If job one is "don't be evil" this is long overdue. I'm serious.
First of all, this is only useful if you're willing to log onto the service from an untrusted machine. It shouldn't store or be automatically linked to personal information other than user interaction preferences. Previous settings should have a roll-back (similar to a wiki) in case someone messes with an unattended instance or sniffed and hacked from some library PC. Vandalism should be easily dealt with by a simple revert and a change of password.
The preferences available might read like a sequence of Slashdot polls.
How do you feel about your keyboard?
A) good for catching toast crumbs B) round keys good, square keys bad C) can hum a few bars, but don't ask me to shift key D) Liszt himself would blanch watching me type
How do you feel about interactive whiz-bang?
A) Every key a hot key to destinations unknown? Cool! B) Jiggle good, stutter bad. C) I'm tighter than my Amish chess correspondent. D) My enter key is operated through a postage meter which prints receipts.
Are you social?
A) Don't tell about my varroa mites, K? B) Happiness is a tribe of peanuts. C) If you hate something send it away, if it comes back, kill it. D) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me.
How do you feel about novelty?
A) I miss Clippy B) ask forgiveness C) ask permission D) those little Roombas in the Smithsonian make me nervous
What is your preferred display resolution?
A) dangles off my keychain B) flips open with one thumb C) flips open with two thumbs D) I'm an authorized EyeWonder theme park
What's your idea of light entertainment?
A) outtakes from Married with Children B) Our Lady of Blessed Acceleration (aka The Blues Brothers) C) Lord of the Rings trilogy in a single viewing D) The Seventh Seal, looped, Criterion edition, Swedish/Latin without subtitles
Do you have anything else to add?
A) 3.141592 B) Captain Kirk C) Elvis has left the room D) Cmdr Taco
From a hierarchy of preferences from general to specific, default settings on new Google offerings could be set appropriately. It's time to stop pretending that there's a universal set of GUI defaults that span three orders of magnitude on personal aptitude and work style.
Seriously, real friends respect taste. My real friends don't stuff my face into a bling parlour or offer me a Bud Light. Why can't my online services have half as much clue?
The alternative here is to watch Facebook slurp and dribble.
When you first launch RockMelt, you have to sign in with your Facebook account. No account? You can't use RockMelt. Also, RockMelt requests that you agree to a long list of Facebook permissions, such as "Access my basic information," "Access my data any time," and "Access my custom friend list."... [RockMelt] stores and synchronizes your data on its servers. That offers a benefit because you may log into RockMelt on any computer and see your same configuration.
Bush started a war he didn't know how to finish, bungled Katrina, presided over the passing of the DMCA and Patriot acts, color-coded fear against Muslims, and was holding the wheel for eight long years when the economy drove off a cliff on the ideological experiment that greedy self-interest will self-regulate (a legitimate inheritance by birth and creed). If he got blamed for anything else, I was already past my saturation point. On the plus side, he galvanized.
Obama stabilized the banking sector, but not enough. He started the process of fixing the medicare problem, but left too much to be fixed later. He also failed to send U.S. nuclear submarines into the gulf to quell the oil leak, never mind that it wouldn't have worked. He failed to send U.S. nuclear submarines to deal with the corrupt bankers on Wall Street. It's not clear this lynching would have worked, either, without sinking everything. He capitulated to republican demands to prioritize a balanced budget over boosting employment. On the plus side, if you can stay awake, his sentences parse.
I listened to a great EconTalk podcast last night on the destructive nature of letting people patent the wrong things.
One of the lessons from Iraq is that it is easier to tear something apart than put it back together again. This is why republicans barely try to address problems such as health care reform. The nice thing about foreign adventures is leaving the mess behind.
Tell me, what was the Bush legacy on building up government institutions for the long term? If you count the Patriot Act, I think American should fold up shop on exporting freedom. If that's not what America wants to be, so be it.
And it's not like strengthening government has to lead to big or expensive government. Fixing the patent system would be good for American competitiveness, and probably save money as well.
Some of these measures would be unpopular among circles that peddle influence. They get away with this under the cover of media that inflames polarization until the average voter can't distinguish better from worse. Obama doesn't appear to have the backbone to get on TV and challenge this, a monumental missed opportunity considering that W handed him the worst mess since the great depression.
Ask any business manager and he will be against higher income taxes, in part because it makes it harder to attract new talent when your area has income tax higher than average.
Miracle! If you frame the question as getting more than giving, everyone pipes up in full agreement. Uniform consensus is usually a dead giveaway that the question is half framed. It's also hard to attract talent if your civic structure decays until only Batman is holding the fort.
Around here people are opposed to the HST (harmonized sales tax). This raises more revenue for the province, and helps to balance the books. There are only two alternatives: increase a different tax, or cut programs (unless you count waving the magic wand of waste-free administration, as much beloved by the pumpkin pie in the sky sect). The programs large enough to achieve the necessary cost savings are most likely the usual suspects: education, health care, and pensions.
What people are really in favour of is decreasing taxes while increasing programs. You can sell that proposition any day of the week. You can even return from the political grave to mobilize heroic opposition. (Damn, I thought we had put a stake in that guy. Bill Voldemort. I dare not speak his name.)
Government is a necessary evil. Solutions proposed by the cheerleaders of polarization (no government/all government) are worse than the disease. The useful debate is on subjects such as accountability and effectiveness, not self-interested wishful thinking by sober capitalists cloaked in the gravitas of expensive suits while fixing their beady eyes on their next quarterly bonus payment.
The joy of capitalism is the pursuit of narrow self-interest. That's why it works, and that's also why you don't solicit the people involved for balanced perspectives.
I live on the not-so-Pacific coast. One day the buildings here will be sorted into two rough groups: the OLD buildings from the Port-au-Prince distribution, and the NEW buildings from the Santiago distribution.
It's not the age so much as the ethos of the day. Network transparency in X was never foreseen to handle streaming HDTV, 3D animation frame rates at the limits of human perception, or strange constraints of the pocket toys that are gaining prominence.
What I don't get in this discussion is the fear that native Wayland apps won't play nicely with remote X sessions. How many people do full motion video editing over remote X sessions? This is the kind of app most in need of a tighter and more seamless binding to the local display.
Is someone going to port the 2D Oracle installer to Wayland native? What the hell for?
What I expected to see here was more debate about whether Shuttleworth is a positive driving force in the Linux user experience ecosystem.
I'm inclined to think from the comments I've read here that this is a needed initiative. "We've always done it that way" is hardly a better reason to keep something around, than "old" is a reason to toss it out.
I suspect there's an element to this agenda of improving the working relationship with graphic chip vendors so that Linux does not run so far behind proprietary releases, moving X a little further out of the picture of what open source contributions from Intel and AMD need to validate as part of the Ubuntu release cycle, in performance validation, if nothing else.
Re:Python is the Lisp of the 21st century
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Land of Lisp
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· Score: 1
Python places to much reliance on the text editing environment.
Have you ever maintained unfamiliar APL code on an ASCII-only terminal where the overstrike symbols displayed with a ^H in the middle? I did for a couple of days I'll never forget. One can get used to anything.
Warriors of yesteryear age and join standardization committees and then languages like C adopt horrible bodges such as trigraphs, whose short term application was government tick marks on warehouses of obsolete IBM terminal equipment (supports the C language, check), and whose only lasting utility was obfuscated code competitions.
Python takes a more liberal view toward the Geneva convention on IBM legacy support. You can argue this both ways.
I tend to think of APL as what Lisp would look like rendered in an ideographic character set. Too many characters all different, versus one main character and mirror fatigue. In any language, if you work artistically within what's given, you can make yourself heard.
The problems arise from competence inversion. A business person trying to be clever hires an artless drudge, and the end result is unsatisfactory. Then someone more world-wise is brought in to clean up the mess, and the yowls from the dungeon curdle the blood.
The upside of APL and Lisp is the -10 hit bonus to artless drudges. The downside is the +10 hit bonus to line noise virtuosos.
Any code hand-off across an order of magnitude productivity gradient is going to hurt. And as we know, this is not uncommon in the programming profession.
Copyright law is constantly described as being "broken" around here...
If you take training in business communications, you come across this notion of the 10 minute reader, the 3 minute reader, and the 1 minute reader, although I think the pyramid has undergone an increase in pay grade or two since the advent of Twitter (the one minute reader, the 10 second reader, and the 3 second reader). If you think the voices around here complaining about copyright are some kind of consensus, you've yet to discover word wrap. Yours is three-second reader daily digest.
Among the three-minute readers, copyright is considered a cornerstone of the intellectual property economy. Complaints have more to do with the current implementation, starting with the Mickey Mouse copyright extension act, and extending to predatory enforcement by RIAA and the MPAA, including the collection of revenue on blank media.
