There is no "elastic clause" as such in the Constitution. The closest thing to it is the Commerce Clause, which has been expanded in interpretation far beyond what the Framers had in mind. The Commander-in-Chief authority has also been extended to the point that the exclusive power of Congress to declare war has been rendered effectively meaningless.
In any case, the courts have held that the preamble is not binding at all. I wish it were - then one could challenge any law or policy which did not effect the purposes laid out in the preamble. Even if the preamble were a binding limitation on government power, its excercise of that power would be limited to the explicit powers granted in the rest of the Constitution as constrained by the rights guaranteed in the Amendments.
Energy is essential for all commerce, is itself a class of articles of commerce, and is also essential for the common defense, so none of this affects the power of the US Government to create the DOE.
Actually, the 3D engines still suck just as much as the rest of the games. You just get a sharper, smoother view of the artifacts from the stupid polygons they still use to construct everything. Any supposedly curved 3D model in a game still has freaking corners sticking out all over the place, and the higher the poly count, the more corners there are. There is no legitimate reason for this - NURBS (non-uniform rational bezier spline) technology has been out since last century! Setting aside the near-total lack of original game ideas - there is no excuse for the wretched technical quality of today's 3D engines. Hell, 13 year-old Amiga demos in 64K have a higher eye-candy factor than today's games.
The article you mentioned can only show that the particular forms of graphical programming they looked at perform poorly for the specific tasks they set. Better representations for specific tasks would show different results. In particular, this might be the case for languages implementing the original poster's idea of a: "...specification oriented programming model, [where] you specify the behaviour, not all the million little steps that are needed to perform it"
Clearly for intrinsically graphical tasks such as GUI-building a graphical programming method is superior to text. Just as clearly for the case of languages with representations which are somewhere between graphical and linear-symbolic, such as Mathematica, most complicated math is easier to understand in 2-D symbolic format, yet this can also introduce ambiguity in interpretation - converting linear to 2-D and back will not always yield the original equation.
I think that graphical tools also have an important place in debugging, because the execution of programs itself is no longer linear. It is often very difficult to figure out where a particular line, function, method, or whatever fits in the grand scheme of things in code one did not write oneself, and the bigger the codebase, the more external libraries, processes, threads, message-passing and so forth that a program has, the more valuable a good graphical representation can be in figuring out the larger context of what was supposed to happen and what went wrong.
While it may not be possible or desirable to completely eliminate traditional linear programming in favor of graphical programming, I think reversing the relative proportions of each may work better when creating a specification-oriented programming language.
All character-based languages are just variations on a theme. Why not have the specification be primarily graphical, as in interface builders, flowcharts and object relationship diagrams, then go directly to a low-level representation such as object code, machine language or bytecode with no traditional semi-readable character-based language at all? That would really be a big change.
If the link between graphic representation and runtime code were 2-way, it would beat the heck out of traditional debuggers, too.
The advantage of HTML/HTTP was that it took existing inventions (open-link hypertext* and TCP/IP) and packaged them into a simple and easy-to-use form which was released as an open, non-commercial standard. The difficulty of the invention was very low and only slight originality was required. The tremendous effects of the web are another matter, and TBL does not deserve much credit there since his contribution was relatively minor compared to the difficulty and originality required to make the thousands of other needed bits of software work. Whatever his status as an innovator, as a choice for an interview, TBL is a bit dull. To me, he comes off as an academic bureaucrat who wouldn't ever say anything that could cause controversy.
$$$
*Guess who first implemented open-link hypertext and hypermedia? - the inventor that the crowd loves to hate, Mike Doyle of Eolas. http://www.eolas.com/technology.html
MetaMAP: The First Open-Linking Hypermedia System
Method and apparatus for identifying features of an image on a video display U.S. Patent 4,847,604, Filed in August, 1987, Issued July 11, 1989 Inventor: Michael D. Doyle
The MetaMAP system pioneered the use of clickable image maps in distributed hypermedia systems. It is also believed that the MetaMAP application was the first example of an "open-linking" hypermedia navigator, since it employed link references external to any single database. Previously, hypermedia systems were self-contained, representing all links between objects within a single monolithic database. A single small MetaMAP navigator application, on the other hand, could navigate through a potentially unending series of linked documents, no matter how large the collection of navigable documents might be. Later systems, such as the World Wide Web, similarly employed an open-linking architecture. The efficiencies that allowed the first MetaMAP application to provide instant object identification for tens of thousands of clickable objects in high resolution biomedical images, displayed on a 4.77MHz IBM PC, now enable the latest MetaMAP systems to deliver immensely-large multidimensional navigable image spaces for a variety of vertical applications. The patent also covers image space collision detection technology believed to be currently in widespread use throughout the computer game industry.
