First off, its not a requisite that a VM add significant overhead to code. Its true that it can't have zero overhead, but its not true that it automatically causes a massive CPU performance hit and memory explosion. I'll point to one benchmark that at least indicates JVM performance can exceed C++ performance, http://kano.net/javabench/ . (To be clear, Android does not use a JVM, it uses its own VM).
Second, if you base your language choice for a mainstream, general purpose platform, solely on code efficiency, you're making a mistake. Speed is *not* all that matters. Portability and *programmer* efficiency are major factors to consider if you want a successful platform. In these dimensions the Java language and VM execution environments tend to be superior.
Third, for the vast majority of programs, its the code you write, regardless of language that makes the most difference. Languages create far fewer slow programs than poor programmers and designers.
None of this is to say that their aren't benefits to native code, and in the long run Android should provide a way to write native code for those tiny bits of the program that are doing heavy algorithmic work. What I do mean to say is that saying the best language for all your code is C[++] is incorrect (unless all you write is heavy algorithmic code, most applications have more than this).
At midnight GMT (well, UTC actually), we added a leap second. This seems to correspond with the time you're talking about. The most shocking thing is that this was not the first response to this story.
No, the reason 99% of people don't care is that 99.9% of people aren't important enough for anyone to want their data. Of the 1% that do care, 9% are people who are important enough they should worry, and 91% are geeks like you who think you merit notice, but don't.
I have always believed that the vast majority of today's financial instruments have been invented out of thin air for no reason other than to ultimately ensure the employment of bankers and brokers.
Bzzzzz! Wrong. Every financial instrument out there is there for one reason, and one reason only, someone was interested in buying it. The problems we are in today are not with the tools, the tools functioned exactly like they were supposed to. The problem is that everyone, E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E was too busy or too lazy to read the manual for the tool. When I say "everyone" I mean the subprime borrowers who should have understood their mortgage agreement, I mean the loan originator who should have known the borrower couldn't conceivably repay, I mean the credit rating agency who didn't do their due diligence on their AAA-rated security, I mean the banker who bought the mortgage-backed security and blindly trusted the rating agency, I mean underwriters of CDSes who didn't do their due diligence in so many ways, I mean the legislators that told Fannie and Freddie to get more people to own houses no matter what, I mean the people who bought shares in financial companies who didn't realize the valuations were completely unsustainable.
A couple of examples in what I'm sure you would call "invented" financial instruments
The mortgage-backed security (MBS) that is blamed most often for this crisis did exactly as intended. This security is perfectly useful, someone said, hey, for the most part a mortgage is a bond, why don't we treat them like it. The problem is that an individual mortgage might not be repaid, but if you pool a bunch of similar mortgages together, you can get a pretty good idea of what percentage will fail. Now, you slice this pool up and sell the puddles. Now people who never could offer a mortgage before because they didn't have the money to lend for a whole house, or couldn't put all their eggs in one basket can essentially sell mortgages and be pretty confident about their risk and return. What went wrong is that the mortgage originators didn't assess the borrowers suitability properly, the rating agency that rated the MBS didn't check the originator's work, and the buyer of the security didn't bother to check the rating agencies work.
How about credit default swaps (CDS)? Paul borrows $1000 from you, and you're pretty sure that Paul will pay all of it back in a year, but you have to have at least $900 to pay for a new liver (you drunk!) in a year. Now, I say, hey, for $5 a month, I'll pay you the difference between the $1000 and what Paul pays you, just in case he doesn't pay you back. This is a great deal for you, because no matter what you get your new liver, and if Paul does pay you back, you get $940. Sound familiar, that's right, this is just insurance with a fancy name! I'm sure you'd agree that insurance wasn't just 'invented out of this air'. The problem was in this case that I didn't assess correctly that Paul was just developing a coke habit and would skip to the Caymans after two months. Now with home insurance, companies can assess the risk very well, because they have a lot of historical data and a big sample size. The risk of default on corporate debt is a lot more complex and has less historical data, and many writing the CDSes (yeah, I'm looking at you AIG) were way off in their assessments.