Among the ten-minute readers, there are acknowledgments that services such as Google Books change the parameters of the copyright act as it used to exist (when it was reasonably balanced), and issues about the ownership and generativity of culture in the form of mash-ups and parody. There are no clear answers to these questions yet. It's a work in progress, and the ground is still shifting under our feet.
I watched "Control Room" last night. An extra feature interview tells the story about a conversation with some smart-ass Arab cab driver (possibly an under-employed physicist) in a country other than Iraq where the cab driver acknowledged that not everyone was happy with their own statuary, and suggesting that Iraq option would be just fine, if perhaps "we could skip the bombing and go straight to the looting". This is the attitude of people who think that the current implementation of copyright is so broken, we should nix it altogether.
Try reading past the word wrap some day. The real argument is whether copyright can be saved from the lobbyists. This is a special case of whether democracy can be saved from the lobbyists, but that topic is too broad to lead to constructive discussion.
Sure, you're paying for it anyway, but what's the point of the extra complexity you get from splitting it out?
Accountability modeled as distracting overhead. Sure worked great in the financial services industry.
I don't know if you meant this as a joke, but it's seventeen flavours of stupid. The whole point the invisible hand is that distributed self-interest produces effective economic decisions for the system as a whole when both sides of the transaction are voluntary and well informed.
Opaque billing is a method of outsourcing a command economy; consumerism is what you get when you bludgeon the free market with a seal club. The whole point of the net neutrality debate is whether we're going to legalize seal clubs.
For government run services, even when they split it out, there's plenty of scope for creative accounting, but at least it's a start.
At the same time, there's no business out there that doesn't have controls in place to safe-guard against entitlement freeloaders. When some telcos first offered unlimited long distance calling, a large population of deep-fryer invalids (who don't get out much) decided to turn their telephones into a permanent intercom system to exchange chicken recipes with their far-away siblings all day long.
I used to frequent a first rate all-you-can-eat dinner buffet in Montreal that initially catered to professionals willing to treat themselves to a refined atmosphere. Over time the patrons became larger and larger, and soon sweatshirts and belly cracks started to appear, when word got around that the determined obese could hoover $50 worth of food (none of it covered in batter) for the $25 price. Needless to say, the business model had to be changed, to the detriment of the population with reasonable notions of moderation.
Netflickers, are you the stuffed cheeks in sweatshirts piling on the cold salmon at the buffet table? Just asking.
It bugs me when people can't keep cultural factors separate from technical factors.
It's a lot like the case study in burgernomics I read long ago. Burger chain has juicy burger, but wants to increase profits by decreasing cost of ingredients/preparation. Taste of cheap burger against original burger shows no significant difference. Recipe changed. Iterate, testing cheap cheap burger against cheap burger. No significant difference, recipe changed. Continue replacing cheap^N with cheap^(N+1). Sales decline. Customers complain, "your burger tastes like shit!" Hire consultant. Compare cheap^(N+1) burger against original burger. Significant difference blows the lid off the charts.
In performance terms, C++ is the original burger (cardiac Whopper edition), if you're prepared to pay the price. Yeah, sometimes you kinda can't tell the difference, but be wary how far you stray down that path.
Java occupies a valid niche for consistent fast food, but it really screwed itself over with its PR conceit. We all know the story:
Java, first edition, portability guidelines: Write once, run anywhere! Java, n'th edition, portability guidelines: Write once, debug everywhere!
A little more engagement with reality and less propaganda would have been welcome at the outset. If you're expecting your language to return consistent results for A = B+C+D for a floating point data type in all program contexts for all environments and architectures, you're either smoking a crack pipe or hamstringing your optimizer.
Actually, I said that C++ was the original juicy burger, but I lied. It was FORTRAN, which gives the compiler even more scope for unsafe optimization, semantics be damned. FORTRAN predates Pasteur and refrigeration, so we can ignore this for most purposes. It is true, though, that some programmers swear by the joy of unpasteurized milk and fermentation by-products.
Now that Oracle controls Java, the question is whether Java can survive severed from the apron strings of its market conceit. Stroustrup constantly points out that C++ never had a PR department. Java did. C++ never got pushed out of the nest. Java might.
Yeah, we need to eliminate mathematics from education because the economist's wet dream of Homo economicus is already working too well. What's sad is to see a statistician write this. For shame, for absolute shame. Statistics are quoted in every newspaper and on every TV station every day, mostly to the befuddlement of the general public.
The problem is that we don't want an educated public who regards the following paper as common sense:
Although I would say that the principle of calculus is important. The problem with calculus is that we can't resist testing ugly mechanics. I guess we have our grade three spelling teacher to thank for that. Great literature, but can't spell during a flood of inspiration? Go to the back of the class.
Regurgitating trig identities as evidence of grasping calculus has an electric chair utility function in the non-engineering population. But seriously, 16% of American GDP spent on health care, largely at the mercy of corporate observational studies, and a statistician is arguing that math education is overrated. Oh, the humanity! How about the general population having the vaguest clue about long tails and concentration of risk?
What Alan Greenspan got wrong is that while heads-up poker is a zero sum game and self interest carries the day, multiparty poker is subject to implicit collusion. You just need one weak player at the table bleeding a big stack for the poker sharks at the table to lick their chops collectively and organize for a division of spoils.
In the world of Goldman Sachs, the chump at the table is the average wage slave trying to save for retirement with no mathematical tools whatsoever. "Listen, here's the thing. If you can't spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you ARE the sucker." So, after one viewing of Fox News, you're expected to know the score. If the general public wasn't trained by public education to play over their heads, the financial elite might be subject to the market discipline of having to play at a table of equals. The horror! The horror!
Williard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your market discipline was unsound. Goldman: Is my market discipline unsound? Williard: I don't see any market discipline at all, sir. Goldman: Who needs discipline when education is bliss? Williard: These savages have K12? Photographer: One through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions. Williard: Are you giving up America for a Playmate of the Month? Goldman: Playmate of the Year, chief, Playmate of the Year. Williard: What's in it for the crew? Goldman: Would you believe 'sloppy seconds'? Willard: You're the asshole of the world, major!
Playmate of the Year: Who are you? Cleaned out: I'm next, ma'am. Playmate: Are you crazy, Goddammit? Don't you think it's a little risky for your 401(k)?
Willard: Charlie Brown didn't get much USO. He was dug in too deep or bleeding too fast. His idea of great retirement was cold grits and a little bush meat. He had only two ways home: death, or bingo, the largest risk his education had trained him to comprehend.
Legacy management is such a burden. Final revision:
In a strange linguistic cock-up, rubbers in Thailand are promoted with the slogan "Erase for the Future". No, on second thought, delete that last joke. To cock-up is beneath me.
There was just no way I was going to find that epic groaner over the board on the blitz-screed time clock (one cup of coffee). Occurred to me on the way back to the grinder.
I don't want the social algorithms of the future to determine that I wasted twenty minutes of my life on the above post without nailing the smugger-than-thou power-chord of purple persuasion.
Strangely, Tigers of Probity is the name of a Thai virginity club with an unfortunate literal translation based in a city with an unfortunate transliteration.
Reading them today will cause you to think and feel things about me, when they were written by a quite different person. This is going to be all too common in the future when people are online in their childhood, when saying stupid things that will later embarrass you is quite common, if not a daily occurrence.
You're basically arguing that in a world with no delete key, only the careerist pyschopaths who control their image from cradle to grave will sail through life irreproachably, and I want that too.
One of the glues that holds small communities together is that you know that they know that ten years ago, you were a complete twirp. Encourages a little more humility in the judgement of others, and perhaps fewer brazenly dismissive tactics in the boardroom. The great thing about being irreproachable, is that you can sweep your adversaries off the table with the gloss of a gap-free CV.
I'm not sure the kind of authority that arises from having no past is a good thing. When everyone has a past, society will adjust, norms will change. We might even start looking at the the smirchless as what they tend to become.
The best argument against the historical merit of snapshots of the internet in it's pimply adolescent growth spurt is that the human species probably isn't going to be here in another 1000 years, anyway. If we're still around, it'll become prized dataset for how people behaved when greater society remained clueless about the laws of digital posterity.
One human institution that will fight this all the way to the singularity is marriage, where less past is a good past, troubled mainly by the genetic archives known as children. A button to delete those, too?
The difference here is that Apollo was actually worthwhile. We got live science and real products and technologies out of it, for less than (yearly) what American women pay for cosmetics.
I can't wait to see you run for office on the burka as a method of balancing the American budget. Or is the argument pro inflation? I can't tell.
Funny how many comments on this thread take the default position that the issue is spin the bottle: whoever is spending the most, sheds the most, until equilibrium is restored. Balanced budgets by the tried and true method "pick on the fat kid". Are we trying to police government budgets the same way we police traffic? Everyone speeds, but we only pick off the most egregious offenders for a slap on the wrist?
