Not only is this solution "good enough", from an anti-trust standpoint it is probably far better than a truly random function.
Obviously dude INAL, but he seems to think he's a judge and speaks for Europe. If the European court wished to have Microsoft innovate "better than random" they could have asked for this solution directly, or Microsoft could have proposed it formally. Anything less is flirting with contempt of court. To think that they pay their junior legal representation on the order of $300/hour just to ask the judge if they might please submit such a request, the idea that they elected to go with "good enough" to save 15 minutes of programming effort that a high school intern could have done better boggles the mind.
But thanks for the faux MBA. After Canada won the hockey game (woohoo), I hung around for the free Texas Hold'em, my first game in real life with strange drunks. In this game, you got a special chip for each beer consumed prior to the game. This chip was worth a SB on any round of play. The guy with seven of these white chips couldn't even properly count out a raise of 1000, but he did offer some excellent business advice while he fumbled around.
Another guy with a big stack of white bonus chips sees my 20 BB raise from early seat with his suited J2 (I'm holding the big slick), stays with me after I go all-in hitting an ace on the flop, then busts me out when he hits his flush draw on the river.
Then I return home to a troll paean that Microsoft's formal incompetence is "better than random". Some days you can't win.
No dude, hate to break this, you outperform the slashdot article-submission hive mind, which is insulting to one of our more glamorous insects. A bumble bee can coordinate six legs, a set of wings, a pair of antenna, a pair of eyes, and some really cool frame-of-reference navigation aids. The average slashdot editor is sometimes unable to navigate himself/herself/itself out of a Joe-blog no-link-anywhere-useful cul de scat. The honey dance for that article is about the magnitude of bee mite sneezing into his elbow.
Witness Forbes beating us senseless by two orders of magnitude with an article that at least qualifies for a flirtatious abdominal shimmy, since it actually links to T original FA.
The editor responsible is running the serious risk of coming down with Alzheimer's in later life and no one noticing. What was occupying your mind on the other monitor, the Jamaican mixed naked luge? Unbelievable.
Nuclear. Fucking. Weapons. There's no problem that cannot be made to go away with sufficient use of nuclear weapons.
Your diction sounds like you're falling into a black hole, so I think you're going to need more than a cowboy hat and a crayon to catapult around the other side.
What kind of mind goes into a parking orbit between words?
I admit, it is kind of menacing to see a blood and guts marine in a stalled humvee bearing down on you with four sumo wrestlers tossing the vehicle forward in three foot increments. Anyone would think twice confronted with that spectacle.
Those two concepts are far from mutually exclusive. Pixel perfect means you can have flexible layouts that don't do unpredictable things because the rendering engine's calculations were off.
If that's what you mean, the term should be pixel precise. TeX has pixel precise layout, the calculations are well defined, and the web should, too.
Perfection sets off my warning bells. There's always a contingent occupying the high ground of right-thinking simplicity known as "one size fits all". These traitors to the crown are surely rallying under the banner of pixel perfect, regardless of any ostensible definition among those in the know.
Precision is a shared value (a precise system delivers precision to everyone), whereas perfection is a social construct, sometimes an entirely personal construct, which can be OK if the individual has the exquisite taste of a Michelangelo and the ascendant heights of the human spirit shine through.
One of my most heavily used Firefox plug-ins is NoSquint, by means of which I dispense with as much of a site's dress code as possible, optimizing the mental process of unpacking the text to determine whether the site is burbling gibberish or not. When I'm reading for critical faculty, my fonts are rarely set at less than 10 cpi, even the proportional fonts.
Right now, an article sitting open on my other screen on AI, augmented intelligence, and alternative intelligence is magnified to 10 cpi / 4 lpi, and I suspect that's barely enough for the landmines within. My landmine detection fonts tend to rupture the aesthetics of the presentation, which is just as well, since there is delicate thinking required.
In the ideal world, perfection is subordinate to purpose. My sole purpose for visiting most web sites is to determine if what they've written there is larded or illuminating. The fashion boutique strip malls at the top, right, and bottom of most web pages interest me not.
Perfection without purpose frightens me. It usually means there will be another force of will present, which I will likely end up battling with. If the user isn't going to supply force of will, it might be good if the operating environment does so on the user's behalf, which is the Apple model. When I use Apple products, I inevitably brush shoulders rather violently with the Apple aesthetic, which does not mirror my own. For every case where it facilitates my goal, there's another where it chafes ingrained preference.
Returning to original sin, my mortal enemy of imprecision is Microsoft Word. You can't assert your will against that thing for any reasonable investment of time or anger. However hard you tug the laces, it manages to squirt sideways at an inconvenient juncture in the middle of getting real work done. Soon one pines for the PDF straight-jacket. The very thought of pining for PDF induces black-leather nightmares straight out of Pan's Labyrinth.
I sincerely hope switching off IE6 marks the beginning of the end for all software that subordinates culture to quirk. In a different life line, I could imagine having this conversation:
Precocious grandchild: Grandpa, what does "imprecise" mean?
Greybeard self: Well, imprecision has been part of civilization since the beginning of time, but it was Bill Gates who made it famous. Ever heard of Bill Gates? No? Have you ever played holographic pinball? It's like that, only the pinball table is hidden inside a machine you depend upon to get things done, so you never know what's going to happen next.
Grandchild (perplexed): Why would he do that? Why would he make a machine like that?
Greybeard self: Well, it never made any sense to me. History is interesting that way. Every society seems to do something that makes no sense, and it's usually the children who figure it out first. Smart children like you. That's why the UN is presently debating a ban on life-extension research.
This is now my second self-response, having since slogged through a fairly close reading of Lomborg's 27 page rebuttal to The Deception and 30 page rebuttal to Scientific American from late 2001, as well as snippets of rebuttal rebuttal.
It must be added that the space allotted for reviews is always limited, as it was in this instance in Scientific American, making it impossible to mention, never mind to explain, every mistake that has been noticed. It should also be understood that, even if space were not limited, few reviewers would consider it their responsibility to explain every error that a deeply flawed work contains, once they have explained enough of them to establish beyond doubt that the author is not competent in the subjects he is addressing.
Did he did state "my objective is to brush aside an irritating gnat" in eminencese, or do my ears deceive me?
And this (emphasis mine):
This means resources of tar sands and oil shale that would be economically exploitable only at prices around $30 per barrel are in fact more expensive than oil has been for nearly all of the last century. They could be considered "reserves" material that is exploitable with current technology at current prices only in circumstances under which the price of conventional oil had risen to well above what has been usual for the past century, which was exactly my point.
Talk about missing the forest for seeing the trees. Holdren seems to completely miss the point that Lomborg is attacking the litany of the apocalypse, the unfounded extrapolations of doom that surround whatever ecological facts gain sway in the moment. Lomborg must lie awake at night sweating over his misguided use of $30/barrel to represent a viable future price of oil. The first chart I pulled up suggests that light sweet crude hasn't seen the underside of $30 since 2004 and might never see it again.
Minus one point to Lomborg for poor scholarship, plus one hundred points to Lomborg for having chosen a credible lower bound on the near-term future price despite the century of contrary pricing which so infatuates Holdren to no useful purpose.
Of the four SA critics, it was Holdren whose initial statement I found most persuasive:
What environmentalists mainly say on this topic is not that we are running out of energy but that we are running out of environment--that is, running out of the capacity of air, water, soil and biota to absorb, without intolerable consequences for human well-being, the effects of energy extraction, transport, transformation and use.
Lomborg understands this, but makes light of the risk by putting too much faith in price trends. There's a lot of political incentive to keep the price of oil within relatively narrow bounds. One of the degrees of freedom to accomplish this is shifting the burden onto the environment, for example, the Bush administration lifting the drilling ban in Alaska. At some point the domino game of shifting the burden is doomed to fail, and then the price might suddenly spike upwards, like an uncontrolled housing bubble.
There was much reference to the IPCC in Lomborg's rebuttal. His critics were engaging in much finger wagging, while putting forth little additional data. How could they? They are eminent and political. The precise wording of IPCC reports is wrangled for years. They don't want to stick their necks out why gnat swatting. Makes me wonder if the end result of IPCC politics is on par with the report on the Challenger explosion that might have resulted without Feynman involved.
I would dearly love to see an incisive mind, such as Feynman's, write a review of Lomborg's tracts. Do you think Feynman would have carped over $30/barrel as an estimated futu
As much as I hate posting twice on the same thread, I couldn't resist adding this to a thread concerning the persecution of lone voices. This old gal tops the charts in biddy charisma.
Lomborg paints himself a persecuted DaVinci, a lone voice of scientific genius against the harsh dogma of the establishment. Basically Friel has published a detailed book review debunking that picture, the journal of nature also reviews books and like Friel they do not claim them to be anything more than researched opinion.
Lomborg was persecuted, by Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty.
[The Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation] found the DCSD verdict "dissatisfactory", "deserving [of] criticism" and "emotional." Most importantly, the Ministry found "that the DCSD has not documented where [Lomborg] has allegedly been biased in his choice of data and in his argumentation, and that the [DCSD] ruling is completely void of argumentation."
To buy off the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty, he'd need to be de Medici (which makes more sense for an economist to begin with), not DaVinci. Where did you come up with that? Instead of opening up an artery of purple prose, you might with more creativity have cited him for posing as Robert Hooke, a man who looked at the same phenomena as every other scientist, but actually saw what he was seeing. It would still exaggerate Lomborg's conceit, but at least it would edify and amuse.
If Lomborg's fraud was so blatant and egregious, how could DCSD have managed to so badly bungle their cause? Is DCSD a lighthouse of incompetence among an otherwise irreproachable system of peer review? Personally, I neither find Lomborg singular, nor the incompetence of his detractors singular. Where there's mass funding at stake, I find the peer review system no less vulnerable to bubbles of human ambition than the banking system.
As for being the "lone voice", you might wish to confer with The Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty concerning his isolation as a pariah. A man willing to go as much against the grain as he has is going to have either a thicker skin or more ego blubber than your average man. Newton chose to alienate Leibniz rather than embracing and engaging in dialog with perhaps the only man alive who could fully appreciate Newton's achievements. What evidence do you have that Lomborg would rather be the sole beacon of his cause rather than embrace his natural allies? Is his solitude selective, or generously bequeathed?
Lomborg does not claim to do science. He's an economist exposing leaps of faith from scientific mechanism to speculation about the probable future effects, to even wilder speculation about costs and outcomes in mitigating those effects. Most scientists are excellent at step one, identifying the scientific mechanism. Few scientists have any training at all in steps two or three. I agree with Lomborg that the discipline of economics has a stronger and better substantiated tradition in assessing cost-benefit of radical intervention. Scientists wade into the dismal science with no apparent concern for all the corpses buried there. To my eye, they look like fools.
What gives scientists the amazing hubris to cross this boundary of fact to speculation unmarked? The peer review process keeps them honest about the mechanism. Most of their contact with step three (cost benefit of mitigation) is a paragraph tacked on to their funding applications about the amazing benefits to humanity that will accrue if their research project is approved. These vapid claims are not subject to peer review. They are instead subject to fiscal reward, an extremely poor substitute for claiming moral high ground in the debate.
I find the obeisance to peer review in popular culture fascinating. Like hazing in the military, it's such an obnoxious process, you have to grow to love it, or lose your sanity. Like military culture, it seems to achieve its stated purpose, and has for hundreds of years.
If car insurance worked like health insurance, we'd never see the real costs of things like oil changes because we'd only pay the co-pays. And the costs would rise since every shop would need an extra person to handle the paperwork and claims.
This is the quasi-logical rhetorical form that gives the economics profession a bad name, for it conceals everything about the issue worth thinking about.
The underlying structure is the timeless vapour-lock of the insipid: "if there is enough food in the food, how come people are starving?"
Indeed, good question, and it happens to have an answer: distribution is often a harder problem to solve than production. This surprises anyone why? The former is largely a political problem (venality and custom), the later is largely an industrial/engineering/scientific problem. Our accomplishments on the later front include the green revolution, fiber optics, and sending a man to moon, on the former front our wreath of achievement is CNN.
