Good point. If we do accept this premise that paying people is the best way to get bugs filed, then it becomes an economic and moral question:
* Does the "bounty" system find better bugs per dollar spent once you factor in the wasted costs of administering the bounty system, or the current "salary" system? In other words, has the free market pegged the salary level of Q&A staff incorrectly?
* If the "bounty" system is indeed more cost effective, is that because we're exploiting the bounty-hunters by getting their labor without paying health insurance &c. ?
What you describe hasn't been my experience. I see TWO orders of magnitude more bugs reported by Microsoft's QA than by external parties (in the field of compiler development). I guess end-users just aren't interested in whether an async lambda inside an anonymous type declaration triggers invalid codegen, and wouldn't even discover the issue until the language feature has been in widespread use for five years, but internal QA will discover the bug before the feature ships. On your question of unicode bugs, users seem happy to use just simple unicode for their variable names, and it's down to QA to discover e.g. that dipthongs don't work in edge cases, or that certain whitespace unicode characters have been reclassified in the latest unicode update.
In general, users will find bugs that "itch", but QA departments will find bugs through systematic review of the spec and all possible interactions of language features. And in the field of compiler development, the latter gives me more confidence, because programming is all about making language features interact in useful ways.
The US problem that needs to be fixed is that in the US, PhD students are slave labor for 6 years, and their supervisor has no incentive to get them through the process. By contrast in the UK a PhD is normally three years, and if you take a day over four years then your department's funding is permanently penalized. That's a strong incentive...
Well, yeah, the bones in their bodies are "discombobulating" while they're up there, just like they do here on earth. The issue is that the body rebuilds bone in proportion to how much stress is placed on it. There's less stress in microgravity, so the "rebuilding" rate constant is lower than on Earth.
In general I'd see the whole human body as a great big bundle of equilibria between opposing processes. It sounds like Aristotelian philosopy but actually this "homeostasis" approach was the central theme of my 1998 medical textbook. Whenever one of the rate constants is altered a little, it's very possible that the body will go out of whack.
It seems reasonable that microgravity could affect a whole bunch of rate constants to do with medicine absorbtion.
Sure, I fully know the functionality is available on other devices. I was merely responding to the person who had never seen a happy Windows Phone user. (Indeed my brother's Nokia from last year was way more fully featured -- it had built in FM transmitter, and he could set up a wireless basestation+SSH server on it when we wanted to share some files, and he could code in C++).
I couldn't find any cheaper unlimited data other than $1.50/day. AT&T had true unlimited data but only if you were grandfathered in. All other so-called unlimited data plans that I've seen are actually limited. The $30 tmobile plan is limited to a tiny 200mb/month with 10c/megabyte after that.
> I have never known a happy Windows phone user. Never. Not one.
Let me introduce myself. My name's Lucian and I *love* my Windows Phone 7. I think the UI looks slicker than that of my girlfriend's iPhone. I love using it for maps. I love how it shows my corporate Exchange email along with my personal IMAP email in customized updating tiles on the front page. It works great as a portable radio for listening to podcasts when I'm out gardening or in my workshop. I take it to bed with me each night to read Kindle and to listen to radio comedies. I'm a developer (I work at Microsoft on the new "async" language feature for C#/VB) and I love developing for for Windows Phone 7. My biggest gripe with the device is that Amazon didn't implement an orientation-lock in their Kindle app.
I'm actually also fairly happy with TMobile, paying $45/month for unlimited data (through the $1.50 "daily webpass") and I hope this survives the AT&T takeover. But I'm jealous of my brother in the UK who gets unlimited data for 6 months for only $40.
With t-mobile prepay, you can get "unlimited data 24hour passes" for $1.50/day -- $45/month. That's pretty cheap for unlimited data. And it works out cheaper because of the many work days where you make do with wifi at home and at the office and can skip the 24hour pass for that day.
Step 4: If you're not rich enough to afford giving an $800 device to each of your children, and have only your own, then say to kid "No you can't use my iPhone".
Step 5: On a long car journey where young kid needs distraction, repeat "No you can't use my iPhone".
Step 6: When young kid continues to whine, repeat "No you can't use my iPhone"
Step 7: When young kid asks why not, explain "Because I went to setting>general>restrictions and turned off the passcode memory"
Step 8: When young kid asks again why not, explain "Because you might accidentally buy stuff"
Step 9: When young kid asks again why not, say "Because I told you so, all right."
Windows has had a very well-defined meaning for DPI, and has done since XP. EVERYTHING is supposed to scale with the DPI setting. Everything does scale in most Microsoft applications. Yes, that includes documents and margins and UI elements.
If you want the UI elements to be larger but not the body, then you've ALWAYS done it by setting larger sizes for UI elements in the DisplayProperties control panel. Not by setting DPI.
