I tend to agree more with Dijkstra on the nead for abstraction. It was actually a coincidental familiarity with symbolic logic (First Order Logic specifically) that made it easy to move from being a Pascal/Modula/Oberon evangelist to being an Object-Oriented thinker.
Programs are not meant to express Universal Truth (at this time) but to act as the instructions for a complex set of machine switching instructions.
Furthermore, Natural Language (and English specifically) are a poor substitute for mathematical descriptions. Almost every word in the natural language is used to describe a mathematical concept, but as it does so it creates non-mathematical ambiguity.
Almost = measure (relationship) every = measure (quantity) word = OBJECT in = relationship (space) the = measure (quantity) natural language = object is = relationship (identity) used to = relationship (change) describe = process (relationship) a = measure (quantity) mathematical concept = OBJECT (relationship)
And, speaking of non-mathematical abiguity, a look at the "is of identity" (and it's relatives such as are, be, to be, were, was) have caused a group of symanticists to propose an alternative to standard English called E' (E-prime).
Lastly, the actual symbolic language of computers is binary arithmetic. Binary symbology saves a huge amount of complexity and saves space overall. (How many symbols must be reserved to express 1024 in decimal?...40. How many symbols must be reserved to express 1024 in binary?...18.) IMHO, the high-level languages are an abstraction tool we can almost understand used to produce an abstraction we have great difficulty understanding.
The article does bring up a good point, though: I really like the idea of studying the inefficiencies in our current programming paradigm to see if the interface or the language could remove some of those. I love the graph at the bottom of the WhyLine that shows the process and causality of results in execution.
I wasn't going to reply to the supercilious ad hominem "intellectually lazy" tag, but then I thought,"What the heck, the guy's on slashdot. He can't be as close-minded as he sounds!"
Perhaps we don't have the same idea of what the "market" is. I'd like to direct you to the bottom of page 163 through 166 in "Beyond the Limits" by Meadows, Meadows and Randers. It points out how "the market" is a part of "the System". But be sure to read the rest of the book. It will give you a superficial familiarity with System Dynamics. Then you can do a little research on Decision Analysis and Econometrics, and maybe read, "Healing the Planet" and check out the IPAT formula, Then, if you are capable of parsing ideas logically or liguistically (perhps in E-prime?), and you still think I'm the one who's intellectually lazy, you can come back and tell me what other tools I need to acquire to have a better understanding of the problem and the solution.
Yes, I did anthropomorphize government and corporations. Given more time to describe the systems involved I would have shown how non-sentient entities behave in very intelligent ways. Of course, this is familiar to anyone who delved into artificial life, or even read Dawkin's book, "The Selfish Gene". Basically, I used the same shortcut that sociologists use when they describe "group dynamics", "crowd behavior" or "population behavior".
However, you bring up a good point: A simulation is not the fact, and the assumption of distinctive corporate and government behavior should be verified before being accused. An interesting start on this was made in Herbert Spiro's book, "Politics: The Master Science".
Uhmm, I'm a little confused as to how the statement about strikes and asthma, etc.. pertain to what I said, unless you are implying that these are the natural and inevitable result of our current productivity practices. However, if a company is being affected by shitting in it's own nest, that in itself provides an incentive to change. If this is correct, we don't need France (Especially not France!) to tell us what changes to make.
Financial incentives granted by the government are paid with money taken from the rest of the population, thereby lowering the overall welfare and prosperity of the the rest of the Nation. IMO, true financial incentives come from finding a more economical, more efficient way to produce goods and services. R. Buckminster Fuller claimed that pollution was really resources in the wrong place, and that effectively recovering and distributing those resources to where they could be best used was the solution to our environmental problems. He also said that it was not possible to push people in the right direction, but they could be led into more positive actions by providing a better way, better technology.
Now, as for the second part of your last statement: My own bias on government would have me labeled an Anti-federalist during our Constitutional Convention. Today I'd be called a Libertarian. (But I'm not a card-carrying member, only a fellow traveler, so its "little-l" libertarian.) To me, the only legitimate functions of Government are national defense and the administration of justice, although I'm flexible on the co-ordination of expanding infrastructure.
According to Herbert J. Spiro, government was initiated to help people resolve problems and evolved into a method of coercing people into sanctioned behavior through the threat or use of force.
One definition of politics is "the vying for scarce resources". This means that (if you accept this definition) politics is a subset of Economics.
Well, there are Economists and there are economists, but Ludwig von Mieses and Frederick Hayek seem to have described the overall economic behavior better than anyone else to date. (IMHO) People do things for their own reasons, not the government's. The comment that was made on Game Theory and the Prisoner's Dilemma, and the lesson of the Fallacy of the Commons was a great example. IMO, businesses should change their behavior because it makes sense, not because they are forced to.
I do agree with the idea that business should be made accountable for the effects of their production. If their production methods are poluting the environment, then they should pay for the restoration. The fact that they aren't held accountable now and in the past is a miscarriage of Justice, and, incidentally, couldn't have occurred without government collusion.
Thank you. I never thought of checking to see if the anecdote was true.
I suppose we all have a headfull of "facts" that aren't true, and I suppose we are all making decisions on those "facts".
I once read a book on Decision Making by a guy named Dawson, and he presented 10 questions with a lot of leeway for the answer, and I still only got 4 of the 10.
First off, in a competitive world, the pinciple of comparative advantage would suggest that goods and services be produced where they can be produced most economically. By subscribing to the Kyoto treaty, we are burdening ourselves with higher costs that don't leead to higher productivity. This reduces the USA overall prosperity, and tips the comparative advantage of many of our goods and services toward countries where they don't have to watch their output as strongly.
Second, the USA has been the world's largest consumer as well as the largest producer, but this is changing. Probably within the next 30 - 50 years, the USA will only consume about 22% of the world's goods and services. This is a result of the growing prosperity of the other nations in the world, especially the EU (which has mostly recovered from WWII). This means that the USA will not automatically be the highest bidder for the worlds resources, and the cost of production will climb dramatically when there are 50 nations bidding for, say, massive amounts of oil, instead of only 12. Multiply this effect by thinking in terms of lumber, minerals, concrete, etc and you can see that we will be replacing many of our most resource-hungry industrial practices with more efficient (and presumeably safer, less polluting) practices as a matter of business evolution. We won't be able to sustain ourselves if we don't, and we won't be able to do it if we squander our capital at this time by allocating it to non-productive goals that are mostly unobtainable at this time.
