Posts by Ru 1818 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jun 2007
The Straw Grandmother argument seems to pop up an awful lot, doesn't it?
- Dear Old Granny will get a new card, or she won't be able to travel. No-one will care to explain, and it doesn't matter anyway.
- Dear Old Granny hates all technology pretty much regardless of its replacement cycle or utility.
- Dear Old Granny probably disapproves of you for not helping her out with her transport card, and is updating the will as we speak.
Well, you can't claim copyright on basic facts (eg, my height or weight) but you can claim copyright on more detailed things (say, a biography or other work of non-fiction which contains factual information). Grabbing basic facts from a copyright work is fine, but the more complex the construct you're appropriating, the more you're likely to fall afoul of the law.
I'd be very surprised if the astrologers succeeded in their lawsuit, but the damage has already been done.
The snopes page cites its references. Anyone care to point us all at some opposing evidence that the series was ever sponsored by the World newspaper? No? Well, there's a surprise. Congratulations on being less useful even than a Wikipedia article. Lol indeed.
This has been ongoing for some time, and the Government has proven to be quite well practised at it. It largely involves making your internal techies redundant, slashing their pay or outsourcing their responsibilities. This has ensured a steady flow of skilled workers from the public sector into new jobs. Don't see much flowing back the other way, though.
I'd add "5. Prepared to stick at something for at least 3 years".
I've worked with numerous people doing coding who haven't had a computer science degree... on the whole they've all been extremely competent at web and web-service type stuff which didn't demand complex designs or have problems of great technical difficulty to overcome.
When its come to doing less conventional dev work, they've started to flounder. Their architectures tend to be mediocre, they've often got no familiarity with moderately esoteric things like function pointers or closures and they take a long time to 'get' patterns and idioms. Anything that isn't a straightfoward coding exercise tends to be a struggle, because it is something they've not really had to worry about before.
If they're caught early enough and given a job in a decent team writing non-trivial applications, everything is great. But due to the difficulty of landing that first job without a degree, they grow up, their brains become less plastic and they end up with a load of ingrained atrocious habits.
That's not to say an appropriate degree washes all these sins away, but it makes a good foundation for a competent software engineer and puts them in a better position to answer the tough interview questions too.
Career astrophysicists are well known to be an ignorant, lazy, workshy bunch who only went into academia because the real world seemed too stressful. They probably don't know a whole lot about astrophysics, and they probably don't know anyone who does and even if they did they wouldn't ask them.
They probably just got drunk, scrawled down a bunch of random numbers in vomit and posted it off to the nearest journal, without even asking the omniscient polymath denizens of the commentardia to do any proofreading.
"Professional software engineering is as big a step up from school programming as civil engineering is from Lego."
Wrong.
You can draw parallels between lego and civil engineering. You can do robotics with lego. You can make mechanisms with lego. Hell, you can even do 'art' with lego.
School ICT teaches you how to use Word. Whilst I'm sure that's a super useful skill, it is almost totally and utterly unrelated to software engineering or computer science in any way, shape or form. Seriously. It isn't even as applicable as learning how to type. There's a closer relationship between learning handwriting and journalism.
I'm practically incoherent with rage; remaining civil at this point is surprisingly challenging. ICT as currently taught is almost entirely worthless, except as a way to discourage people from choosing computer science type courses or careers in future.
There are already nice legal frameworks around trademarking designed to stop this very problem. There are slightly weaker frameworks regarding limited company names (you could always get .ltd.uk or .plc.uk, of course... but no-one does).
Perhaps you can think of some way to persuade nominet or icann or whoever that your use of a domain is more worthwhile than a domain aggregator? Seems like that's a system that could be all too easily abused. And I speak as someone quite opposed to domaining... I'm pretty much in favour of either increasing prices of domains by a fair amount, or significantly restricting the ability to purchase them. I doubt either solution would make you happy though.
So, get there first, choose a better name, use a less sexy TLD or pay up. Seems like a perfectly reasonable set of requirements to me. The magical domain fairy isn't going to give anyone the domains they'd like for free.
If you really wanted the domain badly, you'd be prepared to cough up a few grand to go register a trademark and kick off an ownership dispute, right?
If you're not willing to do that, and you're not willing to pay whatever the current owner wants, then you deserve your second choice.
No, he is an individual. He should therefore be looking at john.smith.me.uk, right?
If that's already taken, he should be suing his parents for not allocating him a nationally unique identifier at birth.
Me, I'll just be over there being quietly smug about the fact I have a slightly unusual first name, and so picking up domains of the form firstname.tld is quite straightforward for me.
I don't see how you disprove everything just Bamfing into existence in a suitable form, but if something with godlike powers manifested and pointed out that yes, it was all engineered that way and yes, YHBT, then evolution doesn't look quite so hot for our universe.
Doesn't answer the 'turtles all the way down' question though.
A much smaller radius sleeping section would help an awful lot; it only needs to have a large enough radius to ensure that astronauts can sleep in it without tidal forces in their inner ears reminding them that the room really is spinning.
Doesn't make it much less of an engineering problem though.
Got a pension? It isn't nearly as far removed from your reality as you might think. The fact you don't understand the issues, or disapprove of the methods is pretty much irrelevant. Demanding markets become understandable to the common man is not only futile, but counterproductive to boot.
My other half did some verilog work for an FPGA device being marketed at quants... the key issue they were targetting there was cost and power usage, because when you're doing the particular kinds of simulation they were interested in you can relatively easily parallelise the problem. They'd rather do it using some cheap, fast, low power hardware than another rack of x64 boxes drawing a few kilowatts.
