There is a trade-off between getting each step right first time by absolute concentration eg. coding, and wasting time exploring the solution-space at the speed of an ant. A lot of programming involves juggling eggs and a mind trained not to drop stitches is required. On the other-hand you can't cross a ditch with lots of tiny steps no mater how small you make them - you need to jump. SOME way of letting 'what the heck' out of the bottle can be a very useful mind tool for minds that are trained to analyse and check everything. Chemical means is one, requirement not to be a 'total nerd' in public another. You could try serious habit-forming methods but cider is more fun -- is there something wrong with that?
If I walk up to you in the street and ask you how old you are and are you married then you're going to be uptight. (You might decline of course but this is EMOTIVE territory.) Yet people blandly fill in forms with this and lots more connected information without worrying.
Let's make it more creepy! 1001 CCTV cameras can see how short skirts are at any place today. So it'll be OK for me to approach women and take my tape measure out will it?
The guy in the story is quite rightly pointing out that we have grown to accept Big Brother surveillance.
The WHOLE POINT of science fiction is to get us to think about how decisions in the past and we make TODAY affect the future.
How about for an example? A TV-top camera watching for who watches what adverts being used to detect atheists who 'ignore' religious blatterings? (I hope) this is SF but either it is bound to be abused occasionally or massively. "The next educational program on Afgan [UAE, Dubai,...] TV is not for women."
Put the super computer deep in the middle of the Pacific ocean. Cooling problem (impossible to deal with on the Moon) solved.
Access? Not easy but a couple of orders of magnitude better than the moon.
Interference? Not much. More like blockage through general clag in the atmosphere.
Dishes? Float them. Float a dozen which will randomly point in various directions as the swell tilts them. But who cares -- You've got a supercomputer to deal with trivia like that.
So you're a democracy with freedom of speech etc. etc. so where are your mass-media communicators that shrivel this ball of idiocy into a cinder? You may have a few obstreperous icons but that's not the same thing as a must-watch 'spitting image' on every week to lampoon the whole lot of them.
If you have a group of people unused to thinking then you can draw pretty lines and boxes together in a friendly sort of way. It is a social thing like ten people going to the kitchen to cook a meal.
If you are an experienced thinker then you probably need time (in ways you have got used to eg On waking-up or hiking or "Shut up! I've just had an idea!") to note your thoughts and see where they lead. You're quite likely to have ways of grouping and ordering notes on [bits of] paper which just happen. The only software you need is a pencil and scrap paper.
If you are one of the 90% of people who don't use analysis and imagination then you need prompts and buckets. Prompts to ask say 'what are the sub-tasks' and buckets to keep similar things together. MM don't have prompts and the buckets are very generic. For a particular task such people need particular headings to put 'first answers' into.
If you wish to create an on-line reference then fine. OTOH understanding is about context and appropriate use. A function reference tells how to use it not why. A discussion of say various ways of doing something may introduce all sorts of concepts and easily mention useful functions or sections of the manual to look at in more detail but it is about why and doesn't need to be on a screen - in fact I would say it is better to have the why and overview documentation in a form suitable for picking up and putting down when the reader is in the mood for a bit of learning and not trying to look at the instructions while driving.
(1) You have job security.
(2) You have delivered what is needed so far
Now what happens...
Your organisation could carry on as-is. It has worked in the past but you might get eaten by a rogue killer whale.
Oho! A/real/ risk of you going AWOL for (100 genuine reasons). So how do you suggest this is is handled? In-line comments? Development Wiki? etc.
IMHO I would try to list the things that could go wrong......Then put them into categories such that responsibility for a certain category can be handed to whoever.
Two days later ask whoever is supposed to be 'in charge of foo' how they intend dealing with a certain detail. (This is Health and Saefty... Gone mad) if you ask people happily fumbling about their own business.ask to see the legal details.
The national, local and various agencies of the UK government could be charged say 1p (or 5p etc) per view. That would bring in many £000. It should be easy to see the domain of...gov.uk in the logs and send a bill each week.
(Obviously it doesn't address the original issue but it does send a message that wealthy organisations should support a socially useful resource instead of just leaching.)
To *think* like a programmer you must have that sense that Murphy (of the law) is inside you [ie. Be humble no matter how clever you are] and in the real world [eg. A valid date might be 'June' which isn't 00:00 on 1st June].
