Scary! I'd say we must work at the same place, but this pretty describes large software development efforts everywhere.
Particularly the "framework" bit - this sort of thing is a particular pet hate of mine. Why do people do this kind of thing continually when it almost never works? Why not just solve the direct problem instead? I have seen it over and over again. People seem to miss the obvious point that solving the class of problem is always going to be an order of magnitude (at least) more difficult that solving an instance of the problem - and you need an appropriately large budget to do it. The final nail in the coffin for the "let's build a framework while we're at it" lunacy is that the "framework" often ends up providing a solution to something that didn't even need doing in the first place - it's just something someone thought might be useful early on. I can't count the number of times we've ripped the bloated, buggy, badly designed, unusable "framework" out of a system and it's then become reliable, simpler, smaller, more efficient, and more extensible and flexible (those two points are often the reasoning for the "framework" in the first place, so it's ironic how that works out).
Sigh. "Frameworks" - it's my anti-pattern of the year. Or maybe decade, or even career. That's not to say it can't be done, it can of course, but only with lots of time, money, careful thought, planning and exactly the right people - certainly not as an off-hand skunkworks inside some other project with no clear purpose or direct problem to solve.
Re:Next Up: Dark Knight Returns ?!
on
Sin City Trailer
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· Score: 1
Ah, "The Dark Knight" - better than Fight Club, Dirty Harry, and Robocop put together. And then turned up to "eleven".
If you want to see a short preview of what this might look like, the "Batman Adventures" television show actually DID it.
As I recall: there was an episode in which three Gotham City kids were discussing what "the bat" might actually be like. This was basically a setup to show different representative versions of Batman from various decades in three segments of the half-hour show, including a segment that was an animated version of some scenes from "The Dark Knight" - done in the same artistic style and with the same attitude and general mood. It went for about 10 minutes, and it was wonderful.
I didn't watch the show religiously - I just caught the odd episode - but I was lucky enough to catch THAT one fine Saturday morning.
LOL! yeah dude. You are a riot. Now I will aim for offense I guess.
You've totally missed the fact that I was trying to prove a point, which is clearly demonstrated below. Here we go...
Oh what the hell...being in a good mood and all...I would like you to just name a few of the things/algorithms we do in computataional chemisty!. Perhaps it is the graphics end...must be trivial to someone who knows everything about computational geometry such as your self. Or the molecular mechanics forcefields which require a multitude of math and algorithms to type atoms, perform energy minimization, molecular dynamics, etc.... Oh and I am certain that you could learn quantum chemistry in 6 months! I guess if you don't have a job then perhaps you should get to learning there brainiac.
You mean you've thought about all the stuff you've studied, judged how difficult it was and how much work you had to do, and you've come to the conclusion that anyone who could says they could just pick it up in some trivial time (or without even studying it at all seriously) clearly doesn't know what they're talking about?
Know you know what you sound like to some of us! You couldn't possible be "on par with a CS graduate" who did any kind of serious CS course unless you did the exact same subjects. Now, I know you think they're probably all easy somehow, but that's simply untrue.
I could and have learned everything and probably much much more about programming than you every did in your CS classes.
No, you haven't, unless you took the same 4 years worth of courses. It is easy to get started, yes, and most science courses these days let people do enough coursework that they get a feel for it, but statements like the above are plainly just arrogance driven by fundamental ignorance. I would never say that I know as much as you just because I did (say) three subjects related to chemistry. Do you see how silly that statement would be? Do you see how you sound now?
If you are so smart and can learn what I know then by all means do it...get a job and quit fucking bitching about not haveing one.
No, my employment situation is just fine, thanks.
oh and to take my position you are gonna be draggin your ass back to school and getting... **grasp** some higher education.
Yes on par with CS graduates..if you want to be good
Absolute rubbish. You simply don't know what you are talking about.
I never said that my job couldn't be learned by a 16 year old...however to be a good computational chemist one also has to have very strong math skills, very strong programming skills (Yes on par with CS graduates..if you want to be good), and very good chemistry skills
And software engineers have none of those skills, right? Let me put it another way: I'm totally confident I could learn everything in your field in 6 months, tops, if I had nothing else to do. So you should probably be worried about all those smart people switching to something else like "computational chemistry" considering that, well, it's not that hard, honestly.
People when your skill can be learned by a sixteen year old who has access to a computer with an internet connection it is time to realize that the barrier to entry is very small...this results in price wars ala...lowered programming wages
And what is it about a being "computational chemist" that cannot, logically, be learned by a 16-year old with enough time and will?
