If that $60b were more evening distributed within the software industry, there would have been a much larger uproar about the impacts of open source on the economy.
The wealthiest participants were determined to break the natural function of a marketplace to protect their own interests, and managed through their success to drive most of the talent into the "white market" of non-purchase goods, where at least some shelter exists from strong-arm market manipulation.
I tend to refer to this kind of financial post hoc as an "entitlement benchmark".
"If things had continued to go as we rigged them to go, maximizing our own benefit with no foresight or consideration for unintended effects, and the peons we squashed had remained powerless to get uppity about this state of affairs, we would have enjoyed another $60b/year in revenues by now."
Well, good for you. Aren't you the same geniuses who collapsed the Grand Banks fisheries, and pumped the Ogallala aquifer dry?
Maybe its a good think that markets don't travel in the straight lines these projections presume.
If there hadn't been any alternatives, the Edsel would have been one of the best sellers of all time. What would that prove? Only that you can paint a goose red, white, and blue, and capitalists among us will still wring its neck to upgrade from wealth into shameful excess.
From way back, my stance has been that "Linux on the desktop" is an unworkable slogan for an unworkable mandate.
I regard this phrase as nothing more than a handy banner people can rally behind, to amplify complaint, without ever agreeing on anything. My desktop requirements are as different from the guy next to me as my server is from his laptop.
It's a ridiculously over-broad mandate. One could argue that Firefox all by itself is almost a desktop experience. I wouldn't be surprised if I've spent more time tuning my Firefox than the whole of my desktop experience.
Here are some workable mandates: * blob-free video drivers that actually work, fully support the capabilities, with short release cycles that track current hardware * beautiful fonts in all sensible sizes -- I had a font I loved for editing code, changed distros, there was nothing comparable, too late to go back * standardized mouse acceleration profiles -- every time I've changed distros lately, I've been unable to exactly replicate the precise mouse acceleration curve I had before, and have to learn subconscious fine motor skills all over again * better support for managing multiple desktops and multiple screens -- never got this to my liking, maybe I've too lazy to enter into a long term relationship with my window manager; each time I get it to barely tolerable, encounter some limitations, and then quickly lose interest * a permanent end to the proprietary codec fiasco
Actually, I'm having trouble thinking of anything else about the desktop I really care about.
The package managers in Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu all get the job done. Updates update.
Beautiful icons. Don't care. Fancy theme. Couldn't care less. Graphical installer? Only if it does sensible things by default and lets me take control when it can't.
I do like distros that make it easy to set up netboot installers via my tftpd server. Every Jo Blow has one of those. We're certainly all on the same page here about the ideal desktop experience.
The server people busy themselves accomplishing well defined chunks of utility. The desktop people wallow around in the diffuse and ill-defined "user experience" nebula and wonder why they make less progress.
Linux on the desktop has always meant to me a grab bag of lightning rods that people with short attention spans rally around when their gratification is delayed by ten minutes after installing their new distro, because they didn't have the common sense to buy hardware known to have good open source support. Every complainer is carping about a different set of lightning rods, there is really no mass agreement at all about what the priorities should be.
I have a list of about twenty applications I never live without on my desktop. Why am I hand picking these with new distro I install?
I should have a key fob where I declare that I am a power user for these twenty applications, and my distro had better get its act together and install the entire bag (and every distro dependendent pre-req).
Don't even bother partitioning the hard drive until I've been assured by the installer that all twenty of those applications will be working fine by the time the install completes.
It wouldn't hurt to also have a list of known hardware, such as my screens and expected resolutions, my network printer, etc. All of that had better work too, or don't bother even starting the drive partition.
Maybe what we need is a meta installer where you input your hardware and software requirements profile (included required fonts and size, mouse acceleration, profiles, applications, known hardware, etc.) and then it presents a table of Linux distros scored based on how well these requirements can be met, from which you can pick one that hasn't screwed up something you particularly care about lately.
I have one major gripe concerning fonts. Too many distros have small fonts with line leadings too close together. I prefer being able to parse the entire s
That would be worth a study. Do more people succumb to blindness more often when dealing with a person who signs their name "Dr", plasters a diploma on their wall with commendations from "U. Never Heard Of", or claims a trump card because "I've been a curator for 30 years"?
Or more often browsing the Wikipedia, which has no trappings of auspiciousness whatsoever?
My theory on the Wikipedia is that the assignment is probably just a stupid hurdle, the students have no time to think deeply (since most of the grading is based on rush, rush, rush), so cribbing from the Wikipedia is about what the average assignment deserves.
How much credibility can one afford to invest in an exercise where the work product is dumped in the round file the day after it receives its grade, after ten minutes of inspection, if you're lucky, by a faculty member who desperately wishes he/she was doing something else at the time?
To bother to unearth first tier sources, and then figure out which ones are full of it (which requires much greater effort, because they all pretend not to be) I would expect several hours of intense debate over the merits of the work product generated.
In a learning environment I could see his point. At a university, probably not.
In the immortal words of Scott McNealy, "Get over it."
"I'm already doing deals to sell your personal information to the highest bidder."
Only in Scott's case, he wasn't *quite* stupid enough to say that out loud.
Two blow hard members of the fait accompli / might-is-right crowd, deluding themselves into thinking they can pull off the "we're already in Iraq" card.
Wait a second there, guys. Neither of you can fill the pants of the loser who pulled that off. Dream on.
The "genie out of the bottle" argument was just as strong on the side of p2p as it is on the loss of consumer privacy. Yet in both cases, there was a loud "we'll see you in court".
It goes without saying that any content provider who finds it necessary to buy their content an express lane isn't competing on quality.
I was just viewing Ikiru, pausing at the end of the first act when my housemate had to run out.
In modern society, the 30 years of perfect attendance as a civil servant with no real purpose is replaced by 30 years of consuming bad content (television), because the average consumer is too lazy to walk an extra block or two to a video store that stocks movies more than a week old.
One of the symptoms of terminal stomach cancer in the movie is diarrhea. There's a good metaphor for the typical content delivered via the fast lane.
"We humans are so careless. How tragic that man can never realize how beautiful life is until he is face to face with death."
That's what's this ISP basshole is counting on: that his consumers will choose instant drivel, rather than wait for the good stuff.
It always happens this way, because too few of us care until sake is suicide.
Whoops, Slashcode consumed the second dimension and more. That's probably where the alien error originated in the first place. Morse coded the schematic onto a six sided cube without first pressing submit. Cocky bastards.
it's 65 and 45nM or.065 and.045uM pedantic, I know... Not nearly pedantic enough, unless you knew Herr Meter personally. Tell me, Herr Meter, why were you named that way? What did you discover to make yourself famous? And why did you say that Ångström deserved what he got?
Funny, I was thinking on the way home that the intergalactic subway machine in Contact blew up because the alien schematic contained a typo calling for 1 eV, and the people building it failed to read it as 1 exavolt.
Wikipedia tells me that 1 EeV/c = 1.783×1018 kg Really? I thought 1 EeV would be more impressive. I guess it's not the exotic extraterrestrial vroom vroom I thought it was. No, wait, what am I talking about, vroom vroom is v.
You're missing the main point, which was central to Shannon's theorem from way back in 1948: an optimal digital encoding process will achieve 100% quality up to, but not exceeding, channel capacity as dictated by the noise model.
Corrupted bits are easy to detect on the receiving side of any digital channel with a relatively trivial modicum of error correction.
If the receiving end of the digital channel sucks so bad it doesn't have a way to report that bits are being dropped or corrupted due to a substandard link, why not just randomly spend three to ten times as much to buy a possibly superior cable, and still be uncertain at the end of the day if you solved the problem, or even if the problem originally existed.
While you're at it, take a walk through the wild side.
Now why is it that all this high end digital audio equipment can't be equipped with a little orange LED that signals digital link fault (lost or corrupted bits)?
Gosh, could it be that it's just not possible to run a mid-grade LSFR in silicon at audio data rates to detect channel bit errors?
The consumer audio industry is built on the fundamental premise: at every juncture, remain subjective.
My DVD player doesn't report bad frames or bit recovery statistics. Internally, the stupid thing knows. It just refuses to say. If I could stick a balky DVD into a couple of different players to see if I get the same error profile, it would be pretty easy to figure out whether the disk or the player was at fault. I guess that would only benefit the consumer, not the vendor.
I don't care whether your amp cost $20k. If it doesn't have an indicator for link faults concerning its digital inputs, the company isn't in the business of enabling objective decisions.