Third, comparing national emissions output between countries is not a valid measurement, and neither is a per-capita emissions level comparison. Basically, what is needed is some type of emissions-per-productive-unit measurement. I suppose it's theoretically possible for a couple hundred blacksmiths to produce a car without using the energy and emitting the pollution of a USA automotive plant, but is it economically feasible? Will it add the same value to the economy and provide the same level of utility?
Fourth, (and this is a hugely debatable point) we are working toward a world-wide crisis. The Club of Rome published a book called, "Limits to Growth" that was updated 20 years later as, "Beyond the Limits". Using a method called System Dynamics (pioneered by Jay Forrester) researchers illustrated the interaction of essential resources and uses and have shown that we are eventually going to have to change our ways or die out. The first book's gloomiest scenario predicted a collapse sometime in the early 90's, and when it didn't come the whole prediction was pooh-poohed as just another doomsday book. Well, the system was more flexible than we thought, and we had a couple of reallocations of resources and technology and so we had a reprieve. But the system is still in place, and in the not-too-distant future we will have to contend with shortages of basics like clean water and decent food. The solution to fending off environmental disaster probably lies in economic incentives, not social regulation.
A number of times I've come across the question of Easter Island: Who cut down the last tree? Didn't they see that deforesting their island would ruin their lives? My guess is that society in general lives like a bunch of slowly boiling frogs. Unless the heat gets turned up significantly, we are willing to adapt to the higher temperature until we're cooked. Pollution is affecting our lives today, but it's happening so slowly that we don't take massive action to remedy the situation. IMO, the Kyoto treaty is an attempt to regulate people by force, rather than improve the situation with feedback. I'd be more impressed with an "Osaka treaty". Turn the air in Osaka as clean as the air in Kyoto, and I'll help everyone adopt the practices that work.
Actually, there are only about 32 story plots. Back in the thirties a guy name Georges Polti wrote a book describing these "human situations" and Earl Stanley Gardner credits this book with helping him track his stories correctly. ESG actually had a device called a "Plot-o-matic" that was based on this book, but gave it up because it decreased his creative enthusiasm.
As I understand it (although I don't have my copy of Polti's book handy) this movie is a classic story of society rejecting someone who is obviously different. "Watchmen", "X-men", "Mutant X" and "The Incredibles" all deal with the same problem, but "Watchmen" and "The Incredibles" take up the story later in the chronology.
Actually, if you are the same Erik Harrison who does the reviews for the Houston Chronicle, I've been pretty impressed with your ability to analyze a movie and write coherently about it. Those reviews are usually entertaining and cover more ground than simple opinions. I have a certain dislike for people who take the title "movie critic" too seriously. I believe "movie reviewer" is a better description of what you do, and I appreciate reading reviews that are seldom one-sidedly negative (or positive), and contain knowledgeable comments on the actors and presentation.
I love movies. I seldom read reviews before seeing a movie (and I usually see about 4 per week), but I don't shy away from your reviews. I'm generally interested in your point of view.
Of course, if you're NOT that Erik Harrison, then you should know that the review you wrote here is VERY good. I wish I wrote half so well.
As I see it, there are two design flaws at work here: Even though computer spying has been around since the '70's (and maybe before), and even though software and systems designers have known that embedded software would monitor your computer activities, until recently it was not a priority consideration in designing software elements that facilitated computer-to-computer communication. The numerical complexity of interactions in a browser is in the billions, and the only way I can see to limit the complexity is to design in small elements with very well-designed but limited interaction. And I believe this should be addressed in the design phase, not discovered after the major code is written. I have some friends who are on the "Devil's team" at a large oil company. Although they are technically part of the QC operation, they examine all major operations for security holes and try to break it. They insist on UML standards being met, and one of their most fearsome questions is, "What is the state of your system at this point?"
The other design consideration is the design of the job (what the user is supposed to do). According to Eli Goldratt, MIS only does three things: Scheduling, compliance and "what if". Most MIS functions should be designed to minimize outside interactivity in the first two, and carefully limited in the third. Most of the problems with spyware/malware come from outside MIS where computers are used for production. Since most production is done by people, the jobs should be designed/described to high standards, but there will need to be some flexibility. People have needs outside of their jobs. They need feedback on what and how well they are doing their jobs and need to be pointed back to the standard if they stray too far. (Unless the straying makes good sense, in which case, the standard should be upgraded.)
What is lacking is feedback on just how spyware/malware gets into the system. I've never had a workstation user get upset if they were made aware of the problem, the scope of the problem, the scope of the solutions and their part in the solution. But I've seen massive resentment when IT lays down policies in a Gestapo-like edict. People will immediately try to find ways around the rules.
Interestingly enough, I have a customer that distributes ceramic materials internationally, and they actually score their users on how well they keep their tools running. They seem to have very few problems with spyware/malware (except in the Sales department). They have one of the largest collections of informed users I know.
After the upstream solutions have been designed in, the downstream protection should be evaluated. I've found the free solutions (like Adaware) are slightly less effective than the paid solutions, but users are not aware of the differences and have the same expectations for both. My attitude: If it's important to your operations, then get a good program and keep it updated as close to real-time as possible.
Something is going to get through anyway. I have increased the logging level on most of the Windows systems to the max, and have been trying to evaluate third-party software that tracks registry access, registry changes, and match them to user activity logs. This allows me to discover (with limited success) where the virus/trojan/spyware came from and what the user was doing at the time. This is not for every installation, but it should be cost-efficient in LANs with a couple of servers and 20+ workstations. BTW, at one customer, the logs are transmitted to a LINUX system drive for added security.
I haven't found a complete solution yet, but I hope this is useful to others.