Maybe Mike Doyle would have been a better choice for an interview of a "seminal, insightful, big picture personality, that really understands the web". Like TBL, surely someone else would have come up with the same ideas before long - but he was there first. Doyle's downside relative to TBL is just that he tried to get paid for what he made instead of releasing it for all to use.
Well as long as that works for you... seems expensive, though. I don't know what kind of crappy DSLAMs Verizon runs, but the ADSL standard says that you should be able to get 15,000ft at 1.5-2Mbps even over 26ga wire. See http://www.dslforum.org/aboutdsl/adsl_tutorial.htm l. I suspect that Verizon has a lot of thin wire, unreliable cable databases and wants to keep the downstream % of max bandwidth below some arbitrary number to reduce support costs. It's really shooting themselves in the foot because the area served goes up as the square of the distance from the CO, so they are giving up a lot of customers by being so conservative.
In my experience DSL is much more reliable than wireless or cable, but YMMV.
So long as you're talking about voluntary, non exclusive trade associations - then, fine. The original post was talking about "required professional orgainization", though, and you mentioned medieval guilds, which were indeed goverment-mandated monopolies on trades.
The limit is 18,000ft, not 13,000. (1472kbps down) Also, the wire length databases are often wrong, sometimes by miles. If you go for a lower speed and set a glite profile on the DSLAM port it will work to 20,000ft or more. If the wiring is thicker than normal it can go even farther. On unspliced 18ga wire I have seen it work out to 29,500ft. at full speed. Your NSP or LEC is dicking you around. Try to see if you can pay for an actual DSL tech to test your line with a proper testset (Sunrise- not Harris). Going through proper channels is likely to be frustrating - you need to escalate your complaint repeatedly through the telco hierarchy until you get someone who will do what you want. The other route is get in touch with a regular phone tech and get the number for a DSL tech. They are often the same people. If you can't get the test done as a favor, some have been known to take under-the-table compensation. You might also try calling the CO - the number is usually listed. Before disqualifying a line, a tech really should get not just the length but also check the line resistence at your NID with the line shorted at the CO coil; verify there are no removable bridged taps, DAMLs, interfering lines (T1s,etc.); and check for alternate pairs and crossbox routings.
It's coming - the VA computer system is being released as open source and adapted for general hospitals and doctors' offices. When it does, count on your medical records - including any notes your psychiatrist takes - being available to anyone in any hospital or government agency.
No, H2 has an unbelieveably low volumetric enrgy density - 1kg H2 - 11,200 l gas at STP, IIRC. Lets say your tank can take 100 atmospheres ~= 1400 psig. That's still 112 l/kg . Gasoline, by contrast is 1.26 l/kg Googling, I find 150bar H2 = 405 Wh/l , whie diesel = 10942 Wh/l. Even if you liquify the H2, you only get 2600Wh/l. While diesel gets 13762 Wh/kg and gas 12,200 Wh/kg, H2 gives 39000 Wh/kg (uncontained). All of the weight advantage and then some is lost when the extra weight of the containment is added. Also, H2 leaks like crazy no matter what you put it in. The best storage may be hydrides - lithium can absorb a surprising amount of hydrogen.
The other problem is that H2 is not an energy source, but merely an energy storage method, and a very inefficient one at that. H2 is produced on an industrial scale by cracking hydrocarbons, generally from fossil fuels.
The market may not lie, but liars do market. People would pay MS far less if it weren't for its abuses of its monopoly power. MS design decisions are always based on what is good for MS, not what is good for the user. (the registry, which makes moving installed applications difficult, activation to prevent multiple installs, standards-breaking and Office file formats designed to lock up users rather than function properly, etc.)
That said, Windows is a far more usable OS than Linux for virtually any task, because frequently what is in the user's interest is best for MS sales, while Linux is set up for the convenience of its developers. MS's target audience is anyone with x86 hardware and money. Linux's target audience is SW developers with time. Linux developers do get paid, just in software, community and prestige rather than money. Linux developers also make money supporting their products - same as MS, except MS seldom admits to its bugs.
What people hate about MS is that it lies to and tries to extort more money from its customers constantly, while at the same time deniying that it has any resposibility to provide a quality product, or indeed anything at all to its customers. It is typical that a MS apologist would rail against the eminently fair deal of the GPL while ignoring the brazenly and utterly inequitable MS EULA as well as MS's wasting of the code from which it has already extracted every cent it could, keeping old versions of it's software locked up permanently with no plans to ever release it into the public domain as the Constitution requires. If MS customers only paid for the developers and maintainers of MS products, what would the price be? The excess is theft from the public.