A properly engineered digital channel exists in an objective evaluation space. It's impossible to stress this strongly enough. No matter how much the equipment costs, if the quality of the digital channel is not reported objectively, either the equipment was badly engineered, or engineered to an agenda that conflicts with objectivity.
If you find that hard to swallow, consider the PRML algorithm used to recover bits from the analog signal reported by your drive head. Bit error rates of 10^-14 from an analog signal that is at best only a weak facsimile of the signal originally recorded, extracted at Gbits/s by a chip the size of your fingernail, in a product costing under $100.
The disk drive people find solutions, where the audio people facing a problem three orders of magnitude less difficult manufactures vagueness.
Guess which group read and understood Shannon's theorem, and wished their customers to benefit from this excellent piece of work. Before Shannon's paper, smart engineers did suffer from confusion about whether digital perfection was a reality or a chimera. Sixty years later, it's sadly ignorant that this is still debated.
While there is nothing wrong with the goal, it means that there is almost no drive at all to produce a machine that is practical for anything BUT duplicating its own plastic parts. Their design calls for basic, lumpy plastic bits and so there is no emphasis on better precision. This is closer to how the silicon semiconductor industry bootstrapped itself than you profess to understand.
By today's standards what would you call 10um lithography? Lumpy? Only if you were incredibly generous.
What were those chips used for? To replace slide rules. In the pockets of engineers. Who were busy designing next generation lithographic technologies and chip architectures. Which soon required sophisticated layout software. Which was implemented using the fastest chips from the most recent process generation.
It's been said you need the performance of the current line size to run the design tools required to achieve the next shrink. You certainly weren't going to lay out the Penryn using a 4004, not even a billion of them, all wired together, each working on its own transistor.
I think it makes far more sense for the core group to invest their energies in mastering loose (lumpy) tolerances, than targeting high precision. The aftermarket can explore precision and adapt the basic mechanism to superior materials. Freeman Dyson's toy model in his little book "Origins of Life" contains toy graphs of Q beginning rather crude.
Has BluR achieved parity with VHS already? How the milestones fall.
The only possible way BluR achieves parity with DVD in under a year is if DVD sales crater worse than Tunguska. No doubt Sony is working overtime behind the scenes to fit DVD with a $500m pair of cement overshoes.
Thirty years ago $500m would buy you a blob of concrete about the size of the Olympic stadium in Montreal, which would suffice, but not the launch vehicle capable of lobbing it far enough into space to achieve a 10km/s atmospheric reentry.
I have no idea how Sony plans to achieve this incredible acceleration of the demise of DVD.
Don't shit on people for having their priorities straight. I suspect that "having your priorities on straight" is a gross exaggeration concerning most of the calls you field. Bottom line is that you like to feel important, and your instant response time feeds into that self image. The management literature is thick with tomes explaining to self-important on-the-go management types that urgency is overrated 90% of the time.
My housemate picked up my copy of Simon Singh's "The Code" last night as was chuckling over the following passage, partly because of the stuffiness of the second sentence:
To convey his instructions securely, Histaiaeus shaved the head of his messenger, wrote the message on his scalp, and waited a year for his hair to regrow. This was clearly a period of history that tolerated a certain lack of urgency. 90% of the urgency in life is generated by people who wish to feel urgent and important.
Cribbed from http://www.thirdside.org/stories_02.cfm, though I've seen better versions.
My first brother heals sickness before it even develops, so his methods appear hidden, his science is an art form and he is known only within our village. My second brother deals with illnesses while they are minor, preventing sickness from getting worse and returning the body to health. I deal with sicknesses when they have reached the level of disease and threaten to destroy the organism of which they are a part. This requires numerous medicines, and skill and knowledge in their use. For this reason my name has become famous throughout the kingdom and I have been asked to be physician to the king. Is urgency the cure, or the disease?
This particular strain of nihilism gets on my nerves after a while. There is no clear inference from "it's been tried before". Not even if you multiply by a million times, or a million wannabe losers all with the same wannabe dream.
When substantial progress is made on a long-standing problem, generally there are three situations: the new approach was never tried before (because all the losers were looking under the same wrong rock), or the approach requires deep theoretical insight and skill (which losers rarely possess), or it was tried a million times already, but even so, none of the losers managed to do it quite right, until now.
All three categories are well represented. By entirely blotting out the "it's been tried before" category on general principle (if a sneer can be referred to as a principle), one wipes out a substantial chunk of the pie of new results worth knowing.
I guess some of us assign a low weight to mistakenly discarding genius, and place a higher priority on correctly labeling losers, which is the only thing the "it's been tried before" inference is any good at.
To sift out the rare occasion of genius you actually have to RTFA and evaluate on merit. You can't pass judgments based on background noise such as "it's been tried before" with a broad sweep of the hand toward the loser parade.
Reminds me of a book reviewed the paper I read at the coffee shop today:
I noted that the illustration of the human mind in that newspaper review left out the center for "having to pee" which I suspect is extensively shared with the center for heckling other primates on slim cause.
If the conceptual approach is sufficiently restrictive (extreme paucity of tunable parameters), it still amounts to something to successfully predict in-sample data.
What I was more concerned about is whether the prediction task they've taken on has low intrinsic difficulty. The fact that others have done it badly doesn't prove much. Worse, those other predictions might have been made with a different immediate purpose, for which they were closer to optimal than as interpreted by this paper for the prediction this paper chose to take on.
It's still worth publishing prospective results in the situation where the available sample data is insufficient to partition into train/test subsets.
If the method scores zero next year, or substantially underperforms chance over the next few years, they'll end up looking fairly foolish.
Roughly for this kind of result I would say 25% it proves worthless, 25% chance it softens toward the mean, and 50% chance it continues to perform as well as advertised.
Of the 50% chance it holds up, there is about a 50% chance that the predictive power pertains to some common sense term that other people have handled improperly or neglected, and only a 50% chance that the LRMC framework was instrumental to its predictive success.
About that comment by some guy that in the NFL 0.800 percentages are more common than in MLB. Doh!
I googled "nfl season length" and the second link comes up with this paper:
http://cnls.lanl.gov/~ebn/pubs/sports/html/
The length of the season is a significant factor in the variability in the winning fraction. In a scenario where the outcome of a game is completely random, the total number of wins performs a simple random walk, and the standard deviation $\sigma$ is inversely proportional to the square root of the number of games played. Generally, the shorter the season, the larger $\sigma$. Thus, the small number of games is partially responsible for the large variability observed in the NFL. This season, the Ottawa Senators had a 15-2 start (about the length of an NFL/CFL season), but barely squeaked into the playoffs after one of the great collapses in pro sports.
That was an 0.880 winning percentage (ignoring any infamous loser points the NHL now awards) over 17 games to start the season. Clearly the Senators were a shoo-in to win the Super Bowl. Bonus: Ray Emery would fit right in among professional place kickers.
Standards are not laws. Companies will only follow standards only if they're useful for the process of making money. You've completely missed the point. Any jurisdiction that signs into law a requirement for government to use standardized document preservation formats can now elect to continue using Microsoft Office.
What the heck did you think they were fighting over in the first place?
It seems to be a bad day for science writing. The piece on rowing a galley was a joke. And now we're being told that one data mining problem with a dominant low-hanging return on augmenting data represents a general principle.
The Netflick data shouldn't be regarded as representative of anything. That data set has shockingly low dimensionality. So far as I know, they make no attempt to differentiate what kind of enjoyment the viewer obtained from the movie, or even determine whether the movie was viewed in a solo or group situation. They don't ask "who was your favorite character / actor / actress". Nor do they follow up on aging opinions: "which of these two movies would you presently rate higher?" so the corroboration factor is zero.
I'm pretty fussy about the movies I rent. The worst movie I've endured this year was "Night at the Museum", which was loaned to me. I managed to get through it at the 1.4x speed setting on a slow evening.
As bad as it was, I wouldn't rate it less than a 3. I'd like to save 1 and 2 for outright incompetence. Was "Museum" a manipulative piece of crap? Absolutely. I'd tick that box in a heartbeat. Did I feel personally soiled by Genghis' emotional discharge? I've been showering for days. From what I've read about Genghis, the only way to get him to discharge would have been to lock him in a room with Sacagawea.
If you give "Museum" a three for competence squandered, what do you give Soderberg's "Solaris"? I'm glad I watched it. It was interesting to see what they did with the sets, and to find out whether anything ever happens (spoiler: no). I still recall the intensity of the black woman, though unfortunately her fine acting served no real purpose. While I was happy to rent it, it also earned a place on my list of movies least likely to rent twice.
Really, Netflick deserves five gold stars for having created the least augmented opinion stream since baby spit out his brussel sprouts.
