I just need to remind a few people that in the past both Postgres and Mozilla were written off for dead in the minds of many. Postgres was lacking one critical performance feature (something to do with row locking), and went dark for a quite during the pursuit of this feature while the developers struggled to wrap their heads around the code base.
Netscape source code was released into open source in early 1998. The project was renamed Firefox in early 2004, around the time that Firefox was gaining credibility as a good general purpose alternative to IE. Hmmm. Not a lot happened in six years.
I wish Perl 6 had been the 'shortsighted' approval of perhaps a quarter or a third of the RFCs, rolled out within a year or two. Maybe Perl 7 could have continued this stupid trajectory it's on to irrelevance. More importantly, the volunteer development and donations would be much higher because people would actually CARE about the progress and the features. I wish Phoenix had been the 'shortsighted' rewrite without Gecko and XUL and associated burden. Maybe Firefox could have continued this stupid trajectory toward skins and plug-ins. More importantly, the volunteer development and donations would be much higher because people would actually CARE about the progress and the features.
In sounds stupid, but I can still recall bitter posts about the lack of progress at Mozilla very much in the same spirit.
The weird thing about the software industry is that no one ever gets credit for achieving a strategic victory, unless the project did not previously exist. Could Firefox have achieved what it did as a long string of small tactical victories? Or does there come a point where you have to take a long hiatus and set down a deep foundation?
For Perl 6, I regard this as a serious question not yet answerable.
It's ridiculous that this system persists in its present form as it does. We need a malpractice code for the credential industry as strong as the medical and legal malpractice codes. I tagged this article "dataspill visavaldez". Of the two, I like the second one better.
If anyone wondered why I included clinical pharmacology alongside landscape cosmology and deconstructionist criticism, the NY Times was kind to oblige me in a story from yesterday I had yet to read.
I would love to answer that point but I don't understand it. Sounds good though. No surprise, I was channeling Ron Perlman's character Salvatore from "Name of the Rose". Great book, but hardly understood it at all. Note that in "Name of the Rose" the scene of the ultimate crime is the library. In that era, the distinction between the washed and the unwashed was more clearly delineated: scholarship had its own private language and inquisitions of enforcement. Except for incidents now and then in the kitchen, everyone knew their place.
Many many historical cultures have encoded the sacred knowledge in a language the common man is unable to speak, and then proclaimed it as the sum total of all knowledge worth having, which is ludicrous.
Does true innovation even exist? I constantly stumble across discussions of "true innovation" (mostly the lack thereof) that never manage to define what true innovation would look like if we had it.
* Cram one down the filler neck in your car's fuel tank and increase gas mileage by 430%. * Tape ten sheets across both of your car's bumpers to prevent accidents--it repels other vehicles. * Put a sheet in your dishwasher and your plates will be wrinkle-free.
And then I found this link from Chemical Engineering News, from which I gleaned the following perky keywords and electrostatically neutral buzzphrase:
polymers and enzymes, softergents, alcohol ethoxylates, cationic dialkyl quaternary surfactants, linear alkylbenzene sulfonates, combination of an alkyltrimethylamine with a fatty acid, monoalkyl quaternary surfactants (quats) or ethoxylated quats, specialty polymers and amidoamines, dispersants and opacifiers, biocides and rheology modifiers, protease and carbohydrase enzymes, manganese-based catalyst that activates percarbonate and perborate bleaches, dye fixative offering dye-transfer inhibition, fluorescent whitening agents, cyclodextrin chemistry to reduce odors, proprietary fragrance with zinc ricinoleate, temporary surface hydrophilicity, silica nanoparticles
No, no innovation at all. But careful not to breath the fumes of progress as it roars off in pursuit of the silicone nanosphere.
As Monkhouse once noted, "It got up to 94 degrees today - that's pretty good at my age." Since the era Monkhouse recalls when "safe sex meant a padded headboard" we've since, uh, licked that particular problem three times over. At the end of the day, the only innovation that matters is the innovation people are willing to pay for, and for most of us, what we're willing to pay for hasn't much changed since the CT boundary.
With some wounds, each further excavation yields new layers of dirt, debris, death, and decay.
Peer review is a functional meritopoly. The people inside the system argue it this way: peer review is the only possible seal of expert approval. Outsiders view it as a social institution bent on stomping into the ground prospective competition. In the middle ground, you have people who concede that peer review is a flawed system, but also defend it as a system we have long had, that has brought us this far (a hereditary meritopoly).
This is the advantage of youth. Youth is less easily fooled. In my generation, it was IBM that was failing to fool anyone, aside from the university administration, which was lapping up discounts on IBM facilities we the students universally despised. (Some of us had the notion the PC would not prove to be a short-lived fad.)
The old people were entirely right: it was a spectacular waste of time and energy to work within the confines of such a hopelessly constrained and misbegotten contraption. The great thing about youth is that they couldn't fussing care less. Liberation is not powered by convenience or short term utility.
In my mind it is not possible that the younger generation will sprout their wings under the ultraviolet Google grow lamp and not beat a retreat from stodgy formal journals like midges from a puddle of turpentine. A few dutiful brown-nosers will fall for the ruse of progress-within. That faint rustling sound that haunts their sleep at night is their less dutiful peers munching their way through the rafters of stone age sweat lodges; the pink and grey eminents within are just beginning to notice some chill eddies.
There are other dimensions to the meritopoly: you can only access the journals if you merit access. The primary form of merit is to belong to a subscribing institution. JSTOR believes they are doing me a favour by offering me the chance to pay $30 to skim a ten page paper to determine that the authors had precious little to say.
How does the majority of my own generation fail to get this? There is so much information in the "new world" that just stopping to consider whether a journal paper is worth a $30 transaction, you've already fallen behind. In hockey, the cardinal sin is skating without moving your feet. In chess, the cardinal sin is relinquishing tempi. In the new world, agility matters more than hidebound (and outright mythical) notions of quality (witness deconstructionist criticism, landscape cosmology, clinical pharmacology).
What remains useful about peer review is its potential to function as the supreme court when disputes escalate. The supreme court is the arbiter of last recourse, not the fountain of first sip. Ultimately you do need a revered forum to shout down the mythomanes. Worthy, but not central.