Let's retroactively limit the copyright terms for all software to 1 product cycle, five years max. That way MS and other developers will still get what they are entitled to and both commercial and GPL software will quickly become available to be incorporated in innovative for-profit products in the same way that BSD has been incorporated into OSX.
"previous behaviour of trying to limit people's speed"?!
I worked in the wholesale DSL service & repair department of BellSouth with: access to about 100 Nortel Shasta BSN5000 switches; 15,000 Alcatel DSLAMs; 30 Sun AMS (Alcatel Management System) servers; control of all BellSouth's ATM data switches; complete end-to-end user-to-NSP control of 1.5 million ATM circuits, access to every system the company had that affected service in any way (some up to 30 years old), authority to dispatch any kind of technician...
If BellSouth wanted to, they could run a script that within 2 or 3 days would, on average, triple people's bandwidth. It wouldn't strain the system in the least. The network is big and empty. Further, the other ISPs were always miles ahead of the poor underpaid bellsouth.net tech support in competence. These days, I hear bs.net has gone even farther downhill, outsourcing level 1 tech support to India, he Phillipines, and even Costa Rica, while at the same time introducing time-and-motion studies and oppressive surveilance on the techs doing my old job. (every keystroke and mouse click recorded, microphones in the cubes that can't be turned off whether or not you're on a call, etc.) The performance metrics measure everything but whether the problem was fixed, and leave no room for creative problem-solving, and as a bonus they have required meetings for all techs on these worse-than-meaningless statistics every morning. Now that they don't have to provide service to other ISPs, I predict that they will find some way to make it even worse.
The lines were mostly put in when the telcos (ILECs) were monopolies allowed to charge the public whatever they needed to make a profit while providing universal access. They were essentially publicly funded and the telcos long ago were repaid what they invested. The telcos have no legitimate claim to excusive private ownnersip and control of the phone lines.
However, the unsealed documents reveal that the government never officially demanded the computer servers -- the subpoena to Rackspace only requested server log files. This contradicts previous statements by the web host that it took the servers offline because the government had demanded the hardware. The documents also contradict Rackspace's claim that it had been ordered by the court not to discuss publicly the government's demand. It cannot be determined from the unsealed documents whether or not the government informally pressured Rackspace to turn over the servers. By giving the government more data than it requested, the company not only violated the privacy of Indymedia journalists whose information was housed on the servers, but also undermined the free flow of information by taking Indymedia's websites offline. Moreover, the logs that the government requested didn't exist, so Rackspace should never have given the government anything at all.
Too right. For that matter, how much more fun are the PS2 games than the ones on the original Nintendo? 10%? 20%? Not that much more than that. I could go for a game of Gauntlet right now. Certainly playability is not a direct function of the processing power increase - more like a factor of 1+log(increase). Same goes for PC games. Since Doom the graphics have gotten a little better (though again, nowhere near in line with the increase in computer power) but all FPS are just the same shit in a shinier can. The imagination of the game designers is not keeping up with the hardware.
Who said anything about a written spec, creating the interface or documentation (not spec) without the input of the developers, or not using iterations? My point was get a real interface designer to lead the development of the interface, iterate interface design without having to code or rearrange code over and over, and get the user input early and often on the parts that they can see before you get into the actual coding. Spiral design is great for things that come in little chunks of usability, but when most everything has to work together before you have something that is usable, then you'd better take a different approach. Even so, when the approach I laid out is used for minimum usable functionality in the program (as I suggested), there is no reason that the spiral approach cannot also be used by making multiple passes through the method (abbriviated on later passes, of course.)
His theories should be judged on their merit, not on his background, which I only referred to because his bacgkround is unusual and interesting. It's like the world's smartest garbageman in Dilbert - he's smarter than anyone, so how can your judgement of his choices is better than his own? Bouncer is a pretty cushy job - no one tells you what to do, lots of time to think, you meet interesting people...it sure beats filing TPS reports.
I don't accept all aspects of his theory, but it is interesting. The basic idea is that everything down to the smallest particles participates in the mind of God. It is explicitly an evolutionary theory while also being in the strict sense a theory of intelligent design. It is also pretty tough to understand.
Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU) - a theory of reality developed in the mid-1980's by Christopher Michael Langan. [Who has a 1 in 1,000,000+ IQ verified on multiple occasions, and was President of the most exclusive IQ club, the Mega Society. He spent 20+ years as a bar bouncer in Long Island and can just about bench-press his Harley.]