I have to say that NYTimes article is a spectacularly good example of bad science writing. Without halfway trying, it manages to regress conservation of energy in the mind of the lay public by 200 years.
The optimal product of force through distance ultimately depends upon build (body type). Most likely the lanky rowers will be positioned at the long end of the level arm, while the stocky people are positioned with shorter lever arms.
Since you probably aren't being fed enough, your primary risk is starvation through overwork. It wouldn't surprise me that rations were set low enough that many rowers had short careers, once they burned out their physical reserves. That was certainly the implication in Ben Hur.
Since you have to maintain cadence with the rest of the oars, your option to cheat is to catch late and release early. You can bet the guy with the whip has a keen eye for shading on stroke length (duration with blade submerged).
I've stroked an eight before. Even without being able to see anyone behind me, I had a pretty good idea who was pulling their weight and who had good form. At the elite level, I'm told everyone knows who pulled a good race.
In Primo Levi's books he talks about the hazards of being teamed up with the nearly goners: the ones who haven't got enough left to pull their share, and worse, the ones who no longer cared about life enough to slack for every extra second possible.
It would be a bit different sharing an oar than lugging railway ties in the snow with half a shirt.
Probably your best situation was to be paired up with the rookie who doesn't know his 4000 calorie work day is going to be rewarded with a 1500 calorie dinner. Until the third day when he faints and you get to pull both shares all by yourself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sawmill
Prior to the invention of the sawmill, boards were rived and planed, or more often sawn by two men with a whipsaw, using saddleblocks to hold the log, and a pit for the pitman who worked below. Sawing was slow, and required strong and enduring men. The topsawer had to be the stronger of the two because the saw was pulled in turn by each man, and the lower had the advantage of gravity. The topsawyer also had to guide the saw so that the board was of even thickness. This was often done by following a chalkline. I was once told a story by a great ancestor that after a few weeks, the topsaw guy became so muscular he beat the crap out of the guy below, so the roles would often reverse, but that more often than not, the muscular guys took the easy jobs, and the small guys either ended up built like pit bulls, or were short for this world.
Anyways, if I'm reincarnated on a slave galley, I'd like to have that NYTimes reporter sitting beside me on the "desirable" side with the long lever arm, to discover the bio-mechanical joys of finishing your stroke at a 45 degree abdominal recline while I dent his head with my elbow every time he slacks off.
C++ stinks for systems level programming. Trust me; done lots. The quickest solution when faced with C++ low level software is to quickly re-write it in C. Nice thing is, it usually ends up more concise, more reliable, and more maintainable.
Trust you? Why?
Yeah, I've also rewritten bad C++ code in C. I've also then taken the improved C code and rewritten it back to C++, with yet further improvements in concision, reliability, and maintenance, (though, granted, for a restricted set of maintainers).
Just for the record, I define maintenance as non-trivial extension of functionality, and not as continuing development with cheaper and more poorly trained resources. Repairing bad code that never could have been correct in the first place I tend to regard to as "emptying diapers".
I always end up repeating the same observation in these C++ discussions: the people who complain most bitterly about C++ tend to be the same people with low regard for their coworkers and their coworker's work output.
I would only choose to use C++ for a project where I had high regard for the other programmers involved.
Most likely, if that same crappy coworker had written the code in C originally, you would have rewritten it to improve concision, reliability, improve maintainability. Only you would have complained less, because rewriting bad C in good C requires less keyboarding than rewriting bad C++ in good C (thought generally little real difference in mental effort).
On the whole, competent C++ programmers tend to code their loops more correctly than most of the C code I've come across. A common meme in C code is to embed five return statements in a deeply nested loop to "handle" error conditions, though usually these nested return statements do a better job of creating error conditions.
In C++ the tendency for novice or mediocre programmers is to invent classes or class hierarchies with no real utility. If the class manages its own memory, it's almost certainly incorrect, though the incorrectness might not show up until the class is used differently in future (such as contained in an STL container).
I wrote my last significant systems programming project in C. In the cases where I wished I had templates available to optimize some constructs at compile time (single-reader single-writer synchronization primitives used heavily in interrupt context), I did hideous things with #define macros that I can assure you will not be maintained lightly. Templates would have accomplished this task with the same (or even better) performance, at a higher level of abstraction, with better safe-guards against incorrect use.
At the end of the day, it was only about 5% of my code base where the limitations of C required putrid convolutions with the C macro processor. If I had programmed in C++, 5% of my code base would have been devoted to hiding the ugliness of C++. Different rug, same difference.
I'm aware of many non-portable constructs in C++. Almost all of them inherited from C. Most of the C++ portability problems were a transitional effect when the standard got fairly far ahead of the compilers.
Nor do I understand the complaint about C++ lacking a standard ABI, either. That's been in the works for years:
Again, it's a matter of having access to mature compilers that actually implement this ABI now that we have it. By that standard, C wasn't portable in the 1980s, as I almost always discovered compiler bugs porting C code from one compiler to another, and rarely was I brave enough to link objects compiled by different compilers.
However, I never blamed the C language for that state of affairs.
If you measured the abstraction of a language with a thermometer, C would read about 10 degrees. Kelvin.
C++ probably has more defects than any other language I know. On average, these defects are less fatal than advertised by
you train their mind like a muscle to develop an extremely strong and sophisticated bullshit detector I have a great BS detector. In order not to squander my fabulous muscle, I generally skip posts by lazy typists. Back in the era of "See Spot run" eliminating one extra use of the shift key per sentence might have amounted to a measurable reduction of effort.
Don't tell me this is the writing style of someone who types with two fingers of one hand, where no "and" was spared.
Seriously, this does not help the reader, though I might make an allowance if you replaced the unreliable and nearly invisible sentence final . with a more visible splat (*) to offset the loss of the sentence initial caps your withered pinky is unwilling to type.
We just need to get another version of the splat mark added to Unicode, aligned where the period used to be found (so it doesn't look like a footnote) and while we're at it, we should also adopt the Chinese dunhao comma into English orthography, which I've always liked.
In depth story today about the collapse of newsprint.
http://www.globeinvestor.com/servlet/story/GAM.20080329.RCOVER29/GIStory/
Even so, the high euro forced the continent's biggest newsprint producer, Norske Skog, to announce on March 14 that it was closing mills in Norway and the Czech Republic, reducing its capacity by 7 per cent or 450,000 tonnes. We see your 450 and raise to 600:
[Abitibi]... closing of more than 600,000 tonnes of newsprint capacity last month
What if I say that things got sloppy because our bureaucracy is so big it can no longer effectively run, as has been for decades?
50% of a truism is the learned helplessness that causes people not to penetrate the "dumb field" that renders the truism immutable.
Over the last three decades we've experienced the most abrupt revolution in communications technology in the history of humanity. The internet, and its crown jewel, the internet search engine, rival the printing press and the written alphabet in its transformative potential on the course of human civilization.
It might even manage to challenge the truism-of-unthinking-debate that government is 99% moronium, completely impervious in its own level of function to the progress of the society it governs. Was it your intent to bestow miraculous powers of immunity on society's least esteemed organ?
Here's a simple way America could have functioned with less government: enact far more restrictive laws concerning telescopic polyderivatives and mark-to-market accounting back in the early 1980s.
We've recently discovered that selling derivatives of derivatives of derivatives carries similar risks as feeding cattle brains to cattle. Of course, as the ageless truism about bloated government would have it, no civil servant earned their paycheck in the rapid bailout of Bear Stearns with special backing by the Fed.
The road to smaller government is to impose an oppressively tight regulatory environment where Enron and the sub-prime melt-down can't happen in the first place. Fewer bulls, fewer bears, and fewer giant economic messes that our small, effective government would be insufficient to clean up.
Software developers, of all people, ought to have a better perspective on scope creep. One mode of increasing government is the ever popular "grandfather regulation", where for example, about 10,000 compounds already in use in the 1960s were exempted from safety standards required to approve new compounds. It would have made for less government if all compounds had been blanketed by the same rules. Does any software person not get this? Expensive for the private sector, who I presume would have been overjoyed to foot this bill, in order to reap the benefits in future of a smaller more effective government.
The division of labour between the public and private sector in modern America seems to run along this fault line: private sector generates massive, unsustainable profits, then the government steps in to "restore confidence", and the cycle repeats.
Here is the kind of useless analysis that perpetuates these myths:
Give us a break. If Bear Stearns goes to zero, there will only be one party to blame: Bear Stearns management.
Duh. It's actually quite easy to set up a competitive situation in game theory where each of the parties has the incentive to outperform (a routine provision in executive compensation packages in the private sector). Anyone who decides to hover nervously-close to the safest exit makes little profit compared to the more aggressive players (aka no performance bonus for Mr Safety Pants).