An age ago when I wrote my book on the subject (text freely available at http://vulpeculox.net/ob/Programming.htm) I twigged that programming is not about splitting problems into bits but understanding the need then building the solution from bits. Of course there are well-known methods for doing this. Now to me a programmer is a mental athlete. I expect them to train, have good facilities and consistently run good races but why on earth would I expect a high performance person to be operating at their peak 7.5 hours a day? Resting, recuperating and reflecting goes with achievement. Enthusiasm and interest in the next challenge keep up the momentum. Constraints and management targets destroy it.
Once you've got the mechanics you can graduate to the principles then the patterns then the practice and finally being able to communicate with people.
Young brains at work with basic materials that are tedious to work with MAY result in mega-technological-breakthrough or not. As most of us here are concerned we left our machine code/assembler/etc behind us 20+ years ago so who are we to judge? The way 'progress' has worked means that a very fey possible choices have been followed. These may not have been the best.
And while you're pooh-poohing 'wasted effort' in bare-metal computing ask yourself what proportion of 'programmer-man-hours' (rough term) end up being wasted at high-level modern day systems? And for those that are implemented that don't cause grief, how long do they last? Of course some pootle on quietly for a very long time, but many never hit the mainstream or if they do for a short while until revision or abandonment.
background
There are three types of personality who get a buzz from different things and are comfortable with different things.
(Left) Techie - "Leave me alone so I can get this right"
(Middle) Admin - Risk adverse, likes routine, satisfied by servicing the organisation
(Right) Outward facing - Likes external challenges. Satisfaction can come from good relationships or 'commission'
People don't have to be compartmentalised but often they will find their niche and want to stay there. (
To read the detail see http://vulpeculox.net/treems/LRC.pdf )
You can imagine the conflict when the sales people are desperate to have something they can demonstrate but the engineers don't want to release something that is buggy and not ready yet.
Possible answer part 1
Get the sales bods to talk to buyers and let techie speak unto techie. Each will be experienced and effective communicators in their roles. Obviously this requires team work - perhaps you should 'assign a techie to a sales bod' and see if they can work out how to complement each other.
Possible answer part 2
Pay sales people for getting the business and techies for delivering. If both understand their interdependence then they may work together.
Limited bandwidth makes it better to get to know a few people really well
Management oversight is more difficult so build mini-team responsibility and development and ownership of objectives
Make sure people are in the part of the organisation that suits them (see link above).
Provide separate communication protocols for gripes and discussions as opposed to getting the job done. (You need a 'grumblee' to be a lightning conductor for things that might get worked out in physical corridors.)
When you're remote everyone needs to feel valuable, cared for by the organisation and spared annoyances.
When IP addresses are abundant block lists are going to be huge and still ineffective.
A naughty downloader (or uploader) can have the server allocate an IP address just for them, and change it in a few minutes time.
I can't think of a better example of the resilience of open source.
Also, once you have a lot of devs around they may take the 'application' to 'other places'. I'm thinking that word processing has only really ever addressed the 'front-end' of documents when there is a huge need for the back-end document management (what we old-timers once called office automation).
I went to ds.test-ipv6.com and was amazed by the clarity of explanations of the various tests. It gave me a technical result and a 'what that result means to you' which I could understand.
I've just assumed that IPv6 is somebody else's issue to deal with. In theory my OS (XP) supports it but that's all I know. Is there a way of pointing my browser somewhere to find out if everything 'at my end' and my ISP connection is fully functional?
The point of failure is that if somebody uses my credentials then how can I prove they have been mis-used. Verified-by-visa is a classic case (in a long and shameful history by the banks) of claiming their systems are 100% secure and therefore the risk of anything going wrong is down to the consumer.
How, for example do you know if your 'master password' has been lifted by a trojan? This is a really great idea for credit card fraudsters as merchants can't cancel fraudulent transactions so the banks don't have to bear the risk of refunds.
The reason governments don't need a master internet ID database is because they can just ask google, amazon, twitter, youtube or any large organisation to cough up loads of details about you already.
What I want is a "this is who I am/where I live" object I can give to an on-line merchant which is DISTINCT from the authorisation.