Reality Principle - The real universe contains all and only that which is real. The reality concept is analytically self-contained; if there were something outside reality that were real enough to affect or influence reality, it would be inside reality, and this contradiction invalidates any supposition of an external reality...
Syndiffeonesis - The expression and/or existence of any difference relation entails a common medium and syntax. Reality is a relation, and every relation is a syndiffeonic relation exhibiting syndiffeonesis or "difference-in-sameness". Therefore, reality is a syndiffeonic relation. Syndiffeonesis implies that any assertion to the effect that two things are different implies that they are reductively the same; if their difference is real, then they both reduce to a common reality and are to that extent similar.
Metaphysical Autology Principle (MAP) - All relations, mappings and functions relevant to reality in a generalized effective sense, whether descriptive, definitive, compositional, attributive, nomological or interpretative, are generated, defined and parameterized within reality itself. In other words, reality comprises a "closed descriptive manifold" from which no essential predicate is omitted, and which thus contains no critical gap that leaves any essential aspect of structure unexplained.
Mind Equals Reality Principle (M=R) asserts that mind and reality are ultimately inseparable to the extent that they share common rules of structure and processing..
Multiplex Unity Principle (MU) - The minimum and most general informational configuration of reality, defines the relationship holding between unity and multiplicity, the universe and its variegated contents. Through its structure, the universe and its contents are mutually inclusive, providing each other with a medium..
Telic Recursion - A fundamental process that tends to maximize a cosmic self-selection parameter, generalized utility, over a set of possible syntax-state relationships in light of the self-configurative freedom of the universe. An inherently "quantum" process that reflects the place of quantum theory in SCSPL, telic recursion is a "pre-informational" form of recursion involving a combination of hology, telic feedback and recursive selection acting on the informational potential of MU, a primal syndiffeonic form that is symmetric with respect to containment.
Teleologic Evolution (TE) is a process of alternating replication and selection through which the universe "creates itself" along with the life it contains. This process, called telic recursion, is neither random nor deterministic in the usual senses, but self-directed. Telic recursion occurs on global and local levels respectively associated with the evolution of nature and the evolution of life; the evolution of life thus mirrors that of the universe in which it occurs. TE improves on traditional approaches to teleology by extending the concept of nature in a way eliminating any need for "supernatural" intervention, and improves on neo-Darwinism by addressing the full extent of nature and its causal dynamics.... The self-configuration of reality involves an intrinsic mode of causality, self-determinacy, which is logically
All these licensing requirements and guilds are primarily to protect the professionals from competition rather than the public from incompetents. If a customer wants to buy silver wrought by an unlicensed maker outside any guild, why should anyone have the right to interfere? The same goes for doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers and all the other petty conspiracies against the public's purse right down to barbers and estate agents. If you let it spread you'll end up like Switzerland where one must speak three languages and be able to identify several dozen types of paper by touch alone in order to get a license to work as a stationery clerk.
Joel is clearly right about the quality and speed of the programming depending entirely on the quality of the programmers. But then he pulls a fast one and assumes that those same people are the best at anticipating what users want and designing the parts of the software that the user interacts with, and that is a rather questionable assumption. How many times have you seen a beautiful interface with unstable code (many media players come to mind) or a crappy interface with code that is like Bach in bytes (TeX, anyone?). There's a lot more that's important in making great software than coding.
My pet theory - and I admit I'm talking out my ass here - is that managing new software development ought to go like this:
1. Decide what you are going to make. Get a reality check from the intended audience. Don't assume that everyone likes or needs what a super-programmer thinks is spiffy.
2. Design and mock-up all the static parts of the user interface and informally specify user-visible behaviors. Have someone who understands visual design and industrial psychology take the lead in directing the UI design with the programmers in a supporting role and management only there to back up the designer's decisions when requested. Get the best such person you can find, even if you think you can't afford her. This person is as important as everybody else on the project put together. Come up with as many radical variations as possible the first couple times through. Be bold and elegant and try to come up with things the user didn't even know she wanted. Have the UI design person get user feedback with the programmers present but with the understanding that they are there to find ways to make what the designer wants and the user needs happen and not to raise problems that programmers can solve on their own. The UI guy needs to be ruthless in excluding things that will get in the way, no matter how cool the programmers think the feature is. Repeat step 2 until the programmers start to lose their minds or the design converges in detail.
3. Formally specify all user-visible behavior by writing the complete user documentation before the first line of code gets written. Have the UI designer and the tech writer work together on the outline and have the programmers looking over the writer's shoulder as the bulk of the text is written. If there is no tech writer, get the UI person to do it, if possible. Check with real users again to make sure it makes sense to them.
