Yes, it's funny - I'm not out to ruin that, but I would like to point out that this is a common fallacy - if A or B is good, then A and B must be even better. That does not follow.
Even if having a blonde wife OR a redhead girlfriend might be good, having a blonde wife AND a redhead girlfriend might not be good at all.
That is what General David Petraeus found the hard way. Wife is good. Girlfriend is good. But Wife && girlfriend is !good.
Did the stone age end because we ran out of stones? Nah, it ended because we found better materials to make the tools, copper and then bronze. Later iron. Then steel.
The age of petroleum, ushered in by the gusher in Titusville Pennsylvania in 1860s, will end with more than half the oil still left in the ground. Oil prices are very unlikely to top 120$ a barrel for sustained periods of time. It might spike to 150$, but will quickly drop back. Shale oil, tar sands oil, oil from coal, etc are all profitable at prices about 100$ a barrel. Solar and wind beat fossil fuels when oil goes above 100$ a barrel.
The only huge problem is energy consumed at fixed points (homes, offices, factories) can be switched to alternative energy relatively easy. But the transportation sector (gasoline for cars, diesel for heavy vehicles, kerosene for aviation) is very heavily dependent on oil. They don't switch to alternative energy easily. But new technologies are emerging. But as the oil price goes up, things will start to change. 90% of the cars are driven less than 60 miles a day. Trucks can stretch the diesel by switching to more efficient diesel-electrics, CNG/LPG and other forms of fossil fuels that are not from Arabia. Arab oil is managed by the big oil companies who know all this. They keep the price to maximize profits without giving a toe hold for the alternative technologies. So it is very unlikely they will let the price spike much above 120$ a barrel. But all their manipulation will just delay the inevitable.
We will leave most of the coal, natural gas and crude oil, in the ground.
For Windows 8 -- we all pretty much knew it was going to happen -- there was no external testing at all. I guess after Vista's performance issues and the poor handling of 7, it was pretty easy for them to decide testers weren't helping them.
Look, the logic is pretty simple. If no bugs were found during testing, it just means there are no bugs in the software. That means the software quality has improved and all the line managers, middle managers, executives, vice presidents and the executive vice president all deserve huge bonuses.
The seeds for this was sown years ago. They came up with quality metrics for software. That quality metric was "number of bugs found during testing". That number is the metric. That is the number to watch. That number must drop for you to make bonus. First few years it works reasonably well. But a few managers fall short of the number, and they find unmotivated lackadaisical unprofessional people and move them to the testing group. Slowly the bugs found during testing drops, and they make bonus. It starts small, with just a few managers. But pretty soon everyone is doing it. Once everyone is doing it, the early "game the system" guys double down, and pretty soon, they cancel the entire testing program and meet the holy grail, "zero bugs found during testing".
There is a coffee shop along the way from my office to my bus stop. 100 feet before to 100 feet after that coffee shop is the place very significant debugging has happened in my code.
A typical debugging session would be like, I will be banging by head against a wall "why the hell this stupid insertion to this std::set fails?" all day. At the end of the day, I would give up, pack my bag, and plan rest of the evening. "OK, Tuesday, so Karate class. Pick up dry-cleaning while the $kid is practicing chandan-up-chuggee. No mowing today. Clear couple of episodes of $episode from TiVo...". Just as I am in the vicinity of that coffee shop, suddenly I go, "Oh! Holycrap. I am cycling through the set in foo(), this calls goo() which inserted an element and changed the sorting order. foo() crashes at the start of next iteration through the loop!"
Next time, I am going to the coffee shop and stand nearby and think. I will tell my boss, "I am letting my subconscious do the debugging! I am working boss. You think I am sipping a latte and checking my facebook on free wifi. But it is work!"
Why the hell should the government make it certain for the VCs? This is free market, pal? Cant stand the heat? Get out of the kitchen.
We don't owe these VCs certain profits. You take the risk. If your bets come off, great, enjoy your fortune after paying the capital gains taxes. If the bet goes bad, cry me a river.
