Read Stewart Brand's How buildings learn, especially the section about purpose built buildings vs 'general purpose' buildings and how to deal with 'planning for future technology'. Executive summary is buildings which are overspecialized for today's needs and technologies rarely work well in the first place (your requirements have usually changed even before the building is finished), and are usually being bashed down within 50 years as unusable spaces. He argues the best bet for 'future proofing' is to aim for a building that's easy to modify - if you can rip out an inconvenient wall or add a raised floor or remove the raised floor and add another wall without to much drama or cost, you'll still be happy in 20 years,
Everyone can learn to program, just as everyone can learn to write.
But learning to write *well* takes time, lots of practice, and a desire to actually get better as a writer. And every now and then you bump into someone whose writing is *truly* good or truly innovative. This is rare enough that they still give Nobel prizes for it.
I think the same basic principle applies to programming. Being a good programmer takes time, lots of practice, and a desire to become a better programmer. And every now and again you bump into someone whose skills are something else again. Although Alfred Nobel's ability to predict the future was a bit lacking, so there's no Nobel prize for programming.
But no, it doesn't take a 'certain kind of mind' to learn to program, any more than it takes a 'certain kind of mind' to learn to read and write. Although medieval monks surrounded by a sea of disinterested illiterates might have thought otherwise.
Just like when automobiles first appeared and everyone shat themselves and cars had to have a man with a red flag walk in front of them. And people had a point - cars operated by humans kill people on a regular basis, and (worse still) render streets unusable for any purpose other than driving. However the combination of normalization (ie people getting used to seeing cars on the streets) and convenience (it proved much easier to have WWI with the help of cars) led to people accepting the tradeoffs. And the same will happen with self-driving cars - initial doubts and legal restrictions (like where automated vehicles can operate, and whether or not they have to have a sober human at the wheel ready to take over), followed by normalization and the desire to access their convenience. Being able to nap or read a book on a long commute or trip; being able to have one drink too many and still get home safely (to name just two obvious benefits of self driving cars) are huge huge conveniences which will quickly trump any minimal risks.
I think this is all kind of backwards. Since moving to the US a decade or so ago from a country with universal healthcare* the biggest problem I've had is with getting my health records passed from one provider to the next when I change jobs / locations / insurers. I'd love it if someone hacked all my health records and put them on the web for everyone (including myself), since that'd actually mean my various providers could see what the last person produced. I really don't give a shit if my next door neighbor knows I have elevated cholesterol and am on anti-anxiety meds. Shit, if they knew that I was so stressed I was having panic attacks, maybe they'd stop firing up their fucking leaf blower at 8am sharp out of concern for my wellbeing. But I digress.
The reason Americans are so paranoid about 'other people' seeing their healthcare records is some of the 'other people' are for-profit health insurers and before 2010 (when key provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act aka 'Obamacare' came into force) they could and did deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. It's not surprising that there's a bit of a social lag here - three generations of Americans have had to be scared about whether their for-profit healthcare provider could find a way to weasel out of actually paying for necessary healthcare, and it's going to take a while for people to realize they don't have to give a shit any more.
* Good luck guessing which country I moved from - every other first world country on earth has universal healthcare, as do many of those who can't easily claim 'first world' status.
The FAA do not control airspace for the entire planet. And unless you include a couple of expensive-to-get-to island territories, the FAA don't control any airspace within 24 degrees of the equator. Pegasus was a NASA project and hence more or less had to launch from US territory for political reasons; Virgin is a UK-based company headed by a UK citizen. Virgin Space may be based in the US at the moment due to convenient access to technical talent, but they have no real reason to launch in the US at all, let alone if the FAA start making things more than usually inconvenient.
Well I'd assume raptors would be mobile, but I still have no idea why a dinosaur would be blogging, let alone why anyone would care what they thought about CLI vs anything else?
I said I don't *use* quantitative methods myself. I didn't say I hadn't received training in it, or that I don't understand it, or that I don't occasionally collaborate with people who use quantitative methods. Just that the parent poster's claim that "If you don't understand statistics you simply cannot work in the Social Sciences. Ever." is demonstrable nonsense. Also, if you'd like to go on down to http://projectreporter.nih.gov/ [nih.gov] and type 'ethnography' into the 'text search' box and limit project start date to >= 1/1/2012 then you'll find the NIH is funding $3.4 million in *new* grants this year alone which revolve around a methodology where the question of whether the PI does or doesn't "understand anything the quantitative guys put out" is completely irrelevant.