Bankers are a fun target because they're generally rich and got that way because they happen to like the soulless task of combing through countless spreadsheets and schmoozing clients until they're both too drunk to see, but there's plenty of blame to go around in this mess. The great thing about free market capitalism is that no one is forcing you to do anything. If you were a good little, risk averse, worker ant for the last 15 years you should be very happy right now. You should have plenty of cash and can get a house, a car, and a new wardrobe at a huge discount. You can sit back and buy that prick banker's Manhattan flat for 50% off and laugh
"Man uses free market mechanisms to avoid losing three quarters of a million bucks, and Big Brother comes down on him."
Markets only work when all the players have access to all the information, otherwise the market prices things incorrectly. The problem is that we don't operate in a perfect market where all information becomes available to all agents at the same time. For example, companies have to put a lot of work in place before announcing a dilutive secondary offering. Therefore, some people with stock in the company will find out about this ahead of time and if they engage in transactions, its a market failure because the parties in the trade are operating on what can only be asymmetric information. If allowed, this results in all assets being sold for less than they are worth because purchasers would be irrational not to demand a risk discount since they can't trust that they know as much as other agents.
No market has perfect information flow, but we can, and should disallow the worst cases of information asymmetry.
I was worried about T-Mobile coverage too, but so far, not an issue in San Francisco, Sonoma Valley, and Boston (including inside South Station). In fact, my call quality is much better than with AT&T. Almost anywhere I was with AT&T I'd miss half of a word in at least every call and often at least every 30 seconds. With T-Mobile and the G1 so far, I've had almost no half-missed words.
What you're talking about are all solvable problems, and pretty simple ones at that.
Warm surface water? There's nothing to say that water for cooling has to be taken from the surface.
Premature drive failure from gentle rocking? Really? You need pretty sudden motions to really cause a drive harm. I have a hard time buying this, salt in the air would be a more likely culprit, but then the air just needs to be filtered. If rocking really is an issue, just design your data center room or racks to essentially float within the ship to reduce motion of the drives themselves. Some of the systems for constructing buildings in earthquake zones are probably relevant here.
Bandwidth latency? Weak sauce on your part if this seems like an issue to you. Just connect to undersea cables. Hey, isn't Google partnering in a trans-Pacific cable venture...
> I predict that when Google comes crashing down (and it will - anyone who has seen the
> ridiculous excess of the Google campus cannot help but realize this),
Yeah, its pretty ridiculous to load your campus up with services and other things so that they are more likely to spend more hours a day there because (1) they want to and (2) they have to spend less time on mundane things like food preparation that you can provide fairly cheaply, benefiting from economies of scale. Google execs aren't a bunch of nutters or philanthropists. It isn't out of the kindness of their hearts that they provide all the amenities. Its out of the desire to keep top talent and finding things that will make their talent stay (and want to) that extra hour or even 30 minutes a day. If you look at revenue per head, it becomes pretty clear that if you can increase time at work by even 5% get a lot back.
> the net result will have been to set back innovation in the software industry a great deal,
> by tying up so many people who would otherwise have done something useful.
You seem to make the assumption that innovation doesn't happen there. This is a pretty bold assumption, considering it seems quite unlikely no innovation has occurred in building an awesome search algorithm and having it search more requests than almost any service on the planet with virtually zero downtime. (Google Docs may go down, but when's the last time search was unavailable?)
If you can write (and technical writing isn't prose), technical writers are in huge demand. Software engineers don't like to write docs, but they're essential.
What if your parents caught you doing something illegal? Should they not punish you? Should they instead go straight to the police and turn you in? What kind of Gestapo bullcrap is that? Do you really want to live in a police state where you can't even confide in your own parents? If what you were doing was illegal, they should report you to the police. The law is the law. I am not saying that all laws are correct, but the way to change them is not to ignore them, there is a different forum for that. In your line of reasoning where the parents decide the punishment, where do you draw the line at what crime they should report? If their child told them that they first sexually abused someone and then murdered them and dumped them in the river, should they not report this? I think you'll immediately say they should report this, but how do you draw the line? What objective standard of what crime is bad enough that it warrants reporting?
Part of the point of the article slamming Java as a first language was that teaching Java first skips over a lot of conceptual ideas that are essential to writing good programs. If you can write good C or C++ and understand what object orientation is, you can write good Java with an extremely low learning curve. The relationship does not hold the other way. Java takes away a lot of repetitive tasks that the C[++] programmer has to worry about, but it is exactly knowing what Java is doing for you that make you more aware of what is a good program and what is a bad one. The language may do it for you, but the computer still has to do it.
