When the first 4K TRS-80 showed up at my high school, I had the option to learn BASIC, Z80 machine code, or APL up the street at the local university.
One of my early exercises with BASIC was writing a set of nested for loops which called a subroutine (gosub). I put the next statement that controlled the for loop iteration inside the subroutine, and the return statement for the subroutine inside the nested for loops. It still worked! At that point I understood that there were mechanistic languages and languages with a solid conceptual basis.
APL's reputation for inscrutability was only halfway deserved. Often the problems arose when you were trying to shoe-horn a data structure that didn't want to be an array into an array, because that was your only hammer. Later APL supported nested arrays, which increased the data structuring options, but I think by then the PR battle was lost.
In the original APL, it was kind of painful to pass more than two arguments to an APL function. This lead to programmers passing in flags to the function encoded in the array's rank, which were extracted to the tune of rho rho rho, while imaging the knapsack folding problem in Colossal Cave Adventure. As brutal as any language I've used. But you have to give APL a bit of a pass in some respects. Like vi, it was designed in 1963 to work well within the constraints of a paper teletype.
The next level of inscrutability arose because the APL primitives could often be combined in novel ways to yield surprisingly powerful algorithms. IIRC, the IBM 370 APL included a JIT compiler for certain common APL idioms. A one line program I wrote in APL to find primes (sieve of Eratosthenes) ran ten times faster than the compiled PASCAL program by the CS student sitting next to me.
Understanding APL was a lot easier if you were familiar with functional programming languages, but these hadn't been invented yet. Hey, I didn't know this: the Wikipedia page credits APL as a direct influence on FP, which I first heard of in 1982. Father knows best.
So you encounter this unfamiliar pattern of 15 familiar symbols for the first time, and you brain is polluted with horrible iterative solutions from BASIC or PASCAL, and the beauty of the expression is denied to your limited frame of consciousness.
Like solving a Suduko? Hardly. It takes me twenty minutes to solve a typical five star Sudoku. It used to take me about the same amount of time to puzzle out an unfamiliar APL one liner, which might be anywhere from 10 to 40 characters. There is one small difference: after decoding the APL algorithm, I usually slapped myself across the head and moaned to myself, "I am unworthy to drool on the shoe laces of the grand designer, but I will learn!" Never got that feeling from Sudoku.
Wrestling with the higher art of APL was like giving your ignorance a root canal. Sometimes the root canal made me barf up my milk: when the highest art of APL was applied to shoe horn a data structure unsuitable to array representation into an array representation anyway, like the Beethoven scene in Clockwork Orange.
The third case is where the one liner isn't all that difficult, but it's doing it in more dimensions than the brain wishes to visualize. This is a case where a picture is worth a thousand words. Your 20 character APL function would have been better presented as a caption on a one page UML diagram. Never figured out how to embed a UML diagram in an APL lamp statement on my VT100 terminal.
Another problem APL suffered was too much kinship with Forth. To thrive in APL, you needed to create hundreds of tiny APL functions, which the implementations of the day mashed together into a single unmaintainable workspace.
And the system interface tended to suck.
But other than that, what's not to like?
I could have composed instead a tedious, but germane post on Shannon's first law: concision is a function of preconception. It's a rare breed of programmer who thrives in a language which provides su
For the purpose of this discussion it helps to bear in mind the criminalization of ambiguity. If I have a source of physical randomness and I use this source to write a multi-GB file to my hard drive, when the Mounties show up to repo my computer system (on false allegations under the Canadian DCMA soon to be shoved down our throats), and I'm unable to provide a password which unlocks my monolith of randomness into something with a lot less entropy, I expect I'll be successfully charged with obstruction of justice.
Ignorance of law is no excuse. No one in the legal system has the balls to state this point blank, but it appears as things are shaping up that ambiguity of circumstance is no defense either.
I generally force myself to use vi to edit smaller Unix configuration files. It's a good skill to have for when the pandemic comes. I visit many different Linux, BSD, and Cygwin hosts. The crap default version of vi on these boxes (or the crap termcap config) seems to have different rules about breaking insert mode. The worst of all are the ones that break edit mode if you press enter to create a blank line to follow your insertion, then cursor up to the line where you wish to edit. Beep! Ah, f.......k the mother of all stupid interactions. Every installer-default vi with a different rule for which keystrokes break insert mode should be forced to have a different name. vi66579 would be the default on OpenBSD. On the worst systems I break down and upgrade vi to vim if possible. I just don't like vi enough to invest in making it bearable. Sorry, potentially you're my one true love, but I just can't get past the mole on your nose.
For a long time xemacs was my primary editor. I sometimes hate, sometimes like, sometimes love emacs. I was willing to invest in it: two or three times a year for half a day of power tweaking. Enough to become proficient in psgml mode when I needed to use that. But I was never willing to invest on a minute by minute basis, so I never achieved full orgasmic enlightenment.
On an untangent, the same is true of my relationship to Lisp. A belief in Lisp is a lot like the faith of economists in rational agents: let's just throw away everything the cognitive scientists have learned about human limitations. When Kurweil finally delivers the neurobot to enable me to paren count like the Rainman, I'll jettison 30 years of blood, sweat, and tears learning all these other languages in a heartbeat. Until then, I rest my shift key.
For my current work in embedded development, I dove head-first cold-turkey into Eclipse 3.4 (Ganymede) last summer. It was a lot to cope with all at once.
I can't say that CDT was a painless transition. I went the fully integrated subversion/JIRA route from day one. I tied to work with the managed build system on some simpler projects. The limitations of the MBS tend to be inscrutable and obscure. The Eclipse documentation (mostly with IBM's thumbprint on it) consists of a masterful job of telling you what you could have guessed already in giant swaths of enterprise-ready declarative text, without ever telling you anything you need to know or can actually use. With one exception: if you intend to acquire your Eclipse skillz by hacking on Eclipse itself, there's a lot of value in what IBM provides.
Hacking Eclipse for me is not an option. I'm using Eclipse mostly for the CDT, so I don't even know Java (which doesn't mean I can't write it, just that I can't correctly set up a classpath in under half a day). I ended up having to write an error parser for a non-standard embedded compiler, which required some Java. Considering my profound ignorance of all things Java, the process was actually pretty slick. Except for diagnosing the classpath problem, which took more time than the multiple ascents on missing skillsets combined.
I don't recommend the Ganymede CDT as an instant-gratification experience. You need some tenacity to get over the learning curve, discover the necessary work-arounds, and train your eyeballs to parse context menus 1000 pixels deep, where most of the selections are the expanding variety. I have a wiki to taking notes on any new technology I'm learning. I nearly melted my wiki server coming to terms with Eclipse.
Having said that, a year later I now have half a dozen major language plug-ins that I use on a regular basis, including some math languages, scripting languages, and simulation environments. Compared to my xemacs days, I love the ability to group a set of projects across multiple languages into a workspace and treat the workspace as a whole.
The current CDT C/C++ parser is not half bad. Having read the history, I would have screamed to have tried Eclipse for C++ development pr
Fork, then announce it on Slashdot. Or is it obvious that this wouldn't be taken seriously?
I'm not detecting much insight into game theory in your comment, unless you view forking as utility maximization. Call it "the merge is greater than the sum of its forks" position. Which, strangely, is often true, but not on principle.
The underlying position of the Whiner seems to be that a small change of behaviour on the part of the Wine overlord would provide the most benefit to everyone for the least additional effort.
You'd have to believe that there is an infinite supply of untapped development talent to put a value of $0 on the duplication of infrastructure that a fork implies, which I imagine in the case of Wine is more substantial than most projects.
I imagine that from the perspective of the Wine developer community what you've just done is set the drama fan to 11 and fire a giant shit cannon at it.
I approve of over the top language. I'm often guilty myself. However, after reading this thread, for a drama at 11 event, it was a bit of a snooze fest. Every second person was making a constructive comment. (Bear in mind in my use of the word "constructive" that on slashdot, posts are scored from 1 to 5 out of 10, to keep the bar accessible.)
'Adverse commercial agenda'... How much thought did you put into those weasel words before you hit submit?
Not nearly enough, I would say. Adverse to what? On the flip side, suspecting ulterior motives is the nearly universal human response to the inability to elicit direct communication.
Comments on this thread suggest that the Wine overlord prefers to conduct technical discussion on IRC. I'm of a certain age where IRC is viewed as the least tool for the job.
(Don't get me started on Twitter. The smallest unit of thought that causes me to lift hand to keyboard is the paragraph. The other day I was watching a presentation by Nouriel Roubini to the Perimeter Institute. He has become a consultant to power brokers. Poor man. His smallest unit of thought is now the PowerPoint slide. And he had so much potential.)
As benevolent dictator for life, should greatness be thrust upon me, I can't conceive of reading a serious patch submission that represents hundreds or thousands of hours of coding effort and not writing an email in return which at least details my concrete initial reaction: I'd be a lot happier if you did A, B, and C. I have some misgivings about X, Y, and Z which I don't have time to formally document, but (if I were possessed by aliens) I'd be willing to discuss in IRC.
I just think it's bad psychology not to give capable, hard working contributors a clear idea of where they stand. In my professional life, nothing undermines my psychological well being more than a vague finish line that constantly moves.
Just because you can say "sulk, fork, repeat" doesn't make it desirable game theoretic outcome.
Because there are sound commercial reasons to do so.
Which vary in each specific instance, while the figure itself remains largely unchanged.
It boils down to human counting systems with only three or four distinct values: 0%, 1%, 90%, 99% aka nobody, hardly anybody, most people, almost everyone.
When you cite 1% it spares you from deciding whether to write "hardly anyone" or "a tenacious few". For exponential distributions, 1% is the glass half-full point: the optimists read that as the upward inflection of immanent domination; status-quo pessimists read that as annoying cohort who forgot to take their meds.
If you write "5% of desktops run Linux", it's like saying the glass is 5/8s full. It only complicates the knee-jerk response.
