pretense that this is patriotic capitalism as it ought to work.
There are several Lessig videos on YouTube about his new rootstriker campaign. As much as I admire his content, he always sounds like a man wearing little round glasses--standard issue for taking down a whomping willow, but I'm not sure it will fly in Washington.
Lessig loves pointing out that Milton Friedman would only sign on if the brief contained the phrase "no brainer" that retroactive copyright extension will not cause George Gershwin to write another GD note. Logic and founding fathers and patriotism aside, they lost to the giant Mickey Mouse billfold.
You must be new here because this is how it works: if you don't shriek at the outrage, some cosmic lamer soon writes "Apple does this and no-one seems to complain so it must be OK". And the idiot fish swim happily ever after. Negative inference from silence makes silence a non-viable strategy.
You'll note that when Steve Jobs needed to pull the wool, he pulled early and often. It's been brilliant over the past weeks learning how the man really operated: one part asshole, one part genius.
Unfortunately, authentic outrage is often mimicked by geeks-with-squeaky-training-wheels who mostly just like the noise. If they suffer and remember, some day they too can assume the clucking greybeard mantle.
Stroustrup concedes that the features of C++ might have benefited from a different development path. Particularly the multiple inheritance cart got too far out in front of the generic horse.
As it stands, there are basically two types of C++ code : code that badly emulates functional programming styles, and code consisting entirely of calls to simple wrappers around extern "C" functions.
So do you think Haida properly belongs to Na-Dene, or are you partial to Na-Dene minus Haida in the newly proposed relationship to Yeniseian?
I'm personally extremely grateful that there's one language out there whose primary claim to fame is not based on what they decided to vote off the island, even if the road was long and convoluted.
Much of the language debate devolves on whether your preference is too give a team with real talent a fair shake at solving the very hardest problems, or whether you're more concerned with extracting short-lived revenue streams from the cheapest talent you can find. C++ is the worst of all possible languages in the second scenario.
Do you admire the guy you sit beside, or detest his incompetence? Choose your language accordingly.
It's entirely possible smartphones will have more processing power than next gen consoles by the time they come out.
Bzzzzzzt. Thanks for playing.
The improvements are tremendous, but the Cortex-A15 Processor almost certainly falls short of the original CoreDuo.
Trinity packaged in a quad-channel socket FM2 with integrated Radeon 7000 graphics core is about the level of performance I expect from the next generation consoles by the time they arrive.
Sony originally hoped to make Cell a one-chip solution. But hey, they'll probably go full custom again just to preserve the DRM co-processor. Maybe they'll try to woo the new chick at IBM for another tango.
Having a history is inefficient. Startups are gloriously efficient because they are unencumbered by legacy. Legacy is what they strive to achieve, if they survive long enough to get there.
I think what we really need is a kind of ombudsman who sounds off whenever a project or corporate linkage spreads its tentacles into "too big to fail" territory. The lesson from the private sector is to make failure quick and merciful. The tactics of awarding these big government contracts often contains a sly dose of "pot commitment" following the timeless adage that if you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem. The ruse is to bring this about at a slow simmer and not to get your program busted for corking the bat in the first inning.
In the private sector this role is handled to some degree by the insurance industry. Certain kinds of overreaching stupidity are impossible to insure. If you're in the private sector and you dream big but you're short on innovation, the government is your only hope. There would be rivers of tears shed in the private sector the morning after the libertarian fairy waves her wand.
One thing about Steve, while he was alive, the truth was out there... never to be apprehended. I'm really enjoying the tidbits about what really made him tick, as opposed to the crap he pushed onto small minds.
Perhaps part of his genius was the invisibility field lurking behind his potent reality distortion field. I'm from the dull quadrant that regards the truth as cool, and hardly anything else, so I was destined to be an outsider on this pageant since day one.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone mentioned Raskin, here's one of his core principles from Wikipedia:
I'm not so hung up as that. I'd be equally satisfied to kick, punch, or pull his hair out.