Be a good generalist and computer scientist. If a company is hiring you because you "know Java" or won't hire you because you're a master C# programmer, but they use Java, you don't want to work for them. Any company that doesn't understand that the language is merely the written expression of the program and that the ability to turn a program's concept into computer algorithms is the important part is lost.
Ants also do a similar thing. The difference is that they release chemicals as they travel. The more ants that travel the same path, the stronger the trail, the more likely the path will continue to be traveled. This also has some consideration for traveling velocity. All other things being equal, a faster (typically shorter) path will have a stronger chemical signature because more ants will traverse it per unit time. Further, new, potentially better, paths will be discovered on rare occasion that an ant gets lost or for some reasons falls off the established path. In artificial simulations this trailblazing can be amplified by increasing the random chance that from any given network hop, the ant/packet will choose some new direction which may be totally random or may be based on other paths that have already been traversed.
"Funny how that is a "world" phone. GSM is only a standard for Europe."
Wrong, try again. CDMA is used in the US, Korea, and Japan, that's it. I know Japan also has GSM available.
GSM on the other hand is used in the US (AT&T and T-Mobile), North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Australia, and Asia (except maybe Korea). So yes, GSM *does* make it a world phone. Good luck using that CDMA in Nigeria!
"it's one of those questions you could easily spend weeks optimizing depending on the OS your using and how the rest of the VM is written."
The optimization is not relevant. The question is meant to probe whether the candidate has an understanding of what an object really is. The logical picture of how a program moves about memory. The basic answer is not that hard, but few people stop and think about it, and shockingly few actually can answer it, even basically.
"IMO a more reasonable question is you are handed some functional but slow code that takes way to long how you go about speeding it up."
Maybe, optimizations can be interesting, I find more often the answer to optimization questions that are answerable in an interview fall into one of two categories: (1) - They fall into a set of no-no's (like memory allocation in a tight loop) (2) - They rely on knowing some "trick" or "quirk" of a given language/platform. The harder and more interesting optimization questions often in involve analysis of multiple systems/programs that are interacting in an unexpected way. These are not really answerable in an interview.
I don't really see the education disconnect. If you learn data structure, systems design, and OOP, the acronyms are unimportant. If you're bright and company X won't hire you because you know acronym Y instead of comparable acronym Z, you don't want to work for them anyway. I've yet to meet any language or protocol that anyone worth hiring couldn't pick up in a matter of a few weeks.
If I didn't make it clear from my original post, I could care less about syntactic minutia. In fact, I've never asked a syntax question. I've never asked a question that required more than psuedo code or got more specific than programming concepts that are found across many languages. I care much more about the ability to think than anything else. A good answer to "How would you design the object memory layout for a language like Java?" is much more important than "What are some examples of ternary logic operators?" Most interviews I conduct, less than 50% of the time is spent on questions related to computers.
The "doesn't interview well" question comes up a lot and I and many other interviewers take this into account if the candidate seems nervous.
Can you show me exactly where this pool of "qualified" applicants is? My company is desperate to hire quality people. Despite extensive pre-screening, I'd say no more than 20% (and that's optimistic) of people who make it to an in-person interview are nearly qualified. Maybe 10% I'm impressed with.
Knowing how to write C/C++/Java or anything else is not sufficient to be "qualified". In fact, I'd sooner hire someone who was bright, creative, well-versed in computer *science*, and doesn't know a compiled language from an interpreted one than hire a wizard at Java who can't think (him|her)self out of a paper bag.
You are drawing a misconclusion here. Animal tend to seek seclusion when they defecate because they are vulnerable at this point. Where a predator to spot prey making #2 its a good opportunity to strike. Yeah, if you have to cut and run, you have to, but with the unfortunate consequence that you might literally get fecal matter on yourself. Another potential evolutionary behavior is to find a spot "off the beaten path" to deposit material which, in the long run, will effect your biological health. So, privacy (a human concept) and seeking seclusion are different.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that whole Android thing, 12+ million lines of code, not a contribution to open source at all...
First off, its not a requisite that a VM add significant overhead to code. Its true that it can't have zero overhead, but its not true that it automatically causes a massive CPU performance hit and memory explosion. I'll point to one benchmark that at least indicates JVM performance can exceed C++ performance, http://kano.net/javabench/ . (To be clear, Android does not use a JVM, it uses its own VM).
