653 karma · joined October 23, 2008
In all seriousness, the possibility of harmful alien contact is quite real and should be taken into consideration by the scientific community. That said, I think it's much more important (and hopefully covered in the new documentary series) to concern ourselves with our behavior as we venture out into the Universe and seek new territory and resources. I mean knowledge.
There was a case in Minneapolis some years back where a police van accelerated, from a stop, and killed at least one person during some festival of lights thing. What they found, eventually, was that the police department wiring modifications from the stock van (to get the cherries and strobes working correctly) could cause the police vans to accelerate on their own. It wasn't a manufacturer issue, but it was still scary stuff.
Bottom line, this isn't an engineering issue or some big coverup in need of Senate hearings. This is a whole group of interests wanting to put Toyota on the stand for something that, while quite random and frightening, is very mundane and embarrassing. What you're witnessing is a modern day witch hunt where Toyota is the accused and has no way of clearing its name or even addressing the possible problems with integrity. The way we (US media and federal government) are treating Toyota is shameful.
Hacker News readers, especially, should be very worried that the mechanical and computer engineers of Toyota are being told that they must only make systems with 0% chance of failure, even if the driver could be at fault. Entrepreneurs should be scared to death of the kind of liability that the US Senate is laying at the feet of Toyota's management. Zero risk is acceptable, that is the message.
"At present, most of our audiovisual info is stored in sophisticated compression formats. If, or when, the format becomes obsolete, you’ve got a painful conversion project on your hands. But in the CS future, Candès believes, we’ll record just 20 percent of the pixels in certain images, like expensive-to-capture infrared shots of astronomical phenomena. Because we’re recording so much less data to begin with, there will be no need to compress. And instead of steadily improving compression algorithms, we’ll have steadily improving decompression algorithms that reconstruct the original image more and more faithfully from the stored data."
Someone, Candès or the author, doesn't seem to understand what they're talking about.
IT needs are changing. There won't be enough job candidates with $DESIRABLE_ATTRIBUTES, obviously, because $DESIRABLE_ATTRIBUTES aren't taught (formally), are acquired through experience, are in demand right now, and weren't a few years ago.
Dwight Gibbs of Input says: "This isn't just about crimping cable, installing OSes and racking and stacking IP anymore." Right, Mr Gibbs, but a few years ago, that's exactly what it was about. I remember applying for jobs a few years back with (basically) those exact requirements.
It wasn't always this way, unfortunately. I've been involved with trying to glean some formulaic/methodological insights from spreadsheets and code and it's not always possible to reverse engineer the essential methodology or be sure that mistakes were avoided.
Proper scientific research practices are similar to proper data backup practices: the documentation (backup files) are important, but they don't matter if you can't have successful reproducibility (restoration).
The author's boldest thesis is that there are no common "destructive" characteristics outside of aggregate behavior. Only by looking at the net effect of an individual in question can you truly determine if their behavior is, to some degree, destructive. Or helpless. Or "bandit." Or generous. By the author's reasoning, "destructive" people cannot help but hurt others and to some extent themselves, regardless of all other factors except influence.
Mr. Cipolla's definition is firm, but adaptable enough to allow for all sorts of situations. What other social model is going to tell you up front that some Nobel laureates behave in destructive ways? That's not supposed to be allowed by the common metrics and understandings of the characteristic/success correlation model.
How many articles have you run across is the last, oh I don't know... year or so that can't seem to penetrate the "mystery" of why the best, brightest, most highly paid group of individuals in the world can't manage the very financial system that keeps them in business and the rest of us employed. Or why members of congress, with assured lives, cannot agree to measures which would enhance the well-being of themselves and their constituents. Or why unhappy, desperate people actively protest measures that would ease their suffering.
In each case you can point to specific reasons for these types of situations (incentives, irrationality, ignorance), but you haven't really said why these types of situations exist and continue to exist despite all of our other advancements. The author simply says that a group of people will experience decline as the balance of power shifts to the "destructive" members of that group, whoever they may be. The effects of this (in the author's mind) are clearly seen throughout history as a regular feature of humans, much as the male/female birth ratio has been unwavering.
