clawrencewenham

Almost all of the software I've written is as useless outside of the company as air pockets taken out of a loaf of bread.

The big-rectangle diagram of what I do is fetch data from A, apply B(A), and send the result to Z. This is great when A is a proprietary API delivered over long-poll HTTP, B(A) converts it into a vocabulary common to just our products, and Z is Websockets to a mobile app. When we add a new customer who uses A2 all I do is write B2() and the rest stays the same.

Outside of the company, it's useless. There are thousands of products that do the same thing for different flavours of A, B and C. However, we can get our particular product to our target markets a year earlier than someone starting from scratch.

Compulsorily licensed to a competitor, they'd barely be able to install it because it's not packaged like a product. There's an old database that has evolved over more than a decade that's as crusty as an old fishing boat's keel. If a "good compulsory licensing scheme" would compensate the company for packaging it and writing manuals for it, then it's looking at millions of dollars just in the opportunity costs of taking the lead developers off other projects.

> Much of Boston is not the same as "a large portion of New England."

Alright, much of Boston is not "a large portion of New England" but to use your figures, even 600 thousand is still huge. Does it really disprove my point that this manhunt will have enormous economic consequences? Even if our economy can absorb it, we must address the fact that the cost was staggering in proportion to what it cost the bombers to conduct their attack.

> In any event, extraordinary events require an extraordinary response.

Bruce Schneier pointed out, once, that airport security was brittle because it couldn't contain an event to the gate: it had to shut down a whole terminal and often--such as with the LAX evacuations after 9/11, an entire airport. This event shut down the work of perhaps 600,000 for the price of some pressure cookers and black powder.

If it cost a few hundred dollars to shut down 600,000 hosts or terminals on the Internet, we would be looking at ways to improve security and protocols so that such an inexpensive attack could not force such enormous losses.

I think we should brainstorm ways to block this vulnerability. It should not be possible for two guys, 26 and 19 years old, to freeze a major city.

I don't know what 128 is, but I know of people who were taking Amtrak to Connecticut but had to get off at NYC and travel uptown to Grand Central Station to get on a commuter train. They weren't going to Boston. Amtrak service was halted north of NYC because of this manhunt.

I do know that much of Boston had no choice but to take a day off on Friday. I know the Bruins game was cancelled, and that Comic Con was "postponed" and likely cancelled because of the difficulty of re-booking the conference center anytime before next year.

Not even considering the salaries and overtime of the officers involved, it is not wrong to say that this manhunt may have cost hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of dollars in economic losses. For example, some of the speculation from The Washington Post this afternoon:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/19/t...

This is as if an entire city went into anaphylaxis.

The ending to The Blues Brothers seems prophetic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2quc-iQ96R0

To edit and elaborate: they shut down a large portion of New England, affecting millions of people. Amtrak service, for example, was suspended north of New York City at 12:30pm today. Private taxi service in the Boston Metro area shut down until 11am. Other public transit, such as the T, shut down for most of the day. People didn't go to work.

I know it sounds callous, considering how many died or were maimed, but we now have to consider that a couple of pressure cookers are on par with hurricanes, blizzards and power blackouts when it comes to anesthetizing the North East corridor. I think we should think about this.

Yes, they can be subdivided by up to eight decimal places.

That part is cool, but it's also "FaceTime with a head-mounted camera". They spent most of their time showing something that is better but not unique. I was under the impression that Glass is supposed to put a UI in your field of vision, yet the entire presentation focused on the camera.

All they really showed in the skydiving stunt was that they were wearing head-mounted cameras.

http://www.thinkinginanutshell.com/nootropics

But saying it's worth "10 IQ points" is a bit of a stretch. There's no drug that's like the one in _Limitless_. Piracetam and most other nootropics are either stimulants, like caffeine, or agents that protect against/repair damage.

I used to be the Editor In Chief of the OS/2 e-Zine! (http://www.os2ezine.com), although I began as just a contributor. The e-Zine was started by Trevor Smith, who slowly handed over more responsibilities until eventually retiring to do other things.

I have fond memories of that era, and of constantly working to keep your chin up as IBM's support grew more and more reluctant. Probably the most important lesson I walked away with was understanding how deep the roots of zealotry can go, how something as cosmically unimportant as an operating system can get woven into a person's identity until the two are indistinguishable.

Boss: "This new feature is similar to one that's already in another program, so you can just copy that code. You can do that in a couple of hours, right?"