Not much use for traders though. Their machines can already work waaaay faster than is needed; its the IO bottleneck that slows em down. See above comment about laying dedicated fibre across the atlantic.
All the traders I've ever met have been cocky and arrogant, certainly, and who doesn't appreciate coke and strippers? (well, maybe those who prefer hands-on entertainment...) but I certainly wouldn't call them ham-fisted or transanocephalous.
If they've accomplished anything at all, it is because underneath it all they tend to be at least moderately capable. They wouldn't ever get anywhere if they weren't, and those hookers don't come on credit you know...
Freedom of the code, not freedom of the developers.
Me, I'm all in favour of the LGPL. Some stuff is best open-sourced in such a way that everyone can fiddle with it... the stuff you cannot sensibly sell. Everything else which you can actually make money from can then be written under strict licensing and still benefit from the common code.
Its the way to go.
Its as bad as the bloody stupid '.museum' TLD. More stringent rules on .com usage would have fixed the issue nicely... the whole thing is absolutely riddled with domainers many of whom make so much from advertising that the domains will remain forever useless. What you need, when you need it indeed.
Seems to me that if they're still allowed to telecommute and still getting paid, then they are working exactly as much as they need to.
Either they're doing a job which has no means of evaluating how much work is actually done, or their supervisors/managers/whoever cannot be bothered to check on their own minions or people only really do a few hours of productive work every day.
My other half runs a software business, and keeps a very careful eye on the output of the employees. Lazy employees rapidly lose telecommuting benefits until they pull themselves together.
(personally, I'm glad my employer is a little more lenient)
Round these parts I can think of a fair number of employers who might actually kill in order to get competent C, C++ and Java devs. The job market seems to have no shortage of people with fairly questionable skills, but to find people who are actually any good seems to need headhunting.
Either you're living in the wrong part of the world, or perhaps your skills need a little brushing up.
What, seriously? Facebook has managed to bring in a few pennies, and even Groupon has a business model. Twitter hasn't managed to progress beyond "1) Become the principle source of drivel on the internet, 2) ??? 3) Profit!"
Facebook doesn't look like they'll do a MySpace anytime soon, but they're not exactly on a solid footing. Looks like the real winners in the list are Zynga, and I can't even manage grudging respect for them. Financial jealousy though, certainly.
Lets hope for a burst bubble soon. Nothing of value will be lost.
Truly random strings exhibit lots of entropy for their length... in this case, a random alphanumeric password using upper and lower case characters has about 6 bits of entropy per character. 'N5hX1qfap' therefore has a fair amount more entropy than the example short phrase the XKCD cartoon suggested.
The cartoon points out that mangled dictionary words merely look complex, but aren't. Random text looks complex and is, but as you pointed out isn't very easy to remember.
Careful analysis of both the hardware and software industried suggests that the appropriate emotion felt by manufacturers and vendors towards customers and users should be either hatred or contempt, or a combination of the two.
There's probably an ISO standard that people comply to, considering the attitude is all but ubiquitous.
I don't see anything unfair there. If you cannot or will not promote, market, advertise your product then no-one will want it. This hypothetical muso might be the most awe inspiring and incredibly prolific artist in the world, but if no-one hears about his work, how the hell does he expect to get any money? Why should he be given money when no-one else is getting anything in return?
Your example is crap. You seem to be confusing a fair reward for a fair amount of work, with some sort of magical fairy communist godmother who rewards talent, no matter how well hidden, with cash and drugs and women conjured from thin air.
Like it or not, the non-creative side of the music industry does actually serve a purpose. It didn't just suddenly spring into being one day like a vast bureaucratic neoplasm killing off the wonderful utopian market that preceded it, because there was no such thing. If you took every single music publisher, recording studio and music-related advertising exec, employee and shareholder on earth and shot them, the same things would start reforming tomorrow.
And seeing as they have already spent my tax money on generating the data in the first place, they can do me the courtesy of providing it to me in a form in which I can make use of it.
The fact you dislike the guardian has no bearing on this at all.
I was thinking more along the lines of the Wii. Sure, it's pretty cool, but the initial enthusiasm wears out and you don't have to go far down the line to find that most of the purchasers aren't interested anymore.
Businesses with an actual use case for a tablet will no doubt be terribly happy. And much like Windows in the past, they'll tie themselves to the platform by using applications which can't be trivially ported. Consumers though? Fashion comes and goes.
Each and every human being is equipped with a complex biological warfare system that has been honed over millions of years to defend them against chemical and biological threats, is capable of keeping its host alive in incredibly hostile circumstances and has the innate capability to learn and adapt to new threats. Its called an Immune System.
Given that I can't just breathe over someone and laugh evilly as my army of killer T cells reduces them to a pool of pus and bones, why do people seem to think that a man-made technological solution is going to immediately go rogue and become an unstoppable civilisation eating nightmare?
Incompetence will save us from the Machines. Seriously. A self replicating swarm of death robots sounds like the end of the world, but it'll have been designed and built by Capita or EDS or the like. Any damage it wreaks will be purely upon those paying for the inevitable vast budget overruns, and the end product will be total crap.
I think its fair to say that if you feel that the only way to solve a problem is to create an entirely new programming language, the odds are good that you have failed to understand the problem.
There are all sorts of reasons to dislike javascript, but the proliferation of third party frameworks is a fairly trivial one.
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