Disagree. At some level, a real command for a real delete has to happen. This should be like RDP being built on top of UDP. The script could just as easily be deleting prev.active.stuff, then renaming active.stuff to prev.active.stuff, rather than directly deleting active.stuff. Oh, wait, that would imply building a system with enough extra capacity to maintain a first generation hot backup - which is what the "undo" does anyway.
Years ago there were articles pointing out that the default voices in different languages were male or female depending on culture. As I recall, the German default was male because it was assumed that male drivers wouldn't want to take orders from a woman; OTOH some other cultures defaulted to female because a male voice would be taken as competitive or aggressive, while a female voice was "obviously" just making suggestions.
None of this is new. Confucius was very big on obedience to established authority, as were some of the ancient Greek philosophers. "Being disruptive" is obviously bad - "disruption" is definitely negative. The use of this word to describe business and social changes that are supposedly positive is, in itself, a recent style change; and the ready acceptance of such word redefinition is similarly a slightly longer-term-recent style change.
For stone wheels, fine. For software, wasteful. One of the benefits of open source should be the pooling of effort and intellect. Instead of many people writing their own library, and then having to refine and optimize it, many hands can get the same work done faster - and hopefully with cross-checking and review.
... universal build system... everything build from scratch every day and wouldn't build if any of its dependencies didn't build.
I worked under a similar philosophy at one place (maybe a little less complete). 1. Anything wrong was noticed IMMEDIATELY. 2. Everyone knew that their bad check-in would shut down everyone else, so we were cautious enough to confirm our work before doing the check-in, and maybe do a confirmation check-out-and-build afterwards just for paranoia's sake. Yes, it's overhead, and so is "Measure twice, cut once".
I'm sorry, I must have misunderstood something and am now confused to the point of whiplash. I thought you started out disagreeing with the person you responded to, and you thought that he was "old and set in [his] ways" which sounds negative towards his point (which I understood as "Don't take away my features"). Now it sounds like you're in violent agreement that changing features is a major inconvenience for the user.
No, what he's really saying is, I love the current product and was very happy with it, and then someone REMOVED a feature I liked, for no discernable reason - it's not as if someone's saving money by leaving that feature out (there's certainly no material cost in software), and in fact the feature is still there internally. One person's idea of "clean design" is another's idea of "boring/ugly/plain" - that's why there are so many different brands of furniture.
>>>..... just have one Linux distro with a number of different desktop environments.
Maybe that would mean that people were actually working on productive products and variants, instead of expending effort reinventing the wheel? Maybe that would prove, beyond any doubt, just how much better the Linux concept of interchangeable layers can be (as opposed to the monolithic Windows model)?
The entire Personal Computing revolution was the ability to work WITHOUT a remote server, in contrast to the dumb-terminal/remote-mainframe paradigm that had been the only game in town. Total reliance on a remote server (when there is local intelligence) is abysmally stupid - it's not even reasonable DRM for local features like a clock to fail. (Yes, I'm willing to put up with "reasonable" DRM for subscription services just like I pay for my dead-tree magazine subscriptions, politically incorrect, so sorry.)
No, it's not that "expensive solutions are considered just another day"; it's penny-wise shortsightedness when things are running, interspersed with crisis emergency spending when the shortsightedness explodes. Besides, what IT project has ever run on time and under budget? So of course the replacement plans get knocked down. Heck, look at the FAA . . .
Remember that the original goal of "internetworking" was "connecting disparate networks (typical from different companies)". At the time this system was set up, someone probably thought it was very clever to standardize on the industry-leading format. The most important part of this story is the reminder that "peephole optimization" can completely miss the point of what the SYSTEM is doing. PS I wonder why nobody ever considered putting a TIP in front of each computer and taking TCP/IP between them, so that as computers were upgraded they could just use TCP . . . oh, right, penny-wise shortsightedness, same problem that almost everyone has.
Do you go around your house changing your light switches every few years as a preventive measure? Or the circuit breakers? I'll bet they're the same ones put in when the place was built. And you replace them when they break, which is rare. A lot of the 1970s vintage systems are simpler and more robust than a modern ultra-small-scale IC SOC. They had transistors and resistors and parts that could survive, rather than a few atoms barely holding each bit.:-)
This isn't a permanent prohibition. It is a use case, and a spec, for additional sensors that we don't have just yet. I'll bet perfume and skin-care companies would also like to have scent sensors.