(1) It is a really good idea to attend a meeting of the local 'ghost hunters' or Psychical research society. You won't be any the wiser about 'ghosts' but you will have learned a lot about people that they didn't teach you in school. (Quite frankly many are utter nutters, some are deluded enthusiasts and one or two may be keen and still detached. If there are any in the third category then enjoy their company as they will be INTERESTING without expecting you to accept their stories. - In fact if you're NOT highly sceptical with this last mob then you will be discarded as 'the usual spiritualist idiot'.
(2) Allow ten years for your researches. (Assuming you're not being led by a controlling person and you choose your approach and objectives) Maturity will bring a certain degree of
(a) "I wouldn't have believed that if I hadn't been there" and
(b) "Even after researching the hoodwinkers (a) is still spooky" and
(c) I have to accept I can't explain some phenomena.
Now (c), [can't explain] is a trap! For every super-natural spasm there are really a dozen everyday explanations. But seek out the people who might be able to spot the 'normal' explanation. (IMHO Most of these are clueless which is why you want to seek the third category of people in (1) who are usually a lot brighter.)
(3) I can tell you there are some 'super-natural' things 'that are a fact'. For example I have dowsed a water main leak about which I knew nothing with my bare hands. So what does that prove? That is the important question! It doesn't prove Ley lines, or that dowsing can be used to show [fill in your fantasy] or that Auntie Flo is 'with you' at a spiritualist seance.
(4) Good luck. SCIENCE (It used to be called things like "Natural philosophy") is about studying phenomena and reproducing results. Don't be afraid to EXPERIMENT because what YOU find may be useful to somebody one day.
PS Personally I have been 'forced' to do fortune telling for people (I'm one of those sorts of unusual chaps who are assumed by various vacuous people to be 'natural' fortune tellers.) Without the aid of spirits or 'fluences I've scared myself and subjects by the thrust (they might say accuracy) of my guesswork. It is jaw dropping to be told by somebody you met ten minutes previously that "In 50 years I have never told anybody that" - but that's just 'reading people" See http://vulpeculox.net/misc/try.htm and http://vulpeculox.net/archive/brose.htm for things that I learned as a result.
PPS The world is OVERFLOWING with weirdos who don't have much sense of hard scientific ground. (And most of the rest are gullible as hell.) When I first put my FACTS about the Compass pubs in a line on the web (14 years ago) I received 14 pages of close handwritten script on air-mail paper from a nutter who tried through mathematics to show that volume...great pyramid...12345.67890...moon...volume...etc. [Eh?] The moral of this story is that SCIENTIFIC METHOD - including peer review - is your friend. By all means investigate but never let it be said "He should get out more"
The original meaning of "art" was 'Man's work' as opposed to "nature" which was 'God's work'.
A tool is a man-made thing (even if it a rock to chip flints with it is selected and used in a way that is man-made). The cave-man who acquires a better hammer rock is naturally pleased and proud of it and will either imbue it with magical qualities (God-Nature you see) or appreciate its qualities as they matter to a flint-maker (weight, hardness, fit in the hand etc.). The latter is just a 'beautiful' as a clever team manoeuvre to score a goal, or the technology that goes into making an affordable, low maintenance, lightweight bicycle. Of course you have to 'know what beauty looks like' - Those ingredients that make you most proud of your tools and achievements.
I don't think anyone was claiming that 'expressions all over the blackboard' were beautiful......but the conclusion may be, and the lead-up to it may be a guide for our own explorations.
FWIW here is my analysis of levels:
Reading number, counting and realising 'sums can do things' (Many are shamefully allowed to fail even this!)
Basic facility with numbers. 'Arithmetic' (Failure here too. IMHO the key here is 'confidence'.)
Maths for high-school science. Inkling of curious 'worlds' and strange coincidences (The best motivator here is 'being brainy is cool')
Maths as a field of intellectual study in its own right. (A minority interest.)
Somewhere, possibly after school, especially in old age, people need a sense of 'be safe with numbers, statistics and graphs'
Teachers give exercises in the same way that cooks prepare food.
Everyone learns just like everyone eats.
And while we're at it let's not muddle "pupil" and "student".
The mentor, professor or role-model turn pupils into students by showing them how to be pro-active and then giving mature guidance, and not-least, encouragement.
