An ironic twist I think... I know many people whose DSLR pictures totally suck because the camera is beyond their ability to master even simple photographs. Also, ironically, anyone who would want useful information from digital pictures can readily shoot quality pictures with non-DSLR digital cameras. Is this for real?
well, the bulk of real information about the said thief in TFA says he "recieved a stolen motorcycle". This isn't much to go on and get a sense of how or why the sanctions were applied. Considering the dearth of underlying exposition, this article qualifies as a non sequitur.
Some additional information worth introducing to the discussion:
"how" the thief received said stolen motorcycle
"why"/. summary would describe motorcycle as "bicycle"
"if" there were computer-related activity leading to discovery and tracking of said thief.
Even microsoft will distance themselves from this thesis. They've come too far "embracing" open. My guess, this guy gets cut loose, and if microsoft can make a PR coup of it at the same time, they will.
Correct! There are a number of studies about the effects of bicycle seats, but I find none associated with (directly) lowered sperm count. That's all I was asking.
need citation!, I know of no study where the cause of lower count is from seat... there are a couple where lower count is theorized to be caused by excess heat from physical exertion of bicycling.
I'm the guy in our household responsible for applying our patches, being an IT professional and all.
Since we have a "few" computers all around the house, it's pretty much every time I sit down to one I have to apply patches, and usually a reboot to boot. Sometimes, it's a rarely used computer that I grab (laptop) just to get a few quick things done, and it requires multiple iterations of patches and reboots. Sigh.
I find it exasperating that my experience is almost always, "apply these patches", and then you can do some work with Windows. The good news (for me), I'm finally migrating EVERYTHING (as in replacing with) Macs and Linux. Time and money, that's all it takes.
Interestingly the other day... I got in and was productive immediately on a Windows laptop. Wow! C'est vrai? And when I went to shut it down? "Please do not power down your computer. Windows is installing (3 of 10...) updates..." WTH?
in addition to the new release...
on
Vim 7.2 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
O'Reilly released the latest new version of their vi book, (now
"Learning
the vi and Vim Editors") last
summer with seven new chapters devoted to vim!
I long ago discovered my text-messaging device allows me to talk
directly to another person through his or her text-messaging device.
Amazing!
And, not only is this more efficient and accurate, it costs far less.
Imagine the lives that could be saved if doctors were given instructions
for talking through these text-messaging devices. I, for one welcome
the emergence of these devices and their new-found features.
I was stopped on Christmas Holiday day in Chicago's downtown Ogilvie
Transportation Center, the terminal where half the commuter trains come and go. I
was firmly admonished to cease and desist taking pictures of my girlfriend in fromt
of a Christmas Display in front of one of the stored at the center. I joked that
the camera had no film (get it, digital, ha-ha), but the security officer was not
amused and said he would have to take my camera and arrest me if I took any more
pictures. WTH?
I understand security is an issue, and scary stuff has happened, but stopping
people from enjoying their holidays this way doesn't improve or increase our
security a whit. Nada, Zip! If someone wants the information about what a
building looks like, it's certainly easy to do on the covert. But, it's probably
not even necessary, as blueprints and photos exist on the internet for any target
one might find interesting.
This, in some oblique way is a victory for terrorists, they've cowed us into
being such pussies that we no longer can live day to day and enjoy things freely as
we should be able. Annoying. Frustrating. Embarrassing.
I think the emphasis needs to be less on specific and proprietary technologies
and more on how a candidate thinks. While the task and platform/architecture at
hand is important, picking someone because they know flash, and you're "doing"
flash may be the wrong reasoning. Instead, focus on picking someone who has some
proven background, strong in at least a couple of areas. Verify they really are
strong, but then ask them questions that make them think. Give them problems to
solve. Give them something unsolvable to solve. See how the react.
Getting a sense of how they maneuver in problem-solving situations is
going to be a much better indicator of their eventual worth than some credential
(certificate, etc.) in the chosen technology du jour. A good tech can always and
easily adapt to new and different ways to do things.
I wonder why bother with 1080 sets if they're doing this. The difference in quality seems quite dramatic. I would guess that while you have a choice between 720 and 1080, it's hardly worth extra $$ for the 1080. Just curious if this would seem true to others.
Why does the marketplace demand so little when it comes to these
services?
The marketplace has been duped into believing that this is the best technology
can provide. People don't have time to know, understand, or research history and
find that technology really can be reliable.
I'll get modded troll, but I lay much of this at Microsoft's feet. I laughed
them off when I first heard of them and their goal of taking over the industry.
