Knuth's maxim is sufficiently pithy to have become, over time, self referential, as evidenced by your misunderstanding.
The root of all evil used to be deep and singular, now it is broad and shallow. I guarantee you that Knuth did not include choosing the best fundamental algorithm under the label "premature" unless it involves squabbling over log log N terms or stray digits in the exponent term.
An unpacked (deoptimized) version of Knuth's maxim is that the transition from program structure and notation which maximizes readability, comprehension, and conviction (concerning its correctness and merit) to one which favours performance should be delayed as long as possible. Ideally until performance becomes the sole remaining success factor.
(Taking into account the human mind's special capacity to imprint upon evil, Knuth's formulation remains the better one.)
Originally Knuth meant manually hoisting loop constant expressions (often in ways that later turn out to not be fully general) or manually evaluating constant expressions or manually fusing nested function calls and the kind of rot that a good compiler these days will do on your behalf. Anyone used the "register" keyword lately? Once upon a time it seemed like a good idea.
While the principle remains the same, the temptations have changed. Such as parallelizing a bad implementation of a poor algorithm in the misguided belief that the underlying task is not sequentially bound.
That said, projects which do *no* evil typically fail to impress anyone. The ideal is to wrap large amount of cleanly structured and accessible source code around a nugget of pure, smoldering evil, coked to the last clock cycle.
Perversely, the worst example of this is TeX itself. The smoldering nugget of pure evil is the single pass parsing regime and data packing eight bit character values.
I suspect the literature on parallel programming would roughly equal the literature on electro-chemical storage cells. Sheesh, if only those guys were paying attention, we'd have watch batteries powering small cities by now.
On second thought, how much literature could there really be if you can summon the majority of it onto your screen in 4/10'ths of a second for any combination of keywords?
Parallel programming is a lot like fuel cells. You get some pretty impressive results on selected applications involving pristine apparatus in a controlled setting, dating back to the Apollo program (in both cases).
Reality on the ground is rarely so forgiving.
If we hadn't already achieved a pixel processing speed-up between 1980 and 2008 best approximated by a sideways 8, Javascript wouldn't even have entered the conversation.
It boils down to this: ignoring everything you guys have already accomplished, you've pretty much done nothing. I worked for that kind of company once. The guy in charge put on a Cirque du Soleil of intestinal recursion. That's how I feel about the claim that software developers haven't been paying attention to parallelism for elephant years.
I find that somewhat typical of beautiful theories. Everything is wonderful with stack based interpreters until someone points out that it borks the branch predictor. Good luck cooking up a telepathic branch predictor. (And you thought your original problem was hard?)
As for the JIT comment, most of the Java code I use on a daily basis (Eclipse, JIRA) suffers from extreme lurch.
Why does it take two minutes to close and reload the same Eclipse workspace? I think the network mandated virus scanner is so busy looking under the JIT compiler's skirt, it can't get anything done. Hardly a panacea.
These "Java moments" are livable, but I wouldn't discourage anyone from trying a different approach.
So a guy had a problem to solve, and batted some ideas back-and-forth amongst a few of his mates. Why is this newsworthy?
So a bunch of guys who all knew each other from the failed Nupedia project got together and wrote 50 articles in one week. Why is this newsworthy?
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. — Harry S Truman
I find it quite interesting to see the first law of collaboration confirmed among a small group of experts, after Nupedia so abjectly failed to do so. Bear in mind that I number myself among the lunatic fringe with a rather low regard for "peer review" and a working definition of "expert" as as someone who has perfected the art of taking credit. I also number myself among the lunatic fringe more concerned with the flow of ideas than the flow of dollars.
Maybe I should update Truman for the 21'st century:
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you aren't trying to pay a mortgage. —
That's another good working definition of expert: a person excessively encumbered by formal roles and obligations.
Nine times out of ten in this world, convenience is accompanied with a lot of bending over and taking it.
My local video store stocks somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 titles. Any five movies from the enormous back catalogue for $10, with a seven day return period. No pop-ups, no Silverlight, no Flash, and only movies I pick myself. If I just had a DVD player lobotomized of the "operation prohibited by madmen with small winkies" message when I try to bypass the FBI warning or the logo rotation, my movie watching experience would be 100% ankle-grip free.
The other day I received an unsolicited offer for life insurance with a pre-authorized chequing option. It contains the sentence "This authorization to the company is also my authorization to the Bank; however, the Bank need not verify that payments are withdrawn in accordance with this authorization."
Convenience, check. Jolly rogering, check.
Need not verify is precisely what Madoff's glamazons were all about.
... want it to operate smoothly. No reason to complain.
I guess I'm a more inventive complainer than you are.
Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass: and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak.
The day not long ago where I installed the USB protocol analyzer and it blue-screened my workstation every half hour all day, Firefox was adding another 2m to every round trip starting plug-ins that I wouldn't gain any advantage from until after another half-dozen blue screens.
When one application pauses to load a major plug-in, I have eight other desktops one keystroke away where I can continue to accomplish useful work. When Windows is so bogged down coming up from a cold-start that I can't the program menu to pop up, I'm pretty much dead in the water.
What I would really like is a global setting "how much does instant gratification rule your life?" Hint: I won't be picking "make it smooth". I'm no fan of gratification that arrives unannounced and doesn't sport an off switch.
With the modern network of air transportation, just about any new strain of halfway competent contagion can spread to every major world city in 24 to 48 hours.
In the real world, there are hardly any large scale systems where robustness is measured by 0-day quarantine containment.
If a four hour flu goes around the world in 80 hours, and everything is back to normal the following Monday, I'd regard that as a robust system flexing its immune response.
Since the internet surpassed the importance of human well being around 2004, it gets held to a higher standard, as it should. Any day now, I expect the FDA to announce a recall on IOS 11, and maybe pull the entire IOS product line behind the counter.
This just emphasizes what we already knew about C, even the most careful, security conscious developer messes up memory management.
I know nothing of the sort. How about asking some developers who have a history of getting both the security and the memory management correct which intellectual challenge they lose the most sleep over?
The OpenBSD team has a history of strength in both areas. I suspect most of these developers would laugh out loud at the intellectual challenge of the memory management required to implement a hash function. It's about a hundred thousand lines of code short of where the OpenBSD team gets grey hair over memory management problems in the C language.
I was just having an intense conversation about restrictive land covenants with my GF. If the economic cycle tips downward, the covenant holder (often a not-for-profit manila file folder which is legally distinct from the insolvent main entity) ceases to afford regular maintenance. Suddenly it turns into a dandelion orchard, and everyone in the community is dead certain that every dandelion on every lawn originated from this single source, whereupon some soon to be re-elected politico harpoons the legal infrastructure that permitted these things to flourish in the first place.
"What we know about C" and "what we know about dandelions" are surprisingly equivalent.
I wouldn't hire a programmer who can't get memory management right to take on any significant intellectual challenge. It's just a way to feel good about yourself without having the aptitude to cut your way out of a wet paper bag.
90% of software development projects are not aptitude driven. Let's stop fooling ourselves into thinking that the languages that work well in those contexts having anything to offer those of us dealing with the other 10%
Memory management is a subcase of resource management with a particularly harsh way of delivering the news: you suck. A memory managed language deprives the environment of so many golden opportunities to deliver this message, despite the fact that you still suck. By the time you don't suck, you've ceased to regard unmanaged memory as a core intellectual challenge, and trained yourself to work within an idiom where you hardly ever get it wrong anyway.
The C string functions that cause the worst of the grief were widely known to be a bad idea by the mid 1980s. They originated a point in history where linking sprintf() was sometimes considered a luxury you couldn't afford. In the microcontroller world, it's still common that an environment provides three different versions of printf/sprintf: basic, basic plus more of the format options and maybe long integers, and then the full version which also includes floating point. The middle option is the beer budget. The first option is for when you can't even afford beer. These micros are not so different that the mini-computers on which C and Unix were originally created.
Furthermore the efficiency of the string functions tends to ripple outward, as they tend to carry the torch for the platform's memory subsystem performance in most C code bases. What do the Z80, 6809, and 8086 all have in common? Instruction set tweaks to make zipping along a string of bytes a lot zippier.
These tricks are then rolled into vendor optimized string libraries and made available to the developer via the ratified ANSI C string functions.
It's unfortunate that all this industry of tweaking toward core performance was consolidated under a string API whose modern legacy is to have informed so many programmers that "you suck" that the general sentiment is to vote it off the island, as if such a thing is possible with a cockroach or a rat or dandelion dandruff.