I'm more interested in whether we receive full value for the $80B expended, within government norms for this kind of expenditure, bearing in mind that large bundles of this sum are handed over to the private sector (for expensive goodies and toys) and immediately relabeled "profits".
To start with, any corporation with holding companies in the BVI or Caymen islands (or other offshore tax shelters) should be excluded from receiving defense contracts. These procurement projects are a large enough windfall up front.
I'd be less concerned about the total number of dollars swooshing around if there were fewer sink holes.
Ah, the evolution of language. In 1,278,698 I.D. use of the shift key diminished, but the point made was not lost on even the lowly four and five diggers.
It's true: the M.A.D. doctrine (by which I mean M.A.D in newspeak) inverts the risk profile of the launch-fail condition. Deterrence is like that. In oldspeak, as we used to say, "when the cat's away the mice will play". No, those strange symbols are not mouse-whisker emoticons. We used to call them delimiters, back when both ends of a sentence had one, even though not of the same kind. Yeah, it was kinda weird, now that I think about it. But it grows on you after 40,000 hours of reading 600 wpm. You get used to it, ya know?
Too bad we only have negative evidence that M.A.D. actually worked in the first place.
Because the word 'liberal' begins with the same first 5 letters as 'liberty' does not mean the two have anything at all to do with each other.
Try listening to Wolfe on Liberalism. The correlation increases with education. But I concede your point in the case of Liberia.
Liberalism comes up on EconTalk fairly regularly. If this is the lecture I recall, Liberals were originally people who opposed intrusive, proscriptive behaviours of the church (sometimes a state church).
The quick and dirty transcript gives the flavour right off the top:
Three aspects of liberalism: substantive, procedural, and temperamental. Definition: Liberalism has a set of principles; liberals are committed to the principle that as many people as possible should have control over their lives as feasible. Substantive: In competition with other ideologies, so if you are a substantive liberal, you are not a conservative or a socialist, etc. Also, liberalism is about procedures: commitments to open government, separation of power, checks and balances, suspicion on absolutist rule. Can be a substantive conservative and still be a procedural liberal. Temperament: openness to the world, willingness to experiment and be inventive. A lot of Manhattan leftists who have tenure and live in rent-controlled apartments who temperamentally are not liberals because they are so completely shut off to changing anything.
Apologies to Russ Roberts if I quote too much. Of course, not everyone agrees, which does not, however, erase history. Control, in particular, is a slippery word, but potentially resolvable by the one child per planet policy.
Innovation is not restricted to technology or end product. Corporations also innovate on business methods. Microsoft's gift to the world was backward-compatibility for the masses on top of a commodity hardware base. Darn hard to do, as the open source community has discovered. Apple's take on this was "just buy everything all over again (machine, software, peripherals), we need the revenue; shiny new, shiny new, la la la la la la, can't hear you".
Back when a kick-ass PC workstation set you back three grand, the Apple tax was ungodly. It wasn't until the majority of their product line was sub $1000 that the Apple business model really caught flight. Turns out people are willing to chuck a $500 gadget that's 18 months old if the replacement gadget screams hotness. Apple should have modeled it's marketing department after women's tennis, where the careers last about as long as the average Apple product introduction, and scream almost as loudly.
What Microsoft pulled off with their business method was the most profitable business method innovation in human history even if it came mostly from the department of velcro thumbscrews, rather than the software coders. Loathed all the way to the bank.
The goal of every dominant corporation is to escape market discipline by redefining your own niche entirely to your own satisfaction. Actually competing on virtue is strictly for losers. You might even lose money if your product is mediocre. Intolerable! Mostly the companies competing on virtue are the companies that have yet to displace the incumbent gorilla. We watch Google nervously for the onset of absolute power.
Few companies wish to concede their gorilla envy, so everyone at the top of the ecosystem (gorillas and gorilla-wannabees) screams "innovation" at the top of their lungs to throw off the scent.
Did the Little Shop of Horrors innovate? Damn right, but rarely did they make an appearance as the hottest up and coming women's tennis star. Not for them to be washed out at twenty one. No, they were always more interested in being one of those old guys on the golf tour cranking up the career winnings wearing those funny clothes. The trendy golf cap with the Xbox logo fools no-one. The rest of the outfit is pure polyplad. Puffy men with Rolex's drool in admiration.
Reading slashdot feels like dropping in on a pool boy convention. Yeah, we're the man, feasting on neglected trophy wives and rolling along with a twelve-month life plan. Yeah, the man has three houses in Palm Beach and forty billion in loose change, but what has he done lately?
Each version is a little better, but it is years and years behind the iPhone for basic reliability
That's an amazing crystal ball you have there. Can you wrap you arms around it?
It's notoriously hard to project stability in a rapidly moving software project. "Years and years" is a span of time longer than Chrome's entire release history. You might get away with saying that clang/llvm is years and years behind GCC, if the parts that aren't done yet matter more than what's already superior.
OpenBSD takes a lot of flack for bragging about "security out of the box" where the lion's share of this accomplishment is ensuring that risky services are not enabled by default. So it's damn secure doing not very damn much, and probably slightly more damn secure than anything else doing equally little. I think it's a great policy, but it only proves so much.
For all I know, the iPhone is years and years behind the basic stability of the DynaTAC brick phone from 1983. You hold those damn bricks any damn way you wanted to, tennis elbow notwithstanding.
The more likely explanation, however, is that they are both listed in alphabetical order and it is just a poor coding job. Hanlon's Razor and all.
This would be true in a non-iterated system, but as soon as your nefarious adversary hears you declaring this with sincerity, it potentially becomes non-true in the next iteration, unless this is already the next iteration, it which case it might already be true.
Voting systems need to be built to standards at least as high as the judiciary, where perception of bias is considered almost as bad as bias itself.
Electronic voting designs should be subject to the same scrutiny that NIST applied in selecting AES or the next secure hash. Or is democracy not actually worth the effort? Funny how when America goes around exporting freedom, the customer response is tepid.
Hanlon's razor needs to be revised to read "Never attribute to malice in the first instance that which is adequately explained by stupidity." As Bush once tried to say "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me".
Is there any adequate explanation for trusting democracy to opaque code? I think not.
I have large hands. Size L dish gloves look like latex paint. My choice boils down to one X or two. For the longest time I had the jumbo Mouseman Wheel. Used it until the teflon feet wore off. It's highly sculpted. 45mm to the top of the arch along the inside (left) ridge. Beauty. Unfortunately, very coarse wheel, no side scrolling, no side buttons. Replaced with an MX-500, which is just barely big enough. More buttons, less sculpted. This is good, because I've been mousing left handed for years now. My mouse position is 22cm to the left of the GH divide. On my aging Compaq keyboard, 22cm to the right side of the GH divide reaches the outer edge of the page down/page up keys. My mouse position on the right would be another 18cm further displaced from my centerline, after clearing the numeric keypad.
After at least four years mousing on the left, I'm pretty ambidextrous for mouse work. It's a bit annoying that my thumb buttons are turned outward, but I can live with that. For detail work (pixel touch-up in GIMP, which is a rare task) I reach across with the right hand and drive the mouse tilted. This isn't bad and actually stretches the shoulder in a direction where it could use more work.
It takes a lot of stress off the shoulder and upper arm to keep the mouse tight to the keyboard's home position. At the end of a long day, When your shoulder gets tired, it cooks up a bad deal with the spine: tilt a little bit to the right, please. Any tilt in the spine requires *three* lateral bends, because the ears have this strange idea of keeping the head vertical. You get one tilt out, one tilt back, and a third kink to restore the neck to the vertical axis. That final kink is up in the shoulder or the base of the neck. A very effective method to discover how much you fall into this kind of bad habit is to tape a giant X onto your bare back. Every time you tilt, the tape pulls. It's a shock at first how often this happens. You soon lose some hairs. In fact, it was the only really useful thing I got out of a back therapy program that was too oriented to worker's compensation.
I'm hard on my hands when keyboarding, but rarely experience discomfort. When I do, I cease typing fairly immediately. When I have experienced pain, it's always due to typing with the wrist kinked upward. This especially happened with my first laptop, which wasn't especially thin at the front bezel. Keeping the monitors high enough helps prevent stooping and upward compensation in the wrist. Never had a problem with lateral flex at the wrist. Average width of ribcage with longish forearms and fingers are an advantage I guess. The downside of large hands is that I have to employ the Steve Jobs finger file just to type on the average laptop these days. Ergonomically, most laptop users are completely hosed. The base of my desktop screen is half a meter from the back of keyboard. Larger than average fonts reduce craning. The laptop form factor would be a perfect fit for Yoda, but given his hand structure, he probably uses a Blackberry.