After all, I'd been working on systems that ran 24x7 with five-9 reliability for
years, and DOS/Windows couldn't touch that.
One time I had an opportunity to visit Microsoft and have lunch with a friend
there. I figured while there I'd take the opportunity. I asked them in hushed
tones, "Just how do you configure Windows so that you don't have to reboot
it all of the time?" They looked at me like I was crazy.
Technology can provide reliability. The general public is no longer even
aware that it's possible.
This smells a little like Netscape-gate. It would seem that giving
away (very expensive) software to the demographic of "beginners" is using
Microsoft's monopoly position to affect competition in another market, in
this case software development.
While Open Source tools are available for free, this smacks of Microsoft
competing by giving something of perceived monetary value for free too,
thus offering something with the imprimatur of "valuable". This is similar
to the Netscape debacle. The only difference is that a tool such as
Eclipse's starting price already is zero. But, this move by
Microsoft unbalances the playing field again with the deep pockets backing
them as long as necessary. I'd guess their hope is they plant the seed
early enough, and corner the student market and their future work to be
always Microsoft products until other tools are no longer used.
When the rest of the competition disappears, Microsoft gets to charge as
much as they want. If Microsoft wants to compete like this, I wish the
government would do what they'd discussed doing before, and break Microsoft
up into separate companies. This would force them to compete along product
lines without the ability to destroy competition without fear of losing
money in the process. They will lose money in the process, but
they won't fear it. And, in the long run, this is a huge money and market
grab for them.
The key here is they can't compete... not that they can't get some business. Yes, people may have shown they go out of their way to download a different browser, but if the market is still severely skewed (IMO it is) because of a monopoly abuse, there is a case for a remedy.
The summary suggests that Firefox's success could come at Opera's
expense:
'Firefox's continued success in Europe may
undermine some of the arguments made by Norwegian browser maker Opera
in an antitrust complaint filed against Microsoft in December of last
year. Opera accused Microsoft of abusing its dominant position in the
web browser market by tying Internet Explorer to
Windows.
Isn't the issue with Microsoft more correctly framed that Microsoft
is using its monopoly and dominance of its OS to stifle
competition in other markets, in this case, specifically browsers? I
believe that if Firefox is actually close to 30% market share,
Microsoft's position in browsers wouldn't (or would barely) meet the threshold for
monopoly. It's their position in their OS. Opera's case shouldn't be
at risk.
First and foremost, to answer the question put forth in the
summary:
Is this just pop psychology masquerading as
science?
To parse:
is it pop psychology(?)
this first would have to lend
credence that the thesis warrants comparison to psychology in any
way, let alone "pop" psychology which tends to be a few rungs down
from the imprimatur of truly researched psychology. It
isn't. It's not even close.
masquerading(?)
You bet! No matter what this is
trying to be in any genuine sense other than phooey, it's
masquerading.
science(?)
Not a chance. Anecdotally I would expect
to be able to be able to think of a number of fellow engineers who
match the description and thesis. I'm not sure I can even think of a
single example. I can think of some peers from the past who I may
describe as of a similar mindset, but those I would hardly describe
as real engineers.
I'm guessing this article was supposed to be released April 1, but
someone jumped the gun. That said, it's not even a very funny joke.
I don't know why this article is so harshly critical of
MapReduce. They base their critique and criticism on the following
five tenets, which they further elaborate in detail in the article:
A giant step backward in the programming paradigm for large-scale data intensive applications
A sub-optimal implementation, in that it uses brute force instead of indexing
Not novel at all -- it represents a specific implementation of
well known techniques developed nearly 25 years ago
Missing most of the features that are routinely included in current DBMS
Incompatible with all of the tools DBMS users have come to depend on
If you take the time to read the article you'll find they use
axiomatic arguments with lemmas like: "schemas are good", and
"Separation of the schema from the application is good, etc.
First, they make the assumption that these points are relevant and
germaine to MapReduce. But, they mostly aren't.
Also taking the five tenets listed, here are my observations:
A giant step backward in the programming paradigm for large-scale data intensive applications
they don't offer any proof, merely their view... However, the
fact that Google used this technique to re-generate their entire
internet index leads me to believe that is this were indeed a giant
step backward, we must have been pretty darned evolved to step
"back" into such a backwards approach
A sub-optimal implementation, in that it uses brute force instead of indexing
Not sure why brute force is such a poor choice, especially
given what this technique is used for. From wikipedia:
MapReduce is useful in a wide range of applications,
including: "distributed grep, distributed sort, web link-graph
reversal, term-vector per host, web access log stats, inverted
index construction, document clustering, machine learning,
statistical machine translation..." Most significantly, when
MapReduce was finished, it was used to completely regenerate
Google's index of the World Wide Web, and replaced the old ad hoc
programs that updated the index and ran the various analyses.