No one knows the exact moment when the music will stop. When the music does stop, this group as a whole is overextended, and this can only be put right by savaging the carcass of the bank that happened to be slightly more overextended (aka which fails to land on a chair) than the other banks at that precise moment in time.
If the profit model was driven by flipping the hot potato, you can't choose not to touch the hot potato, you just have to hope you can unload it fast each time you take the risk. Of course, someone has to get caught with it if the system as a whole is overextended.
The best part of this: the eulogy that the corpse deserved its fate.
Amazing the number of "ignorance is bliss" responses on this thread. What you don't know is not allowed to hurt you. Wish I lived in that world. I concede the emotional appeal.
I have a question for the "ignorance is bliss" crowd. When a fat husband and wife completely block the grocery aisle nattering with each other about the best flavour of Twinkies, how long do you stand patiently behind them waiting for them to clue in to the blockade capacity of four lumbering Super-Size-Me ham haunches?
A little more cleverness on the part of the ORDB could have improved the spin. They could implemented a quota of 10,000 queries since noon today until the false positives begin for that query source. And that number could have been slowly tapered down. Then the serious abusers would have felt the pain before the mom and pop shops whose consultant shows up twice annually, and it would have been more apparent to people who put convenience ahead of reality that rejecting connections is not a proper solution to terminating the unwanted traffic.
But if you think that ODF can survive in competition against OOXML if both are ISO standards, you're kidding yourself. What kind of competition would that be? Certainly not a competition based on having a viable alternative implementations. Anyone care to speculate on the first non-MS implementation of OOXML to pass the OOXML Acid 3 test suite?
To cover a 6000 page specification that hasn't yet undergone a clarity bulk-out, the OOXML Acid 3 test suite would need to incorporate on the order of 20,000 distinct unit tests.
With an implementation, a test suite, or a at least an OOXML validator (ideally supplied by Microsoft itself), this standard is nothing more than an insult to dead trees.
It's up to the EU not to allow their antitrust legal provisions to be bamboozled by an "ISO approved" rubber stamp regarding a stillborn 6000 pound syntactic placenta.
Operator overloading? Great, now you can enjoy C++ style code, where left shift and print are the same command. I never get this particular pot-shot at the C++ language. This issue has bitten me exactly... never... times.
If C++ wanted to be liked, it would have long ago redefined the integral left-shift and right-shift operators to some other syntax, leaving operator<< and operator>> to become widely known as "get" and "put", which is how the majority of objects tend to employ these operators, leaving you to whimper:
Operator overloading? Great, now you can enjoy C++ style code, where put() and put() are the same command. Does it matter to my point whether you spell "put" as put() or "operator<<"?
Far more to the point is whether you prefer a pure prefix language over a mixed prefix/infix language. Infix notation seems to enjoy a certain staying power. I've never seen a paper in pure mathematics where the equations are expressed in RPN. It might have something to do with the human brain having a limited and unreliable parse stack. If I could read Lisp like the Rain Man I'd abolish infix notation in a heart beat.
Instead of being liked, C++ resolutely persists with its dreadfully uncool attribute of not breaking existing code. To this end, it egregiously overloads the same infix operator for integers and iostreams. Scandalous! AltaVista might have been Google, but some programmer there mistyped a statement intended to strip some bits off a long integer, causing their month-long internet spider to fail with the output "42" on the console, and the rest is history.
The most heavily overloaded operator in generic style C++ is operator<, which establishes an ordering relationship which, among other things, makes the use of ordered containers possible (e.g. any container implemented on top of a red-black tree). Oh the horror of keeping all those overloaded operators straight in my mind.
My favorite example of operator overloading comes not from C++, but the Unix command line. There are many tools that define the commands "exit" and "quit" where one saves and the other doesn't, not always in the same correspondence.
If I assembled a list of C++ language defects, eliminating operator overloading would be point #1000, and I would probably conclude the facility makes a positive contribution to code quality, given a certain amount of progress in human factors concerning the binding of bad names to outrageous semantics. No useful language can eliminate poor human judgment. Of all the silver bullets, the goal of eliminating poor human judgment has to rank as the stupidest of them all.
We already have a good name for tasks involving no human judgment: it's called a "program" and you run it on a computer.
I would argue that mainstream society was a bit less tech savvy then as well. The older generation was not savvy at all. The average person didn't even know how to type "crack BluRay" into the Google search bar.
... touted as the most powerful and energy efficient fan of its size... With that glowing endorsement, it's possible that in terms of absolute efficiency (power consumption/rate of air flow) it blows goats.
The automotive industry pulls this stunt all the time. Some lame-mass product is designated "best in class" by Kudos-For-Sale Inc. and the reader is left to wonder if the "class" includes any other models by any other manufacturer, or if the entire class is just the same useless car available with 17 different trim configurations.
In Detroit, the primary criteria over whether two vehicles belong in different classes is whether either vehicles incorporates superior technology. The golden rule is never to compare one thing to another thing that might actually be better.
Cooling 25W has no information content, unless operating delta_T over ambient is also given. Useless. Comparison failed.
I've been waiting for this targeted advertising thing to kick into gear.
I have an exceptionally long lumbar region, so I have the seated height of an average person who is 6'7". I see all these car ads promising "more leg room" than a Samizdat, "more head room" than a Clonazipan. O RLY?
My typical seated posture is a 45 degree recline so my head doesn't scuff the sun roof. My head is well back into the seat behind me. With a foot long tongue I could lick the dome light. This includes most "full sized" pick-up trucks.
Problem: by the time my head is no longer bumping the canopy, my shoulders are positioned so far back in the cabin my arms can no longer reach the steering wheel. The next thing I do is slam the seat forward until my knees physically strike the dashboard. Then I can reach the steering wheel, operate the pedals, *and* see the traffic lights (dimly, through the windscreen tint).
This is my typical experience of "more leg room".
I'll believe in targeted advertising the first time Google tells me "you would be so squashed inside this 'roomy' contraption, after a week you'd park it in neutral and roll it over a cliff face".
Unfortunately, much science reporting has caught this disease from Detroit. The next landmark for Google is to be able to summarize this kind bad technology PR as "uselessly claims to cool 25W without disclosing operating delta_T over ambient". *That* would be Turing test worth passing.
If the ads were similarly useful, I might for the first time in my life click on one.
We accept the dangerous because the convenience is worth it.
I remember back when I played Quake II a lot, I would see a lot of things on the road that would cause a neural reflect to tap the "7" key IIRC which selected the rocket launcher. We "accept" the dangers created by the stupidity of those around us because government heavily repress our primal responses. Man, if I ever became the overlord at the DMV, things would be different.
That includes those people who think that driving at 50kph over the speed limit entitles them to private use of the inside lane. Look at me, I'm doing 160 in a 110 zone, everybody F'ing pull into the right lane like this is my private German autobahn or I'm going to hang inches behind your bumper pulsing my halogen highbeams like a prolapsed hemorrhoid. I don't feel myself radiating "acceptance", toward your average MF POS.
If you are decoding my driving behaviour as "acceptance" your powers of perception are extremely dim. The things some people do on the highway done in a wolf pack would see your liver served up as communal pate. Now and then a few aggressive bumper humpers hung from the signage scaffolds would soon set things right. To properly designate the offense, the bumper humpers could be hung with their pants around their ankles. Is Spitzer's wife known to be in the vicinity? No? That must have been another bumper humper. I'm digging, digging, digging and not finding this "acceptance" whereof you speak within myself.
Back to the subject at hand, I actually *have* non-24 hour sleep-wake disorder, and I can tell you that blue light does not function as described in any research I've seen.
Both melatonin and blue light have phase response curves with a fixed phase relationship to your daily body temp. min., that varies somewhat from one person to the next. For most people daily min. occurs somewhere around 05:00. A sleep study which captures this marker involves finding subjects willing (and able) to sleep wired up with rectal thermometers. For improved subject comfort, most sleep studies use DLMO (dim light melatonin offset) as a proxy marker instead. This occurs in the mid evening, and is marked by the first detectable increase of melatonin concentration in saliva (which doesn't occur if the eyes are exposed to bright light).
Blue light exposure in the early morning in the hour *before* your natural rising time will advance your cycle (earlier rising time). Blue light in the evening will delay your cycle (later rising time). To maintain a 24-hour sleep cycle, I require melatonin in the late afternoon and blue light on waking.