4. Then let the programmers do their thing. Having hired good people, don't tell them how to factor or comment or code or what languages they should use. Let them add things only so long as it does not affect the user. (General solutions for specific problems, for example.) Before they start, make them hash out whatever rules they like to ensure quality and maintainability - but hold them to their own rules when things get hairy. Make a significant part of their pay (20%-50%) depend on matching the design and documentation to the UI designer's satisfaction, passing testing and meeting or beating target dates they agreed to when they got full control of the project.
5. Short of correcting a thermonuclear fuckup that would otherwise cripple the software, don't allow any changes, additions or deletions to the design by anybody until the whole thing is out the door as planned.
Is this a stupid or impractical way of doing things? What am I missing?
Slashdot Mirror
That'd be a catenary = cosh(). Pretty close to a parabola, as you said.
There is no "elastic clause" as such in the Constitution. The closest thing to it is the Commerce Clause, which has been expanded in interpretation far beyond what the Framers had in mind. The Commander-in-Chief authority has also been extended to the point that the exclusive power of Congress to declare war has been rendered effectively meaningless.
In any case, the courts have held that the preamble is not binding at all. I wish it were - then one could challenge any law or policy which did not effect the purposes laid out in the preamble. Even if the preamble were a binding limitation on government power, its excercise of that power would be limited to the explicit powers granted in the rest of the Constitution as constrained by the rights guaranteed in the Amendments.
Energy is essential for all commerce, is itself a class of articles of commerce, and is also essential for the common defense, so none of this affects the power of the US Government to create the DOE.
Actually, the 3D engines still suck just as much as the rest of the games. You just get a sharper, smoother view of the artifacts from the stupid polygons they still use to construct everything. Any supposedly curved 3D model in a game still has freaking corners sticking out all over the place, and the higher the poly count, the more corners there are. There is no legitimate reason for this - NURBS (non-uniform rational bezier spline) technology has been out since last century! Setting aside the near-total lack of original game ideas - there is no excuse for the wretched technical quality of today's 3D engines. Hell, 13 year-old Amiga demos in 64K have a higher eye-candy factor than today's games.
Best quote from the article: "it's OK to be ghetto."
I don't think he meant to take it quite so far as dealing smack or pimping out underaged runaways, though.
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/classic/message1987 .html had an interesting discussion of this. Frank Atanassow's comment was particularly good.
The article you mentioned can only show that the particular forms of graphical programming they looked at perform poorly for the specific tasks they set. Better representations for specific tasks would show different results. In particular, this might be the case for languages implementing the original poster's idea of a: "...specification oriented programming model, [where] you specify the behaviour, not all the million little steps that are needed to perform it"
Clearly for intrinsically graphical tasks such as GUI-building a graphical programming method is superior to text. Just as clearly for the case of languages with representations which are somewhere between graphical and linear-symbolic, such as Mathematica, most complicated math is easier to understand in 2-D symbolic format, yet this can also introduce ambiguity in interpretation - converting linear to 2-D and back will not always yield the original equation.
I think that graphical tools also have an important place in debugging, because the execution of programs itself is no longer linear. It is often very difficult to figure out where a particular line, function, method, or whatever fits in the grand scheme of things in code one did not write oneself, and the bigger the codebase, the more external libraries, processes, threads, message-passing and so forth that a program has, the more valuable a good graphical representation can be in figuring out the larger context of what was supposed to happen and what went wrong.
While it may not be possible or desirable to completely eliminate traditional linear programming in favor of graphical programming, I think reversing the relative proportions of each may work better when creating a specification-oriented programming language.
All character-based languages are just variations on a theme. Why not have the specification be primarily graphical, as in interface builders, flowcharts and object relationship diagrams, then go directly to a low-level representation such as object code, machine language or bytecode with no traditional semi-readable character-based language at all? That would really be a big change.
If the link between graphic representation and runtime code were 2-way, it would beat the heck out of traditional debuggers, too.
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*Guess who first implemented open-link hypertext and hypermedia? - the inventor that the crowd loves to hate, Mike Doyle of Eolas.
http://www.eolas.com/technology.html
Maybe Mike Doyle would have been a better choice for an interview of a "seminal, insightful, big picture personality, that really understands the web". Like TBL, surely someone else would have come up with the same ideas before long - but he was there first. Doyle's downside relative to TBL is just that he tried to get paid for what he made instead of releasing it for all to use.