If some materials science wonk invents an exotic new material which they have absolutely no idea how to commercialize, but raised money anyway, the obligatory quote is that commercial products will be available "in five years". It's kinda PR speak for "don't call us, we'll call you, if we ever get our shit together".
There are sound reasons not to take precision too seriously.
in the end it was some employee who decided that the man's life was worth less than $20 and/or his/her own job
Or it was a clever and disgruntled employee who recently had his/her wrist slapped over some minor do-gooder misdeed (no good deed goes unpunished) and figured this was the main chance to land Verizon in the PR soup pot while hiding behind the directive he/she was recently clubbed with.
The guy at the bottom of the heap might be a bumbling numbskull, or might be the end product as shaped by a malign corporate culture. Coin toss.
Why do I suspect that Verizon is running a soulless work-to-rule sweat shop and that half their front-line staff hate their employer's guts?
If a company as large as Verizon doesn't have a front-line policy in place to handle this situation, it's because they don't wish to. They worked the numbers and the Magic Eight Ball replied "drag your feet" with a side order of "extract concessions".
Many billion cell phones in the world and this is the first emergency activation request? Puleeze.
It's not a problem until he flunks out of school, gets booted from the house for not paying rent,...
My god, you'd fit well into the medical establishment. Studying to become a doctor?
Q: My friend survives on a diet of poutine and coke. A: It's not a problem until his heart palpitates.
I guess nothing is a problem in life until the condition is so severe that the poor sop is ready to cut a large cheque (supposing any funds remain) for quadruple bypass surgery performed by someone who didn't flunk out of school.
Great advice from the perspective of the doctor's retirement fund, not such good advice from the perspective of the future patient.
The underlying anger thing suggests this person is not ready to confront his inner conflict in the context of the larger world. Probably the best move is to distance yourself from the impending conflagration.
If you set yourself up to become the lightening rod for your friend's anger, and you have the patience of a saint, your friend might recover, but your friendship won't. One way or another, your friend will ultimately classify you in the "before" or "after" category.
You do have an opportunity to provide your friend with a small glimpse of leadership and self determination by taking responsibility for your own emotional content.
"I don't like hanging around with you when you play games 15 hours a day. It worries and irritates me to think about where your life might end up if you continue to behave this way. We need to think about different living arrangements. I hope we'll continue to be friends. I'll be very upset if we end up falling out over this. One of us needs to start looking for a new place to live. How are we going to sort this out?"
I've been reading a lot of economic theory lately. Apparently, according to economists, humans are rational agents in almost every respect.
Who's to tell me that my utility function is wrong?
Unfortunately, there is a lot of truth to this. Where he means to put the emphasis on "wrong", I would put the emphasis on "who", as it concerns your friend. If you solve for x and x = yourself, I'd harbour some grave doubts about *your* utility function after you showed the common sense to look before leaping.
Unless there really is someone out there that thinks drinking crappy domestic beer will make them sexy, and the life of the party. This is the person I fear.
What do the people who spend hundreds of millions of dollars filming and airing those ads believe about this proposition? The customer drinks our crap macro brew because it tastes good? Or because none of his penis enlargers are working too good?
Seriously, advertising memes that stand the test of time (dirt churning monster trucks, herky-jerky bullet-time sorority angel pub-swoop) are most definitely hitting the desired nerve within a large consumer demographic.
Not only that, these ads are shaping entire social values systems regarding consumption and life style.
Another goal of advertising is to cause a momentary amnesia when the customer is standing there in WhizMart eyeing the shiny HP printer under the $30 rebate coupon what it feels like to sit on hold to an Indian call center for 15 minutes and then reach a person who is accountable for nothing except tiring you out while your fancy new printer with the half empty by design chip cartridge completes the 17'th consecutive unnecessary head clean operation.
This momentary detachment needs to last for all of five minutes between impulse and purchase.
The HP brand was revered during the homebrew era the way Apple is now. I had classmates more devoted to their HP41C than your typical iPhone addict. My SAT exam contained the syllogism
HP : engineers:: Disney : children
It was such a deep hook into my psyche, when I walk past a post-Carly HP consumer product display I develop Capgras syndrome.
I'm 6'5" with most of my height in my back. My brother at 6'2" has the same leg length. My chiro thinks I'm 6'7" because of the length of my back. I don't get this leg length thing.
In almost *every* vehicle I've driven, I crank the seat almost as far forward as it will go, then tip the seat back until my head doesn't hit the roof. If I stretch out my legs at the same time, my shoulders end up in the back seat, and I can barely reach the wheel. People who complain about leg room have never suffered insufficient head room. On an aircraft with my knees jammed into the seat in front of me, if I tip my head back, it's a 90 degree bend before my head rests on the seat top. I'm nose to the air vents.
Long ago on trans Atlantic flights I learned to rip the seat cushion off the aluminum air frame (usually velcro) if I wanted to sleep for a couple of hours. Talk about hard and cold, but it beats sleeping in the chin on sternum position.
One time sitting in the aisle seat I managed to corkscrew myself sideways far enough to sleep with my ear on the headrest. The flight attendant rammed the beer cart of Lilliputian portions into my kneecap as hard as she could three times before I managed to regain consciousness, determine the source of the red flashes (oh, that's my pain system), and complete the origami move to remove my knee from the battering path. I've never slept well on a plane since.
Trucks, SUVs, whatever, they all lack headroom. Thirty years ago I had an Austin America where I could sit up straight. This is because the top of the seat cushion was about 4" off the floor boards. Loved it. If they add comfort, I'm screwed, no matter how much hulking metal they mold around it.
These days I'm getting 8.8 liters/100km (27 U.S. MPG according to Google calc.) in a 1991 Toyota pickup with a heavy, indestructible, yet somewhat underpowered engine (50% city, 50% highway, by minutes operated). If you goose it a bit on the flat, it'll happily do 140kph up an 8 percent grade in the BC interior (two occupants, no load). However, if you fall below 110kph, you're unlikely to recover without taking 3rd gear into jet engine territory. The engine is plenty adequate if you plan ahead, not so adequate for whims and impulses.
The real problem here is people purchasing enough engine displacement to carry a Bigfoot camper while towing a 30 foot boat across the Rockies, and then using it half the time to drive down the street to fetch a six pack.
There's no way to idle a huge displacement engine efficiently. I've long suspected that the trick of turning off two cylinders only gets you half the benefit of not having those two extra cylinders in the first place.
The other thing is that I'm moderately heavy on the gas pedal, light on the brake pedal. (I've read that peak fuel conversion efficiency typically corresponds 2/3rds of max. engine output.) Light on the brake pedal requires more traffic anticipation than the average person can muster while talking on a cell phone. I can usually detect these people pretty quickly. They're the ones riding up my ass while I coast up to a red light (or one that is about to become red long before I get there), make an abrupt lane change to pass me, then come to an abrupt halt when the light actually turns red.
MPG figures are pretty much useless if they aren't evaluated in terms of the actual driver and typical trip conditions (e.g. three mile round trip of road range while talking on a cell phone to fetch a six pack).
It does make me wonder, however, of the bad stuff that gets falsely pinned to Dick, if the guy is really that bad at all.
With this logic, you could rehab almost anyone. There exists x who makes false claim y, therefore Cheney is chummy. The only qualification on x is ability to shoot mouth off. x could be the first person booted off American Idol and do no damage to your lemma as stated.
In fact, I read an article last night which said much the same about Ferdinand Marcos. After finishing Cryptonomicon, I was checking up Yamashita's gold. Everything else in the book with a historical basis I was familiar with already.
Apparently some people fervently believe that Marcos didn't extra billions in wealth from the Philippines, but instead helped himself to gold extracted by the Japanese with ruthless efficiency pretty much anywhere they went during the war and the years leading up to the war.
Today I watched this video, via Edge. This is Taleb speaking at the Perimeter Institute on the leading edge of the aftermath of the downside of belief in fragile statistics.
When we ran Freedom of Information queries to see what was behind it, we were grudgingly sent a copy of a telex message on which every word was blacked out, including the date. The justification given for this censorship was the need to protect government sources, which are above the law.
This source has so many shades of dubious it makes my eyes bug out, but one nevertheless wonders what Cheney actually deserves. Not judging so much by this, but other things, Cheney didn't find himself in a swirling cloud of false accusations by accident. Some transparency here and there from the Bush administration would have greatly reduced this effect.
Over time I've become increasingly bemused at how poorly the scope of the word "evolution" is rendered by its adherents.
At the least contentious end of the spectrum, we have proof on pins and needles that the distribution (and combinatorial distribution) of genes within a breeding population changes across the generations.
At the most contentious end of the spectrum, there is this amazing conjecture that if you shine a bright, broad-spectrum light at a wet rock long enough, something that wasn't there before will eventually crawl out from the wet part onto the dry part. The time scale for this is the age of the universe divided by some number of human fingers.
We continue to await replication of this result. The grant application was filed alongside replication of the Planck energy scale, and hasn't been approved, pending completion of the funding cycle for the Ringworld SSC. This program recently suffered a great set back when a cock-up on the subspace auction channel concerning symmetries of the group-projection resulted in a wrongward spin relative to the beam tunnel path correction accounting for the near-dimensional dark-matter density distribution.
Concerns are mounting that the primordial soup ab initio program could end up costing even more, and no one is entirely clear on how to sterilize life-encoding biases from the background neutrino flux.
We're stalled on the proof-by-engineering front and neither do we yet have a suitable mathematical foundation for the emergence of self-organizing complexity within the fringes of billion-year slow-roast entropy gradients.
Someone tell me what exactly is the difference between a fertile soup and an infertile soup? I've never heard a useful comment on this that wasn't implicitly referencing the chain of human ancestry all the way back to the mother soup.
