The question presupposes too many things. Namely that muslims are either praying or plotting terror 24/7 and that no athiest ever plans to hurt anyone else.
No it doesn't. I presupposes only that people might be dumb enough to think that. And while Scott was being satirical, I don't think he's actually wrong about that.
I've tried to keep these sufficiently un-obvious that you might not have them. Hopefully I've succeeded with most of them, though Penrose and Brookes works are well known - though nothing like as well known as they should be.
The Inventions of Daedalus The Further Inventions of Daedalus These two books are just fabulous. The author, David E. H. Jones comes up with far fetched inventions, immaculately thought through and presented. Sometimes they then come true - he predicted buckyballs rather handily, for example. The books are collections of his columns for Nature and other publications, with additional notes and cartoons. Absolutely lovely, but sadly out of print - you'll have to snap up second hand copies quick. I'd love it if Jones did a new edition, or better yet another book!
The Emperor's New Mind - Roger Penrose. An exposition of weak AI, but taking in computer science and particle physics. Pretty epic, though I have trouble with his conclusions.
The Man Who Knew Too Much - Stephen Inwood. A life of Robert Hooke, a multi-talented scientist of the 17th century. Fascinating insight into the perspective of a friend or acquaintance of Newton, Christopher Wren, and Edmund Halley.
Mind Children - Hans Moravec Musings on the future of robot and human intelligence, with particular thoughts about how we might "upload" our minds to computers. Not as silly a book as I make it sound, I think.
The Mythical Man Month - Fred Brookes The truth about project management. Written in 1975 and we still haven't learnt.
Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (Case Studies in Common Lisp) - Peter Norvig Lots of hands on stuff, plenty of examples, and a good introduction to Lisp into the bargain. I loved it at college, and I've just bought myself a copy after all these years (the Library at University didn't see their copy very often while I was there).
Hacking Matter - Wil McCarthy (not a typo, it really is "Wil") This is great, but I have to say I didn't enjoy it quite as much as the entertaining semi-humorous science fiction novel The Collapsium that's based to a large part around the more speculative parts of this non-fiction book. But regardless, it opened my eyes to a number of possibilities; even if they come to naught I appreciate his voice on the subject.
Thanks for the excellent question - I'll enjoy reading the other contributions to this thread.
There's a (probably urban myth) story about someone nicking power from the UK national grid by putting a huge coil in a shed directly under the power lines that hung over his garden...
I recently configured Ubuntu and XP Pro on the same (Thinkpad) laptop consecutively over a couple of days.
Getting Ubuntu installed was genuinely trivial. Getting XP installed was a total pain in the butt, with most of my time spent divining the correct drivers to download and the appropriate order in which to install them.
However, points in XP's favour: It was installed out of the box - I was doing this because I wanted the laptop installed MY way, not IBM/Lenovo's way (gah, it had 96 processes running as delivered). It looks and feels a hell of a lot more professional than Ubuntu. Strictly speaking the driver issue wasn't XP's fault - that's up to the hardware vendor.
Points in Ubuntu's favour: The software's all free, and nobody asked me to validate my installation (or refused to accept the OEM sticker from the bottom of the laptop forcing me to use a spare license instead - not everone would have had this). Strictly speaking the driver issue wasn't Ubuntu's fault - that's up to the hardware vendor:-)
Maybe Ubuntu could be tweaked to run as smoothly as I like, maybe (probably) it didn't fully recognise the hardware that it was running on.
If distributions like Ubuntu can be sufficiently commonplace to be a correctly pre-installed option on consumer laptops, and manage the last 10% of the look and feel issues, I think Linux on the desktop is a real possibility. But I couldn't tell you how far off that's going to be.
The architecture of Java 5 EE is unnecessarily complex.
This usually translates as "I don't understand all of the Java features - therefore it must be BAD.
No. Java is necessarily complex. The features aren't their for Sun's entertainment - they're there because certain customers need and use them. It's not the most appropriate environment to build a "little" website, but that doesn't make it "unnecessarily" complex when building big ones.
Companies in the market for significant numbers of Java EE application servers and their attendant support contracts are rarely in a hurry to adopt the newest and latest technologies. Companies I work with usually lag at least a major revision - sometimes two - behind the bleeding edge.
I think the only way you could worry Jobs is if you made a media device that physically pleasures the user
I just read an article about an attachment for the iPod which is, in every sense of the word, a "plugin". So I don't think it would worry him all that much.
Pretty disturbing to the rest of us though...
Link (to the product itself) is definitely not worksafe: OhMiBod
How does one develop the driver in the first place if you can't run it unless it's signed? Seems a bit chicken and egg to me, but I expect I'm missing something.
