This is something I notice nearly everyone does. We hate to admit we're wrong and if you do admit it, people are more prejudiced against you. If you look at it logically, it makes almost no sense because why should a previous decision or conclusion have any effect on my current conclusion at this time when I have the luxury of gathering more information on the question. Until this was pointed out to me by Nicholas Taleb in "Black Swan" and "Fooled by Randomness", I wasn't very keen to change mind after I made a decision. Taleb claims that George Soros, one of the most successful investors, have been known to change his mind from one day to the next on things that have huge financial impacts. When asked why, he supposedly answers in a very matter of fact tone that he knows more now. If only we were all so logical... Well I guess it's just hardwired into us.
The whole "Do No Evil" thing and being the wunderkind of corporations rub people the wrong way because they serve as mirrors to these other firms. When I worked at a hedge fund, a lot of the guys were really hoping for Google to fail and prove to themselves that Google is no better than all the other companies. One trader suggested after the Google IPO that Google should take all their cash and buy out a media company because their amazing IPO, to the trader, was a fluke and Google was itself worthless. They didn't understand Google or the value of what it does. Google keeps beating the odds and the old establishment hates it. They've told themselves so many times that doing evil is OK because it generates money. Google proved them wrong and they want to see Google fail to prove themselves.
Please, please, please don't compare Google to Microsoft. Microsoft represents the old establishment of winning through deceit, monopoly, distrust, FUD, and marketing. Google is a triumph of engineering. Not only that, I think their mentality has really caught on with the newer companies. There were good companies before Google and there will be more after.
That all depends on what you think prison is for. If it is for revenge, ala "eye for an eye", then sure this is good. But if prison term is for revenge then we should have just executed her in the first place, which we didn't. So that leads me to think that prison terms are meant for rehabilitation. If that's the case then the goal has already been met without the prison.
So it's less of a FAQ and more of, say..., a slap across the face? One might even call it a bitch slap. Or perhaps one can call it "Kim Jong-Il's Playbook" instead of a FAQ.
I've heard the same thing from multiple people about Amex. I've avoided them for a while because of the annual fees but it seems that they're safer than the others.
To be honest, every time there is a hurricane, I am more relieved if it is headed towards the Florida Keys instead some where else that doesn't usually get hit by one. People who grew up in the Keys know about hurricanes. Our houses are mostly steel reinforced concrete and built on stilts. The flood water has to be a story high before it can reach the living room of my parent's house. Keys residents will laugh at anything that's category 3 or less. We know how to stock up on food and when to evacuate because it's something we have to do every couple of years.
My point is that directing a hurricane else where will likely cause more damage and deaths because the places where hurricanes hit have developed "defenses" against them. This is not an useful idea if they're intending to do good. Plus a great deal of natural life actually depends on the occasional hurricane to replenish itself. Hurricanes are natural events in those areas and people and wildlife have adapted to them.
Yochai Benkler[sp?] called it the "Shoulder of Giants" effect in his book the "Wealth of Networks". He noted that innovations is one of those processes where the output serves as an input for the next cycle, meaning when you innovate your discovery can be used for more innovations. Needless to say, he argues against patents and this is coming from a law professor who gained an incredible insight into open source software development. Highly recommend his book.
In the "Myth of Innovations", the author, who I forgot, also talks about innovations are not inevitabilities but as a tree with different ideas branching off. A lot of them will be pruned and turn out to be failures in their environment but a few will survive. His insight was that innovations are more like trees, not lines, and their success depend on the environment they were developed in. The right solution for the wrong problem is still a failure. The two makes it sound awful lot like evolution like you mentioned.
As a web developer, there's no browser I hate more than IE 6 and 5. IE 7, although not the most standard compliant browser out there, is a step closer to being there. A lot of what works on Firefox works on IE 7. IE 6/5 have to treated in a class of their own. I'm glad IE 6 will soon be gone, regardless of what is going to replace it. More importantly, I've been considering the idea of only support Firefox, Opera, and IE 7 for my new project and this move makes my choice easier.