Of course, we know so much about the mother soup. First you extrapolate backwards 150 generations to about 1000 BC. Taking the last 150 generations of my paternal ancestors as a whole, 10% were rapists, 40% were opportunistic philanderers, 35% were gormless schmucks, and 15% were chest-thumping he-men. The first and last groups are especially hard to distinguish. So that's step one.
Then we have to project back from 1000 BC to 40 ka, or whenever language took that big jump. This was a big moment in our evolutionary history. For 15 million years, primate females had been patiently awaiting the arrival of sweet nothings, and now, finally, it was possible to voice them.
It doesn't take many of these steps to get all the way back to the mother soup itself. The cool thing about the process is that each step justifies taking the next step over an order of magnitude increase in time scale. The farther away from 2009 AD, the less absolute time matters in our reconstruction of the initial conditions.
What's more, lacking an observational denominator concerning alternate conditions, we can arrive at one through divination, which human society has been practising for circa the last 100,000 years, so it's a mature skill if ever there was one.
The evolutionary debate would be better served in the short term if we flushed the mother soup and focused instead on what we are actively establishing on a scale that would make Kinsey check himself into an OCD ward: that the sum total of the world's genetic endowment is a mosh pit of unimagined multitudes, with brambles of entanglement, commonality, and diversity that exceed our wildest hierarchical back-projections.
Rationalists would do well to focus on the grand interconnectedness of the earth's genetic bounty and stop harping for a while on the stone-and-water mother soup thing, or worse, working backwards from the mother soup thing to the alignment of cosmic forces within a minor infinitude of groupie coefficients--the most gormless debating tactic of all time.
For some reason, though, we continue to blunder through this debate on "evolution" using a word which bundles all these meanings equally.
Enough time wasted on this. I'm going to return now to enumerating the set of NP-complete axiomatizations of human grammar.
If I were a guy with a wife and kids and a fake uniform and no real power and a lot of money on and around my person on a regular basis, I would definitely not want my picture plastered all over the internet. You just never know when some lowlife might recognize you from real life, figure out who you are, kidnap you wife or your child, and demand some kind of crazed ransom. It doesn't matter whether the crazed ransom plan could actually work, it only matters whether some drugged-up lowlife might briefly think that it could, until the hostage drama takes on a life of its own.
Here is where things get a bit tricky for the family man with the fake uniform. In a reasonable business environment, you wouldn't be opening micro-vaults in quasi-public spaces in full view of the general public, which as everyone knows who has ever worked with the general public, is 10% batshit.
Bottom line: it's a stupid place to put a cash machine if you aren't willing to arrange service during off-hours. (Bonus offered for a picture of a cash machine in a gun shop with a liquor license, with a legitimate bank on either side.) But the guy with the fake uniform has no control over this.
Family man with fake uniform could go up to asshole with camera and say "I'd really prefer you not take pictures which potentially expose my identity to the general public". Asshole with camera might infer from this that it is OK to take a picture of the inner workings of the machine, as long as family man with fake uniform is not personally identifiable. This would be bad. Family man with fake uniform find soon be unemployed family man with no uniform, since the employer might take a dim view of the implied consent to photograph the machine.
So what is family man with fake uniform supposed to do? He can't go up and say "I understand that it is within your rights to photograph this machine, but I'd prefer that you didn't" without risking his own job. Family man with fake uniform has no protection under America's "at will employment" regime. The fact that he made an effort to respect the rule of law won't get him his job back.
He can probably be fired just as quickly for not getting the ID from the asshole camera guy, even if the camera guy refuses to buckle under intimidation that crosses the law. His main protection is the cost of his replacement (permits and training, however minimal) and pissing off everyone else who works for you (do they really have any power to disrupt the business?) In America, the potential loss of health benefits keeps a lot of people biting their lips on ethical niceties and thinking "better him than me".
Aside from the "tackle" threat, which was not recorded, fake uniform did a good job of letting the cop show up and cross the legal line, which the cops are generally quite happy to do. From the cops' perspective: let's suppose this guy sues and wins. Do they really care? Odds are low it ever gets that far. In the long run, losing those cases is just more ammunition to get the laws changed to something a lot more repressive, which they would prefer.
While we still have these freedoms, is this the kind of thing we want it squander it on? Isn't the purpose of becoming an anarchist to provoke fascist behaviour from the rest of society? It's great fun for the anarchist, because it proves the anarchist was right in the first place. The anarchist doesn't actually want the system to work, so being proved right is about as good as it gets.
It would be cool if America was a society where guy with fake uniform could stand up and openly state "this whole thing sucks three ways from Sunday" and not lose his job. But no, let's write another 500 finely reasoned posts on Douche Bag vs Brush Cut.
Banks are in the business of selling trust. This doesn't stop them from raping the golden egg as often as they can get away with. Then there is an orgy of denial and offshore transactions while an outside party intervenes to "restore trust". Their words, not mine.
Elsevier is in the business of selling unimpeachability, aka, no scientist ever got fired for citing a reputable, peer reviewed journal.
Peer review has an especially strong appeal to the CYA crowd. The information in a peer reviewed journal is not necessarily all that great, but you confidently cite the journal without fear for your reputation.
The list of biases in peer reviewed journals would require a journal all to itself. They will tell you that method A (in which they have a financial stake) outperforms method B at half the cost, but they won't tell you that they accidentally discovered method C which will cure you almost for free.
Peer reviewed writing is sometimes so opaque you hardly dare to draw a specific conclusion. Yet you can't overtly find an error, which is mostly the point.
An all-pervading contempt for unthinking appeal to authority was among my first sentient experiences as a child. My hostility toward climbing up the food chain of rational authority to discover infinity squared as the basis step nearly melted my circuits. God the omnipotent, god the omnipresent, god the mysterious, god the unaccountable.
I gained my childhood sentience during the Von Daniken era and its peculiar aftermath.
Much has been made about the 'Pyramid Power' that Red Kelly used to help motivate his team. The Leafs were under terrific pressure to beat the Flyers.... Kelly, whose sons had visited Egypt and spoke passionately about the supernatural powers of the pyramid, gave their father an idea. He placed pyramids under the Leaf bench and in the dressing room. "Red put a pyramid in the dressing room. I put my sticks underneath it hoping it might help." It seemed to help, but so did the assistance of something else - "I have a tie I wear when it's a crucial game," admitted Sittler. "I wore it one night when I got three goals. I had it on the time I had the ten points against Boston. I felt this game was so crucial, I went to the cleaners to pick up the tie specially."
Hey, you just don't know.
I was in a Sunday school class, a day in my life I'll never forget, and the Sunday school teacher taught the assorted passel of rug rats about the various magic properties of pyramids, such as the one employed by the hysterically desperate Leafs (check out the team's success rate in the subsequent four decades).
I wasn't sure if I should blame the church, some mind-numbing side effect of the adult condition (which seemed to also effect my elementary school teachers), the frowzy muffin and Kool-Aid Sunday school cult, small town inbreeding, the stultifying effects of the long dark Canadian winter, the near-to-toxic levels of new car smell in our Chevy Bel Air, the sulphur stockpile a kilometre down the tracks large enough to dike Holland, or the town's water supply. God, at least, was off the hook, having in my mind no influence on anything.
I couldn't agree more about Apple in the mid to late nineties. I helped both my brother and my father migrate to back to PCs. Then in the last couple of years, I helped them migrate back to Macs, now that they no longer suck, and I bought one for my GF, too.
The one button mouse is pretty close to the top of my ridicule list, but I have no real grudge against Apple when the products don't suck.
Mark of the beast: that one Photoshop benchmark where PowerPC trounced x86.
Fortunately the pragmatist crowd, Gandalf performed an exorcism on Steve Jobs.
The other day I tried to read slashdot bare eyed. I was reading very slowly and started to get a headache. I'll never try that again. Soon I'm going to trade up my expensive five-year-old pair of glasses for a cheap pair, then report back to slashdot that the cheap new pair outperforms the old expensive pair. Miracle! Hence I should be reading bare eyed after all.
The other claim here that's kind of stupid is that most professional runnings are wearing shoes therefor some vaguely alluded halo of benefits. Au contraire. The average NHL lineman can barely walk up a flight of stairs upon retirement at the age of thirty (the few who make it that far). These people are trading momentary glory against pain and disability for the rest of their lives. (Guy with Nike gym bag: This drug with make you stronger and shrink your testicles. Athlete: I'll take two!) What athletes do is a testament to what protects the athlete's performance career. It's a terrible argument for the effects on the athlete's post-performance health.
My first gig as a teenager was to tidy up some APL code that had been used to assess data from a Chinese census project concerning rural agriculture. During the day I had a terminal which supported the APL characters, but during the evening I had access only to a glass teletype with regular ASCII characters. IIRC the code itself was on IP Sharp, an APL time-sharing service based out of Toronto. Impressive for the era, but definitely not cheap.
The guy who hired me went "oh, come on, it's not that hard to figure out which ASCII character(s) represent which APL character". I think the APL overprinted characters had a ^H in the middle. Those who claim that Perl looks like line noise have never seen APL transliterated into ASCII. It says something about the density of APL that I could ponder the keyboard location of every keystroke for 10 seconds and still feel relatively productive. The time sharing fees must have been dollars per minute.
Can't complain too much, he kept his fridge packed with Heineken, my first experience of a beer not bottled (I won't say brewed) by Labatts or Molson. I came from a fairly dry household, so despite the coding conditions, I thought it was the best gig ever.
Him: So how's the data looking now? Me: Half a dozen of these regions/provinces have more holes than numbers. Him: Can you fix it? Me: Not a chance. Him: Well then, blow it away. Me: Like, hundred of peasant-years of census data collection? Him: Fire when ready. Me: Sweet.
How much sunlight do you think was needed to create the coal we burn?
The accrued savings from a raging fusion inferno a million times the mass of the earth whose wispy out layer glowed incandescent for four billion years will be pretty much wiped out by about 200 years of human activity.
More cost-effective? That's a different matter, and impossible to calculate since we can't even properly measure the true costs of burning coal for electricity.
