The planet was covered with dense clouds and the atmosphere contained a high concentration of carbon dioxide, producing tropical conditions north of the 45th parallel. For example, many dinosaur fossils were excavated in Alberta, Canada. As the earth's crust cooled down, volcanic activity reduced.
The site, close to the B.C.-Alberta border, is considered crucial to understanding the so-called Cambrian "explosion" of life - a time when the future Canadian land mass was drifting in tropical climes close to the Earth's equator.
In my historical atlas, the equator is considerably south of the 45th latitude. The dinosaur fossils in Alberta are equatorial in origin. But hey, if you can't get that right, no obstacle to solving the fusion problem. Like it's not a hard problem or anything. The typical Alberta fat cat oilman probably doesn't believe in plate tectonics to begin with. Just a bunch of mud we turn into money. Now they're all excited about version 2: just a bunch of water we turn into money.
BTW, the Royal Tyrrell Museum in the Alberta badlands is pretty kick-ass if you're into bones.
No one expected a Patriot in air defense mode to stay stationary for 10 hours let alone 100.
Use case blindness is an incredibly rich source of severe system errors. Proof of correctness is hard enough without a clutter of use case clauses (apparently) lopping off obvious failure modes. Until they don't, because, oh ya, use cases evolve long after the coding is done. [Cue John Mellencamp].
And the thing is, it wasn't hard to just do it right in the first place. If they were working in a language with C-level abstraction (which isn't much), it's trivial to create a type such as uptime_t which counts in integer ticks (of whatever granularity you require) and has an uptime range which is very nearly impossible to overflow (months or years at a dead minimum). A 64-bit integer incremented at 4GHz won't overflow for 4 billion seconds, more than a century. Few timekeeping systems increment at 4GHz, so a century is your worst case. Hey brother, can you spare me eight bytes?
Even a lowly pair of 24 bit integers (if that was their machine architecture) can be used to create a 48 bit integer with increment and difference at almost zero overhead. You can augment this with a saturating 24 bit uptime_diff_t. If the answer comes back as 2^24-1 deci-seconds (about two weeks) your code should interpret this as "blink and it's gone". These types can be implemented in asm with a two or three 10 line macros, at a cost only a handful of extra cycles at run time.
Floating point conversion of the diff_t result would have been fine (elapsed time of flight for a Scud missile isn't going to overflow anything). Nothing required here but clear thinking and a refusal to accept "that can't happen" use cases lightly.
BTW, some people are confused about the precision required: they aren't trying to hit the missile with this calculation, but position an acquisition window for a higher-precision targeting system, if I got the drift.
There's a time and place for use cases, and there is a time and place for a more rigorous foundation.
There are no atheists in foxholes. Corollary: the only use case is whatever saves their skin. I didn't notice any of the soldiers under the bridge in Apocalypse Now sitting around reading their user manuals by the rocket's red glare.
Ten years ago, a similar machine was my junk box of last resort for messing around with ipsec firewalls, a spare end point for some test configurations. I had OpenBSD 2.5 on the box and had to compile some stuff out of ports. With 16MB, this was deadly slow and some ports failed to compile. With 24MB it was about twice as fast, and most of my compile problems went away.
OpenBSD doesn't seem to have become especially bloated, but on a recent OpenBSD, even something as basic as gcc likely have inflated memory requirements to the point where 24MB is a bit dicey. That said, on my old clunker, it was amazing how much it would do if left alone for 24 hours. OTOH, I was reading last week that compiling Java on OpenBSD 4.6 out of ports might not work if your machine was low on memory, which I suspect is somewhere around the 512MB threshold. (OpenBSD now has Java as a binary package, but it's an early-look version of 1.7, that doesn't scream prime time).
My first laptop was a 486DX/25 with 8MB of memory and a 120MB hard drive. I had NetBSD on it before I tossed it out. Under DOS, I had measured sequential disk transfer at about 250KB/s (using PIO mode 4 or the least DMA mode, can't recall precisely). That's less than DSL speed these days--for sequential hard disk transfer.
Many video cards from the day had single-ported memory. You'd get the majority of your frame buffer update bandwidth during the blanking intervals. For a single-ported video card, a video driver optimized to the hilt (there were many of these, I wrote one myself) would have trouble redrawing the screen in 640x480 mode with a static image in under 200ms and it tended to tie up your CPU the whole while. If the CPU has anything else to do, or the disk is swapping, good luck with that.
I suspect you could browse the web successfully on such a machine with a lot of patience if you turn off images and JavaScript and Flash, etc. You'll want the mode I used to use on bad dial-up: click the image to have the image load. It'll be about as useful as console mode on a 1200 baud dial-up. I wonder how many lines of code that still exist in the BSDs were written over 1200 baud dial-up.
My oldest machine at the moment is a PPro 200 on an Intel Venus FX440 board that doesn't know how to die (slated for replacement this very day). I don't recall this machine glitching a single time in ten years. I could have dry walled it into a closet.
A PPro 200 with 64MB running something tight like OpenBSD is where you might actually manage to forget for more than five minutes (on a graphical desktop) what a terrible POS you've just built. The PPro was the first CPU Intel made that really worked well at 32-bit, with DMA all around, a split transaction bus, etc. It was the first Intel chip scorned with a hint of fear.
I find this stuff interesting from the perspective of historical delusion. At the time, people are wailing that you can or can't do X, for X possibly equal to X. In hindsight, sometimes that was true, sometimes it wasn't. We're about to go through another round of the same delusions as we transfer from the oil economy to the post-oil economy over the next 100 years, maybe a lot quicker if the carbon hits the coral reef.
A lot of people out there presently believe it's not possible to drive home from work in the summer without air conditioning. Necessity is 90% perception.
The first manned Apollo mission to achieved manned lunar orbit was Apollo 8, launched 21 December 1968. Imagine the electronics that was running. It was soon miniaturized.
The first space shuttle launch was 12 April 1981, thirteen years later. What a difference a decade makes. It's now been three decades since the construction of nuclear power plants in America came to a grinding halt. In the meantime, we've gone from a 8086 to the i970. I wonder if that translates into a safer reactor design.
I once designed an algorithm which achieved extremely high compression using a pre-computed hash table (the elements were optimally assigned using a bipartite graph matching algorithm, with an open chain of length three, to a fill rate over 90%).
The cool thing about the hash table in our application is that it generated false positives. We enumerated all the false positives and added additional data to suppress the ones that would actively interfere with the algorithm, leaving all the others intact. The hash location was tied to a hardware dongle. You couldn't enumerate the table (by an easy method) because the false positives were an exponentially growing set (over phrase length). And you couldn't re-purpose the table in its existing form without leaving all the canaries intact, which would have been a dead giveaway had they shown up in anyone else's program.
It was a nice confluence of abstract properties, applicable only to a very specific kind of data and algorithm. It wasn't quite a perfect fit, since the exponential growth of the phantom set didn't kick into high gear until past the longest phrase length where we had enough data to matter. But the attacker wouldn't have immediately known this, and would have been frustrated by a few surprises long before arriving at that point. If the hardware dongle was not installed, you got a warning message, but nothing on the algorithm code path was modified. It just continued to use white noise from where the dongle was supposed to be, which yielded poor hash locations relative to the desired function. Some guy in China thought he cracked it because he removed the warning message, but he didn't check to see if the program still worked.
By the time you've been clever enough to warrant a patent, the applicability is too narrow to make it worth doing so. At least I managed an original combination of well known ideas, rather than rehashing Canary techniques that have been widely used in the intelligence community (I would bet a spare limb) back to the origin of high performance printers, if not earlier.
It's slightly easier to win a patent if you've never read a book before. That really amps up the novelty of invention factor.
High material prices would have slowed economic activity easing environmental burden, but recycling has lubricated the plundering of the earth with recycled crap.
Brought to you by the colour brown. This kind of language doesn't end well.
In any case, it reminded me of people who say similar things quite earnestly.
I was listening to a interview last night on EconTalk with Dan Pink while I updated my FreeBSD package tree. He was talking about a different mix of skillsets will be required to compete in the workforce of the developed world with so much routine-oriented white collar work heading to India.
He's clearly a smart guy, but he's trying to sell books, so he couches this in left brain/right brain terminology, but we can overlook this. In the spirit of his right brain metaphor he applies some new-age labels to the skillsets most likely to resist deportation to India. More overlooking required. Nevertheless, his points are valid.
One of the skillsets he promotes for the strip-mined jobscape is symphony. This is the ability to see the big picture, how everything fits together, how things are evolving, where it all ends up. Stuff like that.
In my experience the question "what do you think of recycling programs" is a good litmus test for the presence of symphony. If the response is, "well, it's not cost effective, so it's a waste of time" you can only hope the person you're talking to is strong in the other five job retention talents, or they are not long for the job market of the 21st century.
If the answer is "well, it's completely idiotic not to practice closed-cycle resource management, so the sooner we promote this as a cultural value, and learn how to orchestrate this in a cost effective manner, the better off we'll all be" then you're talking to someone with a little more staying power in the sliding jobscape.
And this from a podcast whose host views minimum wage as a form of dire economic distortion, and who often lays on a heaping dose of manlove for first-person price signal narratives.
Returning briefly to the essential but no longer sufficient skills of the past century, such as specialization, insight, and rationality, there's not a lot of upside to conducting this analysis without discussion of the nitrogen cycle, which is used to cost protein, versus the carbon cycle, which is used to price the SUV. One of these problems is not like the other.
Even Intel's shiny new Nehalem architecture is not much more than an updating of the DEC Alpha (ditto for AMD but their designs, at least, have been based on it for 10 years).
I'm shocked at this claim. Back in the day, Byte Magazine used to dissect processor architectures in a way you rarely see any more, apart from anything written by Jon Stokes over at Ars. Realworldtech picked up the torch, and I followed it for a while; smart guys, but you need a large Kool-Aid division factor to hang there.
This problem of "true innovation" has dogged the computer industry since the introduction of Hype 1.0.
Kurweil's law is "no technology before its time". Why is it that the premature ejaculator so often gets the lion's share of the credit? You can't deny the innovation at Xerox. The Xerox Dorado from 1979, which I once used for an hour, is reputed to have contained 3000 discrete ECL chips and have a BOM cost pushing up into six figures. Retail price might have been in the $200k range if, say, all the moon rocks recovered by NASA had been made of solid gold, and the engineers were suitably rewarded. I was told my my friend, a coop student there at the time, that the rumour on estimated street price to sell the Dorado was "probably $250k". I thought that was high at the time, but I knew less then about cost multiples.