As a side note, the neurons in the retina that detect this blue light and signal phase change to the SCN are independent of the optical neurons. Some blind people retain this sensitivity, some don't (e.g. complete retinal loss). The blind people without this retinal sensitivity often suffer from non-24-hour sleep-wake disorder.
Both the existence of this retinal cell population and the phase response curves are fairly recent discoveries. I've only been able to successfully treat my condition for a year now (no help from my doctors, I ended up finding the research myself). Prior to that, was two decades where my body clock delayed an average of 1h15 per day. Internally, I was living on Mars time.
Subjectively, trying to live in day mode while my body wasn't was *exactly* the same as discovering each day that you are now experiencing an extra hour of jet lag as compared to the day before.
Imagine the suckiest jet lag you've ever experienced knowing the next day it will only get one hour worse, and this will continue for weeks. I would eventually reach the point of total circadian insanity, have a waking period 26 to 28 hours long, sleep for 12 to 16 hours, and wake up feeling great again. The funny thing about those long waking periods: I could code 26 hours straight and not suffer any diminishment in my vigilance contrary to most research (I have
Slashdot Mirror
If that $60b were more evening distributed within the software industry, there would have been a much larger uproar about the impacts of open source on the economy.
The wealthiest participants were determined to break the natural function of a marketplace to protect their own interests, and managed through their success to drive most of the talent into the "white market" of non-purchase goods, where at least some shelter exists from strong-arm market manipulation.
I tend to refer to this kind of financial post hoc as an "entitlement benchmark".
"If things had continued to go as we rigged them to go, maximizing our own benefit with no foresight or consideration for unintended effects, and the peons we squashed had remained powerless to get uppity about this state of affairs, we would have enjoyed another $60b/year in revenues by now."
Well, good for you. Aren't you the same geniuses who collapsed the Grand Banks fisheries, and pumped the Ogallala aquifer dry?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer
Maybe its a good think that markets don't travel in the straight lines these projections presume.
If there hadn't been any alternatives, the Edsel would have been one of the best sellers of all time. What would that prove? Only that you can paint a goose red, white, and blue, and capitalists among us will still wring its neck to upgrade from wealth into shameful excess.
From way back, my stance has been that "Linux on the desktop" is an unworkable slogan for an unworkable mandate.
I regard this phrase as nothing more than a handy banner people can rally behind, to amplify complaint, without ever agreeing on anything. My desktop requirements are as different from the guy next to me as my server is from his laptop.
It's a ridiculously over-broad mandate. One could argue that Firefox all by itself is almost a desktop experience. I wouldn't be surprised if I've spent more time tuning my Firefox than the whole of my desktop experience.
Here are some workable mandates:
* blob-free video drivers that actually work, fully support the capabilities, with short release cycles that track current hardware
* beautiful fonts in all sensible sizes -- I had a font I loved for editing code, changed distros, there was nothing comparable, too late to go back
* standardized mouse acceleration profiles -- every time I've changed distros lately, I've been unable to exactly replicate the precise mouse acceleration curve I had before, and have to learn subconscious fine motor skills all over again
* better support for managing multiple desktops and multiple screens -- never got this to my liking, maybe I've too lazy to enter into a long term relationship with my window manager; each time I get it to barely tolerable, encounter some limitations, and then quickly lose interest
* a permanent end to the proprietary codec fiasco
Actually, I'm having trouble thinking of anything else about the desktop I really care about.
The package managers in Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu all get the job done. Updates update.
Beautiful icons. Don't care. Fancy theme. Couldn't care less. Graphical installer? Only if it does sensible things by default and lets me take control when it can't.
I do like distros that make it easy to set up netboot installers via my tftpd server. Every Jo Blow has one of those. We're certainly all on the same page here about the ideal desktop experience.
The server people busy themselves accomplishing well defined chunks of utility. The desktop people wallow around in the diffuse and ill-defined "user experience" nebula and wonder why they make less progress.
Linux on the desktop has always meant to me a grab bag of lightning rods that people with short attention spans rally around when their gratification is delayed by ten minutes after installing their new distro, because they didn't have the common sense to buy hardware known to have good open source support. Every complainer is carping about a different set of lightning rods, there is really no mass agreement at all about what the priorities should be.
I have a list of about twenty applications I never live without on my desktop. Why am I hand picking these with new distro I install?
I should have a key fob where I declare that I am a power user for these twenty applications, and my distro had better get its act together and install the entire bag (and every distro dependendent pre-req).
Don't even bother partitioning the hard drive until I've been assured by the installer that all twenty of those applications will be working fine by the time the install completes.
It wouldn't hurt to also have a list of known hardware, such as my screens and expected resolutions, my network printer, etc. All of that had better work too, or don't bother even starting the drive partition.
Maybe what we need is a meta installer where you input your hardware and software requirements profile (included required fonts and size, mouse acceleration, profiles, applications, known hardware, etc.) and then it presents a table of Linux distros scored based on how well these requirements can be met, from which you can pick one that hasn't screwed up something you particularly care about lately.
I have one major gripe concerning fonts. Too many distros have small fonts with line leadings too close together. I prefer being able to parse the entire s
That would be worth a study. Do more people succumb to blindness more often when dealing with a person who signs their name "Dr", plasters a diploma on their wall with commendations from "U. Never Heard Of", or claims a trump card because "I've been a curator for 30 years"?
Or more often browsing the Wikipedia, which has no trappings of auspiciousness whatsoever?
My theory on the Wikipedia is that the assignment is probably just a stupid hurdle, the students have no time to think deeply (since most of the grading is based on rush, rush, rush), so cribbing from the Wikipedia is about what the average assignment deserves.
How much credibility can one afford to invest in an exercise where the work product is dumped in the round file the day after it receives its grade, after ten minutes of inspection, if you're lucky, by a faculty member who desperately wishes he/she was doing something else at the time?
To bother to unearth first tier sources, and then figure out which ones are full of it (which requires much greater effort, because they all pretend not to be) I would expect several hours of intense debate over the merits of the work product generated.
In a learning environment I could see his point. At a university, probably not.
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1999/01/17538
In the immortal words of Scott McNealy, "Get over it."
"I'm already doing deals to sell your personal information to the highest bidder."
Only in Scott's case, he wasn't *quite* stupid enough to say that out loud.
Two blow hard members of the fait accompli / might-is-right crowd, deluding themselves into thinking they can pull off the "we're already in Iraq" card.
Wait a second there, guys. Neither of you can fill the pants of the loser who pulled that off. Dream on.
The "genie out of the bottle" argument was just as strong on the side of p2p as it is on the loss of consumer privacy. Yet in both cases, there was a loud "we'll see you in court".
It goes without saying that any content provider who finds it necessary to buy their content an express lane isn't competing on quality.
I was just viewing Ikiru, pausing at the end of the first act when my housemate had to run out.
In modern society, the 30 years of perfect attendance as a civil servant with no real purpose is replaced by 30 years of consuming bad content (television), because the average consumer is too lazy to walk an extra block or two to a video store that stocks movies more than a week old.
One of the symptoms of terminal stomach cancer in the movie is diarrhea. There's a good metaphor for the typical content delivered via the fast lane.
"We humans are so careless. How tragic that man can never realize how beautiful life is until he is face to face with death."
That's what's this ISP basshole is counting on: that his consumers will choose instant drivel, rather than wait for the good stuff.
It always happens this way, because too few of us care until sake is suicide.
Whoops, Slashcode consumed the second dimension and more. That's probably where the alien error originated in the first place. Morse coded the schematic onto a six sided cube without first pressing submit. Cocky bastards.
pedantic, I know... Not nearly pedantic enough, unless you knew Herr Meter personally. Tell me, Herr Meter, why were you named that way? What did you discover to make yourself famous? And why did you say that Ångström deserved what he got?
Funny, I was thinking on the way home that the intergalactic subway machine in Contact blew up because the alien schematic contained a typo calling for 1 eV, and the people building it failed to read it as 1 exavolt.
Wikipedia tells me that 1 EeV/c = 1.783×1018 kg Really? I thought 1 EeV would be more impressive. I guess it's not the exotic extraterrestrial vroom vroom I thought it was. No, wait, what am I talking about, vroom vroom is v.
You're missing the main point, which was central to Shannon's theorem from way back in 1948: an optimal digital encoding process will achieve 100% quality up to, but not exceeding, channel capacity as dictated by the noise model.
Corrupted bits are easy to detect on the receiving side of any digital channel with a relatively trivial modicum of error correction.
If the receiving end of the digital channel sucks so bad it doesn't have a way to report that bits are being dropped or corrupted due to a substandard link, why not just randomly spend three to ten times as much to buy a possibly superior cable, and still be uncertain at the end of the day if you solved the problem, or even if the problem originally existed.