I agree. I used to work at the largest server hosting company in the US, and customers who didn't keep up with their admin tasks were routinely rooted within hours of new exploits being published. Mounting some directories as read only, noexec or nosuid (depending on the needs of your environment) greatly reduces the risk of being compromised. Pay particular attention to/swap.
The GPU ought to be able to be optimized for FP arithmetic, also.
This idea is not mine, but back when the first Netra came out, a couple of guys here in Houston who used to optimize Crays figured out how to use the GPU to do floating point arithmetic a whole magnitude faster than Sun knew it could be done.
My optimization skills are a little rusty, but the same architectural elements are there in the ATI graphics cards.
If some one does this, drop me a line and tell me how you did it.
Well, if I were looking at instances of Government irresponsibility, I would surely not expect unbiased information from a government site. I found this site http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm from a/. article, and it might be interesting to an open-minded person.
I used to sell Sun back in the mid-90's and I believe their problems run much deeper than just the language. In fact, I re-read Goldratt's "The Goal" and "It's Not Luck" occasionally, and Sun is one of the first companies that comes to mind for the the examples of things they DIDN'T/DONT do.
Calling Scott McNealy "fiscally conservative" is an understatement. During the mid- 90's the local Sun office was devastated by workforce reductions and obsessive focussing on "headcount". Tech help was scarce, and morale was as low as I've seen in an office for a high-quality product. They moved from a well-organized top-floor office to a mediocre government-looking office across the street. You can only cut cost so far. You could cut costs to zero, and then where do you go to improve proitability?
Sun never made it easy. The manuals were good for techs (although the first editions of some of the Solaris 6 and NIS manuals had major errors in them), the classes were great, but the customer focus was fuzzy and confused, just as the article said.
And God help any unsuspecting IT manager who thought he could just load Solaris as easy as loading Windows! My impression was that the frustrations over the complex installation and administration process were major avoidable pitfalls in the Sun marketing plan. Luckily, I was mostly selling against NT 3.51 and had a major performance advantage at the time. The problem is, loading, configuring and administering Solaris is still a tedious, joyless task, even if it's done over a network. Troubleshooting administrative problems is not as easy as it could be, and the docs still suck.
OK, I've been thinking about this and doing a couple of tests, and I believe it's theoretically possible to design an automated testing suite concurrently with the objects themselves if the method of designing objects is similar to the method described in another Jaaksi-Aalto book, "Tried and True Object Development: An Industry-proven approach using UML".
The difficulty is certainly no harder than port-knocking, decryption or virus pattern searching, and would be much faster because you could use a table of valid I/O responses on each object interface, along with a table of test data for communicating with each object and each integrated iteration. Once the test app's framework is designed, it should be re-usable from project to project. After the object is designed your responsible programmer would add the valid input data and valid response data to the appropriate tables. After the object is developed, those I/O's would be used to test the Object for logic and arithmetic errors, at the least. Final testers would integrate the object testers into app testers and confirm the logic. It seems to me that the testing suite would be something on the order of a script that replaced the user interface for massive testing.
I've been programming since 1965, when I started doing cryptology in assembly language (AUTOCODER) on IBM 1401's. EACH segment, module or object needs to be tested for internal consistency and a table of results should be generated by each programmer before delivering the responsible section. Then, as has been mentioned, a separate testing team should test at each stage of integration before delivering the system for customer/client testing.
I've struggled with a methodology for development of Object-Oriented systems. When I first started to learn to program we planned the system first and developed flowcharts before we actually did any code. If the design was right, coding from the flowchart was very easy, and testing was pretty easy also. I have been struggling, trying to get the same results from UML, and finally found a book called, "Tried and True Object-Oriented Development: Practical approaches with UML" by Aalto, et al, and this is how I choose to develop software today. (I do more formal use-case diagrams, and I'm not above letting Rose or Visio generate the first couple of code iterations.) Their method, developed at NOKIA, is a logical intgration of development and testing.
Tom DeMarco, in his book, "Peopleware", made great arguments for the type of environment that programmers thrived in, including no more than two persons to an office.
How big an office? IBM figured it out: The inventor(?) of Function Point Analysis (http://www.sei.cmu.edu/str/descriptions/fpa_body. html0, AJ Albrecht, used his method to determine the least minimum size of a productive programmer's office.
I have contracted for numerous organizations since 1968, and while I hardly remember the companies that gave me the best tools and environments, I still resent the companies that gave me lousy tools or environments and wanted miracles. I suppose it's sort of like being cautious about the food that made you sick.
The examples I've seen from the book are not so much "decision tools" as "insight tools". Presumably they are aids to communication. In my universe "decision tools" bring precision to various elements so the factors are more objectively evaluated. Quantitative Analysis is a decision tool for me.
I read in one of my Decision Analysis books where a study showed that ANY method of formal decision making outperformed shooting from the hip on an overall basis, but huge progress has been made by people just following their own gut feeling. (Jobs and Wozniak come to mind.)
I would say this book is not about Decision Analysis, but about communication. A good book on overall thinking and decision making might be "The Complete Thinker" by Barry Anderson if it's still in print. Matrix-style decision making is covered in almost any good book on Game Theory.
Regarding the idea that a decision or problem should be reduced to it's two core elements: Eli Goldratt, in his book, "It's Not Luck", described a conflict resolution method he called "The Cloud". In a later book, "Critical Chain", he went so far as to claim that conflicts don't exist in nature, and that any conflict could be resolved to the satisfaction of both parties using the cloud technique and keeping their minds open. I've found this to be true so far in my own life, but then, I seldom deal with fanatics.
What I don't like about the 2x2 matrix is that it requires sorting attributes into arbitrary and subjective boundaries. Much of what I see being sorted in this arbitrary manner (Corporate Strategy is a great example) would (IMHO) be best analyzed through System Dynamics. The 2x2 matrix doesn't account for the interaction of each quadrant on the other three. The strenght of the 2x2 matrix is that it does lend some direction and momentum to problem analysis, even if it's not the right tool to finish the job.