... acceleration of technology [is a] strong interest of mine, and a theme that I've developed for some 30 years. I realized that my technologies had to make sense when I finished the project. That invariably, the world was a different place when I would introduce a technology. And, I noticed that most inventions fail, not because the R&D department can't get it to work -- if you look at most business plans, they will actually succeed if given the opportunity to build what they say they're going to build, and 90 percent of those projects or more will fail, because the timing is wrong -- not all the enabling factors will be in place when they're needed.
When you run a giant fab, you need to consider your volume targets in choosing processor design goals. What made the Alpha kick ass was the incorporation of some ultra-expensive metalization. That's how you get fast 64-bit adder in early 1990s process technology: an entire layer devoted to fast carry propagation. Lacking OOO, you need short, deterministic instruction latencies above all else, unobtainium be damned. Works for NASA, Boeing, and Ferrari. This fabrication approach was a total non-starter for Intel volume production.
IIRC--and this is becoming dim--the Alpha was a four-issue core with a uniform instruction width and precious little OOO logic. What is it that Nahalem is reputed to have copied here? It's been known for 15 years now that x86 integer performance was able to directly compete with RISC designs given a large design team devoted to working around the instruction set wonkiness. Most of the problems with x86 were toll bridges, rather than permanent road blocks. On the floating point side, the blighted x86 stack architecture cost you a factor of two. But floating point defined the low-volume workstation market, where sports cars like the Alpha found fleeting glory. I actually think the Itanium better represented Intel's desire to take Alpha to the next level.
Apart from that, over the longer time frame, reality imposes convergent evolution. To my knowledge, Intel never once publicly stated that AMD's on-die memory controller was the wrong path to take. Intel usually said "not yet, we can do it cheaper for another spin without going there, and besides, our marketing department ate some bad mushrooms for a couple of years there, so our roadmap is a bit jumbled right now." Does AMD get credit for innovating on-die memory controllers or for facing up to despe
At the rate we're going, by 2020 Windows will probably need 500GB for a base install
Only if you install the Federation Font Pack and the holographic tridi layout engine. And that's supposing the SETI program makes an immediate break-through, like tomorrow, and Perl 7 ships on time.
We've already passed the visual resolution where porn becomes gynaecology. Even lust has resolution limits.
Or maybe Google decides it saves bandwidth to send out the entire public Internet encoded as a single quantum particle, but for some reason people don't disable their Mozilla page cache.
Extrapolation is a valid exercise, but works better accompanied by graphs and data points rather than historical fat jokes. The last time Windows hung over its pants like a muffin top, I had a 6GB hard drive. Seagate hasn't sold anything smaller than a military surplus tent awning for years now. Hard to believe, times change.
So, it was marketing departments that forced this upon us, but it wasn't entirely Microsoft's fault...
That's the shallowest legitimate attempt to make sense of Microsoft marketing I've come across in years.
I'm reminded of the episode where Schlomo Teittleman accuses Tony Soprano of being a living golem. Teittleman creates the golem through a deal with Tony to deprive his ex son-in-law of his divorce settlement. Tell me, who created this "magic sticker" program in the first place?
At the time, Intel was worried that it wouldn't be able to ship the more advanced 945 chispet, which was capable of running Aero, in step with Microsoft's proposed schedule for the introduction of the marketing upgrade plan. ... "In the end, we lowered the requirement to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with the 915 graphics embedded," Microsoft's John Kalkman wrote in a February 2007 e-mail to Scott Di Valerio...
Apparently, not all of the back-pressure came from the down trodden, and there was a clear second option: delay Vista-capable until Intel could ship the 945 in volume. Pretty risky, counting on Intel to meet volume targets.
Their second golem-making move was to set Vista up as a mandatory upgrade, so you got Vista whether you were happy enough with XP or not and then quoting Vista adoption figures as if it was a blockbuster out of the gate, fooling no one of any importance.
Finally--since I don't wish to continue all day--how could any sane company manage to screw up its QA relationship with nVidia while releasing an OS where the promoted benefit to end user is a more advanced graphical user interface?
Microsoft decided to push Vista into the marketplace where the customers didn't want it, and their partners weren't yet ready to fully support it. Major partners like Intel and nVidia.
It should have been handled more like the Windows 2000 roll-out. Let the losers continue to run Windows 98 if they're happy enough with it, force the issue with Windows XP when there's not much left to complain about. Imagine how the Windows 2000 roll-out would have gone if they'd discontinued selling Windows 98 pre-installed, without providing a stable nVidia driver, while Intel was still pushing volume on chipsets with no AGP support.
Even Microsoft's internal communication sounded a lot like a NASA engineer's memo from the launch pad declaring "I've got a bad feeling about this".
Windows 7 is not what Vista should have been, but rather when Vista should have been. A less arrogant refresh in between would have served the day. Was the entire MS marketing department too clueless to type Itanium, RDRAM, Caminogate, or Prescott into the Google search bar? A fine education in Golem 101 was there for the taking.
Who wrote the rule about vigorously defending trade-marks? The principle beneficiaries of risible litigation.
What cracks me up is the implication by Sparc Industries that their customer base is, in the main, dumber than a bag of hammers. If I were a customer of Sparc Industries, I think I'd have grounds here for a class action defamation of character suit.
Judged on ambition, rhetoric, and failure, the evidence that AI can't work is at least as compelling as the evidence that Marxism can't work.
I don't particular wish to see Marxism successfully debugged, and from time to time I wonder what kind of anti-nirvana AI might lead to. The killer-app for AI seems to be circumventing the "Are you human?" question, and it's heavily funded by the fastest growing sector of the global economy.
Likewise, the failures of Marxism 50 years ago have about as much present relevance as the failures of AI 50 years ago. The world has changed. Furthermore, the old binary world view has become increasingly less relevant.
Many different outcomes, which fail to line up nicely on either side of the gym according to gender and bench space.
At their most naive, a libertarian reasons "big government can't be right, so small government can't be wrong". The device here is to make size the defining factor. But it's not. There are tolerable large governments (Sweden and Singapore could be doing a lot worse) and execrable small governments.
Here is quite a different theory about why size matters in government.
The basic idea is that corruption in government is in an inverse relation with the size of the ruling coalition. If the coalition is diffuse enough, the honcho in chief must sway the coalition through the creation of public goods; if small enough, the coalition can be bought through private corruption.
My personal beef with libertarianism is the naive suspension of emergent behaviour: that personal liberty is some kind of magic stable equilibrium point. The usual argument is "except for all the rest" meaning everyone who thinks government is part of the solution spoiling the situation. Kind of like telling someone driving in Sao Paulo for the first time "you won't crash if you don't flinch". All those white and yellow lines are overrated. Who needs them?
For all its counterintuitive sense, crossing the street like a Roman can be summed up in one sentence: Step off the curb with a confident stride and the traffic will stop. But for the amateur street crosser, wait for a native to cross and then follow. Watch as they step off the curb with what appears to be reckless but suave abandon and, like Moses parting the Red Sea, the traffic magically stops.
I read that as a pretty good summary for the libertarian model of how to reform government. I'd like better insight into the "magically stops" part. Something more sophisticated than "size matters". Perhaps something that takes into account Sapolsky as a leading authority on emergent behaviour.
Back to coalitions and public goods, open source is pretty much the definition of a public good. It's highly compatible with a subtle form of libertarianism not well suited for shouting about from roof tops. My sense of it is that the cohort of subtle libertarians is a pretty small voice in the weeds.
Posts that speculate about their moderation fate induce nausea. Moderation is vicissitudinous. That's the deal. Enough with the existential shirt rending, even if I agree with you.
What I'd like to see the adoption statistics of Postgres vs MySQL after subtracting out everyone who has expressed even the vaguest warm and fuzzy business sentiment about "monetizing eyeballs". Most people I know divide by some large number whenever this term comes up, except when quoting MySQL's enormous install base. I don't get it.
MySQL's original strength was rapidly generating page views containing data that was either 1) not very important, or 2) securely stored somewhere else, or 3) not worth thinking about in the frenetic pursuit of a profitable quarter. The big bang for open source database adoption was the second half of the 1990s, when monetizing eyeballs was cliff-jumping delusion of choice. It's clear nevertheless that MySQL won class presidency by a landslide. Isn't it?
One company out there that seems to be doing quite well lately is Atlassian. They strongly support the use of Postgres in conjunction with their Tomcat application suite. They are presently offering six tools on a heavy discount for small teams: issue tracker, wiki, source code inspection tool, agile PM, continuous integration server, and an OpenID server. I can speak well of JIRA at this point, not much experience yet with the others, but I'm doing the full-on Postgres installation tour of all six.
These are applications where the customer consumes their own data, so integrity of the data outweighs page view performance. Not that there's so much difference at this point due to convergent evolution. What irks me though is that MySQL gained its initial reputation on an inflated resume. I'm just saying that MySQL's storied success on prom night should be taken with a grain of salt. Ms Nortel 1999 is now a 30-year-old crack-ho.
My investigation of the Atlassian tool suite is an exploration of the uncomfortable boundary between pure open source and commercial software with attractive low-end adoption clauses. Atlassian seems to be 100% in the Java development camp, but with no special love for Oracle. I'm sure that will cause Larry some heartache. Is freedom from the hairy arms of Bugzilla worth the risk of being BitKeepered? I don't mind using Bugzilla, but I'm loath to administrate it. Time will tell whether I've sold my soul for a bad price.
I deliberately maintain a heterogeneous home network involving OpenBSD, FreeBSD, a daily flavour of Linux, an iMac (not my own), and Windows clunkers that can be pulled out of a closet if truly necessary.
I've never had an OpenBSD lemon, but then I tend to ask less of it. It has a defined role. FreeBSD rocks, when it works at all. The 5.x series was about as stable as the Apollo 13 re-entry. I've mostly used it as a web application server. The FreeBSD mojo is a little different than the OpenBSD mojo, so I never feel entirely at home there. I feel like a Brazilian in Portugal.
My primary desktop has been Linux since I retired my Windows 2000 box. At first it was Debian, but the Woody to Sarge upgrade cycle left a sour taste, so then it was FC4 and FC6, followed by Ubuntu.
I had a surprisingly good run on FC4. Everything I needed to do actually worked. Ubuntu has been hit and miss. On a good day, I forget what desktop I'm running. That's the ideal. One of the Ubuntu upgrades borked something to the point where I had to install from scratch. I decided to switch back to Fedora, but that release of Fedora made a total hash of my video card setup. Rather than diving into the arcana of xconfig with a heaping dose of new and improved, I went right back to Ubuntu.
It's pretty much impossible on any given day to say that X is better than Y. Every one of these projects has a few burrs under the saddle. I don't use my desktop for multimedia. Prefer not to install Flash at all, if I can get away with it, don't listen to music, don't play games. I'm not here to have a consumer experience.