The sense of entitlement these businesses have is astounding. It is your money. Keep it under the mattress if you want. Fund startups at your own risk. Or enjoy it on a beach in Cayman islands. We live in a democracy. We change our House every two years. We change the White House every four years. We change the Senate every six years, 33% every two years. The winner makes new rules. Wanna play? Fine. Wanna take your ball and go home? Good riddance.
It is not a cyber attack. It is just the project ORCA meant to help the election day volunteers for Mitt Romney got its URL messed up and kept redirecting traffic from its http server to https server. It somehow sent everything via Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. The Saudi Aramco is just a bystander caught in the cross fire. Simple glitch.
Nah, not developer. Not even software developer. Not senior software developer either. Not even lead software developer. Principal Software Developer? nah sounds too much like some boarding school in UK. What about Senior Lead Principal Software Yahoo. Nah, it is going bankrupt. What about Senior Lead Principal Chief Software Architect? May bet. This is what I am going to call myself. Please dont tell HR.
Some tiny startup is planning to go hunting for sugar daddy venture capital. They have hired some PR firm to plant fluff pieces to create a buzz. Probably the same firm that cleaned up on "treasure trove of genetic goodies in the rain forest" crowd. They never change the modus operandi. What worked once will always work again.
I have been using a panasonic DVR for about six years now. When I was with DirecTV it used to get the programming through TVGoS and everything was fine. Later when I switched to Verizon FiOS, I lost the TV guide on screen. What made it very painful was that Panasonic DVR does not have an ability to set the clock directly. It relies on this TVGoS to set the clock. So my DVR has been drifting without clock reset for years now. I am using the old VCR like interface to pick the date and time to record the show. The channel is always IN3. Then I use Verizon set top box to schedule channel changes. Very very painful.
But I don't watch much of TV. All I record is Jay Leno, Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert, and interesting marahtons on Discovery or History. Pretty soon I am going to ditch the whole damned cable tv and switch purely to net and streaming.
Basic concepts like languages, writing systems, trading, counting, money, philosophy, astronomy, martial arts and many other things have probably been invented, forgotten and reinvented hundreds of times by individual geniuses over the course of those 200,000 years
Trading is really old, so it was never forgotten. It evolved just once, in East Africa before we got out of Africa. It was never forgotten
Spoken language is something we evolved into. We have the language instinct at birth. It is not something to be taught to children. They naturally try to communicate via spoken language. They know objects have names, and actions have names, and they can be strung together to express concrete events (cup-broke!) or express intent (want-juice) . So laungages were never fogotten.
Writing was invented only twice. Looking at the effort we need to undertake to teach children to write, it is clear, it is not instinctive. It was invented. There are only two instances of independent invention of writing. The linear-b alphabet found in the Mediterranean island and the pictographic glyphs of the Incas. All the writing systems of the Old World were either derived from linear-b or inspired by it. Some minor record keeping aids probably existed long back, notches on a stick or knots on a vine or shells strung up. But it probably did not blossom into full fledged writing based on symbols standing in for phonemes or words.
Adobe PDF and Flash are now the two most serious vectors for malware. Most of us have switched to foxit reader. But I learnt that some of the security holes are actually in the pdf spec itself, and whatever $reader you are using, if it is faithful to the specs, the vulnerability will exist. In this case, is it the reader or the specs that is broken?
High time people stop using the Adobe pdf reader, and disable the "active hyperlinks" in it if it cant be fully uninstalled. Just in case some malware manages to trick the browser into using the installed adobe reader overriding the preference to foxit reader.
I was probably the last few generations of IIT grads to emigrate. When I started my career there really were not good opportunities for my skill set, back in the India. Still I did my patriotic duty, served in the Ministry of Defense, R&D organization in the equivalent ranks of captain and major for six years before leaving. My batch mates who stayed behind are already Brigadiers and Major Generals. Well, I just picked the commander-in-chief of an army that can whip them. Go Obama. So no regrets.
Some time after the year 2000 the emigration from the top schools in India ground to a halt. I am not getting any IIT grads in my application pool. Our company used to hire only IITians from India and similar top schools from Russia, China and Taiwan. I had no difficulty finding IITians to hire till about 2003. I have not seen a single IITian applying to us in the last six years. They are all staying back. IIT grads go directly into middle management track in Indian companies. A significant portion go to Indian Institute of Management. If you have a BTech from IIT and an MBA from IIM, you are guaranteed to reach top management in your career. That would be the equivalent of getting a BS comp sci from MIT and then an MBA from Harvard. IIT grads now a days get American salary in Indian purchasing power.