Second, if you base your language choice for a mainstream, general purpose platform, solely on code efficiency, you're making a mistake. Speed is *not* all that matters. Portability and *programmer* efficiency are major factors to consider if you want a successful platform. In these dimensions the Java language and VM execution environments tend to be superior.
Third, for the vast majority of programs, its the code you write, regardless of language that makes the most difference. Languages create far fewer slow programs than poor programmers and designers.
None of this is to say that their aren't benefits to native code, and in the long run Android should provide a way to write native code for those tiny bits of the program that are doing heavy algorithmic work. What I do mean to say is that saying the best language for all your code is C[++] is incorrect (unless all you write is heavy algorithmic code, most applications have more than this).
At midnight GMT (well, UTC actually), we added a leap second. This seems to correspond with the time you're talking about. The most shocking thing is that this was not the first response to this story.
No, the reason 99% of people don't care is that 99.9% of people aren't important enough for anyone to want their data. Of the 1% that do care, 9% are people who are important enough they should worry, and 91% are geeks like you who think you merit notice, but don't.
I have always believed that the vast majority of today's financial instruments have been invented out of thin air for no reason other than to ultimately ensure the employment of bankers and brokers.
Bzzzzz! Wrong. Every financial instrument out there is there for one reason, and one reason only, someone was interested in buying it. The problems we are in today are not with the tools, the tools functioned exactly like they were supposed to. The problem is that everyone, E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E was too busy or too lazy to read the manual for the tool. When I say "everyone" I mean the subprime borrowers who should have understood their mortgage agreement, I mean the loan originator who should have known the borrower couldn't conceivably repay, I mean the credit rating agency who didn't do their due diligence on their AAA-rated security, I mean the banker who bought the mortgage-backed security and blindly trusted the rating agency, I mean underwriters of CDSes who didn't do their due diligence in so many ways, I mean the legislators that told Fannie and Freddie to get more people to own houses no matter what, I mean the people who bought shares in financial companies who didn't realize the valuations were completely unsustainable.
A couple of examples in what I'm sure you would call "invented" financial instruments
The mortgage-backed security (MBS) that is blamed most often for this crisis did exactly as intended. This security is perfectly useful, someone said, hey, for the most part a mortgage is a bond, why don't we treat them like it. The problem is that an individual mortgage might not be repaid, but if you pool a bunch of similar mortgages together, you can get a pretty good idea of what percentage will fail. Now, you slice this pool up and sell the puddles. Now people who never could offer a mortgage before because they didn't have the money to lend for a whole house, or couldn't put all their eggs in one basket can essentially sell mortgages and be pretty confident about their risk and return. What went wrong is that the mortgage originators didn't assess the borrowers suitability properly, the rating agency that rated the MBS didn't check the originator's work, and the buyer of the security didn't bother to check the rating agencies work.
How about credit default swaps (CDS)? Paul borrows $1000 from you, and you're pretty sure that Paul will pay all of it back in a year, but you have to have at least $900 to pay for a new liver (you drunk!) in a year. Now, I say, hey, for $5 a month, I'll pay you the difference between the $1000 and what Paul pays you, just in case he doesn't pay you back. This is a great deal for you, because no matter what you get your new liver, and if Paul does pay you back, you get $940. Sound familiar, that's right, this is just insurance with a fancy name! I'm sure you'd agree that insurance wasn't just 'invented out of this air'. The problem was in this case that I didn't assess correctly that Paul was just developing a coke habit and would skip to the Caymans after two months. Now with home insurance, companies can assess the risk very well, because they have a lot of historical data and a big sample size. The risk of default on corporate debt is a lot more complex and has less historical data, and many writing the CDSes (yeah, I'm looking at you AIG) were way off in their assessments.
Bankers are a fun target because they're generally rich and got that way because they happen to like the soulless task of combing through countless spreadsheets and schmoozing clients until they're both too drunk to see, but there's plenty of blame to go around in this mess. The great thing about free market capitalism is that no one is forcing you to do anything. If you were a good little, risk averse, worker ant for the last 15 years you should be very happy right now. You should have plenty of cash and can get a house, a car, and a new wardrobe at a huge discount. You can sit back and buy that prick banker's Manhattan flat for 50% off and laugh
"Man uses free market mechanisms to avoid losing three quarters of a million bucks, and Big Brother comes down on him."