Yesterday I was checking out crypto performance as part of sizing my network backup regime. I did an scp loopback test on a number of machines, which primarily tests AES CPU load, but also network stack agility.
time scp some_big_file.tgz `hostname`:/dev/null
Two of my Linux boxes crashed shorting afterwards: one a current Ubuntu, the other an antique Fedora. There was a console message on one of them about an illegal truncation request on/dev/null after the copy completed. I had an ssh-agent running to avert password prompts. My agent froze when one of the remote Linux machines died. These are machines that ordinarily don't crash at all. I was able to kill X on one of the crashed machines, but it was still borked enough to require a reboot. Strange.
My perception of the difference between Ubuntu and Fedora is that Ubuntu has some funny elements in its culture, whereas Fedora is a little more burdened by decisions long ago in its heritage. Ubuntu feels more like an immature first marriage, Fedora feels more like a wary second marriage (that can't shut up about SELinux due to some bad experience in a previous life).
The only thing I know for certain is that Fedora has a lot more talent available concerning everything to do with Java than Ubuntu. Java is relatively low on the Ubuntu totem pole. "apt-get install eclipse" will work on Ubuntu sometime after the release of Perl 7. Not that it matters all that much, if you have nothing else to do than figure out for yourself that it doesn't matter much.
I often wish my life was simple enough to declare "if it can't be done on OpenBSD, I don't want to do it". OpenBSD is far and away the most enlightened monastery. I'm not the kind of person to declare "my OS rocks [because I've decided to content myself with everything it does well]". I'd rather say "my OS rocks because it forces me to content myself with what can be done well". If only I could afford the ascetic luxury.
Reminds me of the best way to make a theory in linguistics bullet proof: making it Turing complete. That creates obstacles in proving with pencil and paper that it can't work. Your proposal is deficient in vitamin T.
First, the swayzun can take the form of this: if it comes up A we pay you $200, if it comes up !A, you pay us $100. It's going to cost you $100 for sure if neither of your balls is tattooed with the letter A. I'm sure no one accosted at a casino would possibly take up this wager.
Second, the swayzun can take a more insidious form: better not vote for them darkies. As long as there are at least two melatonin deficient candidates on the ballet, you can cover your ass without ruffling the swayder's white bed sheet.
God help you if you have a program that [relies on floor() truncating toward zero]
So true. Either the person writing the library or the person writing the program has no mathematical training or little concern over disregarding conventions long associated with quality software.
The authors of APL back in 1963 worked very, very hard to define the computational equivalents of common mathematical notation to preserve and obey the maximal set of mathematical identities. Perhaps they worked harder at this than other language teams because identities are none too compelling expressed in Lisp notation.
Later, when I learned many ideas about program correctness and defensive programming from Dijkstra, his notions of program correctness were highly APL compliant. People don't understand the full gravity of Dijkstra's lament APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. The only language consistent with his notions of programming elegance was a failed enterprise out of the starting gate. His implied converse also interests me: X, for X != APL, is a valuable step forward, borked beyond all recognition.
The people who brought you floor() truncating toward zero also brought you modulus operators where mod (x,N) == -mod(-x,N) Good luck using that to write an elegant loop dealing with possible negative values of x while ensuring that an array subscript is within the viable range [0..N)
And how about malloc(0) aborting your program on the assumption that a program which correctly handles the empty set (a rare condition indeed) deserves to have multiple extra lines of conditional statements to permanently clutter code review, when falling through the primary code path could have been completely safe. ["rare condition" resolves twice: once for sarcasm, once for cynicism. Lisp notation ruins everything.]
Too many OSes out there refuse to differentiate progress from borkage. Once you inflict enough paper cuts, one begins to think that bugs are a fact of life. Yet a few people out there who refuse to tolerate paper cuts manage to write large chunks of software near to entirely bug free. Mostly individuals, as it happens.
OpenBSD is a bit of a sore point for many people out there who like to crow about their progress unsullied by their borkage. The deep issue here is what ultimately happens to the rotting pea under the mattress? Do all the layers of straw and cotton mask the problem from the princess on top? Or does it just fester down there causing endless problems and sleepless nights?
This came to mind concerning the indicted IBM executive. I was thinking about the common career strategy of presiding over short term success, leaving at the top before the stink catches up with your actions, taking credit for a few brilliant quarters, then repeating the cycle with your next employer (who likely hired you after boning up on sharp trading practices). Our progress detectors are easily fooled.
I think in larger projects, one generally has to burn a few boats to hit the release date. Nothing stops a project from pausing after the release cycle to clean up the mess. I've noticed, however, that several projects that took a significant hiatus to get things right were severely punished by the nattering nabobs of negativism (don't look now, if you're reading here, you're surrounded). Postgres, Mozilla, Perl 6, Snow Leopard all come to mind (as a list, that's a bit of a Lewis Carroll Sesame Street: three of these things aren't not like the other. The yin/yang of car/cdr.).
Since I'm inclined to be dangerously open minded, I haven't made up my mind on Perl 6 yet, especially since the Python people have already released a darn good Perl 5.9
Are there no parallels here between Parrot and OpenSSH? "Man, I don't know what those guys are doing over there, but *just look* at the tools they leave lying around, and the man page *actually explains* how to use it. Too bad about their misguided agenda / abject ind
Most people don't realize it, but from time to time financial crimes in the US are punished pretty severely. Enron's Skilling got 24 years in jail for conspiracy to defraud investors.
There, fixed that for you. Never thought I'd say that, but I just did. I don't know if this link is any good, it's just the first one I found. America Has Become Incarceration Nation Circa not so long ago, America had 2.2 million people incarcerated, 5 to 8 times the rate of any other industrial nation, and one guy is serving a 24 year sentence for playing a critical role in putting the entire state of California one step closer to the poor house. Harsh. That's slightly less severe than the penalty for spitting gum onto the sidewalk in Singapore. Or stealing video tapes in America. Three strikes law
Leandro Andrade, received double sentence of 25 year-to-life for 2 counts of shoplifting
I see your silky Skilling with my scumbag Andrade in a death wrestle of naked data points. I hope Andrade winds up on top.
Did Skilling make one bad decision, or was he living a life of culpably bad decisions, day after day, month after month?
A proficient criminal executive makes it into his early retirement bracket before getting caught the first time, and usually has enough socked away in tax fraud havens not to resort to lifting video tapes to buy a pack of ciggies to smoke on a park bench in his golden years when his prostate starts to leak.
I failed tribalism 101, so I never get these apparent paradoxes, which seem to be rooted in the us/them, good/evil, they rape/we liberate cognitive homunculus.
Chlorine is also known as a deadly poison. That's how Ghandi liberated India: by extracting a deadly poison from the sea water and spreading it throughout the British subway system. And don't get me started on dihydrogen monoxide. Can kill someone with as little as one teaspoon, and it's found just about everywhere.
The question then becomes, is it fair for government or businesses to subsidize people living in the middle of no where?
It grieves me that this comment so frequently passes for intelligent thought. As if we don't subsidize our cities in too many ways to count. Have you ever noticed that wheat farmers in Saskatchewan often get paid less for their wheat cost than the energy input required to grow it? Thought not. The below market price for basic food stuffs primarily benefits urban dwellers. What about living in the middle of a wheat field that feeds 10,000 people constitutes nowhere? The ten mile drive to the nearest shack-and-gas coffee shop? Sucks to be them.
A large percentage of the people living in the middle of nowhere are employed in the resource sector, without which cities would not be possible.
City: a congregation of clueless consumers who convene on occasion to decide whether to subsidize the resource sector that made building their city possible in the first place.
I remember when I first began making heavy use of assert statements. I was using an early release of the Walter Bright's Zortech C++ compiler (circa 1989). I was reading Plaugher and Meyer's Eiffel book. I thought some of the stuff in the Eiffel book was a bit cracked, but I took to programming by contract like a fish to water.
This was early days, and there was a lot of opposition to the use of assert() statements among the troglodytes. The main objections were: it slows the program down, it uses too much code space (a more grievous offence when you are programming in 640kB), and, duh, the assert() statement might stop the program from continuing to run--in front of a customer, if you leave the assert() statement active in your production build.
The space problem was the worst of the three (how times change), so our production build had only a small percentage of our debug build. Our debug build often required a DOS extender to run at all. We used programming by contract extensively.
The end result of having all those assert statement? We had very few bugs. In the two or three cases where a customer had an assert statement go off, we had a patch out within days. We had one very upset customer who experienced assert() failures on an hourly basis. It didn't take us long to determine that this customer had a faulty memory subsystem. This customer was adamant that all his other software ran fine (he thought it did) and that only our application failed. In was one of those cases where we became the bearers of bad news. At some point, memory cache bit rot was going to melt his file system. Did he appreciate the early warning? Not so much.
The upshot is that I've been immune to a certain kind of nonsense about software reliability for a good twenty years now.
I suspect GE considers it a feature, not a bug, that your average radiologists is afraid to tweak the settings on the ionizing ray gun of deep cranial insight. I have a brother in law who practices radiology (reading the x-rays, not operating the machine). Your average radiologist is not average. He does the Navy Seals training program as a hobby. His radiology degree nearly killed him. For the first year, radiology is like trying to discover ET by staring at the white noise on your TV set after analog broadcasting has been discontinued. I suspect he could work through a book of Sudoku puzzles with every second page glued together.
In a design inspired by programming by contract, the final screen would be a dose assessment screen. As programmed, the machine will emit dose X. This is 8x the safety threshold configured for this procedure.
[Scorch patient now] [Think again]
If the exact position of the patient in the machine matters, then this can be entered into the machine, it can render a model which the operator can compare to the actual situation. This is not rocket science. You just have to want to do it.
The question at the end of the day is this: does GE want to? Or have they eaten the Oreo?
But then, it's not like Unix programmers are any smarter. I can think of very few applications, once I'm done editing the configuration files, will give me a summary screen of the directories which it requires for read or write or read/write operation in order to run correctly. I have to use strace on a regular basis to figure out why a configuration file doesn't get read (or gets read and later clobbered by something else).
Like what's the argument these days for that? Not enough disk space? Program would be too large? It makes my brain hurt?
Even C++ shot itself in the foot. Not because it had the wrong agenda, though many can't get past this (I can still hear Meyer's scream echoing from the 1980s). No, because they made function call resolution complicated involving inputs from dozens or (potentially) hundreds of places, and they couldn't b
Balance is a word with a lot of baggage. Ask any hunter-gatherer. Or for that matter, any dairy farmer. Or an NFL football player. Or an obsessive neuropathologist.