Maybe things will turn out like Firefly/Serenity predicted: Mandarin Chinese and English would be left as the two languages spoken by all humans.
I know that Mandarin is slowly taking over in China with its a hundred plus dialects of Chinese. Even dialects with millions of speakers are falling into disuse by the younger people who prefer to speak Mandarin instead of their native dialect. The government has put no effort into this but since they use Mandarin in school everyone in my generation can speak it. It then becomes a networking effect or Metcalfe's law. Mandarin is just much more useful than the other dialects because you have a billion speakers instead of just a few million. Why bother using those? Plus the regional dialects are what the parents and grandparents use. Mandarin is the cooler, hipper dialect.
It'll be sad when the regional dialects die out because some of them are much older than Mandarin and some classical Chinese poems only rhyme properly in the south dialects such as Cantonese.
Would a virtualization layer fulfill this? VMware's ESX is essentially an OS in itself so it has schedulers that schedule VMs, which is a lot like processes. Inside the VM, the guest OS then schedule its own processes. So maybe the answer is to write and ship application inside virtual appliances. This is just me pondering.
At the risk of being shot down myself, I have to agree with you on most points. I think your article was very sensible. More importantly, I took a similar route as you (PHP, then Ruby on Rails, and now Python/Django). I started my first web project in PHP. I loved PHP because it had nearly everything I needed and it was just so convenient. After my project launched, I realized my code was a mess. I tried to do MVC as much as possible but obviously lacked the experience to do it right. So I gave RoR a try and fell in love after getting over the initial learning curve. Active Records is simply amazing. Ruby itself is just beautiful. The use of code blocks and the ease of using introspection made it easy to write nice clean code. Still it took time and effort. My RoR project was abandoned after I moved to the Bay Area and took a new job. Then I started Python and Django on yet another new project. I'm still hacking away at it. Python is just a fun language to code in and Django is very well made, though I would say not as well polished as RoR. Both Python and Django are in some ways more "practical" than RoR but are at various points inconsistent. Ruby is very predictable after you learn it. Yesterday I revisited my old PHP code. It's still ugly code but I did get a lot done with PHP and the project was more complex than anything I've attempted since and it launched!
PHP is an easy language to get things done. Both Ruby and Python, in my opinion, are much easier to read because you can say quite a bit in a few lines (list comprehension in Python can get hard to decipher though). So what would be interesting to know is how well you can maintain your new code and how easy it would be for someone else to do it. Personally, I would find it harder to write good and maintainable code in PHP than in Ruby and Python. In fact, I find myself digging through the Django framework code to look around but had a much harder time doing it with CakePHP (which I really don't like and prefer plain PHP over, sorry). It seems that some of it has to do with the languages they're written in.
You're kidding me right? You based your statement about the Long March on looks? The Long March resembles the Delta family of rockets and the earlier Arianes too. That's just silly.
Furthermore, you obviously don't grasp the concept of price parity. No one mentioned a thing about worker productivity. You dragging that into the conversation just shows how little you understand the concept. Let me give you an example. If an American has $5 allocated for his lunch budget and a Chinese has the 5 yuan allocated, it would look as though the American will have roughly 6 times as much for lunch. However, since the Chinese is buying his lunch in China, his 5 yuan would buy him more or less the same. Only when there is trade happening does the foreign exchange rate matter. So if you examine the Chinese budget for their program in dollar terms you're going to get misleading results.
Lastly, what the hell is the point of soothing our pride? That's such a petty, petty thing to do. We've gone to the moon and come back almost half a century ago. Worrying about something else doing the same now just shows how insecure we are about ourselves. Personally, I'm not worried and don't feel the need to use words to feel proud about our achievements. I look at the vast amount of scientific data NASA has generated, not some national pride stunt, to feel proud. I'm more proud of us launching the next space telescope or the Mars Rovers than I would ever be about us repeating what we had done 50 years ago.