I have no opinion on the legal position, but I would have thought it unlikely that Nominet would pull Spamhaus's record or IP address. So ICANN probably couldn't do much about it even if they wanted to. In the worst case scenario one might have to use the spamhaus.org.uk address instead of the spamhaus.org one.
Check o[u]t bacteria. They don't care for their descendants, and they do quite well.
You might like to buy a biology textbook. Bacteria don't reproduce sexually. Any individual bacterium survives until at most the point at which it reproduces, at which point it is its descendents.
She's not going to be making that big a wave in the gene pool.
Caring for her own descendents is good for the survival of her genes. In which case the genes of the long-lived mothers who care for their offspring (and indeed their offspring, i.e. grandmothers) will outperform those of mothers who are short lived, or who do not care for their descendents.
The Register is not a reliable news source. Moreover, Andrew Orlowski has a bee in his bonnet about Google and constantly writes articles attacking them with very little merit - I would be astonished if this article is not by him, but even if it isn't, their association with him completely discredits them in my eyes.
Finally Peter Norvig is the author of the seminal Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (if you haven't read it, go and buy it right now) and is definitely not a complete idiot - I simply don't believe the story as summarised in the slashdot writeup regardless of whether it correctly reflects El Reg's article.
You can't prove a negative... Those opposed to the idea of global warming have to responsiblity to do anything here.
Oh really? Well, then the earth is not round. Those opposed to the idea of a round earth have no responsibility to do anything here.
Oh, wait, there's heaps of evidence that the earth is round, disproving the "negative" opinion that it's flat. Much like there's heaps of evidence that global warming is going on, disproving the "negative" opinion that it is not.
[i]What really matters is not looking like crap on the inside.[/i]
This is true. So what?
Given a choice between dressing up nicely and achieving something, and standing on your principles and achieving nothing, please feel free to go ahead and achieve nothing. But don't expect anyone to be surprised. Or interested.
Oh, we play it - we just don't take it seriously. It's called rounders, and the rules say you have to wear stockings and a pleated skirt if you want to play. It's right up there with Morris dancing as an Olympic candidate.
Seconded. That's a really nice design - it clearly maintains the original design brief of retaining the "feel" of the old slashdot look, while removing the overall impression of suckiness.
I'm sure there will be a lot of nit-pickers. People hate change.
We sometimes forget just how amazing the developments in computing have been over the last three decades.
Slightly off topic, but this was brought home to me a while ago when I was working with a commercial linear programming tool to solve some tricky resource allocation problems.
The tool in question has been around for quite a while, allowing for significant hardware developments - and the algorithms used to solve LP problems have advanced substantially over the same period.
The end result being that this tool is now able to solve problems six million times faster than was the case twenty years ago. Our problem took about five minutes to spit out a satisfactory answer. If I'd started its predecessor on the same problem twenty years ago it would have... still been calculating it!
Read Nielson's essays. Then do what they say. Specifically conduct usability testing in the manner he prescribes - anything else is a waste of time and money.
Has anyone done usability testing with non-technical people to see if they understand the whole "stable/dev/nightly" thing that a lot of OSS projects use? Seems to me that could probably be simplified as "Recommended" vs "Everything else".
I have no arguments with any of your points, I just wanted to chime in to point out that commercial software can be pretty bad with that last one. Specifically Sun has the utterly opaque, and apparently undocumented "FCS" ('First Customer Ship' apparently)versions of some of its software. This appears to mean that it's basically the first production release of the software in question, but they don't actually document that anywhere that I've seen.
Ask your offshore development outfit how many C++ developers they have. And how many Java developers. I'll happily bet you $100 that they have at most a couple of C++ devs, and that this is the reason for their "recommendation". Given that they won't have the expertise on hand to understand the logic of your existing system what are the odds they'll do a good job of the rewrite?
I'm a full time Java consultant who used to be a full time C++ consultant. I like the Spring framework, and I've written a book on Hibernate. And I think this idea is just insane.
Take your existing system and build upon it incrementally. If it is full of bugs, replace the buggy components incrementally. If you can't figure out how to maintain it in this incremental manner, I guarantee that the big-bang solution is going to be a total disaster anyway.
And this is all setting aside my reservations about the wisdom of outsourcing a project like yours.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say it's almost becoming more common to refer to the "phone" and use the retronym of "landline" for a wired telephone.
The question presupposes too many things. Namely that muslims are either praying or plotting terror 24/7 and that no athiest ever plans to hurt anyone else.