Hint: There's actually more to software engineering than you think. Just because you can buy a computer and hack out some code with it doesn't mean a damned thing.
You saw Episode I, and Episode II, the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi, the "special" editions, and you've heard how the DVD version of the OT is going to be even more "special," right? You have to ask this question?
So we watch 4,5,6, and think its about Luke. We watch 1,2,3, and realize that its about Vader. We watch 7,8,9 and maybe we will finally realize it's just about an old man who doesn't know when to let someone else take over.
That's very close to the system we have now, isn't it? If it can't be detected then you get away with it - and keep the advantage.
I do agree with you and some of the other posters in that it's a tricky question. Why is genetic advantage "ok"? Why is having a millions of dollars of sports research behind you "ok"? Why is it that millions of dollars of equipment and facilities - that others might now have access to - is "ok"? The only way to make it absolutely "fair" would be to clone athletes, dole them out to each country and ensure that only a certain amount of money (and no less) is invested in each one. Of course, that's madness, but that's inevitably where the "fair" argument leads.
Here's another way to look at it - pragmatically. The Olympics is fundamentally a big show. If people stop being interested, then it just disappears. The IOC has to judge whether the rules end up enhancing the Olympics' popularity or degrading it. They have judged that allowing all sorts of performance enhancing drugs would turn people off, as it then becomes mostly a measure of how good your drugs are. And whether it's right or not to exclude these drugs, I tend to agree with that assessment of audience reaction.
Take a pathological case and work backwards. Assume the existence of an undetectible "cheat" that would allow me to easily win every event in the Olympics with no training at all, and even no experience in any of the events. By your rule, that would be fine. And that would instantly be the end of the Olympics from an audience interest point of view, and therefore the end of the Olympics - and the IOC obviously don't want that. So, that means that there are some things the audience will find acceptable at this time (eg. lots of training even with expensive equipment) and others that they won't (eg. filling yourself with drugs, having a cybernetic heart, or altering time and space). The only question is where you draw that line exactly.
The original olympics wasn't about all of this silly ethical garbage. It was about muscular naked men manhandling one another in front of a large audience. I, for one, think we should honor this spirit and seek to preserve it.
Why? I'm not sure from the above what spirit you're referring to exactly:)
When changing jobs recently, I was offered an onerous IP agreement. I manage to get it amended without too much hassle - and not just for me, but (I'm told) for all future employees. Having been through this a couple of times before, it seems to me that the authors of such agreements grab everything they can by default, and will just fall over at the least sign of resistance.
You do have to be prepared to walk away. If you're not able to decline (for financial reasons, for example) and sign the thing anyway you really have no right to complain later. At the very least you should be aware of what you're agreeing to, so at least then you can choose not to develop particularly valuable IP in your own time and with your own resources. I was amazed by the number of people working for my new employer that didn't even know what they had signed.
Actually, I tried to find his slashdot account once before, and failed. I probably just got the spelling of his name wrong at the time, and I concluded that he must have had an obscure account name instead of his real name.
So, don't be so quick to throw insults around - you might make a simple and honest mistake one day.
Take a look at his posting list and tell me again where he went.
Yep, it looks like he came back all right. No, I didn't realize that. That's good, I'll be watching for his posts.
Can't have them inconvenient facts ruin a good debating strategy, no siree.
No strategy - that's just what happened. I'm not sure what you're implying, honestly.
I'm pretty sure that Bumblebee and Herbie haved both laughed, cried, winked and glared angrily. I mean, didn't the patent office even search for any prior art?;)
Jumped the shark? No, that was when Tom Christensen left publicly never to return in a post attached to a despicable comment for the story announcing the death of Richard Stevens. It was 1999. I can't seem to find it now, but it really was a low point.
But I guess that just marks the point of no return for the/. "community", and this is the worst story ever.
I wonder if David Brin even intended for this email to be made public - it's just not very good. I've certainly sent some emails in the past that, in hindsight, weren't really all that funny - it's just good for me that 1) I'm not famous, and 2) I never sent them to Hemos.
Someone said: Some other advice I would offer would be to actually not insult people in a public forum. You might not be prepared for the consequences.
Then you said:... its hard to see what the possible consequences could be (except for people being rude back to me!).