Confining a skill-oriented white collar job into a 40 hour week is a rare skill, especially when the skills involved have a short halflife. But it can be done. It doesn't hurt to show up on Monday morning rested and refreshed. Feeling like you are constantly reacting in the work environment is taken by time management specialists to be a sign of poor time management skills. Sure there is a constant pressure in most organizations to lapse into a reactive mode, but why succumb? Because you're burned out from staying up too late the night before downloading version 7.9.1 of this week's latest and greatest?
The upside on the hiring side is that young people with poor time management skills often have a poor sense of the value of their time or the compensation available with a heaping dose more discipline.
I've seen a lot of high turnover shops who on the surface complain about hiring costs, but couldn't possibly stay in business at the compensation level required to eliminate churn. Both software consulting shops and accounting firms. Burn them and churn them is a viable business model. Many college grads sign up for a year at such an outfit to get that critical first job on their resume.
What I haven't seen are people who combine levels of talent and creativity succeed in compartmentalizing their mental life. Startup companies involve incessant problem solving, and sometimes career consultants or time management people will confuse this with true creativity, which is altogether different.
It's not a sign of professionalism to smudge the boundary. Smudging the boundary can be considered careerism on one end of the spectrum, or called to the cloth on the other (for the fashion conscious).
I'm as smudged as any human living, but I don't rationalize this within a careerist imperative. Modern society has taken a vow. Like the borg, we are one flesh with our technology, for better or worse, in sickness or health, until death do us part. This is a marriage I take seriously. Unlike the ceremonial vow, this one might prove to have real teeth. What's the alimony payment on a trillion tons of CO2? We owe, we owe, it's off to work we go. One form of compartmentalization for day to day living, another for civilization surviving the next century. To each his own.
As compared to a 500 word essay that you probably wrote with outside assistance? The problem with subjective examinations is that they depend on the mindset of the marker, so you could well be marked down if they're having a bad day, or up if they're feeling generous. This is the very definition of unfair.
I hope you're not planning to apply for a statistics degree with that little essay. It would be the definition of fair if they refused you. There's variability in which standardized questions any particular applicant is exposed to. The coverage of material is not exactly the same from test to test, and might impact one student differently than another. It's also possible to cross validate subjective appraisals, if one is willing to go to enough trouble. It's possible that the variability in the subjective appraisal is on roughly the same scale as variability due to test composition. That hardly strikes me as the definition of unfair. Usually we reserve the strong definition of "unfair" to systemic effects rather than random, impersonal, not every day is equal effects. Is the testing supposed to be less variable than life itself? In 500 words, explain how.
There are many advertising practices that are either illegal or will get you into immense hot water with the enforcement agency (FDA, FCC, FTC, others). I don't know every law or rule in this field, and I don't wish to. It strikes me that blatantly creating false impressions in the mind of casual consumers violates the spirit of other laws in this field which do exist. It would be nice to find out which law, or if there is no law, to figure why this gap exists in consumer misrepresentation where others don't.
In the case where the reviews are heavily filtered, I'd happy enough the web site referred to the reviews as "selected reviews". One additional word to indicate that the reviews are not necessarily representative of the views filed. This would not be required when reviews are removed for violating terms of service (prices, personal attacks). If the terms of service indicate that unfavourable reviews can/will be removed, why does the site offer the ability to rate a product one star? I'd be happy if the FTC supplied some clarity around this.
Before we had consumer protection laws, we had a thriving industry in snake oil. Their ghosts achieved Valhalla on the internet. Capitalism is worthless unless it consists of informed exchanges. I don't regard caveat emptorism as a desirable economic system.
This is somewhat OT, but I think Polansky came morally unglued Abu Ghraib style. He lived through more than one R-rated horror show, and somewhere along the way someone forgot to inform him about the greater moral code. I'm with Zimbardo about AG: most of the fault lies with those who created the environment. What Polansky did was done with enough deliberation that he certainly deserved some jail time, but not 100 years as the judge is reported to have commented. 100 years would be the appropriate sentence for his second offence. For the first offence: you've had a bit of a rough go, now stand up, take your punishment for your despicable conduct, and consider yourself informed.
While I was mildly underwhelmed by "The Pianist", I didn't consider it a bad movie. It was a worthy attempt that didn't quite make it. I didn't regret the time I spent watching it, nor did I take a lot away from it that hadn't been done as well or better in other films. I preferred the lead-up-to-the-war, Cabaret ethos of the first act to the silent, enduring protagonist. Don't know why, just prefer my protagonists mouthy. Like they hired a script writer, or something. Quest for Fire has a better script than half the subtitle-friendly movies made these days.
Responding to another post, it's a bit of stretch to compare Harper to Cheney. I was reading an op-ed the other day about how Obama's summer plunge in the polls was a traditional American populist backlash against an educated and intelligent president. Many Americans instinctively regard intelligence in a politician as a sure makings of a crook. It's possibly a good theory, but I didn't spot any evidence that W's speech impediment in any way slowed the damage.
Harper's not a dumb man, and I probably don't agree with much of his vision for Canada, but I don't think he aspires to the creation of a fascist state. He possesses a measure of the petty ideological corruption common in right-thinking politicians of any stripe. Not so different than the social delusions of Polansky or famous NHL quarterbacks: a little bit above, beyond, or outside the law. OTOH, the most naive political position of all is to think the greater electorate is going to reward a politician for doing a good job, so we get what we pay for.
Case in point: Canada, probably as much by luck as good management, had one of the few banking systems to emerge relatively unscathed from the credit crisis. Has any Canadian lined up to pay more taxes in exchange for this excellent governance? Fat chance. We'd be happier if they had lost $100b (that's Canadian for $1t) so we could pillory them as models of what we deplore. Despising politicians is a nation building experience.
I don't think it's the politicians who are so fond of the police state as those who finance their election. The fat cats feel vulnerable to a free society, as well they should. Many times politicians seem to be yanking away freedoms that we in fact never possessed. Since WWII the Americans have practiced de facto spying against their own citizens. In the W era (he didn't quite earn himself the knighthood WWIII), they endeavoured to ratify what they had always done. Not that it would be so much different, but a little more convenient, with fewer safeguards, (and a little less internal laundry passing through the British).
At some point fewer safeguards spells catastrophe, so on principle we should oppose everything. I knew I would say something !OT eventually.
I have a personal rule of thumb: never engage in a debate over nuclear power until the word "fuel cycle" has been mentioned. One fuel cycle does not equal another. There's a bewildering smorgabord of choices, each with advantages and complications. Maybe we can cross off direct-to-hydrogen if this battery thing pans out.
You want to choose your fuel cycle carefully. The waste tends to stick around for a long time. What's the half-life in an ex-Soviet state on an unsupervised nuclear warhead? I suspect the big board at the NNSA has been a busy place since the wall fell. Maybe a few of those air traffic controllers that Reagan fired found a new calling in life.
Here's a curiosity. I was reminding myself about uranium supplies and the thorium cycle, when I stumbled onto a WNA propaganda zone. I wondered to myself, is this just one guy who doesn't adjust his meds, or is it manipulated by a powerful DC lobby org? Sometimes it's hard to know. The weird thing: to work there you need a good whitebread scrabble name. Here's all five names from the leadership page:
John Ritch Andy White Chris Crane Hans Blix Zack Pate
OK, so it's not located in Louisiana. Throw me a bone here, I need the names of their butlers, gardeners and sommoliers to place this outfit. Not a single Amarananda Jayawardena, Pathak Bindeshwar, or even a Nicholas Negroponte, the kinds of names I encountered in "The Ingenuity Gap" the other night.
Apparently, in the pro-nuclear lobby, no one wants to be accused of a stray letter or a spare syllable. Andy, you got some 'splainin to do. And Chris, how do you feel about the letter K? This here director's nuclear melt-down liability insurance form has only got *ten* letter boxes to spell out your name, and unless you're mononymous, you need one of those for the space in the middle.
Check out the kind of balderwashtheir clean little names allow them to publish:
From an economic perspective, these exploration costs are essentially equivalent to capital investment costs, albeit spread over a longer time period. It is, however, this time lag between the exploration expense and the start of production that confounds attempts to analyse exploration economics using strict discounted cash flow methods. The positive cash flows from production occur at least 10-15 years into the future, so that their present values are obviously greatly reduced, especially if one treats the present as the start of exploration. This creates a paradox, since large resource companies must place a real value on simply surviving and being profitable for many decades into the future; and, without exploration discoveries, all mining companies must expire with their reserves. Recent advances in the use of real options and similar methods are providing new ways to understand this apparent paradox. A key insight is that time, rather than destroying value through discounting, actually adds to the option value, as does the potential of price volatility. Under this perspective, resource companies create value by obtaining future resources which can be exploited optimally under a range of possible economic conditions. Techniques such as these are beginning to add analytical support to what have always been intuitive understandings by resource company leaders - that successful exploration creates profitable mines and adds value to company shares.
Now there's a man who once made a lot of money in a former career writing Enron press releases: it's not a cost, it's an option.
Now, what is the difference (tech-wise) between their shutter glasses and mine? Only the fact that theirs send a specific "yes I'm nvidia" signal back to the card.
I call this the "fill factor" as in landfill. I had a perfectly good Canon scanner that died when Canon decided it would never have a driver more recent than Windows 2000. Off to the landfill in near mint condition. (Or off to China in a mist of CO2 and particulate heavy metals). Generally my experiences with Canon have been good, but this one did not impress me.
I'm appalled at waste streams involving perfectly good manufactured goods that outlived its software. Stewart Brand was joking about "squanderable energy". You mean we don't already have that in the energy invested in squanderable applicances?
I understand his inner mirth at the term. It's against nature to squander entropy. It's like saying "squanderable blood". Maybe from one vantage point. The sentiment is rarely universal.
I've never reconciled myself to some of the emergent stupidities associated with free market capitalism. The main argument is that most of the cures (regulation is the most cited) are worse that the disease--until we caught a bad case of trillion-dollar bail out. Taleb and Summers refer to this outcome as the "privatization of gain, socialization of loss". This was true for a long time about the medical profession (who were slow to grasp sterilization).
Semmelweis was puzzled that puerperal fever was rare amongst women giving street births. "To me, it appeared logical that patients who experienced street births would become ill at least as frequently as those who delivered in the clinic.
OK, so sometimes the cure *is* worse than the disease. But that won't last forever. Free market capitalism (and its champion of the hour, Nvidia) does such a good job of motivating economic Semmelweis's to contemplate the alternatives, if the system can't manage to eliminate it's own issues, we'll eventually reach the point of replacing the whole thing. God forbid it's any system we've tried already.
We haven't yet invented the germ theory of capitalism, so I'll have to content myself by referring to Nvidia's PhysX business decision as a cadaverous particle.
