The government should allow the merger between IBM and Sun only on condition that the resulting megacorporation and all of its employees move to India.
I mean, look at how many people think evolution is "just a theory", and you might start to realize just how dangerous a little knowledge is in the hands of morons.
Gosh, its almost as bad as those morons who claim that "race is just a social construct"!
Seriously, the problem with a little knowledge is it is too little. The social chaos results from people throwing data away and that starts with designating certain kinds of discrimination off limits to private parties making their own decisions, as does Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Timothy A. Salthouse
Received 17 April 2008; received in revised form 20 August 2008; accepted 12 September 2008. published online 24 February 2009.
Abstract
Cross-sectional comparisons have consistently revealed that increased age is associated with lower levels of cognitive performance, even in the range from 18 to 60 years of age. However, the validity of cross-sectional comparisons of cognitive functioning in young and middle-aged adults has been questioned because of the discrepant age trends found in longitudinal and cross-sectional analyses. The results of the current project suggest that a major factor contributing to the discrepancy is the masking of age-related declines in longitudinal comparisons by large positive effects associated with prior test experience. Results from three methods of estimating retest effects in this project, together with results from studies comparing non-human animals raised in constant environments and from studies examining neurobiological variables not susceptible to retest effects, converge on a conclusion that some aspects of age-related cognitive decline begin in healthy educated adults when they are in their 20s and 30s.
My comment:
Speaking as one of those aging boomers, age profiling is OK. So is racial, gender, sexual preference and religious profiling. We operating in a mysterious and complex world while suffering from a poverty of information. It's all about getting all the data you can, baby... its all about the data...
The story ends there. "Josh" is no coding genius. He's a business genius. He understands that business nowadays is all about rent-seeking. Rent-seeking is looking for a parasitic niche from which you can milk the system with impunity, until the system collapses.
How could anyone learn any other lesson from the goings-on in Washington, D.C. and Wall St. nowadays?
Aside from academic pissing contests you have a much more immediate worry: The lack of bankruptcy protection afforded student loans coupled with the trend in life-time income prospects for CS graduates.
Liskov says: "Today the field is on a very sound foundation."
If only it were true.
I recall, in fact, the point in time when I first ran across Liskov's CLU in the context of working one of the first commercial distributed computing environments for the mass market, VIEWTRON, and determining the real problem with distributed programming was finding an appropriate relational formalism.
We're still struggling with the object-relational impedance mismatch today. The closest we are to finding a "solid basis" for computer science is a general field of philosophy called "structural realism" which attempts to find the proper roles of relations vs relata in creating our models of the world.
If anything, our descriptions should be "relations all the way down" unless we can find a good way, as some are attempting, to finally unify the two concepts as conjugates of one another.
Put some lye and aluminum foil in a big bowl of water.
Once the aluminum is consumed and you have witnessed a whole bunch of hydrogen come off, don't put any more lye into the water, but do put some more aluminum foil into it. Watch it get consumed too as it produces more hydrogen. Repeat until you see how silly TFA is.
I worked on one of the most widely deployed automated toll road systems and it was pretty obvious that the strategic direction was to address the emerging market of corrupt politicians selling off public roads to private interests for instant money now.
Problem is, when you have everything automated the only people with money to pay the tolls will be the owners. Of course, maybe that's the point. I mean who wants all that traffic congestion? In fact, who wants all that population?
Low earth orbit (LEO) is about 22k miles lower than Geostationary Orbit (GSO) and collisions are very rare in GSO due to the ~0 relative velocity of the satellites there.
The risk adjusted net present value of unicorns is basically 0 because the risk of their not existing is close to 1. Of genies, well that depends on your religion, but for the vast majority of folks making economic decisions with real money, its 0. Of "Rotovators" of the type linked to by you, it is probably higher than space elevators but lower than the HASTOL rotovator type I linked to by quite a lot because the HASTOL rotovator can be constructed with current materials and suborbital launch vehicles now going into commercial operation.