This bodes ill for America. We need to keep the country enticing for the best and brightest in the world.
They kept firing and retiring older Americans who knew Cobol. Y2K came, the only large supply of Cobol programmers left in the world were the Indian programmers working on the hand-me-down systems used by the Indian companies. There was the media frenzy and scare mongering waves. Suddenly H1B quota was raised from 65K a year to 130K a year for the years 1997 to 2002. About 66% of those visas went to fellow Indians.
Created some resentment among the older Indian immigrants who had to slog through med school or get through IITs and IISc to make it to USA. Now grads from third class colleges like Sri Bhagawati Amman College of Engineering, Middel-of-Nowhere, Godforsakenpradesh, India were waving their newly minted H1B. It was disconcerting. "Why is America letting these lunatics in? Why did I have to struggle so hard to get in? And this hoodlum is also in E2 category?" they were muttering under their breath as the nouveau immigrants were talking loudly and hogging the buffet line.
Back in 1989 when I was doing my masters one of my classmates had this as her project. No hardware, just some conceptual studies, literature survey and a project report.
If you place some seismometers on the street quite close to the house, people can detect if there are people moving about in the house. Add to it laser beams reflecting off the window panes, they can detect minute changes in the structure as it flexes when you move from your bedroom to the bathroom. Sensitive microphones can be used to detect the sounds of toilet flushes too.
So, next time, in addition to getting tin foil for the hats, you should get non reflective paint for the whole structure, shock isolating floating foundation for the entire home and special noise cancelling speakers attached to the plumbing. Else, gasp! thieves will know when you are in and when you are not in your own home.
Yeah, yeah. It happens all the time. Some mods look at a posting, think other mods are going up vote that posting so they up vote it too. Wouldn't be surprised if that happens to your posting.
Nate Silver, Dr Sam Wang etc are in a position where they don't depend on the advertisement revenue to keep this little pet project going. So they inform. Should they be forced to depend on advertisement revenue, like CNN or MSNBC or Fox News, they too would see the value in being "entertaining" than being "informative".
Princeton Election consortium is projecting 99.9% win for obama. Dr Sam Wang is a very well respected professor of statistics. His methods are public. Votamatic has been projecting Obama win for a long time. Obama was leading in Nate's estimate for a long time. The high water mark for Romney was about 40% chance immediately after the first debate.
You know what they say about new legislation or technology. All the people who are going to lose jobs or otherwise affected by the newfangled thing or the new law are going to know it and oppose it fiercely. But the people who might benefit from the new technology or the law might not even know they are going to benefit. So they discount the future, become lackadaisical, and ignore the whole thing.
Killer asteroids are good to life that might emerge after the collision. But if you poll the existing life on the planet? meh! Its popularity is going to be very very bad.
These scientists are a bunch of wusses. They should have issued a severe warning five years ago and fired him at the second or at most the third offense. CDesign Proponentists have no place in a science lab.
The last item widely reported as "purloined" was stashed in a cubby hole of the only women who has out smarted the companion of the famous chronicler. So just find the smartest woman in Northern California and shout "fire" within her earshot and look for the place she is running it save it from the fire.
It is elementary. Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is the solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it's funny - I'm not out to ruin that, but I would like to point out that this is a common fallacy - if A or B is good, then A and B must be even better. That does not follow. Even if having a blonde wife OR a redhead girlfriend might be good, having a blonde wife AND a redhead girlfriend might not be good at all.
That is what General David Petraeus found the hard way. Wife is good. Girlfriend is good. But Wife && girlfriend is !good.
Let me sleep over it. May be I will understand what you are talking about it.
Seems very high brow to me. Let me wait to see if I understand this when I take a shower or tomorrow morning.
The age of petroleum, ushered in by the gusher in Titusville Pennsylvania in 1860s, will end with more than half the oil still left in the ground. Oil prices are very unlikely to top 120$ a barrel for sustained periods of time. It might spike to 150$, but will quickly drop back. Shale oil, tar sands oil, oil from coal, etc are all profitable at prices about 100$ a barrel. Solar and wind beat fossil fuels when oil goes above 100$ a barrel.