If you'd like to go on down to http://projectreporter.nih.gov/ and type 'ethnography' into the 'text search' box and limit project start date to >= 1/1/2012 then you'll find the NIH is funding $3.4 million in *new* grants this year alone where 'storytelling' is the central research method. That's just one of a number of common qualitative methods, and the NSF funds far more ethnography than the NIH.
You might not have any appreciation for the utility of non-quantitative methods, but that doesn't mean the largest funders of science in the United States don't.
Um, I have a PhD from the University of California San Francisco in sociology, plus 12 years experience doing NIH-funded research and I don't use statistics. There's this little thing called "qualitative research" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualitative_research) you may want to look into one day.
I'm not the parent poster but I've also been using openoffice/libreoffice on a linux laptop in a predominantly microsoft environment since ~ 2001 without any meaningful problems. Whatever authentication method ID is using for network connectivity and access to shared folders seems to be being handled perfectly gracefully by my distro (mint at the moment, following ubuntu, suse, redhat) without me knowing or caring what it is. Admittedly my employers across that time period have been large research universities where people use all sorts of random OS/hardware combinations, so if IT set up a system so dependent on one commercial company's permissions/network architecture that it created problems for anyone not using that company's particular and limited collection of OS's they'd all be fired..
.. and kiss goodbye to your mysql & postgresql databases as well as any web sites you were developing in/var/www and for that matter anything at all that stores its data in/var..
Your method is a decent one, but it requires that you know for sure you don't have any important data anywhere other than/home and/etc. The parent poster is complaining that on generic ubuntu you can do a full upgrade and not have to worry about this.
Sure, as long as your business or the business you work for which is 'earning' all that money starts paying directly on a per-use basis for the infrastructure on which it depends - you know, roads, the education system which gave you literate workers, a legal and police system to stop anyone with a gun just walking in and taking your hard earned money whenever they feel like it,.. If you really don't think that stuff is necessary, I hear Somalia would love to have you move there and start a business.
For sure. It's like reasoning with Rick Santorum. I mean, here's Foreign Policy magazine's quiz to see if you can successfully identify the difference between Rick's quotes and those of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei:
Oh, for sure. I'm an Australian living in the US, and I'm always a bit surprised to find that many Americans think most of their fighting was in Europe against the Nazis, and the liberation of Europe was somehow their doing. The European fighting was largely Nazi German vs the Russians, with the rest of the allies providing a useful distraction (my grandfather was part of that distraction, fighting in North Africa and Greece, and being wounded in Greece - I'm hardly one to underplay the difficulty of that 'distraction'). It's also ironic, because the Americans *did* do the bulk of the fighting against the Empire of Japan (my grandmother's brothers all fought in the Pacific, so again I'm not one to underplay the role of non-US allied forces in that theatre), and it's always seemed a little sad to me that so many Americans see the European theatre as being more 'important' when their own people did so much more in the Pacific.
Seriously. I remember deciding to use a Palm III as my note-talking device at a conference in the early '00s. a) notes sucked. b) I don't have them any more. Meanwhile, the paper notebooks I used for conferences both before and after that ill-fated experiment are on the bookshelf in front of me, and once a year or so I actually read through them because they spur new ideas (and I get re-excited by my old brainfarts) every time I read them. I'm sure the tech solutions offered by others on this page are an improvement on the effectiveness of a Palm III at allowing the user to write quick, effective freehand notes, and making sure you still have those notes years later, but I bet they're still wildly more sucky at both than a notebook.
A more complete description would have also mentioned that the furlough program was signed into law by the previous Republican governor.
I'm beginning to regret using the Horton case as an example - I was trying to talk about the idea of political risk and black swan events, not get bogged down in the partisan nitty-gritty of an exemplar that no-one outside the US will care about..
Slashdot Mirror
Read Stewart Brand's How buildings learn, especially the section about purpose built buildings vs 'general purpose' buildings and how to deal with 'planning for future technology'. Executive summary is buildings which are overspecialized for today's needs and technologies rarely work well in the first place (your requirements have usually changed even before the building is finished), and are usually being bashed down within 50 years as unusable spaces. He argues the best bet for 'future proofing' is to aim for a building that's easy to modify - if you can rip out an inconvenient wall or add a raised floor or remove the raised floor and add another wall without to much drama or cost, you'll still be happy in 20 years,
Everyone can learn to program, just as everyone can learn to write.