Is there where the multi-tasking generation leads us? This has the trappings of someone who actually boarded the bus toward useful cognition, then at the first sign the going was less than 100% straight forward, decided to check out the latest Android killer. The next morning the incomplete thought was picked up off the bedroom floor and tossed into the hatbox beside the front door labelled "father knows best" (just as soon as he unjams his slide rule of universal valuation).
Human society never returns to exactly the same state. We can't actually measure the true cost of anything without making abstractions about myriads of future differences having some kind of linear relationship to present conditions, briefly shared by a fleeting census coalition. The duration of the consensus condition is inversely proportional to the number of people consulted.
This whole thing works a lot better for renewable resources than what we term "non-renewable", which actually means a resource whose replenishment cycle is like watching paint dry in bullet time. Everything in life is relative to our boredom threshold. It's the only metric humans widely agree on.
It also denominates our discussion threads. On a logarithmic scale from 1 to 10, your comment betrays a boredom factor of about 3. The threshold for useful engagement in the multidimensional value space associated with our environmental choices is somewhere around six. Six earns you a seat at the table of meaningful errors.
It will be interesting to see what a generation of multitaskers is able to accomplish on deep challenges. Who knows, it could work.
Believe it or not, the time domain reflectometer is real technology, and not particularly new either.
This from a five-digit palindromic slashdot ID. God rest my soul.
William Thompson (class instance Lord Kelvin) had his way with the telegrapher's equations in 1850 when the lack of a plastics industry proved to be a huge threat to the first trans-Atlantic cable. Notorious dullard that he was, he can't possibly have noticed, either in his equations or in real life, signal reflections originating from impedance discontinuities. Not doubt he thought his needle was possessed by nervous daemons.
While I was quickly checking my dates, I came across this humorous early expression of the BBQ assembly gene:
The Anglo-American Atlantic Telegraph Company was formed in 1856 with money from Cyrus Field and technical expertise from Britain. The cable was projected to extend from Valentia Bay in Ireland to Trinity Bay in Newfoundland, 3039 km, in depths of 1700-2400 fathoms, which was by far the most ambitious project yet attempted. The project was rushed to completion in 1857, but the first attempt in that year quickly failed. The two companies independently manufacturing halves of the cable managed to spiral the armor in opposite directions, which caused splicing difficulties.
Picture the 3200 ton HMS Agamemnon and the 5000 ton USS Niagara engaged in a stern exchange at the moment of truth. If the Americans handed the semaphore flags to an Italian crew member, they probably got the better of the exchange. It takes half a cup of tea to text back FU2 in Morse code with the shutter contraption. Your average hot-blooded Italian can compress the Sodomites Compendium into three gestures.
Comments elicited by the great blackout of August 2003 brought up the speed of electrons, the average slashdotter's knowledge extending to the existence of electrons as carrying electrical energy but not much further.
What is with this sentiment of "God help the colourblind?" I've never seen a monitor with a face button to colour rotate the screen, which is the obvious aid to provide for the dominant red-greed cohort. As 500 million monitors attest, society doesn't give a damn.
What amazes about this subject is that some people seem able to disparage AI in one breath, then capitulate on captchas in the next breath. At least I assume it's the same fleeting "what have you done for me lately?"
We were comfortably smarter than our machines until there was connivance at stake. Maybe we're playing the wrong side of the fence. Perhaps human stupidity is our more enduring quality. Crib some text from a 419 solicitation. (This could be done in real time.) See if the purported person sends you money (the bots aren't dumb enough to do this, despite having more than their fair share of the credit cards). If you receive money, you have a 100% certified human visitor who will certainly raise the level of discourse in your many forums.
I suspect the deeper problem with captchas is our herd mentality. Doesn't Google serve half their queries with prebuilt pages keyed off a few dozen most popular search terms?
Considering the relative advantages and disadvantages of human cognition, I'm tempted to implement a captcha which asks the user to "identity the statistically fallacy in the following statement from today's lead story on FOX News". There are some compelling advantages here. For one, you'll never run out of fresh material. This could be named the "dusty corridor" captcha. Perhaps there is a unique signature that emanates from disused wetware taking the plunge.
Or maybe instead it's our knee-jerk circuits that are most intrinsically human. If a pregnant women is shot in the stomach who or what is responsible: A) the gun, B) the bullet, C) the government, D) the foetus
Or perhaps we should be queried on our finely honed social calculus: which is worse, an Asian man marrying a black women, or a black man with an Asian wife? If possible, justify your answer. (For a human, the optional portion is normally left blank.)
Here's another good one. "From your current computer terminal, make a one sentence edit to [randomly selected] page on Wikipedia. If an edit associated with your IP address is still there in five minutes, you will allowed to register with this site."
The telling detail here is that we value our site visitors so slightly (fractions of a cent, on average) that we can't spare a sliver of human eyeball to vet that the new registrant doesn't instantly leave a cow patty.
We're not even trying to validate humans. We're trying to validate cattle.
This was plenty clear in the article: the aggrieved party is the power company which ends up supplying two units of energy for every unit billed, if you trust the napkin math on power factors, which I don't.
I think the issue with power factor pertains to aggregate load. If you have a large resistive load, and you add a power factor 0.5 bulb, I don't think the bulb boosts the supply requirement by twice its rated wattage.
The problem for the modern electrical grid, as I understand it, is that with so much electrical equipment on the grid, power factor has become a losing battle. I don't think there is any joy at the generation companies that a large chunk of the remaining resistive load is being shuffled out in favour of power factor piglets.
All the computers I've built myself over the last few years have high power factor PSUs. I suspect one conscientious PSU offsets half a dozen dubious CFLs.
CFLs are destined to function as a transition market. Around the time that all the shoddy goods are driven out of the market, the CFL itself will be displaced by a superior technology, accompanied by an almost instantaneous ban on mercury containing bulbs, in the same way that toxic additives in gasoline are rarely banned until halfway cost effective replacements are in the pipeline.
I have an insufficient fixture in the kitchen rated for a pair of 60W incandescents. Instead I run a 100W incandescent in tandem with a 14W CFL, which produces about twice as much light at the same power rating, and with a reasonable colour mix.
Unlike some people here, I've never had a CFL that buzzed, few have been slow to start, and the burn-out rate hasn't been a factor, but I've probably been more strategic in their deployment than most people.
My apartment has electric base board heat. For half the year, heat generated by my servers is merely offsetting electricity that would have gone into base board heating. Keeping the place at 16 degrees C over the winter months, we get enough incidental heat that the base boards rarely come on. On the really cold days, I cook a pot roast, and the base boards don't come on.
As a child I was surprised that you could screw an incandescent bulb into an Easy Bake Oven and cook a nicely browned but not exceptionally edible cake with it. Wasn't it supposed to produce light, not heat? Our surprise should be the other way around: that you can screw an Easy Bake Oven heating element into a light socket and read a book with it.
A pity that the electrical grid most efficiently supplies the least rational use.
Apple somehow slipped that "drag icon to trash" shortcut in, and it's been a point of criticism since.
That says a lot about the attitude toward Apple when the major point of criticism is over style points.
I had the original fat Mac (512KB) with two floppy drives. There was no internal hard drive and not really anywhere to put it. IIRC, I priced a 10MB hard drive in the range of $1500 with the necessary case mods. Whatever the price, it was a sizable fraction of the purchase of a new-fangled IBM AT. (If you don't know what fangled means, assume the worst.)
The dual floppy fat Mac was pretty much a write-off for coding in C. My Unix-like C environment required at least three active floppy drives to get anything accomplished.
Fortunately, Apple had implemented an auto-eject whenever the unmounted floppy was required. Invariably, it chose to eject the disk you would immediately need next. I muttered so many times to myself "no, you stupid POS, suck that diskette back in and eject the *other* one". Apple provided no convenient way to override this mistake. I had a lot of bent paper clips on my desk.
Apple's philosophy then, which has ever-so-slowly evolved over two decades was "if this bothers you that much, spend half the price of a new machine on a short-sighted upgrade to an internal 10MB hard drive, which was never built to accommodate this". (You still won't have a proper LAN.) Or better yet, buy the Lisa.
I would have loved to drag Apple's entire floppy disk interface into the trash can.
Another thing about Apple back in the day was the rumour that Mac OS would support true virtual memory "real soon now" once hard drives became a standard feature. Apparently they were too busy crowing about the lack of 8.3 to pull this off. It didn't come true until the first release of OS X. Thus the nearly twenty year gap between my first Mac purchase and my second one.
I'm tired of hearing that. Are you one of those precious snowflakes who thinks he's irreplacable?
The official U.S. unemployment rate is presently around 8%. Maybe double that to 20% to include all the people who have given up looking. Some of those people are unlucky folks who caught the winds of misfortune. Others come from the group who post inane comments on CNN news stories and call in to radio talk shows who are no one's first choice as hiring candidates.
Out of the 80% who are employed, maybe 1/4 of those jobs are pretty darn good jobs. So about 20% of the work force has a job worth having.
If there are more people with good jobs than people with no job, maybe glass half-full would be a the more proactive perspective for a person with talent and energy?
In white collar professions, even replacing a run-of-the-mill cookie-cutter snowflake probably costs a company a minimum of three months salary for the position in question, by the time you count hiring costs, disruption, and retraining. A big part of the hiring cost is the one hire in five a company gets seriously wrong, the person who should have been left in the "seeking employment" pool.
John Cleese: Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind
on
The Age of Speed
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· Score: 1
As it happens, I was reading this just last night.
Slashdot Mirror
When the first 4K TRS-80 showed up at my high school, I had the option to learn BASIC, Z80 machine code, or APL up the street at the local university.
One of my early exercises with BASIC was writing a set of nested for loops which called a subroutine (gosub). I put the next statement that controlled the for loop iteration inside the subroutine, and the return statement for the subroutine inside the nested for loops. It still worked! At that point I understood that there were mechanistic languages and languages with a solid conceptual basis.