One theory of monitor height is to position the center of the monitor at eye level. Few people do this. The deep reason is that it forces the eyelid to open a bit wider, and this can lead to eye fatigue. The usual recommendation is top of the monitor at eye level. This is high enough to keep the neck and back upright, but low enough not to stress the eyes.
All these things work together to reduce stress on the hands. It's not just a matter of optimal tactile feel. Ergonomics is great place to practice the five whys. Many people latch onto a solution halfway down the why tower, especially when shopping displaces thinking.
Nice. That's what you need to have small fonts that scale smoothly without blotchy in-betweens. I don't much like squinting at small, fuzzy fonts. If 150 DPI is visually acceptable, why have I not seen a 150 DPI laser printer since the early 1990s? I suspect on the screen with some good AA that 200 DPI would permit smooth scaling of smaller font sizes.
It won't happen for large screens until the marginal cost of the extra pixel density is relatively insignificant, about five years I'd guess after 30" desktop screens become relatively normal, at which point the same number of pixels might become available in higher density screens a size or two less overwhelming.
I've never thought that 1080 was enough vertical pixels for programming. Both of my panels tilt, but then I figured out that this kind of buggers up the clear-type support. The first time I tried it my video card didn't have the horsepower to run transposed. It was SLOW. Haven't tried it with my new Evergreen card, but I'd assume the Linux drivers remain too broken to make a go of it. An open source driver that might work great someday beats a closed source driver that already does, in my peculiar world view.
I think the 6000 series will have multiple DP outlets.
One DP provides "17.28 Gbit/s of video bandwidth, enough for supporting 4 simultaneous 1080p60 displays or 2560 × 1600 × 30 bit @120 Hz" according to the bathroom wall of all knowledge.
The problem is not with the video cards, although it seems kind of obscene to make the electrons wiggle so much.
It also misses the point that Facebook is about *SHARING* data. The idea is you are sharing things with people. If you want to keep things private... Facebook is not the place to do it.
Duh! But I did enjoy watching the metal boomerang slice your hand off. I'm sure you won't mind if I share (having assumed your Facebook identity on the sly) that you're dumping your main squeeze because she slept with your boss, but you don't care because you're out now.
It's unfortunate that authentication and privacy get so badly conflated. The need for SSL certificates derives from the authentication function, but you can't establish a private connection without one, for no technical reason at all, but it's a nice racket. Sometimes I want privacy (e.g. plaintext passwords being exchanged) and sometimes I want authenticity (that only I post under my own identity).
Hopefully you fingers came off clean and can be surgically repaired. Next time, type smarter.
Concerning Facebook, it's a no-fly zone for me. I preferred sharing back in the day when sharing was only weakly transitive unless especially ghastly, malicious or inbred.
I'm surprised at the quick dominance of brick-layers with children justifying a laissez faire attitude towards information attrition. I'm less surprised that some people have latched onto the question as a support group for media squirrels. I concur. In the long run, investing cathexis in trinkets disappoints.
What interests me is capturing the random lateral associations of an overstimulated mind. It's easy to recover the main grooves, harder to recover unexpected connections. Some authors do this for a living. I think some science fiction succeeds precisely because the author is attuned to noticing (and remembering) these strangely persistent stray associations.
For myself, I settled on a three-tier system depending on my current state of overstimulation. When I'm on a tear I keyboard so vigorously that people sometimes ask "what's that noise in the other room?" It's blurs into a staccato rattle. But then I have days where my not even my hyperactive fingers can keep up with the bubbles of free association. On these days I fire up the iPod as a voice recorder. When I'm finished, I use an audio program to remove background noise, zap silence, and accelerate. An hour or two on the couch turns into a forty minute recording (but you have to learn to shut up until you have fully formed sentences). It took a while not to find the sound of my own voice revolting. I've sometimes listened to previous rants while doing kitchen work. It's a way to reprime the pump when the internal lava lamp ceases to roil. The narcissism of the project makes me gag, but sometimes you have to suck up your pride to do your best work. My GP sends me back for a thyroid exam every second visit. He thinks I talk too fast in normal life. My post-processed verbal diatribes are quite brisk.
If the idea storm slows down a bit, but still too much to wiki with declarative sentences, I fall back on a mind manager. I've been using XMIND within Eclipse, which is not without its frustrations.
The ideal is when ideas flow at roughly the maximum rate I can enter the ideas into my personal wiki. There have been idea floods where I've created 100 new pages in the space of three or four hours, usually forming at least a weakly connected graph with plenty of spider wires burring in previously existing pages to stumble upon in future traversals. I've micro-managed mass battles in AoE with less ferver. After ten of thousands of edits, I've developed some favorite mouse paths. Let's just say Glipper is my friend, tab management is a way of life, and working memory is the Gift of the Magi. Well, not quite that dire, but there is a tension involved in optimizing wiki efficiency with also remembering the content you're trying to record, along with attitudes about how you're filtering that content while you record it. Inspiration is a meta bomb.
In the long run, data is not terribly meaningful. Attitudes about the data, however, are impossible to fully recover if you don't take notes. It's really all a giant record of what I care about and why I care about it. Attitude interests me. Working code also interests me, because I have complex attitudes about skirting debasement. At the end of the day, I mostly program so I can write about it. Berlioz was a first rate musician who had a touch of the same disease.
In an artist's life one thunderclap sometimes follows swiftly on another... I had just had the successive revelations of Shakespeare and Weber. Now at another point on the horizon I saw the giant form of Beethoven rear up. The shock was almost as great as that of Shakespeare had been. Beethoven opened before me a new world of music, as Shakespeare had revealed a new universe of poetry.
Of course, it's his response to these thunderclaps that pours out in his music. The central ideas in my life have been gestating for twenty years now, and only through my wiki have I finally measured their circumference.
The situation where this seemed potentially useful is when you smoke one down the baseline (left or right). It will either be caught (you're out), curve foul (return to the batters box, do not collect $200) or rattle around in the deep corner. If the loping path is as much faster as this suggests, maybe some of the easy stand-up doubles can be stretched for a triple, or a triple can be waved home if the outfielder makes multiple pumps to fish out the ball.
Baseball is a game of inches. You take whatever edge you can, whether it comes up often or not. I haven't watched much baseball since the Jays last won the series (I was in Toronto at the time and caught the homer-fever despite the deadly slow pace of the game compared to the one true sport), but it seems to me that a guy like John Olerud would be the perfect case study. "Cheetah" hit a lot of balls that begged to be stretched for an extra base, but didn't have Henderson's wheels.
From the bathroom wall of all knowledge:
Longtime scout Charlie Metro remembered the havoc caused by Henderson: '"I did a lot of study and I found that it's impossible to throw Rickey Henderson out. I started using stopwatches and everything. I found it was impossible to throw some other guys out also. They can go from first to second in 2.9 seconds; and no pitcher catcher combination in baseball could throw from here to there to tag second in 2.9 seconds, it was always 3, 3.1, 3.2. So actually, the runner that can make the continuous, regular move like Rickey's can't be thrown out, and he's proven it."
This is followed by another cute anecdote, demonstrating a rare, appropriate use of all-caps:
"I'm about to give you one of my all-time favorite statistics: Rickey Henderson walked 796 times in his career LEADING OFF AN INNING. Think about this again. There would be nothing, absolutely nothing, a pitcher would want to avoid more than walking Rickey Henderson to lead off an inning. And yet he walked SEVEN HUNDRED NINETY SIX times to lead off an inning.
For Rickey, when he made first base, he was 81% safe at 2nd already. No math required.
Even when it seems "obvious" (off the wall, etc) you almost always base the decision to go to 2nd from the 1st conference presentation. You make contact, start running at fast as you can, everyone starts looking, and you are basically over 1/2 way to 1st base before anyone figures out whether the result has merit. And a lot of the time you are not the only one running - you (and your faculty advisers) have to look out for other runners, figure out what they are going to do, and guess the composition of the peer review panel, etc, to know whether the paper will be accepted for publication.
Trying to plan for the exact base and route to it (beyond the usual wide turn that any little leaguer already knows) from the moment you make contact is about as useful as planning where you are going to swing before the pitch. Mathematics research is NOT a video game...
Now it all makes sense. The paper is actually a parody on outcome-based research investment as depicted in the red states.
Slashdot Mirror
If job one is "don't be evil" this is long overdue. I'm serious.
First of all, this is only useful if you're willing to log onto the service from an untrusted machine. It shouldn't store or be automatically linked to personal information other than user interaction preferences. Previous settings should have a roll-back (similar to a wiki) in case someone messes with an unattended instance or sniffed and hacked from some library PC. Vandalism should be easily dealt with by a simple revert and a change of password.
The preferences available might read like a sequence of Slashdot polls.
How do you feel about your keyboard?