Now the "robots" are really just waldoes - totally controlled by an operator (a skilled surgeon, but still "operator" of the tool, no more and no less than the operator of a backhoe or crane). Next they will be robots, guided and monitored by an operator (perhaps a less skilled or less experienced surgeon). Then they will be good enough for remote locations, bringing emergency care to hospital-less places, with telepresence oversight. And maybe emergency or combat locations. Eventually they'll be good enough that they just need watching . . . . sort of like interns . . .
A sequel (sort of ) to "The Marching Morons". An automated medical kit is time-traveled back to the current (1950s) time, and is found by a former doctor, now a bum after being de-licensed for malpractice due to alcoholism. Thinking the novelty and improvement of the tools is improvement in medical technology that he missed, he uses the power for good in an emergency, and starts turning his life around. Someone else, though, notices a future date on something in the kit, and eventually steals and misuses it. The safety mechanisms notice this . . . ((Also adapted for... Twilight Zone? some other 1950s show?))
Especially that rope-climbing bit, I could never do that. Or gymnastics. The lighter quicker kids were always better at that. OTOH I could lift more than they could, and beat any two of them at a tug of war. So, horses for courses.
Yes, it sounds childish. And yes, if the union head doxxed the witness, then doxxing the union head seems only fair. But vigilante justice has its problems too.
Umm . . . a taller drive geometry in a single package with a single motor (rather than multiple packages) should take less *net* power to spin for the same amount of storage. Make the radius smaller (fewer tracks, less seek time) should lead to less rotational momentum and even less net power. If we're making special data-center drives in vibration mounts, maybe we can talk about magnetic frictionless bearings or other mechanical enhancements. OF COURSE an SSD will always be more efficient - but the cost will still be higher.
Or else it's just about the sheer quantity of data involved. Even a comparatively small additional cost-per-gigabyte adds up when you're storing all of Youtube plus caching every single website being indexed.
Storage drum systems had many heads, arranged in a spiral around the drum so there was time at the end of a "ring" to select the next head. (Apparently nobody thought of making a straight line of heads and spiraling the data.) One of the later models of IBM multi-platter disk drives had 2 sets of head arms. All of these are mechanically complex, which is part of the reason for RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) (redundancy of course being the other). Instead of trying to make one disk drive bigger and/or put more heads on it, make the disk SYSTEM bigger with modular increments of the then-current technology, and get more heads by spreading them across the modules.
There is a tradeoff between system complexity and speed. Highest performance has been attained on specialized systems with intelligent distribution of indices and data, particularly as differentiated by activity, across different levels of storage media; but there is benefit in maintaining a simple generic model of storage, particularly across replicated networked storage systems, so that multi-server and/or back systems need not be identical. One can envision managing active data in many gigabytes of RAM, backing it to SSD, further demoting it to HD as activity decreases; but this involves a lot of system complexity
Remember, though, that the 3330 10-platter drive held a whopping 200 MB, and a controller managing five of them could get all the way to 1 GB - when today I have a 64 GB microSD card in my camera that weighs nothing and runs at 50 MB/sec.
this++. The original title missed the point: It's not a stupid example. It's a deliberately misleading example, with a deliberate appeal to emotion that is totally unrelated, and as unrefutable as it is unprovable.
Dinner for four (with a tip) can easily approach $100. Shopping for the week can easily be $100. There is an order of magnitude difference between $100 and 500 Euros (OK, half an order, it's 5.5x instead of 10x). I have to assume that part of this is shilling for the banks, who would love to impose their 3% tax on every single dollar, every single time it changes hands. Hey, Mr. Summers, instead of removing convenience from the great mass of people, how about explaining why banks get to charge such a high percentage for, essentially, an email? (And then you can explain why phone companies get to charge ridiculous rates for data when it's in the form of text messages . . . but that's another story of the large entity being able to force its will on each of the small entities, even though the small entities could easily overwhelm the large one if they would only work together.)