Consider the legendary interview from "A Thin Blue Line". This is interesting because Judge Metcalfe is supposed to number among the upholders of truth and justice, yet he is as delusional as any Wikipedian sock puppet keyboarding half naked in a purple bath robe.
Wellington Film Society -- knows the word "mythomane", but not the name of the judge he's criticizing Pace Law Review -- knows the name of the judge, but soft pedals his stupidity
Judge Metcalfe's view of the appellate process suggests either naivete or arrogance:
Our highest state appellate court - the Court of Criminal Appeals in Austin - affirmed the case 9-0. And then it was reversed by the United States Supreme Court, 8-1. When the Appellate Court reverses a case, they are never saying the trial judge was right or wrong. They are saying they disagree with the judge. You can't, for instance, in the Adams appeals say the appellate courts were saying I was right or I was wrong. Af
Had a spelling mistake flashback on my way to the coffee maker. There's some deeply rooted psychological instinct not to incite a knife fight with your fly unzipped, connected to the neurological Jerry McGuire.
I just decided to check on the existence of a journal entitled "Journal of Peer Review". Such a foundational mechanism would surely have a journal all to itself. Apparently not. Perhaps the peer review system has issues with self critique.
I did find what appears to have been a fleeting initiative known as the "Journal of Universal Peer Review" which sounds a bit like a pre-wiki-puberty wet dream.
http://listserv.tulsa.cc.ok.us/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind9605&L=okpsystu&P=310
The Journal of Universal Peer Review (JUPR) has been created to satisfy two needs of information dissemination in this age of Computer Mediated Communication. The first is a more rapid dissemination of information while assuring the quality of that information. Even the most recent print journal reflects the thinking and work of an author that was written two years ago. JUPR will publish article abstracts along with the comments of reviewers and the article will be discussed in a public forum. JUPR-DIS is that public forum. Within a month of the original dissemination, the article will have been reviewed, evaluated and its worth established in an open debate.
This leads directly into the second need satisfied by JUPR. In the current peer review system, the decision with respect to the quality of any scientific work is in the hands of anonymous reviewers from whom there is no real appeal. Many new ideas are rejected because they go against traditional thought or are out of the zeitgeist. JUPR will give voice to authors and the whole readership and who will have the opportunity to discuss the critiques of reviewers.... Note that this critique was not publishing in a peer reviewed journal. It was published in a mailing list announcing a peer review journal.
I wish I had handy the literature on the psychology of initiation rights: that which makes you suffer needlessly is most vigorously defended once the in-group status is bestowed of dutiful, uncomplaining survivorship.
I tend to visualize peer review as a vise on the end of a sturdy bench, with a long line of men (and women) with damaged fingernails smocked in black hoods awaiting their turn at the crank.
Plead in Latin if you must, but bear in mind that the Romans didn't devote much of their language to escaping unscathed.
You're wrong about that. The academic indexes are good enough that you can be certain enough not to have missed anything important. If somebody has done some significant (yes even Indian students), then they will have sent it to a peer reviewed journal, and that journal will be indexed. Why is it that every time the term "peer review" comes up, it comes up in a sentence justifying silliness? First of all, peer review is like the patent system: at any given time, all the breaking discoveries are tied up in a secretive review process. By the time this information is actually published, it's awfully late to the party in any fast moving discipline.
Then there is the cross-discipline problem. In a field such as cognitive psych, useful material can be squirreled away in pretty much any journal from the sciences or the humanities. How good is that index, really?
The more original your thesis, the less likely your useful sources are the top scoop in the peer review catalog system. The "peer review" bucket is a form of insularity, but somehow most scholars within the system manage to convince themselves that nothing from the barbarian sphere is much worthy of consideration.
This distinction would be much clearer if the world had adopted the practice that all peer review articles are published in Latin. And then when some stooped-backed doctoral acolyte pops his badly shaven head out of an ivory tower and proclaims (in Latin) that every road leads to Rome, it would be plainly evident what kind of world that person is living in.
I didn't say C++ was a nail gun. I said that with C++ you often get the same gory results if you hand C++ to the kind of person who would file the safety off of a nail gun to become a turbo nail god.
37,000 nail gun accidents a year. The damage one can self-inflict with C++ is also impressive.
That doesn't make C++ a bad tool, it just makes C++ a risky choice for work sites where the majority of workers are less than fully compliant with workplace safety procedures.
I only used the word "shadowy" because it took some digging from the DBpedia page where his company is mentioned to discover who he was, and I hadn't found a "who we are" page at DBpedia, and I still don't know exactly what Kingsley's company brings/brought to the table over at DBpedia, aside from being generally all over the SPARQL technology. Actually, he looks like a pretty energetic and enthusiastic guy, once you get past those eye-jabbing cyclopropane moieties on his blog.
The guy mentioned turns out to be the founder and CEO, and he keeps a personal blog space with a lot of stuff about SPARQL, but man, protect your eyeballs from the vision gouging link clutter. Has all the visual appeal of a rental car insurance application form.
Even includes a link to the Zitgist data viewer. Amazingly, that domain was still available.
http://www.zitgist.com/
Zitgist (pronounced "zeitgeist") is an industry standards compliant Semantic Web Query Service. Its goal is to help Web users locate data, information, and knowledge on the Web. My god, hope springs eternal. The only occasion I'd pronounce "zit" as "zeit" is to rhyme it with "shite". Also, that's capital Web, pronounced "veeb".
Actually, from my experience as a programmer I'd much rather have someone come with a spreadsheet he worked with for a year, and very specific requirements such as "we want some people to be able to see these fields, some people to be able to edit these columns" and so... than to have someone with a vague notion of what he needs and then turning that into a relational database. Even if spreadsheets seem awful, a year's user experience with a fast prototyping tool (i.e. the spreadsheet) is priceless. I totally agree, as far as your post goes.
OTOH, fast prototyping can just as easily cause a lot problems. By the time you reach the natural limits of the prototype, who pays to extract the data into a preservation format? Did anybody even ask before the "fast" prototype was slapped together whether the data being captured will ultimately require preservation in a properly thought through archival structure? And if so, was this conversion budgeted ahead of time, or does it just show up as a problem further down the road, and effectively bite a chunk out of the IT dept. budget that should have been allocated to a business activity?