There is no "DPI aware problem", apart from the UI programmers you mention -- and they're just being ignorant or lazy.
But, why should I have to purchase Office 2010 because my state government is now sending out informational requests in docx format?
You shouldn't! If you're on Windows, then use Microsoft's free Word Viewer to view the docx file. If you're on Linux, install the addin for OpenOffice to read the docx. if you're on a Mac, use one of the many online converters from docx format.
(The point that "no one implements docx with 100% fidelity" is irrelevant here. When your state govt sends out informational requests in docx format, they're not relying on subtleties of Word2003-style kerning vs Word2010-style kerning, or the other inadequately documented things. You'll be able to read the informational request fine even if pagination is slightly different.)
Maybe your point was: "What if my state requires me to submit tenders in docx format?"
There are typographical errors on 50% of pages (usually missing spaces between punctuation). And most importantly, the Kindle edition simply LACKS those "blank-line paragraph breaks". In the physical copy I can tell that time has jumped forward or we've switched planet by that half an inch of whitespace. But on the Kindle, it all just flows together and I have to slow down, stop, reverse, and figure out that there should have been a break there.
The issue is that, when packets are dropped and the TCP window narrows, it's pretty much a catastrophe from throughput perspective. In particular, the recipient won't know about a dropped packet until the latency delay, and the sender won't know about it until (minimum) twice that latency. And so the sender will keep on sending at its high rate, causing it and everyone else's packets to drop, and it'll take many round-trip-times before flow is re-established.
If there were smaller buffers in the internet routers, then receiver and sender would know much quicker about congestion, and they'd be able to get the correct transmission rates with only a tiny amount of disruption.
I think effectiveness of US anti-terrorist techniques is HARMED by its current levels of secrecy.
Think of the TSA and its no-fly list. And the fact that list itself is secret. And the fact that everything around it is shrouded in secrecy. It means that an ineffective and wasteful government program hsan't been exposed to the glare of public scrutiny that would have killed it. Likewise the body-scanners.
Think of government funding of people like funding Saddam or Noriega or Irangate-- public scrutiny could easily have squashed for their manifest stupidity, but in the culture of secrecy these counterproductive programs flourished.
I think that prosecuting the "war on terror" is like the other aspects of running a country: improved by the US's marvelous system of openness and checks and balances, and hindered when it follows the UK model of paternalistic secretive "we know best" government.
So far we haven't actually seen ANY downsides of the wikileaks...
* We saw a german official get fired for leaking information to a foreign state * We saw the Yemeni government conspiring to lie to its people * We saw the UK foregin office trying to lie to the UK parliament about breaking international commitments on cluster bombs * US secretary of defense Bob Gates explained that the leaks haven't hurt the US
"We the government think the best way to run a democracy is to systematically lie to the electorate".
It's ludicrous to compare the two. Also you missed the middle ground between "uncontrolled verbal diarrhea of opinions" and "deliberately tell outright factual lies".
That sounds like a US perspective. I think the cables have all reflected very well on the US, as expected, and confirmed that it's a responsible decent world power.
The scandals we're seeing is more about FOREIGN governments who have been lying to their people. Some of us suspected they lied some of the time, but I don't think we knew about how much, and I don't think we knew about all the instances of it.
I didn't know about Yemen government lying to its people. I didn't know about UK government lying to parliament about cluster bombs. The German news was enough to cause a resignation. Wikileak's Kenyan news a few years ago was enough to cause a revolution, basically -- rioting and protests that led the corrupt government to collapse.
In general, whistleblowers are important -- and indeed there are lots of laws specifically to protect whistleblowers.
Every soldier has a moral (and sometimes legal) duty to disobey unjust orders, and we should feel sorry when the soldier is punished for disobeying orders.
So yes in general there are many circumstances when we should feel sorry for someone being punished when he breaks an agreements.
Does the specific case of Bradley Manning fall into one of this circumstances? I don't know. I think his leak of the helicopter attack in Iraq counts heavily in his favour.
Slashdot Mirror
Translation: "Our business model is founded on doing stuff to consumers that they don't want. Please let us continue doing it."
Good point. If we do accept this premise that paying people is the best way to get bugs filed, then it becomes an economic and moral question:
* Does the "bounty" system find better bugs per dollar spent once you factor in the wasted costs of administering the bounty system, or the current "salary" system? In other words, has the free market pegged the salary level of Q&A staff incorrectly?
* If the "bounty" system is indeed more cost effective, is that because we're exploiting the bounty-hunters by getting their labor without paying health insurance &c. ?
What you describe hasn't been my experience. I see TWO orders of magnitude more bugs reported by Microsoft's QA than by external parties (in the field of compiler development). I guess end-users just aren't interested in whether an async lambda inside an anonymous type declaration triggers invalid codegen, and wouldn't even discover the issue until the language feature has been in widespread use for five years, but internal QA will discover the bug before the feature ships. On your question of unicode bugs, users seem happy to use just simple unicode for their variable names, and it's down to QA to discover e.g. that dipthongs don't work in edge cases, or that certain whitespace unicode characters have been reclassified in the latest unicode update.