So a fair comparison has to compare the economies of a HASTOL rotovator, adjusted for the technological risk, to the difference between current high perigee LEO applications and modification of those applications to have perigees low enough to naturally reenter at about the same time the satellite is at the end of its projected useful life.
The trade-off is not nearly as clear as you make it out to be, and with the value of getting things to and from space being essentially "halfway to anywhere", it is pretty clear that you've got a lot weaker case than you apparently think.
This is a good example of why circular, indeed any high-perigee orbit should be reserved for applications like tether propulsion such as HASTOL Rotovators.
Low perigee orbits, orbits that dip into upper atmosphere, naturally decay to reentry. If collisions occur, the pieces will naturally decay to reentry.
Rotovators are highly valuable and actually need to operate in LEO to throw things out of LEO, both up and down -- and Rotovators are quite vulnerable to debris.
500 mile perigee is way to high. It is a nighmare orbit for debris proliferation.
The mathematics of objects are poorly formalized. The mathematics of relations, on the other hand, are inherent in the very idea of formal language, subsuming functional as well as object oriented programming. Object orientation is being brought into philosophical question by advances in Structural Realism. I suspect something like Informational Realism will be a more appropriate approach for a mathematically strong culture like Russia to use for setting up an OS for the 21st century.
"If somebody is good in their job, they're going to want to stay in the job that they're in," Johnson said. "They aren't the ones papering the town with resumes right now." As a result, Johnson is using the LinkedIn social networking site to augment his hiring efforts. He said he is searching the site for a "passive candidate" â" someone who may be advertising his IT credentials on LinkedIn and looks like a strong match for CME, but isn't actively looking to leave the security of his current job.
Somehow this points to a guy who isn't really interested in doing his own job.
Basically the reason that people write web apps is because port 80 is the only port they know they can get access to through all the network barriers, AND the fact that the browser based standards endorsed by the W3C not only are sufficiently adopted but are are free of charge, unlike Microsoft's widely adopted operating system that is neither free nor open.
Kolmogorov Programming
on
Less Is Moore
·
· Score: 1
Make the engine, upon which the winning succinct byte code runs, a new W3C standard browser programming language (or at least virtual machine) and reduce the Microsoft OS CD to those components required to create a web-delivered application platform using the winning engine. Such an engine would, of course, have some features that dynamically encached expansions (and/or "memoizations") similar to the Hotspot optimization technology that originated with the Self programming language (and was later adopted by Sun's Java Virtual Machine). Hence it would make sense to have the OS CD contain a partially pre-expanded/optimized code base.
Then, for delivery of software services to pre-existing platforms, create a legacy port of the services code to pre-existing W3C standards like XForms implemented in a downloadable ECMAScript Client/SOA library in a manner similar to the way TIBET(tm) does. The idea is to go "Live", ie: web-delivered, with a fundamentally new W3C base (whatever engine won the prize) but support legacy W3C environments for migration.
Again, this prize-oriented strategy would, of course, require a rigorous specification of the software services so the testing could be largely automated.
This approach addresses Microsoft's 2 biggest problems deriving from the same fundamental reality: Everyone has needed their OS to interoperate with the bulk of the information industry.
The first problem is ethical and really goes beyond the scope of my professional opinions to my public opinions about the support of property rights. Suffice to say, I have no trouble with someone who goes after a natural monopoly position and succeeds. I have a problem with someone who then refuses to use that position of success to fix the bug in the society that made them inordinately rich and their technology inordinately influential.
The second problem is technical, which is what my argument here is really all about.
Basically Microsoft's code bloat problem derives from its monopoly position. This may seem like a truism since all of the software "profession" suffers from code bloat, but only Microsoft can take this to monopolistic proportions -- proportions that make Ma Bell's monopolistic complexities of yore look Spartan.