Not novel at all -- it represents a specific implementation of
well known techniques developed nearly 25 years ago
Again, not sure why something "old" represents something
"bad". The most reliable rockets for getting our space satellites
into orbit are the oldest ones.
I would also argue their bold approach to applying these
techniques in such a massively aggregated architecture is at least
a little novel, and based on results of how Google has used it,
effective.
Missing most of the features that are routinely included in current DBMS
They're mistakenly assuming this is for database
programming
Incompatible with all of the tools DBMS users have come to depend on
See previous bullet
Are these guys just trying to stake a reputation based on being
critical of Google?
I know some kids who are extremely bright, curious, and for lack of
a better description, "like to experiment". Any one of these I think
could have done the same thing, and with completely innocent
(though mischievous) intent. For playing with such big toys in
such a fashion there should be repercussions. But the kids I know who
also could have done something like this would be much more on track
with thinking about how they're moving switches than about what moving
those switches implies.
However, I'm led to a different train of thought. What other
systems are out there created in the same context, i.e., with little
thought to external interference? I'm betting there are a "few". I
wonder that in the process of designing something like this if we must
pay more attention to the possibility of outsiders tinkering. I hope
France's TGV has a bit more built in checks and balances than this. I
hope the new Boeing 787 has
more security built in than this.
I actually think (and hope) this kid's imagination and curiosity
somehow gets channeled rather than squashed. He actually sounds like
he could be a contributor. Of course, he's at least grounded for the
next month.
Is this a solution looking for a problem? The first thing that
comes to mind for me around these new features is, how do I explain
this to my parents when now, after years of getting the hang
of Outlook (and others), they're seeing e-mail messages arranged in some
heuristic-based order they don't understand. (And, yeah, I know for now this is Yahoo only, but it always seems that all jump on the bandwagon and add their version of the latest gee-whiz new e-mail behavior.)
Heck, I could see it as throwing me... all of a sudden something
that should have been a very important note falls to the bottom of the
queue because it wasn't a correspondent in my "linkedin" network.
And, it's a whole new path for spammers to investigate and
abuse.
I've learned to manage my e-mails without these kinds of filters,
even when dealing with more than 100 e-mails a day. And, when you're
getting that many e-mails a day, organizing "friends" to the top isn't
likely to be much help. You still have a ton of e-mail to sort out
with your own personal heuristics.
With inverted indices, IMO, there's enough power at your fingertips
to manage your information your own way. Letting Yahoo sift through
the chaff to extract phone numbers, restaurant recommendations, etc.,
starts to make me nervous... again, with spammers figuring ways to get
into your lists.... no thanks.
I know I don't have to use these kinds of new services.
But I also know I'm going to get called upon, as always, to explain to
family and friends, what's going on with their new mail interactions.
At some point these automagic features transcend their explainability.
Reminds me a little of Lotus NOTES... a cool and interesting solution
religiously doted upon by its followers, but not really a solution to
an existing problem but more a solution looking for a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
An ironic twist I think... I know many people whose DSLR pictures totally suck because the camera is beyond their ability to master even simple photographs. Also, ironically, anyone who would want useful information from digital pictures can readily shoot quality pictures with non-DSLR digital cameras. Is this for real?
yes, that would be sub-bullet one of many under "etc."... :-)
Some additional information worth introducing to the discussion:
lost me at "penultimate"
Even microsoft will distance themselves from this thesis. They've come too far "embracing" open. My guess, this guy gets cut loose, and if microsoft can make a PR coup of it at the same time, they will.
Correct! There are a number of studies about the effects of bicycle seats, but I find none associated with (directly) lowered sperm count. That's all I was asking.
need citation!, I know of no study where the cause of lower count is from seat... there are a couple where lower count is theorized to be caused by excess heat from physical exertion of bicycling.
school days are Monday through Friday, which is a little week. Maybe that's what he meant.
Is this game too hard to play?
Since we have a "few" computers all around the house, it's pretty much every time I sit down to one I have to apply patches, and usually a reboot to boot. Sometimes, it's a rarely used computer that I grab (laptop) just to get a few quick things done, and it requires multiple iterations of patches and reboots. Sigh.
I find it exasperating that my experience is almost always, "apply these patches", and then you can do some work with Windows. The good news (for me), I'm finally migrating EVERYTHING (as in replacing with) Macs and Linux. Time and money, that's all it takes.
