Just like software optimization. When you've got '1000 things' to fix, you've really got 1 thing to fix: Process/Culture. There is a difference between premature optimization and not doing stupid slow things.
Even if you can eventually 'fix' the mess, it's now a mess with the inner loops optimized, not cleaned up. The original team is likely making another mess.
Not at all, you can be inefficient in non-critial code if it makes it easier to understand or maintain.
But if you're attacking a performance problem you don't start by wasting your time and money on little pointless fixes, you go for the root of the problem with extreme prejudice.
"Well we're still bottlenecked on the DB, but I made the pages load 5ms faster by spending the day optimizing our CSS."
And now nobody will understand it... thanks Bob...
Honestly if I was working for GCHQ or NSA my response would be: "Of course we're bloody spying, that's what you damn well pay us to do."
Mr. Clapper didn't take that approach because he knows damn well if he told us what he was doing, we'd tell him to stop and/or stop the payments.
Mr. Clapper does not take that approach because he's not allowed to take that approach. Like the Marines, if the NSA is doing something it's because they've been TOLD to do something. (Same for SAS and GCHQ)
I agree! The budget is so big that we shouldn't even consider looking at an item if it isn't in the "top 100" projects list.
In this sense, let's buy everyone an Alienware computer, upgrade to the most expensive brand of toilet paper, put in a soda fridge that is fully stocked for all federal employees, paint the building every year, and invite Britney Spears to the company picnic.
Waste less than 1% of the budget is still waste. The fact that the employees themselves thought that it was enough waste to report it should be an indication.
True... but this is like software optimization, you can spend your time fixing 1000 things that have a 0.00126% impact and you're still fucked.
Or you can go after something that will actually make a difference.
... but despite a wealth of capability and opportunity have managed to abstain from it ever since. (The U.S. has reduced the number of warheads stockpiled by over 80% since 1967)
There were some pretty nasty genocidal maniacs running around in Europe just 60 years ago.
It takes a considerable amount of balls to play that card after Vietnam, Cambodia, and the so called War on Terror which were all just political power moves back home.
The U.S. has overall been a force for good in the world, but do not fail to consider your failings as well. Military force requires oversight.
The biggest fear is that a group of people who are clueless about what actual customers want and never talk to anyone outside their small circle believe that they know more about what customers want than people that actually talk to customers.
It gets worse when an arrogant developer becomes a manager and can impose his twisted world view on minions with a complete disregard of what is best for anyone but himself.
When did you last time see a pretty woman doing great things like that? Woman is either fugly and has no choice but study, or pretty and not compelled to do anything besides her hair and nails. This is the way how things are.
The most beautiful woman I ever met was a mathematician who was working on her Phd. Her idea of small talk was Pi. When she walked down a hallway every man she passed literally stopped walking as soon as she passed by and drank her in. I have never seen men behave that way, before or since.
One of my cousins is a lawyer who worked through college as a fashion model.
Perhaps one day you'll get to move out of Mom's basement.
Come down hard?! Hmm, no. The American people will continue to ignore what the U.S. government does as long as they keep Hollywood pumping out new episodes of "Ouch! My Balls!" If the American people really gave a fuck, then a Congress with 16% approval rating would be wiped clean rather than the majority of incumbents be re-elected.
What is human right and human freedom that USA Government have been actively accusing other countries of lacking whereby they are spying on their own people in their own backyard? Its a disgraceful joke
They've been doing it for decades through their intelligence partnerships with various NATO allies. The predecessors of these systems were already in place, the post-9/11 paranoia allowed them to ramp it up to unprecedented levels all over NATO.
For example, Canada has the same rule, a Canadian agency cannot spy on Canadians without specific legal orders. However the U.S. can spy on Canadians, and Canada can spy on Americans. Quid quo pro.
As soon as you have a covert agency in any country is will find some way to dirty itself because most of the time they cannot discuss their operations with politicians.
Google is trying to wrestle control away from the carriers after whoring out Android under their terms when it first came out. Obviously to get carriers interested in Android phones, Google had to ensure they gave power over feature set and update release to the carriers. This "control" caused a massive fragment in the market were phones today are still being sold with Android 2 to 3 versions behind the version of Android Google wants to ship.