We have Trend where I work. More than doubles Eclipse startup time. Often I open more than one workspace. Without antivirus, you can start multiple Eclipse instances in parallel at a reasonable speed. With Trend running, I think it rescans every DLL for every Eclipse instance. It's brutal to have to restart multiple workspaces after an Eclipse update, like I did today. Sometimes I think "haven't you scanned that *enough* already?" Too bad Eclipse doesn't have a "fork new workspace" option so that I could load my workspace instances on the other side of airport security.
On our machines, XP doesn't recognize TrendMicro, so we get the "running naked" DR DOS jim-bob. Reminds me that Microsoft has been in the anti-virus game a long time. One of their early efforts was called AARD.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for that link to General Confusion. Made my day. Check out the freshman T-rex with his lava lamp and the sordid diatripe:
http://www.generalfusion.com/fossil_fuel_crisis.php
The planet was covered with dense clouds and the atmosphere contained a high concentration of carbon dioxide, producing tropical conditions north of the 45th parallel. For example, many dinosaur fossils were excavated in Alberta, Canada. As the earth's crust cooled down, volcanic activity reduced.
Riddle of Burgess Shale's fossil-rich deposits solved
The site, close to the B.C.-Alberta border, is considered crucial to understanding the so-called Cambrian "explosion" of life - a time when the future Canadian land mass was drifting in tropical climes close to the Earth's equator.
In my historical atlas, the equator is considerably south of the 45th latitude. The dinosaur fossils in Alberta are equatorial in origin. But hey, if you can't get that right, no obstacle to solving the fusion problem. Like it's not a hard problem or anything. The typical Alberta fat cat oilman probably doesn't believe in plate tectonics to begin with. Just a bunch of mud we turn into money. Now they're all excited about version 2: just a bunch of water we turn into money.
BTW, the Royal Tyrrell Museum in the Alberta badlands is pretty kick-ass if you're into bones.
No one expected a Patriot in air defense mode to stay stationary for 10 hours let alone 100.
Use case blindness is an incredibly rich source of severe system errors. Proof of correctness is hard enough without a clutter of use case clauses (apparently) lopping off obvious failure modes. Until they don't, because, oh ya, use cases evolve long after the coding is done. [Cue John Mellencamp].
And the thing is, it wasn't hard to just do it right in the first place. If they were working in a language with C-level abstraction (which isn't much), it's trivial to create a type such as uptime_t which counts in integer ticks (of whatever granularity you require) and has an uptime range which is very nearly impossible to overflow (months or years at a dead minimum). A 64-bit integer incremented at 4GHz won't overflow for 4 billion seconds, more than a century. Few timekeeping systems increment at 4GHz, so a century is your worst case. Hey brother, can you spare me eight bytes?
For Want of a Nail a lot of COBOL programmers came out of retirement.
Even a lowly pair of 24 bit integers (if that was their machine architecture) can be used to create a 48 bit integer with increment and difference at almost zero overhead. You can augment this with a saturating 24 bit uptime_diff_t. If the answer comes back as 2^24-1 deci-seconds (about two weeks) your code should interpret this as "blink and it's gone". These types can be implemented in asm with a two or three 10 line macros, at a cost only a handful of extra cycles at run time.
Floating point conversion of the diff_t result would have been fine (elapsed time of flight for a Scud missile isn't going to overflow anything). Nothing required here but clear thinking and a refusal to accept "that can't happen" use cases lightly.
BTW, some people are confused about the precision required: they aren't trying to hit the missile with this calculation, but position an acquisition window for a higher-precision targeting system, if I got the drift.
There's a time and place for use cases, and there is a time and place for a more rigorous foundation.
There are no atheists in foxholes. Corollary: the only use case is whatever saves their skin. I didn't notice any of the soldiers under the bridge in Apocalypse Now sitting around reading their user manuals by the rocket's red glare.
Ten years ago, a similar machine was my junk box of last resort for messing around with ipsec firewalls, a spare end point for some test configurations. I had OpenBSD 2.5 on the box and had to compile some stuff out of ports. With 16MB, this was deadly slow and some ports failed to compile. With 24MB it was about twice as fast, and most of my compile problems went away.
OpenBSD doesn't seem to have become especially bloated, but on a recent OpenBSD, even something as basic as gcc likely have inflated memory requirements to the point where 24MB is a bit dicey. That said, on my old clunker, it was amazing how much it would do if left alone for 24 hours. OTOH, I was reading last week that compiling Java on OpenBSD 4.6 out of ports might not work if your machine was low on memory, which I suspect is somewhere around the 512MB threshold. (OpenBSD now has Java as a binary package, but it's an early-look version of 1.7, that doesn't scream prime time).
My first laptop was a 486DX/25 with 8MB of memory and a 120MB hard drive. I had NetBSD on it before I tossed it out. Under DOS, I had measured sequential disk transfer at about 250KB/s (using PIO mode 4 or the least DMA mode, can't recall precisely). That's less than DSL speed these days--for sequential hard disk transfer.
Many video cards from the day had single-ported memory. You'd get the majority of your frame buffer update bandwidth during the blanking intervals. For a single-ported video card, a video driver optimized to the hilt (there were many of these, I wrote one myself) would have trouble redrawing the screen in 640x480 mode with a static image in under 200ms and it tended to tie up your CPU the whole while. If the CPU has anything else to do, or the disk is swapping, good luck with that.
I suspect you could browse the web successfully on such a machine with a lot of patience if you turn off images and JavaScript and Flash, etc. You'll want the mode I used to use on bad dial-up: click the image to have the image load. It'll be about as useful as console mode on a 1200 baud dial-up. I wonder how many lines of code that still exist in the BSDs were written over 1200 baud dial-up.
My oldest machine at the moment is a PPro 200 on an Intel Venus FX440 board that doesn't know how to die (slated for replacement this very day). I don't recall this machine glitching a single time in ten years. I could have dry walled it into a closet.
A PPro 200 with 64MB running something tight like OpenBSD is where you might actually manage to forget for more than five minutes (on a graphical desktop) what a terrible POS you've just built. The PPro was the first CPU Intel made that really worked well at 32-bit, with DMA all around, a split transaction bus, etc. It was the first Intel chip scorned with a hint of fear.
I find this stuff interesting from the perspective of historical delusion. At the time, people are wailing that you can or can't do X, for X possibly equal to X. In hindsight, sometimes that was true, sometimes it wasn't. We're about to go through another round of the same delusions as we transfer from the oil economy to the post-oil economy over the next 100 years, maybe a lot quicker if the carbon hits the coral reef.
A lot of people out there presently believe it's not possible to drive home from work in the summer without air conditioning. Necessity is 90% perception.
The first manned Apollo mission to achieved manned lunar orbit was Apollo 8, launched 21 December 1968. Imagine the electronics that was running. It was soon miniaturized.
http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/dedicated/homepong.html
The first space shuttle launch was 12 April 1981, thirteen years later. What a difference a decade makes. It's now been three decades since the construction of nuclear power plants in America came to a grinding halt. In the meantime, we've gone from a 8086 to the i970. I wonder if that translates into a safer reactor design.
I once designed an algorithm which achieved extremely high compression using a pre-computed hash table (the elements were optimally assigned using a bipartite graph matching algorithm, with an open chain of length three, to a fill rate over 90%).
The cool thing about the hash table in our application is that it generated false positives. We enumerated all the false positives and added additional data to suppress the ones that would actively interfere with the algorithm, leaving all the others intact. The hash location was tied to a hardware dongle. You couldn't enumerate the table (by an easy method) because the false positives were an exponentially growing set (over phrase length). And you couldn't re-purpose the table in its existing form without leaving all the canaries intact, which would have been a dead giveaway had they shown up in anyone else's program.
It was a nice confluence of abstract properties, applicable only to a very specific kind of data and algorithm. It wasn't quite a perfect fit, since the exponential growth of the phantom set didn't kick into high gear until past the longest phrase length where we had enough data to matter. But the attacker wouldn't have immediately known this, and would have been frustrated by a few surprises long before arriving at that point. If the hardware dongle was not installed, you got a warning message, but nothing on the algorithm code path was modified. It just continued to use white noise from where the dongle was supposed to be, which yielded poor hash locations relative to the desired function. Some guy in China thought he cracked it because he removed the warning message, but he didn't check to see if the program still worked.
By the time you've been clever enough to warrant a patent, the applicability is too narrow to make it worth doing so. At least I managed an original combination of well known ideas, rather than rehashing Canary techniques that have been widely used in the intelligence community (I would bet a spare limb) back to the origin of high performance printers, if not earlier.
It's slightly easier to win a patent if you've never read a book before. That really amps up the novelty of invention factor.
Brought to you by the colour brown. This kind of language doesn't end well.
In any case, it reminded me of people who say similar things quite earnestly.
I was listening to a interview last night on EconTalk with Dan Pink while I updated my FreeBSD package tree. He was talking about a different mix of skillsets will be required to compete in the workforce of the developed world with so much routine-oriented white collar work heading to India.
He's clearly a smart guy, but he's trying to sell books, so he couches this in left brain/right brain terminology, but we can overlook this. In the spirit of his right brain metaphor he applies some new-age labels to the skillsets most likely to resist deportation to India. More overlooking required. Nevertheless, his points are valid.
One of the skillsets he promotes for the strip-mined jobscape is symphony. This is the ability to see the big picture, how everything fits together, how things are evolving, where it all ends up. Stuff like that.
In my experience the question "what do you think of recycling programs" is a good litmus test for the presence of symphony. If the response is, "well, it's not cost effective, so it's a waste of time" you can only hope the person you're talking to is strong in the other five job retention talents, or they are not long for the job market of the 21st century.
If the answer is "well, it's completely idiotic not to practice closed-cycle resource management, so the sooner we promote this as a cultural value, and learn how to orchestrate this in a cost effective manner, the better off we'll all be" then you're talking to someone with a little more staying power in the sliding jobscape.
And this from a podcast whose host views minimum wage as a form of dire economic distortion, and who often lays on a heaping dose of manlove for first-person price signal narratives.
Returning briefly to the essential but no longer sufficient skills of the past century, such as specialization, insight, and rationality, there's not a lot of upside to conducting this analysis without discussion of the nitrogen cycle, which is used to cost protein, versus the carbon cycle, which is used to price the SUV. One of these problems is not like the other.
I'm shocked at this claim. Back in the day, Byte Magazine used to dissect processor architectures in a way you rarely see any more, apart from anything written by Jon Stokes over at Ars. Realworldtech picked up the torch, and I followed it for a while; smart guys, but you need a large Kool-Aid division factor to hang there.
This problem of "true innovation" has dogged the computer industry since the introduction of Hype 1.0.