Markets only work when all the players have access to all the information, otherwise the market prices things incorrectly. The problem is that we don't operate in a perfect market where all information becomes available to all agents at the same time. For example, companies have to put a lot of work in place before announcing a dilutive secondary offering. Therefore, some people with stock in the company will find out about this ahead of time and if they engage in transactions, its a market failure because the parties in the trade are operating on what can only be asymmetric information. If allowed, this results in all assets being sold for less than they are worth because purchasers would be irrational not to demand a risk discount since they can't trust that they know as much as other agents.
No market has perfect information flow, but we can, and should disallow the worst cases of information asymmetry.
I was worried about T-Mobile coverage too, but so far, not an issue in San Francisco, Sonoma Valley, and Boston (including inside South Station). In fact, my call quality is much better than with AT&T. Almost anywhere I was with AT&T I'd miss half of a word in at least every call and often at least every 30 seconds. With T-Mobile and the G1 so far, I've had almost no half-missed words.
.dex is not machine code, its virtual machine bytecode.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/3145691/Steve-Wozniak-interview-iconic-co-founder-on-the-iPod-iPhone-and-future-for-Apple.html
Next time don't be so lazy and find the original article, that way I can be lazy.
What you're talking about are all solvable problems, and pretty simple ones at that.
Warm surface water? There's nothing to say that water for cooling has to be taken from the surface.
Premature drive failure from gentle rocking? Really? You need pretty sudden motions to really cause a drive harm. I have a hard time buying this, salt in the air would be a more likely culprit, but then the air just needs to be filtered. If rocking really is an issue, just design your data center room or racks to essentially float within the ship to reduce motion of the drives themselves. Some of the systems for constructing buildings in earthquake zones are probably relevant here.
Bandwidth latency? Weak sauce on your part if this seems like an issue to you. Just connect to undersea cables. Hey, isn't Google partnering in a trans-Pacific cable venture...
> I predict that when Google comes crashing down (and it will - anyone who has seen the > ridiculous excess of the Google campus cannot help but realize this), Yeah, its pretty ridiculous to load your campus up with services and other things so that they are more likely to spend more hours a day there because (1) they want to and (2) they have to spend less time on mundane things like food preparation that you can provide fairly cheaply, benefiting from economies of scale. Google execs aren't a bunch of nutters or philanthropists. It isn't out of the kindness of their hearts that they provide all the amenities. Its out of the desire to keep top talent and finding things that will make their talent stay (and want to) that extra hour or even 30 minutes a day. If you look at revenue per head, it becomes pretty clear that if you can increase time at work by even 5% get a lot back. > the net result will have been to set back innovation in the software industry a great deal, > by tying up so many people who would otherwise have done something useful. You seem to make the assumption that innovation doesn't happen there. This is a pretty bold assumption, considering it seems quite unlikely no innovation has occurred in building an awesome search algorithm and having it search more requests than almost any service on the planet with virtually zero downtime. (Google Docs may go down, but when's the last time search was unavailable?)
If you can write (and technical writing isn't prose), technical writers are in huge demand. Software engineers don't like to write docs, but they're essential.
Gee, this was hard to find... http://www.mini-box.com/Intel-Mini-ITX-Boards
What I find really comical lately on /. is the following has been deemed true
if (company.accumulated_user_information.now > company.accumulated_user_information.before) {
printf("company has become evil");
}
Yes, surely, no company could be trying to provide services to their users by organizing their information.
If what you were doing was illegal, they should report you to the police. The law is the law. I am not saying that all laws are correct, but the way to change them is not to ignore them, there is a different forum for that. In your line of reasoning where the parents decide the punishment, where do you draw the line at what crime they should report? If their child told them that they first sexually abused someone and then murdered them and dumped them in the river, should they not report this? I think you'll immediately say they should report this, but how do you draw the line? What objective standard of what crime is bad enough that it warrants reporting?