An ignorant (but wise) man says "I ask a question when I don't know"
A wise man says "I ask a question when I already have an answer"
A teacher says "I ask questions to teach my pupils"
A professor says "I teach my students to ask questions"
A leader says "There is a time for questions and a time for action"
A browser that will detect repeating structures in the DOM and parse them into segments. Then be able to select on elements with the possibility of export. Often people have to look through long lists of things where only a few are of interest. For example (a) detect the 'comment' structure in a slashdot page (without being told the template) (b) parse into title, who, text (c) offer (in this case) three search fields to select on and then (d) copy a selected one into the clipboard in XLM or append to a clippings file.
Firstly : NO you don't have to do it once and have it set in stone. The business requirements will be changing all the time. So you must plan for change the only way you know how and that's expect to make alterations as you go.
Secondly : NO - do not put all your eggs in one basket. Keep the bunker as stand-by short-term fall-back. Not only is this your resilience (including all those system changes that cause grief) but you can also run training exercises down there without impacting on the normal system. Also spending a short time in the bunker helps people focus on issues, objectives and methods a lot more - which counts when there is 'an emergency'.
Thirdly : A secure but non-hardened environment is much cheaper, 'normal' and easier to alter than a bunker. It is FAR better to give people the tools they need to manage the everyday noise and have the necessary grades of experience of staff (=quantity) to learn the practicalities under supervision than to lock a apprentice in a box with flashing lights and coloured buttons hoping that they will not make too many mistakes.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a trade-off between getting each step right first time by absolute concentration eg. coding, and wasting time exploring the solution-space at the speed of an ant. A lot of programming involves juggling eggs and a mind trained not to drop stitches is required. On the other-hand you can't cross a ditch with lots of tiny steps no mater how small you make them - you need to jump. SOME way of letting 'what the heck' out of the bottle can be a very useful mind tool for minds that are trained to analyse and check everything. Chemical means is one, requirement not to be a 'total nerd' in public another. You could try serious habit-forming methods but cider is more fun -- is there something wrong with that?
If I walk up to you in the street and ask you how old you are and are you married then you're going to be uptight. (You might decline of course but this is EMOTIVE territory.) Yet people blandly fill in forms with this and lots more connected information without worrying. Let's make it more creepy! 1001 CCTV cameras can see how short skirts are at any place today. So it'll be OK for me to approach women and take my tape measure out will it? The guy in the story is quite rightly pointing out that we have grown to accept Big Brother surveillance.
The WHOLE POINT of science fiction is to get us to think about how decisions in the past and we make TODAY affect the future.
How about for an example? A TV-top camera watching for who watches what adverts being used to detect atheists who 'ignore' religious blatterings? (I hope) this is SF but either it is bound to be abused occasionally or massively. "The next educational program on Afgan [UAE, Dubai,...] TV is not for women."
Put the super computer deep in the middle of the Pacific ocean. Cooling problem (impossible to deal with on the Moon) solved.
Access? Not easy but a couple of orders of magnitude better than the moon.
Interference? Not much. More like blockage through general clag in the atmosphere.
Dishes? Float them. Float a dozen which will randomly point in various directions as the swell tilts them. But who cares -- You've got a supercomputer to deal with trivia like that.
In two words BS.
You know the result: This.
So you're a democracy with freedom of speech etc. etc. so where are your mass-media communicators that shrivel this ball of idiocy into a cinder? You may have a few obstreperous icons but that's not the same thing as a must-watch 'spitting image' on every week to lampoon the whole lot of them.
If you are an experienced thinker then you probably need time (in ways you have got used to eg On waking-up or hiking or "Shut up! I've just had an idea!") to note your thoughts and see where they lead. You're quite likely to have ways of grouping and ordering notes on [bits of] paper which just happen. The only software you need is a pencil and scrap paper.
If you are one of the 90% of people who don't use analysis and imagination then you need prompts and buckets. Prompts to ask say 'what are the sub-tasks' and buckets to keep similar things together. MM don't have prompts and the buckets are very generic. For a particular task such people need particular headings to put 'first answers' into.
If you wish to create an on-line reference then fine. OTOH understanding is about context and appropriate use. A function reference tells how to use it not why. A discussion of say various ways of doing something may introduce all sorts of concepts and easily mention useful functions or sections of the manual to look at in more detail but it is about why and doesn't need to be on a screen - in fact I would say it is better to have the why and overview documentation in a form suitable for picking up and putting down when the reader is in the mood for a bit of learning and not trying to look at the instructions while driving.