In the case of our hyper-technological medical system, it's a miracle of paper-work that anyone gets the right sequence of treatments on a prompt and cost effective basis. The paper-pushers are hardly a burden on the system, they are practically the whole of the system, unless you regard the human brain as a leech on the human organism.
E. O. Wilson: Trailhead is a nice read. Now imagine what it requires to individually and fairly compensate every ant in this society for their individual contribution as measured by the outcome to the hive of the trails they blaze or toil upon? You'd need a whole other ant hill just to keep track.
A founding principle of America is that all this score keeping is a pro bono service of the invisible hand. That's what "invisible" primarily means by those who invoke it: that you never see the bill for services rendered. A health system based on less individual score keeping for the corporate participants (such as the Canadian system) strikes most Americans as inimical to the American way, yet at the same time the cost of all this score keeping is brushed off the table as inefficiency and overhead endemic to the regulatory structure as opposed to being endemic to the problem itself, delivering health care products and services so complex and litigious and expensive it boggles the mind.
Yes, it's possible to stiff the invisible hand, if you don't mind watching 20% of American society line up for the soup kitchen while the nation fences with Asian tigers for increasingly sparse petroleum resources.
I've been trying to decode the lure of "the invisible hand" for over a decade. Visibility in America is anything or anyone that collects its debts; invisibility is everything else. Amazing what can hide in a word and for how long. The old gag in America is that as soon as the invisible hand becomes visible (by collecting its debt for services rendered) it's immediately dismissed as a burden of regulation, with the same fatuous logic that in a world with enough food for everyone, no one starves.
In the glib theory of the invisible hand, a twenty year old American male lacking health insurance who comes down with testicular cancer can borrow $100,000 against future earnings (without posting hard equity of which he has none), to cure himself of the cancer and remain a valuable member of the American work force, since this is the most sensible economic outcome. Equity-lite loans worked great with housing.
If your family posts equity, that's sugar-daddy insurance, a whole different ball game. In the American myth, everyone has a loving sugar-daddy to fall back upon when the heartless banks demand equity against their loans, and thus a productive future worker never falls through the cracks of too little treatment too late.
Chapter 8 of How To Save Jobs contains a nice discussion of the U.S. health care system. Since David Gewirtz has kindly made this book free to download, I've taken the liberty of quoting more than I might otherwise, concerning bankruptcy and rescission (emphasis mine):
Three-quarters had health insurance. Put those two numbers together. 60% of all bankruptcies in America were driven by people who couldn't pay their medical bills, most of whom actually had health insurance.
...
Most insurers claim the rate of rescission is fairly small. In testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce, Don Hamm, CEO of Assurant Health stated "Rescission is rare. It affects less than one-half of one percent of people we cover."
And yet, according to a story by Karl Vick in the September 8, 2009 issue of the Washington Post:
In the past 18 months, California's five largest insurers paid almost $19 million in fines for marooning policyholders who had fallen ill. That includes a $1 million fine against Health Net, which admitted offering bonuses to employees for finding reasons to cancel policies, according to company documents released in court.
Amazing statistical coincidence that the rescission rate mirrors the relatively low rate in modern society of personal health catastrophe.
Gewirtz is an odd duck, with significant background in both politics and technology. If your response to Gewirtz is to pigeon-hole him for easy target practice at one end or the other of the ideological spectrum, good luck with that. If he's as clever as I think he is, his misguiding jingoism on "buy American" could be cured by a close listen to Rustici on Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression, another flawed discussion which nevertheless can not be resolved by means of a circular pigeon dance. In the end, I rejected about a quarter of what Rustici puts forward, but felt edified by the other three quarters.
I'm about halfway through The Baroque Cycle which has an an organizing theme tumult in the understanding of financial markets and the stability of credit and currency. If Neil's super-great (mostly paternal) granddaughter Nellie Stephenson were to write the Barack Cycle several hundred years from now, it would focus on the present tumult and disorder in our health insurance industry, with lobbyists in Washington taking center stage as the imposing yet perhaps doomed palace of Versailles.
America fails to reform it's health care system because it is now in the late phase of the French disease, terminal narcissism. Debate rarely turns on what needs to be done until coinage runs short. From what I've read, mission accomplished. Will the American empire make it to the next gas station running on fumes? America is not to be underestimated, but far enough back, hard to believe, neither was France.
These kinds of laws are a lot like Smoot-Hawley. The elite has a shallow hand-waving understanding of how this implicates tax revenue (shared by few of the wonks), while totally failing (with scant concern) to wrap their minds around the larger consequences.
Fortunately, there are economies gaining steam in other corners of the world less set in their sumptitude, that sucking glissando you hear as you circle around the velvet drain pipe.
In a vigorous nation, it might be prudent to fix this while time remains, starting with a cold hard look at some of these small fish nourishing larger ponds.
You don't go to college to make friends with other idiots. You go there to study, end of story.
I've read several books lately suggesting this attitude is a good foundation for watching your future job be outsourced to India from under your feet. Pure analytic skills are no longer the Mecca of employment they once were.
Also, painting your entire peer group by the deficiencies of the majority doesn't score well on the EQ scale. If 80% of your peers are so far beneath you as to deserve contempt, look around you, you've made the worst choice of college of anyone in the room. Three or four like minds is more than enough, amid a larger network of people oriented to succeed in life.
End of story? Yes, if that's your attitude, I bet it is. For the bright and broad-minded, beginning of story.
University is not such a great educational environment for the gifted. It tends to be far too compartmentalized and generativity is barely tolerated until you hit graduate school, by which point you're already deep into the politics of career advancement.
What I would have liked between high school and university is two years in a program with no intellectual walls, a complete absence of what McLuhan called "hardening of the categories". Let the gifted student gravitate to his/her own level, find some difficult problems of interest, and go where the wind takes you.
Why can't we postpone hardening of the categories until our gifted young people have actually learned something of their own devising?
You see this in the software profession as well. Surrounded by the riches of invention, some people only manage to see that the programming language of the moment isn't managing to prevent the guy next to you from making sloppy or irritating mistakes.
Every time I see "the desktop" debated, there seems to be a group retreat into the logic of one-size-fits-all. I don't think *anyone* will ever manage to make a desktop operating system that suits all purposes.
Windows is designed to be convenient in many respects, but what was the opportunity cost to the web as a whole to support the idiosyncrasies of IE6? Could that effort have delivered more user value employed elsewhere? Hell yes. Monolithic design is good for the gaming ecosystem, but you pay for it in so many other ways.
I've never thought the value system of Linux was particularly desktop-centric. That always struck me as a bolt-on by people who crave affiliative affirmation. For me, the fundamental value system of Linux is as a method of software distribution and collaboration. If it also plays Flash--supposing you even want that--that's a cherry on top. 99% of the content I consider important can be had without Flash. For me the desktop is *not* a glorified media player. My goal on a computer is to interact with the desktop as little as possible. I prefer my screens plastered with applications so that the desktop can't be seen.
My biggest hardship with Ubuntu has been the default policy that you're stuck with whatever version of your favourite tool made the cut in the last release cycle.
I was working on a Windows system at work three days a week, and Ubuntu at home the other two (or three) days a week, accessing the same code base, and needing to run many of the same tools. I was constantly running into problems where some task could be completed on the Windows side by upgrading to the latest version of tool X, only to discover when I pulled the workspace onto my home network, that Ubuntu was stuck on some older version. I often wished it were easier to ask Ubuntu to install the experimental upgrade of some tool alongside the official version. Many times I only needed limited functionality from the experimental version for a small sub-project of some small sub-workspace.
Occasionally I fought to pull something in from some non-standard package source, usually with a fair amount of frustration, and not always with ultimate success. Problems get hairy in a big hurry if things don't mesh. I didn't choose Ubuntu for the pleasure of reverse engineering dpkg.
I find Ubuntu easy enough to work with if I'm prepared (on a semi-permanent basis) to lag six to nine months behind the latest major update of many highly popular tools. When I had to force Ubuntu to run something newer than whatever validated build came with my current install, I often lived to regret trying.
This is problematic on several levels. Ubuntu is often far enough behind that the upstream sources aren't terribly interested in your bug reports. Given the nature of my work, I generally prefer to run closer to upstream than what Ubuntu manages to package. Yet I don't want to live on a daily basis in testing. What I want is an easy way to live one foot in, one foot out.
There's a saying in sports that when you finally break into the major league, keep doing whatever it was that brought you. Stay with your strength and build your game from there. Too many discussions of The Desktop lose sight of this maxim. It's tempting to look around the locker room at what everyone else is bringing and deciding that "I need to be more like them". Desktop envy a good way to get busted back down to the minor leagues. You don't stick in the major leagues because you click in the clubhouse. Most discussions of the desktop feel like evaluating the roster by how great they are to hang with between games.
Areas where Linux could kick the snot out of XP on the field of battle are things like having a consistent, system-wide user-selectable spell checker. I've heard rumours of progress in this direction.
Spell checkers are typically tragic. Many times I work with text from elsewhere and I couldn't care less if American/British/Canadian spellings are mixed in every sentence. For text I wr
While youtube is nice for idling away some downtime, it's not the internet-dominating force this article makes out.
Wow, do you ever misunderstand the calculus of adolescent outrage. Ever joined a condo association rife with government retirees? If you have a busy career, there's a lot of battles you aren't going to fight on time investment alone.
Teenagers don't have much clout in the adult world, but they do have a lot of time, they're well connected, they function as mobs, and nothing makes them yowl louder than exclusion from mob norms.
For example, in many split families, if one of the parents has YouTube and the other can't be bothered to torch IE6, guess which parent won't be seeing much of the kids, if the kids have the option about which bus to take home after school that day?
I know families which function exactly this way. Kids start to get on your nerves, wait for an incident to occur (never in short supply), then shut off the Xbox for a week, then they predictably spend the next six days out of seven staying over at Dad's place. Nice little time out. In the example I'm thinking about, Dad doesn't make the kids do homework, so eventually you have to turn the Xbox back on, to make sure the little rats don't flunk the entire school year.
I like the way Google is presently working to lock-out lock-in.
I had a Seagate 500GB 7200.10 fail in September 2008 (crappy firmware edition), not long after installation after having sat on a shelf for a few months. When I approached Seagate to RMA the drive, they barely bothered to ask me what was wrong with it. Filled out a form, slapped it into a box, and back came the replacement, though a little less promptly than 3-7 days on the RMA form.
I'm at the point in life where I generally install a new OS onto a new disk drive, re-using older drives after *months* of successful operation on the new system / configuration. Spindles are cheap insurance at modern prices.
No vendor is immune from production glitches. I've been searching for the fountain of electronic youth for twenty years. No company, however great, is immune from a Toyota moment.
It amuses me how talismanic we tend to become on low sample sizes. Typical example: "I had a Brand X drive fail on me back in 2000, and haven't purchased another one since." Every vendor I've ever tried has fallen on its platter at least once, so I'm now back to pencil and paper.
What would make me happy is more binning from the drive manufacturer's. I like the middle bin between Joe consumer and Enterprise exabucks. It can't be that hard to look at production data and say "this batch is better than that batch" and bin accordingly.
I've heard that the external backup drives sold at Costco and places like that *are* sourced from batches not up to full warranty treatment. You'll notice these appliances have a shorter drive-life warranty than the same drive sold naked.
OTOH, it's hard for the average consumer to know for certain if you pay a $50 premium for the extra quality bin whether you're getting more quality, or just a different sticker. A web hosting facility is going to have the failure data to back up any decision making on paying a premium price.
Also, it's pretty easy for a careless consumer to compromise drive life by poor handling, installation, or faulty cooling. I'd guess about half of all failed drives (excepting DeathStar production sagas) suffered abuse at the hands of the retail chain or end user, which sets the limit on how much quality it makes sense for the vendors to promise.