Here's one for you that has nothing to do with threats - politeness is a habit, and no matter how talented you are, you won't get very far in the real world without other people. So, in general, it's good not to get on the wrong side of people from the start, or worse without even intending to. Of course, there are exceptions, but in general you want to maintain a viable working relationships in order to get anything done (aside from, I suppose, than the most low-level functionary type work imaginable).
Now, you can try to separate your "real" life from your "online" one. You can make your Slashdot account as anonymous as you can, you can even post as an Anonymous Coward. It won't help, because being belittling, arrogant and bullying is also a habit, and will inevitably "leak" back into your real life.
I've had it start to happen to me around 4 years ago, and I've seen it in others. For independent proof, look at the people on Slashdot who go around being arrogant and insulting on Slashdot seemingly 24/7. If they haven't carefully hidden their "real" identities (always a damning step for someone who considers themselves to be a genius/uberhacker/whatever), you will *without* *fail* see that they have accomplished exactly nothing in their lives aside from perhaps getting a degree and maybe barely managing to hold down a pretty mediocre job of some kind. And it's not suprising - the real world will naturally punish that kind of behaviour, no matter how good you are, or how good you *think* you are. No one wants to deal with that kind of person, and *that* has consequences.
Note: I'm not talking about you here, even though you're basically anonymous - you flatly admitted you were wrong in another post after being very sure you were correct, and I find that (on Slashdot) almost unbelievable. I suppose that's another thing about not being a prat - it lets you be wrong with no real damage done.
Also, people bitten by spiders don't generally become ultra-powerful.
I guess someone's got to do it...
Martin: I would've thought that being hit by an atomic bomb would've killed him!
Bart: Now you know better.
Now, as for all those people busy finding mistakes, here's one for just for you:
Comic Book Guy: But Aquaman, you cannot marry a woman without gills. You're from two different worlds! (nuclear missile suddenly detonates nearby) Oohh, I've wasted my life...
I'm not sure if you'll actually read this in amongst the long discussion, but I've got a couple of sincere questions to ask and this post seemed like as good a place as any.
The background: I've seen a few of your posts, and yours is an interesting perspective to me - simply because, being Australian, there's really not much printed here in the way of arguments *for* the war on Iraq. So a lot of the points you make really are news to me. Even though I do look at US news sites occasionally.
No, no, no. Iraq did have stockpiles of proscribed weapons. These stockpiles have been found, cataloged, and destroyed. Artillery shells, ballistic missiles, binary and multiplex chemical agents, and so on. What has not been found is a big jug with the label "Saddam's sarin--handz off!" on it, and that's evidently the only thing that would satisfy some people. These people are generally--not always, but generally--the same people who thought Saddam's brand of Stalinist socialism and pan-Arab nationalism were pretty neat ideas and are sorry to see him go, so I'm not really concerned about their naysaying
Okay, my question is this: why isn't this being basically shouted from the rooftops by pro-War people? I wouldn't know about all this if I hadn't seen you (or someone like you, at least) talking about it here and provoking me to search on Google for more information. There was, IIRC, one small story on CNN about the Sarin attack recently. Even Fox News, which I gather is right-leaning, gave it fairly short shrift. Nothing of the kind made the news here in Australia. There are, however, many talking heads appearing quite often in the media here that get to say "no WMDs have been found", or words to that effect and are never called on it.
From what I've read, I would have thought it made for a pretty open-and-shut case for most people. So, without meaning it as a challenge, I'd like to know why anyone arguing for the war isn't stating these facts at every opportunity. I would.
Have you read the reports? Statement 15, which is the one you're referring to, says that Iraq did have contacts with al-Qaida, but that the nature of those contacts remains open to interpretation. They said they didn't find a smoking gun. Which is not surprising or troubling to me in the slightest. I'm familiar with the evidence, and I've drawn my conclusion. You have a responsibility to be familiar with the evidence and to draw your conclusion. Don't let anybody hand you a pre-built conclusion in the form of a headline or a sound bite. Educate yourself, and then think.
I have the same question for this issue - it appears to hardly exist in the new media here, and yet it seems pretty important whether it turns out to be true or false. Of course, this may be being reported more comprehensively (or even at all) in printed newspapers in the US, but it doesn't seem to rate a mention here, just like the WMDs found so far.
The net effect of all this, of course, is that very few people I know are even aware of these issues. The majority believe the "no WMDs/no link to al-Quaida" anti-war line, which just doesn't seem to be true. We can argue about the amount and degree in each case, sure, but people do seriously believe these things don't exist at all.