Although a lot of the threads debate the merits of engineering and other disciplines over PhD programs, and one thread even asks what the use is of Science classes in K-12 education, I see the problem as a lack of good thinking skills: There are not enough people qualified to think through the potential of all the research available from the Scientists we have!
Back in the mid 80's a Physicist from Israel, Eli Goldratt, overwhelmed the manufacturing industries by applying scientific thought to manufacturing. There is tons of raw research out there, and the USA has some pretty good Scientists, so why aren't we seeing this type of thinking applied to other areas of the Economy and Environment? I believe it's because the HABIT of scientific thinking is acquired while we are young, and teaching these habits is mostly lacking in our educational system. I suspect that there would be plenty of demand for PhD's if there were enough thinkers to take advantage of their outputs.
An interesting note, though: I read an article in the IEEE magazine back in the 70's that said something to the effect that that the best balanced ratio between Engineers/Inventors and Pure Scientists was 7/1. If I remember the article correctly, "Pure Science" is the raw material of Engineering.
I wonder what 3M would have to say about this ratio?
I think that's a fair assumption. Things will change. When I sold the first Apple ii's and Commodore Pet systems, margins were typically 33% to 50% and it stayed that way for a number of years. A customer spending $50,000 on a computer solution would get about 5 desktop systems and $25,000 worth of consulting and support. (Support contracts were an essential part of the sale.) Now a consumer would get 50 or more desktop systems and be offended if the support wasn't free for the first year. The installation and configuration may still be a separate item. I know people who are basically selling the system at cost and charging for the consulting. Unless you work in a fast-moving retail environment, the comissions you can make on hardware won't support you. But for the consumer it's great! OfficeMax delivers a few systems, the secretary puts them together using large, comic-bokk type diagrams, and any additional software is almost self-loading and configuring. Sometimes it's harder to learn the software than to install it. (Ask any first-time MS Outlook user!) Being able to order and download products from the Web has started to even out the value for the seller. I'm looking forward to practical nanotechnology: I'll just post my system solutions on a web page and the customer can download it from there using a phone.
This is tough, isn't it? Suppose you learn to build GUI's from a specific textbook, along with 200,000 other programmers. You might continue to build GUI's that way from then on, unless you learn something new that's better. But the code is going to be similar in all of them precisely because of the structure of the language! Nobody expects you to learn a new language to solve familiar problems. But even more interesting is that if you use something like Rational Rose, design a solution and then generate the code, the code for similar problems is going to be very similar. Is this "copying code?" Standards in hardware and software practically require that any software developed to exploit the same specific features/stadards/limitations will look pretty much the same. Is this "copying code?. All accounting software works on a set of principles that must be adhered to. Any accounting software I write can have similar features to, say, Great Plains, but I wouldn't consider it "copying" or "infringement" unless the "look feel" was somewhere just short of counterfeiting. It seems to me that this community could help define the limits for ourselves and for the public. The article does not define the limits well enough to be useful.
"From scratch" is an undefined phrase with no real meaning. All invention is based on some previously-discovered principles. In fact, there is a discipline (TRIZ) that exploits this to reduce the time necessary to produce new inventions. If you calculate data to a new conclusion, no one will say it's not your work simply because the method (arithmetic) and the tools (numbers) were defined or discovered in the past. If you tell a good story, you are given credit for your efforts unless you actually use the exact same words of another storyteller. I doubt that Linus invented any new programming methodology, but using the common tools of the trade he certainly seems to have produced a unique product and deserves the credit for his efforts. Improvements since then have been well-attributed to the people responsible.
This (Ken Brown's portion) is actually a semantics-challenged statement that arrives at good economics: It makes total sense that as the cost of producing/reproducing human effort is reduced, then a competitive market will reduce the cost of the product to the consumer.
I remember when I could make a pretty good living selling a couple of Vector Graphics Z-80/S-100 systems each week. The margins were 50% or higher and we were able to charge a reasonable amount for consulting and programming. Within a few years, the component costs, OS costs and expectations had reduced margins to about 15% on systems costing only 1/10 as much for the same features.
It makes total sense that consumers would be interested in almost any method to to reduce their incremental cost, but we had to do about 30 times the business to make the same amount of money.
In addition, the maintenance costs on proprietary methods and products is very good for the proprietor, but a real annoyance for the end user and consumer. People seem to resent being bent over a barrel while they are trying to accomplish their own goals.
Lastly, the cost of reproducing a solution is much less than the cost of initially deriving a solution. One thing I like about producing software solutions is: NO INVENTORY! It's all brainsweat, and the distribution of the solution is likely to be jsut as valuable to the last person who uses it as to the first person, even though the cost of distribution is so much less.
Unfortunately, I can't seem to find anything good on the web. This illustration sucks: http://www.buckminster.info/Biblio/About-Articles- 1980.htm
There is a decent picture of the concept in his book, "Critical Path"
You might find more than I did by searching for "Sky-City", Sky Cities, or "Cloud 9" with Buckminster Fuller as a keyword.
Mike
Yes, there were observation blimps as far back as the American Civil War.
I think this technology is under-utilized. A friend of mine from Alaska bid to provide materials for the Trans-Alaska Gas pipeline and crane services by using blimps. He felt he could cut millions off the estimated bill and eliminate the need for a truck road by using blimps. Needless to say, no visionaries were on the bid committee.
Blimps should be ideal for overland hauling, and they could make a great platform for cranes in many instances.
R. Buckminster Fuller found that using a vacuum-filled strut in his tensegrity domes would make them air-buoyant. The struts "displaced" a volume of air, and enough struts made the whole structure buoyant. I think the University of Minnesota was building a 33-foot tensegrity dome from hollw firberglass struts and it started floating about two-thirds through the construction. Fuller envisioned whole neighborhoods and possibly towns floating around and tethered to the ground. Wanna live in blimp?
As I understand it, one minor problem with blimps is containing the Helium used to fill it. The molecules are so small they eventually pass through most materials. Is "need more Helium" another argument for developing workable cold fusion?
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct: It is an interesting read.