A) good for catching toast crumbs
B) round keys good, square keys bad
C) can hum a few bars, but don't ask me to shift key
D) Liszt himself would blanch watching me type
How do you feel about interactive whiz-bang?
A) Every key a hot key to destinations unknown? Cool!
B) Jiggle good, stutter bad.
C) I'm tighter than my Amish chess correspondent.
D) My enter key is operated through a postage meter which prints receipts.
Are you social?
A) Don't tell about my varroa mites, K?
B) Happiness is a tribe of peanuts.
C) If you hate something send it away, if it comes back, kill it.
D) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me.
How do you feel about novelty?
A) I miss Clippy
B) ask forgiveness
C) ask permission
D) those little Roombas in the Smithsonian make me nervous
What is your preferred display resolution?
A) dangles off my keychain
B) flips open with one thumb
C) flips open with two thumbs
D) I'm an authorized EyeWonder theme park
What's your idea of light entertainment?
A) outtakes from Married with Children
B) Our Lady of Blessed Acceleration (aka The Blues Brothers)
C) Lord of the Rings trilogy in a single viewing
D) The Seventh Seal, looped, Criterion edition, Swedish/Latin without subtitles
Do you have anything else to add?
A) 3.141592
B) Captain Kirk
C) Elvis has left the room
D) Cmdr Taco
From a hierarchy of preferences from general to specific, default settings on new Google offerings could be set appropriately. It's time to stop pretending that there's a universal set of GUI defaults that span three orders of magnitude on personal aptitude and work style.
Seriously, real friends respect taste. My real friends don't stuff my face into a bling parlour or offer me a Bud Light. Why can't my online services have half as much clue?
The alternative here is to watch Facebook slurp and dribble.
From RockMelt: Modestly Useful, But Not for Enterprises
When you first launch RockMelt, you have to sign in with your Facebook account. No account? You can't use RockMelt. Also, RockMelt requests that you agree to a long list of Facebook permissions, such as "Access my basic information," "Access my data any time," and "Access my custom friend list." ... [RockMelt] stores and synchronizes your data on its servers. That offers a benefit because you may log into RockMelt on any computer and see your same configuration.
Bush started a war he didn't know how to finish, bungled Katrina, presided over the passing of the DMCA and Patriot acts, color-coded fear against Muslims, and was holding the wheel for eight long years when the economy drove off a cliff on the ideological experiment that greedy self-interest will self-regulate (a legitimate inheritance by birth and creed). If he got blamed for anything else, I was already past my saturation point. On the plus side, he galvanized.
Obama stabilized the banking sector, but not enough. He started the process of fixing the medicare problem, but left too much to be fixed later. He also failed to send U.S. nuclear submarines into the gulf to quell the oil leak, never mind that it wouldn't have worked. He failed to send U.S. nuclear submarines to deal with the corrupt bankers on Wall Street. It's not clear this lynching would have worked, either, without sinking everything. He capitulated to republican demands to prioritize a balanced budget over boosting employment. On the plus side, if you can stay awake, his sentences parse.
I listened to a great EconTalk podcast last night on the destructive nature of letting people patent the wrong things.
Heller on Gridlock and the Tragedy of the Anticommons. Heller hails from the Columbia Law School.
One of the lessons from Iraq is that it is easier to tear something apart than put it back together again. This is why republicans barely try to address problems such as health care reform. The nice thing about foreign adventures is leaving the mess behind.
Tell me, what was the Bush legacy on building up government institutions for the long term? If you count the Patriot Act, I think American should fold up shop on exporting freedom. If that's not what America wants to be, so be it.
And it's not like strengthening government has to lead to big or expensive government. Fixing the patent system would be good for American competitiveness, and probably save money as well.
Some of these measures would be unpopular among circles that peddle influence. They get away with this under the cover of media that inflames polarization until the average voter can't distinguish better from worse. Obama doesn't appear to have the backbone to get on TV and challenge this, a monumental missed opportunity considering that W handed him the worst mess since the great depression.
Ask any business manager and he will be against higher income taxes, in part because it makes it harder to attract new talent when your area has income tax higher than average.
Miracle! If you frame the question as getting more than giving, everyone pipes up in full agreement. Uniform consensus is usually a dead giveaway that the question is half framed. It's also hard to attract talent if your civic structure decays until only Batman is holding the fort.
Around here people are opposed to the HST (harmonized sales tax). This raises more revenue for the province, and helps to balance the books. There are only two alternatives: increase a different tax, or cut programs (unless you count waving the magic wand of waste-free administration, as much beloved by the pumpkin pie in the sky sect). The programs large enough to achieve the necessary cost savings are most likely the usual suspects: education, health care, and pensions.
What people are really in favour of is decreasing taxes while increasing programs. You can sell that proposition any day of the week. You can even return from the political grave to mobilize heroic opposition. (Damn, I thought we had put a stake in that guy. Bill Voldemort. I dare not speak his name.)
Government is a necessary evil. Solutions proposed by the cheerleaders of polarization (no government/all government) are worse than the disease. The useful debate is on subjects such as accountability and effectiveness, not self-interested wishful thinking by sober capitalists cloaked in the gravitas of expensive suits while fixing their beady eyes on their next quarterly bonus payment.
The joy of capitalism is the pursuit of narrow self-interest. That's why it works, and that's also why you don't solicit the people involved for balanced perspectives.
Besides, fat cheques speak louder than words.
I live on the not-so-Pacific coast. One day the buildings here will be sorted into two rough groups: the OLD buildings from the Port-au-Prince distribution, and the NEW buildings from the Santiago distribution.
Oh, hell. I'll include a link for the geographically impaired. Peter Haas: Haiti's disaster of engineering
It's not the age so much as the ethos of the day. Network transparency in X was never foreseen to handle streaming HDTV, 3D animation frame rates at the limits of human perception, or strange constraints of the pocket toys that are gaining prominence.
What I don't get in this discussion is the fear that native Wayland apps won't play nicely with remote X sessions. How many people do full motion video editing over remote X sessions? This is the kind of app most in need of a tighter and more seamless binding to the local display.
Is someone going to port the 2D Oracle installer to Wayland native? What the hell for?
What I expected to see here was more debate about whether Shuttleworth is a positive driving force in the Linux user experience ecosystem.
I'm inclined to think from the comments I've read here that this is a needed initiative. "We've always done it that way" is hardly a better reason to keep something around, than "old" is a reason to toss it out.
I suspect there's an element to this agenda of improving the working relationship with graphic chip vendors so that Linux does not run so far behind proprietary releases, moving X a little further out of the picture of what open source contributions from Intel and AMD need to validate as part of the Ubuntu release cycle, in performance validation, if nothing else.
Python places to much reliance on the text editing environment.
Have you ever maintained unfamiliar APL code on an ASCII-only terminal where the overstrike symbols displayed with a ^H in the middle? I did for a couple of days I'll never forget. One can get used to anything.
Warriors of yesteryear age and join standardization committees and then languages like C adopt horrible bodges such as trigraphs, whose short term application was government tick marks on warehouses of obsolete IBM terminal equipment (supports the C language, check), and whose only lasting utility was obfuscated code competitions.
Python takes a more liberal view toward the Geneva convention on IBM legacy support. You can argue this both ways.
I tend to think of APL as what Lisp would look like rendered in an ideographic character set. Too many characters all different, versus one main character and mirror fatigue. In any language, if you work artistically within what's given, you can make yourself heard.
The problems arise from competence inversion. A business person trying to be clever hires an artless drudge, and the end result is unsatisfactory. Then someone more world-wise is brought in to clean up the mess, and the yowls from the dungeon curdle the blood.
The upside of APL and Lisp is the -10 hit bonus to artless drudges. The downside is the +10 hit bonus to line noise virtuosos.
Any code hand-off across an order of magnitude productivity gradient is going to hurt. And as we know, this is not uncommon in the programming profession.
Copyright law is constantly described as being "broken" around here ...
If you take training in business communications, you come across this notion of the 10 minute reader, the 3 minute reader, and the 1 minute reader, although I think the pyramid has undergone an increase in pay grade or two since the advent of Twitter (the one minute reader, the 10 second reader, and the 3 second reader). If you think the voices around here complaining about copyright are some kind of consensus, you've yet to discover word wrap. Yours is three-second reader daily digest.
Among the three-minute readers, copyright is considered a cornerstone of the intellectual property economy. Complaints have more to do with the current implementation, starting with the Mickey Mouse copyright extension act, and extending to predatory enforcement by RIAA and the MPAA, including the collection of revenue on blank media.
Among the ten-minute readers, there are acknowledgments that services such as Google Books change the parameters of the copyright act as it used to exist (when it was reasonably balanced), and issues about the ownership and generativity of culture in the form of mash-ups and parody. There are no clear answers to these questions yet. It's a work in progress, and the ground is still shifting under our feet.