If we're on that track, why don't we standardize the ideal user, and certify products for use by standardized users only. This kind of sentiment makes Raskin a pompous ass in my books. If I smack Raskin hard enough, perhaps he'll spend the rest of his life wheeling around in a power chair. I sure hope he gets one of universal design making no concession to his special needs. Sorry buddy, joy stick and blow stick put up their dukes in the OK Corral and the blow stick lost. One control only, you know.
I wonder how many kitchen knives this guy has? Just one, for the single task of cutting? Is peeling just a slightly different cutting task?
Is cut and paste a single task or multiple tasks? Is it the same task when I'm writing source code as when I'm posting on Slashdot? I might use the keyboard in one case and the mouse in the other, the same way I switch chef knives for chopping soft vegetables or hard vegetables (my chef knives have a pronounced wedge profile, which makes them useless on turnip, unless approached as an axe and maul).
In Japan, I bet most people would concede it takes decades to develop precision knife skills across all kitchen tasks. Walk into a high-end sushi kitchen and start randomly upgrading the knives to Gnome 3 and see if you make it out alive. On what I've read, there's more difference between Gnome 2 and Unity than there is between a German and a Japanese chef knife. What's the problem, you stubborn old goats?
While we're at it, just grab some guy's bike from the Tour de France and inform him that his shifter location needs to move before his next race because of some new development in the mountain bike market and, oh, here's your bike back as modified, no charge special occasion, you can thank me after the race.
I didn't particularly like Gnome 2 when I first installed it. It wasn't initially a comfortable garment. Over time with some perseverance, I mastered a desktop configuration and workflow that together are well adapted to what I'm trying to accomplish. There's a substantial amount of personal equity invested in making Gnome 2 home. I still don't like Gnome 2 in particular, I only like what I've managed to make of it.
When you get into developmental psychology, what you learn is that no two human beings are exactly the same. We have very different cognitive approaches, and even a single person will use different cognitive modes from one task to another.
Ebert sums it up nicely modulo s/movie/Raskin's monotony/g:
On my present desktop, my panels have the same pixel size but the right panel is a bit deeper and wider than the other as it is newer and has greater resolution. I use the extra depth on the right screen for my task bar. This is my primary screen, since the left screen suffers more glare from the window beside me. If Unity slams a vertical menu bar onto my desktop, where do I put it? On the left side of my right monitor? Making it pretty much useless to stretch windows across my two screens when I wish to do this? Well, I make one change for that, then it impacts something else I liked, so I make another change for that ...
And for what gain do I sacrifice my many small hard-won accommodations? So that I can become sooner compatible with twenty-something world when I have yet to purchase my first ce
Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?
I made my choice when I installed Ubuntu in the first place with the hope of not having to revisit my initial choice any time soon.
From Benford to Erd(slashcode fuckup)s
Erdos carried a suitcase from one city to another, arrived at the doorstep of any living mathematician, and declared "My brain is open!" Are you advocating that I carry my home directory with me from one distribution to another and declare "My desktop is open!" as a model of good living?
It's not a common knowledge problem until you state that every woman knows that every other woman knows this. If the women have philosophy degrees, nothing much happens. If they don't, they will charge ahead on the assumption that "every other woman is just like me" as all logicians sans philosophy will do. In that case: on the third full moon, all the men depart on a very long hunting trip after several months of heightened debauchery. Assuming they know whether their women have philosophy degrees and what they assume about whether the women also know this. Or perhaps there's a hasty shotgun marriage before this all plays out with suitable supervision to constrain what A knows about what B doesn't know.
At my ripe age, I personally find it more entertaining to conduct a code review on the statement of problem than to actually solve it.
The pirate problem contains a misleading plural of unreliable plurality:
How does the lowest ranked pirate reliably defeat his immediate superior in a knife fight while folding his ballot slip? I think you need a set of complex interlocking manacles to implement the problem as stated. Interesting. At first it doesn't look like a crypto problem.