I tend to agree more with Dijkstra on the nead for abstraction. It was actually a coincidental familiarity with symbolic logic (First Order Logic specifically) that made it easy to move from being a Pascal/Modula/Oberon evangelist to being an Object-Oriented thinker.
Programs are not meant to express Universal Truth (at this time) but to act as the instructions for a complex set of machine switching instructions.
Furthermore, Natural Language (and English specifically) are a poor substitute for mathematical descriptions. Almost every word in the natural language is used to describe a mathematical concept, but as it does so it creates non-mathematical ambiguity.
(If mathematics = measure, space, relationship, then:
Almost = measure (relationship)
every = measure (quantity)
word = OBJECT
in = relationship (space)
the = measure (quantity)
natural language = object
is = relationship (identity)
used to = relationship (change)
describe = process (relationship)
a = measure (quantity)
mathematical concept = OBJECT (relationship)
And, speaking of non-mathematical abiguity, a look at the "is of identity" (and it's relatives such as are, be, to be, were, was) have caused a group of symanticists to propose an alternative to standard English called E' (E-prime).
Lastly, the actual symbolic language of computers is binary arithmetic. Binary symbology saves a huge amount of complexity and saves space overall. (How many symbols must be reserved to express 1024 in decimal?...40. How many symbols must be reserved to express 1024 in binary?...18.) IMHO, the high-level languages are an abstraction tool we can almost understand used to produce an abstraction we have great difficulty understanding.
The article does bring up a good point, though: I really like the idea of studying the inefficiencies in our current programming paradigm to see if the interface or the language could remove some of those. I love the graph at the bottom of the WhyLine that shows the process and causality of results in execution.
Mike
I wasn't going to reply to the supercilious ad hominem "intellectually lazy" tag, but then I thought,"What the heck, the guy's on slashdot. He can't be as close-minded as he sounds!"
Perhaps we don't have the same idea of what the "market" is. I'd like to direct you to the bottom of page 163 through 166 in "Beyond the Limits" by Meadows, Meadows and Randers. It points out how "the market" is a part of "the System". But be sure to read the rest of the book. It will give you a superficial familiarity with System Dynamics. Then you can do a little research on Decision Analysis and Econometrics, and maybe read, "Healing the Planet" and check out the IPAT formula, Then, if you are capable of parsing ideas logically or liguistically (perhps in E-prime?), and you still think I'm the one who's intellectually lazy, you can come back and tell me what other tools I need to acquire to have a better understanding of the problem and the solution.
Yes, I did anthropomorphize government and corporations. Given more time to describe the systems involved I would have shown how non-sentient entities behave in very intelligent ways. Of course, this is familiar to anyone who delved into artificial life, or even read Dawkin's book, "The Selfish Gene". Basically, I used the same shortcut that sociologists use when they describe "group dynamics", "crowd behavior" or "population behavior". However, you bring up a good point: A simulation is not the fact, and the assumption of distinctive corporate and government behavior should be verified before being accused. An interesting start on this was made in Herbert Spiro's book, "Politics: The Master Science".
Uhmm, I'm a little confused as to how the statement about strikes and asthma, etc.. pertain to what I said, unless you are implying that these are the natural and inevitable result of our current productivity practices. However, if a company is being affected by shitting in it's own nest, that in itself provides an incentive to change. If this is correct, we don't need France (Especially not France!) to tell us what changes to make.
Financial incentives granted by the government are paid with money taken from the rest of the population, thereby lowering the overall welfare and prosperity of the the rest of the Nation. IMO, true financial incentives come from finding a more economical, more efficient way to produce goods and services. R. Buckminster Fuller claimed that pollution was really resources in the wrong place, and that effectively recovering and distributing those resources to where they could be best used was the solution to our environmental problems. He also said that it was not possible to push people in the right direction, but they could be led into more positive actions by providing a better way, better technology.
Now, as for the second part of your last statement: My own bias on government would have me labeled an Anti-federalist during our Constitutional Convention. Today I'd be called a Libertarian. (But I'm not a card-carrying member, only a fellow traveler, so its "little-l" libertarian.) To me, the only legitimate functions of Government are national defense and the administration of justice, although I'm flexible on the co-ordination of expanding infrastructure.
According to Herbert J. Spiro, government was initiated to help people resolve problems and evolved into a method of coercing people into sanctioned behavior through the threat or use of force.
One definition of politics is "the vying for scarce resources". This means that (if you accept this definition) politics is a subset of Economics.
Well, there are Economists and there are economists, but Ludwig von Mieses and Frederick Hayek seem to have described the overall economic behavior better than anyone else to date. (IMHO) People do things for their own reasons, not the government's. The comment that was made on Game Theory and the Prisoner's Dilemma, and the lesson of the Fallacy of the Commons was a great example. IMO, businesses should change their behavior because it makes sense, not because they are forced to.
I do agree with the idea that business should be made accountable for the effects of their production. If their production methods are poluting the environment, then they should pay for the restoration. The fact that they aren't held accountable now and in the past is a miscarriage of Justice, and, incidentally, couldn't have occurred without government collusion.
Thank you. I never thought of checking to see if the anecdote was true.
I suppose we all have a headfull of "facts" that aren't true, and I suppose we are all making decisions on those "facts".
I once read a book on Decision Making by a guy named Dawson, and he presented 10 questions with a lot of leeway for the answer, and I still only got 4 of the 10.
First off, in a competitive world, the pinciple of comparative advantage would suggest that goods and services be produced where they can be produced most economically. By subscribing to the Kyoto treaty, we are burdening ourselves with higher costs that don't leead to higher productivity. This reduces the USA overall prosperity, and tips the comparative advantage of many of our goods and services toward countries where they don't have to watch their output as strongly.
Second, the USA has been the world's largest consumer as well as the largest producer, but this is changing. Probably within the next 30 - 50 years, the USA will only consume about 22% of the world's goods and services. This is a result of the growing prosperity of the other nations in the world, especially the EU (which has mostly recovered from WWII). This means that the USA will not automatically be the highest bidder for the worlds resources, and the cost of production will climb dramatically when there are 50 nations bidding for, say, massive amounts of oil, instead of only 12. Multiply this effect by thinking in terms of lumber, minerals, concrete, etc and you can see that we will be replacing many of our most resource-hungry industrial practices with more efficient (and presumeably safer, less polluting) practices as a matter of business evolution. We won't be able to sustain ourselves if we don't, and we won't be able to do it if we squander our capital at this time by allocating it to non-productive goals that are mostly unobtainable at this time.