In general, users will find bugs that "itch", but QA departments will find bugs through systematic review of the spec and all possible interactions of language features. And in the field of compiler development, the latter gives me more confidence, because programming is all about making language features interact in useful ways.
The US problem that needs to be fixed is that in the US, PhD students are slave labor for 6 years, and their supervisor has no incentive to get them through the process. By contrast in the UK a PhD is normally three years, and if you take a day over four years then your department's funding is permanently penalized. That's a strong incentive...
Wait, what? This shows that even a mild authority presence (e.g. checkout staff) is enough, and neither armed police nor guard dogs are needed.
"I'm going to take a look at your cellphone. Would you hand it to me?"
I can't tell whether that's a question or a demand, even after you told me.
Well, yeah, the bones in their bodies are "discombobulating" while they're up there, just like they do here on earth. The issue is that the body rebuilds bone in proportion to how much stress is placed on it. There's less stress in microgravity, so the "rebuilding" rate constant is lower than on Earth.
In general I'd see the whole human body as a great big bundle of equilibria between opposing processes. It sounds like Aristotelian philosopy but actually this "homeostasis" approach was the central theme of my 1998 medical textbook. Whenever one of the rate constants is altered a little, it's very possible that the body will go out of whack.
It seems reasonable that microgravity could affect a whole bunch of rate constants to do with medicine absorbtion.
Sure, I fully know the functionality is available on other devices. I was merely responding to the person who had never seen a happy Windows Phone user. (Indeed my brother's Nokia from last year was way more fully featured -- it had built in FM transmitter, and he could set up a wireless basestation+SSH server on it when we wanted to share some files, and he could code in C++).
I couldn't find any cheaper unlimited data other than $1.50/day. AT&T had true unlimited data but only if you were grandfathered in. All other so-called unlimited data plans that I've seen are actually limited. The $30 tmobile plan is limited to a tiny 200mb/month with 10c/megabyte after that.
> I have never known a happy Windows phone user. Never. Not one.
Let me introduce myself. My name's Lucian and I *love* my Windows Phone 7. I think the UI looks slicker than that of my girlfriend's iPhone. I love using it for maps. I love how it shows my corporate Exchange email along with my personal IMAP email in customized updating tiles on the front page. It works great as a portable radio for listening to podcasts when I'm out gardening or in my workshop. I take it to bed with me each night to read Kindle and to listen to radio comedies. I'm a developer (I work at Microsoft on the new "async" language feature for C#/VB) and I love developing for for Windows Phone 7. My biggest gripe with the device is that Amazon didn't implement an orientation-lock in their Kindle app.
I'm actually also fairly happy with TMobile, paying $45/month for unlimited data (through the $1.50 "daily webpass") and I hope this survives the AT&T takeover. But I'm jealous of my brother in the UK who gets unlimited data for 6 months for only $40.
With t-mobile prepay, you can get "unlimited data 24hour passes" for $1.50/day -- $45/month. That's pretty cheap for unlimited data. And it works out cheaper because of the many work days where you make do with wifi at home and at the office and can skip the 24hour pass for that day.
Step 4: If you're not rich enough to afford giving an $800 device to each of your children, and have only your own, then say to kid "No you can't use my iPhone".
Step 5: On a long car journey where young kid needs distraction, repeat "No you can't use my iPhone".
Step 6: When young kid continues to whine, repeat "No you can't use my iPhone"
Step 7: When young kid asks why not, explain "Because I went to setting>general>restrictions and turned off the passcode memory"
Step 8: When young kid asks again why not, explain "Because you might accidentally buy stuff"
Step 9: When young kid asks again why not, say "Because I told you so, all right."
Step 10: Console young kid.
Up until 2000 or so, non-religious suicide bombers (largely Tamils) outnumbered religious suicide bombers,
Windows has had a very well-defined meaning for DPI, and has done since XP. EVERYTHING is supposed to scale with the DPI setting. Everything does scale in most Microsoft applications. Yes, that includes documents and margins and UI elements.
If you want the UI elements to be larger but not the body, then you've ALWAYS done it by setting larger sizes for UI elements in the DisplayProperties control panel. Not by setting DPI.
There is no "DPI aware problem", apart from the UI programmers you mention -- and they're just being ignorant or lazy.
But, why should I have to purchase Office 2010 because my state government is now sending out informational requests in docx format?
You shouldn't! If you're on Windows, then use Microsoft's free Word Viewer to view the docx file. If you're on Linux, install the addin for OpenOffice to read the docx. if you're on a Mac, use one of the many online converters from docx format.