APL's reputation for inscrutability was only halfway deserved. Often the problems arose when you were trying to shoe-horn a data structure that didn't want to be an array into an array, because that was your only hammer. Later APL supported nested arrays, which increased the data structuring options, but I think by then the PR battle was lost.
In the original APL, it was kind of painful to pass more than two arguments to an APL function. This lead to programmers passing in flags to the function encoded in the array's rank, which were extracted to the tune of rho rho rho, while imaging the knapsack folding problem in Colossal Cave Adventure. As brutal as any language I've used. But you have to give APL a bit of a pass in some respects. Like vi, it was designed in 1963 to work well within the constraints of a paper teletype.
The next level of inscrutability arose because the APL primitives could often be combined in novel ways to yield surprisingly powerful algorithms. IIRC, the IBM 370 APL included a JIT compiler for certain common APL idioms. A one line program I wrote in APL to find primes (sieve of Eratosthenes) ran ten times faster than the compiled PASCAL program by the CS student sitting next to me.
Understanding APL was a lot easier if you were familiar with functional programming languages, but these hadn't been invented yet. Hey, I didn't know this: the Wikipedia page credits APL as a direct influence on FP, which I first heard of in 1982. Father knows best.
So you encounter this unfamiliar pattern of 15 familiar symbols for the first time, and you brain is polluted with horrible iterative solutions from BASIC or PASCAL, and the beauty of the expression is denied to your limited frame of consciousness.
Like solving a Suduko? Hardly. It takes me twenty minutes to solve a typical five star Sudoku. It used to take me about the same amount of time to puzzle out an unfamiliar APL one liner, which might be anywhere from 10 to 40 characters. There is one small difference: after decoding the APL algorithm, I usually slapped myself across the head and moaned to myself, "I am unworthy to drool on the shoe laces of the grand designer, but I will learn!" Never got that feeling from Sudoku.
Wrestling with the higher art of APL was like giving your ignorance a root canal. Sometimes the root canal made me barf up my milk: when the highest art of APL was applied to shoe horn a data structure unsuitable to array representation into an array representation anyway, like the Beethoven scene in Clockwork Orange.
The third case is where the one liner isn't all that difficult, but it's doing it in more dimensions than the brain wishes to visualize. This is a case where a picture is worth a thousand words. Your 20 character APL function would have been better presented as a caption on a one page UML diagram. Never figured out how to embed a UML diagram in an APL lamp statement on my VT100 terminal.
Another problem APL suffered was too much kinship with Forth. To thrive in APL, you needed to create hundreds of tiny APL functions, which the implementations of the day mashed together into a single unmaintainable workspace.
And the system interface tended to suck.
But other than that, what's not to like?
I could have composed instead a tedious, but germane post on Shannon's first law: concision is a function of preconception. It's a rare breed of programmer who thrives in a language which provides su
For the purpose of this discussion it helps to bear in mind the criminalization of ambiguity. If I have a source of physical randomness and I use this source to write a multi-GB file to my hard drive, when the Mounties show up to repo my computer system (on false allegations under the Canadian DCMA soon to be shoved down our throats), and I'm unable to provide a password which unlocks my monolith of randomness into something with a lot less entropy, I expect I'll be successfully charged with obstruction of justice.
Ignorance of law is no excuse. No one in the legal system has the balls to state this point blank, but it appears as things are shaping up that ambiguity of circumstance is no defense either.
I generally force myself to use vi to edit smaller Unix configuration files. It's a good skill to have for when the pandemic comes. I visit many different Linux, BSD, and Cygwin hosts. The crap default version of vi on these boxes (or the crap termcap config) seems to have different rules about breaking insert mode. The worst of all are the ones that break edit mode if you press enter to create a blank line to follow your insertion, then cursor up to the line where you wish to edit. Beep! Ah, f.......k the mother of all stupid interactions. Every installer-default vi with a different rule for which keystrokes break insert mode should be forced to have a different name. vi66579 would be the default on OpenBSD. On the worst systems I break down and upgrade vi to vim if possible. I just don't like vi enough to invest in making it bearable. Sorry, potentially you're my one true love, but I just can't get past the mole on your nose.
For a long time xemacs was my primary editor. I sometimes hate, sometimes like, sometimes love emacs. I was willing to invest in it: two or three times a year for half a day of power tweaking. Enough to become proficient in psgml mode when I needed to use that. But I was never willing to invest on a minute by minute basis, so I never achieved full orgasmic enlightenment.
On an untangent, the same is true of my relationship to Lisp. A belief in Lisp is a lot like the faith of economists in rational agents: let's just throw away everything the cognitive scientists have learned about human limitations. When Kurweil finally delivers the neurobot to enable me to paren count like the Rainman, I'll jettison 30 years of blood, sweat, and tears learning all these other languages in a heartbeat. Until then, I rest my shift key.
For my current work in embedded development, I dove head-first cold-turkey into Eclipse 3.4 (Ganymede) last summer. It was a lot to cope with all at once.
I can't say that CDT was a painless transition. I went the fully integrated subversion/JIRA route from day one. I tied to work with the managed build system on some simpler projects. The limitations of the MBS tend to be inscrutable and obscure. The Eclipse documentation (mostly with IBM's thumbprint on it) consists of a masterful job of telling you what you could have guessed already in giant swaths of enterprise-ready declarative text, without ever telling you anything you need to know or can actually use. With one exception: if you intend to acquire your Eclipse skillz by hacking on Eclipse itself, there's a lot of value in what IBM provides.
Hacking Eclipse for me is not an option. I'm using Eclipse mostly for the CDT, so I don't even know Java (which doesn't mean I can't write it, just that I can't correctly set up a classpath in under half a day). I ended up having to write an error parser for a non-standard embedded compiler, which required some Java. Considering my profound ignorance of all things Java, the process was actually pretty slick. Except for diagnosing the classpath problem, which took more time than the multiple ascents on missing skillsets combined.
I don't recommend the Ganymede CDT as an instant-gratification experience. You need some tenacity to get over the learning curve, discover the necessary work-arounds, and train your eyeballs to parse context menus 1000 pixels deep, where most of the selections are the expanding variety. I have a wiki to taking notes on any new technology I'm learning. I nearly melted my wiki server coming to terms with Eclipse.
Having said that, a year later I now have half a dozen major language plug-ins that I use on a regular basis, including some math languages, scripting languages, and simulation environments. Compared to my xemacs days, I love the ability to group a set of projects across multiple languages into a workspace and treat the workspace as a whole.
The current CDT C/C++ parser is not half bad. Having read the history, I would have screamed to have tried Eclipse for C++ development pr
Fork, then announce it on Slashdot. Or is it obvious that this wouldn't be taken seriously?
I'm not detecting much insight into game theory in your comment, unless you view forking as utility maximization. Call it "the merge is greater than the sum of its forks" position. Which, strangely, is often true, but not on principle.
The underlying position of the Whiner seems to be that a small change of behaviour on the part of the Wine overlord would provide the most benefit to everyone for the least additional effort.
You'd have to believe that there is an infinite supply of untapped development talent to put a value of $0 on the duplication of infrastructure that a fork implies, which I imagine in the case of Wine is more substantial than most projects.
I imagine that from the perspective of the Wine developer community what you've just done is set the drama fan to 11 and fire a giant shit cannon at it.
I approve of over the top language. I'm often guilty myself. However, after reading this thread, for a drama at 11 event, it was a bit of a snooze fest. Every second person was making a constructive comment. (Bear in mind in my use of the word "constructive" that on slashdot, posts are scored from 1 to 5 out of 10, to keep the bar accessible.)
'Adverse commercial agenda'... How much thought did you put into those weasel words before you hit submit?
Not nearly enough, I would say. Adverse to what? On the flip side, suspecting ulterior motives is the nearly universal human response to the inability to elicit direct communication.
Comments on this thread suggest that the Wine overlord prefers to conduct technical discussion on IRC. I'm of a certain age where IRC is viewed as the least tool for the job.
(Don't get me started on Twitter. The smallest unit of thought that causes me to lift hand to keyboard is the paragraph. The other day I was watching a presentation by Nouriel Roubini to the Perimeter Institute. He has become a consultant to power brokers. Poor man. His smallest unit of thought is now the PowerPoint slide. And he had so much potential.)
As benevolent dictator for life, should greatness be thrust upon me, I can't conceive of reading a serious patch submission that represents hundreds or thousands of hours of coding effort and not writing an email in return which at least details my concrete initial reaction: I'd be a lot happier if you did A, B, and C. I have some misgivings about X, Y, and Z which I don't have time to formally document, but (if I were possessed by aliens) I'd be willing to discuss in IRC.
I just think it's bad psychology not to give capable, hard working contributors a clear idea of where they stand. In my professional life, nothing undermines my psychological well being more than a vague finish line that constantly moves.
Just because you can say "sulk, fork, repeat" doesn't make it desirable game theoretic outcome.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_optimal
I'd be interested to get Adam Kahane's reaction to the "fork off" model of conflict resolution. (Wired did a feature article on this long ago.)
http://www.generonconsulting.com/publications/papers/pdfs/Mont%20Fleur.pdf
What kind of bird would he choose to represent the outcome where every disgruntled open source developer forks at the first sign of trouble?
Hmm, I never knew this: if you were lost at sea, the albatross was good eating.
Because there are sound commercial reasons to do so.
Which vary in each specific instance, while the figure itself remains largely unchanged.
It boils down to human counting systems with only three or four distinct values: 0%, 1%, 90%, 99% aka nobody, hardly anybody, most people, almost everyone.
When you cite 1% it spares you from deciding whether to write "hardly anyone" or "a tenacious few". For exponential distributions, 1% is the glass half-full point: the optimists read that as the upward inflection of immanent domination; status-quo pessimists read that as annoying cohort who forgot to take their meds.