Kurweil's law is "no technology before its time". Why is it that the premature ejaculator so often gets the lion's share of the credit? You can't deny the innovation at Xerox. The Xerox Dorado from 1979, which I once used for an hour, is reputed to have contained 3000 discrete ECL chips and have a BOM cost pushing up into six figures. Retail price might have been in the $200k range if, say, all the moon rocks recovered by NASA had been made of solid gold, and the engineers were suitably rewarded. I was told my my friend, a coop student there at the time, that the rumour on estimated street price to sell the Dorado was "probably $250k". I thought that was high at the time, but I knew less then about cost multiples.
Ray Kurzweil on how technology will transform us
When you run a giant fab, you need to consider your volume targets in choosing processor design goals. What made the Alpha kick ass was the incorporation of some ultra-expensive metalization. That's how you get fast 64-bit adder in early 1990s process technology: an entire layer devoted to fast carry propagation. Lacking OOO, you need short, deterministic instruction latencies above all else, unobtainium be damned. Works for NASA, Boeing, and Ferrari. This fabrication approach was a total non-starter for Intel volume production.
IIRC--and this is becoming dim--the Alpha was a four-issue core with a uniform instruction width and precious little OOO logic. What is it that Nahalem is reputed to have copied here? It's been known for 15 years now that x86 integer performance was able to directly compete with RISC designs given a large design team devoted to working around the instruction set wonkiness. Most of the problems with x86 were toll bridges, rather than permanent road blocks. On the floating point side, the blighted x86 stack architecture cost you a factor of two. But floating point defined the low-volume workstation market, where sports cars like the Alpha found fleeting glory. I actually think the Itanium better represented Intel's desire to take Alpha to the next level.
Apart from that, over the longer time frame, reality imposes convergent evolution. To my knowledge, Intel never once publicly stated that AMD's on-die memory controller was the wrong path to take. Intel usually said "not yet, we can do it cheaper for another spin without going there, and besides, our marketing department ate some bad mushrooms for a couple of years there, so our roadmap is a bit jumbled right now." Does AMD get credit for innovating on-die memory controllers or for facing up to despe
Only if you install the Federation Font Pack and the holographic tridi layout engine. And that's supposing the SETI program makes an immediate break-through, like tomorrow, and Perl 7 ships on time.
We've already passed the visual resolution where porn becomes gynaecology. Even lust has resolution limits.
Or maybe Google decides it saves bandwidth to send out the entire public Internet encoded as a single quantum particle, but for some reason people don't disable their Mozilla page cache.
Extrapolation is a valid exercise, but works better accompanied by graphs and data points rather than historical fat jokes. The last time Windows hung over its pants like a muffin top, I had a 6GB hard drive. Seagate hasn't sold anything smaller than a military surplus tent awning for years now. Hard to believe, times change.
That's the shallowest legitimate attempt to make sense of Microsoft marketing I've come across in years.
I'm reminded of the episode where Schlomo Teittleman accuses Tony Soprano of being a living golem. Teittleman creates the golem through a deal with Tony to deprive his ex son-in-law of his divorce settlement. Tell me, who created this "magic sticker" program in the first place?
From Microsoft e-mails reveal Intel pressure over Vista
Apparently, not all of the back-pressure came from the down trodden, and there was a clear second option: delay Vista-capable until Intel could ship the 945 in volume. Pretty risky, counting on Intel to meet volume targets.
Their second golem-making move was to set Vista up as a mandatory upgrade, so you got Vista whether you were happy enough with XP or not and then quoting Vista adoption figures as if it was a blockbuster out of the gate, fooling no one of any importance.
Finally--since I don't wish to continue all day--how could any sane company manage to screw up its QA relationship with nVidia while releasing an OS where the promoted benefit to end user is a more advanced graphical user interface?
Microsoft decided to push Vista into the marketplace where the customers didn't want it, and their partners weren't yet ready to fully support it. Major partners like Intel and nVidia.
It should have been handled more like the Windows 2000 roll-out. Let the losers continue to run Windows 98 if they're happy enough with it, force the issue with Windows XP when there's not much left to complain about. Imagine how the Windows 2000 roll-out would have gone if they'd discontinued selling Windows 98 pre-installed, without providing a stable nVidia driver, while Intel was still pushing volume on chipsets with no AGP support.
Even Microsoft's internal communication sounded a lot like a NASA engineer's memo from the launch pad declaring "I've got a bad feeling about this".
Windows 7 is not what Vista should have been, but rather when Vista should have been. A less arrogant refresh in between would have served the day. Was the entire MS marketing department too clueless to type Itanium, RDRAM, Caminogate, or Prescott into the Google search bar? A fine education in Golem 101 was there for the taking.
Who wrote the rule about vigorously defending trade-marks? The principle beneficiaries of risible litigation.
What cracks me up is the implication by Sparc Industries that their customer base is, in the main, dumber than a bag of hammers. If I were a customer of Sparc Industries, I think I'd have grounds here for a class action defamation of character suit.
Marxism is more realistic.
Judged on ambition, rhetoric, and failure, the evidence that AI can't work is at least as compelling as the evidence that Marxism can't work.
I don't particular wish to see Marxism successfully debugged, and from time to time I wonder what kind of anti-nirvana AI might lead to. The killer-app for AI seems to be circumventing the "Are you human?" question, and it's heavily funded by the fastest growing sector of the global economy.
Misha Glenny investigates global crime networks
Likewise, the failures of Marxism 50 years ago have about as much present relevance as the failures of AI 50 years ago. The world has changed. Furthermore, the old binary world view has become increasingly less relevant.
Hans Rosling: Let my dataset change your mindset
Many different outcomes, which fail to line up nicely on either side of the gym according to gender and bench space.
At their most naive, a libertarian reasons "big government can't be right, so small government can't be wrong". The device here is to make size the defining factor. But it's not. There are tolerable large governments (Sweden and Singapore could be doing a lot worse) and execrable small governments.
Here is quite a different theory about why size matters in government.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on Democracies and Dictatorships | Library of Economics and Liberty
The basic idea is that corruption in government is in an inverse relation with the size of the ruling coalition. If the coalition is diffuse enough, the honcho in chief must sway the coalition through the creation of public goods; if small enough, the coalition can be bought through private corruption.
My personal beef with libertarianism is the naive suspension of emergent behaviour: that personal liberty is some kind of magic stable equilibrium point. The usual argument is "except for all the rest" meaning everyone who thinks government is part of the solution spoiling the situation. Kind of like telling someone driving in Sao Paulo for the first time "you won't crash if you don't flinch". All those white and yellow lines are overrated. Who needs them?
How to Cross the Street in Rome
I read that as a pretty good summary for the libertarian model of how to reform government. I'd like better insight into the "magically stops" part. Something more sophisticated than "size matters". Perhaps something that takes into account Sapolsky as a leading authority on emergent behaviour.
Back to coalitions and public goods, open source is pretty much the definition of a public good. It's highly compatible with a subtle form of libertarianism not well suited for shouting about from roof tops. My sense of it is that the cohort of subtle libertarians is a pretty small voice in the weeds.
Posts that speculate about their moderation fate induce nausea. Moderation is vicissitudinous. That's the deal. Enough with the existential shirt rending, even if I agree with you.
What I'd like to see the adoption statistics of Postgres vs MySQL after subtracting out everyone who has expressed even the vaguest warm and fuzzy business sentiment about "monetizing eyeballs". Most people I know divide by some large number whenever this term comes up, except when quoting MySQL's enormous install base. I don't get it.
MySQL's original strength was rapidly generating page views containing data that was either 1) not very important, or 2) securely stored somewhere else, or 3) not worth thinking about in the frenetic pursuit of a profitable quarter. The big bang for open source database adoption was the second half of the 1990s, when monetizing eyeballs was cliff-jumping delusion of choice. It's clear nevertheless that MySQL won class presidency by a landslide. Isn't it?
One company out there that seems to be doing quite well lately is Atlassian. They strongly support the use of Postgres in conjunction with their Tomcat application suite. They are presently offering six tools on a heavy discount for small teams: issue tracker, wiki, source code inspection tool, agile PM, continuous integration server, and an OpenID server. I can speak well of JIRA at this point, not much experience yet with the others, but I'm doing the full-on Postgres installation tour of all six.
These are applications where the customer consumes their own data, so integrity of the data outweighs page view performance. Not that there's so much difference at this point due to convergent evolution. What irks me though is that MySQL gained its initial reputation on an inflated resume. I'm just saying that MySQL's storied success on prom night should be taken with a grain of salt. Ms Nortel 1999 is now a 30-year-old crack-ho.
My investigation of the Atlassian tool suite is an exploration of the uncomfortable boundary between pure open source and commercial software with attractive low-end adoption clauses. Atlassian seems to be 100% in the Java development camp, but with no special love for Oracle. I'm sure that will cause Larry some heartache. Is freedom from the hairy arms of Bugzilla worth the risk of being BitKeepered? I don't mind using Bugzilla, but I'm loath to administrate it. Time will tell whether I've sold my soul for a bad price.
I deliberately maintain a heterogeneous home network involving OpenBSD, FreeBSD, a daily flavour of Linux, an iMac (not my own), and Windows clunkers that can be pulled out of a closet if truly necessary.
I've never had an OpenBSD lemon, but then I tend to ask less of it. It has a defined role. FreeBSD rocks, when it works at all. The 5.x series was about as stable as the Apollo 13 re-entry. I've mostly used it as a web application server. The FreeBSD mojo is a little different than the OpenBSD mojo, so I never feel entirely at home there. I feel like a Brazilian in Portugal.
My primary desktop has been Linux since I retired my Windows 2000 box. At first it was Debian, but the Woody to Sarge upgrade cycle left a sour taste, so then it was FC4 and FC6, followed by Ubuntu.
I had a surprisingly good run on FC4. Everything I needed to do actually worked. Ubuntu has been hit and miss. On a good day, I forget what desktop I'm running. That's the ideal. One of the Ubuntu upgrades borked something to the point where I had to install from scratch. I decided to switch back to Fedora, but that release of Fedora made a total hash of my video card setup. Rather than diving into the arcana of xconfig with a heaping dose of new and improved, I went right back to Ubuntu.
It's pretty much impossible on any given day to say that X is better than Y. Every one of these projects has a few burrs under the saddle. I don't use my desktop for multimedia. Prefer not to install Flash at all, if I can get away with it, don't listen to music, don't play games. I'm not here to have a consumer experience.
Yesterday I was checking out crypto performance as part of sizing my network backup regime. I did an scp loopback test on a number of machines, which primarily tests AES CPU load, but also network stack agility.
time scp some_big_file.tgz `hostname`:/dev/null
Two of my Linux boxes crashed shorting afterwards: one a current Ubuntu, the other an antique Fedora. There was a console message on one of them about an illegal truncation request on /dev/null after the copy completed. I had an ssh-agent running to avert password prompts. My agent froze when one of the remote Linux machines died. These are machines that ordinarily don't crash at all. I was able to kill X on one of the crashed machines, but it was still borked enough to require a reboot. Strange.