While you're at it, take a walk through the wild side.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
Now why is it that all this high end digital audio equipment can't be equipped with a little orange LED that signals digital link fault (lost or corrupted bits)?
Gosh, could it be that it's just not possible to run a mid-grade LSFR in silicon at audio data rates to detect channel bit errors?
The consumer audio industry is built on the fundamental premise: at every juncture, remain subjective.
My DVD player doesn't report bad frames or bit recovery statistics. Internally, the stupid thing knows. It just refuses to say. If I could stick a balky DVD into a couple of different players to see if I get the same error profile, it would be pretty easy to figure out whether the disk or the player was at fault. I guess that would only benefit the consumer, not the vendor.
I don't care whether your amp cost $20k. If it doesn't have an indicator for link faults concerning its digital inputs, the company isn't in the business of enabling objective decisions.
A properly engineered digital channel exists in an objective evaluation space. It's impossible to stress this strongly enough. No matter how much the equipment costs, if the quality of the digital channel is not reported objectively, either the equipment was badly engineered, or engineered to an agenda that conflicts with objectivity.
If you find that hard to swallow, consider the PRML algorithm used to recover bits from the analog signal reported by your drive head. Bit error rates of 10^-14 from an analog signal that is at best only a weak facsimile of the signal originally recorded, extracted at Gbits/s by a chip the size of your fingernail, in a product costing under $100.
The disk drive people find solutions, where the audio people facing a problem three orders of magnitude less difficult manufactures vagueness.
Guess which group read and understood Shannon's theorem, and wished their customers to benefit from this excellent piece of work. Before Shannon's paper, smart engineers did suffer from confusion about whether digital perfection was a reality or a chimera. Sixty years later, it's sadly ignorant that this is still debated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_m_process
By today's standards what would you call 10um lithography? Lumpy? Only if you were incredibly generous.
What were those chips used for? To replace slide rules. In the pockets of engineers. Who were busy designing next generation lithographic technologies and chip architectures. Which soon required sophisticated layout software. Which was implemented using the fastest chips from the most recent process generation.
It's been said you need the performance of the current line size to run the design tools required to achieve the next shrink. You certainly weren't going to lay out the Penryn using a 4004, not even a billion of them, all wired together, each working on its own transistor.
I think it makes far more sense for the core group to invest their energies in mastering loose (lumpy) tolerances, than targeting high precision. The aftermarket can explore precision and adapt the basic mechanism to superior materials. Freeman Dyson's toy model in his little book "Origins of Life" contains toy graphs of Q beginning rather crude.
Has BluR achieved parity with VHS already? How the milestones fall.
The only possible way BluR achieves parity with DVD in under a year is if DVD sales crater worse than Tunguska. No doubt Sony is working overtime behind the scenes to fit DVD with a $500m pair of cement overshoes.
Thirty years ago $500m would buy you a blob of concrete about the size of the Olympic stadium in Montreal, which would suffice, but not the launch vehicle capable of lobbing it far enough into space to achieve a 10km/s atmospheric reentry.
I have no idea how Sony plans to achieve this incredible acceleration of the demise of DVD.
My housemate picked up my copy of Simon Singh's "The Code" last night as was chuckling over the following passage, partly because of the stuffiness of the second sentence: To convey his instructions securely, Histaiaeus shaved the head of his messenger, wrote the message on his scalp, and waited a year for his hair to regrow. This was clearly a period of history that tolerated a certain lack of urgency. 90% of the urgency in life is generated by people who wish to feel urgent and important.
Cribbed from http://www.thirdside.org/stories_02.cfm, though I've seen better versions. My first brother heals sickness before it even develops, so his methods appear hidden, his science is an art form and he is known only within our village. My second brother deals with illnesses while they are minor, preventing sickness from getting worse and returning the body to health. I deal with sicknesses when they have reached the level of disease and threaten to destroy the organism of which they are a part. This requires numerous medicines, and skill and knowledge in their use. For this reason my name has become famous throughout the kingdom and I have been asked to be physician to the king. Is urgency the cure, or the disease?
This particular strain of nihilism gets on my nerves after a while. There is no clear inference from "it's been tried before". Not even if you multiply by a million times, or a million wannabe losers all with the same wannabe dream.
When substantial progress is made on a long-standing problem, generally there are three situations: the new approach was never tried before (because all the losers were looking under the same wrong rock), or the approach requires deep theoretical insight and skill (which losers rarely possess), or it was tried a million times already, but even so, none of the losers managed to do it quite right, until now.
All three categories are well represented. By entirely blotting out the "it's been tried before" category on general principle (if a sneer can be referred to as a principle), one wipes out a substantial chunk of the pie of new results worth knowing.
I guess some of us assign a low weight to mistakenly discarding genius, and place a higher priority on correctly labeling losers, which is the only thing the "it's been tried before" inference is any good at.
To sift out the rare occasion of genius you actually have to RTFA and evaluate on merit. You can't pass judgments based on background noise such as "it's been tried before" with a broad sweep of the hand toward the loser parade.
Reminds me of a book reviewed the paper I read at the coffee shop today:
Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind
I noted that the illustration of the human mind in that newspaper review left out the center for "having to pee" which I suspect is extensively shared with the center for heckling other primates on slim cause.
I wonder if that book is any good.
What I was more concerned about is whether the prediction task they've taken on has low intrinsic difficulty. The fact that others have done it badly doesn't prove much. Worse, those other predictions might have been made with a different immediate purpose, for which they were closer to optimal than as interpreted by this paper for the prediction this paper chose to take on.
It's still worth publishing prospective results in the situation where the available sample data is insufficient to partition into train/test subsets.
If the method scores zero next year, or substantially underperforms chance over the next few years, they'll end up looking fairly foolish.
Roughly for this kind of result I would say 25% it proves worthless, 25% chance it softens toward the mean, and 50% chance it continues to perform as well as advertised.
Of the 50% chance it holds up, there is about a 50% chance that the predictive power pertains to some common sense term that other people have handled improperly or neglected, and only a 50% chance that the LRMC framework was instrumental to its predictive success.
About that comment by some guy that in the NFL 0.800 percentages are more common than in MLB. Doh!
I googled "nfl season length" and the second link comes up with this paper:
http://cnls.lanl.gov/~ebn/pubs/sports/html/ The length of the season is a significant factor in the variability in the winning fraction. In a scenario where the outcome of a game is completely random, the total number of wins performs a simple random walk, and the standard deviation $\sigma$ is inversely proportional to the square root of the number of games played. Generally, the shorter the season, the larger $\sigma$. Thus, the small number of games is partially responsible for the large variability observed in the NFL. This season, the Ottawa Senators had a 15-2 start (about the length of an NFL/CFL season), but barely squeaked into the playoffs after one of the great collapses in pro sports.
That was an 0.880 winning percentage (ignoring any infamous loser points the NHL now awards) over 17 games to start the season. Clearly the Senators were a shoo-in to win the Super Bowl. Bonus: Ray Emery would fit right in among professional place kickers.
What the heck did you think they were fighting over in the first place?
It seems to be a bad day for science writing. The piece on rowing a galley was a joke. And now we're being told that one data mining problem with a dominant low-hanging return on augmenting data represents a general principle.
The Netflick data shouldn't be regarded as representative of anything. That data set has shockingly low dimensionality. So far as I know, they make no attempt to differentiate what kind of enjoyment the viewer obtained from the movie, or even determine whether the movie was viewed in a solo or group situation. They don't ask "who was your favorite character / actor / actress". Nor do they follow up on aging opinions: "which of these two movies would you presently rate higher?" so the corroboration factor is zero.
I'm pretty fussy about the movies I rent. The worst movie I've endured this year was "Night at the Museum", which was loaned to me. I managed to get through it at the 1.4x speed setting on a slow evening.
As bad as it was, I wouldn't rate it less than a 3. I'd like to save 1 and 2 for outright incompetence. Was "Museum" a manipulative piece of crap? Absolutely. I'd tick that box in a heartbeat. Did I feel personally soiled by Genghis' emotional discharge? I've been showering for days. From what I've read about Genghis, the only way to get him to discharge would have been to lock him in a room with Sacagawea.
If you give "Museum" a three for competence squandered, what do you give Soderberg's "Solaris"? I'm glad I watched it. It was interesting to see what they did with the sets, and to find out whether anything ever happens (spoiler: no). I still recall the intensity of the black woman, though unfortunately her fine acting served no real purpose. While I was happy to rent it, it also earned a place on my list of movies least likely to rent twice.