But learning to write *well* takes time, lots of practice, and a desire to actually get better as a writer. And every now and then you bump into someone whose writing is *truly* good or truly innovative. This is rare enough that they still give Nobel prizes for it.
I think the same basic principle applies to programming. Being a good programmer takes time, lots of practice, and a desire to become a better programmer. And every now and again you bump into someone whose skills are something else again. Although Alfred Nobel's ability to predict the future was a bit lacking, so there's no Nobel prize for programming.
But no, it doesn't take a 'certain kind of mind' to learn to program, any more than it takes a 'certain kind of mind' to learn to read and write. Although medieval monks surrounded by a sea of disinterested illiterates might have thought otherwise.
And people wonder why women avoid IT..
Just like when automobiles first appeared and everyone shat themselves and cars had to have a man with a red flag walk in front of them. And people had a point - cars operated by humans kill people on a regular basis, and (worse still) render streets unusable for any purpose other than driving. However the combination of normalization (ie people getting used to seeing cars on the streets) and convenience (it proved much easier to have WWI with the help of cars) led to people accepting the tradeoffs. And the same will happen with self-driving cars - initial doubts and legal restrictions (like where automated vehicles can operate, and whether or not they have to have a sober human at the wheel ready to take over), followed by normalization and the desire to access their convenience. Being able to nap or read a book on a long commute or trip; being able to have one drink too many and still get home safely (to name just two obvious benefits of self driving cars) are huge huge conveniences which will quickly trump any minimal risks.
The plural of anecdote is not data..
Come visit LA. You'll get incompetently cut off by lunatics driving pretty much anything on a daily basis.
I think this is all kind of backwards. Since moving to the US a decade or so ago from a country with universal healthcare* the biggest problem I've had is with getting my health records passed from one provider to the next when I change jobs / locations / insurers. I'd love it if someone hacked all my health records and put them on the web for everyone (including myself), since that'd actually mean my various providers could see what the last person produced. I really don't give a shit if my next door neighbor knows I have elevated cholesterol and am on anti-anxiety meds. Shit, if they knew that I was so stressed I was having panic attacks, maybe they'd stop firing up their fucking leaf blower at 8am sharp out of concern for my wellbeing. But I digress.
The reason Americans are so paranoid about 'other people' seeing their healthcare records is some of the 'other people' are for-profit health insurers and before 2010 (when key provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act aka 'Obamacare' came into force) they could and did deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. It's not surprising that there's a bit of a social lag here - three generations of Americans have had to be scared about whether their for-profit healthcare provider could find a way to weasel out of actually paying for necessary healthcare, and it's going to take a while for people to realize they don't have to give a shit any more.
* Good luck guessing which country I moved from - every other first world country on earth has universal healthcare, as do many of those who can't easily claim 'first world' status.
Or alternately, "Good, pointless office upgrades need to be wiped out".
The FAA do not control airspace for the entire planet. And unless you include a couple of expensive-to-get-to island territories, the FAA don't control any airspace within 24 degrees of the equator. Pegasus was a NASA project and hence more or less had to launch from US territory for political reasons; Virgin is a UK-based company headed by a UK citizen. Virgin Space may be based in the US at the moment due to convenient access to technical talent, but they have no real reason to launch in the US at all, let alone if the FAA start making things more than usually inconvenient.
"Mobile Raptor blogger Roberto Lim"
Well I'd assume raptors would be mobile, but I still have no idea why a dinosaur would be blogging, let alone why anyone would care what they thought about CLI vs anything else?
I said I don't *use* quantitative methods myself. I didn't say I hadn't received training in it, or that I don't understand it, or that I don't occasionally collaborate with people who use quantitative methods. Just that the parent poster's claim that "If you don't understand statistics you simply cannot work in the Social Sciences. Ever." is demonstrable nonsense. Also, if you'd like to go on down to http://projectreporter.nih.gov/ [nih.gov] and type 'ethnography' into the 'text search' box and limit project start date to >= 1/1/2012 then you'll find the NIH is funding $3.4 million in *new* grants this year alone which revolve around a methodology where the question of whether the PI does or doesn't "understand anything the quantitative guys put out" is completely irrelevant.