I've always believed one of the golden rules of foresight is "whoever created the mess, fixes the mess". In any situation where this rule is violated (e.g. the person creating the mess doesn't have the skillset to fix the mess), maybe some careful up-front design trumps the retrospective knowledge benefits of a fast prototype.
If the average prospective customer cares so much about having a replacement battery, this version won't sell as well as Apple hopes, and soon they will introduce a new version which does allow battery replacement.
I bought my first (and last) laptop in the early 1990s: a Gateway 2000 486DX/25. It was fairly small by the standards of the day, and the battery lasted five hours if you nursed it along. I said to myself, my next laptop purchase will run ten hours and weigh three pounds. Still waiting, but closer now. Meanwhile, I've discovered I rarely have an idea in a coffee shop so profound I can't jot it down on a slip of loose paper in ten words or fewer.
Then when I return home, I can keyboard it at an ergonomic workstation with the top of the screen positioned to eye level. But who knows, maybe kyphosis is actually good for your sex life after all.
Most of us haven't heard of it because it has been in a closed private pilot program, now open to all of us. I was hoping that most of us hadn't heard of this because we were sensibly protecting our brain cells from those paragraphs of bafflegab that constitute IBM's parting of the polyester curtain on their newest 1958 Buick with the inimitable "Fashion-Aire Dynastar grille".
Speaking of blurry unveilings in the era of monochromatic one-piece swimwear, what's the least amount of cling wrap required to dress a trade-show bunny so as not to get her arrested?
It's a valid point. Certainly the European car manufacturers have a "gentleman's agreement" to limit their high-end sports cars to a maximum speed of 155mph (around 250km/h). Now, I know that I wouldn't use that kind of power every day, but it would annoy me to know that the car was capable of more but prevented from doing so by an artificial limitation. If I'm paying for a 500bhp car, I want it to run like a 500bhp car... I suppose people like you are the reason for the limitation. Isn't this one of the attitudes about women put forward by the porn industry? If she comes equipped with three cylinders, I want all three, even if I've only got one piston.
Steven Pinker has a pretty good article in the NYTimes about moral instincts. By one method of hamming the hog, there are five core instincts: Harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity.
Unfortunately, he leaves out gratification entitlement, which is a shame, since without the archetype of Darth Diggler, you can't even explain most children's cartoons.
LLC is perfectly sensible business arrangement. Incorporation in Delaware, however, is stacking the deck. I would do something about Delaware acting as an offshore bank for corporations wishing to escape liability.
The main thing America requires right now is a firm brake on extreme wealth disparity, which is tremendously corrosive to civil society. Restore the inheritance tax, and do something about the nature of corporate board rooms that leads to ludicrously inflated executive pay. We are talking about America, aren't we? Land of opportunity or overdressed carpet-baggers?
I would post the estimated growth of the national GDP of China through to 2030 on my office wall.
I would suspend tax exempt status to creationist organizations. To pound the nail deeper into that coffin, for K12 I would scrap history, geography and social studies and replace them all with a combined program in media studies and critical thinking authored by Sut Jhally, Noam Chomsky and the deceased Richard Feynman.
I would ban advertising targeted at children under the age of six, and advertising to children under the age of 15 in any place they can't legally choose not to attend (such as their school). That would clean up the walls and cafeterias. If teenagers wish to sell their bodies as corporate billboards, feel free, it's your life, slut for Nike if you wish to. Bribes to the school board to accomplish the same thing, no chance.
I would mandate standardized UPC codes for all retail food products which can be entered into manufacturer web pages to obtain extended health information. I would require grocery stores to produce an aggregate summary of nutritional information for the grocery purchase as a whole. This would be phased in over a period of time, to allow update of their systems. I would require (or encourage through incentives) far more disclosure on food origins.
There is no sane reason in modern society to deprive consumers of choice information. The power of consumer choice is what business exists to satisfy, but business decides this is too difficult, and takes the easy way out.
I would encourage increases in electricity and consumer oil prices, but phased in at a steady rate, established as much as possible ahead of time. We still don't price energy anywhere close to its marginal cost. Bad price signals, bad results. With the extra taxes on energy, eliminate frictional taxes elsewhere.
I would task the FDA to come up with a vastly cheaper drug approval process for highly targeted drugs (e.g. Herceptin) and change the liability associated with these drugs so that the patient assumes more risk. More drugs would become available to treat more diseases, at lower prices. More people helped, higher initial risk. Each highly targeted drugs would be taken by vastly fewer people who don't benefit from it (yet still experience all the side effects and potentially dangerous drug interactions). I would try to squeeze out all forms of medication taken by large populations not proven to benefit. I'm not talking about a 10% reduction in cholesterol averaged over 100,000 people. There's a good chance more than half of those people benefit not at all, and that all the benefit comes from the half which does. It's stupid to have millions of people taking potentially dangerous drugs who aren't benefiting, because some benefit was measured in aggregate over a test population.
The correct model is this: if you have gene G or protein P, you take the drug targeted at gene G or protein P.
I wouldn't eliminate asymmetrical broadband, but I would force the providers to offer a choice at the same price: do you want the fast side to point up or down? Maybe the providers would decide symmetrical wasn't so difficult after all. Or maybe not.
I would rewrite the constitution such that any future copyright term extension could not constitutionally be applied retroactively. If possible, I'd kill that damn mouse much sooner than that.
I would also repeal protectionist software lumber tariffs. As a Canadian president of the United States, that's the least I could do.
There is a difference between a good programmer and a programmer who is easy to exploit. People who collapse at a young age into a hyperfocussed code-is-my-life every-waking-hour-of-the-day mania are generally engaged in some deep emotional avoidance behaviours.
10,000 highly focused hours rewriting some major OS or application is probably worth more to your career down the road that the same 10,000 hours editing Wikipedia, or leveling-up in WoW. Many of these people wake up and smell the bacon in their early to mid-thirties having given their best energy to a cause that might not even continue to exist. A small percentage (who are wired a bit differently than most of us) thrive in this mode of living indefinitely; just enough to be held up as models to those of us who can't.
EA has been particularly good at spotting talented young programmers who are willing to collapse into a 100-hour per week delivery grind to escape having to deal with life on any other basis, without EA having to fully compensate those hours, leading eventually to a lawsuit.