(The point that "no one implements docx with 100% fidelity" is irrelevant here. When your state govt sends out informational requests in docx format, they're not relying on subtleties of Word2003-style kerning vs Word2010-style kerning, or the other inadequately documented things. You'll be able to read the informational request fine even if pagination is slightly different.)
Maybe your point was: "What if my state requires me to submit tenders in docx format?"
I think that, in scientific papers, correlation is usually *correlated* with causation...
I bought my first Kindle book last week -- "Selected Stories by Philip K Dick"
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0027MJTNS
I'm very unhappy with the Kindle experience.
There are typographical errors on 50% of pages (usually missing spaces between punctuation). And most importantly, the Kindle edition simply LACKS those "blank-line paragraph breaks". In the physical copy I can tell that time has jumped forward or we've switched planet by that half an inch of whitespace. But on the Kindle, it all just flows together and I have to slow down, stop, reverse, and figure out that there should have been a break there.
Just from last year's stamps alone in the UK --
Boyle, Newton, Franklin, Babbage, Rutherford: http://www.royalmail.com/portal/stamps/content1?catId=115800796&mediaId=116600770
Flemming, Ross, Hounsfield: http://www.royalmail.com/portal/stamps/content1?catId=127200772&mediaId=128800767
Darwin: http://www.royalmail.com/portal/stamps/content1?catId=91400755&mediaId=91500749
Watt, Stephenson, McAdam: http://www.royalmail.com/portal/stamps/content1?catId=93000750&mediaId=93000754
88kph on as much power as a toaster? That's nothing. We've had flying toasters for years...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cm7tv5cM8g
The issue is that, when packets are dropped and the TCP window narrows, it's pretty much a catastrophe from throughput perspective. In particular, the recipient won't know about a dropped packet until the latency delay, and the sender won't know about it until (minimum) twice that latency. And so the sender will keep on sending at its high rate, causing it and everyone else's packets to drop, and it'll take many round-trip-times before flow is re-established.
If there were smaller buffers in the internet routers, then receiver and sender would know much quicker about congestion, and they'd be able to get the correct transmission rates with only a tiny amount of disruption.
I think effectiveness of US anti-terrorist techniques is HARMED by its current levels of secrecy.
Think of the TSA and its no-fly list. And the fact that list itself is secret. And the fact that everything around it is shrouded in secrecy. It means that an ineffective and wasteful government program hsan't been exposed to the glare of public scrutiny that would have killed it. Likewise the body-scanners.
Think of government funding of people like funding Saddam or Noriega or Irangate-- public scrutiny could easily have squashed for their manifest stupidity, but in the culture of secrecy these counterproductive programs flourished.
I think that prosecuting the "war on terror" is like the other aspects of running a country: improved by the US's marvelous system of openness and checks and balances, and hindered when it follows the UK model of paternalistic secretive "we know best" government.
So far we haven't actually seen ANY downsides of the wikileaks...
* We saw a german official get fired for leaking information to a foreign state
* We saw the Yemeni government conspiring to lie to its people
* We saw the UK foregin office trying to lie to the UK parliament about breaking international commitments on cluster bombs
* US secretary of defense Bob Gates explained that the leaks haven't hurt the US
There have ben only upsides so far.
"I think you look great in that dress".
"We the government think the best way to run a democracy is to systematically lie to the electorate".
It's ludicrous to compare the two. Also you missed the middle ground between "uncontrolled verbal diarrhea of opinions" and "deliberately tell outright factual lies".
That sounds like a US perspective. I think the cables have all reflected very well on the US, as expected, and confirmed that it's a responsible decent world power.
The scandals we're seeing is more about FOREIGN governments who have been lying to their people. Some of us suspected they lied some of the time, but I don't think we knew about how much, and I don't think we knew about all the instances of it.
I didn't know about Yemen government lying to its people. I didn't know about UK government lying to parliament about cluster bombs. The German news was enough to cause a resignation. Wikileak's Kenyan news a few years ago was enough to cause a revolution, basically -- rioting and protests that led the corrupt government to collapse.
In general, whistleblowers are important -- and indeed there are lots of laws specifically to protect whistleblowers.
Every soldier has a moral (and sometimes legal) duty to disobey unjust orders, and we should feel sorry when the soldier is punished for disobeying orders.
So yes in general there are many circumstances when we should feel sorry for someone being punished when he breaks an agreements.
Does the specific case of Bradley Manning fall into one of this circumstances? I don't know. I think his leak of the helicopter attack in Iraq counts heavily in his favour.
He wrote that he tried one way -- just releasing large quantities of data and expecting the blogs and independent people to mine through it.
And it didn't work. The "many eyeballs" model of software development didn't work on politics for whatever reason.
So he switched to the next way, with a high-profile "news story" that professional journalists pour over. And this has been working.
I suspect that having a personally identified person is part and parcel of making it a "news story".