However, if the consumer is playing a $50 sticker premium for a "black edition" disk drive, it's also likely the abuse level and cooling components are more carefully considers.
That would be a funny business model. The drive vendor sells exactly the same drives for $50 more, but the buyers who spring for the premium take so much better care of the drives, the drives gain a reputation for delivering higher reliability justifying the price.
To make this work, the vendor has to keep the supply of "black edition" drives to a relatively small trickle. Once the masses get their hands on them, the game is ruined.
One point the article doesn't mention is analyzing the platters under static load instead of dynamic load (including strain from spinning) and spindle vibration. I wonder how much that complicates quality control.
Approximation is a social construct. Most of the kids who are frightfully accelerated end up in math or computer science or some hard core discipline which can be done with no recourse to social constructs whatsoever. A 14-year-old prodigy doesn't have much social context to fall back upon. There's too much social context in engineering to appeal to many of these kids: what part of the equation to cross off and ignore today because it typically ends up being a rounding error on a safety margin.
These are the same kids who might have preferred engineering had they entered university at a more mature age. That's a selection bias that doesn't have much to do with it. I'm only interested in comparing people who have the engineering temperament with people who have the math/computer science temperament. There are some fairly deep differences in how these tribes approach simplicity, another social construct. It doesn't interest me much that math and physics are the best holding tanks for a certain type of person on an extreme cognitive development path.
The other bias is how you count sobriety. An engineer has roughly the same amount of social skill, divided into fewer sober hours. How much skill is involved in drinking six pints? How much social skill is involved in counting binge drinking as a social skill? After graduation the engineers look around the room and go "we're all relatively normal" not counting their fallen comrades who succumbed to life-long alcoholism i.e. those who continue behaving the same way after leaving school.
More of the attrition from math and computer science is by way of the psychiatric ward. A fallen engineer might end up turning a wrench in a pit crew (not at the F1 level). A fallen mathematician might go around knitting an imaginary blanket patterned after a Turkish fractal.
I was thinking about cognitive bias earlier today. We're all pretty good at cooking the denominator, which seems to be a prerequisite for social acceptance. Social skill is most impressive when least understood. We're a strange species.
The Xbox merely repackages IP from Intel, NVidia, Samsung, and Seagate. Hardly counts as a Microsoft product when you source so much IP from other companies, does it?
Buttercup sat up in bed. It must be his teeth. The farm boy did have good teeth, give credit where credit was due.
It's Microsoft's keyboard division that validates Microsoft as a manufacturing venture and not a patent troll.
Note to self: bad brain, bad. If I cut off the offending finger, will the other nine fingers work twice as hard?
That would be my right index finger. The "i" can be replaced with "1", commas can be replaced w1th sem1-colons; and it's long been overdue to cnaccer the letter "k". The angle-braccet / less-than symbol 1s the tough one 1n the group. Don't see how ! can l1ve w1thout that. So ! guess r1ght 1ndex f1nger 1s a ceeper; border1ng on 1nd1spens1ble.
There's a famous quote, "The graveyards are full of indispensable men."
I'm surprised more of them weren't cremated with the share certificates from the ventures they founded. Buried right beside them are the alcoholics who bet their future comfort on the wrong horse. Of course, that was before the invention of spare livers.
Unfortunately, this phrase suffers the usual semantic debasement in the shallow minds of the harried until it often means "without that fellow around, I'd actually have to show up and earn my living". Ask any plantation owner. Paradoxically, nothing boosts productivity like an indispensable head rolling down a splintered plank, so beware of second-order effects.
For some reason, my warning bells go off whenever Dave Winer enters the conversation.
It might be a mistake to define Google's business model so narrowly as advertising. There are broader perspectives on this ecosystem.
Amazing that Winer inherently proposes replacing the existing N:1 + 1:M model with an N:M model. When does that ever work? Middlemen exist for a reason. Is Winer's position that not tantamount to claiming that corporations will evolve to bypass the stock exchange and go direct to the shareholder? Why should NASDAQ take a cut of the pie? Parasites, all of them.
I don't get how the corporations are going to actively "come to me". I've mostly locked my work process down so that this can't happen. Direct telephone marketers still make my phone ring despite fierce efforts to the contrary. Hope the telcos are enjoying the Google rope trick. Hard to think of an industry more deserving of an internal-rope keel-hauling.
From Google's perspective, I've long thought that monetizing clicks was a perilous revenue model. I've never suspected that Google's security as the world's ultimate middleman was in any real jeopardy. There could be interesting ahead times if Google has to reinvent their revenue generation model from their position of power.
One guess is that Google ends up creating a user-pay micro-payment model for *highly* customized search results, exploiting semantic data-mining on a scope only possible to an organization sitting on 10^18 bytes of storage.
Or you can sit there and perform a hundred Google searches by hand to piece the same results together yourself. They don't have to take that away. What's your time worth? If you're in the group who never clicks on ads, your time is probably of enough value to expedite progress.
If you think Google is vulnerable on this front, good luck with your efforts to raise venture capital to compete against them. They've got an exabyte head start. Make sure your prospectus includes a good explanation of the zetta scale and the need to arrive their to achieve financial victory. You don't want to be busted by the stock exchange for deluding old ladies. First stop on your direct sales pitch should be Dave Winer. He's already declared himself sympathetic on two separate fronts. No wait, I forgot, Winer believes in an N:M routing around the leviathan with no interior infrastructure. Whew, that sure beats having to compete.
This whole summary is ignorant. Everyone is pushing a point of view. It has to be somebody's.
Some perspectives are more polarized than others, such as yours.
Peter Drucker distinguishes a garden-variety decision, which in a group setting could be by consensus or by fiat, from a management decision in which all implications of the decision are carefully thought through as it pertains to all facets of the organization/society.
One of the perspectives out there--such as mine--is that more people should think through the larger implications of these choices rather than splintering into irreconcilable "points of view", framing every debate in terms of differences instead of commonalities.
Ignoring my own advice, here's another take on the matter. The creations are in a bit of a pickle right now. It's easy enough to dismiss cosmology. The average person never even looks though a simple optical telescope at the heavens above. For all the average person knows, it's unicorns up there.
Genetic data, however, is not so easy to brush aside. The trickle is becoming a flood is becoming a global deluge. With a decade or three, this will completely redefine the delivery of health care. There won't be any escaping this daily reality unless you're so far off the grid you don't pay taxes. I don't think they like to admit this, but my take is that creationists are frightened out of their wits by the evolutionary tsunami.
Within a generation, it will common coinage that human genetics are a living document. I think "punctured evolution" is a bit like a river cutting its way into a steeper gorge. A first a trickle, then with increasing acceleration, until the whole river changes course. Something about the organization of the human brain cut its way into a new gorge at some point in the last 50,000 to 1Ma which leads to a lot of other things seeking a new equilibrium point (within the non-catastrophic degrees of freedom). All this small adjustment is preserved in the recent genetic record.
Six billion people times four billion base pairs. To a creationist trying hard not to be believe in 10^9, 24*10^18 is a harsh, unimaginable place. There's no lack of signal to resolve these matter. (I only counted one cell per person, there's additional signal in the cell-to-cell variability data.)
The remaining barrier is the mounting the massive collection and analysis program to extract this signal. The original 8086 had 20,000 transistors. Intel's latest flash memory chip has 64 billion bits. Who is going to confidently predict that we're not up to the genetic challenge? And then what for the creationists?
The old argument with the anthropologists was centered on the gaps in the fossil record, which resembled the gaps between stars in cold, hard space. The living genetic record also has gaps, like the gaps between hydrogen atoms at the sun's core.
What makes the creationists so frighteningly effective for the last twenty years is that they presently enjoy the clarity advantage that Sun Tsu described for an army fighting with its back against a river offering no escape. That worked fine against the motley assortment of fossil data.
Their present situation mirrors a cheesy line from Dances With Wolves, when Costner finally fesses up the appalling magnitude of the lost cause: Europeans will arrive "like the stars" in number. Noah, pack your umbrella, the data is here.
I listened to a somewhat disappointing talk with Richard Epstein on EconTalk last night. He's a smart guy, but never leaves a long enough gap in his sentence for another mind to participate and develop trust. Takes about 70% of your cognitive capacity just to parse the erudite logorrhea.
Nevertheless, he makes some good points along the way. One is that one unit of investment in the intellectual development of a four year old is worth two units of catching up later on.
It makes sense for the creationists to push the creationist view of the world o
One goal of EMV was to externalise the costs of dispute from the issuing bank, in that if a disputed transaction has been authorised by a manuscript signature, it would be charged to the merchant, while if it had been authorised by a PIN then it would be charged to the customer. The net effect is that the banking industry, which was responsible for the design of the system, carries less liability for the fraud. The industry describes this as a 'liability shift'.
Security economics teaches us that such arrangements create "moral hazard," by insulating banks from the risk of their poor system design, so it is no surprise when such plans go awry.
The main security fraud taking place here is duping the customers (and the courts) into thinking there's any security associated with the PIN protocol in the first place.
Let's make this clear to the court, in terms they might be able to comprehend.
Let's say you have a band of tax evading Massachusetts patriots concerned with the migratory cycle of lobsterbacks. They approach a fellow named Paul and tell him that they have set up special tower with a lantern and then hand him the key and some simple instructions, along with the parting shot "don't F this up, we know where to find you!"
Later, the patriots spy the wrong single lantern signal from the vague proximity of the special tower, make the wrong decision, and America drinks tea forever after. The patriots are pissed. Paul, you F-ed this up! You were the only one with the key to the signal tower.
To which Paul replies: What colour was the lantern light you witnessed?
Same as any other lantern, you dolt!
Did you tell anyone about the protocol who might abuse it?
No of course not! We've never told anyone who doesn't hold a key.
And how many keys did you give out?
Oh, about a billion.
And you could clearly identify my tower on a dark night?
Absolutely. It was the only lantern light clearly displayed above the horizon in your general direction.
What if it wasn't my lantern?
Impossible. You had the only key.
It'll be a rough night for the EMV consortium if they are ever visited by the ghost of patriots past, who would likely take a pretty dim view of the institutional foolishness on display here.
Which three men in a tub assumed 20 years ago, too, and it didn't happen.
The first rule of thumb is never to believe a prediction by anyone who writes grant applications for a livelihood, which covers most living scientists.
Computers will acquire a patchwork of amazing abilities over the next three decades. I'm not sure it's particularly useful to measure this against a three year old. Right now we're further along on "fly airplane" than "tie shoes". If there was a Turing test to declare whether a task is simple or not, humans would fail.
A Google data center with 100,000 CPU nodes is already pretty far up the cognitive scale, but it's not a form of cognition we've bothered to define as such. The most important intelligence will be assisted intelligence: what humans accomplish in collaboration with their tools. The tools will become increasingly amazing, at first on a patchwork basis, and then the seams will become increasingly unclear.
Right now social networking sites predict what we might find interesting on fairly trivial low-dimensional criteria. Netflix must be the all-time champion of the drunken I-fought-with-my-wife-tonight 1-5 rating. Could the data set possibly be less rich or more corrupt? And already we squeeze something out. Just wait until the computers know everything about us and the ability of the computer/network to anticipate our cognitive whims becomes spooky prescient.
On another front, some of the fruits of neurology are now coming on line. I have no idea whether this stuff works or not. Typical how we trip over our own shoelaces, trying to get speech recognition to work *before* mastering auditory grouping, which strikes me as far more fundamental.
Audience is the first company to deliver a commercial product based on the science of [a]uditory [s]cene [a]nalysis, which entails the grouping of components in a complex mixture of sound into sources. Just as the human auditory system can readily ignore background noises while focusing on a voice of interest, [our stuff achieves] noise suppression up to 30 dB for both stationary and non-stationary noise sources to provide [adjective of awesomeness] voice quality within even the [pertinent superlative].
Estimating programming time is often estimating how long it will take to do something that has never been done before.
And if it has been done before, it's out the door to India already, which I'm sure someone else will also point out.