No it doesn't. I presupposes only that people might be dumb enough to think that. And while Scott was being satirical, I don't think he's actually wrong about that.
I've tried to keep these sufficiently un-obvious that you might not have them. Hopefully I've succeeded with most of them, though Penrose and Brookes works are well known - though nothing like as well known as they should be.
The Inventions of Daedalus
The Further Inventions of Daedalus
These two books are just fabulous. The author, David E. H. Jones comes up with far fetched inventions, immaculately thought through and presented. Sometimes they then come true - he predicted buckyballs rather handily, for example. The books are collections of his columns for Nature and other publications, with additional notes and cartoons. Absolutely lovely, but sadly out of print - you'll have to snap up second hand copies quick. I'd love it if Jones did a new edition, or better yet another book!
The Emperor's New Mind - Roger Penrose.
An exposition of weak AI, but taking in computer science and particle physics. Pretty epic, though I have trouble with his conclusions.
The Man Who Knew Too Much - Stephen Inwood.
A life of Robert Hooke, a multi-talented scientist of the 17th century. Fascinating insight into the perspective of a friend or acquaintance of Newton, Christopher Wren, and Edmund Halley.
Mind Children - Hans Moravec
Musings on the future of robot and human intelligence, with particular thoughts about how we might "upload" our minds to computers. Not as silly a book as I make it sound, I think.
The Mythical Man Month - Fred Brookes
The truth about project management. Written in 1975 and we still haven't learnt.
Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (Case Studies in Common Lisp) - Peter Norvig
Lots of hands on stuff, plenty of examples, and a good introduction to Lisp into the bargain. I loved it at college, and I've just bought myself a copy after all these years (the Library at University didn't see their copy very often while I was there).
Hacking Matter - Wil McCarthy (not a typo, it really is "Wil")
This is great, but I have to say I didn't enjoy it quite as much as the entertaining semi-humorous science fiction novel The Collapsium that's based to a large part around the more speculative parts of this non-fiction book. But regardless, it opened my eyes to a number of possibilities; even if they come to naught I appreciate his voice on the subject.
Thanks for the excellent question - I'll enjoy reading the other contributions to this thread.
There's a (probably urban myth) story about someone nicking power from the UK national grid by putting a huge coil in a shed directly under the power lines that hung over his garden...
I recently configured Ubuntu and XP Pro on the same (Thinkpad) laptop consecutively over a couple of days.
:-)
Getting Ubuntu installed was genuinely trivial. Getting XP installed was a total pain in the butt, with most of my time spent divining the correct drivers to download and the appropriate order in which to install them.
However, points in XP's favour:
It was installed out of the box - I was doing this because I wanted the laptop installed MY way, not IBM/Lenovo's way (gah, it had 96 processes running as delivered).
It looks and feels a hell of a lot more professional than Ubuntu.
Strictly speaking the driver issue wasn't XP's fault - that's up to the hardware vendor.
Points in Ubuntu's favour:
The software's all free, and nobody asked me to validate my installation (or refused to accept the OEM sticker from the bottom of the laptop forcing me to use a spare license instead - not everone would have had this).
Strictly speaking the driver issue wasn't Ubuntu's fault - that's up to the hardware vendor
Maybe Ubuntu could be tweaked to run as smoothly as I like, maybe (probably) it didn't fully recognise the hardware that it was running on.
If distributions like Ubuntu can be sufficiently commonplace to be a correctly pre-installed option on consumer laptops, and manage the last 10% of the look and feel issues, I think Linux on the desktop is a real possibility. But I couldn't tell you how far off that's going to be.
The architecture of Java 5 EE is unnecessarily complex.
This usually translates as "I don't understand all of the Java features - therefore it must be BAD.
No. Java is necessarily complex. The features aren't their for Sun's entertainment - they're there because certain customers need and use them. It's not the most appropriate environment to build a "little" website, but that doesn't make it "unnecessarily" complex when building big ones.
Companies in the market for significant numbers of Java EE application servers and their attendant support contracts are rarely in a hurry to adopt the newest and latest technologies. Companies I work with usually lag at least a major revision - sometimes two - behind the bleeding edge.
I think the only way you could worry Jobs is if you made a media device that physically pleasures the user
I just read an article about an attachment for the iPod which is, in every sense of the word, a "plugin". So I don't think it would worry him all that much.
Pretty disturbing to the rest of us though...
Link (to the product itself) is definitely not worksafe: OhMiBod
How does one develop the driver in the first place if you can't run it unless it's signed? Seems a bit chicken and egg to me, but I expect I'm missing something.