You're wrong on two accounts. Long March is indigenously developed. Also, the US having a space budget with more dollars doesn't translate into 10x the resources. You have to consider price parity. What I mean is that China doesn't pay dollar to its workers and things are cheaper over there. If you only use the exchange rate to compare the budgets you won't get a fair comparison. You have to find the relative cost of products in each country, which is how price parity came about. Once you take that into account the difference is not nearly as great as you think.
More importantly, I don't know why people bother posting things like that. It doesn't nothing but soothe our pride. Either we make it our goal to return to the moon before the Chinese or just shrug it off and say we've already done it in the 60s. If we're are going to go to return, then let's take the Chinese seriously and put some real effort into it. The worst thing for us to do is to put in a half ass effort and waste resources.
Which is exactly why we built our B2 Spirit stealth bomber out of it... or why Ferrari uses CF for their cars or why my high end Cannondale bicycle is made out of it. Aluminum doesn't bend; it just cracks given enough flexing (try this with a soda can). Any cyclist who knows bikes are aware of this.
I recall a letter written to the daily newspaper of my alma mater by another alum who fought in WWII. He stated that he and those of his generation never believed in Brokaw's "Greatest Generation bullshit" (exact words written and printed) and fought because his country told him to.
I agree with you completely on how unfairly Vietnam veterans were treated compared to WWII veterans when both groups fought for the same reason. They were drafted. That's not to understate the merits and deeds of those who fought but to call them the "Greatest Generation" is just unfair to the later and previous generations. What about those who fought in the Civil War? Let's not forget that all the soldiers holding up the Iraq war today are volunteers. So how is our generation any less valiant than those before or after us?
Slashdot Mirror
This is something I notice nearly everyone does. We hate to admit we're wrong and if you do admit it, people are more prejudiced against you. If you look at it logically, it makes almost no sense because why should a previous decision or conclusion have any effect on my current conclusion at this time when I have the luxury of gathering more information on the question. Until this was pointed out to me by Nicholas Taleb in "Black Swan" and "Fooled by Randomness", I wasn't very keen to change mind after I made a decision. Taleb claims that George Soros, one of the most successful investors, have been known to change his mind from one day to the next on things that have huge financial impacts. When asked why, he supposedly answers in a very matter of fact tone that he knows more now. If only we were all so logical... Well I guess it's just hardwired into us.
Sprint and Nextel is one company. Sprint acquired Nextel.
At least they won't instinctively duck every time the CEO puts his hands on the back of a chair...
So... myth confirmed?
The whole "Do No Evil" thing and being the wunderkind of corporations rub people the wrong way because they serve as mirrors to these other firms. When I worked at a hedge fund, a lot of the guys were really hoping for Google to fail and prove to themselves that Google is no better than all the other companies. One trader suggested after the Google IPO that Google should take all their cash and buy out a media company because their amazing IPO, to the trader, was a fluke and Google was itself worthless. They didn't understand Google or the value of what it does. Google keeps beating the odds and the old establishment hates it. They've told themselves so many times that doing evil is OK because it generates money. Google proved them wrong and they want to see Google fail to prove themselves.
Please, please, please don't compare Google to Microsoft. Microsoft represents the old establishment of winning through deceit, monopoly, distrust, FUD, and marketing. Google is a triumph of engineering. Not only that, I think their mentality has really caught on with the newer companies. There were good companies before Google and there will be more after.
That all depends on what you think prison is for. If it is for revenge, ala "eye for an eye", then sure this is good. But if prison term is for revenge then we should have just executed her in the first place, which we didn't. So that leads me to think that prison terms are meant for rehabilitation. If that's the case then the goal has already been met without the prison.