Do you want to pay prices for electronics higher by an order of magnitude?
Concerning orders of magnitude, it wouldn't hurt if some of the posts to slashdot were an order of magnitude less stupid.
TFA states these workers are being paid 41 cents/hour to work 84 hour weeks. Let's pay them 82 cents/hour to work 42 hour weeks. This will require twice as many workers, working shifts half as long, and double the labour cost for each keyboard.
100 key keyboard at 1.1s per key is 110s, which is under 2 minutes. Original labour cost is 1.3 cents/keyboard. Under the relatively humane proposal, this doubles to 2.6 cents per keyboard.
It would take six intermediaries between China and the U.S market to each mark-up this additional labour by 100% for the humane labour practise to add $1 to the cost of a keyboard landed to the consumer.
I've heard a rumour that Walmart doesn't have six intermediaries in their supply chain, and those they do have rarely get away with 100% markups.
This has nothing to do with the economics of production. It has a lot more to do with Chinese society having pockets of corruption where everyone with the power to put a stop to this turns a blind eye to enslavement conditions, and powerful corporations turning a blind eye to the greater powers in China not doing much about this.
Even Detroit would have difficulty coming up with a way to make a $10 keyboard cost $100. $40/hour with a production rate of two keyboards per hour and markups galore?
I once heard that decimation has come to mean either 90% attrition or 10% attrition. Contrary to popular opinion and Walmart shopping tendencies, it's not actually true that an "order of magnitude" is 10%
The Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM,55Ma) marks the onset of the Eocene and is characterised by a sudden worldwide temperature increase of ~5oC, lasting for ~100.000 years. The release of large quantities of methane from the seafloor probably played a key role in this event, but the primary cause is unclear.
The Eocene and Oligocene epochs (approx 55 to 23 million years ago) comprise a critical phase in Earth history. An array of geological records supported by climate modeling indicates a profound shift in global climate during this interval, from a state that was largely free of polar ice caps to one in which ice sheets on Antarctica approached their modern size. However, the early glaciation history of the Northern Hemisphere is a subject of controversy.
If we didn't have those blasted ice caps hanging over our heads, the modern era of global warming wouldn't be half so terrifying, and we could better focus our energies on fleeing the fauna.
Isn't "web of trust" in the same synosphere as Greenspan's failed notion of counter party surveillance? Wasn't it a "web of trust" which allowed the Catholic church to conceal deeply entrenched violations of trust while delaying its apology to Galileo for 400 years? Wasn't "web of trust" what allowed Madoff to dig a $50b crater? What percentage of novel endorsements from one genre author to another come equipped with a set of kneepads?
Why is it that so many people are allured by this concept?
You talk about backward compatibility as if there is only one model.
The Microsoft version of "backward compatibility" is why my perfectly good USB 2.0 Canon scanner just went to landfill heaven: the only workable driver for this model was Windows 2000. (In fairness, other Canon models from the same era did carry forward their drivers, but my crystal ball failed me, and despite this one large black mark, Canon is nowhere close to the top of my reviled list.) I buried the pristine carcass in the basement for a long time after I disposed of my last 2000 box, thinking maybe an open source driver would one day come to pass. Doubt I scanned 100 pages from the date of purchase. Off to the landfill in near mint condition. (Yes, I sent it off the the feel-good "end of life" electronics recycling program, which gave me coupons toward a pollution-free car in exchange.)
Open source tends not to dump you out in the cold to quite this degree, but you might find yourself forced to roll up your sleeves and recompile an aging code base from time to time, or change the hooks to work with a slightly more recent API. It becomes more a question of whether the effort is justified. People clinging to the dinosaur fringe end up carrying their fair share of the burden, a sentiment which for me does not cover landfilling a USB 2.0 scanner in 2004 (around the time I was no longer able to use it) due to Windows' "greatest strength".
Every Win-modem and Win-printer and Win-sick scanner should have carried a "Landfill Capable" certification sticker, right beside the big ROHS logo with the giant red circle slash.
But our geek cred is a little dented around here, so our marionettes content themselves with shouting down the minions of Mordor.
To the sage wit who suggested uninstalling Microsoft, I suggest also having a go at your BIOS and your Intel microcode CPU update. Then I suggest working through the 10^500 vacuum states of string theory with pencil and paper to ensure we're really as secure as we think we are.
Concerning this abusive patch, it strikes me that Microsoft has finally turned the corner from fearsome to pathetic.
The Dmanisi specimens were quite different. Their skull sizes indicated that their brains were not much larger than the brain of a chimpanzee. Their brains were closer in size to those of Homo habilis, a poorly understood earlier ancestral species.
In the last few years, however, the researchers collected more extensive, well-preserved skeletal remains of an adolescent and three adults. Some of the fossils resembled those of later erectus specimens in Africa. The lower limbs and arched feet reflected traits "for improved terrestrial locomotor performance," the team reported.
Over all, the fossils were "a surprising mosaic" of primitive and evolved features. The small body and small craniums, the upper limbs, elbows and shoulders were more like the earliest habilis specimens.
I would very interested to come up with a data point where someone made a break through press release which promised commercialization in five years, and then it actually happened four to six years later.
I tend to read "five years" the same way I read population drug studies. Saving 10% of the study population usually means it saved half the people in the 20% of the study population who stood to benefit from the drug, and 0% of the other 80% who weren't suitable targets due to genetic disposition (which we aren't clueful enough to test, so we lump everyone together into the same study population).
By that reading, "five years" means three years if some deep pocket gushes orgasmic over the market potential, and ten years (or never) if no white knight swoops over the horizon. For some reason when it comes to venture capital, you take the harmonic mean instead of the linear average, discard the never term, assume a 50% probability distribution (white knight/no white knight), and finally round down, thus sqrt (3 * 10) = 5 years.
If you're stupid enough to have not figured out that "freedom of speak" is constrained by context, and you wade into every malfeasance discussion on the wooden "freedom of speech" horse, you've exercised the most basic freedom of all: to open your mouth and make a fool of yourself.
In a small town, it's amusing to have a town drunk. In a large city, by the time enough drunks assemble together to make a skid row, it becomes a tedious affair. Unfortunately, slashdot offers security in numbers, so there's a permanent September surplus of town drunks to remind us of the peril of opening mouth before engaging brain. Imagine a world where every movie contains seven FBI warnings. Doesn't take much imagining, does it?
I also get pissed off about the IANAL meme. Why are we giving lip service to a profession who won't refactor their code base to the point where mere mortals can understand it? Most of the time, the lawyers themselves don't understand it, the difference being that after paying $300/hour for legal advice, you can sue your lawyer if the legal advice obtained is hopelessly incorrect (though you'll rarely succeed, and you stand to lose more than you'll gain).
In America, it seems everyone has the right to offer legal-sounding advice. And the other party (apparently, for reasons I find hard to justify) has the right to sue you if you fail to designate yourself IANAL, or otherwise club the tragically gullible or conniving reader with a clue stick. (Strangely difficult to tell those two groups apart. They seem to unite under the banner of "born complainers".)
It's the same deal with commercial endorsements. Speak away, but if you represent the firm in an official capacity, don't forget to add IANADTP: I am not a disinterested third party.
Even if you're not litigated, you'll still look like a tool if discovered. Unfortunately, on the internet, tools enjoy security in numbers, so I'm all for litigation whenever it can be managed. Generally speaking, prosecution against commercial astroturfing rarely culminates in a criminal conviction until the offense is large enough to make organized crime salivate. Estimating a population of 100,000 scumbags and tools, there might be 20 convictions a year, and only half of these where the punishment exceeds the reward (the ultra tools who didn't know when to stop, or got their noses too deep into the blow).
Even if this idiot loses his job over this (unlikely), I doubt he'll be long unemployed. It's not much of a career move for a guy like this to begin astroturfing penny stocks, and he has no apparent scruples against it.
I wish we could move this annoying IANAL meme into the browser. In the license agreement for the user agent, there would be a tick box "I am a gullible and/or conniving douche bag". For these people, the browser would add to every page rendered (in big red letters at both the top and the bottom) "The text contained on this page does not constitute legal advice unless the author explicitly identifies it as such and backs it up with legal credentials". Those of us who arrogantly tick this box off would rarely see the IANAL meme ever again. Good riddance if you ask me.
Judging by what you didn't discuss, you don't seem to distinguish fixing surface manifestations from root causes. I find that when I focus on addressing root cause, I don't run into this regression. Code is correct when it performs as specified in the design and API documents. If that means the entire application bombs out because something on the other side is broken, that's a separate consideration.