It seems to me that a lot of project estimation is done to serve a hidden purpose.
Yes, and the hidden agendas are formal inputs to the schedule estimation problem. Been there, done that. One of the major terms in the non-linear politics is who gets the blame when a product shipped with working functionality proves impossible to extend in the next coding iteration because the wrong foundation was chosen. Do you want the estimate consistent with my professionalism, or with grenades baked in for the next guy to work on this? How many accountants say "the audit will take six weeks, but I could have it done in three if I cut a few corners"? The engineers are often the easiest departed to prey upon to extract the necessary lies to feed management fiction in the face of disgruntled investors. Our work process is among the least subjective, but our quality standards are among the most subjective. Works or doesn't work is hard science. Maintainable or not maintainable is pure sociology (under most boardroom conditions).
Some day I would love to seal my estimate into a cryptographic vault on the basis that my estimate is only correct if I don't tell anyone. As soon as you tell someone, that person immediately goes around changing the assumed conditions.
I'd also love to try a pair programming exercise where the project manager sits down beside me while I work and then I go into a stream of conscious mode:
Well, without knowing more about this tool, my estimate is one to eight weeks". If we spend anywhere from two to eight hours, my estimate will likely improve to an interval of (t,2*t) + investigation overhead. Which path would you like me to take?
Generally I can lucidly explain every decision point, usually three or four levels deep off the top of my head. Every time my companion antiparticle shies away from taking the abrupt path to clarity, the estimation error expression spouts more terms, in some cases combinatorially depending on sub-problem interrelationships.
With a certain level of development maturity, the shortest distance between two points is to drive clarity at every step of the process coupled with an intense feedback-loop concerning local discoveries. It wouldn't be a mathematical contradiction is the decision strategy with the lowest expected time has a particularly ragged expected variance. In fact, I believe this is true.
Another thing to throw at my companion antiparticle is that you can't just take the statistical average of the anticipated decision chain. If the variance of a distribution is poorly behaved (e.g. real life, according to Nassim Taleb) higher order moments of your distribution are undefined. Put that in your pipe and compute the average.
Of course, there are exceptions to the recalcitrance of black swans, such as when your business is in a lucrative application domain with slow moving market conditions with only gentlemen competitors if any competitors at all, and your company is funded by private money who politely and happily declare "looks like we're still on target to reach profitability in year ten, good work chaps".
About a year ago I had my Telus account switched to electronic billing. I tend to do my electronic banking in the wee hours. Half of my attempts to access my Telus account electronically resulted in text like this:
Unfortunately, we were unable to process your request. Our site is currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again later or contact a TELUS Customer Service Representative at 666-6666. We apologize for any inconvenience.
This was annoying, as the email notification does not include the balance owing. What I wanted was the email to contain an encrypted PDF of my paper statement so I never have to log onto their crappy web site. Nope, that's not possible.
Finally I call up my innovation-loving Telus rep. to complain about these recurrent electronic account service outages. I refrained from pointing out that the telephone industry *invented* uptime in the first place and that their billing computers seem not to take a holiday in the wee hours every other night.
I said if you can't send my billing details through email, then send me the paper bill as well until you figure out how to keep your electronic service online. To which the answer was "I can do that, but I'll first have to cancel your electronic billing".
What? Logically incompatible? Or a return visit of my old Bell Canada nightmare?
When Bell Canada first brought in DTMF dialing, they charged a low price for rotary dial phones, a higher price for DTMF phones, and the highest price of all for phones with keypads that dialed by clicking. Not for the phone itself, but for your monthly service, depending on the type of phone you chose to own. From their side, their equipment couldn't really tell the rotary dial clicks from the simulated clicks of a keypad phone, so this fee only applied if you were dumb enough to tell someone at Bell Canada that you owned the contraband device.
The logic looked something like this: tone dialing is new and sexy, so we have to charge more for it. However, it costs us more to support the old analog dialing equipment, and we *want* the customers to move to the new technology, so we have to charge *even more* to customers who by sneaky means obtain the convenience of keypad dialing, while sticking it to us for charging more to access a system that actually costs us less to deliver.
If Telus gave me combination billing (both paper and electronic) then as the customer, I'd have the best of both worlds: an electronic copy of my records when their system is working, and a paper backup when it isn't. This would cost Telus more and might encourage them to keep their electronic records system online more than a few dark hours a month so I eventually call back and cancel the paper.
She asked me at the end of the call if her support had been helpful (clearly a mandatory call phase). I replied, "you've personally been very nice, but clearly your organization has created Byzantine rules that prevent you from offering me the sensible solution I requested". She hung up sounding sour as if my response had not been polite.
Since then I've purchased an OCR scanner and I'm probably going back to paper billing. I can have searchable records of numbers called without the hassle of navigating the arbitrary rules of the world according to Telus.
And arbitrarily they are, unless you group them under "clever ways to drill a hole in your pocket".
In November 2007, TELUS began charging close to half a million customers in Alberta and British Columbia a monthly network-access fee of $2.95. These customers had not signed up for a long-distance plan, either with TELUS or another company, and the charge applied even if they did not make long-distance calls or if they made long-distance calls using only dial-around long-distance services.
In other words, the thing that makes it great is often something the artist can't even articulate to himself, at least not in words -- instead, he articulates it in his work.
That Watterson gives rare and rather boring interviews is a point in your favour. But for the rest, I don't buy it.
From Wikipedia:
Watterson also lampooned the academic world. In one example, Calvin writes a "revisionist autobiography," recruiting Hobbes to take pictures of him doing stereotypical kid activities like playing sports in order to make him seem more well-adjusted. In another strip, he carefully crafts an "artist's statement," claiming that such essays convey more messages than artworks themselves ever do (Hobbes blandly notes "You misspelled Weltanschauung").
Few great artists work backwards from the desired effect on the audience. What you end up with is the worst of the early Woody Allen. He saved himself by turning the lens on his own pathetic need to hit the funny bone.
For that matter, there's not 30 seconds in Young Frankenstein where Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks are less than 1000% aware of their own humour, but it still works. No-one makes movies like that anymore, because it's impossible to translate schwanzstucker into German.
Here's Vonnegut from Man Without a Country (small, but well worth owning). He doesn't seem to lack for insight into his own process.
It's damn hard to make jokes work. In Cat's Cradle, for instance, there are these very short chapters. Each one of them represents one day's work, and each one is a joke. If I were writing about a tragic situation, it wouldn't be necessary to time it to make sure the thing works. You can't really misfire with a tragic scene. It's bound to be moving if all the right elements are present. But a joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap.
Watterson had a keen ear for language, the emotional colour of a word employed for mischief. He'd fail to write a textbook on the subject, but I don't he suffered for lack of clarity in his own mind.
Unable to articulate to himself? Artists are writing about life. I can't articulate life, not in full measure, which doesn't mean I'm lacking in the articulation department. He could probably say more, but has the taste to stop while he's ahead, which is not my strong point.
Three days after the quarrel, Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky--Stiva, as he was called in the fashionable world-- woke up at his usual hour, that is, at eight o'clock in the morning, not in his wife's bedroom, but on the leather-covered sofa in his study. He turned over his stout, well-cared-for person on the springy sofa, as though he would sink into a long sleep again; he vigorously embraced the pillow on the other side and buried his face in it; but all at once he jumped up, sat up on the sofa, and opened his eyes.
"Yes, yes, how was it now?" he thought, going over his dream. "Now, how was it? To be sure! Alabin was giving a dinner at Darmstadt; no, not Darmstadt, but something American. Yes, but then, Darmstadt was in America. Yes, Alabin was giving a dinner on glass tables, and the tables sang, _Il mio tesoro_--not _Il mio tesoro_ though, but something better, and there were some sort of little decanters on the table, and they were women, too," he remembered.
Stepan Arkadyevitch's eyes twinkled gaily, and he pondered with a smile. "Yes, it was nice, very nice. There was a great deal more that was delightful, only there's no putting it into words, or even expressing it in one's thoughts awake."
Inarticulate or ineluctable? It's too bad Tolstoy neglected his own wisdom later in life.
At the high school level, much of the educational process involves jumping through hoops. Students making it into Waterloo have obviously done something right. Top departments there have entrance requirements in the CMU bracket. I recall a year in the 1980s where the median GPA out of high school for entrance to Systems Design Engineering program was 93%. More than a few of these flunked the English assessment test.
Who created the hurdles where you could gain entrance to an elite program such as that and then flunk a basic test of composition and grammar? The adults. And somehow, every generation, the adults get stupider. I have a friend who went to an engineering school in Ontario in the same time frame who had an instructor who promised the class "you'll all thank me later for learning how to neatly hand-letter your engineering blueprints". Twenty years later, it's still too soon to tell. Maybe "later" meant at some point in the aftermath of peak oil and the evacuation of Bangladesh.
If you train your muscle memory to generate "cuz" when you mean "because" it's not the easiest thing to suppress in the heat of the moment when they spring the assessment exam on you in your frosh week. Stopping to correct your hands will interfere with your composition process, which will also be graded negatively.
Another fallacy in play here is Paul Collier's"bottom billion. Fifty years ago the bottom billion was a quartile. Now it's much less than that. Meanwhile, the bell of the income curve has shifted significantly to the right. So despite the fact that the bottom billion has made little progress, there's reason to be optimistic about the bottom quartile.
Notice the effect doesn't show up in an elite university whose intake funnel has not widened to the same degree as the post-secondary education in general.
For the record, I've posted that link before. A rare data point in a sea of whinging is worth posting twice.
Lunsford is interviewed about her own writing process at How I Write which is an excellent resource for those us who would rather walk around the office with our fly undone than pen "your" as a verb in business correspondence.
At 90wpm I'm about 90% at fielding your/you're, their/there/they're, it/it's on the fly. At that speed, I have a poorer track record on than/that or dropping negatives (the last part of the trace to fill in) and the ed/ing problem, which comes to the fingers so swiftly the hands outrace the mind.
IIRC, she gave one piece of advice I've never been brave enough to try: compose an essay using a crayon to gain insight into your mental processes. That would certainly throw a wrench into my autonomic nervous system. I'm sure it would illuminating if I survived the process with sanity intact.
That's effectively what Waterloo did when I was there: handed me a speed crayon (Bic pen) and wondered why my composition process suffered. I was one of those young people who just weren't as good as my predecessors.
USTR head Ron Kirk has reportedly said that countries would walk away from the treaty if the text were made available
I don't get this. If our elected leaders walk off on the job, we already have a mechanism in place to fix this: a general election. Maybe the next batch is willing to contend with the issue under democratic conditions, such as open consultation.
Oh, you mean only the tinpots will walk away from the table, which will hurt us more than it hurts them. Why didn't you make yourself clear in the first place? Democracy is good, except when negotiating with tinpots, which necessarily takes place on their terms, in the best interest of all concerned.
Nice tail-wags-the-dog justification for subverting democratic transparency.
Or is there something I missed here? Did I skip an essential chapter in Democracy for Dummies? I feel so stupid. Our politicians are willing to shine their eminent sensibilities on this problem and all they want is a little secrecy to work their magic for the good of humanity? There's just no respect in this world, is there?
Slashdot Mirror
Not only is this solution "good enough", from an anti-trust standpoint it is probably far better than a truly random function.
Obviously dude INAL, but he seems to think he's a judge and speaks for Europe. If the European court wished to have Microsoft innovate "better than random" they could have asked for this solution directly, or Microsoft could have proposed it formally. Anything less is flirting with contempt of court. To think that they pay their junior legal representation on the order of $300/hour just to ask the judge if they might please submit such a request, the idea that they elected to go with "good enough" to save 15 minutes of programming effort that a high school intern could have done better boggles the mind.
But thanks for the faux MBA. After Canada won the hockey game (woohoo), I hung around for the free Texas Hold'em, my first game in real life with strange drunks. In this game, you got a special chip for each beer consumed prior to the game. This chip was worth a SB on any round of play. The guy with seven of these white chips couldn't even properly count out a raise of 1000, but he did offer some excellent business advice while he fumbled around.