If you write "5% of desktops run Linux", it's like saying the glass is 5/8s full. It only complicates the knee-jerk response.
If some materials science wonk invents an exotic new material which they have absolutely no idea how to commercialize, but raised money anyway, the obligatory quote is that commercial products will be available "in five years". It's kinda PR speak for "don't call us, we'll call you, if we ever get our shit together".
There are sound reasons not to take precision too seriously.
http://www.scientificblogging.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/nitpicking_omega_b_discovery
in the end it was some employee who decided that the man's life was worth less than $20 and/or his/her own job
Or it was a clever and disgruntled employee who recently had his/her wrist slapped over some minor do-gooder misdeed (no good deed goes unpunished) and figured this was the main chance to land Verizon in the PR soup pot while hiding behind the directive he/she was recently clubbed with.
The guy at the bottom of the heap might be a bumbling numbskull, or might be the end product as shaped by a malign corporate culture. Coin toss.
Why do I suspect that Verizon is running a soulless work-to-rule sweat shop and that half their front-line staff hate their employer's guts?
If a company as large as Verizon doesn't have a front-line policy in place to handle this situation, it's because they don't wish to. They worked the numbers and the Magic Eight Ball replied "drag your feet" with a side order of "extract concessions".
Many billion cell phones in the world and this is the first emergency activation request? Puleeze.
It's not a problem until he flunks out of school, gets booted from the house for not paying rent, ...
My god, you'd fit well into the medical establishment. Studying to become a doctor?
Q: My friend survives on a diet of poutine and coke. A: It's not a problem until his heart palpitates.
I guess nothing is a problem in life until the condition is so severe that the poor sop is ready to cut a large cheque (supposing any funds remain) for quadruple bypass surgery performed by someone who didn't flunk out of school.
Great advice from the perspective of the doctor's retirement fund, not such good advice from the perspective of the future patient.
The underlying anger thing suggests this person is not ready to confront his inner conflict in the context of the larger world. Probably the best move is to distance yourself from the impending conflagration.
If you set yourself up to become the lightening rod for your friend's anger, and you have the patience of a saint, your friend might recover, but your friendship won't. One way or another, your friend will ultimately classify you in the "before" or "after" category.
You do have an opportunity to provide your friend with a small glimpse of leadership and self determination by taking responsibility for your own emotional content.
"I don't like hanging around with you when you play games 15 hours a day. It worries and irritates me to think about where your life might end up if you continue to behave this way. We need to think about different living arrangements. I hope we'll continue to be friends. I'll be very upset if we end up falling out over this. One of us needs to start looking for a new place to live. How are we going to sort this out?"
I've been reading a lot of economic theory lately. Apparently, according to economists, humans are rational agents in almost every respect.
This via Colby Cosh, my favourite lucid and agreeable wingnut.
http://offsettingbehaviour.blogspot.com/2009/04/berl-redux.html
Who's to tell me that my utility function is wrong?
Unfortunately, there is a lot of truth to this. Where he means to put the emphasis on "wrong", I would put the emphasis on "who", as it concerns your friend. If you solve for x and x = yourself, I'd harbour some grave doubts about *your* utility function after you showed the common sense to look before leaping.
Unless there really is someone out there that thinks drinking crappy domestic beer will make them sexy, and the life of the party. This is the person I fear.
What do the people who spend hundreds of millions of dollars filming and airing those ads believe about this proposition? The customer drinks our crap macro brew because it tastes good? Or because none of his penis enlargers are working too good?
Seriously, advertising memes that stand the test of time (dirt churning monster trucks, herky-jerky bullet-time sorority angel pub-swoop) are most definitely hitting the desired nerve within a large consumer demographic.
Not only that, these ads are shaping entire social values systems regarding consumption and life style.
Another goal of advertising is to cause a momentary amnesia when the customer is standing there in WhizMart eyeing the shiny HP printer under the $30 rebate coupon what it feels like to sit on hold to an Indian call center for 15 minutes and then reach a person who is accountable for nothing except tiring you out while your fancy new printer with the half empty by design chip cartridge completes the 17'th consecutive unnecessary head clean operation.
This momentary detachment needs to last for all of five minutes between impulse and purchase.
The HP brand was revered during the homebrew era the way Apple is now. I had classmates more devoted to their HP41C than your typical iPhone addict. My SAT exam contained the syllogism
HP : engineers :: Disney : children
It was such a deep hook into my psyche, when I walk past a post-Carly HP consumer product display I develop Capgras syndrome.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind.html
There's a lot of beer loser in all of us. You are what you drink. AdBlock is a tiny little oasis of mental Reinheitsgebot.
grep *ad* > /dev/subconscious
I'm 6'5" with most of my height in my back. My brother at 6'2" has the same leg length. My chiro thinks I'm 6'7" because of the length of my back. I don't get this leg length thing.
In almost *every* vehicle I've driven, I crank the seat almost as far forward as it will go, then tip the seat back until my head doesn't hit the roof. If I stretch out my legs at the same time, my shoulders end up in the back seat, and I can barely reach the wheel. People who complain about leg room have never suffered insufficient head room. On an aircraft with my knees jammed into the seat in front of me, if I tip my head back, it's a 90 degree bend before my head rests on the seat top. I'm nose to the air vents.
Long ago on trans Atlantic flights I learned to rip the seat cushion off the aluminum air frame (usually velcro) if I wanted to sleep for a couple of hours. Talk about hard and cold, but it beats sleeping in the chin on sternum position.
One time sitting in the aisle seat I managed to corkscrew myself sideways far enough to sleep with my ear on the headrest. The flight attendant rammed the beer cart of Lilliputian portions into my kneecap as hard as she could three times before I managed to regain consciousness, determine the source of the red flashes (oh, that's my pain system), and complete the origami move to remove my knee from the battering path. I've never slept well on a plane since.
Trucks, SUVs, whatever, they all lack headroom. Thirty years ago I had an Austin America where I could sit up straight. This is because the top of the seat cushion was about 4" off the floor boards. Loved it. If they add comfort, I'm screwed, no matter how much hulking metal they mold around it.
These days I'm getting 8.8 liters/100km (27 U.S. MPG according to Google calc.) in a 1991 Toyota pickup with a heavy, indestructible, yet somewhat underpowered engine (50% city, 50% highway, by minutes operated). If you goose it a bit on the flat, it'll happily do 140kph up an 8 percent grade in the BC interior (two occupants, no load). However, if you fall below 110kph, you're unlikely to recover without taking 3rd gear into jet engine territory. The engine is plenty adequate if you plan ahead, not so adequate for whims and impulses.
The real problem here is people purchasing enough engine displacement to carry a Bigfoot camper while towing a 30 foot boat across the Rockies, and then using it half the time to drive down the street to fetch a six pack.
There's no way to idle a huge displacement engine efficiently. I've long suspected that the trick of turning off two cylinders only gets you half the benefit of not having those two extra cylinders in the first place.
The other thing is that I'm moderately heavy on the gas pedal, light on the brake pedal. (I've read that peak fuel conversion efficiency typically corresponds 2/3rds of max. engine output.) Light on the brake pedal requires more traffic anticipation than the average person can muster while talking on a cell phone. I can usually detect these people pretty quickly. They're the ones riding up my ass while I coast up to a red light (or one that is about to become red long before I get there), make an abrupt lane change to pass me, then come to an abrupt halt when the light actually turns red.
MPG figures are pretty much useless if they aren't evaluated in terms of the actual driver and typical trip conditions (e.g. three mile round trip of road range while talking on a cell phone to fetch a six pack).
With this logic, you could rehab almost anyone. There exists x who makes false claim y, therefore Cheney is chummy. The only qualification on x is ability to shoot mouth off. x could be the first person booted off American Idol and do no damage to your lemma as stated.
In fact, I read an article last night which said much the same about Ferdinand Marcos. After finishing Cryptonomicon, I was checking up Yamashita's gold. Everything else in the book with a historical basis I was familiar with already.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamashita's_gold
Apparently some people fervently believe that Marcos didn't extra billions in wealth from the Philippines, but instead helped himself to gold extracted by the Japanese with ruthless efficiency pretty much anywhere they went during the war and the years leading up to the war.
Today I watched this video, via Edge. This is Taleb speaking at the Perimeter Institute on the leading edge of the aftermath of the downside of belief in fragile statistics.
http://streamer.perimeterinstitute.ca/Flash/a28b2897-507f-40e2-8b71-e5d26992a01a/viewer.html
To cover inference from stupidity, as a higher grade of fragile statistic, we'd have to exhume Cantor to construct some whole new cardinalities.
Bad statistical instinct:
Stupid person x said y about z, therefore z isn't so bad after all.
Good statistical instinct:
Stupid person x said y about z, therefore what the hell am I doing loitering around here with spam shields inoperative?
http://www.preferrednetwork.com/GOLD_WARRIORS.htm
This source has so many shades of dubious it makes my eyes bug out, but one nevertheless wonders what Cheney actually deserves. Not judging so much by this, but other things, Cheney didn't find himself in a swirling cloud of false accusations by accident. Some transparency here and there from the Bush administration would have greatly reduced this effect.
Over time I've become increasingly bemused at how poorly the scope of the word "evolution" is rendered by its adherents.
At the least contentious end of the spectrum, we have proof on pins and needles that the distribution (and combinatorial distribution) of genes within a breeding population changes across the generations.
At the most contentious end of the spectrum, there is this amazing conjecture that if you shine a bright, broad-spectrum light at a wet rock long enough, something that wasn't there before will eventually crawl out from the wet part onto the dry part. The time scale for this is the age of the universe divided by some number of human fingers.
We continue to await replication of this result. The grant application was filed alongside replication of the Planck energy scale, and hasn't been approved, pending completion of the funding cycle for the Ringworld SSC. This program recently suffered a great set back when a cock-up on the subspace auction channel concerning symmetries of the group-projection resulted in a wrongward spin relative to the beam tunnel path correction accounting for the near-dimensional dark-matter density distribution.