Put in the correct code (as if the other side is also correct) and then mark the bug as fixed, pending final validation when the other side is also fixed.
If addition of correct code makes the surface manifestation unbearable (application constantly bombs), then you can restore the broken code as a temporary work-around, to be removed as soon as the bug on the other side of the interface is properly addressed.
If one side of the API knows which cases are failing on the other side, you might be able to detect the suspect case and write a record to the log file "overlapping FOO handled by dubious heuristic BAR". Then if the work-around code causes a downstream cascade of weirdness, people don't get too quick to decide that another 100 bugs need to be reported.
I've also found that conservative design and coding conventions mitigates these interdependency cascades.
It can be a good idea wading into an unstable code base to pare down to a completely stable build. This is a build where you compile out functionality until what remains is believed to be rock solid. If your rock solid build is hugely divergent from your production build, then you likely have a serious cultural or management problem.
It's almost always faster in the long run to merge solid code back into the rock solid build than jello diving on an unstable production build.
On a big project, it's great to have a couple of world class jello divers to actually get the product out the door.
It should never be half of your release team. An ecology of jello dancers tends to support only one big fish, as the Microsoft story illustrates. When half of your release team is 100 FTEs, it's amazing what you can pass off the buying public long enough to rinse and repeat.
I can also say as an architect that I'm wounded to the core if my code base degenerates into a cascade of jello dancing. More than once I've seen the exact moment where a solid code base takes a bad turn. One time I took a several weeks off due to a death in the family at a critical design juncture. Everyone worked really hard to fill in the gap, and some new features were completed in record time by bastardizing one facility to do what it hadn't been intended to do. The project lived to see another day. The software was never as solid again. It's brutally hard to back these things out.
I've also sat down to discuss implementation strategies with other developers only to discover the person was navigating around the core difficulty in the belief that he ended up with would handle 99% of the cases required by the next shipment point. The person might look at this as the difference between one day to whip it out (cue infantile jokes), instead of three days to nail the specification, at a point in the deliver schedule when days (and nights) are precious resources.
It's a false calculus once you consider the downstream investment in validating the code, shipping the code and obtaining marketplace confidence, bug reporting cycles, and the persistent niggling fear that every subtle bug "could be one of five or ten different corner cases we shaved off in the last iteration".
No large project is ever shipped without cutting corners, but you have to choose your battles carefully. If you end up with a cascade of interdependent bugs, someone along the way made some unwise choices.
By the time you are proposing to build a meta-bug tracker because these interaction chains exceed what can be mentally managed, it sounds like a invitation to a bring in an MBA student to write a case study of a business whose business model had degenerated into managing their own dysfunction. I would think long and hard about this before I mastered my queasy feeling.
I've read a lot on this subject over the years, but not much recently, and what I recall best at this point is the portions I decided to believe at the time from the accounts I found most compelling.
I'm inclined toward accounts based on the premise that America and Russia had an agreement (what blend of official/unofficial I can't recall) that Russia would pressure the Japanese from the Kamchatka peninsula and that territorial control in the post-war world would be to some degree be established by how much territory in the region of Japan the Russians had managed to occupy at the point in time of formal Japanese surrender.
To fully appreciate the political situation, you need to realize that the Americans were reading Purple. Purple never got as much press as Enigma because it was considered somewhat unsporting to crack a diplomatic code. The Americans had a sense that Japanese surrender was already in the works, but then the Japanese began to haggle among themselves about exactly how this would be done and how the internal post-surrender pecking order would unfold.
Meanwhile the Russians are progressing far faster than the Americans wished. Japan had long understood that the American military economy was humming along at a fever pitch, and was pretty much impossible to mess with short of capturing Hawaii. The Japanese civil servants were long resigned to the outcome, while the royal crust was dithering.
Also, don't forget that conventional Tokyo fire bombing destroyed 50% of the world's most densely inhabited city. The McNamara movie "Fog of War" has some good stuff on this. (Complicated man, that guy.) It's not as if Japan was lacking reasons to cease hostilities. Memo for next war: less wooden housing.
I think one American perspective about the bomb was "hurry up and get on with the surrender, before we have to concede every square inch of east Asia to the rapidly advancing Russian borg".
The other perspective is that they had spent 1/7'the of their entire wartime economy on this project, and along the way denied a lot of conventional armaments to their generals and enlisted troops. A lot of powerful people who hadn't been in on the Manhattan project were pissed about this. Really, they're going to spend a billion 1940 dollars on this program and then cancel the big demonstration, when you have no end of detractors within the ranks of power?
Even with large contingents of Japanese officialdom resigned to surrender, there's always a risk that a survivalist faction rallies around some blood-thirsty cause about how much American blood will be spilled on the land invasion. Remember the Iwo Jima! The Americans will never be willing to pay this price in blood! No, actually, they'll turn entire cities, one by one, into glass ponds with a single bomb dropped from a single airplane. Sure takes the spit out of "dead to the last drop" jingoism.
Turn the tables and imagine it was America on the brink of surrender, with California and New York conceding the inevitable, while Texas and Utah are piling on the guns and sand bags. How many Americans have bothered to conceptualize what surrender feels like? To my knowledge, the only military superpower to have transgressed upon American soil is Canada, which hardly gives a nation much practice in fearing the worst.
Another factor I think is that the American physicists realized that making the bomb was not all difficult given the progression of technology, and decades instead of years for the program to unfold. Feynman has described that some of the computational challenges were dealt with by circulating punch card in fancy tabulating machines. There's more computational power available these days in a Palm Pilot. I'm sure guys as smart as Feynman concluded early on that this particular genie was not being coaxed back into the bottle, not even for a short decade-long snooze. It was going to be a post-nuclear world order, one way or another. Would the nuclear arms race have played out better without the deva
While I'm at it, for some unknown reason my partner left a copy of Dr Seuss's "Oh, the Places You'll Go" on the kitchen table. We have no offspring, not even a pony.
The copyright notice contains a summary line:
SUMMARY: Advice in rhyme for proceeding in life; weathering fear, loneliness, and confusion; and being in charge of your actions.
Here's a few lines that had me do a double take about whether this was the Wall Street edition.
Wherever you fly, you'll be the best of the best. Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.
Except when you don't. Because, sometimes you won't.... (turn page)
You'll come down from the Lurch with an unpleasant bump. And the chances are, then, that you'll be in a slump.
And when you're in a Slump, you're not in for much fun. Un-slumping yourself is not easily done.
(turn page)
Until Uncle Sam...
Oh, wait, that's not what it says. It is the children's edition after all.
Seriously, they should reprint this thing with an extra verse or two. There are a lot of alpha achievers out there right now who could use it, who valiantly fed the majority of their recent accomplishments into the paper shreder just in time to preserve their pristine track records as upstanding members of society.
What exactly does "being in charge of your actions" entail in modern society? One school of thought is capitulation and deceit. It's bad enough that the private sector communicates these values so successfully, without our universities aiding and abetting.
I've seen that before. I think the crime on the opening page was to allow a gifted student to coast for seven years in a state of stultifying boredom. What do you think happens on the inside during those years? Most likely a gifted student develops a highly internalized frame of reference on what is worth accomplishing in life.
The exception in my own schooling was a grade six math teacher who allowed me to proceed at my own pace, provided I complete all the exercises in each textbook along the way. I very nearly completed grade 10. It was mostly an exercise in speed writing. Sadly, the material covered over those years rarely ascended above the level of manipulating formulas. Ooh, wow, now we are manipulating formulas by canceling out letters of the alphabet. And we don't even have to write (x != 0) on the right margin.
By the time I got to grade eleven, I had reviewed grade six another four times. One day I just randomly decided I had enough. Instead of doing yet another tedious exercise I'd seen before, I started proving some interesting congruence relationships I'd known about for a long time, but never deeply questioned. One bit I recall was generalizing "casting out nines" to other base systems. (Does "casting out ones" work in base two?) An interesting way to pass a dull class, but hardly advanced.
I remember this day because it was also the only time that year the teacher demanded we submit our exercise book at the end of class. Well, I got a good tongue lashing out of it. "This isn't the exercise I assigned! What is this nonsense about proving theorems?" And this was a teacher I liked, at a private school with a good reputation. (My math teacher the previous school was the worst teacher I've known. He spent the first half of year teaching us to conceptual positive and negative numbers as red and black ants in a kill jar, and the second half of the year teaching us his mortgage disguised as lessons in interest rates.)