Another guy with a big stack of white bonus chips sees my 20 BB raise from early seat with his suited J2 (I'm holding the big slick), stays with me after I go all-in hitting an ace on the flop, then busts me out when he hits his flush draw on the river.
Then I return home to a troll paean that Microsoft's formal incompetence is "better than random". Some days you can't win.
No dude, hate to break this, you outperform the slashdot article-submission hive mind, which is insulting to one of our more glamorous insects. A bumble bee can coordinate six legs, a set of wings, a pair of antenna, a pair of eyes, and some really cool frame-of-reference navigation aids. The average slashdot editor is sometimes unable to navigate himself/herself/itself out of a Joe-blog no-link-anywhere-useful cul de scat. The honey dance for that article is about the magnitude of bee mite sneezing into his elbow.
Witness Forbes beating us senseless by two orders of magnitude with an article that at least qualifies for a flirtatious abdominal shimmy, since it actually links to T original FA.
IBM's Data-Sifting Shortcut - Forbes.com
The editor responsible is running the serious risk of coming down with Alzheimer's in later life and no one noticing. What was occupying your mind on the other monitor, the Jamaican mixed naked luge? Unbelievable.
Nuclear. Fucking. Weapons. There's no problem that cannot be made to go away with sufficient use of nuclear weapons.
Your diction sounds like you're falling into a black hole, so I think you're going to need more than a cowboy hat and a crayon to catapult around the other side.
What kind of mind goes into a parking orbit between words?
I admit, it is kind of menacing to see a blood and guts marine in a stalled humvee bearing down on you with four sumo wrestlers tossing the vehicle forward in three foot increments. Anyone would think twice confronted with that spectacle.
Those two concepts are far from mutually exclusive. Pixel perfect means you can have flexible layouts that don't do unpredictable things because the rendering engine's calculations were off.
If that's what you mean, the term should be pixel precise. TeX has pixel precise layout, the calculations are well defined, and the web should, too.
Perfection sets off my warning bells. There's always a contingent occupying the high ground of right-thinking simplicity known as "one size fits all". These traitors to the crown are surely rallying under the banner of pixel perfect, regardless of any ostensible definition among those in the know.
Precision is a shared value (a precise system delivers precision to everyone), whereas perfection is a social construct, sometimes an entirely personal construct, which can be OK if the individual has the exquisite taste of a Michelangelo and the ascendant heights of the human spirit shine through.
One of my most heavily used Firefox plug-ins is NoSquint, by means of which I dispense with as much of a site's dress code as possible, optimizing the mental process of unpacking the text to determine whether the site is burbling gibberish or not. When I'm reading for critical faculty, my fonts are rarely set at less than 10 cpi, even the proportional fonts.
Right now, an article sitting open on my other screen on AI, augmented intelligence, and alternative intelligence is magnified to 10 cpi / 4 lpi, and I suspect that's barely enough for the landmines within. My landmine detection fonts tend to rupture the aesthetics of the presentation, which is just as well, since there is delicate thinking required.
In the ideal world, perfection is subordinate to purpose. My sole purpose for visiting most web sites is to determine if what they've written there is larded or illuminating. The fashion boutique strip malls at the top, right, and bottom of most web pages interest me not.
Perfection without purpose frightens me. It usually means there will be another force of will present, which I will likely end up battling with. If the user isn't going to supply force of will, it might be good if the operating environment does so on the user's behalf, which is the Apple model. When I use Apple products, I inevitably brush shoulders rather violently with the Apple aesthetic, which does not mirror my own. For every case where it facilitates my goal, there's another where it chafes ingrained preference.
Returning to original sin, my mortal enemy of imprecision is Microsoft Word. You can't assert your will against that thing for any reasonable investment of time or anger. However hard you tug the laces, it manages to squirt sideways at an inconvenient juncture in the middle of getting real work done. Soon one pines for the PDF straight-jacket. The very thought of pining for PDF induces black-leather nightmares straight out of Pan's Labyrinth.
I sincerely hope switching off IE6 marks the beginning of the end for all software that subordinates culture to quirk. In a different life line, I could imagine having this conversation:
Precocious grandchild: Grandpa, what does "imprecise" mean?
Greybeard self: Well, imprecision has been part of civilization since the beginning of time, but it was Bill Gates who made it famous. Ever heard of Bill Gates? No? Have you ever played holographic pinball? It's like that, only the pinball table is hidden inside a machine you depend upon to get things done, so you never know what's going to happen next.
Grandchild (perplexed): Why would he do that? Why would he make a machine like that?
Greybeard self: Well, it never made any sense to me. History is interesting that way. Every society seems to do something that makes no sense, and it's usually the children who figure it out first. Smart children like you. That's why the UN is presently debating a ban on life-extension research.
Grandchild: But th
This is now my second self-response, having since slogged through a fairly close reading of Lomborg's 27 page rebuttal to The Deception and 30 page rebuttal to Scientific American from late 2001, as well as snippets of rebuttal rebuttal.
From Holden's Response to Lomborg's Response to My Critique of His Energy Chapter:
It must be added that the space allotted for reviews is always limited, as it was in this instance in Scientific American, making it impossible to mention, never mind to explain, every mistake that has been noticed. It should also be understood that, even if space were not limited, few reviewers would consider it their responsibility to explain every error that a deeply flawed work contains, once they have explained enough of them to establish beyond doubt that the author is not competent in the subjects he is addressing.
Did he did state "my objective is to brush aside an irritating gnat" in eminencese, or do my ears deceive me?
And this (emphasis mine):
This means resources of tar sands and oil shale that would be economically exploitable only at prices around $30 per barrel are in fact more expensive than oil has been for nearly all of the last century. They could be considered "reserves" material that is exploitable with current technology at current prices only in circumstances under which the price of conventional oil had risen to well above what has been usual for the past century, which was exactly my point.
Talk about missing the forest for seeing the trees. Holdren seems to completely miss the point that Lomborg is attacking the litany of the apocalypse, the unfounded extrapolations of doom that surround whatever ecological facts gain sway in the moment. Lomborg must lie awake at night sweating over his misguided use of $30/barrel to represent a viable future price of oil. The first chart I pulled up suggests that light sweet crude hasn't seen the underside of $30 since 2004 and might never see it again.
Minus one point to Lomborg for poor scholarship, plus one hundred points to Lomborg for having chosen a credible lower bound on the near-term future price despite the century of contrary pricing which so infatuates Holdren to no useful purpose.
Of the four SA critics, it was Holdren whose initial statement I found most persuasive:
What environmentalists mainly say on this topic is not that we are running out of energy but that we are running out of environment--that is, running out of the capacity of air, water, soil and biota to absorb, without intolerable consequences for human well-being, the effects of energy extraction, transport, transformation and use.
Lomborg understands this, but makes light of the risk by putting too much faith in price trends. There's a lot of political incentive to keep the price of oil within relatively narrow bounds. One of the degrees of freedom to accomplish this is shifting the burden onto the environment, for example, the Bush administration lifting the drilling ban in Alaska. At some point the domino game of shifting the burden is doomed to fail, and then the price might suddenly spike upwards, like an uncontrolled housing bubble.
There was much reference to the IPCC in Lomborg's rebuttal. His critics were engaging in much finger wagging, while putting forth little additional data. How could they? They are eminent and political. The precise wording of IPCC reports is wrangled for years. They don't want to stick their necks out why gnat swatting. Makes me wonder if the end result of IPCC politics is on par with the report on the Challenger explosion that might have resulted without Feynman involved.
I would dearly love to see an incisive mind, such as Feynman's, write a review of Lomborg's tracts. Do you think Feynman would have carped over $30/barrel as an estimated futu
As much as I hate posting twice on the same thread, I couldn't resist adding this to a thread concerning the persecution of lone voices. This old gal tops the charts in biddy charisma.
Elaine Morgan says we evolved from aquatic apes
If nothing else, it opens the window for some clear thinking about the surprisingly thin line between peer review and culthood.
Makes me wonder if the prevailing savannah hypothesis was stitched together in much the same way as the original anomalocaris.
Lomborg paints himself a persecuted DaVinci, a lone voice of scientific genius against the harsh dogma of the establishment. Basically Friel has published a detailed book review debunking that picture, the journal of nature also reviews books and like Friel they do not claim them to be anything more than researched opinion.
Lomborg was persecuted, by Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty.
From FAQ - Bjørn Lomborg (emphasis mine):
[The Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation] found the DCSD verdict "dissatisfactory", "deserving [of] criticism" and "emotional." Most importantly, the Ministry found "that the DCSD has not documented where [Lomborg] has allegedly been biased in his choice of data and in his argumentation, and that the [DCSD] ruling is completely void of argumentation."
To buy off the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty, he'd need to be de Medici (which makes more sense for an economist to begin with), not DaVinci. Where did you come up with that? Instead of opening up an artery of purple prose, you might with more creativity have cited him for posing as Robert Hooke, a man who looked at the same phenomena as every other scientist, but actually saw what he was seeing. It would still exaggerate Lomborg's conceit, but at least it would edify and amuse.
If Lomborg's fraud was so blatant and egregious, how could DCSD have managed to so badly bungle their cause? Is DCSD a lighthouse of incompetence among an otherwise irreproachable system of peer review? Personally, I neither find Lomborg singular, nor the incompetence of his detractors singular. Where there's mass funding at stake, I find the peer review system no less vulnerable to bubbles of human ambition than the banking system.
As for being the "lone voice", you might wish to confer with The Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty concerning his isolation as a pariah. A man willing to go as much against the grain as he has is going to have either a thicker skin or more ego blubber than your average man. Newton chose to alienate Leibniz rather than embracing and engaging in dialog with perhaps the only man alive who could fully appreciate Newton's achievements. What evidence do you have that Lomborg would rather be the sole beacon of his cause rather than embrace his natural allies? Is his solitude selective, or generously bequeathed?
Lomborg does not claim to do science. He's an economist exposing leaps of faith from scientific mechanism to speculation about the probable future effects, to even wilder speculation about costs and outcomes in mitigating those effects. Most scientists are excellent at step one, identifying the scientific mechanism. Few scientists have any training at all in steps two or three. I agree with Lomborg that the discipline of economics has a stronger and better substantiated tradition in assessing cost-benefit of radical intervention. Scientists wade into the dismal science with no apparent concern for all the corpses buried there. To my eye, they look like fools.
What gives scientists the amazing hubris to cross this boundary of fact to speculation unmarked? The peer review process keeps them honest about the mechanism. Most of their contact with step three (cost benefit of mitigation) is a paragraph tacked on to their funding applications about the amazing benefits to humanity that will accrue if their research project is approved. These vapid claims are not subject to peer review. They are instead subject to fiscal reward, an extremely poor substitute for claiming moral high ground in the debate.
I find the obeisance to peer review in popular culture fascinating. Like hazing in the military, it's such an obnoxious process, you have to grow to love it, or lose your sanity. Like military culture, it seems to achieve its stated purpose, and has for hundreds of years.
I love this comment from Lesli
If car insurance worked like health insurance, we'd never see the real costs of things like oil changes because we'd only pay the co-pays. And the costs would rise since every shop would need an extra person to handle the paperwork and claims.
This is the quasi-logical rhetorical form that gives the economics profession a bad name, for it conceals everything about the issue worth thinking about.
The underlying structure is the timeless vapour-lock of the insipid: "if there is enough food in the food, how come people are starving?"
Indeed, good question, and it happens to have an answer: distribution is often a harder problem to solve than production. This surprises anyone why? The former is largely a political problem (venality and custom), the later is largely an industrial/engineering/scientific problem. Our accomplishments on the later front include the green revolution, fiber optics, and sending a man to moon, on the former front our wreath of achievement is CNN.
In the case of our hyper-technological medical system, it's a miracle of paper-work that anyone gets the right sequence of treatments on a prompt and cost effective basis. The paper-pushers are hardly a burden on the system, they are practically the whole of the system, unless you regard the human brain as a leech on the human organism.