Well as long as that works for you... seems expensive, though. I don't know what kind of crappy DSLAMs Verizon runs, but the ADSL standard says that you should be able to get 15,000ft at 1.5-2Mbps even over 26ga wire. See http://www.dslforum.org/aboutdsl/adsl_tutorial.htm l.
I suspect that Verizon has a lot of thin wire, unreliable cable databases and wants to keep the downstream % of max bandwidth below some arbitrary number to reduce support costs. It's really shooting themselves in the foot because the area served goes up as the square of the distance from the CO, so they are giving up a lot of customers by being so conservative.
In my experience DSL is much more reliable than wireless or cable, but YMMV.
That's 10dB/km - decimal point, not comma. Good link, though.
So long as you're talking about voluntary, non exclusive trade associations - then, fine. The original post was talking about "required professional orgainization", though, and you mentioned medieval guilds, which were indeed goverment-mandated monopolies on trades.
The limit is 18,000ft, not 13,000. (1472kbps down) Also, the wire length databases are often wrong, sometimes by miles. If you go for a lower speed and set a glite profile on the DSLAM port it will work to 20,000ft or more. If the wiring is thicker than normal it can go even farther. On unspliced 18ga wire I have seen it work out to 29,500ft. at full speed. Your NSP or LEC is dicking you around. Try to see if you can pay for an actual DSL tech to test your line with a proper testset (Sunrise- not Harris). Going through proper channels is likely to be frustrating - you need to escalate your complaint repeatedly through the telco hierarchy until you get someone who will do what you want. The other route is get in touch with a regular phone tech and get the number for a DSL tech. They are often the same people. If you can't get the test done as a favor, some have been known to take under-the-table compensation. You might also try calling the CO - the number is usually listed. Before disqualifying a line, a tech really should get not just the length but also check the line resistence at your NID with the line shorted at the CO coil; verify there are no removable bridged taps, DAMLs, interfering lines (T1s,etc.); and check for alternate pairs and crossbox routings.
It's coming - the VA computer system is being released as open source and adapted for general hospitals and doctors' offices. When it does, count on your medical records - including any notes your psychiatrist takes - being available to anyone in any hospital or government agency.
Mod parent up. Thorium is teh BOMB! Er..I mean it ISN'T ...
No, H2 has an unbelieveably low volumetric enrgy density - 1kg H2 - 11,200 l gas at STP, IIRC. Lets say your tank can take 100 atmospheres ~= 1400 psig. That's still 112 l/kg . Gasoline, by contrast is 1.26 l/kg Googling, I find 150bar H2 = 405 Wh/l , whie diesel = 10942 Wh/l. Even if you liquify the H2, you only get 2600Wh/l. While diesel gets 13762 Wh/kg and gas 12,200 Wh/kg, H2 gives 39000 Wh/kg (uncontained). All of the weight advantage and then some is lost when the extra weight of the containment is added. Also, H2 leaks like crazy no matter what you put it in. The best storage may be hydrides - lithium can absorb a surprising amount of hydrogen.
The other problem is that H2 is not an energy source, but merely an energy storage method, and a very inefficient one at that. H2 is produced on an industrial scale by cracking hydrocarbons, generally from fossil fuels.
The market may not lie, but liars do market. People would pay MS far less if it weren't for its abuses of its monopoly power. MS design decisions are always based on what is good for MS, not what is good for the user. (the registry, which makes moving installed applications difficult, activation to prevent multiple installs, standards-breaking and Office file formats designed to lock up users rather than function properly, etc.)
That said, Windows is a far more usable OS than Linux for virtually any task, because frequently what is in the user's interest is best for MS sales, while Linux is set up for the convenience of its developers. MS's target audience is anyone with x86 hardware and money. Linux's target audience is SW developers with time. Linux developers do get paid, just in software, community and prestige rather than money. Linux developers also make money supporting their products - same as MS, except MS seldom admits to its bugs.
What people hate about MS is that it lies to and tries to extort more money from its customers constantly, while at the same time deniying that it has any resposibility to provide a quality product, or indeed anything at all to its customers. It is typical that a MS apologist would rail against the eminently fair deal of the GPL while ignoring the brazenly and utterly inequitable MS EULA as well as MS's wasting of the code from which it has already extracted every cent it could, keeping old versions of it's software locked up permanently with no plans to ever release it into the public domain as the Constitution requires. If MS customers only paid for the developers and maintainers of MS products, what would the price be? The excess is theft from the public.
Let's retroactively limit the copyright terms for all software to 1 product cycle, five years max. That way MS and other developers will still get what they are entitled to and both commercial and GPL software will quickly become available to be incorporated in innovative for-profit products in the same way that BSD has been incorporated into OSX.