So Microsoft has this problem and it has many programmers (contributing to the code-bloat problem). It also has mountains of cash.
So how can Microsoft bust its own monopoly position turning its many programmers (many newly laid off!) and mountains of cash into succinct code?
Monetary Incentives for the Programmers.
For example, the original idea for the Hutter Prize was:
S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus
R = S/P (the compression ratio).
Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at the time of the new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))
Something similar can be done with the size of the binary that passes the entire suite of tests for Microsoft's software suite.
What happens very rapidly is the programmers first apply their skills to maximally refactoring. What falls out is a series of legacy API layers written atop a tight core.
They'd have to spend more money on code testing to verify the compressed code-bases of the competing teams actually worked to spec but the results should be quite gratifying.
First, I'm not a lawyer, but I have been reading code for a few decades.;)
Second, if the H-1b workers are here legitimately then I can't find anything in the law requiring Microsoft to lay them off first. Correct me if I'm wrong. I may have missed something.
THIRD, there is plenty of evidence that there has been a systemic and deliberate abuse of the provisions of the law in hiring H-1b workers. Specifically, the requirement that the employer make a good faith effort to hire US citizens prior to application for an H-1b visa.
FOURTH, Microsoft is the largest user, and therefore likely the largest abuser of the H-1b provision.
FIFTH, the penalty for filing a fraudulent H-1b application is:
To knowingly furnish any false information in the preparation of this form and any supporting documentation thereto, or to
aid, abet or counsel another to do so is a felony, punishable by $10,000 fine or five years in the penitentiary, or both (18
U.S.C. 1001). Other penalties apply as well to fraud or misuse of this immigration document (U.S.C. 1546) and to perjury with
respect to this form (18 U.S.C. 1546 and 1621).
SIXTH: Since this practice is likely pervasive at Microsoft, it must be prosecuted as a criminal Racket under the provisions of RICO.
SEVENTH: Since Bill Gates and Steve Balmer are clearly the leaders of this apparently criminal organization, they should be indicted and tried for fraud and perjury.
How many terabytes in the entire archive of Usenet? Yes, I'm including the binaries.
What is the cost per terabyte these days?
How many seconds of, say, the Iraq war would that cost if the Library of Congress or the National Archives were to keep a backup or two in some salt mines somewhere?
It's no coincidence that this fight centers in Iowa. Silicon Valley hence Gateswould not exist without the
Iowans As Tom Wolfe documents in
his Forbes article:,
Robert Noyce and His Congregation,[August 25,
1997] virtually all of the essential inventions upon
which Silicon Valley was founded were created by the
much-derided, non-"vibrant", "white-bread",
"middle class" of"fly-over country".
A few months ago I asked the aging Bob Johnson -- former CTO
of Burroughs Corporation when it was a leading mainframe
company in Minneapolis where he developed the magnetic
ink you see on the bottom of your checks -- what he thought
caused the loss of the Midwestern high tech leadership
to the coasts, and he said it was the financial
dominance of the coasts.
That squares with what I observed while at Control
Data Corporation/Cray Research, Inc -- midwestern companies that invented the supercomputer.
The reason Bill Norris and Seymour Cray were able to
start CDC thence Cray Research was because they violated
SEC regs and went around selling stock at PTA meetings,
making a lot of middle class people retire very
comfortably. My late father bought some Cray stock early
on which helped greatly with his retirement.
When I was at CDC in Arden Hills, MN attempting to
deploy the mass market version of the PLATO network with
Internet-like capabilities (the system that Ray Ozzie
(Bill Gates' replacement at Microsoft) cut his teeth on)
in 1980 the primary resistance was from a middle
management that, due to the financial press' hostility
toward Norris's vision of a society disintermediated by
computer networking, small high-tech farms and locally
produced and consumed essentialsâ"had itself grown
hostile to Norris.