I watched "Control Room" last night. An extra feature interview tells the story about a conversation with some smart-ass Arab cab driver (possibly an under-employed physicist) in a country other than Iraq where the cab driver acknowledged that not everyone was happy with their own statuary, and suggesting that Iraq option would be just fine, if perhaps "we could skip the bombing and go straight to the looting". This is the attitude of people who think that the current implementation of copyright is so broken, we should nix it altogether.
Try reading past the word wrap some day. The real argument is whether copyright can be saved from the lobbyists. This is a special case of whether democracy can be saved from the lobbyists, but that topic is too broad to lead to constructive discussion.
Sure, you're paying for it anyway, but what's the point of the extra complexity you get from splitting it out?
Accountability modeled as distracting overhead. Sure worked great in the financial services industry.
I don't know if you meant this as a joke, but it's seventeen flavours of stupid. The whole point the invisible hand is that distributed self-interest produces effective economic decisions for the system as a whole when both sides of the transaction are voluntary and well informed.
Opaque billing is a method of outsourcing a command economy; consumerism is what you get when you bludgeon the free market with a seal club. The whole point of the net neutrality debate is whether we're going to legalize seal clubs.
For government run services, even when they split it out, there's plenty of scope for creative accounting, but at least it's a start.
At the same time, there's no business out there that doesn't have controls in place to safe-guard against entitlement freeloaders. When some telcos first offered unlimited long distance calling, a large population of deep-fryer invalids (who don't get out much) decided to turn their telephones into a permanent intercom system to exchange chicken recipes with their far-away siblings all day long.
I used to frequent a first rate all-you-can-eat dinner buffet in Montreal that initially catered to professionals willing to treat themselves to a refined atmosphere. Over time the patrons became larger and larger, and soon sweatshirts and belly cracks started to appear, when word got around that the determined obese could hoover $50 worth of food (none of it covered in batter) for the $25 price. Needless to say, the business model had to be changed, to the detriment of the population with reasonable notions of moderation.
Netflickers, are you the stuffed cheeks in sweatshirts piling on the cold salmon at the buffet table? Just asking.
Java and .NET are as fast as C++
It bugs me when people can't keep cultural factors separate from technical factors.
It's a lot like the case study in burgernomics I read long ago. Burger chain has juicy burger, but wants to increase profits by decreasing cost of ingredients/preparation. Taste of cheap burger against original burger shows no significant difference. Recipe changed. Iterate, testing cheap cheap burger against cheap burger. No significant difference, recipe changed. Continue replacing cheap^N with cheap^(N+1). Sales decline. Customers complain, "your burger tastes like shit!" Hire consultant. Compare cheap^(N+1) burger against original burger. Significant difference blows the lid off the charts.
In performance terms, C++ is the original burger (cardiac Whopper edition), if you're prepared to pay the price. Yeah, sometimes you kinda can't tell the difference, but be wary how far you stray down that path.
Java occupies a valid niche for consistent fast food, but it really screwed itself over with its PR conceit. We all know the story:
Java, first edition, portability guidelines: Write once, run anywhere!
Java, n'th edition, portability guidelines: Write once, debug everywhere!
A little more engagement with reality and less propaganda would have been welcome at the outset. If you're expecting your language to return consistent results for A = B+C+D for a floating point data type in all program contexts for all environments and architectures, you're either smoking a crack pipe or hamstringing your optimizer.
Actually, I said that C++ was the original juicy burger, but I lied. It was FORTRAN, which gives the compiler even more scope for unsafe optimization, semantics be damned. FORTRAN predates Pasteur and refrigeration, so we can ignore this for most purposes. It is true, though, that some programmers swear by the joy of unpasteurized milk and fermentation by-products.
Now that Oracle controls Java, the question is whether Java can survive severed from the apron strings of its market conceit. Stroustrup constantly points out that C++ never had a PR department. Java did. C++ never got pushed out of the nest. Java might.
Yeah, we need to eliminate mathematics from education because the economist's wet dream of Homo economicus is already working too well. What's sad is to see a statistician write this. For shame, for absolute shame. Statistics are quoted in every newspaper and on every TV station every day, mostly to the befuddlement of the general public.
The problem is that we don't want an educated public who regards the following paper as common sense:
Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science
Or course what I'm saying is not original to me. Dweebs everywhere are catching on.
Arthur Benjamin's formula for changing math education
Although I would say that the principle of calculus is important. The problem with calculus is that we can't resist testing ugly mechanics. I guess we have our grade three spelling teacher to thank for that. Great literature, but can't spell during a flood of inspiration? Go to the back of the class.
Jane Austen's famous prose may not be hers after all
Regurgitating trig identities as evidence of grasping calculus has an electric chair utility function in the non-engineering population. But seriously, 16% of American GDP spent on health care, largely at the mercy of corporate observational studies, and a statistician is arguing that math education is overrated. Oh, the humanity! How about the general population having the vaguest clue about long tails and concentration of risk?
What Alan Greenspan got wrong is that while heads-up poker is a zero sum game and self interest carries the day, multiparty poker is subject to implicit collusion. You just need one weak player at the table bleeding a big stack for the poker sharks at the table to lick their chops collectively and organize for a division of spoils.
In the world of Goldman Sachs, the chump at the table is the average wage slave trying to save for retirement with no mathematical tools whatsoever. "Listen, here's the thing. If you can't spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you ARE the sucker." So, after one viewing of Fox News, you're expected to know the score. If the general public wasn't trained by public education to play over their heads, the financial elite might be subject to the market discipline of having to play at a table of equals. The horror! The horror!
Williard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your market discipline was unsound.
Goldman: Is my market discipline unsound?
Williard: I don't see any market discipline at all, sir.
Goldman: Who needs discipline when education is bliss?
Williard: These savages have K12?
Photographer: One through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions.
Williard: Are you giving up America for a Playmate of the Month?
Goldman: Playmate of the Year, chief, Playmate of the Year.
Williard: What's in it for the crew?
Goldman: Would you believe 'sloppy seconds'?
Willard: You're the asshole of the world, major!
Playmate of the Year: Who are you?
Cleaned out: I'm next, ma'am.
Playmate: Are you crazy, Goddammit? Don't you think it's a little risky for your 401(k)?
Willard: Charlie Brown didn't get much USO. He was dug in too deep or bleeding too fast. His idea of great retirement was cold grits and a little bush meat. He had only two ways home: death, or bingo, the largest risk his education had trained him to comprehend.
Legacy management is such a burden. Final revision:
In a strange linguistic cock-up, rubbers in Thailand are promoted with the slogan "Erase for the Future". No, on second thought, delete that last joke. To cock-up is beneath me.
There was just no way I was going to find that epic groaner over the board on the blitz-screed time clock (one cup of coffee). Occurred to me on the way back to the grinder.
s/smirchless/tigers of probity
I don't want the social algorithms of the future to determine that I wasted twenty minutes of my life on the above post without nailing the smugger-than-thou power-chord of purple persuasion.
Strangely, Tigers of Probity is the name of a Thai virginity club with an unfortunate literal translation based in a city with an unfortunate transliteration.
On the other hand, maybe not.
How condoms became famous in Thailand?
In a strange linguistic cock-up, rubbers in Thailand are promoted with the slogan "Erase for the Future".
No, on second thought, delete that last joke.
Reading them today will cause you to think and feel things about me, when they were written by a quite different person. This is going to be all too common in the future when people are online in their childhood, when saying stupid things that will later embarrass you is quite common, if not a daily occurrence.
You're basically arguing that in a world with no delete key, only the careerist pyschopaths who control their image from cradle to grave will sail through life irreproachably, and I want that too.
One of the glues that holds small communities together is that you know that they know that ten years ago, you were a complete twirp. Encourages a little more humility in the judgement of others, and perhaps fewer brazenly dismissive tactics in the boardroom. The great thing about being irreproachable, is that you can sweep your adversaries off the table with the gloss of a gap-free CV.
I'm not sure the kind of authority that arises from having no past is a good thing. When everyone has a past, society will adjust, norms will change. We might even start looking at the the smirchless as what they tend to become.
The best argument against the historical merit of snapshots of the internet in it's pimply adolescent growth spurt is that the human species probably isn't going to be here in another 1000 years, anyway. If we're still around, it'll become prized dataset for how people behaved when greater society remained clueless about the laws of digital posterity.
One human institution that will fight this all the way to the singularity is marriage, where less past is a good past, troubled mainly by the genetic archives known as children. A button to delete those, too?
The difference here is that Apollo was actually worthwhile. We got live science and real products and technologies out of it, for less than (yearly) what American women pay for cosmetics.
I can't wait to see you run for office on the burka as a method of balancing the American budget. Or is the argument pro inflation? I can't tell.