If you don't understand what's going on at the machine level, you are going to run into trouble eventually because your perception of the runtime environment is slightly or even wildly incorrect.
Example: When programming in languages like C or C++, you have to know what a stack frame is and basically how it's implemented, so that when something goes wrong you can correctly diagnose the problem. If you just know the corresponding language syntax (i.e. the scoping rules), you won't have the first clue where to start.
This applies to Java as well - just replace "machine code" with "bytecode" and "CPU" with "virtual machine".
In all these cases, a compiler takes your program specification (the source code) and produces the *real* program (in machine code or bytecode) - and that is what is executed and that is what you will be debugging and analysing. If you don't understand basically what machine code is and how it works, you will keep running into brick walls. I've seen this over and over again - the new graduates who just can't see why their program is behaving the way it does, because they never did assembly programming, or studied the run-time environment of programming languages, and so have these bizarre ad-hoc mental models of what's happening that bears little or no relation to reality.
I'm not saying that assembler should be used any more than it is currently, but if we are going to be using compiled languages (C, C++, Java), then it simply *must* be taught. There is simply no way to avoid this if you want to be a half-way productive programmer in those environments.
This reminds me of a (relatively) old saying: "Don't underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes!" We could update that to, "Don't underestimate the bandwidth of an SUV full of DVDs!"
I use this example sometimes when explaining latency and throughput, but it's interesting that people basically do it. I suppose it's not surprising, it does make a lot of sense in certain specific situations.
but there are people in the rest of the world who actually will consider what he has to say
Everything he bases his "insights" on is the result of being incredibly ignorant and/or misinformed, as Tanenbaum's original rebuttal makes clear beyond a shadow of a doubt. Now, why should anyone listen to such a person again?
Slashdot Mirror
Scary! I'd say we must work at the same place, but this pretty describes large software development efforts everywhere.
Particularly the "framework" bit - this sort of thing is a particular pet hate of mine. Why do people do this kind of thing continually when it almost never works? Why not just solve the direct problem instead? I have seen it over and over again. People seem to miss the obvious point that solving the class of problem is always going to be an order of magnitude (at least) more difficult that solving an instance of the problem - and you need an appropriately large budget to do it. The final nail in the coffin for the "let's build a framework while we're at it" lunacy is that the "framework" often ends up providing a solution to something that didn't even need doing in the first place - it's just something someone thought might be useful early on. I can't count the number of times we've ripped the bloated, buggy, badly designed, unusable "framework" out of a system and it's then become reliable, simpler, smaller, more efficient, and more extensible and flexible (those two points are often the reasoning for the "framework" in the first place, so it's ironic how that works out).
Sigh. "Frameworks" - it's my anti-pattern of the year. Or maybe decade, or even career. That's not to say it can't be done, it can of course, but only with lots of time, money, careful thought, planning and exactly the right people - certainly not as an off-hand skunkworks inside some other project with no clear purpose or direct problem to solve.
Ah, "The Dark Knight" - better than Fight Club, Dirty Harry, and Robocop put together. And then turned up to "eleven".
If you want to see a short preview of what this might look like, the "Batman Adventures" television show actually DID it.
As I recall: there was an episode in which three Gotham City kids were discussing what "the bat" might actually be like. This was basically a setup to show different representative versions of Batman from various decades in three segments of the half-hour show, including a segment that was an animated version of some scenes from "The Dark Knight" - done in the same artistic style and with the same attitude and general mood. It went for about 10 minutes, and it was wonderful.
I didn't watch the show religiously - I just caught the odd episode - but I was lucky enough to catch THAT one fine Saturday morning.
As Homer J would say, it must have been a pretty slow year!
LOL! yeah dude. You are a riot. Now I will aim for offense I guess.
...
You've totally missed the fact that I was trying to prove a point, which is clearly demonstrated below. Here we go
Oh what the hell...being in a good mood and all...I would like you to just name a few of the things/algorithms we do in computataional chemisty!. Perhaps it is the graphics end...must be trivial to someone who knows everything about computational geometry such as your self. Or the molecular mechanics forcefields which require a multitude of math and algorithms to type atoms, perform energy minimization, molecular dynamics, etc.... Oh and I am certain that you could learn quantum chemistry in 6 months! I guess if you don't have a job then perhaps you should get to learning there brainiac.