What the article fails to state is that as the brain matures, there is a window of opportunity where the mind is alive to the material. You can't arbitrarily postpone teaching the material to a capable student, and then expect the same results when you finally get around to it. And note here that none of our athletic programs are constructed on this principle. Capable athletes are given meaningful challenges as soon as they are able to cope with them. In the NHL, if a young guy gets called up to fill a hole, and then gets press-boxed for seventy games, the fans will rage about management "destroying a prospect's career".
I'm sure I've told this story before. At university I had a classmate who enrolled in an unusual double major in pure and applied math. One of his lazy ass professors in differentials equations (on the "applied" side) borrowed from her colleague the same assigned he had completed the previous term on the pure side. TeX had not yet been perfected yet, so this was a tedious exercise in pencil pushing. I recall it was 20 pages of densely scribbled derivations, on which he had scored 95% the first time around. I wanted to go for beers, so I told him to scratch the name of his first professor, and write in the name of his second professor and submit "his own work" again. The junior faculty cow gave him a zero, which he spent the next several weeks disputing, while I pretended not to snicker.
Maybe I was naive about the clause "it was his work". Perhaps the university actually owned his assignment after he submitted it the first time. But if they already owned his completion of the assignment the first time around, on what basis are they compelling him to plagiarize work that is no longer his? Maybe he's obligated to submit incorrect answers the second time around, so as not to break any copyright laws.
In any case, that was the end of my academic career. By then the institutions of lower learning (elementary school) had left me alone in my own mind for far too long and I just couldn't put up with the crap.
Oh good, so Writer is now at Word 2000 level on that feature, and only 10 years later.
Yes, but did the Word 2000 feature actually work, or did they slide it onto the "dare ya" menu item? Note that "whack a mole" does not count. It has to work while *not* disabling some other innocent feature on another page unseen.
I've seen Microsoft marketing literature which claims that MSVC++ supported namespaces in 1995. Why couldn't anyone else implement this feature so quickly? (Perhaps because no one else thought that successfully parsing "using std" was a complete implementation.)
Here's a mathematical question. What's the maximal subset of Microsoft Word features with no buggy interactions? Probably the singleton "File|exit". And even that is suspect. Today I watched XP go into dreamland for ten minutes closing a simple rdp session on a fresh OS install.
This is one of the reasons why the notability criteria on Wikipedia leaves a lot to be desired. There's a lot of cite worthy sources about when Microsoft first purports to offer a feature, hardly anything you can reliably quote about when the feature actually started to work.
Tell me about Microsoft's feature achievements when you can back it up with a long history of 3rd party "ACID for Office" compliance results.
Well, also a code clean-up would help, the stories I've heard about OOo's codebase do *not* entice me to contribute, at all.
Yes, that's what Mozilla did and was bitten in the neck by the "Mozilla is dead" vampires, who have lately been feeding on the purported corpse of Perl 6. In the open source world, the "what have you done for me lately" has an even shorter event horizon than a U.S. election cycle.
And unfortunately these situations often take a long time to get sorted out, because the real problem is usually someone even higher up that has enough conniving/nepotistic/irrational faith in the bottom-feeder to be blind to the problem.
This is the great fiction of human hierarchies: that it's nothing but Machiavellian insight and back-stabbing all the way up, then nothing but irrationality and blindness once you arrive. As quaint as it is, it doesn't wash.
The military values discipline and aggression more than competence and fair play. If you look at ape society, the silver back has only two job responsibilities: copulating and snarling at potential mutineers.
Once you get to a level where you have no direct input into the competence of the organization, hierarchy is all you have left. It's not surprising that those who excel at this transition look and act like baboons. It's in the genes.
How many who campaign on "off with their heads" end up wearing the crown? It's a common story that the loudest murmuring about fair play from below ultimately proves disingenuous.
I wish the psychologists would study this more. Unfortunately, in a world where we're still discriminating on race after sequencing the chimp genome, we're not quite ready for what we would learn.
Back in high school, I once reprogrammed a TRS-80 to the Dvorak layout, and taught myself to type on it over several weeks. It took a while to override pre-existing patterns.
The weird thing was, my hands felt like they were moving like sludge, but the letters were flying across the screen. It's a different ratio of smoke to fire. I never became faster on this layout, but could type about the same speed with less mechanical effort. I've been typing for so long, a large portion of my typing mistakes are whole word substitutions, when my spelling system doesn't keep up with my fingers. I don't regard my fingers as the limiting factor.
Since we're kicking baseless fables around the barn, how about the old canard RISC vs CISC, one of the original founding members of the Steve Jobs reality distortion consortium?
Quite simply, it's never held up. To begin with, RISC went much too far the other direction. The happy medium is somewhere closer to Thumb-2. Meanwhile the much predicted demise of x86 never came to pass. People usually pass this off with the Intel process prowess excuse, but the fact of the matter is that the complexity of the instruction didn't matter nearly so much as purported. Aspects of the instruction set that were liabilities during one architectural phase would become an asset in a subsequent architectural phase (e.g. read-modify-write instructions were later exploited to alleviate memory ordering pressure).
At the end of the day, the outcome is strikingly similar to my experience with Dvorak so many years ago: x86 runs just as fast as any RISC design, but it does so producing a lot more heat (huge amounts of churn in the instruction decode and in-flight score-boarding stages compared to RISC).
Another point no one ever mentions, is that QWERTY on a modern keyboard requires far less finger power than Dvorak on an old mechanical keyboard. I learned on an Underwood which required a pinky-finger pole vault to lift the carriage for an upper case letter. If I hit the shift key at the wrong angle (as a seventh grader) my pinky would buckle.
Hand skills at the desktop have evolved every bit as much, but we're kind of blind to it. Suppose there was a database of keyboard key stream intercepts categorized by year, dating back to the 1970s. If you were given a random sample of 100 contiguous keystrokes, how hard do you think it would be to guess the era?
I suspect my email keyboarding has remained the most consistent over the past 15 years, but even there, I bet there have been incremental changes in sentence structure and punctuation. I used to use the semicolon every page or so. These days, no one has time for a sentence in two acts with a curtain call in the middle.
If you think about it, even the mental construct of "the keyboard" as a rate determining factor is pretty old school. Back in the day, made a nice headline for Omni or Popular Mechanics along with the inevitable flying cars.
It always amazes me how science-leaning people such as those on slashdot seem to think all disease should be made to go away.
I think you're the guy who missed the boat. It's a generally accepted convention to treat human health as a universal good. This point came up many times in the Economist when banning tobacco in pubs was a hot button issue. There were always people pointing out that tobacco deaths saved money in the health care system. As the Economist said a number of times, we aren't in the business of evaluating human life on that premise. Almost everyone regards their own health as a positive good, so it requires a considerable amount of double-think to enter into a debate with the position that aggregate human health is a net liability.
Any argument about the carrying capacity of the planet involves unreliable extrapolations. The confident arguments are inevitably circular. For example, you can eliminate speculation about where human technology will be in 100 years by claiming that the problems are already so large we'll never get there, when actually the present magnitude of our challenge is very much under debate.
Looking at it from another side, "most of us are better off dead" is a loser perspective. Not exactly energizing in the pursuit of a good outcome. What society ever had a good outcome coping with daunting challenges from that emotional foundation?
The one outcome I truly fear is the one where all the billionaires are living 200 year life spans, and everyone else is dead in under a century. I can only visualize this as degenerating into some kind of dog-eat-dog feudalism. The cream of the human race will become so preoccupied with making the immortality cut, there won't be a lot of cycles spared on externalities, such as the rest of the planet.
How many countries already have governments that would rather be the shiny big fish in a shit box than actually do something constructive?
Um, they are paying all the taxes they owe. 100% of them. Oh, I see. You want them to pay more than they owe. Gotcha.
Impressive, that's a troll of a magnitude rarely encountered. You're in range of Eta Carinae.
First of all, there's no shortage of American corporations engaged in outright duplicity, or have you forgotten Enron already? Apparently for a while there, it was "within the rules" to plunge California back into the stone age by ransoming electricity. And that was, by Enron's standards, one of their more legal endeavors. Best line from Smartest Men in the Room: "Burn, baby, burn". Kneecapping the country you live in is generally regarded as unpatriotic, whether legal or not.
If a corporation takes Enronesque liberties with the American tax code, they're still only paying "what they own". Gotcha. Nice to have that cleared up.
Of course, it's useless arguing with someone like you, so I'll end off with an instructional video.
Slashdot Mirror
Knuth's maxim is sufficiently pithy to have become, over time, self referential, as evidenced by your misunderstanding.