What's fascinating about this essay is that it has to be the purest form of "don't judge a book by its cover" that I've ever read. It also agrees quite nicely (unless I'm mistaken) with the spirit of the Nash Equilibrium, which says that the best thing that you can do is take into account the other players' (members of society) potential actions and plan for the best outcome for yourself and all other players. According to Mr. Cipolla's model, the best thing you can do is elevate the generous (those who will help all) and mitigate the destructive (those who will hurt all), not just for yourself or in spite of them but for all of us.
I'm having a hard time disagreeing with that sentiment.
So, in essence, your friend has a malfunctioning phone.
How many iPhone 3GS devices are out there now? Over a million? Given that some portion of the stock will be defective, let's say one in every few thousand, you're going to have hundreds or thousands of devices with major problems.
From the symptoms described above and in the article, it sounds like some combination of software and hardware is causing these phones to burn through battery power at an alarming rate. Ok, fine. So tell your friend to take it to a Genius Bar and let us know if Apple states that this overheating is expected behavior.
Given all that Apple is stuffing into these devices, I'm surprised they work so well for the vast majority of users.
- written from an iPhone 3GS
"We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces."
- Carl Sagan, interview with Anne Kalosh, 1995No, the author wants to "integrate a (not yet developed) visual programming language." On the JVM. What will this accomplish? Well, it would allow users to "create fairly sophisticated apps by dragging, dropping and plugging things together." But fear not, programmers: "Programmers wishing to make more sophisticated apps would have at least one real programming language with a DSL or DSL-like library for interacting with the system."
Wonderful, another do-everything GUI app development environment where users can do more and programmers can do even more than that. Ugh.
"Does anyone who understands the needs of the corporate market have some input?"
Sure, make sure you check out the billions that have been spent on this very problem:
http://www.hanford.gov/rl/?page=671&parent=666
The worst that will happen is that an emergency/safety system will be tripped accidentally. The workaround is to mask the EPROM windows (with tape, I assume) after programming them.
This team (and many other teams) of unfortunate researchers got caught up in a belief system that skewed their results. Ironically, the more skeptical one is of a particular belief, the deeper in love one will fall with it when it appears to be correct.
Wikipedia also briefly covers the debunking of the Belfast homeopathy results: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory#Subsequent_researc...
Bonuses, retirement plans, health benefits, and all other incentives are still set at management's discretion, but are funded with the other 70% of the profit. It's really that simple.
Realize too, that simple profit sharing coexists with the normal grading of wages based on whatever position/seniority algorithm the organization uses. So you're guaranteed, as a developer or designer or whatever, to make your normal wage and be considered for increases. But every pay period would have that profit sharing bonus that shows you how the business is doing and exactly how much your organization values your contribution.
Stock-based incentives are supposed to fulfill this role, but they're often given out after some major event and then only to the most visible members of the contribution. Arbitrarily, in other words. Holiday bonuses are nice, too, but they are supposed to be confidential in most organizations (creating uncomfortable speculation and comparisons) and can lead to unmet expectations.
For an IT shop, each worker's salary/wage sets their base pay and is confidential, while a biweekly or monthly "bonus" check could be the profit sharing reward. In that environment, everyone knows when business is going well and everyone knows when it isn't. Profit sharing can (and should) be open for discussion among all employees.
So, take Joel's example: Noah helps make an additional $1 million in a year for Fog Creek. What's that going to translate into for each employee's profit sharing check? I'll assume that Joel's generous, and that the ads are wonderfully profitable, so let's say an additional $400/mo/employee (average) while the ads are active. Holy shit, Noah, thanks! So, Noah get's more. Noah gets recognitions. Noah's coworkers get more. The company makes more. Hell, even Joel gets to make more. It's win/win/win/win.
And don't get me started on company stock. Stock is fine in many cases, but that's not what successful organizations make. They make money! Share it with the employees. They deserve it. 'Cause here's the thing: If your take-home wage isn't tied to your performance or the performance of the company as a whole, what exactly is everyone's motivation? Oh, sure, some people are going to do a great job no matter what, but that's not what really makes a company great, now is it?