elblanco

Can you recall any of Brin's ideas on the subject?

(It's funny since I just started reading Sundiver the other day!)

I don't (anymore).

About two years ago I went through about a six month period where I spent pretty much every day in a revert war with various people who definitely didn't know anything about the field/area I was trying to provide some information on.

I happen to have a fair amount of expertise and experience in a certain area (Music Trackers) and at the time thought I would lend a hand to flesh out the still woefully inadequate content to that part of Wikipedia and started or fleshed out dozens of pages of content. I probably spent north of 100 hours on content creation even going so far as to setup emulated environments in other OSs so I could get screen captures of some of the software. I spent dozens more cleaning up missing or outright incorrect information.

Every time I did something, the change was reverted. To this day, not a single edit I did ever stayed on Wikipedia longer than a week. Eventually, tired of endless arguing with editors who just wholesale reverted entire sections of material rather than edit or augment what I put in there, I just gave up.

Particularly egregious were the endless arguments over notoriety of this or that. Responses to the editors demonstrating conformance to Wikipedia's notoriety guidelines were met with silence and further reverts. One in particular, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Sega, actually has a page now anyways -- but it's not mine. Fascinatingly, I think that two of the editors causing most of the problems didn't even know what the demoscene was! In a bizarre argument from one of the editors, I was called unqualified to write about the demoscene since I myself was a 'scener!

I think I'd still be contributing if the editors had...I don't know..."edited", instead of reverted. I would have happily participated in ensuring things like objectivity and article organization were well followed, but wholesale deleting information? Nah, I'm done with participating in Wikipedia as a contributor.

Which brings up an interesting point, would engineering methods other than the waterfall method have even worked for this? It certainly sounds like Babbage struggled with this.

I often find that when I'm playing an old game in an emulator that supports these filters I don't use them...even if they look stunning with the filters on, they games look "wrong" somehow (perhaps they don't fit my grainy memory of them so they don't ping the nostalgia button the same way). Inevitably I feel like I'm playing a vector art/flash remake.

I'm not an LDS by any possible stretch of the imagination, but I must say, SLS is actually a really nice town in a fantastically cool and wonderfully bizarre geographical setting. Flying into the city and over the salt marshes, is like flying into another planet. If you can get over the heebeejeebies of flying into LDS central it's really worth the trip. Kinda like visiting the Vatican in Rome in a certain sense.

I have to agree with you on this, nothing drives me more to distraction with modern web design than the tremendous amounts of wastes space on my screen. I do exactly what you do, zoom the page until the content fills the horizontal width of the screen. (Though often as not, I'm zooming in to the content to push sidebar adverts off the side of the screen like with this site http://www.geek.com/). I have a good solid 6-7" of wasted horizontal screen space ignoring the sidebar adverts, 3-4 if I add them.

All that being said, I do find that raw text that spans the screen to be harder to read...mostly because it's easier to get lost ending a line on the far right of my screen and returning to the far left (especially if the font it small, something that zooming the page up doesn't seem to have as much problem with).

I think a better middle ground are n-column layouts, like in newspapers, or most holy books. http://randysimons.nl/125,english/129,multi-column-text/

A terrible amount of the effort in modern enterprise software engineering is bridging the gap between business logic and code. Layers upon layers of diagrams and modeling techniques and pseudo-code systems are all purely intended to try and take a very high level and abstract business concept and bring logic and discipline to those concepts until they reach a level they can be instantiated in code.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Process_Execution_Lang... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArchiMate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOGAF#TOGAF_8_Certified_Tools etc. etc. etc.

All of the above (and more) are the wild shots in the dark to not only bring engineering discipline to business folks, and to supply a common language between equally intractable engineers and business people but also to prevent blame coming from both sides (which can get really ugly at times as engineers try and interpret wildly abstract and often contradictory business ideas into a working system, and business folks thinking that engineers don't understand basic business concepts).

That all being said, I don't think it's entirely working (as several very high profile, very expensive, Enterprise Software failures have demonstrated). It requires business people to learn a modicum of technical and logical skills to fill out the high level models, and it takes engineers out of their development time to drag it down through the rest of the levels of abstraction to get to actually getting down to working. Then they have to validate conformance to spec with entire trips up and down the abstraction stack.

sigh Of course this is probably the best way we know so far to build monstrous systems but it's clear we still have a long way to go.