My proposed solution is simple to state but will
perhaps require a war to institute:
Replace all taxes on
economic activity with a tax on net-assets, assessed at
their in-place liquidation value, at the risk free
interest rate (which according to modern portfolio
theory is the short-term US Treasury rate) so as to
extract all economic rents from the private sector, and
then, to prevent public sector rent-seeking in
pork-barrel politics, disperse those funds evenly in a
dividend to all citizens, as the beneficiaries of the
land-trust called the United States.
That will not only stop the vicious centralization of
power in the private and public sectors, but it will
clarify the role of immigrationâ"it is a dilution of the
benefits
intended for the
Posterity of the Founders of the land trust called
The United States of America.
Slashdot Mirror
Haven't these guys ever booted from a CD?
"IBM Offers To Move Laid Off Workers To India" and "Everyone in Indian cities is at risk of consuming human feces, if they're not already, the Ministry of Urban Development concluded in September.
In fact, I'm going to contact my Congressmen today to recommend this stipulation. Please do the same if you love America.
If you don't mind my asking...
Yeah any true "geek" understands that the existence of mixins implies their base classes don't really exist. Right?
Gosh, its almost as bad as those morons who claim that "race is just a social construct"!
Seriously, the problem with a little knowledge is it is too little. The social chaos results from people throwing data away and that starts with designating certain kinds of discrimination off limits to private parties making their own decisions, as does Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
When does age-related cognitive decline begin?
Timothy A. Salthouse
Received 17 April 2008; received in revised form 20 August 2008; accepted 12 September 2008. published online 24 February 2009.
Abstract
Cross-sectional comparisons have consistently revealed that increased age is associated with lower levels of cognitive performance, even in the range from 18 to 60 years of age. However, the validity of cross-sectional comparisons of cognitive functioning in young and middle-aged adults has been questioned because of the discrepant age trends found in longitudinal and cross-sectional analyses. The results of the current project suggest that a major factor contributing to the discrepancy is the masking of age-related declines in longitudinal comparisons by large positive effects associated with prior test experience. Results from three methods of estimating retest effects in this project, together with results from studies comparing non-human animals raised in constant environments and from studies examining neurobiological variables not susceptible to retest effects, converge on a conclusion that some aspects of age-related cognitive decline begin in healthy educated adults when they are in their 20s and 30s.
My comment:
Speaking as one of those aging boomers, age profiling is OK. So is racial, gender, sexual preference and religious profiling. We operating in a mysterious and complex world while suffering from a poverty of information. It's all about getting all the data you can, baby... its all about the data...
The story ends there. "Josh" is no coding genius. He's a business genius. He understands that business nowadays is all about rent-seeking. Rent-seeking is looking for a parasitic niche from which you can milk the system with impunity, until the system collapses.
How could anyone learn any other lesson from the goings-on in Washington, D.C. and Wall St. nowadays?
and you know what the damn boss said?
"You're fired."
Here I thought he'd be impressed...
If this "blowhard" didn't care about getting CS out that condition.
Aside from academic pissing contests you have a much more immediate worry: The lack of bankruptcy protection afforded student loans coupled with the trend in life-time income prospects for CS graduates.
If only it were true.
I recall, in fact, the point in time when I first ran across Liskov's CLU in the context of working one of the first commercial distributed computing environments for the mass market, VIEWTRON, and determining the real problem with distributed programming was finding an appropriate relational formalism.
We're still struggling with the object-relational impedance mismatch today. The closest we are to finding a "solid basis" for computer science is a general field of philosophy called "structural realism" which attempts to find the proper roles of relations vs relata in creating our models of the world.
If anything, our descriptions should be "relations all the way down" unless we can find a good way, as some are attempting, to finally unify the two concepts as conjugates of one another.
Legislation is a change to the code.
The legislative process is change control.
*It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that the "code base" of law in the US is designated by the prefix "United States Code".