This whole hiring thing devolves into a common judgement problem. Good judgement is the way to hire good people. But how do you know the person doing the hiring has good judgement? Because you hired him or her in the first place, supposing you implemented this policy on day one. But no, you're saying you don't trust long inference chains after all, and you'd rather I just completed the problem set?
Perhaps the real point of the Blood Queen of Bath problem is to prove you know enough about what logic implies to never assume it holds sway in the real world.
The Firefox makelink plugin is great for pasting links with actual link text. It will use the page title by default, or a text selection as the link text if you make one. You can customize it for any forum or BB syntax in under 60 seconds.
At a casino, no one considers a call of the big pot to be a failure if got your chips in with 70% odds and then got burned on the river. Likewise, if it costs you $100 to participate in a $1000 pot and you got in at well better than 10% odds, how does that count as a failure? Real failures are small companies that burn through a ton on money on an idea that never could have worked. True failure is when people foolishly misallocate capital on blind hope or to bilk the investment base. Far from failure is when you come out on the wrong side of a well-judged risk.
At the same time, it's becoming a very common business model to create a forum for ambitious aspirants and profit from the vast majority who go away empty handed.
We're making data science a sport
So they admit it.
The 100 Greatest Hockey Arguments by Bob McCown and David Naylor
Repeating their own excerpt:
They then continue to summarize in their own words:
And this was considered to be a particularly strong crop.
The restart speed becomes annoying when you're fighting with wonky plugins and need to make frequent restarts. The worst start speed problem was under XP with anti-virus scanner from hell. I usually have three or four different Eclipse workspaces open on different desktops with a mixture of R and C++ code. Start up isn't much of an issue.
I feel that CDT has lost some momentum lately. It's usable, so it's OK on that front. However, the managed build system is long overdue for a rewrite and I don't see much evidence that this is on the horizon any time soon. Managed build limps along about as well as the C++ indexer prior to its rewrite by CDT Doug. But then he lost religion.
A UI Revolution is Coming. Are we Ready?
Actually, no, I'm not ready to drink the Ubuntu Kool-Aid to the power of infinity.
I'd feel half my age right now if the Clang/LLVM Eclipse plugin I tried a month ago hadn't made my Eclipse too unstable to use until I removed it again.
It took me a long time to discover a reasonable work flow around Eclipse, mostly because interface discovery is overwhelming at first. But pretty much everything I needed proved to be possible.
Right now the feature causing me the most pain is console management. I have R consoles and R graphic output consoles and Sweave consoles and C++ build consoles and Java error consoles and never the right console on top. The little drop-down doohicky for switching consoles is like having a 5x5 pixel start menu placed at some obscure mid-screen location amid a white-out blizzard of window cruft.
Go ahead, Doug, throw me a new skin and solve all my problems. Make my day without actually fixing anything. I'll be the loudest person cheering if this pans out. It could be that most of my pain radiates from being imprisoned in an unfashionable box. But then, I'm a guy who went directly from MSDOS to Windows NT. The intervening steps were not on my menu. I wanted to move to a real OS, not a lipstick pig of consumer sentiment.
Thinking about this from the higher level, I'm probably not making as much use of custom perspectives as my work flow now requires. It wasn't until adding Sweave documents and installing the newest release of StatET that I really started to drown.
You're a word bully, aren't you? Here's another stripe of aWTFism: I have no clue what God is, so it's impossible to judge whether any of my beliefs are congruent.
I guess you'll argue that I don't really believe if I'm not willing to manufacture a mental representation of the emperor's clothes, of what the "god" word entails. Cognitive psychology tells us that we're normally fast and loose about said manufacture. We're also pretty good at manufacturing an excess of objective certainty if we swing the other direction.
What do we call ourselves who are content to navigate the uncertainty of life, the universe, and everything without recourse to belief steroids?
And what about belief algebra? Does it lessen one's belief in God to also believe in alien abduction? What do you call someone with promiscuous belief targets where only one is labelled as a god?
Here's something else I can choose to believe in or not. On the question of understanding it, I have fewer options.