While it may have ultimately made Android the top phone platform on the market today, it's cause a huge headache for Google to try and now release value added features like Play Music and Apps while supporting a wide assortment of random versions. Its also a nightmare platform to develop on unless you ignore everything before Android 4 and accept the limited scope of customers.
Not sure this is the best model for Ubuntu to follow because they don't even have the clout Google has that still struggles to get control back.
Carriers need to be told that they features of a phone is defined by the phone, if their networks can't support the feature then they don't get the premium top brands to sell to customers. For instance any carrier that does not support iPhone has seen significant decline in their customer base, this forces the carrier to support the features that Apple wants, not the other way around, to get back customers.
Also this goes completely against the openness of the Ubuntu platform as carriers are more interested in "locking down" rather then "opening up". Not sure open source and phone carriers are a good synergy, this product is doomed.
These are all great points, and I don't disagree with anything per se.
However, I think you are assuming that the future must be like the past. The phone market has undergone a series of significant changes over a period of decades, the past five (+) years with the rise of Apple and then Android coupled with the collapse of Blackberry and Nokia have only accelerated that.
I suspect that as the technology becomes both more powerful and ubiquitous the easier it becomes for a small competitor or open source project (Like the raspberry pi) to effect the entire market.
his appointment to the House of Lords is a strong argument in favour of getting rid of the undemocratic House of Lords, or at least making it an elected body.
So you say that only professional politicians should be able to hold government positions?
For anyone who's lost -- the United Kingdom has this strange political system where you need to be a member of the legislative branch in order to serve on the national executive: only members of parliament can be ministers of Her Majesty's government. This would appear to imply that it is impossible to appoint a specialist as minister, since only professional politicians have a chance to be elected to parliament; in practice, appointment to the Lords is used as a workaround.
Which, as someone else has pointed out, means that a member of the House of Lords is statistically more likely to be actually useful than any elected politician anywhere.
H. Beam Piper posited that an archeological team, finding the remains of a reasonably advanced civilization would be able to puzzle out their language(s) based on the fundamentals of math and chemistry in his novel ``Omnilingual'':
I wonder what he would have thought of this, and how many other useful representations / arrangements there are of the periodic table.
Nice to see I'm not the only one who remembers this. Consider though that they confirmed the information it out from the electron shells and atomic weights since they had already found reasonable guesses for number symbols and "months", the fact that it was arranged as a table was just one of the clues used to decipher it.
(The concept of a periodic table as Rosetta Stone was reused in a Stargate episode and probably elsewhere, but Omnilingual is the oldest one I know of.)
But most of the Moore Bond movies are terrible -- except for the Spy Who Loved Me. Somehow, everything worked in that feature.
A lotus that turned into a Submarine! Honestly they could have got away with no plot or actors and just done a documentary about the car. (With a Top Gear voice over of course...)
It's funny, because Hulk/Banner is one of the deepest, most complex characters in all of comic books.
And that's why I spent my early teens reading Heinlein, Asimov and Tolkien (.. among others too numerous to mention) and trying to figure out what was wrong with my classmates who thought that comic books were the bomb.
I respect the medium, but guys... they're comic books...
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Just like software optimization. When you've got '1000 things' to fix, you've really got 1 thing to fix: Process/Culture. There is a difference between premature optimization and not doing stupid slow things.
Even if you can eventually 'fix' the mess, it's now a mess with the inner loops optimized, not cleaned up. The original team is likely making another mess.
Not at all, you can be inefficient in non-critial code if it makes it easier to understand or maintain.
But if you're attacking a performance problem you don't start by wasting your time and money on little pointless fixes, you go for the root of the problem with extreme prejudice.
"Well we're still bottlenecked on the DB, but I made the pages load 5ms faster by spending the day optimizing our CSS."
And now nobody will understand it... thanks Bob...
The U.S. has overall been a force for good in the world, but do not fail to consider your failings as well. Military force requires oversight.
No worries then - they provide oversights aplenty.
I know you're being ironic but... On a global scale, significantly better than average. From an ideal perspective, never enough.