From an EA perspective, those programmers were the best. Money can't buy you a programmer who is willing to work 100 hours and get paid for 40. You have to spot them yourself.
Coverity is doing what all the firewall vendors do, self-inventing threats and then focusing all the dialog on count statistics. It's almost impossible to find coverage on Coverity in terms of what classes of bugs they detect, and the relative importance of the bugs they find. How many are of the "oh my god" variety? I would hazard a guess somewhere between 1 and 5 percent. This is not a number Coverity wishes to see tracked in public forums, as their effort to inflate total bug counts will inevitably drive this number downward, even if the rate of occurrence in open source projects remains relatively flat.
The debate about surface syntax goes all the way back to the APL / COBOL schism.
There is no question that APL code was *too* dense for comfort. On the flip side, it was impossible to program in APL seriously without improving your thinking skills. APL is like the monolith in 2001. Fall asleep beside it, you wake up with a headache, smarter than you were before, forever permeated by the orthogonal "om" of higher dimensionality.
COBOL's major intellectual contribution to the world was selling a lot of IBM's green and white printer paper. I've heard the Dr Seuss edition of Einstein's general relatively has an exceptionally low fog index.
The natural evolution of a programmer's expressive intellect is away from simple statements (with embedded side effects) and toward compound, side-effect free, functional expressions.
The complexity of code that matters is the complexity to reason successfully about the code's correctness. The syntax of the statement is chicken feed, unless it actively discourages reading.
Dijkstra defined the best criteria I've ever seen for what makes it possible to reason about a chunk of code (embodying an algorithm) successfully: can you point to any execution point and write down a correct invariant expression of what must be true whenever that execution point is crossed?
This is the reason why I adopted the practice of writing code like this:
int things_done = 0; char* p = NULL; for (;;) {
*p = malloc (BUFSIZE);
if (p) {
if (do_something (p)) ++things_done;
}
if (p) free (p); /* invariant false HERE only */
p = NULL; }
At every execution point, you can write the invariant that either p is NULL, or p contains a valid pointer from malloc(). *Except* exactly the one point in the code flow where the next statement serves the purpose of re-establishing that simple invariant.
If p fails to malloc() I don't bother to create an error pathway. I just use it as a guard against the code that follows. Do nothing is cheap. You'll fall through to the bottom in no time. At the bottom, test whether the routine accomplished its tasks.
Fewer error pathways, simpler invariants. You get what you pay for. Avoid side effects, and always always always handle zeros and empty structures correctly.
By the time you get to this point in your coding evolution, you'll be wanting to write your statements in functional map/reduce form, because that is all that remains to express, now that the code is reduced to its Dijkstra essentials.
An accessible surface form matters most for code that is either badly specified or badly commented, forcing you to read the code to determine the code's intended purpose. Reverse engineering purpose from the code itself is not a higher zen-fu coding practice.
Accessible surface form becomes a minor concern if you are reading code to determine whether the code correctly implements a specification you already comprehend.
Migrating between PHP and Ruby, it's the difference in surface form you must first surmount. Sometimes the immediacy of a challenge is confused with the magnitude of the challenge. We tend to overestimate comfort and underestimate utility.
Consider, though, the primary goal of making people more productive. How can someone spending twice as long at a given task be more productive? They can't, particularly when one considers the reason the subjective time seems so short: the intensity of the user's total mental engagement in performing the manipulation. Under such circumstances, the user must set aside the original task of writing or editing a document in favor of figuring out what key to press and how many times to press it. While the mouse users are dragging and pressing a
This is so lame I can't believe it. Wyoming's very slight over-representation has squat influence of Wyoming's net power within the majoritarian voting structure of the House.
But now that you've said it, I'll point our your just desserts. Soon China's net economy will exceed America's net economy. Just watch the geopolitical influence shift. How much will it matter than the average American has *four times* as much per capita income compared to the average Chinese? A lot, but not nearly as much as you might like to think. Draw a circle on your calendar, circa 2030. Fun times for one and all.
Comparing Wyoming to California is like comparing Luxembourg to America. Massive per capita income, founding member of NATO, an entire loaf of kiln hardened pumpernickel short of casting a veto.
I wouldn't be surprised if Nuevo León has more influence on the House of Reps. than Wyoming, and they have no seats at all.
Sheesh, if Saskatchewan, Montana, and Wyoming formed a rogue nation, the capital city would be Billings or Saskatoon. Face facts here. Wyoming *is* a rounding error, and no amount of jiggering behind the decimal point is going to fix it.
The strangest possible criticism of C++ is the superiority of C. Unlike most languages, if you don't like a C++ feature (one that C doesn't have) you don't have to use it, and there is little or no runtime penalty imposed.
The strangest possible criticism of C++0x templates is that they are impossible to debug. It is, after all, the primary focus of changes to the C++ template system to drive diagnostics to the appropriate surface (at long last).
This is the fundamental advantage of a hammer over a pneumatic nail gun. The nail gun might be perfectly safe is used wisely, but human nature decrees that ultimately many people are going to file off the safety, leading to predictably gory anecdotes.
Standardize instead on the hammer, this can never happen. Which is the principle virtue of C.
C++ is probably the worst language ever devised to throw into a room full of monkeys. Many of the people who hate C++ most strongly have an underlying distrustful view of their peers as unwashed monkeys completely lacking in prudence, judgment, or impulse control.
There are situations where C++ simply should not be used, in much the same way that surgery in an African aid hospital lacking electricity and hot water is not your preferred medical option. Under sterile conditions, with doctors you trust, the pros and cons of C++ balance out quite differently.
I've been trying to put this sentiment into words for a long time. In development teams where dog-eat-dog survivalism holds sway (us against the world, me against my teammates, managers against the staff) C++ can only play out in the worst possible way.
Armed with hammers instead (the C language), the tragedy of the commons can't degenerate nearly so far. The virtue of C is that you don't have to like or respect everyone else you work with, which is no small virtue given human is what it is.
Back in 1998 I would have welcomed a standard compliant C++ compiler from Microsoft. What Microsoft did support, it supported one level deep (e.g. namespaces, many template features) with unbridled hypocrisy.
Fast forward to 2008, if Microsoft can't be bothered, others can, so now they bother. Kind of like arriving at a New Year's party at half past twelve. The champagne is gone, and when you make your grand entrance into the room full of glassy expressions, everyone slaps you on the back and says "hey, glad you could make it". Almost like being there.