The Book of Revelation: Prophecy and Politics
I was always partial to the views of Wittgenstein on metaphor. Do you have any feeling of ethereal awesomeness in search of a good word? Excellent, you're one of us! Or if you won't say so, it turns into "are you going to play nice with our little in-group ritual, or stand out there in the cold?" And if that doesn't work "Not even at risk of burning for all eternity?"
If God functions merely as a shibboleth for an in-group ritual, I guess you could say I'm functionally atheist. If I wasn't going to tell the truth in the first place, putting a bible under my hand isn't going to change my story. Lying as lifestyle is often associated with people with an exaggerated sense of personal autonomy. I think often the real question behind god is whether you're willing to concede anything bigger than yourself. I view myself as a pattern in an information space where boundaries are far less black and white. Instead of using the word "god" as a pipe brush for linguistically unattached sentiments pertaining to human collectivity, I have other modes of expression available, after digesting some equations explaining "you can't get there from here" concerning many woolly sentiments (courtesy Cantor, Turing, Godel, Kolmogorov/Chaitin).
So perhaps atheist means "exactly the same mental things that everyone else experiences attached to different words". I suspect J. L. Austin would be fine with viewing "I am atheist" or "I am agnostic" as a performative utterance rather than expressing a truth value. By that token, your harsh declamation is justified, with one small correction: Unless you proclaim, you're atheist; a theist being anyone in performative garb.
Personally, I'm not rushing to engage in any of the available performatives in this sphere. Here's one that I will accept: I'm aperformative. (Don't tell the girls.) I have no tattoos, either.
On first read, I thought you meant the patient system. That's also broken. Isn't the significance here the increased utilization of these expensive machines?
Seems like the GPGPU is one of the enabling technologies. If someone looked at this ten years ago, likely they would have pulled up short on the computational barrier.
The only unary suffix operators in C are operator[] for array subscript and operator() for function call, not counting the side-effect post-increment/post-decrement.
For consistency as a computing language, the subscript operator should have been a prefix operator. Then *[10]A and [10]*A would have no ambiguity.
Rather than trying to convince mathematicians to reverse two thousand years of convention, C incorporates those four unary suffix operators and gives them all the very highest level of precedence.
Do tell me how you were planning to handle:
(long lvalue expression) *= 2;
Why? So that you can stand there raising and lowering the bar with your brain on dial-tone while everyone else does the heavy lifting?
I'm sure it costs tens of millions of dollars to prove that any system is secure, and the proof won't even be correct. Does OpenBSD say "provably secure" on its web site? I didn't think so.
You want proof? You can't afford the proof!
In the real world, this is actually a matter of judgement and prudence. Your assertion that no-one tries to attack OpenBSD falls under [citation needed].
OpenSSH for certain is among the juiciest targets out there for a zero-day. If portable SSH falls, you can bet that the native OpenBSD SSH would be scoured for the same vulnerability. There's no reason to regard OpenBSD itself is any less secure than OpenSSH on public information about how the project operates. While other projects are busy adding features, OpenBSD is busy adding chroot jails and stack guards.
I will concede that in many ways it's legendary host-based security matters a lot less than it once did, because the attack vectors on what people care about (credentials) are mostly application specific.
No one secures the social network.
That's the number one sad-sack reason why OpenBSD is fading in relevance. Technical arguments have nothing to do with it.
FTFY. And the answer would be: post-war Japan in the 1960s.
I've read before that conception to commission is a ten year process for a nuclear power plant, so much of the initial design would be early 1960s. I'd guess contracts for specialized machinery are being tendered by the mid 1960s. By then, procurement wheels in motion combined with slide rules and manual blueprints and uninvented fax machines put a big crimp on safety rethink. The logistics for this kind of project back then were immense.
By the mid 1970s there's no way a plant is designed like this. We're now forty years downstream from what the 1970s considered to be a good idea. TEPCO had subsequently reassessed with modern engineering resources, but dragged their feet deploying the required mitigation (some of the work had been completed and more was scheduled).