Concerns are mounting that the primordial soup ab initio program could end up costing even more, and no one is entirely clear on how to sterilize life-encoding biases from the background neutrino flux.
We're stalled on the proof-by-engineering front and neither do we yet have a suitable mathematical foundation for the emergence of self-organizing complexity within the fringes of billion-year slow-roast entropy gradients.
Someone tell me what exactly is the difference between a fertile soup and an infertile soup? I've never heard a useful comment on this that wasn't implicitly referencing the chain of human ancestry all the way back to the mother soup.
Of course, we know so much about the mother soup. First you extrapolate backwards 150 generations to about 1000 BC. Taking the last 150 generations of my paternal ancestors as a whole, 10% were rapists, 40% were opportunistic philanderers, 35% were gormless schmucks, and 15% were chest-thumping he-men. The first and last groups are especially hard to distinguish. So that's step one.
Then we have to project back from 1000 BC to 40 ka, or whenever language took that big jump. This was a big moment in our evolutionary history. For 15 million years, primate females had been patiently awaiting the arrival of sweet nothings, and now, finally, it was possible to voice them.
It doesn't take many of these steps to get all the way back to the mother soup itself. The cool thing about the process is that each step justifies taking the next step over an order of magnitude increase in time scale. The farther away from 2009 AD, the less absolute time matters in our reconstruction of the initial conditions.
What's more, lacking an observational denominator concerning alternate conditions, we can arrive at one through divination, which human society has been practising for circa the last 100,000 years, so it's a mature skill if ever there was one.
The evolutionary debate would be better served in the short term if we flushed the mother soup and focused instead on what we are actively establishing on a scale that would make Kinsey check himself into an OCD ward: that the sum total of the world's genetic endowment is a mosh pit of unimagined multitudes, with brambles of entanglement, commonality, and diversity that exceed our wildest hierarchical back-projections.
Rationalists would do well to focus on the grand interconnectedness of the earth's genetic bounty and stop harping for a while on the stone-and-water mother soup thing, or worse, working backwards from the mother soup thing to the alignment of cosmic forces within a minor infinitude of groupie coefficients--the most gormless debating tactic of all time.
For some reason, though, we continue to blunder through this debate on "evolution" using a word which bundles all these meanings equally.
Enough time wasted on this. I'm going to return now to enumerating the set of NP-complete axiomatizations of human grammar.
If I were a guy with a wife and kids and a fake uniform and no real power and a lot of money on and around my person on a regular basis, I would definitely not want my picture plastered all over the internet. You just never know when some lowlife might recognize you from real life, figure out who you are, kidnap you wife or your child, and demand some kind of crazed ransom. It doesn't matter whether the crazed ransom plan could actually work, it only matters whether some drugged-up lowlife might briefly think that it could, until the hostage drama takes on a life of its own.
Here is where things get a bit tricky for the family man with the fake uniform. In a reasonable business environment, you wouldn't be opening micro-vaults in quasi-public spaces in full view of the general public, which as everyone knows who has ever worked with the general public, is 10% batshit.
Bottom line: it's a stupid place to put a cash machine if you aren't willing to arrange service during off-hours. (Bonus offered for a picture of a cash machine in a gun shop with a liquor license, with a legitimate bank on either side.) But the guy with the fake uniform has no control over this.
Family man with fake uniform could go up to asshole with camera and say "I'd really prefer you not take pictures which potentially expose my identity to the general public". Asshole with camera might infer from this that it is OK to take a picture of the inner workings of the machine, as long as family man with fake uniform is not personally identifiable. This would be bad. Family man with fake uniform find soon be unemployed family man with no uniform, since the employer might take a dim view of the implied consent to photograph the machine.
So what is family man with fake uniform supposed to do? He can't go up and say "I understand that it is within your rights to photograph this machine, but I'd prefer that you didn't" without risking his own job. Family man with fake uniform has no protection under America's "at will employment" regime. The fact that he made an effort to respect the rule of law won't get him his job back.
He can probably be fired just as quickly for not getting the ID from the asshole camera guy, even if the camera guy refuses to buckle under intimidation that crosses the law. His main protection is the cost of his replacement (permits and training, however minimal) and pissing off everyone else who works for you (do they really have any power to disrupt the business?) In America, the potential loss of health benefits keeps a lot of people biting their lips on ethical niceties and thinking "better him than me".
Aside from the "tackle" threat, which was not recorded, fake uniform did a good job of letting the cop show up and cross the legal line, which the cops are generally quite happy to do. From the cops' perspective: let's suppose this guy sues and wins. Do they really care? Odds are low it ever gets that far. In the long run, losing those cases is just more ammunition to get the laws changed to something a lot more repressive, which they would prefer.
While we still have these freedoms, is this the kind of thing we want it squander it on? Isn't the purpose of becoming an anarchist to provoke fascist behaviour from the rest of society? It's great fun for the anarchist, because it proves the anarchist was right in the first place. The anarchist doesn't actually want the system to work, so being proved right is about as good as it gets.
It would be cool if America was a society where guy with fake uniform could stand up and openly state "this whole thing sucks three ways from Sunday" and not lose his job. But no, let's write another 500 finely reasoned posts on Douche Bag vs Brush Cut.
Banks are in the business of selling trust. This doesn't stop them from raping the golden egg as often as they can get away with. Then there is an orgy of denial and offshore transactions while an outside party intervenes to "restore trust". Their words, not mine.
Elsevier is in the business of selling unimpeachability, aka, no scientist ever got fired for citing a reputable, peer reviewed journal.
Peer review has an especially strong appeal to the CYA crowd. The information in a peer reviewed journal is not necessarily all that great, but you confidently cite the journal without fear for your reputation.
The list of biases in peer reviewed journals would require a journal all to itself. They will tell you that method A (in which they have a financial stake) outperforms method B at half the cost, but they won't tell you that they accidentally discovered method C which will cure you almost for free.
Peer reviewed writing is sometimes so opaque you hardly dare to draw a specific conclusion. Yet you can't overtly find an error, which is mostly the point.
An all-pervading contempt for unthinking appeal to authority was among my first sentient experiences as a child. My hostility toward climbing up the food chain of rational authority to discover infinity squared as the basis step nearly melted my circuits. God the omnipotent, god the omnipresent, god the mysterious, god the unaccountable.
I gained my childhood sentience during the Von Daniken era and its peculiar aftermath.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_von_D%C3%A4niken
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_power
http://www.legendsofhockey.net/html/spot_oneononep198902.htm
Much has been made about the 'Pyramid Power' that Red Kelly used to help motivate his team. The Leafs were under terrific pressure to beat the Flyers. ... Kelly, whose sons had visited Egypt and spoke passionately about the supernatural powers of the pyramid, gave their father an idea. He placed pyramids under the Leaf bench and in the dressing room. "Red put a pyramid in the dressing room. I put my sticks underneath it hoping it might help." It seemed to help, but so did the assistance of something else - "I have a tie I wear when it's a crucial game," admitted Sittler. "I wore it one night when I got three goals. I had it on the time I had the ten points against Boston. I felt this game was so crucial, I went to the cleaners to pick up the tie specially."
Hey, you just don't know.
I was in a Sunday school class, a day in my life I'll never forget, and the Sunday school teacher taught the assorted passel of rug rats about the various magic properties of pyramids, such as the one employed by the hysterically desperate Leafs (check out the team's success rate in the subsequent four decades).
I wasn't sure if I should blame the church, some mind-numbing side effect of the adult condition (which seemed to also effect my elementary school teachers), the frowzy muffin and Kool-Aid Sunday school cult, small town inbreeding, the stultifying effects of the long dark Canadian winter, the near-to-toxic levels of new car smell in our Chevy Bel Air, the sulphur stockpile a kilometre down the tracks large enough to dike Holland, or the town's water supply. God, at least, was off the hook, having in my mind no influence on anything.
It wasn't long before the Kook-Aid theory made the leap.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown
Here is a recent video that cracks me up about the care and feeding of strange belief systems in children and young adults. I really have to get the rest of it.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/julia_sweeney_on_let
I couldn't agree more about Apple in the mid to late nineties. I helped both my brother and my father migrate to back to PCs. Then in the last couple of years, I helped them migrate back to Macs, now that they no longer suck, and I bought one for my GF, too.
The one button mouse is pretty close to the top of my ridicule list, but I have no real grudge against Apple when the products don't suck.
Mark of the beast: that one Photoshop benchmark where PowerPC trounced x86.
Fortunately the pragmatist crowd, Gandalf performed an exorcism on Steve Jobs.
The other day I tried to read slashdot bare eyed. I was reading very slowly and started to get a headache. I'll never try that again. Soon I'm going to trade up my expensive five-year-old pair of glasses for a cheap pair, then report back to slashdot that the cheap new pair outperforms the old expensive pair. Miracle! Hence I should be reading bare eyed after all.
The other claim here that's kind of stupid is that most professional runnings are wearing shoes therefor some vaguely alluded halo of benefits. Au contraire. The average NHL lineman can barely walk up a flight of stairs upon retirement at the age of thirty (the few who make it that far). These people are trading momentary glory against pain and disability for the rest of their lives. (Guy with Nike gym bag: This drug with make you stronger and shrink your testicles. Athlete: I'll take two!) What athletes do is a testament to what protects the athlete's performance career. It's a terrible argument for the effects on the athlete's post-performance health.
Yeah, you just want that Money song, they charge you the moon.
My first gig as a teenager was to tidy up some APL code that had been used to assess data from a Chinese census project concerning rural agriculture. During the day I had a terminal which supported the APL characters, but during the evening I had access only to a glass teletype with regular ASCII characters. IIRC the code itself was on IP Sharp, an APL time-sharing service based out of Toronto. Impressive for the era, but definitely not cheap.