Worst of all, these articles haven't disclosed the classes of software issues detected. I'm sure huge classes of deadlocks and other system-wide issues go undetected. Even if the point of Coverity is to conduct system-wide analysis, I'd still say large classes escape.
I'm sure it can't detect that a Linux device driver sends the wrong byte to the wrong register of the hardware it supervises.
I think from the DHS perspective, they want to close as many bugs as possible that their adversaries could find by mechanical means. Finding deep bugs is real work, and wouldn't support a multi-vector concerted attack without massive preparation of the kind that HUMINT can usually detect.
I hate the IANAL meme. One has to ask whether our legal ought to be so complex and inscrutable that any remark on the subject by a concerned, intelligent, and clear-headed person can be shot down like a calf in a slaughterhouse with a single 5-grain all-caps slug to the pons presumptuous. I'd like to introduce everyone to IANAL's inbred sister BOAETR (bend over and enjoy the ride).
I don't know whether anyone else has noticed, but it is hugely problematic to live in a society governed by rules you can't comprehend, nor debate to any useful conclusion.
IANAL functions like a secular mirror of the bible-thumping parody of Christian humility: you're never going to find out exactly what God wants, but don't be wrong, because you'll burn in hell forever.
Slashdot Mirror
I just need to remind a few people that in the past both Postgres and Mozilla were written off for dead in the minds of many. Postgres was lacking one critical performance feature (something to do with row locking), and went dark for a quite during the pursuit of this feature while the developers struggled to wrap their heads around the code base.
Netscape source code was released into open source in early 1998. The project was renamed Firefox in early 2004, around the time that Firefox was gaining credibility as a good general purpose alternative to IE. Hmmm. Not a lot happened in six years. I wish Perl 6 had been the 'shortsighted' approval of perhaps a quarter or a third of the RFCs, rolled out within a year or two. Maybe Perl 7 could have continued this stupid trajectory it's on to irrelevance. More importantly, the volunteer development and donations would be much higher because people would actually CARE about the progress and the features. I wish Phoenix had been the 'shortsighted' rewrite without Gecko and XUL and associated burden. Maybe Firefox could have continued this stupid trajectory toward skins and plug-ins. More importantly, the volunteer development and donations would be much higher because people would actually CARE about the progress and the features.
In sounds stupid, but I can still recall bitter posts about the lack of progress at Mozilla very much in the same spirit.
The weird thing about the software industry is that no one ever gets credit for achieving a strategic victory, unless the project did not previously exist. Could Firefox have achieved what it did as a long string of small tactical victories? Or does there come a point where you have to take a long hiatus and set down a deep foundation?
For Perl 6, I regard this as a serious question not yet answerable.
It's ridiculous that this system persists in its present form as it does. We need a malpractice code for the credential industry as strong as the medical and legal malpractice codes. I tagged this article "dataspill visavaldez". Of the two, I like the second one better.
If anyone wondered why I included clinical pharmacology alongside landscape cosmology and deconstructionist criticism, the NY Times was kind to oblige me in a story from yesterday I had yet to read.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/health/17depress.html?em&ex=1200805200&en=c0e173e23c1db9a8&ei=5087
Many many historical cultures have encoded the sacred knowledge in a language the common man is unable to speak, and then proclaimed it as the sum total of all knowledge worth having, which is ludicrous.
Does true innovation even exist? I constantly stumble across discussions of "true innovation" (mostly the lack thereof) that never manage to define what true innovation would look like if we had it.
I did discover yesterday some interesting applications of Bounce dryer sheets.
* Cram one down the filler neck in your car's fuel tank and increase gas mileage by 430%.
* Tape ten sheets across both of your car's bumpers to prevent accidents--it repels other vehicles.
* Put a sheet in your dishwasher and your plates will be wrinkle-free.
And then I found this link from Chemical Engineering News, from which I gleaned the following perky keywords and electrostatically neutral buzzphrase:
polymers and enzymes, softergents, alcohol ethoxylates, cationic dialkyl quaternary surfactants, linear alkylbenzene sulfonates, combination of an alkyltrimethylamine with a fatty acid, monoalkyl quaternary surfactants (quats) or ethoxylated quats, specialty polymers and amidoamines, dispersants and opacifiers, biocides and rheology modifiers, protease and carbohydrase enzymes, manganese-based catalyst that activates percarbonate and perborate bleaches, dye fixative offering dye-transfer inhibition, fluorescent whitening agents, cyclodextrin chemistry to reduce odors, proprietary fragrance with zinc ricinoleate, temporary surface hydrophilicity, silica nanoparticles
No, no innovation at all. But careful not to breath the fumes of progress as it roars off in pursuit of the silicone nanosphere.
As Monkhouse once noted, "It got up to 94 degrees today - that's pretty good at my age." Since the era Monkhouse recalls when "safe sex meant a padded headboard" we've since, uh, licked that particular problem three times over. At the end of the day, the only innovation that matters is the innovation people are willing to pay for, and for most of us, what we're willing to pay for hasn't much changed since the CT boundary.
Peer review is a functional meritopoly. The people inside the system argue it this way: peer review is the only possible seal of expert approval. Outsiders view it as a social institution bent on stomping into the ground prospective competition. In the middle ground, you have people who concede that peer review is a flawed system, but also defend it as a system we have long had, that has brought us this far (a hereditary meritopoly).
This is the advantage of youth. Youth is less easily fooled. In my generation, it was IBM that was failing to fool anyone, aside from the university administration, which was lapping up discounts on IBM facilities we the students universally despised. (Some of us had the notion the PC would not prove to be a short-lived fad.)
The old people were entirely right: it was a spectacular waste of time and energy to work within the confines of such a hopelessly constrained and misbegotten contraption. The great thing about youth is that they couldn't fussing care less. Liberation is not powered by convenience or short term utility.
In my mind it is not possible that the younger generation will sprout their wings under the ultraviolet Google grow lamp and not beat a retreat from stodgy formal journals like midges from a puddle of turpentine. A few dutiful brown-nosers will fall for the ruse of progress-within. That faint rustling sound that haunts their sleep at night is their less dutiful peers munching their way through the rafters of stone age sweat lodges; the pink and grey eminents within are just beginning to notice some chill eddies.