My perception of the difference between Ubuntu and Fedora is that Ubuntu has some funny elements in its culture, whereas Fedora is a little more burdened by decisions long ago in its heritage. Ubuntu feels more like an immature first marriage, Fedora feels more like a wary second marriage (that can't shut up about SELinux due to some bad experience in a previous life).
The only thing I know for certain is that Fedora has a lot more talent available concerning everything to do with Java than Ubuntu. Java is relatively low on the Ubuntu totem pole. "apt-get install eclipse" will work on Ubuntu sometime after the release of Perl 7. Not that it matters all that much, if you have nothing else to do than figure out for yourself that it doesn't matter much.
I often wish my life was simple enough to declare "if it can't be done on OpenBSD, I don't want to do it". OpenBSD is far and away the most enlightened monastery. I'm not the kind of person to declare "my OS rocks [because I've decided to content myself with everything it does well]". I'd rather say "my OS rocks because it forces me to content myself with what can be done well". If only I could afford the ascetic luxury.
Reminds me of the best way to make a theory in linguistics bullet proof: making it Turing complete. That creates obstacles in proving with pencil and paper that it can't work. Your proposal is deficient in vitamin T.
First, the swayzun can take the form of this: if it comes up A we pay you $200, if it comes up !A, you pay us $100. It's going to cost you $100 for sure if neither of your balls is tattooed with the letter A. I'm sure no one accosted at a casino would possibly take up this wager.
Second, the swayzun can take a more insidious form: better not vote for them darkies. As long as there are at least two melatonin deficient candidates on the ballet, you can cover your ass without ruffling the swayder's white bed sheet.
So true. Either the person writing the library or the person writing the program has no mathematical training or little concern over disregarding conventions long associated with quality software.
The authors of APL back in 1963 worked very, very hard to define the computational equivalents of common mathematical notation to preserve and obey the maximal set of mathematical identities. Perhaps they worked harder at this than other language teams because identities are none too compelling expressed in Lisp notation.
Later, when I learned many ideas about program correctness and defensive programming from Dijkstra, his notions of program correctness were highly APL compliant. People don't understand the full gravity of Dijkstra's lament APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. The only language consistent with his notions of programming elegance was a failed enterprise out of the starting gate. His implied converse also interests me: X, for X != APL, is a valuable step forward, borked beyond all recognition.
The people who brought you floor() truncating toward zero also brought you modulus operators where mod (x,N) == -mod(-x,N) Good luck using that to write an elegant loop dealing with possible negative values of x while ensuring that an array subscript is within the viable range [0..N)
And how about malloc(0) aborting your program on the assumption that a program which correctly handles the empty set (a rare condition indeed) deserves to have multiple extra lines of conditional statements to permanently clutter code review, when falling through the primary code path could have been completely safe. ["rare condition" resolves twice: once for sarcasm, once for cynicism. Lisp notation ruins everything.]
Too many OSes out there refuse to differentiate progress from borkage. Once you inflict enough paper cuts, one begins to think that bugs are a fact of life. Yet a few people out there who refuse to tolerate paper cuts manage to write large chunks of software near to entirely bug free. Mostly individuals, as it happens.
OpenBSD is a bit of a sore point for many people out there who like to crow about their progress unsullied by their borkage. The deep issue here is what ultimately happens to the rotting pea under the mattress? Do all the layers of straw and cotton mask the problem from the princess on top? Or does it just fester down there causing endless problems and sleepless nights?
This came to mind concerning the indicted IBM executive. I was thinking about the common career strategy of presiding over short term success, leaving at the top before the stink catches up with your actions, taking credit for a few brilliant quarters, then repeating the cycle with your next employer (who likely hired you after boning up on sharp trading practices). Our progress detectors are easily fooled.
I think in larger projects, one generally has to burn a few boats to hit the release date. Nothing stops a project from pausing after the release cycle to clean up the mess. I've noticed, however, that several projects that took a significant hiatus to get things right were severely punished by the nattering nabobs of negativism (don't look now, if you're reading here, you're surrounded). Postgres, Mozilla, Perl 6, Snow Leopard all come to mind (as a list, that's a bit of a Lewis Carroll Sesame Street: three of these things aren't not like the other. The yin/yang of car/cdr.).
Since I'm inclined to be dangerously open minded, I haven't made up my mind on Perl 6 yet, especially since the Python people have already released a darn good Perl 5.9
Are there no parallels here between Parrot and OpenSSH? "Man, I don't know what those guys are doing over there, but *just look* at the tools they leave lying around, and the man page *actually explains* how to use it. Too bad about their misguided agenda / abject ind
There, fixed that for you. Never thought I'd say that, but I just did. I don't know if this link is any good, it's just the first one I found.
America Has Become Incarceration Nation
Circa not so long ago, America had 2.2 million people incarcerated, 5 to 8 times the rate of any other industrial nation, and one guy is serving a 24 year sentence for playing a critical role in putting the entire state of California one step closer to the poor house. Harsh. That's slightly less severe than the penalty for spitting gum onto the sidewalk in Singapore. Or stealing video tapes in America.
Three strikes law
Leandro Andrade, received double sentence of 25 year-to-life for 2 counts of shoplifting
I see your silky Skilling with my scumbag Andrade in a death wrestle of naked data points. I hope Andrade winds up on top.
Did Skilling make one bad decision, or was he living a life of culpably bad decisions, day after day, month after month?
A proficient criminal executive makes it into his early retirement bracket before getting caught the first time, and usually has enough socked away in tax fraud havens not to resort to lifting video tapes to buy a pack of ciggies to smoke on a park bench in his golden years when his prostate starts to leak.
I failed tribalism 101, so I never get these apparent paradoxes, which seem to be rooted in the us/them, good/evil, they rape/we liberate cognitive homunculus.
Chlorine is also known as a deadly poison. That's how Ghandi liberated India: by extracting a deadly poison from the sea water and spreading it throughout the British subway system. And don't get me started on dihydrogen monoxide. Can kill someone with as little as one teaspoon, and it's found just about everywhere.
It grieves me that this comment so frequently passes for intelligent thought. As if we don't subsidize our cities in too many ways to count. Have you ever noticed that wheat farmers in Saskatchewan often get paid less for their wheat cost than the energy input required to grow it? Thought not. The below market price for basic food stuffs primarily benefits urban dwellers. What about living in the middle of a wheat field that feeds 10,000 people constitutes nowhere? The ten mile drive to the nearest shack-and-gas coffee shop? Sucks to be them.
A large percentage of the people living in the middle of nowhere are employed in the resource sector, without which cities would not be possible.
City: a congregation of clueless consumers who convene on occasion to decide whether to subsidize the resource sector that made building their city possible in the first place.
I remember when I first began making heavy use of assert statements. I was using an early release of the Walter Bright's Zortech C++ compiler (circa 1989). I was reading Plaugher and Meyer's Eiffel book. I thought some of the stuff in the Eiffel book was a bit cracked, but I took to programming by contract like a fish to water.
This was early days, and there was a lot of opposition to the use of assert() statements among the troglodytes. The main objections were: it slows the program down, it uses too much code space (a more grievous offence when you are programming in 640kB), and, duh, the assert() statement might stop the program from continuing to run--in front of a customer, if you leave the assert() statement active in your production build.
The space problem was the worst of the three (how times change), so our production build had only a small percentage of our debug build. Our debug build often required a DOS extender to run at all. We used programming by contract extensively.
The end result of having all those assert statement? We had very few bugs. In the two or three cases where a customer had an assert statement go off, we had a patch out within days. We had one very upset customer who experienced assert() failures on an hourly basis. It didn't take us long to determine that this customer had a faulty memory subsystem. This customer was adamant that all his other software ran fine (he thought it did) and that only our application failed. In was one of those cases where we became the bearers of bad news. At some point, memory cache bit rot was going to melt his file system. Did he appreciate the early warning? Not so much.
The upshot is that I've been immune to a certain kind of nonsense about software reliability for a good twenty years now.
I suspect GE considers it a feature, not a bug, that your average radiologists is afraid to tweak the settings on the ionizing ray gun of deep cranial insight. I have a brother in law who practices radiology (reading the x-rays, not operating the machine). Your average radiologist is not average. He does the Navy Seals training program as a hobby. His radiology degree nearly killed him. For the first year, radiology is like trying to discover ET by staring at the white noise on your TV set after analog broadcasting has been discontinued. I suspect he could work through a book of Sudoku puzzles with every second page glued together.
In a design inspired by programming by contract, the final screen would be a dose assessment screen. As programmed, the machine will emit dose X. This is 8x the safety threshold configured for this procedure.
[Scorch patient now] [Think again]
If the exact position of the patient in the machine matters, then this can be entered into the machine, it can render a model which the operator can compare to the actual situation. This is not rocket science. You just have to want to do it.
The question at the end of the day is this: does GE want to? Or have they eaten the Oreo?
But then, it's not like Unix programmers are any smarter. I can think of very few applications, once I'm done editing the configuration files, will give me a summary screen of the directories which it requires for read or write or read/write operation in order to run correctly. I have to use strace on a regular basis to figure out why a configuration file doesn't get read (or gets read and later clobbered by something else).
Like what's the argument these days for that? Not enough disk space? Program would be too large? It makes my brain hurt?
Even C++ shot itself in the foot. Not because it had the wrong agenda, though many can't get past this (I can still hear Meyer's scream echoing from the 1980s). No, because they made function call resolution complicated involving inputs from dozens or (potentially) hundreds of places, and they couldn't b
Balance is a word with a lot of baggage. Ask any hunter-gatherer. Or for that matter, any dairy farmer. Or an NFL football player. Or an obsessive neuropathologist.
Game Brain
Confining a skill-oriented white collar job into a 40 hour week is a rare skill, especially when the skills involved have a short halflife. But it can be done. It doesn't hurt to show up on Monday morning rested and refreshed. Feeling like you are constantly reacting in the work environment is taken by time management specialists to be a sign of poor time management skills. Sure there is a constant pressure in most organizations to lapse into a reactive mode, but why succumb? Because you're burned out from staying up too late the night before downloading version 7.9.1 of this week's latest and greatest?
The upside on the hiring side is that young people with poor time management skills often have a poor sense of the value of their time or the compensation available with a heaping dose more discipline.
I've seen a lot of high turnover shops who on the surface complain about hiring costs, but couldn't possibly stay in business at the compensation level required to eliminate churn. Both software consulting shops and accounting firms. Burn them and churn them is a viable business model. Many college grads sign up for a year at such an outfit to get that critical first job on their resume.