Funny how many comments on this thread take the default position that the issue is spin the bottle: whoever is spending the most, sheds the most, until equilibrium is restored. Balanced budgets by the tried and true method "pick on the fat kid". Are we trying to police government budgets the same way we police traffic? Everyone speeds, but we only pick off the most egregious offenders for a slap on the wrist?
I'm more interested in whether we receive full value for the $80B expended, within government norms for this kind of expenditure, bearing in mind that large bundles of this sum are handed over to the private sector (for expensive goodies and toys) and immediately relabeled "profits".
To start with, any corporation with holding companies in the BVI or Caymen islands (or other offshore tax shelters) should be excluded from receiving defense contracts. These procurement projects are a large enough windfall up front.
I'd be less concerned about the total number of dollars swooshing around if there were fewer sink holes.
Ah, the evolution of language. In 1,278,698 I.D. use of the shift key diminished, but the point made was not lost on even the lowly four and five diggers.
It's true: the M.A.D. doctrine (by which I mean M.A.D in newspeak) inverts the risk profile of the launch-fail condition. Deterrence is like that. In oldspeak, as we used to say, "when the cat's away the mice will play". No, those strange symbols are not mouse-whisker emoticons. We used to call them delimiters, back when both ends of a sentence had one, even though not of the same kind. Yeah, it was kinda weird, now that I think about it. But it grows on you after 40,000 hours of reading 600 wpm. You get used to it, ya know?
Too bad we only have negative evidence that M.A.D. actually worked in the first place.
Because the word 'liberal' begins with the same first 5 letters as 'liberty' does not mean the two have anything at all to do with each other.
Try listening to Wolfe on Liberalism. The correlation increases with education. But I concede your point in the case of Liberia.
Liberalism comes up on EconTalk fairly regularly. If this is the lecture I recall, Liberals were originally people who opposed intrusive, proscriptive behaviours of the church (sometimes a state church).
The quick and dirty transcript gives the flavour right off the top:
Three aspects of liberalism: substantive, procedural, and temperamental. Definition: Liberalism has a set of principles; liberals are committed to the principle that as many people as possible should have control over their lives as feasible. Substantive: In competition with other ideologies, so if you are a substantive liberal, you are not a conservative or a socialist, etc. Also, liberalism is about procedures: commitments to open government, separation of power, checks and balances, suspicion on absolutist rule. Can be a substantive conservative and still be a procedural liberal. Temperament: openness to the world, willingness to experiment and be inventive. A lot of Manhattan leftists who have tenure and live in rent-controlled apartments who temperamentally are not liberals because they are so completely shut off to changing anything.
Apologies to Russ Roberts if I quote too much. Of course, not everyone agrees, which does not, however, erase history. Control, in particular, is a slippery word, but potentially resolvable by the one child per planet policy.
Innovation is not restricted to technology or end product. Corporations also innovate on business methods. Microsoft's gift to the world was backward-compatibility for the masses on top of a commodity hardware base. Darn hard to do, as the open source community has discovered. Apple's take on this was "just buy everything all over again (machine, software, peripherals), we need the revenue; shiny new, shiny new, la la la la la la, can't hear you".
Back when a kick-ass PC workstation set you back three grand, the Apple tax was ungodly. It wasn't until the majority of their product line was sub $1000 that the Apple business model really caught flight. Turns out people are willing to chuck a $500 gadget that's 18 months old if the replacement gadget screams hotness. Apple should have modeled it's marketing department after women's tennis, where the careers last about as long as the average Apple product introduction, and scream almost as loudly.
What Microsoft pulled off with their business method was the most profitable business method innovation in human history even if it came mostly from the department of velcro thumbscrews, rather than the software coders. Loathed all the way to the bank.
The goal of every dominant corporation is to escape market discipline by redefining your own niche entirely to your own satisfaction. Actually competing on virtue is strictly for losers. You might even lose money if your product is mediocre. Intolerable! Mostly the companies competing on virtue are the companies that have yet to displace the incumbent gorilla. We watch Google nervously for the onset of absolute power.
Few companies wish to concede their gorilla envy, so everyone at the top of the ecosystem (gorillas and gorilla-wannabees) screams "innovation" at the top of their lungs to throw off the scent.
Did the Little Shop of Horrors innovate? Damn right, but rarely did they make an appearance as the hottest up and coming women's tennis star. Not for them to be washed out at twenty one. No, they were always more interested in being one of those old guys on the golf tour cranking up the career winnings wearing those funny clothes. The trendy golf cap with the Xbox logo fools no-one. The rest of the outfit is pure polyplad. Puffy men with Rolex's drool in admiration.
Reading slashdot feels like dropping in on a pool boy convention. Yeah, we're the man, feasting on neglected trophy wives and rolling along with a twelve-month life plan. Yeah, the man has three houses in Palm Beach and forty billion in loose change, but what has he done lately?
Each version is a little better, but it is years and years behind the iPhone for basic reliability
That's an amazing crystal ball you have there. Can you wrap you arms around it?
It's notoriously hard to project stability in a rapidly moving software project. "Years and years" is a span of time longer than Chrome's entire release history. You might get away with saying that clang/llvm is years and years behind GCC, if the parts that aren't done yet matter more than what's already superior.
OpenBSD takes a lot of flack for bragging about "security out of the box" where the lion's share of this accomplishment is ensuring that risky services are not enabled by default. So it's damn secure doing not very damn much, and probably slightly more damn secure than anything else doing equally little. I think it's a great policy, but it only proves so much.
For all I know, the iPhone is years and years behind the basic stability of the DynaTAC brick phone from 1983. You hold those damn bricks any damn way you wanted to, tennis elbow notwithstanding.
The more likely explanation, however, is that they are both listed in alphabetical order and it is just a poor coding job. Hanlon's Razor and all.
This would be true in a non-iterated system, but as soon as your nefarious adversary hears you declaring this with sincerity, it potentially becomes non-true in the next iteration, unless this is already the next iteration, it which case it might already be true.
Voting systems need to be built to standards at least as high as the judiciary, where perception of bias is considered almost as bad as bias itself.
Electronic voting designs should be subject to the same scrutiny that NIST applied in selecting AES or the next secure hash. Or is democracy not actually worth the effort? Funny how when America goes around exporting freedom, the customer response is tepid.
Hanlon's razor needs to be revised to read "Never attribute to malice in the first instance that which is adequately explained by stupidity." As Bush once tried to say "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me".
Is there any adequate explanation for trusting democracy to opaque code? I think not.
I have large hands. Size L dish gloves look like latex paint. My choice boils down to one X or two. For the longest time I had the jumbo Mouseman Wheel. Used it until the teflon feet wore off. It's highly sculpted. 45mm to the top of the arch along the inside (left) ridge. Beauty. Unfortunately, very coarse wheel, no side scrolling, no side buttons. Replaced with an MX-500, which is just barely big enough. More buttons, less sculpted. This is good, because I've been mousing left handed for years now. My mouse position is 22cm to the left of the GH divide. On my aging Compaq keyboard, 22cm to the right side of the GH divide reaches the outer edge of the page down/page up keys. My mouse position on the right would be another 18cm further displaced from my centerline, after clearing the numeric keypad.
After at least four years mousing on the left, I'm pretty ambidextrous for mouse work. It's a bit annoying that my thumb buttons are turned outward, but I can live with that. For detail work (pixel touch-up in GIMP, which is a rare task) I reach across with the right hand and drive the mouse tilted. This isn't bad and actually stretches the shoulder in a direction where it could use more work.
It takes a lot of stress off the shoulder and upper arm to keep the mouse tight to the keyboard's home position. At the end of a long day, When your shoulder gets tired, it cooks up a bad deal with the spine: tilt a little bit to the right, please. Any tilt in the spine requires *three* lateral bends, because the ears have this strange idea of keeping the head vertical. You get one tilt out, one tilt back, and a third kink to restore the neck to the vertical axis. That final kink is up in the shoulder or the base of the neck. A very effective method to discover how much you fall into this kind of bad habit is to tape a giant X onto your bare back. Every time you tilt, the tape pulls. It's a shock at first how often this happens. You soon lose some hairs. In fact, it was the only really useful thing I got out of a back therapy program that was too oriented to worker's compensation.
I'm hard on my hands when keyboarding, but rarely experience discomfort. When I do, I cease typing fairly immediately. When I have experienced pain, it's always due to typing with the wrist kinked upward. This especially happened with my first laptop, which wasn't especially thin at the front bezel. Keeping the monitors high enough helps prevent stooping and upward compensation in the wrist. Never had a problem with lateral flex at the wrist. Average width of ribcage with longish forearms and fingers are an advantage I guess. The downside of large hands is that I have to employ the Steve Jobs finger file just to type on the average laptop these days. Ergonomically, most laptop users are completely hosed. The base of my desktop screen is half a meter from the back of keyboard. Larger than average fonts reduce craning. The laptop form factor would be a perfect fit for Yoda, but given his hand structure, he probably uses a Blackberry.