There are other dimensions to the meritopoly: you can only access the journals if you merit access. The primary form of merit is to belong to a subscribing institution. JSTOR believes they are doing me a favour by offering me the chance to pay $30 to skim a ten page paper to determine that the authors had precious little to say.
How does the majority of my own generation fail to get this? There is so much information in the "new world" that just stopping to consider whether a journal paper is worth a $30 transaction, you've already fallen behind. In hockey, the cardinal sin is skating without moving your feet. In chess, the cardinal sin is relinquishing tempi. In the new world, agility matters more than hidebound (and outright mythical) notions of quality (witness deconstructionist criticism, landscape cosmology, clinical pharmacology).
What remains useful about peer review is its potential to function as the supreme court when disputes escalate. The supreme court is the arbiter of last recourse, not the fountain of first sip. Ultimately you do need a revered forum to shout down the mythomanes. Worthy, but not central.
Consider the legendary interview from "A Thin Blue Line". This is interesting because Judge Metcalfe is supposed to number among the upholders of truth and justice, yet he is as delusional as any Wikipedian sock puppet keyboarding half naked in a purple bath robe.
Wellington Film Society -- knows the word "mythomane", but not the name of the judge he's criticizing
Pace Law Review -- knows the name of the judge, but soft pedals his stupidity
s/initiation rights/initiation rites
Had a spelling mistake flashback on my way to the coffee maker. There's some deeply rooted psychological instinct not to incite a knife fight with your fly unzipped, connected to the neurological Jerry McGuire.
I did find what appears to have been a fleeting initiative known as the "Journal of Universal Peer Review" which sounds a bit like a pre-wiki-puberty wet dream.
http://listserv.tulsa.cc.ok.us/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind9605&L=okpsystu&P=310 The Journal of Universal Peer Review (JUPR) has been created to satisfy two needs of information dissemination in this age of Computer Mediated Communication. The first is a more rapid dissemination of information while assuring the quality of that information. Even the most recent print journal reflects the thinking and work of an author that was written two years ago. JUPR will publish article abstracts along with the comments of reviewers and the article will be discussed in a public forum. JUPR-DIS is that public forum. Within a month of the original dissemination, the article will have been reviewed, evaluated and its worth established in an open debate.
This leads directly into the second need satisfied by JUPR. In the current peer review system, the decision with respect to the quality of any scientific work is in the hands of anonymous reviewers from whom there is no real appeal. Many new ideas are rejected because they go against traditional thought or are out of the zeitgeist. JUPR will give voice to authors and the whole readership and who will have the opportunity to discuss the critiques of reviewers.
I wish I had handy the literature on the psychology of initiation rights: that which makes you suffer needlessly is most vigorously defended once the in-group status is bestowed of dutiful, uncomplaining survivorship.
I tend to visualize peer review as a vise on the end of a sturdy bench, with a long line of men (and women) with damaged fingernails smocked in black hoods awaiting their turn at the crank.
Plead in Latin if you must, but bear in mind that the Romans didn't devote much of their language to escaping unscathed.
Then there is the cross-discipline problem. In a field such as cognitive psych, useful material can be squirreled away in pretty much any journal from the sciences or the humanities. How good is that index, really?
The more original your thesis, the less likely your useful sources are the top scoop in the peer review catalog system. The "peer review" bucket is a form of insularity, but somehow most scholars within the system manage to convince themselves that nothing from the barbarian sphere is much worthy of consideration.
This distinction would be much clearer if the world had adopted the practice that all peer review articles are published in Latin. And then when some stooped-backed doctoral acolyte pops his badly shaven head out of an ivory tower and proclaims (in Latin) that every road leads to Rome, it would be plainly evident what kind of world that person is living in.
I didn't say C++ was a nail gun. I said that with C++ you often get the same gory results if you hand C++ to the kind of person who would file the safety off of a nail gun to become a turbo nail god.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3685791.stm
37,000 nail gun accidents a year. The damage one can self-inflict with C++ is also impressive.
That doesn't make C++ a bad tool, it just makes C++ a risky choice for work sites where the majority of workers are less than fully compliant with workplace safety procedures.
http://www.fmlink.com/News/Articles/news.cgi?display=article&id=22630
I only used the word "shadowy" because it took some digging from the DBpedia page where his company is mentioned to discover who he was, and I hadn't found a "who we are" page at DBpedia, and I still don't know exactly what Kingsley's company brings/brought to the table over at DBpedia, aside from being generally all over the SPARQL technology. Actually, he looks like a pretty energetic and enthusiastic guy, once you get past those eye-jabbing cyclopropane moieties on his blog.
http://www.openlinksw.com/index.htm
The guy mentioned turns out to be the founder and CEO, and he keeps a personal blog space with a lot of stuff about SPARQL, but man, protect your eyeballs from the vision gouging link clutter. Has all the visual appeal of a rental car insurance application form.
http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen/
Even includes a link to the Zitgist data viewer. Amazingly, that domain was still available.
http://www.zitgist.com/ Zitgist (pronounced "zeitgeist") is an industry standards compliant Semantic Web Query Service. Its goal is to help Web users locate data, information, and knowledge on the Web. My god, hope springs eternal. The only occasion I'd pronounce "zit" as "zeit" is to rhyme it with "shite". Also, that's capital Web, pronounced "veeb".
OTOH, fast prototyping can just as easily cause a lot problems. By the time you reach the natural limits of the prototype, who pays to extract the data into a preservation format? Did anybody even ask before the "fast" prototype was slapped together whether the data being captured will ultimately require preservation in a properly thought through archival structure? And if so, was this conversion budgeted ahead of time, or does it just show up as a problem further down the road, and effectively bite a chunk out of the IT dept. budget that should have been allocated to a business activity?
I've always believed one of the golden rules of foresight is "whoever created the mess, fixes the mess". In any situation where this rule is violated (e.g. the person creating the mess doesn't have the skillset to fix the mess), maybe some careful up-front design trumps the retrospective knowledge benefits of a fast prototype.
If the average prospective customer cares so much about having a replacement battery, this version won't sell as well as Apple hopes, and soon they will introduce a new version which does allow battery replacement.