"previous behaviour of trying to limit people's speed"?!
I worked in the wholesale DSL service & repair department of BellSouth with: access to about 100 Nortel Shasta BSN5000 switches; 15,000 Alcatel DSLAMs; 30 Sun AMS (Alcatel Management System) servers; control of all BellSouth's ATM data switches; complete end-to-end user-to-NSP control of 1.5 million ATM circuits, access to every system the company had that affected service in any way (some up to 30 years old), authority to dispatch any kind of technician...
If BellSouth wanted to, they could run a script that within 2 or 3 days would, on average, triple people's bandwidth. It wouldn't strain the system in the least. The network is big and empty. Further, the other ISPs were always miles ahead of the poor underpaid bellsouth.net tech support in competence. These days, I hear bs.net has gone even farther downhill, outsourcing level 1 tech support to India, he Phillipines, and even Costa Rica, while at the same time introducing time-and-motion studies and oppressive surveilance on the techs doing my old job. (every keystroke and mouse click recorded, microphones in the cubes that can't be turned off whether or not you're on a call, etc.) The performance metrics measure everything but whether the problem was fixed, and leave no room for creative problem-solving, and as a bonus they have required meetings for all techs on these worse-than-meaningless statistics every morning. Now that they don't have to provide service to other ISPs, I predict that they will find some way to make it even worse.
The lines were mostly put in when the telcos (ILECs) were monopolies allowed to charge the public whatever they needed to make a profit while providing universal access. They were essentially publicly funded and the telcos long ago were repaid what they invested. The telcos have no legitimate claim to excusive private ownnersip and control of the phone lines.
And as the EFF release puts it:
Too right. For that matter, how much more fun are the PS2 games than the ones on the original Nintendo? 10%? 20%? Not that much more than that. I could go for a game of Gauntlet right now. Certainly playability is not a direct function of the processing power increase - more like a factor of 1+log(increase). Same goes for PC games. Since Doom the graphics have gotten a little better (though again, nowhere near in line with the increase in computer power) but all FPS are just the same shit in a shinier can. The imagination of the game designers is not keeping up with the hardware.
Did you even read my post?
Who said anything about a written spec, creating the interface or documentation (not spec) without the input of the developers, or not using iterations? My point was get a real interface designer to lead the development of the interface, iterate interface design without having to code or rearrange code over and over, and get the user input early and often on the parts that they can see before you get into the actual coding. Spiral design is great for things that come in little chunks of usability, but when most everything has to work together before you have something that is usable, then you'd better take a different approach. Even so, when the approach I laid out is used for minimum usable functionality in the program (as I suggested), there is no reason that the spiral approach cannot also be used by making multiple passes through the method (abbriviated on later passes, of course.)
His theories should be judged on their merit, not on his background, which I only referred to because his bacgkround is unusual and interesting. It's like the world's smartest garbageman in Dilbert - he's smarter than anyone, so how can your judgement of his choices is better than his own? Bouncer is a pretty cushy job - no one tells you what to do, lots of time to think, you meet interesting people...it sure beats filing TPS reports.
Not all ID proponents are Bible-thumpers.
... The self-configuration of reality involves an intrinsic mode of causality, self-determinacy, which is logically
I don't accept all aspects of his theory, but it is interesting. The basic idea is that everything down to the smallest particles participates in the mind of God. It is explicitly an evolutionary theory while also being in the strict sense a theory of intelligent design. It is also pretty tough to understand.
From http://www.ctmu.org/
Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU) - a theory of reality developed in the mid-1980's by Christopher Michael Langan. [Who has a 1 in 1,000,000+ IQ verified on multiple occasions, and was President of the most exclusive IQ club, the Mega Society. He spent 20+ years as a bar bouncer in Long Island and can just about bench-press his Harley.]
Reality Principle - The real universe contains all and only that which is real. The reality concept is analytically self-contained; if there were something outside reality that were real enough to affect or influence reality, it would be inside reality, and this contradiction invalidates any supposition of an external reality...
Syndiffeonesis - The expression and/or existence of any difference relation entails a common medium and syntax. Reality is a relation, and every relation is a syndiffeonic relation exhibiting syndiffeonesis or "difference-in-sameness". Therefore, reality is a syndiffeonic relation. Syndiffeonesis implies that any assertion to the effect that two things are different implies that they are reductively the same; if their difference is real, then they both reduce to a common reality and are to that extent similar.