(1) You have job security. (2) You have delivered what is needed so far Now what happens... Your organisation could carry on as-is. It has worked in the past but you might get eaten by a rogue killer whale. Oho! A /real/ risk of you going AWOL for (100 genuine reasons). So how do you suggest this is is handled? In-line comments? Development Wiki? etc.
IMHO I would try to list the things that could go wrong... ...Then put them into categories such that responsibility for a certain category can be handed to whoever.
Two days later ask whoever is supposed to be 'in charge of foo' how they intend dealing with a certain detail. (This is Health and Saefty... Gone mad) if you ask people happily fumbling about their own business.ask to see the legal details.
The national, local and various agencies of the UK government could be charged say 1p (or 5p etc) per view. That would bring in many £000. It should be easy to see the domain of ...gov.uk in the logs and send a bill each week.
(Obviously it doesn't address the original issue but it does send a message that wealthy organisations should support a socially useful resource instead of just leaching.)
The objective may be to make sure you don't unwittingly fork.
To *think* like a programmer you must have that sense that Murphy (of the law) is inside you [ie. Be humble no matter how clever you are] and in the real world [eg. A valid date might be 'June' which isn't 00:00 on 1st June]. An age ago when I wrote my book on the subject (text freely available at http://vulpeculox.net/ob/Programming.htm) I twigged that programming is not about splitting problems into bits but understanding the need then building the solution from bits. Of course there are well-known methods for doing this. Now to me a programmer is a mental athlete. I expect them to train, have good facilities and consistently run good races but why on earth would I expect a high performance person to be operating at their peak 7.5 hours a day? Resting, recuperating and reflecting goes with achievement. Enthusiasm and interest in the next challenge keep up the momentum. Constraints and management targets destroy it. Once you've got the mechanics you can graduate to the principles then the patterns then the practice and finally being able to communicate with people.
And while you're pooh-poohing 'wasted effort' in bare-metal computing ask yourself what proportion of 'programmer-man-hours' (rough term) end up being wasted at high-level modern day systems? And for those that are implemented that don't cause grief, how long do they last? Of course some pootle on quietly for a very long time, but many never hit the mainstream or if they do for a short while until revision or abandonment.
People don't have to be compartmentalised but often they will find their niche and want to stay there. ( To read the detail see http://vulpeculox.net/treems/LRC.pdf )
You can imagine the conflict when the sales people are desperate to have something they can demonstrate but the engineers don't want to release something that is buggy and not ready yet.
Possible answer part 1 Get the sales bods to talk to buyers and let techie speak unto techie. Each will be experienced and effective communicators in their roles. Obviously this requires team work - perhaps you should 'assign a techie to a sales bod' and see if they can work out how to complement each other.
Possible answer part 2 Pay sales people for getting the business and techies for delivering. If both understand their interdependence then they may work together.
When you're remote everyone needs to feel valuable, cared for by the organisation and spared annoyances.
Never heard of LEET before. But I do know what "internationalisation" is ... normally abbreviated to I18n.
When IP addresses are abundant block lists are going to be huge and still ineffective. A naughty downloader (or uploader) can have the server allocate an IP address just for them, and change it in a few minutes time.
Also, once you have a lot of devs around they may take the 'application' to 'other places'. I'm thinking that word processing has only really ever addressed the 'front-end' of documents when there is a huge need for the back-end document management (what we old-timers once called office automation).
I went to ds.test-ipv6.com and was amazed by the clarity of explanations of the various tests. It gave me a technical result and a 'what that result means to you' which I could understand.
I've just assumed that IPv6 is somebody else's issue to deal with. In theory my OS (XP) supports it but that's all I know. Is there a way of pointing my browser somewhere to find out if everything 'at my end' and my ISP connection is fully functional?
How, for example do you know if your 'master password' has been lifted by a trojan? This is a really great idea for credit card fraudsters as merchants can't cancel fraudulent transactions so the banks don't have to bear the risk of refunds.
The reason governments don't need a master internet ID database is because they can just ask google, amazon, twitter, youtube or any large organisation to cough up loads of details about you already.