The only huge problem is energy consumed at fixed points (homes, offices, factories) can be switched to alternative energy relatively easy. But the transportation sector (gasoline for cars, diesel for heavy vehicles, kerosene for aviation) is very heavily dependent on oil. They don't switch to alternative energy easily. But new technologies are emerging. But as the oil price goes up, things will start to change. 90% of the cars are driven less than 60 miles a day. Trucks can stretch the diesel by switching to more efficient diesel-electrics, CNG/LPG and other forms of fossil fuels that are not from Arabia. Arab oil is managed by the big oil companies who know all this. They keep the price to maximize profits without giving a toe hold for the alternative technologies. So it is very unlikely they will let the price spike much above 120$ a barrel. But all their manipulation will just delay the inevitable.
We will leave most of the coal, natural gas and crude oil, in the ground.
For Windows 8 -- we all pretty much knew it was going to happen -- there was no external testing at all. I guess after Vista's performance issues and the poor handling of 7, it was pretty easy for them to decide testers weren't helping them.
Look, the logic is pretty simple. If no bugs were found during testing, it just means there are no bugs in the software. That means the software quality has improved and all the line managers, middle managers, executives, vice presidents and the executive vice president all deserve huge bonuses.
The seeds for this was sown years ago. They came up with quality metrics for software. That quality metric was "number of bugs found during testing". That number is the metric. That is the number to watch. That number must drop for you to make bonus. First few years it works reasonably well. But a few managers fall short of the number, and they find unmotivated lackadaisical unprofessional people and move them to the testing group. Slowly the bugs found during testing drops, and they make bonus. It starts small, with just a few managers. But pretty soon everyone is doing it. Once everyone is doing it, the early "game the system" guys double down, and pretty soon, they cancel the entire testing program and meet the holy grail, "zero bugs found during testing".
A typical debugging session would be like, I will be banging by head against a wall "why the hell this stupid insertion to this std::set fails?" all day. At the end of the day, I would give up, pack my bag, and plan rest of the evening. "OK, Tuesday, so Karate class. Pick up dry-cleaning while the $kid is practicing chandan-up-chuggee. No mowing today. Clear couple of episodes of $episode from TiVo...". Just as I am in the vicinity of that coffee shop, suddenly I go, "Oh! Holycrap. I am cycling through the set in foo(), this calls goo() which inserted an element and changed the sorting order. foo() crashes at the start of next iteration through the loop!"
Next time, I am going to the coffee shop and stand nearby and think. I will tell my boss, "I am letting my subconscious do the debugging! I am working boss. You think I am sipping a latte and checking my facebook on free wifi. But it is work!"
We don't owe these VCs certain profits. You take the risk. If your bets come off, great, enjoy your fortune after paying the capital gains taxes. If the bet goes bad, cry me a river.
The sense of entitlement these businesses have is astounding. It is your money. Keep it under the mattress if you want. Fund startups at your own risk. Or enjoy it on a beach in Cayman islands. We live in a democracy. We change our House every two years. We change the White House every four years. We change the Senate every six years, 33% every two years. The winner makes new rules. Wanna play? Fine. Wanna take your ball and go home? Good riddance.
It is not a cyber attack. It is just the project ORCA meant to help the election day volunteers for Mitt Romney got its URL messed up and kept redirecting traffic from its http server to https server. It somehow sent everything via Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. The Saudi Aramco is just a bystander caught in the cross fire. Simple glitch.
Nah, not developer. Not even software developer. Not senior software developer either. Not even lead software developer. Principal Software Developer? nah sounds too much like some boarding school in UK. What about Senior Lead Principal Software Yahoo. Nah, it is going bankrupt. What about Senior Lead Principal Chief Software Architect? May bet. This is what I am going to call myself. Please dont tell HR.
Some tiny startup is planning to go hunting for sugar daddy venture capital. They have hired some PR firm to plant fluff pieces to create a buzz. Probably the same firm that cleaned up on "treasure trove of genetic goodies in the rain forest" crowd. They never change the modus operandi. What worked once will always work again.