Put some lye and aluminum foil in a big bowl of water. Once the aluminum is consumed and you have witnessed a whole bunch of hydrogen come off, don't put any more lye into the water, but do put some more aluminum foil into it. Watch it get consumed too as it produces more hydrogen. Repeat until you see how silly TFA is.
Problem is, when you have everything automated the only people with money to pay the tolls will be the owners. Of course, maybe that's the point. I mean who wants all that traffic congestion? In fact, who wants all that population?
Low earth orbit (LEO) is about 22k miles lower than Geostationary Orbit (GSO) and collisions are very rare in GSO due to the ~0 relative velocity of the satellites there.
So a fair comparison has to compare the economies of a HASTOL rotovator, adjusted for the technological risk, to the difference between current high perigee LEO applications and modification of those applications to have perigees low enough to naturally reenter at about the same time the satellite is at the end of its projected useful life.
The trade-off is not nearly as clear as you make it out to be, and with the value of getting things to and from space being essentially "halfway to anywhere", it is pretty clear that you've got a lot weaker case than you apparently think.
Low perigee orbits, orbits that dip into upper atmosphere, naturally decay to reentry. If collisions occur, the pieces will naturally decay to reentry.
Rotovators are highly valuable and actually need to operate in LEO to throw things out of LEO, both up and down -- and Rotovators are quite vulnerable to debris.
500 mile perigee is way to high. It is a nighmare orbit for debris proliferation.
The mathematics of objects are poorly formalized. The mathematics of relations, on the other hand, are inherent in the very idea of formal language, subsuming functional as well as object oriented programming. Object orientation is being brought into philosophical question by advances in Structural Realism. I suspect something like Informational Realism will be a more appropriate approach for a mathematically strong culture like Russia to use for setting up an OS for the 21st century.
Somehow this points to a guy who isn't really interested in doing his own job.
Basically the reason that people write web apps is because port 80 is the only port they know they can get access to through all the network barriers, AND the fact that the browser based standards endorsed by the W3C not only are sufficiently adopted but are are free of charge, unlike Microsoft's widely adopted operating system that is neither free nor open.
Make the engine, upon which the winning succinct byte code runs, a new W3C standard browser programming language (or at least virtual machine) and reduce the Microsoft OS CD to those components required to create a web-delivered application platform using the winning engine. Such an engine would, of course, have some features that dynamically encached expansions (and/or "memoizations") similar to the Hotspot optimization technology that originated with the Self programming language (and was later adopted by Sun's Java Virtual Machine). Hence it would make sense to have the OS CD contain a partially pre-expanded/optimized code base.
Then, for delivery of software services to pre-existing platforms, create a legacy port of the services code to pre-existing W3C standards like XForms implemented in a downloadable ECMAScript Client/SOA library in a manner similar to the way TIBET(tm) does. The idea is to go "Live", ie: web-delivered, with a fundamentally new W3C base (whatever engine won the prize) but support legacy W3C environments for migration.
Again, this prize-oriented strategy would, of course, require a rigorous specification of the software services so the testing could be largely automated.
This approach addresses Microsoft's 2 biggest problems deriving from the same fundamental reality: Everyone has needed their OS to interoperate with the bulk of the information industry.
The first problem is ethical and really goes beyond the scope of my professional opinions to my public opinions about the support of property rights. Suffice to say, I have no trouble with someone who goes after a natural monopoly position and succeeds. I have a problem with someone who then refuses to use that position of success to fix the bug in the society that made them inordinately rich and their technology inordinately influential.
The second problem is technical, which is what my argument here is really all about.
Basically Microsoft's code bloat problem derives from its monopoly position. This may seem like a truism since all of the software "profession" suffers from code bloat, but only Microsoft can take this to monopolistic proportions -- proportions that make Ma Bell's monopolistic complexities of yore look Spartan.
So Microsoft has this problem and it has many programmers (contributing to the code-bloat problem). It also has mountains of cash.