E. O. Wilson: Trailhead is a nice read. Now imagine what it requires to individually and fairly compensate every ant in this society for their individual contribution as measured by the outcome to the hive of the trails they blaze or toil upon? You'd need a whole other ant hill just to keep track.
A founding principle of America is that all this score keeping is a pro bono service of the invisible hand. That's what "invisible" primarily means by those who invoke it: that you never see the bill for services rendered. A health system based on less individual score keeping for the corporate participants (such as the Canadian system) strikes most Americans as inimical to the American way, yet at the same time the cost of all this score keeping is brushed off the table as inefficiency and overhead endemic to the regulatory structure as opposed to being endemic to the problem itself, delivering health care products and services so complex and litigious and expensive it boggles the mind.
Yes, it's possible to stiff the invisible hand, if you don't mind watching 20% of American society line up for the soup kitchen while the nation fences with Asian tigers for increasingly sparse petroleum resources.
I've been trying to decode the lure of "the invisible hand" for over a decade. Visibility in America is anything or anyone that collects its debts; invisibility is everything else. Amazing what can hide in a word and for how long. The old gag in America is that as soon as the invisible hand becomes visible (by collecting its debt for services rendered) it's immediately dismissed as a burden of regulation, with the same fatuous logic that in a world with enough food for everyone, no one starves.
In the glib theory of the invisible hand, a twenty year old American male lacking health insurance who comes down with testicular cancer can borrow $100,000 against future earnings (without posting hard equity of which he has none), to cure himself of the cancer and remain a valuable member of the American work force, since this is the most sensible economic outcome. Equity-lite loans worked great with housing.
If your family posts equity, that's sugar-daddy insurance, a whole different ball game. In the American myth, everyone has a loving sugar-daddy to fall back upon when the heartless banks demand equity against their loans, and thus a productive future worker never falls through the cracks of too little treatment too late.
Chapter 8 of How To Save Jobs contains a nice discussion of the U.S. health care system. Since David Gewirtz has kindly made this book free to download, I've taken the liberty of quoting more than I might otherwise, concerning bankruptcy and rescission (emphasis mine):
Three-quarters had health insurance. Put those two numbers together. 60% of all bankruptcies in America were driven by people who couldn't pay their medical bills, most of whom actually had health insurance.
...
Most insurers claim the rate of rescission is fairly small. In testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce, Don Hamm, CEO of Assurant Health stated "Rescission is rare. It affects less than one-half of one percent of people we cover."
And yet, according to a story by Karl Vick in the September 8, 2009 issue of the Washington Post:
In the past 18 months, California's five largest insurers paid almost $19 million in fines for marooning policyholders who had fallen ill. That includes a $1 million fine against Health Net, which admitted offering bonuses to employees for finding reasons to cancel policies, according to company documents released in court.
Amazing statistical coincidence that the rescission rate mirrors the relatively low rate in modern society of personal health catastrophe.
Gewirtz is an odd duck, with significant background in both politics and technology. If your response to Gewirtz is to pigeon-hole him for easy target practice at one end or the other of the ideological spectrum, good luck with that. If he's as clever as I think he is, his misguiding jingoism on "buy American" could be cured by a close listen to Rustici on Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression, another flawed discussion which nevertheless can not be resolved by means of a circular pigeon dance. In the end, I rejected about a quarter of what Rustici puts forward, but felt edified by the other three quarters.
I'm about halfway through The Baroque Cycle which has an an organizing theme tumult in the understanding of financial markets and the stability of credit and currency. If Neil's super-great (mostly paternal) granddaughter Nellie Stephenson were to write the Barack Cycle several hundred years from now, it would focus on the present tumult and disorder in our health insurance industry, with lobbyists in Washington taking center stage as the imposing yet perhaps doomed palace of Versailles.
America fails to reform it's health care system because it is now in the late phase of the French disease, terminal narcissism. Debate rarely turns on what needs to be done until coinage runs short. From what I've read, mission accomplished. Will the American empire make it to the next gas station running on fumes? America is not to be underestimated, but far enough back, hard to believe, neither was France.
These kinds of laws are a lot like Smoot-Hawley. The elite has a shallow hand-waving understanding of how this implicates tax revenue (shared by few of the wonks), while totally failing (with scant concern) to wrap their minds around the larger consequences.
Fortunately, there are economies gaining steam in other corners of the world less set in their sumptitude, that sucking glissando you hear as you circle around the velvet drain pipe.
In a vigorous nation, it might be prudent to fix this while time remains, starting with a cold hard look at some of these small fish nourishing larger ponds.
You don't go to college to make friends with other idiots. You go there to study, end of story.
I've read several books lately suggesting this attitude is a good foundation for watching your future job be outsourced to India from under your feet. Pure analytic skills are no longer the Mecca of employment they once were.
Also, painting your entire peer group by the deficiencies of the majority doesn't score well on the EQ scale. If 80% of your peers are so far beneath you as to deserve contempt, look around you, you've made the worst choice of college of anyone in the room. Three or four like minds is more than enough, amid a larger network of people oriented to succeed in life.
End of story? Yes, if that's your attitude, I bet it is. For the bright and broad-minded, beginning of story.
University is not such a great educational environment for the gifted. It tends to be far too compartmentalized and generativity is barely tolerated until you hit graduate school, by which point you're already deep into the politics of career advancement.
What I would have liked between high school and university is two years in a program with no intellectual walls, a complete absence of what McLuhan called "hardening of the categories". Let the gifted student gravitate to his/her own level, find some difficult problems of interest, and go where the wind takes you.
Why can't we postpone hardening of the categories until our gifted young people have actually learned something of their own devising?
You'll never find a programming language that will free you from the burden of clarifying your ideas. Isn't that the same quest of computer-assisted-learning? Given a young person who has figured out how to engage that challenge, resources for computer-assisted-learning are now ubiquitous that could barely be conceived thirty years ago, bigger than the Library of Congress and a million times faster.
You see this in the software profession as well. Surrounded by the riches of invention, some people only manage to see that the programming language of the moment isn't managing to prevent the guy next to you from making sloppy or irritating mistakes.
Every time I see "the desktop" debated, there seems to be a group retreat into the logic of one-size-fits-all. I don't think *anyone* will ever manage to make a desktop operating system that suits all purposes.
Windows is designed to be convenient in many respects, but what was the opportunity cost to the web as a whole to support the idiosyncrasies of IE6? Could that effort have delivered more user value employed elsewhere? Hell yes. Monolithic design is good for the gaming ecosystem, but you pay for it in so many other ways.
I've never thought the value system of Linux was particularly desktop-centric. That always struck me as a bolt-on by people who crave affiliative affirmation. For me, the fundamental value system of Linux is as a method of software distribution and collaboration. If it also plays Flash--supposing you even want that--that's a cherry on top. 99% of the content I consider important can be had without Flash. For me the desktop is *not* a glorified media player. My goal on a computer is to interact with the desktop as little as possible. I prefer my screens plastered with applications so that the desktop can't be seen.
My biggest hardship with Ubuntu has been the default policy that you're stuck with whatever version of your favourite tool made the cut in the last release cycle.
I was working on a Windows system at work three days a week, and Ubuntu at home the other two (or three) days a week, accessing the same code base, and needing to run many of the same tools. I was constantly running into problems where some task could be completed on the Windows side by upgrading to the latest version of tool X, only to discover when I pulled the workspace onto my home network, that Ubuntu was stuck on some older version. I often wished it were easier to ask Ubuntu to install the experimental upgrade of some tool alongside the official version. Many times I only needed limited functionality from the experimental version for a small sub-project of some small sub-workspace.
Occasionally I fought to pull something in from some non-standard package source, usually with a fair amount of frustration, and not always with ultimate success. Problems get hairy in a big hurry if things don't mesh. I didn't choose Ubuntu for the pleasure of reverse engineering dpkg.
I find Ubuntu easy enough to work with if I'm prepared (on a semi-permanent basis) to lag six to nine months behind the latest major update of many highly popular tools. When I had to force Ubuntu to run something newer than whatever validated build came with my current install, I often lived to regret trying.
This is problematic on several levels. Ubuntu is often far enough behind that the upstream sources aren't terribly interested in your bug reports. Given the nature of my work, I generally prefer to run closer to upstream than what Ubuntu manages to package. Yet I don't want to live on a daily basis in testing. What I want is an easy way to live one foot in, one foot out.
There's a saying in sports that when you finally break into the major league, keep doing whatever it was that brought you. Stay with your strength and build your game from there. Too many discussions of The Desktop lose sight of this maxim. It's tempting to look around the locker room at what everyone else is bringing and deciding that "I need to be more like them". Desktop envy a good way to get busted back down to the minor leagues. You don't stick in the major leagues because you click in the clubhouse. Most discussions of the desktop feel like evaluating the roster by how great they are to hang with between games.
Areas where Linux could kick the snot out of XP on the field of battle are things like having a consistent, system-wide user-selectable spell checker. I've heard rumours of progress in this direction.
Spell checkers are typically tragic. Many times I work with text from elsewhere and I couldn't care less if American/British/Canadian spellings are mixed in every sentence. For text I wr
While youtube is nice for idling away some downtime, it's not the internet-dominating force this article makes out.
Wow, do you ever misunderstand the calculus of adolescent outrage. Ever joined a condo association rife with government retirees? If you have a busy career, there's a lot of battles you aren't going to fight on time investment alone.
Teenagers don't have much clout in the adult world, but they do have a lot of time, they're well connected, they function as mobs, and nothing makes them yowl louder than exclusion from mob norms.
For example, in many split families, if one of the parents has YouTube and the other can't be bothered to torch IE6, guess which parent won't be seeing much of the kids, if the kids have the option about which bus to take home after school that day?
I know families which function exactly this way. Kids start to get on your nerves, wait for an incident to occur (never in short supply), then shut off the Xbox for a week, then they predictably spend the next six days out of seven staying over at Dad's place. Nice little time out. In the example I'm thinking about, Dad doesn't make the kids do homework, so eventually you have to turn the Xbox back on, to make sure the little rats don't flunk the entire school year.
I like the way Google is presently working to lock-out lock-in.
I see your Seagate anecdote with one of my own.
I had a Seagate 500GB 7200.10 fail in September 2008 (crappy firmware edition), not long after installation after having sat on a shelf for a few months. When I approached Seagate to RMA the drive, they barely bothered to ask me what was wrong with it. Filled out a form, slapped it into a box, and back came the replacement, though a little less promptly than 3-7 days on the RMA form.
I'm at the point in life where I generally install a new OS onto a new disk drive, re-using older drives after *months* of successful operation on the new system / configuration. Spindles are cheap insurance at modern prices.
No vendor is immune from production glitches. I've been searching for the fountain of electronic youth for twenty years. No company, however great, is immune from a Toyota moment.
It amuses me how talismanic we tend to become on low sample sizes. Typical example: "I had a Brand X drive fail on me back in 2000, and haven't purchased another one since." Every vendor I've ever tried has fallen on its platter at least once, so I'm now back to pencil and paper.
What would make me happy is more binning from the drive manufacturer's. I like the middle bin between Joe consumer and Enterprise exabucks. It can't be that hard to look at production data and say "this batch is better than that batch" and bin accordingly.
I've heard that the external backup drives sold at Costco and places like that *are* sourced from batches not up to full warranty treatment. You'll notice these appliances have a shorter drive-life warranty than the same drive sold naked.
OTOH, it's hard for the average consumer to know for certain if you pay a $50 premium for the extra quality bin whether you're getting more quality, or just a different sticker. A web hosting facility is going to have the failure data to back up any decision making on paying a premium price.
Also, it's pretty easy for a careless consumer to compromise drive life by poor handling, installation, or faulty cooling. I'd guess about half of all failed drives (excepting DeathStar production sagas) suffered abuse at the hands of the retail chain or end user, which sets the limit on how much quality it makes sense for the vendors to promise.