But I don't watch much of TV. All I record is Jay Leno, Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert, and interesting marahtons on Discovery or History. Pretty soon I am going to ditch the whole damned cable tv and switch purely to net and streaming.
They are making a veritable God out of him: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/08/1158776/--NateSilverFacts-now-trending
1. Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade.
2. The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond
3. The language instinct by Steven Pinker
4. The Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond.
Trading is really old, so it was never forgotten. It evolved just once, in East Africa before we got out of Africa. It was never forgotten
Spoken language is something we evolved into. We have the language instinct at birth. It is not something to be taught to children. They naturally try to communicate via spoken language. They know objects have names, and actions have names, and they can be strung together to express concrete events (cup-broke!) or express intent (want-juice) . So laungages were never fogotten.
Writing was invented only twice. Looking at the effort we need to undertake to teach children to write, it is clear, it is not instinctive. It was invented. There are only two instances of independent invention of writing. The linear-b alphabet found in the Mediterranean island and the pictographic glyphs of the Incas. All the writing systems of the Old World were either derived from linear-b or inspired by it. Some minor record keeping aids probably existed long back, notches on a stick or knots on a vine or shells strung up. But it probably did not blossom into full fledged writing based on symbols standing in for phonemes or words.
High time people stop using the Adobe pdf reader, and disable the "active hyperlinks" in it if it cant be fully uninstalled. Just in case some malware manages to trick the browser into using the installed adobe reader overriding the preference to foxit reader.
Some time after the year 2000 the emigration from the top schools in India ground to a halt. I am not getting any IIT grads in my application pool. Our company used to hire only IITians from India and similar top schools from Russia, China and Taiwan. I had no difficulty finding IITians to hire till about 2003. I have not seen a single IITian applying to us in the last six years. They are all staying back. IIT grads go directly into middle management track in Indian companies. A significant portion go to Indian Institute of Management. If you have a BTech from IIT and an MBA from IIM, you are guaranteed to reach top management in your career. That would be the equivalent of getting a BS comp sci from MIT and then an MBA from Harvard. IIT grads now a days get American salary in Indian purchasing power.
This bodes ill for America. We need to keep the country enticing for the best and brightest in the world.
Created some resentment among the older Indian immigrants who had to slog through med school or get through IITs and IISc to make it to USA. Now grads from third class colleges like Sri Bhagawati Amman College of Engineering, Middel-of-Nowhere, Godforsakenpradesh, India were waving their newly minted H1B. It was disconcerting. "Why is America letting these lunatics in? Why did I have to struggle so hard to get in? And this hoodlum is also in E2 category?" they were muttering under their breath as the nouveau immigrants were talking loudly and hogging the buffet line.
Back in 1989 when I was doing my masters one of my classmates had this as her project. No hardware, just some conceptual studies, literature survey and a project report.
So, next time, in addition to getting tin foil for the hats, you should get non reflective paint for the whole structure, shock isolating floating foundation for the entire home and special noise cancelling speakers attached to the plumbing. Else, gasp! thieves will know when you are in and when you are not in your own home.
Yeah, yeah. It happens all the time. Some mods look at a posting, think other mods are going up vote that posting so they up vote it too. Wouldn't be surprised if that happens to your posting.
Nate Silver, Dr Sam Wang etc are in a position where they don't depend on the advertisement revenue to keep this little pet project going. So they inform. Should they be forced to depend on advertisement revenue, like CNN or MSNBC or Fox News, they too would see the value in being "entertaining" than being "informative".
Princeton Election consortium is projecting 99.9% win for obama. Dr Sam Wang is a very well respected professor of statistics. His methods are public. Votamatic has been projecting Obama win for a long time. Obama was leading in Nate's estimate for a long time. The high water mark for Romney was about 40% chance immediately after the first debate.
Killer asteroids are good to life that might emerge after the collision. But if you poll the existing life on the planet? meh! Its popularity is going to be very very bad.
These scientists are a bunch of wusses. They should have issued a severe warning five years ago and fired him at the second or at most the third offense. CDesign Proponentists have no place in a science lab.
It is elementary. Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is the solution.