For a second I thought that was graph of the company I work for...right now we're in the wiggles of false hope having just come out of a very rough crash of ineptitude under a previous administration.

> When I was growing up in the 70s, we had a food pyramid that was based on carbohydrates

Any wonder that America's obesity epidemic started around that time?

It'd feel more open if they actively designed the OS to make it hard to lock down, thus requiring rooting.

> The only way vertical farming becomes reasonable is with cheap energy, and high food costs

I'd argue it'd only become tenable with high land costs. The cheaper energy is, the less sense vertical farming becomes since it makes the transport costs from far away, cheap-land areas even lower. If real-estate in and out of a city are roughly the same (no cheap pasture land!), then the farm can be more or less any location, that includes in a city. But for that to happen, would probably imply some kind of Judge Dredd continent swallowing city first.

good luck with that....seriously there's always page 3 girls

Far too many physical metaphors, I thought we got over that in the early 90's with MS-Bob.

Designers, please, if you are thinking of using wood paneling or shelves in your design, stop, move on to the next idea.

Right, I like to think that there are milieus of English with which knowledge and conformance can be useful. Formal writing for example. But to say that the rules of formal writing should be extended to all domains is akin to saying that all food should be stir-fried. Just like there is no such thing as standard cooking, there is no such thing as standard English.

Interesting point, which brings up a pseudo-philosophical question, should we consider humans living in large cities a kind of super-organism in a similar manner?

Because there is no such thing as correct English.

This is far too forward looking to ever happen in the U.S.

As someone with a CS background who has worked with several very talented self-taught programmers in the past I can echo this. Even if they knew a particular language or environment better than I did, I could usually write faster or more efficient code simply because of my deeper knowledge of data structures.

One in particular comes to mind, I was working a temp job during my 3rd year at college with a very talented friend who was self-taught. He had written a rather brilliant dynamic reporting system for a very large e-commerce site in Perl, allowing the management to interactively drill down into recent sales and inventory activity. It worked fine for a few years until the volume of data became very large. Try as he might he couldn't get the software to be performant any longer and had to resort to a 10-11 hour batch crunch every night with the output dumped out to static HTML files for the mgmt to review. Finally one night, the process failed -- out of memory. Throwing more hardware at it only bought another few days.

A dive into his code (most of which was really quite well done) turned up the following: he was using Perl hashes everywhere to operate on the data because they made the code easy to read and convenient to write and maintain. I rewrote many of the particularly inefficient parts to use arrays over a few weeks and suddenly, the entire batch took 10 minutes to run! A few more tweaks and we turned it off of batch mode and back into full interactive mode. Mgmt never had to wait more than a minute or two to return back a report of a huge amount of data.

The key of course was that he simply didn't understand how much overhead the associative arrays created because he didn't understand the data-structures involved. He had simply relied on the magic of the language to do that work for him. A few days spent with http://blob.perl.org/tpc/1998/Perl_Language_and_Modules/Perl... and he never made that mistake again.

I found the Gap Cycle rather good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gap_Cycle

and really quite enjoyed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nights_Dawn_Trilogy

and found pretty much everything in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revelation_Space_universe to be as good as anything I've read by Heinlein, Clark et al.

Honestly, there's tons of good stuff out there, but it's just hard to separate it from the pulp. With the oldie goldies it's relatively easy because we have a few decades of people assessing those books.

spot on! I can usually muddle through Spanish and French signs when I travel, but I'm terrified of traveling to China or Japan where the signs are quite a bit more impenetrable.

What's next, universal translators that also make everybody's lips move correctly for the language we are hearing? Perhaps Star Trek got it correct?

Amazing...Android app next?

> engine-oil taste of the great imperial stouts

That's precisely the taste I'm looking for in a good stout...that or old burned steak and rye bread.

Yeah, I was thinking BPEL for a minute...

> And should this surprise anyone? Does anyone here think there's low price/quality correlation in beer?

Perhaps...there's some superb regular day drinkers that run under $2/bottle...and some of the more expensive specialty beers can cost upwards of $8/pint and taste like sewage.

(of course the really cheap beer is pretty universally bad)

I usually find the best wines run between $7-$14.