We pretty much kissed New Orleans good-bye because the Americans were just as stupid/stubborn. It was known that the levees were not adequate.
When there's a bit of a speed delta between adjacent lanes, it makes lane changes easier and you have less concern about someone taking up residence in your blind spots, so you can get away with less severe shoulder checks, taking your attention away from the car in front of you, in case it does something abrupt.
As the enforcement system becomes more sophisticated, so too does the opportunity arise to determine that we're enforcing the wrong parameter. It's about time we started busting drivers for inattentiveness, unsafe following, poor situational awareness, and refusal to adapt to road conditions.
The main reason we say speed causes accidents is that at speed zero you have no accidents. Otherwise the party line would be that incompetence causes accidents. The technology now exists to prove this, if we bother to apply it.
I saw this myself for the first time recently.
Store Wars
Another illustration of what happens when paying less is where thinking ends.
There's a big difference between price as determined by market dynamics and willingness to pay. Red Hat is doing work people are willing to pay for, but parasitic market dynamics create a condition where people don't have to. It's a parameter in the Red Hat business model whether enough people can tell the difference.
The same dynamic exists with second hand bike parts. Let's suppose a pawn shop has a bit of both. If I make a point of purchasing only those parts where I have fair confidence that the parts aren't stolen property, other scumbags will show up and buy whatever remains asking fewer questions. The few bucks I saved will soon need to be invested in even larger and more pointless bike locks.
I know that Canada used to sell (and might continue to do so) tritium for non-weapons use only. This only makes it easier for the entire supply of American produced tritium to be consumed internally. Net effect: more tritium available for warheads.
Mother Nature seems to have pointed the species toward figuring out where your bread is buttered, at least some of the time.
The Evolution of Cooperation
It's pretty sad with the size of the human brain that the best most people can manage is asshole calculus. Mother nature doesn't cluck half so approvingly as you wish to believe.
It says a lot about PCB distribution and signal strength if multiple species have evolved responses over sub-century time frames.
It was convenient while it lasted for the fish who ingested our industrial waste stream to grow carbuncles and remove themselves from the human menu by simple visual inspection. But I guess we're heading back to the days where the host takes a brave first bite, and all the guests applaud if dinner proceeds. We'll all be double checking the Russian royal penumbra to ensure our host doesn't carry any midichlorians of Rasputin lineage.
Canaries in the coal mine all the way up the food chain. Tag, you're it.
I thought the whole idea of the scientific method was that the method was above and beyond whether any individual scientist was right or wrong either by good luck or good management. If Phil Jones puts being right above the rough and tumble of surviving criticism, he's not doing what I recognize as science. My version of science does not limit criticism to authorized lab coats.
Richard Mueller, doing science, out in the open under scrutiny from all comers, came up with the same answer, and did the entire debate a huge favour. If Jones turns out to be as brilliant as Srinivasa Ramanujan (and as lacking in mainstream convention), I might cut him more slack. Hardy nearly had a coronary demanding proofs from Ramanujan that he couldn't supply in the form Hardy desired. Nevertheless, Ramanujan risked everything to join Hardy in collaboration to bridge the divide.
What was Jones' excuse? He's hardly the first scientist faced with the prospect that nearly 100% of his peers (to say nothing of the gadfly rabble) are mainly motivated by the finding of fault. He should have a brief conversation with Daniel Shechtman about the reality of his chosen profession.
Contrary to Hollywood, these qualities don't always play well together. The personal risk involved in getting to the top of this pyramid is insanely high. A certain kind of smart person settles into a comfortable and infinitely less risky niche. Ruthless animal smarts describes the guys who can't figure out how to become Hesh Rabkin.
Information extracted under torture is hard to bet your life on. There... Are... Four... Lights! Pretty soon the subject regards the truth as whichever answer has the least perceived repercussion. You can perform some Skinner maximization, but only if you known enough of the truth already. Every kingpin just loves to employ the shrewd and sadistic lieutenant who approaches the whole thing as a day in the office. Install the ambition restraining bolt very carefully. What could possibly go wrong? I think in reality savagery is carefully metered. The few insanely charismatic despots who run their regimes with complete disregard become the subjects of Hollywood motion pictures.