The root of all evil used to be deep and singular, now it is broad and shallow. I guarantee you that Knuth did not include choosing the best fundamental algorithm under the label "premature" unless it involves squabbling over log log N terms or stray digits in the exponent term.
http://www.siam.org/pdf/news/174.pdf
An unpacked (deoptimized) version of Knuth's maxim is that the transition from program structure and notation which maximizes readability, comprehension, and conviction (concerning its correctness and merit) to one which favours performance should be delayed as long as possible. Ideally until performance becomes the sole remaining success factor.
(Taking into account the human mind's special capacity to imprint upon evil, Knuth's formulation remains the better one.)
Originally Knuth meant manually hoisting loop constant expressions (often in ways that later turn out to not be fully general) or manually evaluating constant expressions or manually fusing nested function calls and the kind of rot that a good compiler these days will do on your behalf. Anyone used the "register" keyword lately? Once upon a time it seemed like a good idea.
While the principle remains the same, the temptations have changed. Such as parallelizing a bad implementation of a poor algorithm in the misguided belief that the underlying task is not sequentially bound.
That said, projects which do *no* evil typically fail to impress anyone. The ideal is to wrap large amount of cleanly structured and accessible source code around a nugget of pure, smoldering evil, coked to the last clock cycle.
Perversely, the worst example of this is TeX itself. The smoldering nugget of pure evil is the single pass parsing regime and data packing eight bit character values.
I suspect the literature on parallel programming would roughly equal the literature on electro-chemical storage cells. Sheesh, if only those guys were paying attention, we'd have watch batteries powering small cities by now.
On second thought, how much literature could there really be if you can summon the majority of it onto your screen in 4/10'ths of a second for any combination of keywords?
Parallel programming is a lot like fuel cells. You get some pretty impressive results on selected applications involving pristine apparatus in a controlled setting, dating back to the Apollo program (in both cases).
Reality on the ground is rarely so forgiving.
If we hadn't already achieved a pixel processing speed-up between 1980 and 2008 best approximated by a sideways 8, Javascript wouldn't even have entered the conversation.
It boils down to this: ignoring everything you guys have already accomplished, you've pretty much done nothing. I worked for that kind of company once. The guy in charge put on a Cirque du Soleil of intestinal recursion. That's how I feel about the claim that software developers haven't been paying attention to parallelism for elephant years.
I find that somewhat typical of beautiful theories. Everything is wonderful with stack based interpreters until someone points out that it borks the branch predictor. Good luck cooking up a telepathic branch predictor. (And you thought your original problem was hard?)
As for the JIT comment, most of the Java code I use on a daily basis (Eclipse, JIRA) suffers from extreme lurch.
Why does it take two minutes to close and reload the same Eclipse workspace? I think the network mandated virus scanner is so busy looking under the JIT compiler's skirt, it can't get anything done. Hardly a panacea.
These "Java moments" are livable, but I wouldn't discourage anyone from trying a different approach.
So a bunch of guys who all knew each other from the failed Nupedia project got together and wrote 50 articles in one week. Why is this newsworthy?
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. — Harry S Truman
I find it quite interesting to see the first law of collaboration confirmed among a small group of experts, after Nupedia so abjectly failed to do so. Bear in mind that I number myself among the lunatic fringe with a rather low regard for "peer review" and a working definition of "expert" as as someone who has perfected the art of taking credit. I also number myself among the lunatic fringe more concerned with the flow of ideas than the flow of dollars.
Maybe I should update Truman for the 21'st century:
That's another good working definition of expert: a person excessively encumbered by formal roles and obligations.
Nine times out of ten in this world, convenience is accompanied with a lot of bending over and taking it.
My local video store stocks somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 titles. Any five movies from the enormous back catalogue for $10, with a seven day return period. No pop-ups, no Silverlight, no Flash, and only movies I pick myself. If I just had a DVD player lobotomized of the "operation prohibited by madmen with small winkies" message when I try to bypass the FBI warning or the logo rotation, my movie watching experience would be 100% ankle-grip free.
The other day I received an unsolicited offer for life insurance with a pre-authorized chequing option. It contains the sentence "This authorization to the company is also my authorization to the Bank; however, the Bank need not verify that payments are withdrawn in accordance with this authorization."
Convenience, check. Jolly rogering, check.
Need not verify is precisely what Madoff's glamazons were all about.
I guess I'm a more inventive complainer than you are.
The day not long ago where I installed the USB protocol analyzer and it blue-screened my workstation every half hour all day, Firefox was adding another 2m to every round trip starting plug-ins that I wouldn't gain any advantage from until after another half-dozen blue screens.
When one application pauses to load a major plug-in, I have eight other desktops one keystroke away where I can continue to accomplish useful work. When Windows is so bogged down coming up from a cold-start that I can't the program menu to pop up, I'm pretty much dead in the water.
What I would really like is a global setting "how much does instant gratification rule your life?" Hint: I won't be picking "make it smooth". I'm no fan of gratification that arrives unannounced and doesn't sport an off switch.
With the modern network of air transportation, just about any new strain of halfway competent contagion can spread to every major world city in 24 to 48 hours.
In the real world, there are hardly any large scale systems where robustness is measured by 0-day quarantine containment.
If a four hour flu goes around the world in 80 hours, and everything is back to normal the following Monday, I'd regard that as a robust system flexing its immune response.
Since the internet surpassed the importance of human well being around 2004, it gets held to a higher standard, as it should. Any day now, I expect the FDA to announce a recall on IOS 11, and maybe pull the entire IOS product line behind the counter.
I know nothing of the sort. How about asking some developers who have a history of getting both the security and the memory management correct which intellectual challenge they lose the most sleep over?
The OpenBSD team has a history of strength in both areas. I suspect most of these developers would laugh out loud at the intellectual challenge of the memory management required to implement a hash function. It's about a hundred thousand lines of code short of where the OpenBSD team gets grey hair over memory management problems in the C language.
I was just having an intense conversation about restrictive land covenants with my GF. If the economic cycle tips downward, the covenant holder (often a not-for-profit manila file folder which is legally distinct from the insolvent main entity) ceases to afford regular maintenance. Suddenly it turns into a dandelion orchard, and everyone in the community is dead certain that every dandelion on every lawn originated from this single source, whereupon some soon to be re-elected politico harpoons the legal infrastructure that permitted these things to flourish in the first place.
"What we know about C" and "what we know about dandelions" are surprisingly equivalent.
I wouldn't hire a programmer who can't get memory management right to take on any significant intellectual challenge. It's just a way to feel good about yourself without having the aptitude to cut your way out of a wet paper bag.
90% of software development projects are not aptitude driven. Let's stop fooling ourselves into thinking that the languages that work well in those contexts having anything to offer those of us dealing with the other 10%
Memory management is a subcase of resource management with a particularly harsh way of delivering the news: you suck. A memory managed language deprives the environment of so many golden opportunities to deliver this message, despite the fact that you still suck. By the time you don't suck, you've ceased to regard unmanaged memory as a core intellectual challenge, and trained yourself to work within an idiom where you hardly ever get it wrong anyway.
The C string functions that cause the worst of the grief were widely known to be a bad idea by the mid 1980s. They originated a point in history where linking sprintf() was sometimes considered a luxury you couldn't afford. In the microcontroller world, it's still common that an environment provides three different versions of printf/sprintf: basic, basic plus more of the format options and maybe long integers, and then the full version which also includes floating point. The middle option is the beer budget. The first option is for when you can't even afford beer. These micros are not so different that the mini-computers on which C and Unix were originally created.
Furthermore the efficiency of the string functions tends to ripple outward, as they tend to carry the torch for the platform's memory subsystem performance in most C code bases. What do the Z80, 6809, and 8086 all have in common? Instruction set tweaks to make zipping along a string of bytes a lot zippier.
These tricks are then rolled into vendor optimized string libraries and made available to the developer via the ratified ANSI C string functions.
It's unfortunate that all this industry of tweaking toward core performance was consolidated under a string API whose modern legacy is to have informed so many programmers that "you suck" that the general sentiment is to vote it off the island, as if such a thing is possible with a cockroach or a rat or dandelion dandruff.
Concerning orders of magnitude, it wouldn't hurt if some of the posts to slashdot were an order of magnitude less stupid.
TFA states these workers are being paid 41 cents/hour to work 84 hour weeks. Let's pay them 82 cents/hour to work 42 hour weeks. This will require twice as many workers, working shifts half as long, and double the labour cost for each keyboard.