Really, Netflick deserves five gold stars for having created the least augmented opinion stream since baby spit out his brussel sprouts.
The optimal product of force through distance ultimately depends upon build (body type). Most likely the lanky rowers will be positioned at the long end of the level arm, while the stocky people are positioned with shorter lever arms.
Since you probably aren't being fed enough, your primary risk is starvation through overwork. It wouldn't surprise me that rations were set low enough that many rowers had short careers, once they burned out their physical reserves. That was certainly the implication in Ben Hur.
Since you have to maintain cadence with the rest of the oars, your option to cheat is to catch late and release early. You can bet the guy with the whip has a keen eye for shading on stroke length (duration with blade submerged).
I've stroked an eight before. Even without being able to see anyone behind me, I had a pretty good idea who was pulling their weight and who had good form. At the elite level, I'm told everyone knows who pulled a good race.
In Primo Levi's books he talks about the hazards of being teamed up with the nearly goners: the ones who haven't got enough left to pull their share, and worse, the ones who no longer cared about life enough to slack for every extra second possible.
It would be a bit different sharing an oar than lugging railway ties in the snow with half a shirt.
Probably your best situation was to be paired up with the rookie who doesn't know his 4000 calorie work day is going to be rewarded with a 1500 calorie dinner. Until the third day when he faints and you get to pull both shares all by yourself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sawmill Prior to the invention of the sawmill, boards were rived and planed, or more often sawn by two men with a whipsaw, using saddleblocks to hold the log, and a pit for the pitman who worked below. Sawing was slow, and required strong and enduring men. The topsawer had to be the stronger of the two because the saw was pulled in turn by each man, and the lower had the advantage of gravity. The topsawyer also had to guide the saw so that the board was of even thickness. This was often done by following a chalkline. I was once told a story by a great ancestor that after a few weeks, the topsaw guy became so muscular he beat the crap out of the guy below, so the roles would often reverse, but that more often than not, the muscular guys took the easy jobs, and the small guys either ended up built like pit bulls, or were short for this world.
Anyways, if I'm reincarnated on a slave galley, I'd like to have that NYTimes reporter sitting beside me on the "desirable" side with the long lever arm, to discover the bio-mechanical joys of finishing your stroke at a 45 degree abdominal recline while I dent his head with my elbow every time he slacks off.
C++ stinks for systems level programming. Trust me; done lots. The quickest solution when faced with C++ low level software is to quickly re-write it in C. Nice thing is, it usually ends up more concise, more reliable, and more maintainable.
Trust you? Why?
Yeah, I've also rewritten bad C++ code in C. I've also then taken the improved C code and rewritten it back to C++, with yet further improvements in concision, reliability, and maintenance, (though, granted, for a restricted set of maintainers).
Just for the record, I define maintenance as non-trivial extension of functionality, and not as continuing development with cheaper and more poorly trained resources. Repairing bad code that never could have been correct in the first place I tend to regard to as "emptying diapers".
I always end up repeating the same observation in these C++ discussions: the people who complain most bitterly about C++ tend to be the same people with low regard for their coworkers and their coworker's work output.
I would only choose to use C++ for a project where I had high regard for the other programmers involved.
Most likely, if that same crappy coworker had written the code in C originally, you would have rewritten it to improve concision, reliability, improve maintainability. Only you would have complained less, because rewriting bad C in good C requires less keyboarding than rewriting bad C++ in good C (thought generally little real difference in mental effort).
On the whole, competent C++ programmers tend to code their loops more correctly than most of the C code I've come across. A common meme in C code is to embed five return statements in a deeply nested loop to "handle" error conditions, though usually these nested return statements do a better job of creating error conditions.
In C++ the tendency for novice or mediocre programmers is to invent classes or class hierarchies with no real utility. If the class manages its own memory, it's almost certainly incorrect, though the incorrectness might not show up until the class is used differently in future (such as contained in an STL container).
I wrote my last significant systems programming project in C. In the cases where I wished I had templates available to optimize some constructs at compile time (single-reader single-writer synchronization primitives used heavily in interrupt context), I did hideous things with #define macros that I can assure you will not be maintained lightly. Templates would have accomplished this task with the same (or even better) performance, at a higher level of abstraction, with better safe-guards against incorrect use.
At the end of the day, it was only about 5% of my code base where the limitations of C required putrid convolutions with the C macro processor. If I had programmed in C++, 5% of my code base would have been devoted to hiding the ugliness of C++. Different rug, same difference.
I'm aware of many non-portable constructs in C++. Almost all of them inherited from C. Most of the C++ portability problems were a transitional effect when the standard got fairly far ahead of the compilers.
Nor do I understand the complaint about C++ lacking a standard ABI, either. That's been in the works for years:
http://www.codesourcery.com/cxx-abi/
Again, it's a matter of having access to mature compilers that actually implement this ABI now that we have it. By that standard, C wasn't portable in the 1980s, as I almost always discovered compiler bugs porting C code from one compiler to another, and rarely was I brave enough to link objects compiled by different compilers.
However, I never blamed the C language for that state of affairs.
If you measured the abstraction of a language with a thermometer, C would read about 10 degrees. Kelvin.
C++ probably has more defects than any other language I know. On average, these defects are less fatal than advertised by
Don't tell me this is the writing style of someone who types with two fingers of one hand, where no "and" was spared.
Seriously, this does not help the reader, though I might make an allowance if you replaced the unreliable and nearly invisible sentence final . with a more visible splat (*) to offset the loss of the sentence initial caps your withered pinky is unwilling to type.
We just need to get another version of the splat mark added to Unicode, aligned where the period used to be found (so it doesn't look like a footnote) and while we're at it, we should also adopt the Chinese dunhao comma into English orthography, which I've always liked.
http://www.globeinvestor.com/servlet/story/GAM.20080329.RCOVER29/GIStory/ Even so, the high euro forced the continent's biggest newsprint producer, Norske Skog, to announce on March 14 that it was closing mills in Norway and the Czech Republic, reducing its capacity by 7 per cent or 450,000 tonnes. We see your 450 and raise to 600: [Abitibi]
What if I say that things got sloppy because our bureaucracy is so big it can no longer effectively run, as has been for decades?
50% of a truism is the learned helplessness that causes people not to penetrate the "dumb field" that renders the truism immutable.
Over the last three decades we've experienced the most abrupt revolution in communications technology in the history of humanity. The internet, and its crown jewel, the internet search engine, rival the printing press and the written alphabet in its transformative potential on the course of human civilization.
It might even manage to challenge the truism-of-unthinking-debate that government is 99% moronium, completely impervious in its own level of function to the progress of the society it governs. Was it your intent to bestow miraculous powers of immunity on society's least esteemed organ?
Here's a simple way America could have functioned with less government: enact far more restrictive laws concerning telescopic polyderivatives and mark-to-market accounting back in the early 1980s.
We've recently discovered that selling derivatives of derivatives of derivatives carries similar risks as feeding cattle brains to cattle. Of course, as the ageless truism about bloated government would have it, no civil servant earned their paycheck in the rapid bailout of Bear Stearns with special backing by the Fed.
The road to smaller government is to impose an oppressively tight regulatory environment where Enron and the sub-prime melt-down can't happen in the first place. Fewer bulls, fewer bears, and fewer giant economic messes that our small, effective government would be insufficient to clean up.
Software developers, of all people, ought to have a better perspective on scope creep. One mode of increasing government is the ever popular "grandfather regulation", where for example, about 10,000 compounds already in use in the 1960s were exempted from safety standards required to approve new compounds. It would have made for less government if all compounds had been blanketed by the same rules. Does any software person not get this? Expensive for the private sector, who I presume would have been overjoyed to foot this bill, in order to reap the benefits in future of a smaller more effective government.
The division of labour between the public and private sector in modern America seems to run along this fault line: private sector generates massive, unsustainable profits, then the government steps in to "restore confidence", and the cycle repeats.
Here is the kind of useless analysis that perpetuates these myths:
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/3/pathetic_bear_stearns_bailout_who_to_blame
Give us a break. If Bear Stearns goes to zero, there will only be one party to blame: Bear Stearns management.
Duh. It's actually quite easy to set up a competitive situation in game theory where each of the parties has the incentive to outperform (a routine provision in executive compensation packages in the private sector). Anyone who decides to hover nervously-close to the safest exit makes little profit compared to the more aggressive players (aka no performance bonus for Mr Safety Pants).
No one knows the exact moment when the music will stop. When the music does stop, this group as a whole is overextended, and this can only be put right by savaging the carcass of the bank that happened to be slightly more overextended (aka which fails to land on a chair) than the other banks at that precise moment in time.