You mean you've thought about all the stuff you've studied, judged how difficult it was and how much work you had to do, and you've come to the conclusion that anyone who could says they could just pick it up in some trivial time (or without even studying it at all seriously) clearly doesn't know what they're talking about?
Know you know what you sound like to some of us! You couldn't possible be "on par with a CS graduate" who did any kind of serious CS course unless you did the exact same subjects. Now, I know you think they're probably all easy somehow, but that's simply untrue.
I could and have learned everything and probably much much more about programming than you every did in your CS classes.
No, you haven't, unless you took the same 4 years worth of courses. It is easy to get started, yes, and most science courses these days let people do enough coursework that they get a feel for it, but statements like the above are plainly just arrogance driven by fundamental ignorance. I would never say that I know as much as you just because I did (say) three subjects related to chemistry. Do you see how silly that statement would be? Do you see how you sound now?
If you are so smart and can learn what I know then by all means do it...get a job and quit fucking bitching about not haveing one.
No, my employment situation is just fine, thanks.
oh and to take my position you are gonna be draggin your ass back to school and getting... **grasp** some higher education.
The irony is killing me.
Sorry again if I offended any one.
Then stop offending people.
Yes on par with CS graduates..if you want to be good
Absolute rubbish. You simply don't know what you are talking about.
I never said that my job couldn't be learned by a 16 year old...however to be a good computational chemist one also has to have very strong math skills, very strong programming skills (Yes on par with CS graduates..if you want to be good), and very good chemistry skills
And software engineers have none of those skills, right? Let me put it another way: I'm totally confident I could learn everything in your field in 6 months, tops, if I had nothing else to do. So you should probably be worried about all those smart people switching to something else like "computational chemistry" considering that, well, it's not that hard, honestly.
Sorry if I offended you.
People when your skill can be learned by a sixteen year old who has access to a computer with an internet connection it is time to realize that the barrier to entry is very small...this results in price wars ala...lowered programming wages
And what is it about a being "computational chemist" that cannot, logically, be learned by a 16-year old with enough time and will?
Hint: There's actually more to software engineering than you think. Just because you can buy a computer and hack out some code with it doesn't mean a damned thing.
And it's written in Perl 6, right?
There just has to be at least some level of quality assurance before these things can be released to the masses.
;)
Why start now?
*ducks*
Really? Let me check this right now.
/bin/more /usr/bin/less /bin/more and /usr/bin/less differ
$ diff
Binary files
So the answer is a resounding "no". "less" is definitely *not* "more".
Hope that helps.
I don't know if I should be happy or scared...
You saw Episode I, and Episode II, the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi, the "special" editions, and you've heard how the DVD version of the OT is going to be even more "special," right? You have to ask this question?
So we watch 4,5,6, and think its about Luke. We watch 1,2,3, and realize that its about Vader. We watch 7,8,9 and maybe we will finally realize it's just about an old man who doesn't know when to let someone else take over.
It's about John Howard?!
If you can't detect it, it should be legal.
:)
That's very close to the system we have now, isn't it? If it can't be detected then you get away with it - and keep the advantage.
I do agree with you and some of the other posters in that it's a tricky question. Why is genetic advantage "ok"? Why is having a millions of dollars of sports research behind you "ok"? Why is it that millions of dollars of equipment and facilities - that others might now have access to - is "ok"? The only way to make it absolutely "fair" would be to clone athletes, dole them out to each country and ensure that only a certain amount of money (and no less) is invested in each one. Of course, that's madness, but that's inevitably where the "fair" argument leads.
Here's another way to look at it - pragmatically. The Olympics is fundamentally a big show. If people stop being interested, then it just disappears. The IOC has to judge whether the rules end up enhancing the Olympics' popularity or degrading it. They have judged that allowing all sorts of performance enhancing drugs would turn people off, as it then becomes mostly a measure of how good your drugs are. And whether it's right or not to exclude these drugs, I tend to agree with that assessment of audience reaction.
Take a pathological case and work backwards. Assume the existence of an undetectible "cheat" that would allow me to easily win every event in the Olympics with no training at all, and even no experience in any of the events. By your rule, that would be fine. And that would instantly be the end of the Olympics from an audience interest point of view, and therefore the end of the Olympics - and the IOC obviously don't want that. So, that means that there are some things the audience will find acceptable at this time (eg. lots of training even with expensive equipment) and others that they won't (eg. filling yourself with drugs, having a cybernetic heart, or altering time and space). The only question is where you draw that line exactly.