However, if the consumer is playing a $50 sticker premium for a "black edition" disk drive, it's also likely the abuse level and cooling components are more carefully considers.
That would be a funny business model. The drive vendor sells exactly the same drives for $50 more, but the buyers who spring for the premium take so much better care of the drives, the drives gain a reputation for delivering higher reliability justifying the price.
To make this work, the vendor has to keep the supply of "black edition" drives to a relatively small trickle. Once the masses get their hands on them, the game is ruined.
One point the article doesn't mention is analyzing the platters under static load instead of dynamic load (including strain from spinning) and spindle vibration. I wonder how much that complicates quality control.
Approximation is a social construct. Most of the kids who are frightfully accelerated end up in math or computer science or some hard core discipline which can be done with no recourse to social constructs whatsoever. A 14-year-old prodigy doesn't have much social context to fall back upon. There's too much social context in engineering to appeal to many of these kids: what part of the equation to cross off and ignore today because it typically ends up being a rounding error on a safety margin.
These are the same kids who might have preferred engineering had they entered university at a more mature age. That's a selection bias that doesn't have much to do with it. I'm only interested in comparing people who have the engineering temperament with people who have the math/computer science temperament. There are some fairly deep differences in how these tribes approach simplicity, another social construct. It doesn't interest me much that math and physics are the best holding tanks for a certain type of person on an extreme cognitive development path.
The other bias is how you count sobriety. An engineer has roughly the same amount of social skill, divided into fewer sober hours. How much skill is involved in drinking six pints? How much social skill is involved in counting binge drinking as a social skill? After graduation the engineers look around the room and go "we're all relatively normal" not counting their fallen comrades who succumbed to life-long alcoholism i.e. those who continue behaving the same way after leaving school.
More of the attrition from math and computer science is by way of the psychiatric ward. A fallen engineer might end up turning a wrench in a pit crew (not at the F1 level). A fallen mathematician might go around knitting an imaginary blanket patterned after a Turkish fractal.
I was thinking about cognitive bias earlier today. We're all pretty good at cooking the denominator, which seems to be a prerequisite for social acceptance. Social skill is most impressive when least understood. We're a strange species.
Name one product that ARM makes?
ARM Compiler
The Xbox merely repackages IP from Intel, NVidia, Samsung, and Seagate. Hardly counts as a Microsoft product when you source so much IP from other companies, does it?
Buttercup sat up in bed. It must be his teeth. The farm boy did have good teeth, give credit where credit was due.
It's Microsoft's keyboard division that validates Microsoft as a manufacturing venture and not a patent troll.
s/arrive their/arrive there/
Note to self: bad brain, bad. If I cut off the offending finger, will the other nine fingers work twice as hard?
That would be my right index finger. The "i" can be replaced with "1", commas can be replaced w1th sem1-colons; and it's long been overdue to cnaccer the letter "k". The angle-braccet / less-than symbol 1s the tough one 1n the group. Don't see how ! can l1ve w1thout that. So ! guess r1ght 1ndex f1nger 1s a ceeper; border1ng on 1nd1spens1ble.
There's a famous quote, "The graveyards are full of indispensable men."
I'm surprised more of them weren't cremated with the share certificates from the ventures they founded. Buried right beside them are the alcoholics who bet their future comfort on the wrong horse. Of course, that was before the invention of spare livers.
Unfortunately, this phrase suffers the usual semantic debasement in the shallow minds of the harried until it often means "without that fellow around, I'd actually have to show up and earn my living". Ask any plantation owner. Paradoxically, nothing boosts productivity like an indispensable head rolling down a splintered plank, so beware of second-order effects.
For some reason, my warning bells go off whenever Dave Winer enters the conversation.
It might be a mistake to define Google's business model so narrowly as advertising. There are broader perspectives on this ecosystem.
Munger on Middlemen
Amazing that Winer inherently proposes replacing the existing N:1 + 1:M model with an N:M model. When does that ever work? Middlemen exist for a reason. Is Winer's position that not tantamount to claiming that corporations will evolve to bypass the stock exchange and go direct to the shareholder? Why should NASDAQ take a cut of the pie? Parasites, all of them.
I don't get how the corporations are going to actively "come to me". I've mostly locked my work process down so that this can't happen. Direct telephone marketers still make my phone ring despite fierce efforts to the contrary. Hope the telcos are enjoying the Google rope trick. Hard to think of an industry more deserving of an internal-rope keel-hauling.
From Google's perspective, I've long thought that monetizing clicks was a perilous revenue model. I've never suspected that Google's security as the world's ultimate middleman was in any real jeopardy. There could be interesting ahead times if Google has to reinvent their revenue generation model from their position of power.
One guess is that Google ends up creating a user-pay micro-payment model for *highly* customized search results, exploiting semantic data-mining on a scope only possible to an organization sitting on 10^18 bytes of storage.
Or you can sit there and perform a hundred Google searches by hand to piece the same results together yourself. They don't have to take that away. What's your time worth? If you're in the group who never clicks on ads, your time is probably of enough value to expedite progress.
If you think Google is vulnerable on this front, good luck with your efforts to raise venture capital to compete against them. They've got an exabyte head start. Make sure your prospectus includes a good explanation of the zetta scale and the need to arrive their to achieve financial victory. You don't want to be busted by the stock exchange for deluding old ladies. First stop on your direct sales pitch should be Dave Winer. He's already declared himself sympathetic on two separate fronts. No wait, I forgot, Winer believes in an N:M routing around the leviathan with no interior infrastructure. Whew, that sure beats having to compete.
This whole summary is ignorant. Everyone is pushing a point of view. It has to be somebody's.
Some perspectives are more polarized than others, such as yours.
Peter Drucker distinguishes a garden-variety decision, which in a group setting could be by consensus or by fiat, from a management decision in which all implications of the decision are carefully thought through as it pertains to all facets of the organization/society.
One of the perspectives out there--such as mine--is that more people should think through the larger implications of these choices rather than splintering into irreconcilable "points of view", framing every debate in terms of differences instead of commonalities.
Ignoring my own advice, here's another take on the matter. The creations are in a bit of a pickle right now. It's easy enough to dismiss cosmology. The average person never even looks though a simple optical telescope at the heavens above. For all the average person knows, it's unicorns up there.
Genetic data, however, is not so easy to brush aside. The trickle is becoming a flood is becoming a global deluge. With a decade or three, this will completely redefine the delivery of health care. There won't be any escaping this daily reality unless you're so far off the grid you don't pay taxes. I don't think they like to admit this, but my take is that creationists are frightened out of their wits by the evolutionary tsunami.
Within a generation, it will common coinage that human genetics are a living document. I think "punctured evolution" is a bit like a river cutting its way into a steeper gorge. A first a trickle, then with increasing acceleration, until the whole river changes course. Something about the organization of the human brain cut its way into a new gorge at some point in the last 50,000 to 1Ma which leads to a lot of other things seeking a new equilibrium point (within the non-catastrophic degrees of freedom). All this small adjustment is preserved in the recent genetic record.
Six billion people times four billion base pairs. To a creationist trying hard not to be believe in 10^9, 24*10^18 is a harsh, unimaginable place. There's no lack of signal to resolve these matter. (I only counted one cell per person, there's additional signal in the cell-to-cell variability data.)
The remaining barrier is the mounting the massive collection and analysis program to extract this signal. The original 8086 had 20,000 transistors. Intel's latest flash memory chip has 64 billion bits. Who is going to confidently predict that we're not up to the genetic challenge? And then what for the creationists?
The old argument with the anthropologists was centered on the gaps in the fossil record, which resembled the gaps between stars in cold, hard space. The living genetic record also has gaps, like the gaps between hydrogen atoms at the sun's core.
What makes the creationists so frighteningly effective for the last twenty years is that they presently enjoy the clarity advantage that Sun Tsu described for an army fighting with its back against a river offering no escape. That worked fine against the motley assortment of fossil data.
Their present situation mirrors a cheesy line from Dances With Wolves, when Costner finally fesses up the appalling magnitude of the lost cause: Europeans will arrive "like the stars" in number. Noah, pack your umbrella, the data is here.
I listened to a somewhat disappointing talk with Richard Epstein on EconTalk last night. He's a smart guy, but never leaves a long enough gap in his sentence for another mind to participate and develop trust. Takes about 70% of your cognitive capacity just to parse the erudite logorrhea.
Nevertheless, he makes some good points along the way. One is that one unit of investment in the intellectual development of a four year old is worth two units of catching up later on.
It makes sense for the creationists to push the creationist view of the world o
Verified By Visa came up here recently.
The critical passage from the PDF is this one:
One goal of EMV was to externalise the costs of dispute from the issuing bank, in that if a disputed transaction has been authorised by a manuscript signature, it would be charged to the merchant, while if it had been authorised by a PIN then it would be charged to the customer. The net effect is that the banking industry, which was responsible for the design of the system, carries less liability for the fraud. The industry describes this as a 'liability shift'.
Security economics teaches us that such arrangements create "moral hazard," by insulating banks from the risk of their poor system design, so it is no surprise when such plans go awry.
The main security fraud taking place here is duping the customers (and the courts) into thinking there's any security associated with the PIN protocol in the first place.
Let's make this clear to the court, in terms they might be able to comprehend.
Let's say you have a band of tax evading Massachusetts patriots concerned with the migratory cycle of lobsterbacks. They approach a fellow named Paul and tell him that they have set up special tower with a lantern and then hand him the key and some simple instructions, along with the parting shot "don't F this up, we know where to find you!"
Later, the patriots spy the wrong single lantern signal from the vague proximity of the special tower, make the wrong decision, and America drinks tea forever after. The patriots are pissed. Paul, you F-ed this up! You were the only one with the key to the signal tower.
To which Paul replies:
What colour was the lantern light you witnessed?
Same as any other lantern, you dolt!
Did you tell anyone about the protocol who might abuse it?
No of course not! We've never told anyone who doesn't hold a key.
And how many keys did you give out?
Oh, about a billion.
And you could clearly identify my tower on a dark night?
Absolutely. It was the only lantern light clearly displayed above the horizon in your general direction.
What if it wasn't my lantern?
Impossible. You had the only key.
It'll be a rough night for the EMV consortium if they are ever visited by the ghost of patriots past, who would likely take a pretty dim view of the institutional foolishness on display here.
Which three men in a tub assumed 20 years ago, too, and it didn't happen.
The first rule of thumb is never to believe a prediction by anyone who writes grant applications for a livelihood, which covers most living scientists.
Computers will acquire a patchwork of amazing abilities over the next three decades. I'm not sure it's particularly useful to measure this against a three year old. Right now we're further along on "fly airplane" than "tie shoes". If there was a Turing test to declare whether a task is simple or not, humans would fail.
A Google data center with 100,000 CPU nodes is already pretty far up the cognitive scale, but it's not a form of cognition we've bothered to define as such. The most important intelligence will be assisted intelligence: what humans accomplish in collaboration with their tools. The tools will become increasingly amazing, at first on a patchwork basis, and then the seams will become increasingly unclear.
Right now social networking sites predict what we might find interesting on fairly trivial low-dimensional criteria. Netflix must be the all-time champion of the drunken I-fought-with-my-wife-tonight 1-5 rating. Could the data set possibly be less rich or more corrupt? And already we squeeze something out. Just wait until the computers know everything about us and the ability of the computer/network to anticipate our cognitive whims becomes spooky prescient.
On another front, some of the fruits of neurology are now coming on line. I have no idea whether this stuff works or not. Typical how we trip over our own shoelaces, trying to get speech recognition to work *before* mastering auditory grouping, which strikes me as far more fundamental.
From Audience based on research by Lloyd Watts
Audience is the first company to deliver a commercial product based on the science of [a]uditory [s]cene [a]nalysis, which entails the grouping of components in a complex mixture of sound into sources. Just as the human auditory system can readily ignore background noises while focusing on a voice of interest, [our stuff achieves] noise suppression up to 30 dB for both stationary and non-stationary noise sources to provide [adjective of awesomeness] voice quality within even the [pertinent superlative].