If you'd like to go on down to http://projectreporter.nih.gov/ and type 'ethnography' into the 'text search' box and limit project start date to >= 1/1/2012 then you'll find the NIH is funding $3.4 million in *new* grants this year alone where 'storytelling' is the central research method. That's just one of a number of common qualitative methods, and the NSF funds far more ethnography than the NIH.
You might not have any appreciation for the utility of non-quantitative methods, but that doesn't mean the largest funders of science in the United States don't.
Um, I have a PhD from the University of California San Francisco in sociology, plus 12 years experience doing NIH-funded research and I don't use statistics. There's this little thing called "qualitative research" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualitative_research) you may want to look into one day.
I'm not the parent poster but I've also been using openoffice/libreoffice on a linux laptop in a predominantly microsoft environment since ~ 2001 without any meaningful problems. Whatever authentication method ID is using for network connectivity and access to shared folders seems to be being handled perfectly gracefully by my distro (mint at the moment, following ubuntu, suse, redhat) without me knowing or caring what it is. Admittedly my employers across that time period have been large research universities where people use all sorts of random OS/hardware combinations, so if IT set up a system so dependent on one commercial company's permissions/network architecture that it created problems for anyone not using that company's particular and limited collection of OS's they'd all be fired..
BSA probably counts linux installs as examples of piracy. You know, because SCO told them it was.
.. and kiss goodbye to your mysql & postgresql databases as well as any web sites you were developing in /var/www and for that matter anything at all that stores its data in /var..
Your method is a decent one, but it requires that you know for sure you don't have any important data anywhere other than /home and /etc. The parent poster is complaining that on generic ubuntu you can do a full upgrade and not have to worry about this.
Which is amusing because they've clearly banned shorts with a side length of over 5 inches..
Sure, as long as your business or the business you work for which is 'earning' all that money starts paying directly on a per-use basis for the infrastructure on which it depends - you know, roads, the education system which gave you literate workers, a legal and police system to stop anyone with a gun just walking in and taking your hard earned money whenever they feel like it, .. If you really don't think that stuff is necessary, I hear Somalia would love to have you move there and start a business.
For sure. It's like reasoning with Rick Santorum. I mean, here's Foreign Policy magazine's quiz to see if you can successfully identify the difference between Rick's quotes and those of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/02/29/grand_ayatollah_or_grand_old_party
You should also send these to your local church and synagogue.
Oh, for sure. I'm an Australian living in the US, and I'm always a bit surprised to find that many Americans think most of their fighting was in Europe against the Nazis, and the liberation of Europe was somehow their doing. The European fighting was largely Nazi German vs the Russians, with the rest of the allies providing a useful distraction (my grandfather was part of that distraction, fighting in North Africa and Greece, and being wounded in Greece - I'm hardly one to underplay the difficulty of that 'distraction'). It's also ironic, because the Americans *did* do the bulk of the fighting against the Empire of Japan (my grandmother's brothers all fought in the Pacific, so again I'm not one to underplay the role of non-US allied forces in that theatre), and it's always seemed a little sad to me that so many Americans see the European theatre as being more 'important' when their own people did so much more in the Pacific.
Seriously. I remember deciding to use a Palm III as my note-talking device at a conference in the early '00s. a) notes sucked. b) I don't have them any more. Meanwhile, the paper notebooks I used for conferences both before and after that ill-fated experiment are on the bookshelf in front of me, and once a year or so I actually read through them because they spur new ideas (and I get re-excited by my old brainfarts) every time I read them. I'm sure the tech solutions offered by others on this page are an improvement on the effectiveness of a Palm III at allowing the user to write quick, effective freehand notes, and making sure you still have those notes years later, but I bet they're still wildly more sucky at both than a notebook.
German? Riiight..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWII_Casualties#Charts_and_graphs
A more complete description would have also mentioned that the furlough program was signed into law by the previous Republican governor.
I'm beginning to regret using the Horton case as an example - I was trying to talk about the idea of political risk and black swan events, not get bogged down in the partisan nitty-gritty of an exemplar that no-one outside the US will care about..
Oh, touché. Well played sir, I bow before your detailed and articulate rebuttal.
No, I didn't read my linked wikipedia page. Are you new here? Anyway, I'll be back as soon as I finish editing the wikipedia page..