Not until their heads are found. The whole premise rests on the A in anonymous. For double the fun, get the suits in Baltimore mad enough to conspire with the despots in Managua.
The amorality meme is increasingly under fire. When you look closer at human behaviour it doesn't break down into Biblical sheep pens.
There's obviously an incentive for cartels of bloodshed to promote their methods as if your depiction is the last word. But as BB Mesquita points out concerning democrats vs autocrats, talk is cheap and is normally excluded from his models. No organization with recourse to violence means fails to promote their intangibles of ruthless omnipotence. On the down side, terror earns a fragile compliance. Hatred runs deep and burns hot when the day finally comes to settle those scores.
I get kind of tired of ruthless + smart being portrayed as a pair of independent D&D character dice. I weary of dramatic tropes where the supervillian picks the least appropriate moment since galactic creation to gape the jaws in celebration immediately prior to retiring the arch nemesis of justice; I weary also of the notion that doing the exact opposite is therefore a faultless and infinitely more cool depiction, though it wears well on a T-1000.
I've configured the majority of my web clients to use external PDF viewers in the past because there wasn't much benefit to running them inline as opaque applications in affordable housing. There's nothing wrong with being too old for school. However, if PDF behaved more like web content and integrated fully with Zotero, Session Saver, AdBlock, and NoSquint the benefits would be highly appreciable.
I've grown fond of having the ability to remove any image (or logo) from a document I'm reading in Firefox by whichever of my multitudinous plug-ins added "remove this object" to my popup context menu.
Neither am I particularly fond after a system restart of having to rearrange my PDF windows on their habitual desktops, after fighting round one with FF.
From How Netflix Lost 800,000 Members, and Good Will
In fact, I've always hated that PDF was a cloistered universe. I'll be much happier when it's demoted to just another www markup language and treated as such.
But don't feel bad, Reed couldn't see it either.
Speaking out of my Seldon hat, if MS had bought Netscape, the inevitable dust up with the FTC might have taken place over Apple's corpse instead of Netscape's. With a sufficiently large integral, the actual names of the winners and losers are a footnote to the great becoming.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is our closest living Seldonite. Some other political scientists say that if you had the quality of input data his model requires, you could work the same conclusions the hard way. Mesquita himself says that the mathematical formalism mostly prevents ideology from tainting the original model. The equations function as a Tea Party immune system, as I would slant it.
Unfortunately, Amazon book reviews of his recent book bemoan the fact that only with superhuman study does the book lead you to even to a modest replication of his mathematical methods--bemoaning of an unmistakable geek crescendo. How the geeks hunger for psychohistory.
I'm slowly digging into some of his older papers, which are reputed to be quite good, before he went all secret sauce.
This an architecture designed for a ten year run, much like the original P6, which underwhelmed everyone with (at most) half a brain.
Just how long do you think the OS can remain task agnostic as we head down the road to eight and sixteen core processors? Why plan for the future when we can languish on easy-street for another year or two? When the PC came out, some people complained they "would have preferred" a superior and more reliable electronic typewriter.
I'm quite certain the correct design approach is to resource a CPU regarding TDP as your performance wall. If eight floating point units require more TDP than your chip provides, what point is there in providing eight such units? And even if the math in the first spin from the new architecture could have gone the other way on some of these matters, in no time at all you're up hard against it, if you glance a few weeks further down the roadmap.
It's a bizarre conceit in any other walk of life that you can get away with not knowing the workload on the path to optimal resource assignment. Half of the human brain is devoted to power management. The glucose demand of the human brain is one of the big reasons why we were a late addition to mother nature's species road map. The brain doesn't operate from a baseline glucose guzzle equally able to handle any task that might come up. Much of what we perceive as quick reaction is only possible because the brain decided to fire up the necessary circuit 400ms beforehand.