Metaphysical Autology Principle (MAP) - All relations, mappings and functions relevant to reality in a generalized effective sense, whether descriptive, definitive, compositional, attributive, nomological or interpretative, are generated, defined and parameterized within reality itself. In other words, reality comprises a "closed descriptive manifold" from which no essential predicate is omitted, and which thus contains no critical gap that leaves any essential aspect of structure unexplained.
Mind Equals Reality Principle (M=R) asserts that mind and reality are ultimately inseparable to the extent that they share common rules of structure and processing..
Multiplex Unity Principle (MU) - The minimum and most general informational configuration of reality, defines the relationship holding between unity and multiplicity, the universe and its variegated contents. Through its structure, the universe and its contents are mutually inclusive, providing each other with a medium..
Telic Recursion - A fundamental process that tends to maximize a cosmic self-selection parameter, generalized utility, over a set of possible syntax-state relationships in light of the self-configurative freedom of the universe. An inherently "quantum" process that reflects the place of quantum theory in SCSPL, telic recursion is a "pre-informational" form of recursion involving a combination of hology, telic feedback and recursive selection acting on the informational potential of MU, a primal syndiffeonic form that is symmetric with respect to containment.
Teleologic Evolution (TE) is a process of alternating replication and selection through which the universe "creates itself" along with the life it contains. This process, called telic recursion, is neither random nor deterministic in the usual senses, but self-directed. Telic recursion occurs on global and local levels respectively associated with the evolution of nature and the evolution of life; the evolution of life thus mirrors that of the universe in which it occurs. TE improves on traditional approaches to teleology by extending the concept of nature in a way eliminating any need for "supernatural" intervention, and improves on neo-Darwinism by addressing the full extent of nature and its causal dynamics.
There will never be a government opressive enough to eliminate Chinese gambling. Even eliminating smoking would be easier.
All these licensing requirements and guilds are primarily to protect the professionals from competition rather than the public from incompetents. If a customer wants to buy silver wrought by an unlicensed maker outside any guild, why should anyone have the right to interfere? The same goes for doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers and all the other petty conspiracies against the public's purse right down to barbers and estate agents. If you let it spread you'll end up like Switzerland where one must speak three languages and be able to identify several dozen types of paper by touch alone in order to get a license to work as a stationery clerk.
Joel is clearly right about the quality and speed of the programming depending entirely on the quality of the programmers. But then he pulls a fast one and assumes that those same people are the best at anticipating what users want and designing the parts of the software that the user interacts with, and that is a rather questionable assumption. How many times have you seen a beautiful interface with unstable code (many media players come to mind) or a crappy interface with code that is like Bach in bytes (TeX, anyone?). There's a lot more that's important in making great software than coding.
My pet theory - and I admit I'm talking out my ass here - is that managing new software development ought to go like this:
1. Decide what you are going to make. Get a reality check from the intended audience. Don't assume that everyone likes or needs what a super-programmer thinks is spiffy.
2. Design and mock-up all the static parts of the user interface and informally specify user-visible behaviors. Have someone who understands visual design and industrial psychology take the lead in directing the UI design with the programmers in a supporting role and management only there to back up the designer's decisions when requested. Get the best such person you can find, even if you think you can't afford her. This person is as important as everybody else on the project put together. Come up with as many radical variations as possible the first couple times through. Be bold and elegant and try to come up with things the user didn't even know she wanted. Have the UI design person get user feedback with the programmers present but with the understanding that they are there to find ways to make what the designer wants and the user needs happen and not to raise problems that programmers can solve on their own. The UI guy needs to be ruthless in excluding things that will get in the way, no matter how cool the programmers think the feature is. Repeat step 2 until the programmers start to lose their minds or the design converges in detail.
3. Formally specify all user-visible behavior by writing the complete user documentation before the first line of code gets written. Have the UI designer and the tech writer work together on the outline and have the programmers looking over the writer's shoulder as the bulk of the text is written. If there is no tech writer, get the UI person to do it, if possible. Check with real users again to make sure it makes sense to them.
4. Then let the programmers do their thing. Having hired good people, don't tell them how to factor or comment or code or what languages they should use. Let them add things only so long as it does not affect the user. (General solutions for specific problems, for example.) Before they start, make them hash out whatever rules they like to ensure quality and maintainability - but hold them to their own rules when things get hairy. Make a significant part of their pay (20%-50%) depend on matching the design and documentation to the UI designer's satisfaction, passing testing and meeting or beating target dates they agreed to when they got full control of the project.
5. Short of correcting a thermonuclear fuckup that would otherwise cripple the software, don't allow any changes, additions or deletions to the design by anybody until the whole thing is out the door as planned.
Is this a stupid or impractical way of doing things? What am I missing?