The guy who hired me went "oh, come on, it's not that hard to figure out which ASCII character(s) represent which APL character". I think the APL overprinted characters had a ^H in the middle. Those who claim that Perl looks like line noise have never seen APL transliterated into ASCII. It says something about the density of APL that I could ponder the keyboard location of every keystroke for 10 seconds and still feel relatively productive. The time sharing fees must have been dollars per minute.
Can't complain too much, he kept his fridge packed with Heineken, my first experience of a beer not bottled (I won't say brewed) by Labatts or Molson. I came from a fairly dry household, so despite the coding conditions, I thought it was the best gig ever.
Him: So how's the data looking now?
Me: Half a dozen of these regions/provinces have more holes than numbers.
Him: Can you fix it?
Me: Not a chance.
Him: Well then, blow it away.
Me: Like, hundred of peasant-years of census data collection?
Him: Fire when ready.
Me: Sweet.
The accrued savings from a raging fusion inferno a million times the mass of the earth whose wispy out layer glowed incandescent for four billion years will be pretty much wiped out by about 200 years of human activity.
Is there where the multi-tasking generation leads us? This has the trappings of someone who actually boarded the bus toward useful cognition, then at the first sign the going was less than 100% straight forward, decided to check out the latest Android killer. The next morning the incomplete thought was picked up off the bedroom floor and tossed into the hatbox beside the front door labelled "father knows best" (just as soon as he unjams his slide rule of universal valuation).
Human society never returns to exactly the same state. We can't actually measure the true cost of anything without making abstractions about myriads of future differences having some kind of linear relationship to present conditions, briefly shared by a fleeting census coalition. The duration of the consensus condition is inversely proportional to the number of people consulted.
This whole thing works a lot better for renewable resources than what we term "non-renewable", which actually means a resource whose replenishment cycle is like watching paint dry in bullet time. Everything in life is relative to our boredom threshold. It's the only metric humans widely agree on.
It also denominates our discussion threads. On a logarithmic scale from 1 to 10, your comment betrays a boredom factor of about 3. The threshold for useful engagement in the multidimensional value space associated with our environmental choices is somewhere around six. Six earns you a seat at the table of meaningful errors.
It will be interesting to see what a generation of multitaskers is able to accomplish on deep challenges. Who knows, it could work.
This from a five-digit palindromic slashdot ID. God rest my soul.
William Thompson (class instance Lord Kelvin) had his way with the telegrapher's equations in 1850 when the lack of a plastics industry proved to be a huge threat to the first trans-Atlantic cable. Notorious dullard that he was, he can't possibly have noticed, either in his equations or in real life, signal reflections originating from impedance discontinuities. Not doubt he thought his needle was possessed by nervous daemons.
While I was quickly checking my dates, I came across this humorous early expression of the BBQ assembly gene:
http://mysite.du.edu/~jcalvert/tech/cable.htm
Picture the 3200 ton HMS Agamemnon and the 5000 ton USS Niagara engaged in a stern exchange at the moment of truth. If the Americans handed the semaphore flags to an Italian crew member, they probably got the better of the exchange. It takes half a cup of tea to text back FU2 in Morse code with the shutter contraption. Your average hot-blooded Italian can compress the Sodomites Compendium into three gestures.
What is with this sentiment of "God help the colourblind?" I've never seen a monitor with a face button to colour rotate the screen, which is the obvious aid to provide for the dominant red-greed cohort. As 500 million monitors attest, society doesn't give a damn.
What amazes about this subject is that some people seem able to disparage AI in one breath, then capitulate on captchas in the next breath. At least I assume it's the same fleeting "what have you done for me lately?"
We were comfortably smarter than our machines until there was connivance at stake. Maybe we're playing the wrong side of the fence. Perhaps human stupidity is our more enduring quality. Crib some text from a 419 solicitation. (This could be done in real time.) See if the purported person sends you money (the bots aren't dumb enough to do this, despite having more than their fair share of the credit cards). If you receive money, you have a 100% certified human visitor who will certainly raise the level of discourse in your many forums.
I suspect the deeper problem with captchas is our herd mentality. Doesn't Google serve half their queries with prebuilt pages keyed off a few dozen most popular search terms?
Considering the relative advantages and disadvantages of human cognition, I'm tempted to implement a captcha which asks the user to "identity the statistically fallacy in the following statement from today's lead story on FOX News". There are some compelling advantages here. For one, you'll never run out of fresh material. This could be named the "dusty corridor" captcha. Perhaps there is a unique signature that emanates from disused wetware taking the plunge.
Or maybe instead it's our knee-jerk circuits that are most intrinsically human. If a pregnant women is shot in the stomach who or what is responsible:
A) the gun,
B) the bullet,
C) the government,
D) the foetus
Or perhaps we should be queried on our finely honed social calculus: which is worse, an Asian man marrying a black women, or a black man with an Asian wife? If possible, justify your answer. (For a human, the optional portion is normally left blank.)
Here's another good one. "From your current computer terminal, make a one sentence edit to [randomly selected] page on Wikipedia. If an edit associated with your IP address is still there in five minutes, you will allowed to register with this site."
The telling detail here is that we value our site visitors so slightly (fractions of a cent, on average) that we can't spare a sliver of human eyeball to vet that the new registrant doesn't instantly leave a cow patty.
We're not even trying to validate humans. We're trying to validate cattle.
This was plenty clear in the article: the aggrieved party is the power company which ends up supplying two units of energy for every unit billed, if you trust the napkin math on power factors, which I don't.
I think the issue with power factor pertains to aggregate load. If you have a large resistive load, and you add a power factor 0.5 bulb, I don't think the bulb boosts the supply requirement by twice its rated wattage.
The problem for the modern electrical grid, as I understand it, is that with so much electrical equipment on the grid, power factor has become a losing battle. I don't think there is any joy at the generation companies that a large chunk of the remaining resistive load is being shuffled out in favour of power factor piglets.
All the computers I've built myself over the last few years have high power factor PSUs. I suspect one conscientious PSU offsets half a dozen dubious CFLs.
CFLs are destined to function as a transition market. Around the time that all the shoddy goods are driven out of the market, the CFL itself will be displaced by a superior technology, accompanied by an almost instantaneous ban on mercury containing bulbs, in the same way that toxic additives in gasoline are rarely banned until halfway cost effective replacements are in the pipeline.
I have an insufficient fixture in the kitchen rated for a pair of 60W incandescents. Instead I run a 100W incandescent in tandem with a 14W CFL, which produces about twice as much light at the same power rating, and with a reasonable colour mix.
Unlike some people here, I've never had a CFL that buzzed, few have been slow to start, and the burn-out rate hasn't been a factor, but I've probably been more strategic in their deployment than most people.
My apartment has electric base board heat. For half the year, heat generated by my servers is merely offsetting electricity that would have gone into base board heating. Keeping the place at 16 degrees C over the winter months, we get enough incidental heat that the base boards rarely come on. On the really cold days, I cook a pot roast, and the base boards don't come on.
As a child I was surprised that you could screw an incandescent bulb into an Easy Bake Oven and cook a nicely browned but not exceptionally edible cake with it. Wasn't it supposed to produce light, not heat? Our surprise should be the other way around: that you can screw an Easy Bake Oven heating element into a light socket and read a book with it.
A pity that the electrical grid most efficiently supplies the least rational use.
That says a lot about the attitude toward Apple when the major point of criticism is over style points.
I had the original fat Mac (512KB) with two floppy drives. There was no internal hard drive and not really anywhere to put it. IIRC, I priced a 10MB hard drive in the range of $1500 with the necessary case mods. Whatever the price, it was a sizable fraction of the purchase of a new-fangled IBM AT. (If you don't know what fangled means, assume the worst.)
The dual floppy fat Mac was pretty much a write-off for coding in C. My Unix-like C environment required at least three active floppy drives to get anything accomplished.
Fortunately, Apple had implemented an auto-eject whenever the unmounted floppy was required. Invariably, it chose to eject the disk you would immediately need next. I muttered so many times to myself "no, you stupid POS, suck that diskette back in and eject the *other* one". Apple provided no convenient way to override this mistake. I had a lot of bent paper clips on my desk.
Apple's philosophy then, which has ever-so-slowly evolved over two decades was "if this bothers you that much, spend half the price of a new machine on a short-sighted upgrade to an internal 10MB hard drive, which was never built to accommodate this". (You still won't have a proper LAN.) Or better yet, buy the Lisa.
I would have loved to drag Apple's entire floppy disk interface into the trash can.
Another thing about Apple back in the day was the rumour that Mac OS would support true virtual memory "real soon now" once hard drives became a standard feature. Apparently they were too busy crowing about the lack of 8.3 to pull this off. It didn't come true until the first release of OS X. Thus the nearly twenty year gap between my first Mac purchase and my second one.
The official U.S. unemployment rate is presently around 8%. Maybe double that to 20% to include all the people who have given up looking. Some of those people are unlucky folks who caught the winds of misfortune. Others come from the group who post inane comments on CNN news stories and call in to radio talk shows who are no one's first choice as hiring candidates.
Out of the 80% who are employed, maybe 1/4 of those jobs are pretty darn good jobs. So about 20% of the work force has a job worth having.
If there are more people with good jobs than people with no job, maybe glass half-full would be a the more proactive perspective for a person with talent and energy?
In white collar professions, even replacing a run-of-the-mill cookie-cutter snowflake probably costs a company a minimum of three months salary for the position in question, by the time you count hiring costs, disruption, and retraining. A big part of the hiring cost is the one hire in five a company gets seriously wrong, the person who should have been left in the "seeking employment" pool.
As it happens, I was reading this just last night.
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/07/business/talking-management-with-john-cleese-soldier-convention-agent-change-rebuff.html
A bottle rocket is one of two things: an energetic talent seeking alignment between aptitude and ambition, or deicing the wings with discount Vodka.
As far as being a jet is concerned, the direct flight from Gander to Boise is highly overrated.