Honestly if I was working for GCHQ or NSA my response would be: "Of course we're bloody spying, that's what you damn well pay us to do."
Mr. Clapper didn't take that approach because he knows damn well if he told us what he was doing, we'd tell him to stop and/or stop the payments.
Mr. Clapper does not take that approach because he's not allowed to take that approach. Like the Marines, if the NSA is doing something it's because they've been TOLD to do something. (Same for SAS and GCHQ)
I agree! The budget is so big that we shouldn't even consider looking at an item if it isn't in the "top 100" projects list.
In this sense, let's buy everyone an Alienware computer, upgrade to the most expensive brand of toilet paper, put in a soda fridge that is fully stocked for all federal employees, paint the building every year, and invite Britney Spears to the company picnic.
Waste less than 1% of the budget is still waste. The fact that the employees themselves thought that it was enough waste to report it should be an indication.
True... but this is like software optimization, you can spend your time fixing 1000 things that have a 0.00126% impact and you're still fucked.
Or you can go after something that will actually make a difference.
I suspect most if not all nations do it to some extent, the questions are which ones and to what extent.
It's not a question of who is spying, it's a question of who is going to get caught spying.
Honestly if I was working for GCHQ or NSA my response would be: "Of course we're bloody spying, that's what you damn well pay us to do."
... but despite a wealth of capability and opportunity have managed to abstain from it ever since. (The U.S. has reduced the number of warheads stockpiled by over 80% since 1967)
There were some pretty nasty genocidal maniacs running around in Europe just 60 years ago.
It takes a considerable amount of balls to play that card after Vietnam, Cambodia, and the so called War on Terror which were all just political power moves back home.
The U.S. has overall been a force for good in the world, but do not fail to consider your failings as well. Military force requires oversight.
Abolition in the U.S. was decades after most of Europe, and you had to fight a civil war over it.
However, I agree that trying to compare the morality of America with Europe is silly, since you're both pretty guilty.
The biggest fear is that a group of people who are clueless about what actual customers want and never talk to anyone outside their small circle believe that they know more about what customers want than people that actually talk to customers.
It gets worse when an arrogant developer becomes a manager and can impose his twisted world view on minions with a complete disregard of what is best for anyone but himself.
When did you last time see a pretty woman doing great things like that? Woman is either fugly and has no choice but study, or pretty and not compelled to do anything besides her hair and nails. This is the way how things are.
The most beautiful woman I ever met was a mathematician who was working on her Phd. Her idea of small talk was Pi. When she walked down a hallway every man she passed literally stopped walking as soon as she passed by and drank her in. I have never seen men behave that way, before or since.
One of my cousins is a lawyer who worked through college as a fashion model.
Perhaps one day you'll get to move out of Mom's basement.
Remember what happened to Jesus after he kicked around the Money Changers?
I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition!
Oops, wrong script, I'll come in again...
What have the Romans ever done for us eh?
Come down hard?! Hmm, no. The American people will continue to ignore what the U.S. government does as long as they keep Hollywood pumping out new episodes of "Ouch! My Balls!" If the American people really gave a fuck, then a Congress with 16% approval rating would be wiped clean rather than the majority of incumbents be re-elected.
+1 internets for you sir.
What is human right and human freedom that USA Government have been actively accusing other countries of lacking whereby they are spying on their own people in their own backyard? Its a disgraceful joke
You can't handle the truth.
They've been doing it for decades through their intelligence partnerships with various NATO allies. The predecessors of these systems were already in place, the post-9/11 paranoia allowed them to ramp it up to unprecedented levels all over NATO.
For example, Canada has the same rule, a Canadian agency cannot spy on Canadians without specific legal orders. However the U.S. can spy on Canadians, and Canada can spy on Americans. Quid quo pro.
As soon as you have a covert agency in any country is will find some way to dirty itself because most of the time they cannot discuss their operations with politicians.
So we just need to write a Spam Generator that sends out billions of encrypted stuff to US-citizens to create government jobs?
Nice!
As noble as that might seem, you will be undermining national security and wasting your own tax money.
Why are people so emotionally bound to internal combustion engines and coal power plants?