I have no opinion on the legal position, but I would have thought it unlikely that Nominet would pull Spamhaus's record or IP address. So ICANN probably couldn't do much about it even if they wanted to. In the worst case scenario one might have to use the spamhaus.org.uk address instead of the spamhaus.org one.
Check o[u]t bacteria. They don't care for their descendants, and they do quite well.
You might like to buy a biology textbook. Bacteria don't reproduce sexually. Any individual bacterium survives until at most the point at which it reproduces, at which point it is its descendents.
She's not going to be making that big a wave in the gene pool.
Caring for her own descendents is good for the survival of her genes. In which case the genes of the long-lived mothers who care for their offspring (and indeed their offspring, i.e. grandmothers) will outperform those of mothers who are short lived, or who do not care for their descendents.
For once I have not read the 'effing article.
The Register is not a reliable news source. Moreover, Andrew Orlowski has a bee in his bonnet about Google and constantly writes articles attacking them with very little merit - I would be astonished if this article is not by him, but even if it isn't, their association with him completely discredits them in my eyes.
Finally Peter Norvig is the author of the seminal Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (if you haven't read it, go and buy it right now) and is definitely not a complete idiot - I simply don't believe the story as summarised in the slashdot writeup regardless of whether it correctly reflects El Reg's article.
Case dismissed.
Just to add another site to the many good ones already listed:
http://focus.aps.org/
"Long term" is three or four years. To the best of my knowledge RoR hasn't been around for long enough for anyone to gauge the long term benefits.
You can't prove a negative... Those opposed to the idea of global warming have to responsiblity to do anything here.
Oh really? Well, then the earth is not round. Those opposed to the idea of a round earth have no responsibility to do anything here.
Oh, wait, there's heaps of evidence that the earth is round, disproving the "negative" opinion that it's flat. Much like there's heaps of evidence that global warming is going on, disproving the "negative" opinion that it is not.
[i]What really matters is not looking like crap on the inside.[/i]
This is true. So what?
Given a choice between dressing up nicely and achieving something, and standing on your principles and achieving nothing, please feel free to go ahead and achieve nothing. But don't expect anyone to be surprised. Or interested.
Oh, we play it - we just don't take it seriously. It's called rounders, and the rules say you have to wear stockings and a pleated skirt if you want to play. It's right up there with Morris dancing as an Olympic candidate.
Seconded. That's a really nice design - it clearly maintains the original design brief of retaining the "feel" of the old slashdot look, while removing the overall impression of suckiness.
I'm sure there will be a lot of nit-pickers. People hate change.
We sometimes forget just how amazing the developments in computing have been over the last three decades.
Slightly off topic, but this was brought home to me a while ago when I was working with a commercial linear programming tool to solve some tricky resource allocation problems.
The tool in question has been around for quite a while, allowing for significant hardware developments - and the algorithms used to solve LP problems have advanced substantially over the same period.
The end result being that this tool is now able to solve problems six million times faster than was the case twenty years ago. Our problem took about five minutes to spit out a satisfactory answer. If I'd started its predecessor on the same problem twenty years ago it would have... still been calculating it!
Read Nielson's essays. Then do what they say. Specifically conduct usability testing in the manner he prescribes - anything else is a waste of time and money.
Has anyone done usability testing with non-technical people to see if they understand the whole "stable/dev/nightly" thing that a lot of OSS projects use? Seems to me that could probably be simplified as "Recommended" vs "Everything else".
I have no arguments with any of your points, I just wanted to chime in to point out that commercial software can be pretty bad with that last one. Specifically Sun has the utterly opaque, and apparently undocumented "FCS" ('First Customer Ship' apparently)versions of some of its software. This appears to mean that it's basically the first production release of the software in question, but they don't actually document that anywhere that I've seen.
If they really do go ahead with this stupid, stupid idea, then I second all of the well made points in the parent post.
PS...
Ask your offshore development outfit how many C++ developers they have. And how many Java developers. I'll happily bet you $100 that they have at most a couple of C++ devs, and that this is the reason for their "recommendation". Given that they won't have the expertise on hand to understand the logic of your existing system what are the odds they'll do a good job of the rewrite?
I'm a full time Java consultant who used to be a full time C++ consultant. I like the Spring framework, and I've written a book on Hibernate. And I think this idea is just insane.
Take your existing system and build upon it incrementally. If it is full of bugs, replace the buggy components incrementally. If you can't figure out how to maintain it in this incremental manner, I guarantee that the big-bang solution is going to be a total disaster anyway.
And this is all setting aside my reservations about the wisdom of outsourcing a project like yours.
Good luck. You are going to need a lot of it.