The original olympics wasn't about all of this silly ethical garbage. It was about muscular naked men manhandling one another in front of a large audience. I, for one, think we should honor this spirit and seek to preserve it.
Why? I'm not sure from the above what spirit you're referring to exactly
... and be prepared to negotiate.
When changing jobs recently, I was offered an onerous IP agreement. I manage to get it amended without too much hassle - and not just for me, but (I'm told) for all future employees. Having been through this a couple of times before, it seems to me that the authors of such agreements grab everything they can by default, and will just fall over at the least sign of resistance.
You do have to be prepared to walk away. If you're not able to decline (for financial reasons, for example) and sign the thing anyway you really have no right to complain later. At the very least you should be aware of what you're agreeing to, so at least then you can choose not to develop particularly valuable IP in your own time and with your own resources. I was amazed by the number of people working for my new employer that didn't even know what they had signed.
You don't like research , do you?
Actually, I tried to find his slashdot account once before, and failed. I probably just got the spelling of his name wrong at the time, and I concluded that he must have had an obscure account name instead of his real name.
So, don't be so quick to throw insults around - you might make a simple and honest mistake one day.
Take a look at his posting list and tell me again where he went.
Yep, it looks like he came back all right. No, I didn't realize that. That's good, I'll be watching for his posts.
Can't have them inconvenient facts ruin a good debating strategy, no siree.
No strategy - that's just what happened. I'm not sure what you're implying, honestly.
I'm pretty sure that Bumblebee and Herbie haved both laughed, cried, winked and glared angrily. I mean, didn't the patent office even search for any prior art? ;)
I stand corrected. Looks like he returned eventually.
Jumped the shark? No, that was when Tom Christensen left publicly never to return in a post attached to a despicable comment for the story announcing the death of Richard Stevens. It was 1999. I can't seem to find it now, but it really was a low point.
/. "community", and this is the worst story ever.
But I guess that just marks the point of no return for the
I wonder if David Brin even intended for this email to be made public - it's just not very good. I've certainly sent some emails in the past that, in hindsight, weren't really all that funny - it's just good for me that 1) I'm not famous, and 2) I never sent them to Hemos.
Someone said: Some other advice I would offer would be to actually not insult people in a public forum. You might not be prepared for the consequences.
... its hard to see what the possible consequences could be (except for people being rude back to me!).
Then you said:
Here's one for you that has nothing to do with threats - politeness is a habit, and no matter how talented you are, you won't get very far in the real world without other people. So, in general, it's good not to get on the wrong side of people from the start, or worse without even intending to. Of course, there are exceptions, but in general you want to maintain a viable working relationships in order to get anything done (aside from, I suppose, than the most low-level functionary type work imaginable).
Now, you can try to separate your "real" life from your "online" one. You can make your Slashdot account as anonymous as you can, you can even post as an Anonymous Coward. It won't help, because being belittling, arrogant and bullying is also a habit, and will inevitably "leak" back into your real life.
I've had it start to happen to me around 4 years ago, and I've seen it in others. For independent proof, look at the people on Slashdot who go around being arrogant and insulting on Slashdot seemingly 24/7. If they haven't carefully hidden their "real" identities (always a damning step for someone who considers themselves to be a genius/uberhacker/whatever), you will *without* *fail* see that they have accomplished exactly nothing in their lives aside from perhaps getting a degree and maybe barely managing to hold down a pretty mediocre job of some kind. And it's not suprising - the real world will naturally punish that kind of behaviour, no matter how good you are, or how good you *think* you are. No one wants to deal with that kind of person, and *that* has consequences.
Note: I'm not talking about you here, even though you're basically anonymous - you flatly admitted you were wrong in another post after being very sure you were correct, and I find that (on Slashdot) almost unbelievable. I suppose that's another thing about not being a prat - it lets you be wrong with no real damage done.
You are right, I was wrong.
I never thought I'd see someone say that on Slashdot, ever.
Just for that, you're going on to my friends list.
Excellent ... because the original is a well-plotted piece of non-claptrap that never made me want to retch.
Also, people bitten by spiders don't generally become ultra-powerful.
...
I guess someone's got to do it
Martin: I would've thought that being hit by an atomic bomb would've killed him!
Bart: Now you know better.
Now, as for all those people busy finding mistakes, here's one for just for you:
Comic Book Guy: But Aquaman, you cannot marry a woman without gills. You're from two different worlds! (nuclear missile suddenly detonates nearby) Oohh, I've wasted my life...