Third, comparing national emissions output between countries is not a valid measurement, and neither is a per-capita emissions level comparison. Basically, what is needed is some type of emissions-per-productive-unit measurement. I suppose it's theoretically possible for a couple hundred blacksmiths to produce a car without using the energy and emitting the pollution of a USA automotive plant, but is it economically feasible? Will it add the same value to the economy and provide the same level of utility?
Fourth, (and this is a hugely debatable point) we are working toward a world-wide crisis. The Club of Rome published a book called, "Limits to Growth" that was updated 20 years later as, "Beyond the Limits". Using a method called System Dynamics (pioneered by Jay Forrester) researchers illustrated the interaction of essential resources and uses and have shown that we are eventually going to have to change our ways or die out. The first book's gloomiest scenario predicted a collapse sometime in the early 90's, and when it didn't come the whole prediction was pooh-poohed as just another doomsday book. Well, the system was more flexible than we thought, and we had a couple of reallocations of resources and technology and so we had a reprieve. But the system is still in place, and in the not-too-distant future we will have to contend with shortages of basics like clean water and decent food. The solution to fending off environmental disaster probably lies in economic incentives, not social regulation.
A number of times I've come across the question of Easter Island: Who cut down the last tree? Didn't they see that deforesting their island would ruin their lives? My guess is that society in general lives like a bunch of slowly boiling frogs. Unless the heat gets turned up significantly, we are willing to adapt to the higher temperature until we're cooked. Pollution is affecting our lives today, but it's happening so slowly that we don't take massive action to remedy the situation. IMO, the Kyoto treaty is an attempt to regulate people by force, rather than improve the situation with feedback. I'd be more impressed with an "Osaka treaty". Turn the air in Osaka as clean as the air in Kyoto, and I'll help everyone adopt the practices that work.
Actually, there are only about 32 story plots. Back in the thirties a guy name Georges Polti wrote a book describing these "human situations" and Earl Stanley Gardner credits this book with helping him track his stories correctly. ESG actually had a device called a "Plot-o-matic" that was based on this book, but gave it up because it decreased his creative enthusiasm. As I understand it (although I don't have my copy of Polti's book handy) this movie is a classic story of society rejecting someone who is obviously different. "Watchmen", "X-men", "Mutant X" and "The Incredibles" all deal with the same problem, but "Watchmen" and "The Incredibles" take up the story later in the chronology.
Actually, if you are the same Erik Harrison who does the reviews for the Houston Chronicle, I've been pretty impressed with your ability to analyze a movie and write coherently about it. Those reviews are usually entertaining and cover more ground than simple opinions. I have a certain dislike for people who take the title "movie critic" too seriously. I believe "movie reviewer" is a better description of what you do, and I appreciate reading reviews that are seldom one-sidedly negative (or positive), and contain knowledgeable comments on the actors and presentation.
I love movies. I seldom read reviews before seeing a movie (and I usually see about 4 per week), but I don't shy away from your reviews. I'm generally interested in your point of view.
Of course, if you're NOT that Erik Harrison, then you should know that the review you wrote here is VERY good. I wish I wrote half so well.
As I see it, there are two design flaws at work here: Even though computer spying has been around since the '70's (and maybe before), and even though software and systems designers have known that embedded software would monitor your computer activities, until recently it was not a priority consideration in designing software elements that facilitated computer-to-computer communication. The numerical complexity of interactions in a browser is in the billions, and the only way I can see to limit the complexity is to design in small elements with very well-designed but limited interaction. And I believe this should be addressed in the design phase, not discovered after the major code is written. I have some friends who are on the "Devil's team" at a large oil company. Although they are technically part of the QC operation, they examine all major operations for security holes and try to break it. They insist on UML standards being met, and one of their most fearsome questions is, "What is the state of your system at this point?"
The other design consideration is the design of the job (what the user is supposed to do). According to Eli Goldratt, MIS only does three things: Scheduling, compliance and "what if". Most MIS functions should be designed to minimize outside interactivity in the first two, and carefully limited in the third. Most of the problems with spyware/malware come from outside MIS where computers are used for production. Since most production is done by people, the jobs should be designed/described to high standards, but there will need to be some flexibility. People have needs outside of their jobs. They need feedback on what and how well they are doing their jobs and need to be pointed back to the standard if they stray too far. (Unless the straying makes good sense, in which case, the standard should be upgraded.)
What is lacking is feedback on just how spyware/malware gets into the system. I've never had a workstation user get upset if they were made aware of the problem, the scope of the problem, the scope of the solutions and their part in the solution. But I've seen massive resentment when IT lays down policies in a Gestapo-like edict. People will immediately try to find ways around the rules.
Interestingly enough, I have a customer that distributes ceramic materials internationally, and they actually score their users on how well they keep their tools running. They seem to have very few problems with spyware/malware (except in the Sales department). They have one of the largest collections of informed users I know.
After the upstream solutions have been designed in, the downstream protection should be evaluated. I've found the free solutions (like Adaware) are slightly less effective than the paid solutions, but users are not aware of the differences and have the same expectations for both. My attitude: If it's important to your operations, then get a good program and keep it updated as close to real-time as possible.
Something is going to get through anyway. I have increased the logging level on most of the Windows systems to the max, and have been trying to evaluate third-party software that tracks registry access, registry changes, and match them to user activity logs. This allows me to discover (with limited success) where the virus/trojan/spyware came from and what the user was doing at the time. This is not for every installation, but it should be cost-efficient in LANs with a couple of servers and 20+ workstations. BTW, at one customer, the logs are transmitted to a LINUX system drive for added security.
I haven't found a complete solution yet, but I hope this is useful to others.