I bought my first (and last) laptop in the early 1990s: a Gateway 2000 486DX/25. It was fairly small by the standards of the day, and the battery lasted five hours if you nursed it along. I said to myself, my next laptop purchase will run ten hours and weigh three pounds. Still waiting, but closer now. Meanwhile, I've discovered I rarely have an idea in a coffee shop so profound I can't jot it down on a slip of loose paper in ten words or fewer.
Then when I return home, I can keyboard it at an ergonomic workstation with the top of the screen positioned to eye level. But who knows, maybe kyphosis is actually good for your sex life after all.
http://bicyclehabitat.com/page.cfm?PageID=97
Speaking of blurry unveilings in the era of monochromatic one-piece swimwear, what's the least amount of cling wrap required to dress a trade-show bunny so as not to get her arrested?
Steven Pinker has a pretty good article in the NYTimes about moral instincts. By one method of hamming the hog, there are five core instincts: Harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html
Unfortunately, he leaves out gratification entitlement, which is a shame, since without the archetype of Darth Diggler, you can't even explain most children's cartoons.
LLC is perfectly sensible business arrangement. Incorporation in Delaware, however, is stacking the deck. I would do something about Delaware acting as an offshore bank for corporations wishing to escape liability.
The main thing America requires right now is a firm brake on extreme wealth disparity, which is tremendously corrosive to civil society. Restore the inheritance tax, and do something about the nature of corporate board rooms that leads to ludicrously inflated executive pay. We are talking about America, aren't we? Land of opportunity or overdressed carpet-baggers?
I would post the estimated growth of the national GDP of China through to 2030 on my office wall.
I would suspend tax exempt status to creationist organizations. To pound the nail deeper into that coffin, for K12 I would scrap history, geography and social studies and replace them all with a combined program in media studies and critical thinking authored by Sut Jhally, Noam Chomsky and the deceased Richard Feynman.
I would ban advertising targeted at children under the age of six, and advertising to children under the age of 15 in any place they can't legally choose not to attend (such as their school). That would clean up the walls and cafeterias. If teenagers wish to sell their bodies as corporate billboards, feel free, it's your life, slut for Nike if you wish to. Bribes to the school board to accomplish the same thing, no chance.
I would mandate standardized UPC codes for all retail food products which can be entered into manufacturer web pages to obtain extended health information. I would require grocery stores to produce an aggregate summary of nutritional information for the grocery purchase as a whole. This would be phased in over a period of time, to allow update of their systems. I would require (or encourage through incentives) far more disclosure on food origins.
There is no sane reason in modern society to deprive consumers of choice information. The power of consumer choice is what business exists to satisfy, but business decides this is too difficult, and takes the easy way out.
I would encourage increases in electricity and consumer oil prices, but phased in at a steady rate, established as much as possible ahead of time. We still don't price energy anywhere close to its marginal cost. Bad price signals, bad results. With the extra taxes on energy, eliminate frictional taxes elsewhere.
I would task the FDA to come up with a vastly cheaper drug approval process for highly targeted drugs (e.g. Herceptin) and change the liability associated with these drugs so that the patient assumes more risk. More drugs would become available to treat more diseases, at lower prices. More people helped, higher initial risk. Each highly targeted drugs would be taken by vastly fewer people who don't benefit from it (yet still experience all the side effects and potentially dangerous drug interactions). I would try to squeeze out all forms of medication taken by large populations not proven to benefit. I'm not talking about a 10% reduction in cholesterol averaged over 100,000 people. There's a good chance more than half of those people benefit not at all, and that all the benefit comes from the half which does. It's stupid to have millions of people taking potentially dangerous drugs who aren't benefiting, because some benefit was measured in aggregate over a test population.
The correct model is this: if you have gene G or protein P, you take the drug targeted at gene G or protein P.
I wouldn't eliminate asymmetrical broadband, but I would force the providers to offer a choice at the same price: do you want the fast side to point up or down? Maybe the providers would decide symmetrical wasn't so difficult after all. Or maybe not.
I would rewrite the constitution such that any future copyright term extension could not constitutionally be applied retroactively. If possible, I'd kill that damn mouse much sooner than that.
I would also repeal protectionist software lumber tariffs. As a Canadian president of the United States, that's the least I could do.
There is a difference between a good programmer and a programmer who is easy to exploit. People who collapse at a young age into a hyperfocussed code-is-my-life every-waking-hour-of-the-day mania are generally engaged in some deep emotional avoidance behaviours.
10,000 highly focused hours rewriting some major OS or application is probably worth more to your career down the road that the same 10,000 hours editing Wikipedia, or leveling-up in WoW. Many of these people wake up and smell the bacon in their early to mid-thirties having given their best energy to a cause that might not even continue to exist. A small percentage (who are wired a bit differently than most of us) thrive in this mode of living indefinitely; just enough to be held up as models to those of us who can't.
EA has been particularly good at spotting talented young programmers who are willing to collapse into a 100-hour per week delivery grind to escape having to deal with life on any other basis, without EA having to fully compensate those hours, leading eventually to a lawsuit.
From an EA perspective, those programmers were the best. Money can't buy you a programmer who is willing to work 100 hours and get paid for 40. You have to spot them yourself.
http://www.firebirdnews.org/docs/coverity_report_6march.html Suggests a wide range of impact. Negative returns: probably harmless 99% of the time. Use after free: I'd be fixing those pronto.
But you can only guess, because Coverity has managed to keep informative coverage thin on the ground.
Here's a post which actually says something:
https://www.securecoding.cert.org/confluence/display/seccode/cp-mapping
Contains a mapping from Coverity checker labels to CERT coding guideline URLs.
There is no question that APL code was *too* dense for comfort. On the flip side, it was impossible to program in APL seriously without improving your thinking skills. APL is like the monolith in 2001. Fall asleep beside it, you wake up with a headache, smarter than you were before, forever permeated by the orthogonal "om" of higher dimensionality.
COBOL's major intellectual contribution to the world was selling a lot of IBM's green and white printer paper. I've heard the Dr Seuss edition of Einstein's general relatively has an exceptionally low fog index.
The natural evolution of a programmer's expressive intellect is away from simple statements (with embedded side effects) and toward compound, side-effect free, functional expressions.
The complexity of code that matters is the complexity to reason successfully about the code's correctness. The syntax of the statement is chicken feed, unless it actively discourages reading.