So it's less of a FAQ and more of, say..., a slap across the face? One might even call it a bitch slap. Or perhaps one can call it "Kim Jong-Il's Playbook" instead of a FAQ.
Pouring salt on someone's wounds is not okay but pepper is fine?
I've heard the same thing from multiple people about Amex. I've avoided them for a while because of the annual fees but it seems that they're safer than the others.
To be honest, every time there is a hurricane, I am more relieved if it is headed towards the Florida Keys instead some where else that doesn't usually get hit by one. People who grew up in the Keys know about hurricanes. Our houses are mostly steel reinforced concrete and built on stilts. The flood water has to be a story high before it can reach the living room of my parent's house. Keys residents will laugh at anything that's category 3 or less. We know how to stock up on food and when to evacuate because it's something we have to do every couple of years.
My point is that directing a hurricane else where will likely cause more damage and deaths because the places where hurricanes hit have developed "defenses" against them. This is not an useful idea if they're intending to do good. Plus a great deal of natural life actually depends on the occasional hurricane to replenish itself. Hurricanes are natural events in those areas and people and wildlife have adapted to them.
"PCs are meant to be a good enough and cheap enough solution - not necessarily the best solution."
Good enough and cheap enough is usually the best solution if resources (time and money) hold any value.
In the "Myth of Innovations", the author, who I forgot, also talks about innovations are not inevitabilities but as a tree with different ideas branching off. A lot of them will be pruned and turn out to be failures in their environment but a few will survive. His insight was that innovations are more like trees, not lines, and their success depend on the environment they were developed in. The right solution for the wrong problem is still a failure. The two makes it sound awful lot like evolution like you mentioned.
The Senate has to ratify any treaty the US signs. We signed the treaty but never ratified it. You need a 2/3 majority for that to happen.
As a web developer, there's no browser I hate more than IE 6 and 5. IE 7, although not the most standard compliant browser out there, is a step closer to being there. A lot of what works on Firefox works on IE 7. IE 6/5 have to treated in a class of their own. I'm glad IE 6 will soon be gone, regardless of what is going to replace it. More importantly, I've been considering the idea of only support Firefox, Opera, and IE 7 for my new project and this move makes my choice easier.
Maybe things will turn out like Firefly/Serenity predicted: Mandarin Chinese and English would be left as the two languages spoken by all humans.
I know that Mandarin is slowly taking over in China with its a hundred plus dialects of Chinese. Even dialects with millions of speakers are falling into disuse by the younger people who prefer to speak Mandarin instead of their native dialect. The government has put no effort into this but since they use Mandarin in school everyone in my generation can speak it. It then becomes a networking effect or Metcalfe's law. Mandarin is just much more useful than the other dialects because you have a billion speakers instead of just a few million. Why bother using those? Plus the regional dialects are what the parents and grandparents use. Mandarin is the cooler, hipper dialect.
It'll be sad when the regional dialects die out because some of them are much older than Mandarin and some classical Chinese poems only rhyme properly in the south dialects such as Cantonese.
Would a virtualization layer fulfill this? VMware's ESX is essentially an OS in itself so it has schedulers that schedule VMs, which is a lot like processes. Inside the VM, the guest OS then schedule its own processes. So maybe the answer is to write and ship application inside virtual appliances. This is just me pondering.
I know the Netherlands is a open, permissive country but the government dealing cocaine is just a little too much. No, I did not RTFA.
But... but...
It was so obvious!
I'm getting my day in the sun? What did I do wrong? I'm sorry! I won't do it again, please let me back inside! I'm getting a tan. Help!