Me (coining a metaphor): "The fuel distributor in a Pratt & Whitney Turbojet engine will not work in a Norelco Electric Shaver, even though both can be used to cut grass."

When you combine gross underestimation of effort with the re-prioritization cycle, you get a monster that probably destroys millions of hours of productivity every year around the world. As soon as it becomes clear that the project won't get done as early as expected, the boss re-assigns you to a new priority. What would have taken 4 weeks to do 3 projects now takes 4 months and only results in the completion of one.

One of them mentions a shutdown from Amazon because they ship too many orders late. That rang lots of bells for me, because it sounds like IT at an independent fulfillment company, which will usually have its own web store and sell through many other companies besides Amazon.

432 projects are a lot to you? Imagine your boss is someone who reacts to every business challenge and opportunity by creating a new project. Imagine that every vendor you ship for has re-invented EDI, without ever having heard of EDI, and it was designed by one of:

A) Someone they found on Craigslist

B) A kid they hired who doesn't comprehend how you can write a program without wrapping it between <% and %> and loading it in a browser

C) A guy who thinks he's a programmer because he once wrote an Excel macro

Their mechanisms can be so bizarre that you can't really support them by configuring an existing fetch-n-post, or Extract-Transform-Load system. You just have to fire up Visual Studio and write Project 433, AKA "Overstock.com Is Tripping On Acid And Now Requires That We Convey Order Status Via Modulated Carrier Pigeons".

Some of the weirdest I've been asked to support:

* Moving the order file between different subdirectories on their FTP server to convey status (ie: we log into their FTP site and issue a MOVE command on the file to put it in the /shipped folder). Did I mention that each file contains multiple orders?

* We have to implement a SOAP API to _their_ spec and expose it on the public internet for them to call at-will to send orders and query for status.

* CSV wrapped in XML, but it's CSV with a sub-delimiter because one of the columns has to be treated like an array to convey the status of each line-item.

* Orders that come in an Excel file, but they never order or name the columns consistently from file-to-file.

And that's just for fulfillment services.

The post office themselves claim it's a congressional mandate to pre-pay 75-years worth of employee pensions and benefits in a 10-year window. They give Congress 5.5 billion dollars every year, and it's that which is driving the crisis.

You may be able to grasp the instantaneous distribution of forces in a building or charges in a circuit without needing to know the order that they deploy. While a computer itself is an example of a circuit where the order of execution matters, a radio is not.

Order-of-execution is not perceived the same way as cause-and-effect, even though they're both the same thing. It's a damn weird thing that I've seen people do. A little bit like how artists can comprehend how the position of an arm has an effect on the way bones, fat and muscle are distributed over the rest of the body, but can't understand why they got smacked with an overdraft fee when their average daily balance would have covered it easily.

I guess "ends justify the means" would be another article.

I think you'll still learn much from osmosis, anyway.

I guess I can't log-in and add a link to its new home, eh?

I wrote this years ago to get it out of my system, and after Infogami went to the big web host in the sky I ported it and my other nonsense to Google Sites. The slightly updated version of the same article is now here:

http://www.yacoset.com/Home/signs-that-you-re-a-bad-programm...

I spent about an afternoon on it.

I'd endorse a script that auto-submits "Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine" every 2 weeks. It'd have a deeper psychological impact than just putting "Please search before posting" on the submissions page, and it's an article every newbie should read anyway.

I find it exciting that there are others who have also realized that programming skills are going to be as necessary to success today as reading and writing have been for the past few centuries.

I had the same epiphany last year and wrote about it along with what I thought it would lead to:

http://www.yacoset.com/Home/the-future-of-it

Yes, I'm boasting that "I thought of it first", but I have a feeling that maybe I haven't.

Because new necessary skills come along all the time. If you can't drive a car today, for example, you're severely disadvantaged. Or the ability to type more than 20 wpm, or coordinate your thumbs with what a character/cursor does on a screen, or comprehend cause-and-effect once you throw computers and the Internet into the mix.

In another couple of decades there'll be a new skill that everyone has to learn, or else resign to flipping burgers. I, for one, am looking forward to it.

Not the burger flipping part, tho.

Because as everyone else joins and upgrades, the difficulty of mining gets increased to match, and after a few months that machine is no longer efficient enough to pay for its electricity and cooling.

As his first post reveals, he started writing the blog a week after his libel suit was dismissed. It's never too late to correct what you believe are inaccuracies that hurt your reputation.

Everything he's posted since then has been fascinating technolore, worth reading.