Dijkstra defined the best criteria I've ever seen for what makes it possible to reason about a chunk of code (embodying an algorithm) successfully: can you point to any execution point and write down a correct invariant expression of what must be true whenever that execution point is crossed?
This is the reason why I adopted the practice of writing code like this:
At every execution point, you can write the invariant that either p is NULL, or p contains a valid pointer from malloc(). *Except* exactly the one point in the code flow where the next statement serves the purpose of re-establishing that simple invariant.
If p fails to malloc() I don't bother to create an error pathway. I just use it as a guard against the code that follows. Do nothing is cheap. You'll fall through to the bottom in no time. At the bottom, test whether the routine accomplished its tasks.
Fewer error pathways, simpler invariants. You get what you pay for. Avoid side effects, and always always always handle zeros and empty structures correctly.
By the time you get to this point in your coding evolution, you'll be wanting to write your statements in functional map/reduce form, because that is all that remains to express, now that the code is reduced to its Dijkstra essentials.
An accessible surface form matters most for code that is either badly specified or badly commented, forcing you to read the code to determine the code's intended purpose. Reverse engineering purpose from the code itself is not a higher zen-fu coding practice.
Accessible surface form becomes a minor concern if you are reading code to determine whether the code correctly implements a specification you already comprehend.
Migrating between PHP and Ruby, it's the difference in surface form you must first surmount. Sometimes the immediacy of a challenge is confused with the magnitude of the challenge. We tend to overestimate comfort and underestimate utility.
http://www.asktog.com/SunWorldColumns/S02KeyboardVMouse3.html
Consider, though, the primary goal of making people more productive. How can someone spending twice as long at a given task be more productive? They can't, particularly when one considers the reason the subjective time seems so short: the intensity of the user's total mental engagement in performing the manipulation. Under such circumstances, the user must set aside the original task of writing or editing a document in favor of figuring out what key to press and how many times to press it. While the mouse users are dragging and pressing a
This is so lame I can't believe it. Wyoming's very slight over-representation has squat influence of Wyoming's net power within the majoritarian voting structure of the House.
But now that you've said it, I'll point our your just desserts. Soon China's net economy will exceed America's net economy. Just watch the geopolitical influence shift. How much will it matter than the average American has *four times* as much per capita income compared to the average Chinese? A lot, but not nearly as much as you might like to think. Draw a circle on your calendar, circa 2030. Fun times for one and all.
Comparing Wyoming to California is like comparing Luxembourg to America. Massive per capita income, founding member of NATO, an entire loaf of kiln hardened pumpernickel short of casting a veto.
I wouldn't be surprised if Nuevo León has more influence on the House of Reps. than Wyoming, and they have no seats at all.
Sheesh, if Saskatchewan, Montana, and Wyoming formed a rogue nation, the capital city would be Billings or Saskatoon. Face facts here. Wyoming *is* a rounding error, and no amount of jiggering behind the decimal point is going to fix it.
The strangest possible criticism of C++ is the superiority of C. Unlike most languages, if you don't like a C++ feature (one that C doesn't have) you don't have to use it, and there is little or no runtime penalty imposed.
The strangest possible criticism of C++0x templates is that they are impossible to debug. It is, after all, the primary focus of changes to the C++ template system to drive diagnostics to the appropriate surface (at long last).
This is the fundamental advantage of a hammer over a pneumatic nail gun. The nail gun might be perfectly safe is used wisely, but human nature decrees that ultimately many people are going to file off the safety, leading to predictably gory anecdotes.
Standardize instead on the hammer, this can never happen. Which is the principle virtue of C.
C++ is probably the worst language ever devised to throw into a room full of monkeys. Many of the people who hate C++ most strongly have an underlying distrustful view of their peers as unwashed monkeys completely lacking in prudence, judgment, or impulse control.
There are situations where C++ simply should not be used, in much the same way that surgery in an African aid hospital lacking electricity and hot water is not your preferred medical option. Under sterile conditions, with doctors you trust, the pros and cons of C++ balance out quite differently.
I've been trying to put this sentiment into words for a long time. In development teams where dog-eat-dog survivalism holds sway (us against the world, me against my teammates, managers against the staff) C++ can only play out in the worst possible way.
Armed with hammers instead (the C language), the tragedy of the commons can't degenerate nearly so far. The virtue of C is that you don't have to like or respect everyone else you work with, which is no small virtue given human is what it is.
Back in 1998 I would have welcomed a standard compliant C++ compiler from Microsoft. What Microsoft did support, it supported one level deep (e.g. namespaces, many template features) with unbridled hypocrisy.
Fast forward to 2008, if Microsoft can't be bothered, others can, so now they bother. Kind of like arriving at a New Year's party at half past twelve. The champagne is gone, and when you make your grand entrance into the room full of glassy expressions, everyone slaps you on the back and says "hey, glad you could make it". Almost like being there.
But it's not a first time scan. Amada was checked long ago, and FreeBSD has been running a Coverity server since Jan 2006.
http://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/2006031800826OSCYDV
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/committers-guide/coverity.html
Worst of all, these articles haven't disclosed the classes of software issues detected. I'm sure huge classes of deadlocks and other system-wide issues go undetected. Even if the point of Coverity is to conduct system-wide analysis, I'd still say large classes escape.
I'm sure it can't detect that a Linux device driver sends the wrong byte to the wrong register of the hardware it supervises.
I think from the DHS perspective, they want to close as many bugs as possible that their adversaries could find by mechanical means. Finding deep bugs is real work, and wouldn't support a multi-vector concerted attack without massive preparation of the kind that HUMINT can usually detect.
I hate the IANAL meme. One has to ask whether our legal ought to be so complex and inscrutable that any remark on the subject by a concerned, intelligent, and clear-headed person can be shot down like a calf in a slaughterhouse with a single 5-grain all-caps slug to the pons presumptuous. I'd like to introduce everyone to IANAL's inbred sister BOAETR (bend over and enjoy the ride).
I don't know whether anyone else has noticed, but it is hugely problematic to live in a society governed by rules you can't comprehend, nor debate to any useful conclusion.
IANAL functions like a secular mirror of the bible-thumping parody of Christian humility: you're never going to find out exactly what God wants, but don't be wrong, because you'll burn in hell forever.