Estimating programming time is often estimating how long it will take to do something that has never been done before.
And if it has been done before, it's out the door to India already, which I'm sure someone else will also point out.
It seems to me that a lot of project estimation is done to serve a hidden purpose.
Yes, and the hidden agendas are formal inputs to the schedule estimation problem. Been there, done that. One of the major terms in the non-linear politics is who gets the blame when a product shipped with working functionality proves impossible to extend in the next coding iteration because the wrong foundation was chosen. Do you want the estimate consistent with my professionalism, or with grenades baked in for the next guy to work on this? How many accountants say "the audit will take six weeks, but I could have it done in three if I cut a few corners"? The engineers are often the easiest departed to prey upon to extract the necessary lies to feed management fiction in the face of disgruntled investors. Our work process is among the least subjective, but our quality standards are among the most subjective. Works or doesn't work is hard science. Maintainable or not maintainable is pure sociology (under most boardroom conditions).
Some day I would love to seal my estimate into a cryptographic vault on the basis that my estimate is only correct if I don't tell anyone. As soon as you tell someone, that person immediately goes around changing the assumed conditions.
I'd also love to try a pair programming exercise where the project manager sits down beside me while I work and then I go into a stream of conscious mode:
Well, without knowing more about this tool, my estimate is one to eight weeks". If we spend anywhere from two to eight hours, my estimate will likely improve to an interval of (t,2*t) + investigation overhead. Which path would you like me to take?
Generally I can lucidly explain every decision point, usually three or four levels deep off the top of my head. Every time my companion antiparticle shies away from taking the abrupt path to clarity, the estimation error expression spouts more terms, in some cases combinatorially depending on sub-problem interrelationships.
With a certain level of development maturity, the shortest distance between two points is to drive clarity at every step of the process coupled with an intense feedback-loop concerning local discoveries. It wouldn't be a mathematical contradiction is the decision strategy with the lowest expected time has a particularly ragged expected variance. In fact, I believe this is true.
Another thing to throw at my companion antiparticle is that you can't just take the statistical average of the anticipated decision chain. If the variance of a distribution is poorly behaved (e.g. real life, according to Nassim Taleb) higher order moments of your distribution are undefined. Put that in your pipe and compute the average.
Of course, there are exceptions to the recalcitrance of black swans, such as when your business is in a lucrative application domain with slow moving market conditions with only gentlemen competitors if any competitors at all, and your company is funded by private money who politely and happily declare "looks like we're still on target to reach profitability in year ten, good work chaps".
About a year ago I had my Telus account switched to electronic billing. I tend to do my electronic banking in the wee hours. Half of my attempts to access my Telus account electronically resulted in text like this:
Unfortunately, we were unable to process your request. Our site is currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again later or contact a TELUS Customer Service Representative at 666-6666. We apologize for any inconvenience.
This was annoying, as the email notification does not include the balance owing. What I wanted was the email to contain an encrypted PDF of my paper statement so I never have to log onto their crappy web site. Nope, that's not possible.
Finally I call up my innovation-loving Telus rep. to complain about these recurrent electronic account service outages. I refrained from pointing out that the telephone industry *invented* uptime in the first place and that their billing computers seem not to take a holiday in the wee hours every other night.
I said if you can't send my billing details through email, then send me the paper bill as well until you figure out how to keep your electronic service online. To which the answer was "I can do that, but I'll first have to cancel your electronic billing".
What? Logically incompatible? Or a return visit of my old Bell Canada nightmare?
When Bell Canada first brought in DTMF dialing, they charged a low price for rotary dial phones, a higher price for DTMF phones, and the highest price of all for phones with keypads that dialed by clicking. Not for the phone itself, but for your monthly service, depending on the type of phone you chose to own. From their side, their equipment couldn't really tell the rotary dial clicks from the simulated clicks of a keypad phone, so this fee only applied if you were dumb enough to tell someone at Bell Canada that you owned the contraband device.
The logic looked something like this: tone dialing is new and sexy, so we have to charge more for it. However, it costs us more to support the old analog dialing equipment, and we *want* the customers to move to the new technology, so we have to charge *even more* to customers who by sneaky means obtain the convenience of keypad dialing, while sticking it to us for charging more to access a system that actually costs us less to deliver.
If Telus gave me combination billing (both paper and electronic) then as the customer, I'd have the best of both worlds: an electronic copy of my records when their system is working, and a paper backup when it isn't. This would cost Telus more and might encourage them to keep their electronic records system online more than a few dark hours a month so I eventually call back and cancel the paper.
She asked me at the end of the call if her support had been helpful (clearly a mandatory call phase). I replied, "you've personally been very nice, but clearly your organization has created Byzantine rules that prevent you from offering me the sensible solution I requested". She hung up sounding sour as if my response had not been polite.
Since then I've purchased an OCR scanner and I'm probably going back to paper billing. I can have searchable records of numbers called without the hassle of navigating the arbitrary rules of the world according to Telus.
And arbitrarily they are, unless you group them under "clever ways to drill a hole in your pocket".
From CRTC orders TELUS to rebate customers
In November 2007, TELUS began charging close to half a million customers in Alberta and British Columbia a monthly network-access fee of $2.95. These customers had not signed up for a long-distance plan, either with TELUS or another company, and the charge applied even if they did not make long-distance calls or if they made long-distance calls using only dial-around long-distance services.
The CRTC had to step in and bust their
In other words, the thing that makes it great is often something the artist can't even articulate to himself, at least not in words -- instead, he articulates it in his work.
That Watterson gives rare and rather boring interviews is a point in your favour. But for the rest, I don't buy it.
From Wikipedia:
Watterson also lampooned the academic world. In one example, Calvin writes a "revisionist autobiography," recruiting Hobbes to take pictures of him doing stereotypical kid activities like playing sports in order to make him seem more well-adjusted. In another strip, he carefully crafts an "artist's statement," claiming that such essays convey more messages than artworks themselves ever do (Hobbes blandly notes "You misspelled Weltanschauung").
Few great artists work backwards from the desired effect on the audience. What you end up with is the worst of the early Woody Allen. He saved himself by turning the lens on his own pathetic need to hit the funny bone.
For that matter, there's not 30 seconds in Young Frankenstein where Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks are less than 1000% aware of their own humour, but it still works. No-one makes movies like that anymore, because it's impossible to translate schwanzstucker into German.
Here's Vonnegut from Man Without a Country (small, but well worth owning). He doesn't seem to lack for insight into his own process.
It's damn hard to make jokes work. In Cat's Cradle, for instance, there are these very short chapters. Each one of them represents one day's work, and each one is a joke. If I were writing about a tragic situation, it wouldn't be necessary to time it to make sure the thing works. You can't really misfire with a tragic scene. It's bound to be moving if all the right elements are present. But a joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap.
Watterson had a keen ear for language, the emotional colour of a word employed for mischief. He'd fail to write a textbook on the subject, but I don't he suffered for lack of clarity in his own mind.
Unable to articulate to himself? Artists are writing about life. I can't articulate life, not in full measure, which doesn't mean I'm lacking in the articulation department. He could probably say more, but has the taste to stop while he's ahead, which is not my strong point.
Three days after the quarrel, Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch
Oblonsky--Stiva, as he was called in the fashionable world--
woke up at his usual hour, that is, at eight o'clock in the
morning, not in his wife's bedroom, but on the leather-covered
sofa in his study. He turned over his stout, well-cared-for
person on the springy sofa, as though he would sink into a long
sleep again; he vigorously embraced the pillow on the other side
and buried his face in it; but all at once he jumped up, sat up
on the sofa, and opened his eyes.
"Yes, yes, how was it now?" he thought, going over his dream.
"Now, how was it? To be sure! Alabin was giving a dinner at
Darmstadt; no, not Darmstadt, but something American. Yes, but
then, Darmstadt was in America. Yes, Alabin was giving a dinner
on glass tables, and the tables sang, _Il mio tesoro_--not _Il mio
tesoro_ though, but something better, and there were some sort of
little decanters on the table, and they were women, too," he
remembered.
Stepan Arkadyevitch's eyes twinkled gaily, and he pondered with a
smile. "Yes, it was nice, very nice. There was a great deal
more that was delightful, only there's no putting it into words,
or even expressing it in one's thoughts awake."
Inarticulate or ineluctable? It's too bad Tolstoy neglected his own wisdom later in life.
Orwell on Tolstoy on Shakespeare:
It would be more noticeable to the people using it if more of them actually were interested in understanding what other people are saying.
It boils down to blaming the tool or blaming the tool. I'm in favour of blaming the tool.
Burden of clarity has been posted here before, today is my turn.
At the high school level, much of the educational process involves jumping through hoops. Students making it into Waterloo have obviously done something right. Top departments there have entrance requirements in the CMU bracket. I recall a year in the 1980s where the median GPA out of high school for entrance to Systems Design Engineering program was 93%. More than a few of these flunked the English assessment test.
Who created the hurdles where you could gain entrance to an elite program such as that and then flunk a basic test of composition and grammar? The adults. And somehow, every generation, the adults get stupider. I have a friend who went to an engineering school in Ontario in the same time frame who had an instructor who promised the class "you'll all thank me later for learning how to neatly hand-letter your engineering blueprints". Twenty years later, it's still too soon to tell. Maybe "later" meant at some point in the aftermath of peak oil and the evacuation of Bangladesh.
If you train your muscle memory to generate "cuz" when you mean "because" it's not the easiest thing to suppress in the heat of the moment when they spring the assessment exam on you in your frosh week. Stopping to correct your hands will interfere with your composition process, which will also be graded negatively.
Another fallacy in play here is Paul Collier's"bottom billion. Fifty years ago the bottom billion was a quartile. Now it's much less than that. Meanwhile, the bell of the income curve has shifted significantly to the right. So despite the fact that the bottom billion has made little progress, there's reason to be optimistic about the bottom quartile.
Notice the effect doesn't show up in an elite university whose intake funnel has not widened to the same degree as the post-secondary education in general.
Clive Thompson on the New Literacy
For the record, I've posted that link before. A rare data point in a sea of whinging is worth posting twice.
Lunsford is interviewed about her own writing process at How I Write which is an excellent resource for those us who would rather walk around the office with our fly undone than pen "your" as a verb in business correspondence.
At 90wpm I'm about 90% at fielding your/you're, their/there/they're, it/it's on the fly. At that speed, I have a poorer track record on than/that or dropping negatives (the last part of the trace to fill in) and the ed/ing problem, which comes to the fingers so swiftly the hands outrace the mind.
I recall that Knuth once brought in Mary-Claire van Leunen as part of a minicourse in mathematical writing, for which I found a fragment: Mathematical Writing by Donald E. Knuth, Tracy Larrabee, and Paul ...
IIRC, she gave one piece of advice I've never been brave enough to try: compose an essay using a crayon to gain insight into your mental processes. That would certainly throw a wrench into my autonomic nervous system. I'm sure it would illuminating if I survived the process with sanity intact.
That's effectively what Waterloo did when I was there: handed me a speed crayon (Bic pen) and wondered why my composition process suffered. I was one of those young people who just weren't as good as my predecessors.
USTR head Ron Kirk has reportedly said that countries would walk away from the treaty if the text were made available
I don't get this. If our elected leaders walk off on the job, we already have a mechanism in place to fix this: a general election. Maybe the next batch is willing to contend with the issue under democratic conditions, such as open consultation.
Oh, you mean only the tinpots will walk away from the table, which will hurt us more than it hurts them. Why didn't you make yourself clear in the first place? Democracy is good, except when negotiating with tinpots, which necessarily takes place on their terms, in the best interest of all concerned.
Nice tail-wags-the-dog justification for subverting democratic transparency.
Or is there something I missed here? Did I skip an essential chapter in Democracy for Dummies? I feel so stupid. Our politicians are willing to shine their eminent sensibilities on this problem and all they want is a little secrecy to work their magic for the good of humanity? There's just no respect in this world, is there?