At the risk of being shot down myself, I have to agree with you on most points. I think your article was very sensible. More importantly, I took a similar route as you (PHP, then Ruby on Rails, and now Python/Django). I started my first web project in PHP. I loved PHP because it had nearly everything I needed and it was just so convenient. After my project launched, I realized my code was a mess. I tried to do MVC as much as possible but obviously lacked the experience to do it right. So I gave RoR a try and fell in love after getting over the initial learning curve. Active Records is simply amazing. Ruby itself is just beautiful. The use of code blocks and the ease of using introspection made it easy to write nice clean code. Still it took time and effort. My RoR project was abandoned after I moved to the Bay Area and took a new job. Then I started Python and Django on yet another new project. I'm still hacking away at it. Python is just a fun language to code in and Django is very well made, though I would say not as well polished as RoR. Both Python and Django are in some ways more "practical" than RoR but are at various points inconsistent. Ruby is very predictable after you learn it. Yesterday I revisited my old PHP code. It's still ugly code but I did get a lot done with PHP and the project was more complex than anything I've attempted since and it launched!
PHP is an easy language to get things done. Both Ruby and Python, in my opinion, are much easier to read because you can say quite a bit in a few lines (list comprehension in Python can get hard to decipher though). So what would be interesting to know is how well you can maintain your new code and how easy it would be for someone else to do it. Personally, I would find it harder to write good and maintainable code in PHP than in Ruby and Python. In fact, I find myself digging through the Django framework code to look around but had a much harder time doing it with CakePHP (which I really don't like and prefer plain PHP over, sorry). It seems that some of it has to do with the languages they're written in.
You're kidding me right? You based your statement about the Long March on looks? The Long March resembles the Delta family of rockets and the earlier Arianes too. That's just silly.
Furthermore, you obviously don't grasp the concept of price parity. No one mentioned a thing about worker productivity. You dragging that into the conversation just shows how little you understand the concept. Let me give you an example. If an American has $5 allocated for his lunch budget and a Chinese has the 5 yuan allocated, it would look as though the American will have roughly 6 times as much for lunch. However, since the Chinese is buying his lunch in China, his 5 yuan would buy him more or less the same. Only when there is trade happening does the foreign exchange rate matter. So if you examine the Chinese budget for their program in dollar terms you're going to get misleading results.
Lastly, what the hell is the point of soothing our pride? That's such a petty, petty thing to do. We've gone to the moon and come back almost half a century ago. Worrying about something else doing the same now just shows how insecure we are about ourselves. Personally, I'm not worried and don't feel the need to use words to feel proud about our achievements. I look at the vast amount of scientific data NASA has generated, not some national pride stunt, to feel proud. I'm more proud of us launching the next space telescope or the Mars Rovers than I would ever be about us repeating what we had done 50 years ago.
You're wrong on two accounts. Long March is indigenously developed. Also, the US having a space budget with more dollars doesn't translate into 10x the resources. You have to consider price parity. What I mean is that China doesn't pay dollar to its workers and things are cheaper over there. If you only use the exchange rate to compare the budgets you won't get a fair comparison. You have to find the relative cost of products in each country, which is how price parity came about. Once you take that into account the difference is not nearly as great as you think.
More importantly, I don't know why people bother posting things like that. It doesn't nothing but soothe our pride. Either we make it our goal to return to the moon before the Chinese or just shrug it off and say we've already done it in the 60s. If we're are going to go to return, then let's take the Chinese seriously and put some real effort into it. The worst thing for us to do is to put in a half ass effort and waste resources.
Which is exactly why we built our B2 Spirit stealth bomber out of it... or why Ferrari uses CF for their cars or why my high end Cannondale bicycle is made out of it. Aluminum doesn't bend; it just cracks given enough flexing (try this with a soda can). Any cyclist who knows bikes are aware of this.
*.rb? You must think we live in a perfect and elegant world.
I agree with you completely on how unfairly Vietnam veterans were treated compared to WWII veterans when both groups fought for the same reason. They were drafted. That's not to understate the merits and deeds of those who fought but to call them the "Greatest Generation" is just unfair to the later and previous generations. What about those who fought in the Civil War? Let's not forget that all the soldiers holding up the Iraq war today are volunteers. So how is our generation any less valiant than those before or after us?