Mike
I agree. I used to work at the largest server hosting company in the US, and customers who didn't keep up with their admin tasks were routinely rooted within hours of new exploits being published. Mounting some directories as read only, noexec or nosuid (depending on the needs of your environment) greatly reduces the risk of being compromised. Pay particular attention to /swap.
The GPU ought to be able to be optimized for FP arithmetic, also.
This idea is not mine, but back when the first Netra came out, a couple of guys here in Houston who used to optimize Crays figured out how to use the GPU to do floating point arithmetic a whole magnitude faster than Sun knew it could be done.
My optimization skills are a little rusty, but the same architectural elements are there in the ATI graphics cards.
If some one does this, drop me a line and tell me how you did it.
Well, if I were looking at instances of Government irresponsibility, I would surely not expect unbiased information from a government site. I found this site http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm /. article, and it might be interesting to an open-minded person.
from a
I used to sell Sun back in the mid-90's and I believe their problems run much deeper than just the language. In fact, I re-read Goldratt's "The Goal" and "It's Not Luck" occasionally, and Sun is one of the first companies that comes to mind for the the examples of things they DIDN'T/DONT do. Calling Scott McNealy "fiscally conservative" is an understatement. During the mid- 90's the local Sun office was devastated by workforce reductions and obsessive focussing on "headcount". Tech help was scarce, and morale was as low as I've seen in an office for a high-quality product. They moved from a well-organized top-floor office to a mediocre government-looking office across the street. You can only cut cost so far. You could cut costs to zero, and then where do you go to improve proitability? Sun never made it easy. The manuals were good for techs (although the first editions of some of the Solaris 6 and NIS manuals had major errors in them), the classes were great, but the customer focus was fuzzy and confused, just as the article said. And God help any unsuspecting IT manager who thought he could just load Solaris as easy as loading Windows! My impression was that the frustrations over the complex installation and administration process were major avoidable pitfalls in the Sun marketing plan. Luckily, I was mostly selling against NT 3.51 and had a major performance advantage at the time. The problem is, loading, configuring and administering Solaris is still a tedious, joyless task, even if it's done over a network. Troubleshooting administrative problems is not as easy as it could be, and the docs still suck.
OK, I've been thinking about this and doing a couple of tests, and I believe it's theoretically possible to design an automated testing suite concurrently with the objects themselves if the method of designing objects is similar to the method described in another Jaaksi-Aalto book, "Tried and True Object Development: An Industry-proven approach using UML".
The difficulty is certainly no harder than port-knocking, decryption or virus pattern searching, and would be much faster because you could use a table of valid I/O responses on each object interface, along with a table of test data for communicating with each object and each integrated iteration. Once the test app's framework is designed, it should be re-usable from project to project. After the object is designed your responsible programmer would add the valid input data and valid response data to the appropriate tables. After the object is developed, those I/O's would be used to test the Object for logic and arithmetic errors, at the least. Final testers would integrate the object testers into app testers and confirm the logic. It seems to me that the testing suite would be something on the order of a script that replaced the user interface for massive testing.
Sounds like a good project!
Mike
I've been programming since 1965, when I started doing cryptology in assembly language (AUTOCODER) on IBM 1401's. EACH segment, module or object needs to be tested for internal consistency and a table of results should be generated by each programmer before delivering the responsible section. Then, as has been mentioned, a separate testing team should test at each stage of integration before delivering the system for customer/client testing.
I've struggled with a methodology for development of Object-Oriented systems. When I first started to learn to program we planned the system first and developed flowcharts before we actually did any code. If the design was right, coding from the flowchart was very easy, and testing was pretty easy also. I have been struggling, trying to get the same results from UML, and finally found a book called, "Tried and True Object-Oriented Development: Practical approaches with UML" by Aalto, et al, and this is how I choose to develop software today. (I do more formal use-case diagrams, and I'm not above letting Rose or Visio generate the first couple of code iterations.) Their method, developed at NOKIA, is a logical intgration of development and testing.
Mike
Tom DeMarco, in his book, "Peopleware", made great arguments for the type of environment that programmers thrived in, including no more than two persons to an office.
. html0, AJ Albrecht, used his method to determine the least minimum size of a productive programmer's office.
How big an office? IBM figured it out: The inventor(?) of Function Point Analysis (http://www.sei.cmu.edu/str/descriptions/fpa_body
I have contracted for numerous organizations since 1968, and while I hardly remember the companies that gave me the best tools and environments, I still resent the companies that gave me lousy tools or environments and wanted miracles. I suppose it's sort of like being cautious about the food that made you sick.
The examples I've seen from the book are not so much "decision tools" as "insight tools". Presumably they are aids to communication. In my universe "decision tools" bring precision to various elements so the factors are more objectively evaluated. Quantitative Analysis is a decision tool for me.
I read in one of my Decision Analysis books where a study showed that ANY method of formal decision making outperformed shooting from the hip on an overall basis, but huge progress has been made by people just following their own gut feeling. (Jobs and Wozniak come to mind.)
I would say this book is not about Decision Analysis, but about communication. A good book on overall thinking and decision making might be "The Complete Thinker" by Barry Anderson if it's still in print. Matrix-style decision making is covered in almost any good book on Game Theory.
Regarding the idea that a decision or problem should be reduced to it's two core elements: Eli Goldratt, in his book, "It's Not Luck", described a conflict resolution method he called "The Cloud". In a later book, "Critical Chain", he went so far as to claim that conflicts don't exist in nature, and that any conflict could be resolved to the satisfaction of both parties using the cloud technique and keeping their minds open. I've found this to be true so far in my own life, but then, I seldom deal with fanatics.
What I don't like about the 2x2 matrix is that it requires sorting attributes into arbitrary and subjective boundaries. Much of what I see being sorted in this arbitrary manner (Corporate Strategy is a great example) would (IMHO) be best analyzed through System Dynamics. The 2x2 matrix doesn't account for the interaction of each quadrant on the other three. The strenght of the 2x2 matrix is that it does lend some direction and momentum to problem analysis, even if it's not the right tool to finish the job.