What I want is a "this is who I am/where I live" object I can give to an on-line merchant which is DISTINCT from the authorisation.
(2) Allow ten years for your researches. (Assuming you're not being led by a controlling person and you choose your approach and objectives) Maturity will bring a certain degree of
(a) "I wouldn't have believed that if I hadn't been there" and
(b) "Even after researching the hoodwinkers (a) is still spooky" and
(c) I have to accept I can't explain some phenomena.
Now (c), [can't explain] is a trap! For every super-natural spasm there are really a dozen everyday explanations. But seek out the people who might be able to spot the 'normal' explanation. (IMHO Most of these are clueless which is why you want to seek the third category of people in (1) who are usually a lot brighter.)
(3) I can tell you there are some 'super-natural' things 'that are a fact'. For example I have dowsed a water main leak about which I knew nothing with my bare hands. So what does that prove? That is the important question! It doesn't prove Ley lines, or that dowsing can be used to show [fill in your fantasy] or that Auntie Flo is 'with you' at a spiritualist seance.
(4) Good luck. SCIENCE (It used to be called things like "Natural philosophy") is about studying phenomena and reproducing results. Don't be afraid to EXPERIMENT because what YOU find may be useful to somebody one day.
PS Personally I have been 'forced' to do fortune telling for people (I'm one of those sorts of unusual chaps who are assumed by various vacuous people to be 'natural' fortune tellers.) Without the aid of spirits or 'fluences I've scared myself and subjects by the thrust (they might say accuracy) of my guesswork. It is jaw dropping to be told by somebody you met ten minutes previously that "In 50 years I have never told anybody that" - but that's just 'reading people" See http://vulpeculox.net/misc/try.htm and http://vulpeculox.net/archive/brose.htm for things that I learned as a result.
PPS The world is OVERFLOWING with weirdos who don't have much sense of hard scientific ground. (And most of the rest are gullible as hell.) When I first put my FACTS about the Compass pubs in a line on the web (14 years ago) I received 14 pages of close handwritten script on air-mail paper from a nutter who tried through mathematics to show that volume...great pyramid...12345.67890...moon...volume...etc. [Eh?] The moral of this story is that SCIENTIFIC METHOD - including peer review - is your friend. By all means investigate but never let it be said "He should get out more"
A tool is a man-made thing (even if it a rock to chip flints with it is selected and used in a way that is man-made). The cave-man who acquires a better hammer rock is naturally pleased and proud of it and will either imbue it with magical qualities (God-Nature you see) or appreciate its qualities as they matter to a flint-maker (weight, hardness, fit in the hand etc.). The latter is just a 'beautiful' as a clever team manoeuvre to score a goal, or the technology that goes into making an affordable, low maintenance, lightweight bicycle. Of course you have to 'know what beauty looks like' - Those ingredients that make you most proud of your tools and achievements.
I don't think anyone was claiming that 'expressions all over the blackboard' were beautiful... ...but the conclusion may be, and the lead-up to it may be a guide for our own explorations.
FWIW here is my analysis of levels:
Somewhere, possibly after school, especially in old age, people need a sense of 'be safe with numbers, statistics and graphs'
The mentor, professor or role-model turn pupils into students by showing them how to be pro-active and then giving mature guidance, and not-least, encouragement.
A browser that will detect repeating structures in the DOM and parse them into segments. Then be able to select on elements with the possibility of export. Often people have to look through long lists of things where only a few are of interest. For example (a) detect the 'comment' structure in a slashdot page (without being told the template) (b) parse into title, who, text (c) offer (in this case) three search fields to select on and then (d) copy a selected one into the clipboard in XLM or append to a clippings file.
Secondly : NO - do not put all your eggs in one basket. Keep the bunker as stand-by short-term fall-back. Not only is this your resilience (including all those system changes that cause grief) but you can also run training exercises down there without impacting on the normal system. Also spending a short time in the bunker helps people focus on issues, objectives and methods a lot more - which counts when there is 'an emergency'.
Thirdly : A secure but non-hardened environment is much cheaper, 'normal' and easier to alter than a bunker. It is FAR better to give people the tools they need to manage the everyday noise and have the necessary grades of experience of staff (=quantity) to learn the practicalities under supervision than to lock a apprentice in a box with flashing lights and coloured buttons hoping that they will not make too many mistakes.