One theory of monitor height is to position the center of the monitor at eye level. Few people do this. The deep reason is that it forces the eyelid to open a bit wider, and this can lead to eye fatigue. The usual recommendation is top of the monitor at eye level. This is high enough to keep the neck and back upright, but low enough not to stress the eyes.
All these things work together to reduce stress on the hands. It's not just a matter of optimal tactile feel. Ergonomics is great place to practice the five whys. Many people latch onto a solution halfway down the why tower, especially when shopping displaces thinking.
I thought the whole piece was an exercise in death fantasy. For some unknown reason, he's trying to take Mozilla with him.
I can feel the rope being slipped around my neck, but before you kick away the stool, give yourself over to wistfulness for just a moment.
Anticipation is making me wait. No, fuck it, the only wistfulness I need right now is the sound of a rope creaking.
Nice. That's what you need to have small fonts that scale smoothly without blotchy in-betweens. I don't much like squinting at small, fuzzy fonts. If 150 DPI is visually acceptable, why have I not seen a 150 DPI laser printer since the early 1990s? I suspect on the screen with some good AA that 200 DPI would permit smooth scaling of smaller font sizes.
It won't happen for large screens until the marginal cost of the extra pixel density is relatively insignificant, about five years I'd guess after 30" desktop screens become relatively normal, at which point the same number of pixels might become available in higher density screens a size or two less overwhelming.
I've never thought that 1080 was enough vertical pixels for programming. Both of my panels tilt, but then I figured out that this kind of buggers up the clear-type support. The first time I tried it my video card didn't have the horsepower to run transposed. It was SLOW. Haven't tried it with my new Evergreen card, but I'd assume the Linux drivers remain too broken to make a go of it. An open source driver that might work great someday beats a closed source driver that already does, in my peculiar world view.
I think the 6000 series will have multiple DP outlets.
One DP provides "17.28 Gbit/s of video bandwidth, enough for supporting 4 simultaneous 1080p60 displays or 2560 × 1600 × 30 bit @120 Hz" according to the bathroom wall of all knowledge.
The problem is not with the video cards, although it seems kind of obscene to make the electrons wiggle so much.
It also misses the point that Facebook is about *SHARING* data. The idea is you are sharing things with people. If you want to keep things private ... Facebook is not the place to do it.
Duh! But I did enjoy watching the metal boomerang slice your hand off. I'm sure you won't mind if I share (having assumed your Facebook identity on the sly) that you're dumping your main squeeze because she slept with your boss, but you don't care because you're out now.
It's unfortunate that authentication and privacy get so badly conflated. The need for SSL certificates derives from the authentication function, but you can't establish a private connection without one, for no technical reason at all, but it's a nice racket. Sometimes I want privacy (e.g. plaintext passwords being exchanged) and sometimes I want authenticity (that only I post under my own identity).
Hopefully you fingers came off clean and can be surgically repaired. Next time, type smarter.
Concerning Facebook, it's a no-fly zone for me. I preferred sharing back in the day when sharing was only weakly transitive unless especially ghastly, malicious or inbred.
I'm surprised at the quick dominance of brick-layers with children justifying a laissez faire attitude towards information attrition. I'm less surprised that some people have latched onto the question as a support group for media squirrels. I concur. In the long run, investing cathexis in trinkets disappoints.
What interests me is capturing the random lateral associations of an overstimulated mind. It's easy to recover the main grooves, harder to recover unexpected connections. Some authors do this for a living. I think some science fiction succeeds precisely because the author is attuned to noticing (and remembering) these strangely persistent stray associations.
For myself, I settled on a three-tier system depending on my current state of overstimulation. When I'm on a tear I keyboard so vigorously that people sometimes ask "what's that noise in the other room?" It's blurs into a staccato rattle. But then I have days where my not even my hyperactive fingers can keep up with the bubbles of free association. On these days I fire up the iPod as a voice recorder. When I'm finished, I use an audio program to remove background noise, zap silence, and accelerate. An hour or two on the couch turns into a forty minute recording (but you have to learn to shut up until you have fully formed sentences). It took a while not to find the sound of my own voice revolting. I've sometimes listened to previous rants while doing kitchen work. It's a way to reprime the pump when the internal lava lamp ceases to roil. The narcissism of the project makes me gag, but sometimes you have to suck up your pride to do your best work. My GP sends me back for a thyroid exam every second visit. He thinks I talk too fast in normal life. My post-processed verbal diatribes are quite brisk.
If the idea storm slows down a bit, but still too much to wiki with declarative sentences, I fall back on a mind manager. I've been using XMIND within Eclipse, which is not without its frustrations.
The ideal is when ideas flow at roughly the maximum rate I can enter the ideas into my personal wiki. There have been idea floods where I've created 100 new pages in the space of three or four hours, usually forming at least a weakly connected graph with plenty of spider wires burring in previously existing pages to stumble upon in future traversals. I've micro-managed mass battles in AoE with less ferver. After ten of thousands of edits, I've developed some favorite mouse paths. Let's just say Glipper is my friend, tab management is a way of life, and working memory is the Gift of the Magi. Well, not quite that dire, but there is a tension involved in optimizing wiki efficiency with also remembering the content you're trying to record, along with attitudes about how you're filtering that content while you record it. Inspiration is a meta bomb.
In the long run, data is not terribly meaningful. Attitudes about the data, however, are impossible to fully recover if you don't take notes. It's really all a giant record of what I care about and why I care about it. Attitude interests me. Working code also interests me, because I have complex attitudes about skirting debasement. At the end of the day, I mostly program so I can write about it. Berlioz was a first rate musician who had a touch of the same disease.
In an artist's life one thunderclap sometimes follows swiftly on another ... I had just had the successive revelations of Shakespeare and Weber. Now at another point on the horizon I saw the giant form of Beethoven rear up. The shock was almost as great as that of Shakespeare had been. Beethoven opened before me a new world of music, as Shakespeare had revealed a new universe of poetry.
Of course, it's his response to these thunderclaps that pours out in his music. The central ideas in my life have been gestating for twenty years now, and only through my wiki have I finally measured their circumference.
The final cog in my strategy is to vent i
The situation where this seemed potentially useful is when you smoke one down the baseline (left or right). It will either be caught (you're out), curve foul (return to the batters box, do not collect $200) or rattle around in the deep corner. If the loping path is as much faster as this suggests, maybe some of the easy stand-up doubles can be stretched for a triple, or a triple can be waved home if the outfielder makes multiple pumps to fish out the ball.
Baseball is a game of inches. You take whatever edge you can, whether it comes up often or not. I haven't watched much baseball since the Jays last won the series (I was in Toronto at the time and caught the homer-fever despite the deadly slow pace of the game compared to the one true sport), but it seems to me that a guy like John Olerud would be the perfect case study. "Cheetah" hit a lot of balls that begged to be stretched for an extra base, but didn't have Henderson's wheels.
From the bathroom wall of all knowledge:
Longtime scout Charlie Metro remembered the havoc caused by Henderson: '"I did a lot of study and I found that it's impossible to throw Rickey Henderson out. I started using stopwatches and everything. I found it was impossible to throw some other guys out also. They can go from first to second in 2.9 seconds; and no pitcher catcher combination in baseball could throw from here to there to tag second in 2.9 seconds, it was always 3, 3.1, 3.2. So actually, the runner that can make the continuous, regular move like Rickey's can't be thrown out, and he's proven it."
This is followed by another cute anecdote, demonstrating a rare, appropriate use of all-caps:
"I'm about to give you one of my all-time favorite statistics: Rickey Henderson walked 796 times in his career LEADING OFF AN INNING. Think about this again. There would be nothing, absolutely nothing, a pitcher would want to avoid more than walking Rickey Henderson to lead off an inning. And yet he walked SEVEN HUNDRED NINETY SIX times to lead off an inning.
For Rickey, when he made first base, he was 81% safe at 2nd already. No math required.
I agree with the guy a few posts back.
Even when it seems "obvious" (off the wall, etc) you almost always base the decision to go to 2nd from the 1st conference presentation. You make contact, start running at fast as you can, everyone starts looking, and you are basically over 1/2 way to 1st base before anyone figures out whether the result has merit. And a lot of the time you are not the only one running - you (and your faculty advisers) have to look out for other runners, figure out what they are going to do, and guess the composition of the peer review panel, etc, to know whether the paper will be accepted for publication.
Trying to plan for the exact base and route to it (beyond the usual wide turn that any little leaguer already knows) from the moment you make contact is about as useful as planning where you are going to swing before the pitch. Mathematics research is NOT a video game...
Now it all makes sense. The paper is actually a parody on outcome-based research investment as depicted in the red states.