I'm not sure if you'll actually read this in amongst the long discussion, but I've got a couple of sincere questions to ask and this post seemed like as good a place as any.
The background: I've seen a few of your posts, and yours is an interesting perspective to me - simply because, being Australian, there's really not much printed here in the way of arguments *for* the war on Iraq. So a lot of the points you make really are news to me. Even though I do look at US news sites occasionally.
No, no, no. Iraq did have stockpiles of proscribed weapons. These stockpiles have been found, cataloged, and destroyed. Artillery shells, ballistic missiles, binary and multiplex chemical agents, and so on. What has not been found is a big jug with the label "Saddam's sarin--handz off!" on it, and that's evidently the only thing that would satisfy some people. These people are generally--not always, but generally--the same people who thought Saddam's brand of Stalinist socialism and pan-Arab nationalism were pretty neat ideas and are sorry to see him go, so I'm not really concerned about their naysaying
Okay, my question is this: why isn't this being basically shouted from the rooftops by pro-War people? I wouldn't know about all this if I hadn't seen you (or someone like you, at least) talking about it here and provoking me to search on Google for more information. There was, IIRC, one small story on CNN about the Sarin attack recently. Even Fox News, which I gather is right-leaning, gave it fairly short shrift. Nothing of the kind made the news here in Australia. There are, however, many talking heads appearing quite often in the media here that get to say "no WMDs have been found", or words to that effect and are never called on it.
From what I've read, I would have thought it made for a pretty open-and-shut case for most people. So, without meaning it as a challenge, I'd like to know why anyone arguing for the war isn't stating these facts at every opportunity. I would.
Have you read the reports? Statement 15, which is the one you're referring to, says that Iraq did have contacts with al-Qaida, but that the nature of those contacts remains open to interpretation. They said they didn't find a smoking gun. Which is not surprising or troubling to me in the slightest. I'm familiar with the evidence, and I've drawn my conclusion. You have a responsibility to be familiar with the evidence and to draw your conclusion. Don't let anybody hand you a pre-built conclusion in the form of a headline or a sound bite. Educate yourself, and then think.
I have the same question for this issue - it appears to hardly exist in the new media here, and yet it seems pretty important whether it turns out to be true or false. Of course, this may be being reported more comprehensively (or even at all) in printed newspapers in the US, but it doesn't seem to rate a mention here, just like the WMDs found so far.
The net effect of all this, of course, is that very few people I know are even aware of these issues. The majority believe the "no WMDs/no link to al-Quaida" anti-war line, which just doesn't seem to be true. We can argue about the amount and degree in each case, sure, but people do seriously believe these things don't exist at all.
If you don't understand what's going on at the machine level, you are going to run into trouble eventually because your perception of the runtime environment is slightly or even wildly incorrect.
Example: When programming in languages like C or C++, you have to know what a stack frame is and basically how it's implemented, so that when something goes wrong you can correctly diagnose the problem. If you just know the corresponding language syntax (i.e. the scoping rules), you won't have the first clue where to start.
This applies to Java as well - just replace "machine code" with "bytecode" and "CPU" with "virtual machine".
In all these cases, a compiler takes your program specification (the source code) and produces the *real* program (in machine code or bytecode) - and that is what is executed and that is what you will be debugging and analysing. If you don't understand basically what machine code is and how it works, you will keep running into brick walls. I've seen this over and over again - the new graduates who just can't see why their program is behaving the way it does, because they never did assembly programming, or studied the run-time environment of programming languages, and so have these bizarre ad-hoc mental models of what's happening that bears little or no relation to reality.
I'm not saying that assembler should be used any more than it is currently, but if we are going to be using compiled languages (C, C++, Java), then it simply *must* be taught. There is simply no way to avoid this if you want to be a half-way productive programmer in those environments.
This reminds me of a (relatively) old saying: "Don't underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes!" We could update that to, "Don't underestimate the bandwidth of an SUV full of DVDs!"
I use this example sometimes when explaining latency and throughput, but it's interesting that people basically do it. I suppose it's not surprising, it does make a lot of sense in certain specific situations.
but there are people in the rest of the world who actually will consider what he has to say
Everything he bases his "insights" on is the result of being incredibly ignorant and/or misinformed, as Tanenbaum's original rebuttal makes clear beyond a shadow of a doubt. Now, why should anyone listen to such a person again?