What I haven't seen are people who combine levels of talent and creativity succeed in compartmentalizing their mental life. Startup companies involve incessant problem solving, and sometimes career consultants or time management people will confuse this with true creativity, which is altogether different.
It's not a sign of professionalism to smudge the boundary. Smudging the boundary can be considered careerism on one end of the spectrum, or called to the cloth on the other (for the fashion conscious).
I'm as smudged as any human living, but I don't rationalize this within a careerist imperative. Modern society has taken a vow. Like the borg, we are one flesh with our technology, for better or worse, in sickness or health, until death do us part. This is a marriage I take seriously. Unlike the ceremonial vow, this one might prove to have real teeth. What's the alimony payment on a trillion tons of CO2? We owe, we owe, it's off to work we go. One form of compartmentalization for day to day living, another for civilization surviving the next century. To each his own.
As compared to a 500 word essay that you probably wrote with outside assistance? The problem with subjective examinations is that they depend on the mindset of the marker, so you could well be marked down if they're having a bad day, or up if they're feeling generous. This is the very definition of unfair.
I hope you're not planning to apply for a statistics degree with that little essay. It would be the definition of fair if they refused you. There's variability in which standardized questions any particular applicant is exposed to. The coverage of material is not exactly the same from test to test, and might impact one student differently than another. It's also possible to cross validate subjective appraisals, if one is willing to go to enough trouble. It's possible that the variability in the subjective appraisal is on roughly the same scale as variability due to test composition. That hardly strikes me as the definition of unfair. Usually we reserve the strong definition of "unfair" to systemic effects rather than random, impersonal, not every day is equal effects. Is the testing supposed to be less variable than life itself? In 500 words, explain how.
There are many advertising practices that are either illegal or will get you into immense hot water with the enforcement agency (FDA, FCC, FTC, others). I don't know every law or rule in this field, and I don't wish to. It strikes me that blatantly creating false impressions in the mind of casual consumers violates the spirit of other laws in this field which do exist. It would be nice to find out which law, or if there is no law, to figure why this gap exists in consumer misrepresentation where others don't.
In the case where the reviews are heavily filtered, I'd happy enough the web site referred to the reviews as "selected reviews". One additional word to indicate that the reviews are not necessarily representative of the views filed. This would not be required when reviews are removed for violating terms of service (prices, personal attacks). If the terms of service indicate that unfavourable reviews can/will be removed, why does the site offer the ability to rate a product one star? I'd be happy if the FTC supplied some clarity around this.
Before we had consumer protection laws, we had a thriving industry in snake oil. Their ghosts achieved Valhalla on the internet. Capitalism is worthless unless it consists of informed exchanges. I don't regard caveat emptorism as a desirable economic system.
This is somewhat OT, but I think Polansky came morally unglued Abu Ghraib style. He lived through more than one R-rated horror show, and somewhere along the way someone forgot to inform him about the greater moral code. I'm with Zimbardo about AG: most of the fault lies with those who created the environment. What Polansky did was done with enough deliberation that he certainly deserved some jail time, but not 100 years as the judge is reported to have commented. 100 years would be the appropriate sentence for his second offence. For the first offence: you've had a bit of a rough go, now stand up, take your punishment for your despicable conduct, and consider yourself informed.
While I was mildly underwhelmed by "The Pianist", I didn't consider it a bad movie. It was a worthy attempt that didn't quite make it. I didn't regret the time I spent watching it, nor did I take a lot away from it that hadn't been done as well or better in other films. I preferred the lead-up-to-the-war, Cabaret ethos of the first act to the silent, enduring protagonist. Don't know why, just prefer my protagonists mouthy. Like they hired a script writer, or something. Quest for Fire has a better script than half the subtitle-friendly movies made these days.
Responding to another post, it's a bit of stretch to compare Harper to Cheney. I was reading an op-ed the other day about how Obama's summer plunge in the polls was a traditional American populist backlash against an educated and intelligent president. Many Americans instinctively regard intelligence in a politician as a sure makings of a crook. It's possibly a good theory, but I didn't spot any evidence that W's speech impediment in any way slowed the damage.
Harper's not a dumb man, and I probably don't agree with much of his vision for Canada, but I don't think he aspires to the creation of a fascist state. He possesses a measure of the petty ideological corruption common in right-thinking politicians of any stripe. Not so different than the social delusions of Polansky or famous NHL quarterbacks: a little bit above, beyond, or outside the law. OTOH, the most naive political position of all is to think the greater electorate is going to reward a politician for doing a good job, so we get what we pay for.
Case in point: Canada, probably as much by luck as good management, had one of the few banking systems to emerge relatively unscathed from the credit crisis. Has any Canadian lined up to pay more taxes in exchange for this excellent governance? Fat chance. We'd be happier if they had lost $100b (that's Canadian for $1t) so we could pillory them as models of what we deplore. Despising politicians is a nation building experience.
I don't think it's the politicians who are so fond of the police state as those who finance their election. The fat cats feel vulnerable to a free society, as well they should. Many times politicians seem to be yanking away freedoms that we in fact never possessed. Since WWII the Americans have practiced de facto spying against their own citizens. In the W era (he didn't quite earn himself the knighthood WWIII), they endeavoured to ratify what they had always done. Not that it would be so much different, but a little more convenient, with fewer safeguards, (and a little less internal laundry passing through the British).
At some point fewer safeguards spells catastrophe, so on principle we should oppose everything. I knew I would say something !OT eventually.
I have a personal rule of thumb: never engage in a debate over nuclear power until the word "fuel cycle" has been mentioned. One fuel cycle does not equal another. There's a bewildering smorgabord of choices, each with advantages and complications. Maybe we can cross off direct-to-hydrogen if this battery thing pans out.
You want to choose your fuel cycle carefully. The waste tends to stick around for a long time. What's the half-life in an ex-Soviet state on an unsupervised nuclear warhead? I suspect the big board at the NNSA has been a busy place since the wall fell. Maybe a few of those air traffic controllers that Reagan fired found a new calling in life.
Here's a curiosity. I was reminding myself about uranium supplies and the thorium cycle, when I stumbled onto a WNA propaganda zone. I wondered to myself, is this just one guy who doesn't adjust his meds, or is it manipulated by a powerful DC lobby org? Sometimes it's hard to know. The weird thing: to work there you need a good whitebread scrabble name. Here's all five names from the leadership page:
John Ritch
Andy White
Chris Crane
Hans Blix
Zack Pate
OK, so it's not located in Louisiana. Throw me a bone here, I need the names of their butlers, gardeners and sommoliers to place this outfit. Not a single Amarananda Jayawardena, Pathak Bindeshwar, or even a Nicholas Negroponte, the kinds of names I encountered in "The Ingenuity Gap" the other night.
Apparently, in the pro-nuclear lobby, no one wants to be accused of a stray letter or a spare syllable. Andy, you got some 'splainin to do. And Chris, how do you feel about the letter K? This here director's nuclear melt-down liability insurance form has only got *ten* letter boxes to spell out your name, and unless you're mononymous, you need one of those for the space in the middle.
Check out the kind of balderwashtheir clean little names allow them to publish:
From an economic perspective, these exploration costs are essentially equivalent to capital investment costs, albeit spread over a longer time period. It is, however, this time lag between the exploration expense and the start of production that confounds attempts to analyse exploration economics using strict discounted cash flow methods. The positive cash flows from production occur at least 10-15 years into the future, so that their present values are obviously greatly reduced, especially if one treats the present as the start of exploration. This creates a paradox, since large resource companies must place a real value on simply surviving and being profitable for many decades into the future; and, without exploration discoveries, all mining companies must expire with their reserves. Recent advances in the use of real options and similar methods are providing new ways to understand this apparent paradox. A key insight is that time, rather than destroying value through discounting, actually adds to the option value, as does the potential of price volatility. Under this perspective, resource companies create value by obtaining future resources which can be exploited optimally under a range of possible economic conditions. Techniques such as these are beginning to add analytical support to what have always been intuitive understandings by resource company leaders - that successful exploration creates profitable mines and adds value to company shares.
Now there's a man who once made a lot of money in a former career writing Enron press releases: it's not a cost, it's an option.
Now, what is the difference (tech-wise) between their shutter glasses and mine? Only the fact that theirs send a specific "yes I'm nvidia" signal back to the card.
I call this the "fill factor" as in landfill. I had a perfectly good Canon scanner that died when Canon decided it would never have a driver more recent than Windows 2000. Off to the landfill in near mint condition. (Or off to China in a mist of CO2 and particulate heavy metals). Generally my experiences with Canon have been good, but this one did not impress me.
I'm appalled at waste streams involving perfectly good manufactured goods that outlived its software. Stewart Brand was joking about "squanderable energy". You mean we don't already have that in the energy invested in squanderable applicances?
squand
I understand his inner mirth at the term. It's against nature to squander entropy. It's like saying "squanderable blood". Maybe from one vantage point. The sentiment is rarely universal.
I've never reconciled myself to some of the emergent stupidities associated with free market capitalism. The main argument is that most of the cures (regulation is the most cited) are worse that the disease--until we caught a bad case of trillion-dollar bail out. Taleb and Summers refer to this outcome as the "privatization of gain, socialization of loss". This was true for a long time about the medical profession (who were slow to grasp sterilization).
Ignaz Semmelweis
Semmelweis was puzzled that puerperal fever was rare amongst women giving street births. "To me, it appeared logical that patients who experienced street births would become ill at least as frequently as those who delivered in the clinic.
OK, so sometimes the cure *is* worse than the disease. But that won't last forever. Free market capitalism (and its champion of the hour, Nvidia) does such a good job of motivating economic Semmelweis's to contemplate the alternatives, if the system can't manage to eliminate it's own issues, we'll eventually reach the point of replacing the whole thing. God forbid it's any system we've tried already.
We haven't yet invented the germ theory of capitalism, so I'll have to content myself by referring to Nvidia's PhysX business decision as a cadaverous particle.
We have Trend where I work. More than doubles Eclipse startup time. Often I open more than one workspace. Without antivirus, you can start multiple Eclipse instances in parallel at a reasonable speed. With Trend running, I think it rescans every DLL for every Eclipse instance. It's brutal to have to restart multiple workspaces after an Eclipse update, like I did today. Sometimes I think "haven't you scanned that *enough* already?" Too bad Eclipse doesn't have a "fork new workspace" option so that I could load my workspace instances on the other side of airport security.
On our machines, XP doesn't recognize TrendMicro, so we get the "running naked" DR DOS jim-bob. Reminds me that Microsoft has been in the anti-virus game a long time. One of their early efforts was called AARD.