Exactly, just open the door every 24 hours to hose them down, give em some pizza and a carton of T-shirts.
I honestly don't know if they can fly. Atmospheric density and all of that
<sarcasm> Especially with only 38% of our gravitational field to work with... </sarcasm>
Google is trying to wrestle control away from the carriers after whoring out Android under their terms when it first came out. Obviously to get carriers interested in Android phones, Google had to ensure they gave power over feature set and update release to the carriers. This "control" caused a massive fragment in the market were phones today are still being sold with Android 2 to 3 versions behind the version of Android Google wants to ship.
While it may have ultimately made Android the top phone platform on the market today, it's cause a huge headache for Google to try and now release value added features like Play Music and Apps while supporting a wide assortment of random versions. Its also a nightmare platform to develop on unless you ignore everything before Android 4 and accept the limited scope of customers.
Not sure this is the best model for Ubuntu to follow because they don't even have the clout Google has that still struggles to get control back.
Carriers need to be told that they features of a phone is defined by the phone, if their networks can't support the feature then they don't get the premium top brands to sell to customers. For instance any carrier that does not support iPhone has seen significant decline in their customer base, this forces the carrier to support the features that Apple wants, not the other way around, to get back customers.
Also this goes completely against the openness of the Ubuntu platform as carriers are more interested in "locking down" rather then "opening up". Not sure open source and phone carriers are a good synergy, this product is doomed.
These are all great points, and I don't disagree with anything per se.
However, I think you are assuming that the future must be like the past. The phone market has undergone a series of significant changes over a period of decades, the past five (+) years with the rise of Apple and then Android coupled with the collapse of Blackberry and Nokia have only accelerated that.
I suspect that as the technology becomes both more powerful and ubiquitous the easier it becomes for a small competitor or open source project (Like the raspberry pi) to effect the entire market.
Competition is good.
As a dual British citizen, I can only say this:
his appointment to the House of Lords is a strong argument in favour of getting rid of the undemocratic House of Lords, or at least making it an elected body.
So you say that only professional politicians should be able to hold government positions?
For anyone who's lost -- the United Kingdom has this strange political system where you need to be a member of the legislative branch in order to serve on the national executive: only members of parliament can be ministers of Her Majesty's government. This would appear to imply that it is impossible to appoint a specialist as minister, since only professional politicians have a chance to be elected to parliament; in practice, appointment to the Lords is used as a workaround.
Which, as someone else has pointed out, means that a member of the House of Lords is statistically more likely to be actually useful than any elected politician anywhere.
Go figure.
:)
Never look a gift horse in the mouth.
H. Beam Piper posited that an archeological team, finding the remains of a reasonably advanced civilization would be able to puzzle out their language(s) based on the fundamentals of math and chemistry in his novel ``Omnilingual'':
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19445
I wonder what he would have thought of this, and how many other useful representations / arrangements there are of the periodic table.
Nice to see I'm not the only one who remembers this. Consider though that they confirmed the information it out from the electron shells and atomic weights since they had already found reasonable guesses for number symbols and "months", the fact that it was arranged as a table was just one of the clues used to decipher it.
(The concept of a periodic table as Rosetta Stone was reused in a Stargate episode and probably elsewhere, but Omnilingual is the oldest one I know of.)
... here
Shame their web UI is stuck in the 1990's along with their mapping technology.
Literally. >_>
But most of the Moore Bond movies are terrible -- except for the Spy Who Loved Me. Somehow, everything worked in that feature.
A lotus that turned into a Submarine! Honestly they could have got away with no plot or actors and just done a documentary about the car. (With a Top Gear voice over of course...)
Now in theaters:
Coming Soon, Monsters N+1 and Despicable Me 2.
Hollywood has a severe idea shortage.
It's the 80's all over again, Jaws, Star Wars, Rocky, Rambo, Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Give it a few years.
It's funny, because Hulk/Banner is one of the deepest, most complex characters in all of comic books.
And that's why I spent my early teens reading Heinlein, Asimov and Tolkien (.. among others too numerous to mention) and trying to figure out what was wrong with my classmates who thought that comic books were the bomb.
I respect the medium, but guys... they're comic books...