Part of the point of the article slamming Java as a first language was that teaching Java first skips over a lot of conceptual ideas that are essential to writing good programs. If you can write good C or C++ and understand what object orientation is, you can write good Java with an extremely low learning curve. The relationship does not hold the other way. Java takes away a lot of repetitive tasks that the C[++] programmer has to worry about, but it is exactly knowing what Java is doing for you that make you more aware of what is a good program and what is a bad one. The language may do it for you, but the computer still has to do it.
Be a good generalist and computer scientist. If a company is hiring you because you "know Java" or won't hire you because you're a master C# programmer, but they use Java, you don't want to work for them. Any company that doesn't understand that the language is merely the written expression of the program and that the ability to turn a program's concept into computer algorithms is the important part is lost.
Ants also do a similar thing. The difference is that they release chemicals as they travel. The more ants that travel the same path, the stronger the trail, the more likely the path will continue to be traveled. This also has some consideration for traveling velocity. All other things being equal, a faster (typically shorter) path will have a stronger chemical signature because more ants will traverse it per unit time. Further, new, potentially better, paths will be discovered on rare occasion that an ant gets lost or for some reasons falls off the established path. In artificial simulations this trailblazing can be amplified by increasing the random chance that from any given network hop, the ant/packet will choose some new direction which may be totally random or may be based on other paths that have already been traversed.
"Funny how that is a "world" phone. GSM is only a standard for Europe."
Wrong, try again. CDMA is used in the US, Korea, and Japan, that's it. I know Japan also has GSM available.
GSM on the other hand is used in the US (AT&T and T-Mobile), North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Australia, and Asia (except maybe Korea). So yes, GSM *does* make it a world phone. Good luck using that CDMA in Nigeria!
"it's one of those questions you could easily spend weeks optimizing depending on the OS your using and how the rest of the VM is written."
The optimization is not relevant. The question is meant to probe whether the candidate has an understanding of what an object really is. The logical picture of how a program moves about memory. The basic answer is not that hard, but few people stop and think about it, and shockingly few actually can answer it, even basically.
"IMO a more reasonable question is you are handed some functional but slow code that takes way to long how you go about speeding it up."
Maybe, optimizations can be interesting, I find more often the answer to optimization questions that are answerable in an interview fall into one of two categories:
(1) - They fall into a set of no-no's (like memory allocation in a tight loop)
(2) - They rely on knowing some "trick" or "quirk" of a given language/platform.
The harder and more interesting optimization questions often in involve analysis of multiple systems/programs that are interacting in an unexpected way. These are not really answerable in an interview.
I don't really see the education disconnect. If you learn data structure, systems design, and OOP, the acronyms are unimportant. If you're bright and company X won't hire you because you know acronym Y instead of comparable acronym Z, you don't want to work for them anyway. I've yet to meet any language or protocol that anyone worth hiring couldn't pick up in a matter of a few weeks.
If I didn't make it clear from my original post, I could care less about syntactic minutia. In fact, I've never asked a syntax question. I've never asked a question that required more than psuedo code or got more specific than programming concepts that are found across many languages. I care much more about the ability to think than anything else. A good answer to "How would you design the object memory layout for a language like Java?" is much more important than "What are some examples of ternary logic operators?" Most interviews I conduct, less than 50% of the time is spent on questions related to computers. The "doesn't interview well" question comes up a lot and I and many other interviewers take this into account if the candidate seems nervous.
That doesn't help if the geeks are already employed!
Can you show me exactly where this pool of "qualified" applicants is? My company is desperate to hire quality people. Despite extensive pre-screening, I'd say no more than 20% (and that's optimistic) of people who make it to an in-person interview are nearly qualified. Maybe 10% I'm impressed with.
Knowing how to write C/C++/Java or anything else is not sufficient to be "qualified". In fact, I'd sooner hire someone who was bright, creative, well-versed in computer *science*, and doesn't know a compiled language from an interpreted one than hire a wizard at Java who can't think (him|her)self out of a paper bag.
The great part about Google is they don't give much a shit about Wall Street.
You are drawing a misconclusion here. Animal tend to seek seclusion when they defecate because they are vulnerable at this point. Where a predator to spot prey making #2 its a good opportunity to strike. Yeah, if you have to cut and run, you have to, but with the unfortunate consequence that you might literally get fecal matter on yourself. Another potential evolutionary behavior is to find a spot "off the beaten path" to deposit material which, in the long run, will effect your biological health. So, privacy (a human concept) and seeking seclusion are different.