Perhaps by spending the coin you put your backup copy of the wallet in a state where it disagrees with "the network". In which case he's making a very important point: backups are not enough, they have to be realtime synchronized backups.

The site anticipated you:

http://blogging.infogami.com/whats_it_good_for.html

The second monitor still requires me to spend a large percentage of my time manipulating rectangles.

Nor is there anything impractical about process migration. I suspend and resume Windows VMs all the time, and Windows wasn't designed for that. Think of what's possible when the programming language and OS API makes it easier to write programs that can re-orient themselves.

And even if process-migration doesn't become a feature, there is still the inherent advantage of manipulating "windows" in physical space. It's more intuitive, it's more convenient, and it's direct. When people didn't "get" the iPad and dismissed it as just a big iPod Touch, it's because they didn't grasp the benefit of manipulating the UI directly instead of through a mouse.

When you manipulate windows with a desktop manager, you're two steps abstracted: you use the mouse to manipulate the widget that manipulates the windows. THAT is what's impractical.

That's not really true. If I'm writing a book, I don't need anything more than a word processor on that device. If I'm browsing research material on another device, there's nothing breakthrough about the idea of transferring that material to the word processor wirelessly: highlight the material in the browser and "bump" it to the device with the word-processor on it.

Having each app on a separate device would actually make it worlds easier to perform real work, because I'm no longer Alt-Tabbing or Expose-ing back-n-forth between programs. I hate doing that because it forces me to stop thinking about my work in order to think about how to manipulate boxes of pixels into the configuration I want.

Right now I'm considering spending another $1K to get a 27" Cinema Display to go next to my $2k 27" iMac. But I'm wondering if I should have spent that $3k on a stack of wireless tablet computers of various sizes and leave some Bluetooth keyboards around the house instead.

Edit: Now that I'm thinking about it more, I believe this is the trend and the reason desktop innovation has stalled. In a decade we'll all have solid state hard drives and ten times more RAM, so every app can run in its own VM. You could suspend an app's runtime state to disk, transfer it to another device and resume where you left off. "Bump" your Final Cut session to your big-screen when you need to, then "Bump" it back to a tablet when you wanna continue editing on a park bench.

I don't know why we can't do this with web apps already. It transcends the whole idea of a desktop manager.

After using modern smartphones and tablet computers I'm starting to think that the last thing we need is more innovation in how to manage lots of little windows on a medium sized screen.

I don't want another window manager, even if it auto-tiles for me or has a really gosh-darn nifty way of hiding and revealing them. I want innovation in devices and apps that are designed to operate full-screen on all of them. It's as if I want a "tear off" function for windows that literally tears it right off the desktop monitor so I can put it in my pocket or shoulder-bag, or hang it on a wall, or prop it up next to a book. This is what the iPad and the iPhone have done to me.

Tabs, windows, task-bars, Expose, Spaces, ribbons and others are now making me feel like geeks are congratulating themselves on discovering a really nifty new way to organize their sock drawers and lunch-boxes.

The future of "the desktop" are cheap, wireless, mobile displays. Window managers should be replaced with pockets, wall hooks and stands.

They'd still eat paste on the Discovery for two reasons:

1) There might be a power or mechanical failure that prevents the ring section from turning, and you don't want to be stuck years from Earth with most of your food supply inedible in zero-G.

2) "Caviar is cheaper than Cornflakes in space." The paste food would have a much higher nutrition-to-weight ratio. A Hungry-Man dinner wouldn't be able to justify the fuel cost to put it into Earth orbit, let alone a mission to Jupiter.

Also, triggering the explosive bolts on the Pod probably should be easier than using a Zero-G toilet; you wouldn't care where the debris from the bolts end up.

Presumably Apple is obligated to support everything on everything, simply so it isn't seen as "demonstrating its might".

Apple has said no to technologies like Flash, USB3 and Blu-Ray for their own reasons and only for their own devices, which is part of how they make those products good.

If they begin supporting every feasible technology just for the sake of not being a bully, then their products will start to suck, they will lose their customers and the power they've been giving them, and then a new kingmaker will arise. The cycle will continue.

This is an argument for making technology independent of the products that embody them, which is not realistic.

http://www.airdisaster.com/download2/ual232.shtml

The above is an mp3 of the last 10 seconds on the cockpit voice recorder. Just before the noise of impact you can hear the ground proximity alarm go off with a vwoop-vwoop "pull up!" vwoop-vwoop "pull up!". This isn't noted on the transcript.