In fact my current favorite wine runs about $8-9. http://www.penfolds.com.au/brand_penfolds/wines/koonunga-hil...

And I've found this gem for under $12. http://wine90.blogspot.com/2007/12/zaccagnini-montepulciano-...

Once again reminding us that no matter how cool our phones are in the U.S., East Asia stays a step ahead. sigh

Perhaps I should clarify, one of the outstanding issues with the group environment in modern prisons is the highly unsupervised nature of it all. Prisoners form prison gangs, establish strict social rules, violence becomes the norm, gang rape is used as a control mechanism,...etc. A shocking number of first time prisoners end up deep in bizarre race segregated gangs, or if they aren't strong enough, used as sexual barter pieces for stronger prisoners. The list goes on and on.

Guards are there to keep them in the facility, and more or less from killing each other, but that's about it (and the guards are often as much the ones causing the problems as the prisoners).

Most people don't realize the prisons these days are largely like this: http://www.buzzfeed.com/sgtdopushups/cop-killer-updates-face...

So what I mean is that it's not clear, from a correctional standpoint, that the modern group environment is a safer or more sane environment than the original isolation concept. To my understanding, the main reason prisons have largely moved to a social environment had more to do with cost than perceived harm from extended isolation.

I won't dispute that extended solitary is also mentally damaging...but your idea of more solitary than today for the typical prisoner, and a few hours of contact, is pretty sound to me.

One of the problems is that there are actually relatively few big cities in the U.S. that also have the quality of being nice places to live. Most of them are huge (or formerly huge) manufacturing centers, populated by people looking for unskilled jobs. Cities are generally built as "nice places to live", they arise because cities are efficient nodes for economic exchanges to take place. Some urban areas have almost no housing at all! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tysons_Corner,_Virginia

Outside of parts of New York, SF, Seattle (and maybe 2 or 3 others), most urban centers are high crime dumps with the additional quality of being frighteningly expensive to live in and then completely surrounded by vast heavy industrial wastelands.

Don't get me wrong, I'd give my left leg to live in NYC at the standard of living I have in boring suburbia. But back of the envelope calculations show I'd have to make 3-7x what I make now.

At least the nice folks that built my suburb designed it with a walkable layout to a commercial town-center stocked with everything from a Gym and Movie theater to a dozen restaurants and groceries so I can pretend I live there.

Most people who write this kind of stuff really don't mean "people should live in cities"...what they really mean is "people should live in city (singular), and that city should be NYC or SF (or Seattle in some cases)".

The original penitentiaries were actually designed as all solitary -- the idea was that an inmate, isolated from the corruption of the world, would find their innate inner goodness and spend the time praying - hence the "penitent" part of "penitentiary.

This place http://www.easternstate.org/ is a fascinating place to visit -- it's the model for many many prisons around the world still in use today. The idea of putting prisoners in what amounts to group housing is actually a very new notion and not at all clear that it provides a better environment than solitary.

> Neither of these assumptions appear to be true, at least to me.

It's been my observation that if you ask most people who espouse a particular philosophy couched in "morality", that they claim that following their particular moral code will lead to well being. I've also found that the strong that belief is, the less likely that those followers have actually spent time thinking on the ramifications of their moral code towards that goal. They think they have thought about it a lot, but typically they've just spent brain cycles thinking about the code and how to follow it most closely -- not what following that code leads to.

I'm not disagreeing, just throwing in an observation -- most moral codes claim to lead to well being, but in reality many of them do not actually go there.

This phenomenon seems to create a particularly powerful barrier to rational thought that very few people seem to be able to overcome and can even seem to defeat some individuals.

I've seen friends, family and colleagues fail repeatedly to come to terms with this, they think it's because they haven't applied themselves completely to some arbitrary code so the only solution is to double down again and again.

After decades of doubling down this seems to drive people closer and closer to a kind of insanity...I've seen a few withdraw into fantasy worlds constructed of such powerful cognitive dissonance (arising from the inherent contradictions of their moral code and the observed outcome) that having a normal conversation about simple things, like the weather, become impossible -- they can barely complete a sentence without contradicting themselves or becoming lost and sidetracked about how such and such random topic has some particularly deep meaning in their hyper acute moralist world.