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Disagree. At some level, a real command for a real delete has to happen. This should be like RDP being built on top of UDP. The script could just as easily be deleting prev.active.stuff, then renaming active.stuff to prev.active.stuff, rather than directly deleting active.stuff. Oh, wait, that would imply building a system with enough extra capacity to maintain a first generation hot backup - which is what the "undo" does anyway.
Years ago there were articles pointing out that the default voices in different languages were male or female depending on culture. As I recall, the German default was male because it was assumed that male drivers wouldn't want to take orders from a woman; OTOH some other cultures defaulted to female because a male voice would be taken as competitive or aggressive, while a female voice was "obviously" just making suggestions.
None of this is new. Confucius was very big on obedience to established authority, as were some of the ancient Greek philosophers. "Being disruptive" is obviously bad - "disruption" is definitely negative. The use of this word to describe business and social changes that are supposedly positive is, in itself, a recent style change; and the ready acceptance of such word redefinition is similarly a slightly longer-term-recent style change.
For stone wheels, fine. For software, wasteful. One of the benefits of open source should be the pooling of effort and intellect. Instead of many people writing their own library, and then having to refine and optimize it, many hands can get the same work done faster - and hopefully with cross-checking and review.
... universal build system ... everything build from scratch every day and wouldn't build if any of its dependencies didn't build.
I worked under a similar philosophy at one place (maybe a little less complete). 1. Anything wrong was noticed IMMEDIATELY. 2. Everyone knew that their bad check-in would shut down everyone else, so we were cautious enough to confirm our work before doing the check-in, and maybe do a confirmation check-out-and-build afterwards just for paranoia's sake. Yes, it's overhead, and so is "Measure twice, cut once".
I'm sorry, I must have misunderstood something and am now confused to the point of whiplash. I thought you started out disagreeing with the person you responded to, and you thought that he was "old and set in [his] ways" which sounds negative towards his point (which I understood as "Don't take away my features"). Now it sounds like you're in violent agreement that changing features is a major inconvenience for the user.
No, what he's really saying is, I love the current product and was very happy with it, and then someone REMOVED a feature I liked, for no discernable reason - it's not as if someone's saving money by leaving that feature out (there's certainly no material cost in software), and in fact the feature is still there internally. One person's idea of "clean design" is another's idea of "boring/ugly/plain" - that's why there are so many different brands of furniture.
>>> ..... just have one Linux distro with a number of different desktop environments.
Maybe that would mean that people were actually working on productive products and variants, instead of expending effort reinventing the wheel? Maybe that would prove, beyond any doubt, just how much better the Linux concept of interchangeable layers can be (as opposed to the monolithic Windows model)?
The entire Personal Computing revolution was the ability to work WITHOUT a remote server, in contrast to the dumb-terminal/remote-mainframe paradigm that had been the only game in town. Total reliance on a remote server (when there is local intelligence) is abysmally stupid - it's not even reasonable DRM for local features like a clock to fail. (Yes, I'm willing to put up with "reasonable" DRM for subscription services just like I pay for my dead-tree magazine subscriptions, politically incorrect, so sorry.)
No, it's not that "expensive solutions are considered just another day"; it's penny-wise shortsightedness when things are running, interspersed with crisis emergency spending when the shortsightedness explodes. Besides, what IT project has ever run on time and under budget? So of course the replacement plans get knocked down. Heck, look at the FAA . . .
Remember that the original goal of "internetworking" was "connecting disparate networks (typical from different companies)". At the time this system was set up, someone probably thought it was very clever to standardize on the industry-leading format. The most important part of this story is the reminder that "peephole optimization" can completely miss the point of what the SYSTEM is doing. PS I wonder why nobody ever considered putting a TIP in front of each computer and taking TCP/IP between them, so that as computers were upgraded they could just use TCP . . . oh, right, penny-wise shortsightedness, same problem that almost everyone has.
Do you go around your house changing your light switches every few years as a preventive measure? Or the circuit breakers? I'll bet they're the same ones put in when the place was built. And you replace them when they break, which is rare. A lot of the 1970s vintage systems are simpler and more robust than a modern ultra-small-scale IC SOC. They had transistors and resistors and parts that could survive, rather than a few atoms barely holding each bit. :-)
This isn't a permanent prohibition. It is a use case, and a spec, for additional sensors that we don't have just yet. I'll bet perfume and skin-care companies would also like to have scent sensors.