So how can Microsoft bust its own monopoly position turning its many programmers (many newly laid off!) and mountains of cash into succinct code?
Monetary Incentives for the Programmers. For example, the original idea for the Hutter Prize was:
S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus
R = S/P (the compression ratio).
Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:
Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at the time of the new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))
Something similar can be done with the size of the binary that passes the entire suite of tests for Microsoft's software suite.
What happens very rapidly is the programmers first apply their skills to maximally refactoring. What falls out is a series of legacy API layers written atop a tight core.
They'd have to spend more money on code testing to verify the compressed code-bases of the competing teams actually worked to spec but the results should be quite gratifying.
Second, if the H-1b workers are here legitimately then I can't find anything in the law requiring Microsoft to lay them off first. Correct me if I'm wrong. I may have missed something.
THIRD, there is plenty of evidence that there has been a systemic and deliberate abuse of the provisions of the law in hiring H-1b workers. Specifically, the requirement that the employer make a good faith effort to hire US citizens prior to application for an H-1b visa.
FOURTH, Microsoft is the largest user, and therefore likely the largest abuser of the H-1b provision.
FIFTH, the penalty for filing a fraudulent H-1b application is: To knowingly furnish any false information in the preparation of this form and any supporting documentation thereto, or to aid, abet or counsel another to do so is a felony, punishable by $10,000 fine or five years in the penitentiary, or both (18 U.S.C. 1001). Other penalties apply as well to fraud or misuse of this immigration document (U.S.C. 1546) and to perjury with respect to this form (18 U.S.C. 1546 and 1621).
SIXTH: Since this practice is likely pervasive at Microsoft, it must be prosecuted as a criminal Racket under the provisions of RICO.
SEVENTH: Since Bill Gates and Steve Balmer are clearly the leaders of this apparently criminal organization, they should be indicted and tried for fraud and perjury.
What is the cost per terabyte these days?
How many seconds of, say, the Iraq war would that cost if the Library of Congress or the National Archives were to keep a backup or two in some salt mines somewhere?
A few months ago I asked the aging Bob Johnson -- former CTO of Burroughs Corporation when it was a leading mainframe company in Minneapolis where he developed the magnetic ink you see on the bottom of your checks -- what he thought caused the loss of the Midwestern high tech leadership to the coasts, and he said it was the financial dominance of the coasts.
That squares with what I observed while at Control Data Corporation/Cray Research, Inc -- midwestern companies that invented the supercomputer.
The reason Bill Norris and Seymour Cray were able to start CDC thence Cray Research was because they violated SEC regs and went around selling stock at PTA meetings, making a lot of middle class people retire very comfortably. My late father bought some Cray stock early on which helped greatly with his retirement.
When I was at CDC in Arden Hills, MN attempting to deploy the mass market version of the PLATO network with Internet-like capabilities (the system that Ray Ozzie (Bill Gates' replacement at Microsoft) cut his teeth on) in 1980 the primary resistance was from a middle management that, due to the financial press' hostility toward Norris's vision of a society disintermediated by computer networking, small high-tech farms and locally produced and consumed essentialsâ"had itself grown hostile to Norris.
My proposed solution is simple to state but will perhaps require a war to institute:
Replace all taxes on economic activity with a tax on net-assets, assessed at their in-place liquidation value, at the risk free interest rate (which according to modern portfolio theory is the short-term US Treasury rate) so as to extract all economic rents from the private sector, and then, to prevent public sector rent-seeking in pork-barrel politics, disperse those funds evenly in a dividend to all citizens, as the beneficiaries of the land-trust called the United States.
That will not only stop the vicious centralization of power in the private and public sectors, but it will clarify the role of immigrationâ"it is a dilution of the benefits intended for the Posterity of the Founders of the land trust called The United States of America.
When I mentioned "mathematics" I was intending to convey top down, holistic optimization rather than just bottom up, nuts and bolts optimization.