Infinitely unimpressed by the Mickey Mouse copyright act, pissed off at the pretense that this is patriotic capitalism as it ought to work.
There are several Lessig videos on YouTube about his new rootstriker campaign. As much as I admire his content, he always sounds like a man wearing little round glasses--standard issue for taking down a whomping willow, but I'm not sure it will fly in Washington.
Lessig loves pointing out that Milton Friedman would only sign on if the brief contained the phrase "no brainer" that retroactive copyright extension will not cause George Gershwin to write another GD note. Logic and founding fathers and patriotism aside, they lost to the giant Mickey Mouse billfold.
You must be new here because this is how it works: if you don't shriek at the outrage, some cosmic lamer soon writes "Apple does this and no-one seems to complain so it must be OK". And the idiot fish swim happily ever after. Negative inference from silence makes silence a non-viable strategy.
You'll note that when Steve Jobs needed to pull the wool, he pulled early and often. It's been brilliant over the past weeks learning how the man really operated: one part asshole, one part genius.
Dave Winer: The Jobs Book â" Personal, Painful, Repetitive I'm personally no huge fan of Winer, but I think he hit the nail with this one.
Unfortunately, authentic outrage is often mimicked by geeks-with-squeaky-training-wheels who mostly just like the noise. If they suffer and remember, some day they too can assume the clucking greybeard mantle.
Stroustrup concedes that the features of C++ might have benefited from a different development path. Particularly the multiple inheritance cart got too far out in front of the generic horse.
Well, that sure assigns your coordinate in the lumpers and splitters debate.
So do you think Haida properly belongs to Na-Dene, or are you partial to Na-Dene minus Haida in the newly proposed relationship to Yeniseian?
I'm personally extremely grateful that there's one language out there whose primary claim to fame is not based on what they decided to vote off the island, even if the road was long and convoluted.
Much of the language debate devolves on whether your preference is too give a team with real talent a fair shake at solving the very hardest problems, or whether you're more concerned with extracting short-lived revenue streams from the cheapest talent you can find. C++ is the worst of all possible languages in the second scenario.
Do you admire the guy you sit beside, or detest his incompetence? Choose your language accordingly.
Bzzzzzzt. Thanks for playing.
The improvements are tremendous, but the Cortex-A15 Processor almost certainly falls short of the original CoreDuo.
Trinity packaged in a quad-channel socket FM2 with integrated Radeon 7000 graphics core is about the level of performance I expect from the next generation consoles by the time they arrive.
Sony originally hoped to make Cell a one-chip solution. But hey, they'll probably go full custom again just to preserve the DRM co-processor. Maybe they'll try to woo the new chick at IBM for another tango.
My 1979 APL skills gave me a huge leg up on learning the R language in 2008, except for the tax of unlearning elegance, and the odd rust flake or two.
Are we talking skill cycles or fashion cycles on the two year tau?
Having a history is inefficient. Startups are gloriously efficient because they are unencumbered by legacy. Legacy is what they strive to achieve, if they survive long enough to get there.
I think what we really need is a kind of ombudsman who sounds off whenever a project or corporate linkage spreads its tentacles into "too big to fail" territory. The lesson from the private sector is to make failure quick and merciful. The tactics of awarding these big government contracts often contains a sly dose of "pot commitment" following the timeless adage that if you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem. The ruse is to bring this about at a slow simmer and not to get your program busted for corking the bat in the first inning.
In the private sector this role is handled to some degree by the insurance industry. Certain kinds of overreaching stupidity are impossible to insure. If you're in the private sector and you dream big but you're short on innovation, the government is your only hope. There would be rivers of tears shed in the private sector the morning after the libertarian fairy waves her wand.
One thing about Steve, while he was alive, the truth was out there ... never to be apprehended. I'm really enjoying the tidbits about what really made him tick, as opposed to the crap he pushed onto small minds.
Perhaps part of his genius was the invisibility field lurking behind his potent reality distortion field. I'm from the dull quadrant that regards the truth as cool, and hardly anything else, so I was destined to be an outsider on this pageant since day one.