Now the "robots" are really just waldoes - totally controlled by an operator (a skilled surgeon, but still "operator" of the tool, no more and no less than the operator of a backhoe or crane). Next they will be robots, guided and monitored by an operator (perhaps a less skilled or less experienced surgeon). Then they will be good enough for remote locations, bringing emergency care to hospital-less places, with telepresence oversight. And maybe emergency or combat locations. Eventually they'll be good enough that they just need watching . . . . sort of like interns . . .
"So those penis enlargement Android apps don't really work?" Just put the phone in your pocket and call yourself . . . a lot . . .
A sequel (sort of ) to "The Marching Morons". An automated medical kit is time-traveled back to the current (1950s) time, and is found by a former doctor, now a bum after being de-licensed for malpractice due to alcoholism. Thinking the novelty and improvement of the tools is improvement in medical technology that he missed, he uses the power for good in an emergency, and starts turning his life around. Someone else, though, notices a future date on something in the kit, and eventually steals and misuses it. The safety mechanisms notice this . . . ((Also adapted for ... Twilight Zone? some other 1950s show?))
Especially that rope-climbing bit, I could never do that. Or gymnastics. The lighter quicker kids were always better at that. OTOH I could lift more than they could, and beat any two of them at a tug of war. So, horses for courses.
Yes, it sounds childish. And yes, if the union head doxxed the witness, then doxxing the union head seems only fair. But vigilante justice has its problems too.
Well, no, one eye each would LOSE the sense of perspective.
Agreed. And scale matters. A tiny difference in cost/byte makes a difference when multiplied by the huge number of bytes.
Umm . . . a taller drive geometry in a single package with a single motor (rather than multiple packages) should take less *net* power to spin for the same amount of storage. Make the radius smaller (fewer tracks, less seek time) should lead to less rotational momentum and even less net power. If we're making special data-center drives in vibration mounts, maybe we can talk about magnetic frictionless bearings or other mechanical enhancements. OF COURSE an SSD will always be more efficient - but the cost will still be higher.
Or else it's just about the sheer quantity of data involved. Even a comparatively small additional cost-per-gigabyte adds up when you're storing all of Youtube plus caching every single website being indexed.
Storage drum systems had many heads, arranged in a spiral around the drum so there was time at the end of a "ring" to select the next head. (Apparently nobody thought of making a straight line of heads and spiraling the data.) One of the later models of IBM multi-platter disk drives had 2 sets of head arms. All of these are mechanically complex, which is part of the reason for RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) (redundancy of course being the other). Instead of trying to make one disk drive bigger and/or put more heads on it, make the disk SYSTEM bigger with modular increments of the then-current technology, and get more heads by spreading them across the modules.
There is a tradeoff between system complexity and speed. Highest performance has been attained on specialized systems with intelligent distribution of indices and data, particularly as differentiated by activity, across different levels of storage media; but there is benefit in maintaining a simple generic model of storage, particularly across replicated networked storage systems, so that multi-server and/or back systems need not be identical. One can envision managing active data in many gigabytes of RAM, backing it to SSD, further demoting it to HD as activity decreases; but this involves a lot of system complexity
Remember, though, that the 3330 10-platter drive held a whopping 200 MB, and a controller managing five of them could get all the way to 1 GB - when today I have a 64 GB microSD card in my camera that weighs nothing and runs at 50 MB/sec.
this++. The original title missed the point: It's not a stupid example. It's a deliberately misleading example, with a deliberate appeal to emotion that is totally unrelated, and as unrefutable as it is unprovable.
Dinner for four (with a tip) can easily approach $100. Shopping for the week can easily be $100. There is an order of magnitude difference between $100 and 500 Euros (OK, half an order, it's 5.5x instead of 10x). I have to assume that part of this is shilling for the banks, who would love to impose their 3% tax on every single dollar, every single time it changes hands. Hey, Mr. Summers, instead of removing convenience from the great mass of people, how about explaining why banks get to charge such a high percentage for, essentially, an email? (And then you can explain why phone companies get to charge ridiculous rates for data when it's in the form of text messages . . . but that's another story of the large entity being able to force its will on each of the small entities, even though the small entities could easily overwhelm the large one if they would only work together.)