100 key keyboard at 1.1s per key is 110s, which is under 2 minutes. Original labour cost is 1.3 cents/keyboard. Under the relatively humane proposal, this doubles to 2.6 cents per keyboard.
It would take six intermediaries between China and the U.S market to each mark-up this additional labour by 100% for the humane labour practise to add $1 to the cost of a keyboard landed to the consumer.
I've heard a rumour that Walmart doesn't have six intermediaries in their supply chain, and those they do have rarely get away with 100% markups.
This has nothing to do with the economics of production. It has a lot more to do with Chinese society having pockets of corruption where everyone with the power to put a stop to this turns a blind eye to enslavement conditions, and powerful corporations turning a blind eye to the greater powers in China not doing much about this.
Even Detroit would have difficulty coming up with a way to make a $10 keyboard cost $100. $40/hour with a production rate of two keyboards per hour and markups galore?
I once heard that decimation has come to mean either 90% attrition or 10% attrition. Contrary to popular opinion and Walmart shopping tendencies, it's not actually true that an "order of magnitude" is 10%
http://www.researchportal.be/en/projects.pdf?classifications=B330_iwDisciplineCode&page=0&ordering=title&descending=false&itemsPerPage=50
The Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM,55Ma) marks the onset of the Eocene and is characterised by a sudden worldwide temperature increase of ~5oC, lasting for ~100.000 years. The release of large quantities of methane from the seafloor probably played a key role in this event, but the primary cause is unclear.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v446/n7132/abs/nature05591.html
The Eocene and Oligocene epochs (approx 55 to 23 million years ago) comprise a critical phase in Earth history. An array of geological records supported by climate modeling indicates a profound shift in global climate during this interval, from a state that was largely free of polar ice caps to one in which ice sheets on Antarctica approached their modern size. However, the early glaciation history of the Northern Hemisphere is a subject of controversy.
If we didn't have those blasted ice caps hanging over our heads, the modern era of global warming wouldn't be half so terrifying, and we could better focus our energies on fleeing the fauna.
Isn't "web of trust" in the same synosphere as Greenspan's failed notion of counter party surveillance? Wasn't it a "web of trust" which allowed the Catholic church to conceal deeply entrenched violations of trust while delaying its apology to Galileo for 400 years? Wasn't "web of trust" what allowed Madoff to dig a $50b crater? What percentage of novel endorsements from one genre author to another come equipped with a set of kneepads?
Why is it that so many people are allured by this concept?
You talk about backward compatibility as if there is only one model.
The Microsoft version of "backward compatibility" is why my perfectly good USB 2.0 Canon scanner just went to landfill heaven: the only workable driver for this model was Windows 2000. (In fairness, other Canon models from the same era did carry forward their drivers, but my crystal ball failed me, and despite this one large black mark, Canon is nowhere close to the top of my reviled list.) I buried the pristine carcass in the basement for a long time after I disposed of my last 2000 box, thinking maybe an open source driver would one day come to pass. Doubt I scanned 100 pages from the date of purchase. Off to the landfill in near mint condition. (Yes, I sent it off the the feel-good "end of life" electronics recycling program, which gave me coupons toward a pollution-free car in exchange.)
Open source tends not to dump you out in the cold to quite this degree, but you might find yourself forced to roll up your sleeves and recompile an aging code base from time to time, or change the hooks to work with a slightly more recent API. It becomes more a question of whether the effort is justified. People clinging to the dinosaur fringe end up carrying their fair share of the burden, a sentiment which for me does not cover landfilling a USB 2.0 scanner in 2004 (around the time I was no longer able to use it) due to Windows' "greatest strength".
Every Win-modem and Win-printer and Win-sick scanner should have carried a "Landfill Capable" certification sticker, right beside the big ROHS logo with the giant red circle slash.
Not to mention that having the source code doesn't exactly prove anything.
http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html
But our geek cred is a little dented around here, so our marionettes content themselves with shouting down the minions of Mordor.
To the sage wit who suggested uninstalling Microsoft, I suggest also having a go at your BIOS and your Intel microcode CPU update. Then I suggest working through the 10^500 vacuum states of string theory with pencil and paper to ensure we're really as secure as we think we are.
Concerning this abusive patch, it strikes me that Microsoft has finally turned the corner from fearsome to pathetic.
It's unclear these days where erectus begins.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/20/science/20fossil.htm
The Dmanisi specimens were quite different. Their skull sizes indicated that their brains were not much larger than the brain of a chimpanzee. Their brains were closer in size to those of Homo habilis, a poorly understood earlier ancestral species.
In the last few years, however, the researchers collected more extensive, well-preserved skeletal remains of an adolescent and three adults. Some of the fossils resembled those of later erectus specimens in Africa. The lower limbs and arched feet reflected traits "for improved terrestrial locomotor performance," the team reported.
Over all, the fossils were "a surprising mosaic" of primitive and evolved features. The small body and small craniums, the upper limbs, elbows and shoulders were more like the earliest habilis specimens.
I would very interested to come up with a data point where someone made a break through press release which promised commercialization in five years, and then it actually happened four to six years later.
I tend to read "five years" the same way I read population drug studies. Saving 10% of the study population usually means it saved half the people in the 20% of the study population who stood to benefit from the drug, and 0% of the other 80% who weren't suitable targets due to genetic disposition (which we aren't clueful enough to test, so we lump everyone together into the same study population).
By that reading, "five years" means three years if some deep pocket gushes orgasmic over the market potential, and ten years (or never) if no white knight swoops over the horizon. For some reason when it comes to venture capital, you take the harmonic mean instead of the linear average, discard the never term, assume a 50% probability distribution (white knight/no white knight), and finally round down, thus sqrt (3 * 10) = 5 years.
Untruthful, damaging speech is not protected.
If you're stupid enough to have not figured out that "freedom of speak" is constrained by context, and you wade into every malfeasance discussion on the wooden "freedom of speech" horse, you've exercised the most basic freedom of all: to open your mouth and make a fool of yourself.
In a small town, it's amusing to have a town drunk. In a large city, by the time enough drunks assemble together to make a skid row, it becomes a tedious affair. Unfortunately, slashdot offers security in numbers, so there's a permanent September surplus of town drunks to remind us of the peril of opening mouth before engaging brain. Imagine a world where every movie contains seven FBI warnings. Doesn't take much imagining, does it?
I also get pissed off about the IANAL meme. Why are we giving lip service to a profession who won't refactor their code base to the point where mere mortals can understand it? Most of the time, the lawyers themselves don't understand it, the difference being that after paying $300/hour for legal advice, you can sue your lawyer if the legal advice obtained is hopelessly incorrect (though you'll rarely succeed, and you stand to lose more than you'll gain).
In America, it seems everyone has the right to offer legal-sounding advice. And the other party (apparently, for reasons I find hard to justify) has the right to sue you if you fail to designate yourself IANAL, or otherwise club the tragically gullible or conniving reader with a clue stick. (Strangely difficult to tell those two groups apart. They seem to unite under the banner of "born complainers".)
It's the same deal with commercial endorsements. Speak away, but if you represent the firm in an official capacity, don't forget to add IANADTP: I am not a disinterested third party.
Even if you're not litigated, you'll still look like a tool if discovered. Unfortunately, on the internet, tools enjoy security in numbers, so I'm all for litigation whenever it can be managed. Generally speaking, prosecution against commercial astroturfing rarely culminates in a criminal conviction until the offense is large enough to make organized crime salivate. Estimating a population of 100,000 scumbags and tools, there might be 20 convictions a year, and only half of these where the punishment exceeds the reward (the ultra tools who didn't know when to stop, or got their noses too deep into the blow).
Even if this idiot loses his job over this (unlikely), I doubt he'll be long unemployed. It's not much of a career move for a guy like this to begin astroturfing penny stocks, and he has no apparent scruples against it.
I wish we could move this annoying IANAL meme into the browser. In the license agreement for the user agent, there would be a tick box "I am a gullible and/or conniving douche bag". For these people, the browser would add to every page rendered (in big red letters at both the top and the bottom) "The text contained on this page does not constitute legal advice unless the author explicitly identifies it as such and backs it up with legal credentials". Those of us who arrogantly tick this box off would rarely see the IANAL meme ever again. Good riddance if you ask me.
Judging by what you didn't discuss, you don't seem to distinguish fixing surface manifestations from root causes. I find that when I focus on addressing root cause, I don't run into this regression. Code is correct when it performs as specified in the design and API documents. If that means the entire application bombs out because something on the other side is broken, that's a separate consideration.