Interestingly the other day... I got in and was productive immediately on a Windows laptop. Wow! C'est vrai? And when I went to shut it down? "Please do not power down your computer. Windows is installing (3 of 10...) updates..." WTH?
O'Reilly released the latest new version of their vi book, (now "Learning the vi and Vim Editors") last summer with seven new chapters devoted to vim!
I long ago discovered my text-messaging device allows me to talk directly to another person through his or her text-messaging device. Amazing!
And, not only is this more efficient and accurate, it costs far less. Imagine the lives that could be saved if doctors were given instructions for talking through these text-messaging devices. I, for one welcome the emergence of these devices and their new-found features.
I was stopped on Christmas Holiday day in Chicago's downtown Ogilvie Transportation Center, the terminal where half the commuter trains come and go. I was firmly admonished to cease and desist taking pictures of my girlfriend in fromt of a Christmas Display in front of one of the stored at the center. I joked that the camera had no film (get it, digital, ha-ha), but the security officer was not amused and said he would have to take my camera and arrest me if I took any more pictures. WTH?
I understand security is an issue, and scary stuff has happened, but stopping people from enjoying their holidays this way doesn't improve or increase our security a whit. Nada, Zip! If someone wants the information about what a building looks like, it's certainly easy to do on the covert. But, it's probably not even necessary, as blueprints and photos exist on the internet for any target one might find interesting.
This, in some oblique way is a victory for terrorists, they've cowed us into being such pussies that we no longer can live day to day and enjoy things freely as we should be able. Annoying. Frustrating. Embarrassing.
I think the emphasis needs to be less on specific and proprietary technologies and more on how a candidate thinks. While the task and platform/architecture at hand is important, picking someone because they know flash, and you're "doing" flash may be the wrong reasoning. Instead, focus on picking someone who has some proven background, strong in at least a couple of areas. Verify they really are strong, but then ask them questions that make them think. Give them problems to solve. Give them something unsolvable to solve. See how the react.
Getting a sense of how they maneuver in problem-solving situations is going to be a much better indicator of their eventual worth than some credential (certificate, etc.) in the chosen technology du jour. A good tech can always and easily adapt to new and different ways to do things.
I wonder why bother with 1080 sets if they're doing this. The difference in quality seems quite dramatic. I would guess that while you have a choice between 720 and 1080, it's hardly worth extra $$ for the 1080. Just curious if this would seem true to others.
The marketplace has been duped into believing that this is the best technology can provide. People don't have time to know, understand, or research history and find that technology really can be reliable.
I'll get modded troll, but I lay much of this at Microsoft's feet. I laughed them off when I first heard of them and their goal of taking over the industry. After all, I'd been working on systems that ran 24x7 with five-9 reliability for years, and DOS/Windows couldn't touch that.
One time I had an opportunity to visit Microsoft and have lunch with a friend there. I figured while there I'd take the opportunity. I asked them in hushed tones, "Just how do you configure Windows so that you don't have to reboot it all of the time?" They looked at me like I was crazy.
Technology can provide reliability. The general public is no longer even aware that it's possible.
This smells a little like Netscape-gate. It would seem that giving away (very expensive) software to the demographic of "beginners" is using Microsoft's monopoly position to affect competition in another market, in this case software development.
While Open Source tools are available for free, this smacks of Microsoft competing by giving something of perceived monetary value for free too, thus offering something with the imprimatur of "valuable". This is similar to the Netscape debacle. The only difference is that a tool such as Eclipse's starting price already is zero. But, this move by Microsoft unbalances the playing field again with the deep pockets backing them as long as necessary. I'd guess their hope is they plant the seed early enough, and corner the student market and their future work to be always Microsoft products until other tools are no longer used.
When the rest of the competition disappears, Microsoft gets to charge as much as they want. If Microsoft wants to compete like this, I wish the government would do what they'd discussed doing before, and break Microsoft up into separate companies. This would force them to compete along product lines without the ability to destroy competition without fear of losing money in the process. They will lose money in the process, but they won't fear it. And, in the long run, this is a huge money and market grab for them.
The key here is they can't compete... not that they can't get some business. Yes, people may have shown they go out of their way to download a different browser, but if the market is still severely skewed (IMO it is) because of a monopoly abuse, there is a case for a remedy.
The summary suggests that Firefox's success could come at Opera's expense:
Isn't the issue with Microsoft more correctly framed that Microsoft is using its monopoly and dominance of its OS to stifle competition in other markets, in this case, specifically browsers? I believe that if Firefox is actually close to 30% market share, Microsoft's position in browsers wouldn't (or would barely) meet the threshold for monopoly. It's their position in their OS. Opera's case shouldn't be at risk.