Mike
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Although a lot of the threads debate the merits of engineering and other disciplines over PhD programs, and one thread even asks what the use is of Science classes in K-12 education, I see the problem as a lack of good thinking skills: There are not enough people qualified to think through the potential of all the research available from the Scientists we have!
Back in the mid 80's a Physicist from Israel, Eli Goldratt, overwhelmed the manufacturing industries by applying scientific thought to manufacturing. There is tons of raw research out there, and the USA has some pretty good Scientists, so why aren't we seeing this type of thinking applied to other areas of the Economy and Environment? I believe it's because the HABIT of scientific thinking is acquired while we are young, and teaching these habits is mostly lacking in our educational system. I suspect that there would be plenty of demand for PhD's if there were enough thinkers to take advantage of their outputs.
An interesting note, though: I read an article in the IEEE magazine back in the 70's that said something to the effect that that the best balanced ratio between Engineers/Inventors and Pure Scientists was 7/1. If I remember the article correctly, "Pure Science" is the raw material of Engineering.
I wonder what 3M would have to say about this ratio?
Mike
I think that's a fair assumption. Things will change. When I sold the first Apple ii's and Commodore Pet systems, margins were typically 33% to 50% and it stayed that way for a number of years. A customer spending $50,000 on a computer solution would get about 5 desktop systems and $25,000 worth of consulting and support. (Support contracts were an essential part of the sale.) Now a consumer would get 50 or more desktop systems and be offended if the support wasn't free for the first year. The installation and configuration may still be a separate item. I know people who are basically selling the system at cost and charging for the consulting. Unless you work in a fast-moving retail environment, the comissions you can make on hardware won't support you. But for the consumer it's great! OfficeMax delivers a few systems, the secretary puts them together using large, comic-bokk type diagrams, and any additional software is almost self-loading and configuring. Sometimes it's harder to learn the software than to install it. (Ask any first-time MS Outlook user!) Being able to order and download products from the Web has started to even out the value for the seller. I'm looking forward to practical nanotechnology: I'll just post my system solutions on a web page and the customer can download it from there using a phone.
This is tough, isn't it? Suppose you learn to build GUI's from a specific textbook, along with 200,000 other programmers. You might continue to build GUI's that way from then on, unless you learn something new that's better. But the code is going to be similar in all of them precisely because of the structure of the language! Nobody expects you to learn a new language to solve familiar problems. But even more interesting is that if you use something like Rational Rose, design a solution and then generate the code, the code for similar problems is going to be very similar. Is this "copying code?" Standards in hardware and software practically require that any software developed to exploit the same specific features/stadards/limitations will look pretty much the same. Is this "copying code?. All accounting software works on a set of principles that must be adhered to. Any accounting software I write can have similar features to, say, Great Plains, but I wouldn't consider it "copying" or "infringement" unless the "look feel" was somewhere just short of counterfeiting. It seems to me that this community could help define the limits for ourselves and for the public. The article does not define the limits well enough to be useful.
"From scratch" is an undefined phrase with no real meaning. All invention is based on some previously-discovered principles. In fact, there is a discipline (TRIZ) that exploits this to reduce the time necessary to produce new inventions. If you calculate data to a new conclusion, no one will say it's not your work simply because the method (arithmetic) and the tools (numbers) were defined or discovered in the past. If you tell a good story, you are given credit for your efforts unless you actually use the exact same words of another storyteller. I doubt that Linus invented any new programming methodology, but using the common tools of the trade he certainly seems to have produced a unique product and deserves the credit for his efforts. Improvements since then have been well-attributed to the people responsible.
This (Ken Brown's portion) is actually a semantics-challenged statement that arrives at good economics: It makes total sense that as the cost of producing/reproducing human effort is reduced, then a competitive market will reduce the cost of the product to the consumer. I remember when I could make a pretty good living selling a couple of Vector Graphics Z-80/S-100 systems each week. The margins were 50% or higher and we were able to charge a reasonable amount for consulting and programming. Within a few years, the component costs, OS costs and expectations had reduced margins to about 15% on systems costing only 1/10 as much for the same features. It makes total sense that consumers would be interested in almost any method to to reduce their incremental cost, but we had to do about 30 times the business to make the same amount of money. In addition, the maintenance costs on proprietary methods and products is very good for the proprietor, but a real annoyance for the end user and consumer. People seem to resent being bent over a barrel while they are trying to accomplish their own goals. Lastly, the cost of reproducing a solution is much less than the cost of initially deriving a solution. One thing I like about producing software solutions is: NO INVENTORY! It's all brainsweat, and the distribution of the solution is likely to be jsut as valuable to the last person who uses it as to the first person, even though the cost of distribution is so much less.
I found another small picture here: http://www.thirteen.org/bucky/cities.html Mike
Unfortunately, I can't seem to find anything good on the web. This illustration sucks: http://www.buckminster.info/Biblio/About-Articles- 1980.htm
There is a decent picture of the concept in his book, "Critical Path"
You might find more than I did by searching for "Sky-City", Sky Cities, or "Cloud 9" with Buckminster Fuller as a keyword.
Mike
Yes, there were observation blimps as far back as the American Civil War.
I think this technology is under-utilized. A friend of mine from Alaska bid to provide materials for the Trans-Alaska Gas pipeline and crane services by using blimps. He felt he could cut millions off the estimated bill and eliminate the need for a truck road by using blimps. Needless to say, no visionaries were on the bid committee.
Blimps should be ideal for overland hauling, and they could make a great platform for cranes in many instances.
R. Buckminster Fuller found that using a vacuum-filled strut in his tensegrity domes would make them air-buoyant. The struts "displaced" a volume of air, and enough struts made the whole structure buoyant. I think the University of Minnesota was building a 33-foot tensegrity dome from hollw firberglass struts and it started floating about two-thirds through the construction. Fuller envisioned whole neighborhoods and possibly towns floating around and tethered to the ground. Wanna live in blimp?
As I understand it, one minor problem with blimps is containing the Helium used to fill it. The molecules are so small they eventually pass through most materials. Is "need more Helium" another argument for developing workable cold fusion?
MIke