Put in the correct code (as if the other side is also correct) and then mark the bug as fixed, pending final validation when the other side is also fixed.
If addition of correct code makes the surface manifestation unbearable (application constantly bombs), then you can restore the broken code as a temporary work-around, to be removed as soon as the bug on the other side of the interface is properly addressed.
If one side of the API knows which cases are failing on the other side, you might be able to detect the suspect case and write a record to the log file "overlapping FOO handled by dubious heuristic BAR". Then if the work-around code causes a downstream cascade of weirdness, people don't get too quick to decide that another 100 bugs need to be reported.
I've also found that conservative design and coding conventions mitigates these interdependency cascades.
It can be a good idea wading into an unstable code base to pare down to a completely stable build. This is a build where you compile out functionality until what remains is believed to be rock solid. If your rock solid build is hugely divergent from your production build, then you likely have a serious cultural or management problem.
It's almost always faster in the long run to merge solid code back into the rock solid build than jello diving on an unstable production build.
On a big project, it's great to have a couple of world class jello divers to actually get the product out the door.
It should never be half of your release team. An ecology of jello dancers tends to support only one big fish, as the Microsoft story illustrates. When half of your release team is 100 FTEs, it's amazing what you can pass off the buying public long enough to rinse and repeat.
I can also say as an architect that I'm wounded to the core if my code base degenerates into a cascade of jello dancing. More than once I've seen the exact moment where a solid code base takes a bad turn. One time I took a several weeks off due to a death in the family at a critical design juncture. Everyone worked really hard to fill in the gap, and some new features were completed in record time by bastardizing one facility to do what it hadn't been intended to do. The project lived to see another day. The software was never as solid again. It's brutally hard to back these things out.
I've also sat down to discuss implementation strategies with other developers only to discover the person was navigating around the core difficulty in the belief that he ended up with would handle 99% of the cases required by the next shipment point. The person might look at this as the difference between one day to whip it out (cue infantile jokes), instead of three days to nail the specification, at a point in the deliver schedule when days (and nights) are precious resources.
It's a false calculus once you consider the downstream investment in validating the code, shipping the code and obtaining marketplace confidence, bug reporting cycles, and the persistent niggling fear that every subtle bug "could be one of five or ten different corner cases we shaved off in the last iteration".
No large project is ever shipped without cutting corners, but you have to choose your battles carefully. If you end up with a cascade of interdependent bugs, someone along the way made some unwise choices.
By the time you are proposing to build a meta-bug tracker because these interaction chains exceed what can be mentally managed, it sounds like a invitation to a bring in an MBA student to write a case study of a business whose business model had degenerated into managing their own dysfunction. I would think long and hard about this before I mastered my queasy feeling.
I've read a lot on this subject over the years, but not much recently, and what I recall best at this point is the portions I decided to believe at the time from the accounts I found most compelling.
I'm inclined toward accounts based on the premise that America and Russia had an agreement (what blend of official/unofficial I can't recall) that Russia would pressure the Japanese from the Kamchatka peninsula and that territorial control in the post-war world would be to some degree be established by how much territory in the region of Japan the Russians had managed to occupy at the point in time of formal Japanese surrender.
To fully appreciate the political situation, you need to realize that the Americans were reading Purple. Purple never got as much press as Enigma because it was considered somewhat unsporting to crack a diplomatic code. The Americans had a sense that Japanese surrender was already in the works, but then the Japanese began to haggle among themselves about exactly how this would be done and how the internal post-surrender pecking order would unfold.
Meanwhile the Russians are progressing far faster than the Americans wished. Japan had long understood that the American military economy was humming along at a fever pitch, and was pretty much impossible to mess with short of capturing Hawaii. The Japanese civil servants were long resigned to the outcome, while the royal crust was dithering.
Also, don't forget that conventional Tokyo fire bombing destroyed 50% of the world's most densely inhabited city. The McNamara movie "Fog of War" has some good stuff on this. (Complicated man, that guy.) It's not as if Japan was lacking reasons to cease hostilities. Memo for next war: less wooden housing.
I think one American perspective about the bomb was "hurry up and get on with the surrender, before we have to concede every square inch of east Asia to the rapidly advancing Russian borg".
The other perspective is that they had spent 1/7'the of their entire wartime economy on this project, and along the way denied a lot of conventional armaments to their generals and enlisted troops. A lot of powerful people who hadn't been in on the Manhattan project were pissed about this. Really, they're going to spend a billion 1940 dollars on this program and then cancel the big demonstration, when you have no end of detractors within the ranks of power?
Even with large contingents of Japanese officialdom resigned to surrender, there's always a risk that a survivalist faction rallies around some blood-thirsty cause about how much American blood will be spilled on the land invasion. Remember the Iwo Jima! The Americans will never be willing to pay this price in blood! No, actually, they'll turn entire cities, one by one, into glass ponds with a single bomb dropped from a single airplane. Sure takes the spit out of "dead to the last drop" jingoism.
Turn the tables and imagine it was America on the brink of surrender, with California and New York conceding the inevitable, while Texas and Utah are piling on the guns and sand bags. How many Americans have bothered to conceptualize what surrender feels like? To my knowledge, the only military superpower to have transgressed upon American soil is Canada, which hardly gives a nation much practice in fearing the worst.
Another factor I think is that the American physicists realized that making the bomb was not all difficult given the progression of technology, and decades instead of years for the program to unfold. Feynman has described that some of the computational challenges were dealt with by circulating punch card in fancy tabulating machines. There's more computational power available these days in a Palm Pilot. I'm sure guys as smart as Feynman concluded early on that this particular genie was not being coaxed back into the bottle, not even for a short decade-long snooze. It was going to be a post-nuclear world order, one way or another. Would the nuclear arms race have played out better without the deva
While I'm at it, for some unknown reason my partner left a copy of Dr Seuss's "Oh, the Places You'll Go" on the kitchen table. We have no offspring, not even a pony.
The copyright notice contains a summary line:
SUMMARY: Advice in rhyme for proceeding in life; weathering fear, loneliness, and confusion; and being in charge of your actions.
Here's a few lines that had me do a double take about whether this was the Wall Street edition.
Wherever you fly, you'll be the best of the best.
Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.
Except when you don't. ... (turn page)
Because, sometimes you won't.
You'll come down from the Lurch
with an unpleasant bump.
And the chances are, then,
that you'll be in a slump.
And when you're in a Slump,
you're not in for much fun.
Un-slumping yourself
is not easily done.
(turn page)
Until Uncle Sam ...
Oh, wait, that's not what it says. It is the children's edition after all.
Seriously, they should reprint this thing with an extra verse or two. There are a lot of alpha achievers out there right now who could use it, who valiantly fed the majority of their recent accomplishments into the paper shreder just in time to preserve their pristine track records as upstanding members of society.
What exactly does "being in charge of your actions" entail in modern society? One school of thought is capitulation and deceit. It's bad enough that the private sector communicates these values so successfully, without our universities aiding and abetting.
I've seen that before. I think the crime on the opening page was to allow a gifted student to coast for seven years in a state of stultifying boredom. What do you think happens on the inside during those years? Most likely a gifted student develops a highly internalized frame of reference on what is worth accomplishing in life.
The exception in my own schooling was a grade six math teacher who allowed me to proceed at my own pace, provided I complete all the exercises in each textbook along the way. I very nearly completed grade 10. It was mostly an exercise in speed writing. Sadly, the material covered over those years rarely ascended above the level of manipulating formulas. Ooh, wow, now we are manipulating formulas by canceling out letters of the alphabet. And we don't even have to write (x != 0) on the right margin.
By the time I got to grade eleven, I had reviewed grade six another four times. One day I just randomly decided I had enough. Instead of doing yet another tedious exercise I'd seen before, I started proving some interesting congruence relationships I'd known about for a long time, but never deeply questioned. One bit I recall was generalizing "casting out nines" to other base systems. (Does "casting out ones" work in base two?) An interesting way to pass a dull class, but hardly advanced.
I remember this day because it was also the only time that year the teacher demanded we submit our exercise book at the end of class. Well, I got a good tongue lashing out of it. "This isn't the exercise I assigned! What is this nonsense about proving theorems?" And this was a teacher I liked, at a private school with a good reputation. (My math teacher the previous school was the worst teacher I've known. He spent the first half of year teaching us to conceptual positive and negative numbers as red and black ants in a kill jar, and the second half of the year teaching us his mortgage disguised as lessons in interest rates.)