First and foremost, to answer the question put forth in the summary:
To parse:
this first would have to lend credence that the thesis warrants comparison to psychology in any way, let alone "pop" psychology which tends to be a few rungs down from the imprimatur of truly researched psychology. It isn't. It's not even close.
You bet! No matter what this is trying to be in any genuine sense other than phooey, it's masquerading.
Not a chance. Anecdotally I would expect to be able to be able to think of a number of fellow engineers who match the description and thesis. I'm not sure I can even think of a single example. I can think of some peers from the past who I may describe as of a similar mindset, but those I would hardly describe as real engineers.
I'm guessing this article was supposed to be released April 1, but someone jumped the gun. That said, it's not even a very funny joke.
I don't know why this article is so harshly critical of MapReduce. They base their critique and criticism on the following five tenets, which they further elaborate in detail in the article:
If you take the time to read the article you'll find they use axiomatic arguments with lemmas like: "schemas are good", and "Separation of the schema from the application is good, etc. First, they make the assumption that these points are relevant and germaine to MapReduce. But, they mostly aren't.
Also taking the five tenets listed, here are my observations:
they don't offer any proof, merely their view... However, the fact that Google used this technique to re-generate their entire internet index leads me to believe that is this were indeed a giant step backward, we must have been pretty darned evolved to step "back" into such a backwards approach
Not sure why brute force is such a poor choice, especially given what this technique is used for. From wikipedia:
Again, not sure why something "old" represents something "bad". The most reliable rockets for getting our space satellites into orbit are the oldest ones.
I would also argue their bold approach to applying these techniques in such a massively aggregated architecture is at least a little novel, and based on results of how Google has used it, effective.
They're mistakenly assuming this is for database programming
See previous bullet
Are these guys just trying to stake a reputation based on being critical of Google?
It's easier than you think:
After sufficient interactions like these with a good programmer you really should be able to recognize him (or her).
(Appropriate apologies to Steve Martin for shameless borrowing of his "How to get a million dollars, and not pay taxes" routine.
I know some kids who are extremely bright, curious, and for lack of a better description, "like to experiment". Any one of these I think could have done the same thing, and with completely innocent (though mischievous) intent. For playing with such big toys in such a fashion there should be repercussions. But the kids I know who also could have done something like this would be much more on track with thinking about how they're moving switches than about what moving those switches implies.
However, I'm led to a different train of thought. What other systems are out there created in the same context, i.e., with little thought to external interference? I'm betting there are a "few". I wonder that in the process of designing something like this if we must pay more attention to the possibility of outsiders tinkering. I hope France's TGV has a bit more built in checks and balances than this. I hope the new Boeing 787 has more security built in than this.
I actually think (and hope) this kid's imagination and curiosity somehow gets channeled rather than squashed. He actually sounds like he could be a contributor. Of course, he's at least grounded for the next month.
Here's another list you may wish to avoid: (FTA)
(who may have received up to $1M for their information).Is this a solution looking for a problem? The first thing that comes to mind for me around these new features is, how do I explain this to my parents when now, after years of getting the hang of Outlook (and others), they're seeing e-mail messages arranged in some heuristic-based order they don't understand. (And, yeah, I know for now this is Yahoo only, but it always seems that all jump on the bandwagon and add their version of the latest gee-whiz new e-mail behavior.)
Heck, I could see it as throwing me... all of a sudden something that should have been a very important note falls to the bottom of the queue because it wasn't a correspondent in my "linkedin" network.
And, it's a whole new path for spammers to investigate and abuse.
I've learned to manage my e-mails without these kinds of filters, even when dealing with more than 100 e-mails a day. And, when you're getting that many e-mails a day, organizing "friends" to the top isn't likely to be much help. You still have a ton of e-mail to sort out with your own personal heuristics.
With inverted indices, IMO, there's enough power at your fingertips to manage your information your own way. Letting Yahoo sift through the chaff to extract phone numbers, restaurant recommendations, etc., starts to make me nervous... again, with spammers figuring ways to get into your lists.... no thanks.
I know I don't have to use these kinds of new services. But I also know I'm going to get called upon, as always, to explain to family and friends, what's going on with their new mail interactions. At some point these automagic features transcend their explainability. Reminds me a little of Lotus NOTES... a cool and interesting solution religiously doted upon by its followers, but not really a solution to an existing problem but more a solution looking for a problem.