If the profit model was driven by flipping the hot potato, you can't choose not to touch the hot potato, you just have to hope you can unload it fast each time you take the risk. Of course, someone has to get caught with it if the system as a whole is overextended.
The best part of this: the eulogy that the corpse deserved its fate.
Amazing the number of "ignorance is bliss" responses on this thread. What you don't know is not allowed to hurt you. Wish I lived in that world. I concede the emotional appeal.
I have a question for the "ignorance is bliss" crowd. When a fat husband and wife completely block the grocery aisle nattering with each other about the best flavour of Twinkies, how long do you stand patiently behind them waiting for them to clue in to the blockade capacity of four lumbering Super-Size-Me ham haunches?
A little more cleverness on the part of the ORDB could have improved the spin. They could implemented a quota of 10,000 queries since noon today until the false positives begin for that query source. And that number could have been slowly tapered down. Then the serious abusers would have felt the pain before the mom and pop shops whose consultant shows up twice annually, and it would have been more apparent to people who put convenience ahead of reality that rejecting connections is not a proper solution to terminating the unwanted traffic.
Don't everybody stampede all at once to http://www.longbets.org/
To cover a 6000 page specification that hasn't yet undergone a clarity bulk-out, the OOXML Acid 3 test suite would need to incorporate on the order of 20,000 distinct unit tests.
With an implementation, a test suite, or a at least an OOXML validator (ideally supplied by Microsoft itself), this standard is nothing more than an insult to dead trees.
It's up to the EU not to allow their antitrust legal provisions to be bamboozled by an "ISO approved" rubber stamp regarding a stillborn 6000 pound syntactic placenta.
If C++ wanted to be liked, it would have long ago redefined the integral left-shift and right-shift operators to some other syntax, leaving operator<< and operator>> to become widely known as "get" and "put", which is how the majority of objects tend to employ these operators, leaving you to whimper: Operator overloading? Great, now you can enjoy C++ style code, where put() and put() are the same command. Does it matter to my point whether you spell "put" as put() or "operator<<"?
Far more to the point is whether you prefer a pure prefix language over a mixed prefix/infix language. Infix notation seems to enjoy a certain staying power. I've never seen a paper in pure mathematics where the equations are expressed in RPN. It might have something to do with the human brain having a limited and unreliable parse stack. If I could read Lisp like the Rain Man I'd abolish infix notation in a heart beat.
Instead of being liked, C++ resolutely persists with its dreadfully uncool attribute of not breaking existing code. To this end, it egregiously overloads the same infix operator for integers and iostreams. Scandalous! AltaVista might have been Google, but some programmer there mistyped a statement intended to strip some bits off a long integer, causing their month-long internet spider to fail with the output "42" on the console, and the rest is history.
The most heavily overloaded operator in generic style C++ is operator<, which establishes an ordering relationship which, among other things, makes the use of ordered containers possible (e.g. any container implemented on top of a red-black tree). Oh the horror of keeping all those overloaded operators straight in my mind.
My favorite example of operator overloading comes not from C++, but the Unix command line. There are many tools that define the commands "exit" and "quit" where one saves and the other doesn't, not always in the same correspondence.
If I assembled a list of C++ language defects, eliminating operator overloading would be point #1000, and I would probably conclude the facility makes a positive contribution to code quality, given a certain amount of progress in human factors concerning the binding of bad names to outrageous semantics. No useful language can eliminate poor human judgment. Of all the silver bullets, the goal of eliminating poor human judgment has to rank as the stupidest of them all.
We already have a good name for tasks involving no human judgment: it's called a "program" and you run it on a computer.
... touted as the most powerful and energy efficient fan of its sizeThe automotive industry pulls this stunt all the time. Some lame-mass product is designated "best in class" by Kudos-For-Sale Inc. and the reader is left to wonder if the "class" includes any other models by any other manufacturer, or if the entire class is just the same useless car available with 17 different trim configurations.
In Detroit, the primary criteria over whether two vehicles belong in different classes is whether either vehicles incorporates superior technology. The golden rule is never to compare one thing to another thing that might actually be better.
Cooling 25W has no information content, unless operating delta_T over ambient is also given. Useless. Comparison failed.
I've been waiting for this targeted advertising thing to kick into gear.
I have an exceptionally long lumbar region, so I have the seated height of an average person who is 6'7". I see all these car ads promising "more leg room" than a Samizdat, "more head room" than a Clonazipan. O RLY?
My typical seated posture is a 45 degree recline so my head doesn't scuff the sun roof. My head is well back into the seat behind me. With a foot long tongue I could lick the dome light. This includes most "full sized" pick-up trucks.
Problem: by the time my head is no longer bumping the canopy, my shoulders are positioned so far back in the cabin my arms can no longer reach the steering wheel. The next thing I do is slam the seat forward until my knees physically strike the dashboard. Then I can reach the steering wheel, operate the pedals, *and* see the traffic lights (dimly, through the windscreen tint).
This is my typical experience of "more leg room".
I'll believe in targeted advertising the first time Google tells me "you would be so squashed inside this 'roomy' contraption, after a week you'd park it in neutral and roll it over a cliff face".
Unfortunately, much science reporting has caught this disease from Detroit. The next landmark for Google is to be able to summarize this kind bad technology PR as "uselessly claims to cool 25W without disclosing operating delta_T over ambient". *That* would be Turing test worth passing.
If the ads were similarly useful, I might for the first time in my life click on one.
We accept the dangerous because the convenience is worth it.
I remember back when I played Quake II a lot, I would see a lot of things on the road that would cause a neural reflect to tap the "7" key IIRC which selected the rocket launcher. We "accept" the dangers created by the stupidity of those around us because government heavily repress our primal responses. Man, if I ever became the overlord at the DMV, things would be different.
That includes those people who think that driving at 50kph over the speed limit entitles them to private use of the inside lane. Look at me, I'm doing 160 in a 110 zone, everybody F'ing pull into the right lane like this is my private German autobahn or I'm going to hang inches behind your bumper pulsing my halogen highbeams like a prolapsed hemorrhoid. I don't feel myself radiating "acceptance", toward your average MF POS.
If you are decoding my driving behaviour as "acceptance" your powers of perception are extremely dim. The things some people do on the highway done in a wolf pack would see your liver served up as communal pate. Now and then a few aggressive bumper humpers hung from the signage scaffolds would soon set things right. To properly designate the offense, the bumper humpers could be hung with their pants around their ankles. Is Spitzer's wife known to be in the vicinity? No? That must have been another bumper humper. I'm digging, digging, digging and not finding this "acceptance" whereof you speak within myself.
Back to the subject at hand, I actually *have* non-24 hour sleep-wake disorder, and I can tell you that blue light does not function as described in any research I've seen.
Both melatonin and blue light have phase response curves with a fixed phase relationship to your daily body temp. min., that varies somewhat from one person to the next. For most people daily min. occurs somewhere around 05:00. A sleep study which captures this marker involves finding subjects willing (and able) to sleep wired up with rectal thermometers. For improved subject comfort, most sleep studies use DLMO (dim light melatonin offset) as a proxy marker instead. This occurs in the mid evening, and is marked by the first detectable increase of melatonin concentration in saliva (which doesn't occur if the eyes are exposed to bright light).
Blue light exposure in the early morning in the hour *before* your natural rising time will advance your cycle (earlier rising time). Blue light in the evening will delay your cycle (later rising time). To maintain a 24-hour sleep cycle, I require melatonin in the late afternoon and blue light on waking.
As a side note, the neurons in the retina that detect this blue light and signal phase change to the SCN are independent of the optical neurons. Some blind people retain this sensitivity, some don't (e.g. complete retinal loss). The blind people without this retinal sensitivity often suffer from non-24-hour sleep-wake disorder.
Both the existence of this retinal cell population and the phase response curves are fairly recent discoveries. I've only been able to successfully treat my condition for a year now (no help from my doctors, I ended up finding the research myself). Prior to that, was two decades where my body clock delayed an average of 1h15 per day. Internally, I was living on Mars time.
Subjectively, trying to live in day mode while my body wasn't was *exactly* the same as discovering each day that you are now experiencing an extra hour of jet lag as compared to the day before.
Imagine the suckiest jet lag you've ever experienced knowing the next day it will only get one hour worse, and this will continue for weeks. I would eventually reach the point of total circadian insanity, have a waking period 26 to 28 hours long, sleep for 12 to 16 hours, and wake up feeling great again. The funny thing about those long waking periods: I could code 26 hours straight and not suffer any diminishment in my vigilance contrary to most research (I have