What the article fails to state is that as the brain matures, there is a window of opportunity where the mind is alive to the material. You can't arbitrarily postpone teaching the material to a capable student, and then expect the same results when you finally get around to it. And note here that none of our athletic programs are constructed on this principle. Capable athletes are given meaningful challenges as soon as they are able to cope with them. In the NHL, if a young guy gets called up to fill a hole, and then gets press-boxed for seventy games, the fans will rage about management "destroying a prospect's career".
I'm sure I've told this story before. At university I had a classmate who enrolled in an unusual double major in pure and applied math. One of his lazy ass professors in differentials equations (on the "applied" side) borrowed from her colleague the same assigned he had completed the previous term on the pure side. TeX had not yet been perfected yet, so this was a tedious exercise in pencil pushing. I recall it was 20 pages of densely scribbled derivations, on which he had scored 95% the first time around. I wanted to go for beers, so I told him to scratch the name of his first professor, and write in the name of his second professor and submit "his own work" again. The junior faculty cow gave him a zero, which he spent the next several weeks disputing, while I pretended not to snicker.
Maybe I was naive about the clause "it was his work". Perhaps the university actually owned his assignment after he submitted it the first time. But if they already owned his completion of the assignment the first time around, on what basis are they compelling him to plagiarize work that is no longer his? Maybe he's obligated to submit incorrect answers the second time around, so as not to break any copyright laws.
In any case, that was the end of my academic career. By then the institutions of lower learning (elementary school) had left me alone in my own mind for far too long and I just couldn't put up with the crap.
Oh good, so Writer is now at Word 2000 level on that feature, and only 10 years later.
Yes, but did the Word 2000 feature actually work, or did they slide it onto the "dare ya" menu item? Note that "whack a mole" does not count. It has to work while *not* disabling some other innocent feature on another page unseen.
I've seen Microsoft marketing literature which claims that MSVC++ supported namespaces in 1995. Why couldn't anyone else implement this feature so quickly? (Perhaps because no one else thought that successfully parsing "using std" was a complete implementation.)
Here's a mathematical question. What's the maximal subset of Microsoft Word features with no buggy interactions? Probably the singleton "File|exit". And even that is suspect. Today I watched XP go into dreamland for ten minutes closing a simple rdp session on a fresh OS install.
This is one of the reasons why the notability criteria on Wikipedia leaves a lot to be desired. There's a lot of cite worthy sources about when Microsoft first purports to offer a feature, hardly anything you can reliably quote about when the feature actually started to work.
Tell me about Microsoft's feature achievements when you can back it up with a long history of 3rd party "ACID for Office" compliance results.
Well, also a code clean-up would help, the stories I've heard about OOo's codebase do *not* entice me to contribute, at all.
Yes, that's what Mozilla did and was bitten in the neck by the "Mozilla is dead" vampires, who have lately been feeding on the purported corpse of Perl 6. In the open source world, the "what have you done for me lately" has an even shorter event horizon than a U.S. election cycle.
And unfortunately these situations often take a long time to get sorted out, because the real problem is usually someone even higher up that has enough conniving/nepotistic/irrational faith in the bottom-feeder to be blind to the problem.
This is the great fiction of human hierarchies: that it's nothing but Machiavellian insight and back-stabbing all the way up, then nothing but irrationality and blindness once you arrive. As quaint as it is, it doesn't wash.
The military values discipline and aggression more than competence and fair play. If you look at ape society, the silver back has only two job responsibilities: copulating and snarling at potential mutineers.
Once you get to a level where you have no direct input into the competence of the organization, hierarchy is all you have left. It's not surprising that those who excel at this transition look and act like baboons. It's in the genes.
How many who campaign on "off with their heads" end up wearing the crown? It's a common story that the loudest murmuring about fair play from below ultimately proves disingenuous.
I wish the psychologists would study this more. Unfortunately, in a world where we're still discriminating on race after sequencing the chimp genome, we're not quite ready for what we would learn.
Back in high school, I once reprogrammed a TRS-80 to the Dvorak layout, and taught myself to type on it over several weeks. It took a while to override pre-existing patterns.
The weird thing was, my hands felt like they were moving like sludge, but the letters were flying across the screen. It's a different ratio of smoke to fire. I never became faster on this layout, but could type about the same speed with less mechanical effort. I've been typing for so long, a large portion of my typing mistakes are whole word substitutions, when my spelling system doesn't keep up with my fingers. I don't regard my fingers as the limiting factor.
Since we're kicking baseless fables around the barn, how about the old canard RISC vs CISC, one of the original founding members of the Steve Jobs reality distortion consortium?
Quite simply, it's never held up. To begin with, RISC went much too far the other direction. The happy medium is somewhere closer to Thumb-2. Meanwhile the much predicted demise of x86 never came to pass. People usually pass this off with the Intel process prowess excuse, but the fact of the matter is that the complexity of the instruction didn't matter nearly so much as purported. Aspects of the instruction set that were liabilities during one architectural phase would become an asset in a subsequent architectural phase (e.g. read-modify-write instructions were later exploited to alleviate memory ordering pressure).
At the end of the day, the outcome is strikingly similar to my experience with Dvorak so many years ago: x86 runs just as fast as any RISC design, but it does so producing a lot more heat (huge amounts of churn in the instruction decode and in-flight score-boarding stages compared to RISC).
Another point no one ever mentions, is that QWERTY on a modern keyboard requires far less finger power than Dvorak on an old mechanical keyboard. I learned on an Underwood which required a pinky-finger pole vault to lift the carriage for an upper case letter. If I hit the shift key at the wrong angle (as a seventh grader) my pinky would buckle.
Hand skills at the desktop have evolved every bit as much, but we're kind of blind to it. Suppose there was a database of keyboard key stream intercepts categorized by year, dating back to the 1970s. If you were given a random sample of 100 contiguous keystrokes, how hard do you think it would be to guess the era?
I suspect my email keyboarding has remained the most consistent over the past 15 years, but even there, I bet there have been incremental changes in sentence structure and punctuation. I used to use the semicolon every page or so. These days, no one has time for a sentence in two acts with a curtain call in the middle.
If you think about it, even the mental construct of "the keyboard" as a rate determining factor is pretty old school. Back in the day, made a nice headline for Omni or Popular Mechanics along with the inevitable flying cars.
It always amazes me how science-leaning people such as those on slashdot seem to think all disease should be made to go away.
I think you're the guy who missed the boat. It's a generally accepted convention to treat human health as a universal good. This point came up many times in the Economist when banning tobacco in pubs was a hot button issue. There were always people pointing out that tobacco deaths saved money in the health care system. As the Economist said a number of times, we aren't in the business of evaluating human life on that premise. Almost everyone regards their own health as a positive good, so it requires a considerable amount of double-think to enter into a debate with the position that aggregate human health is a net liability.
Any argument about the carrying capacity of the planet involves unreliable extrapolations. The confident arguments are inevitably circular. For example, you can eliminate speculation about where human technology will be in 100 years by claiming that the problems are already so large we'll never get there, when actually the present magnitude of our challenge is very much under debate.
Looking at it from another side, "most of us are better off dead" is a loser perspective. Not exactly energizing in the pursuit of a good outcome. What society ever had a good outcome coping with daunting challenges from that emotional foundation?
The one outcome I truly fear is the one where all the billionaires are living 200 year life spans, and everyone else is dead in under a century. I can only visualize this as degenerating into some kind of dog-eat-dog feudalism. The cream of the human race will become so preoccupied with making the immortality cut, there won't be a lot of cycles spared on externalities, such as the rest of the planet.
How many countries already have governments that would rather be the shiny big fish in a shit box than actually do something constructive?
Um, they are paying all the taxes they owe. 100% of them. Oh, I see. You want them to pay more than they owe. Gotcha.
Impressive, that's a troll of a magnitude rarely encountered. You're in range of Eta Carinae.
First of all, there's no shortage of American corporations engaged in outright duplicity, or have you forgotten Enron already? Apparently for a while there, it was "within the rules" to plunge California back into the stone age by ransoming electricity. And that was, by Enron's standards, one of their more legal endeavors. Best line from Smartest Men in the Room: "Burn, baby, burn". Kneecapping the country you live in is generally regarded as unpatriotic, whether legal or not.
If a corporation takes Enronesque liberties with the American tax code, they're still only paying "what they own". Gotcha. Nice to have that cleared up.
Of course, it's useless arguing with someone like you, so I'll end off with an instructional video.
http://www.markfiore.com/clapper_0
My Linux system is not configured to play this, but last time I sat in front of a Mac, I was LMAO.