And yet neither of those beliefs were bullshit, but simply the best explanation given the available data.
And not surprisingly, when someone was able to show them incorrect, the *whole world* changed their beliefs.
Provided that you're selling something else. The reason we open source things is to give something back to the community; it helps us get our jobs done. But we don't give away our work.
Incidentally, I'm split on the issue. I happen to know a chip vendor that lost at least one contract because their development tools were proprietary; we instead developed with their competitor's FPGA because the tools provided were free.
But it sounds like your expertise is not in the HW, but the SW. Consider that your competition sounds like they're expertise is not in SW, but HW. With their better expertise in HW, they could probably use your algorithms to offer a better overall solution than you can, effectively shutting you out of the market.
If what you say is true, this is truly bad news for cryptography. Algorithms like AES owe their security largely to the fact that brute-forcing all of the keys is generally impractical; with a 256 qubit machine, AES 256 would be cracked in *a single clock cycle*.
If they can do this with two qubits, why not 4? Why not 8, or 128, or 512?
In the same way the WWII cipher designers probably had a hard time imagining that in 40 years there would exist a machine which could crack their ciphers in real time, the designers of block ciphers like DES and AES probably had a difficult time imagining that their ciphers would be insecure in mere decades. DES took 30 years before brute force became practical; will AES survive even 20?
It was just 20 years from the invention of the transistor to the first 32 bit computer. How long will it be before a machine with more computing power than in all of recorded history can be built on something the size of a postage stamp, for a few dollars?
To the extent that not only should the user not need to know the underlying system, but I should not have to learn a new UI every five years because UI designers are too ignorant (yes, ignorant) or arrogant to learn the history of computing and the UIs that worked before them.
What exactly, did the ribbon provide? It made experienced users waste millions of hours relearning their tools so the could be less productive than before.
Sure, his company could have called - if they had someone who knew how to speak BRITISH.
Language barriers allow these sorts of things to go unnoticed for years.
What this merely means is that if/when we do encounter extra-terrestrial life, it will probably be very different from us.
Alien civilizations have probably dismissed Earth as unlikely to contain life because of its magnetism, it's solid surface, and the presence of a solvent (H2O) almost everywhere on the planet.
And who is wrong? You - or all of humanity, throughout all of human history? The belief in God and tendency to organize this belief in a formal way is something which has been with humanity for all of recorded history, and even among peoples isolated from each other.
You don't really expect us to believe that some armchair philosopher somewhere on the internet has solved a problem which has confounded philosophers for centuries, do you? And if you possessed such wit to see what others have not, why is it that you cannot explain it in a manner that anyone reading can understand? If organized religion really was complete bullshit, as you posit, why hasn't humanity abandoned it by now?
The problem is twofold: 1.) Someone who thinks we need more programming languages doesn't understand the problem, but it's generally a moot point because 2.) Someone implementing the latest fad in languages inevitably ends up re-inventing the wheel, albeit poorly.
The end result is that while 10% of the features of the new language may be novel and interesting, only about 1% of the features will be useful in the practical sense. And 90% of the time spent in language development will be put into recreating existing functionality in the new language. Look at Java, for example. Just when UI design was starting to make sense, Java reimplemented the entire GUI in Java, and threw away a large portion of what had been learned on how to do UIs well.
And the result? Nobody used the Java UI. Remember Swing? Yeah, I actually wrote GUI apps with it, but Java went the route of the server - hidden from the user, and never ever came close to challenging C++ for work on Desktop apps. Oh, sure, maybe Swing (or whatever they're calling it these days) has improved, but Java missed an entire generation of programmers in the interim.
The problem today is that by the time your new paradigm catches on, and you've developed all of the attending libraries and functionality to make it competitive with existing languages, the paradigm is already obsolete.
There really has been very little progress on languages since C++. There's very little that's new, functionally speaking. The new languages of today aren't revolutionizing the software paradigm - more often than not, they're just reimplementations of existing functionality and language paradigms with a new set of strange and irritating behavior. Python's use of whitespace to perform block delimiting is an interesting step backwards - it was first done in COBOL - and it was just as much a defect then as it is today. When I had to learn COBOL in school, I thought it a waste of time until Python came out, and then I recognized the value: it had taught me the danger of making stupid decisions in language design.
We've come to the point where unless you're using a really old language - older than C - the language is pretty much irrelevant. Granted, some languages are better than others at solving certain problems, but I've yet to find a new language (after Java, that is) that brought something new and important to the realm of computer science. Even Java was a draw - you lost operator overloading and multiple inheritance - in favor of a simpler, more practical paradigm (sound like C, anyone?!). And C# was definitely a step backward; you got none of the advantages of a vm with all of the disadvantages. And Python has just decided to break backward compatibility on a whim, leaving anyone with a substantial codebase out in the cold.
I can understand no one taking his ideas seriously because he didn't have anything interesting to say. But the sort of people who judge what people say by the way they are dressed probably wouldn't be capable of understanding anything insightful he might otherwise have said.
Have you considered that he dumbed things down because - upon seeing everyone dressed like an MBA - that he assumed most of you couldn't understand the deeper thoughts he would have otherwise said?
My experience is that people dressed casually in formal situations usually do so because they have nothing to lose by doing so. Sometimes they're already wealthy, own the business, etc... Or perhaps (like RMS) they're already a recognized authority in their field. Professors often fall into this category - maintaining their train of thought in the morning is more important than the particulars of how they're dressed.
I'll tell you why governments don't want to legalize drugs...
The things you mentioned may be true. But that's not why the citizens of the US don't want drugs legalized. Most of us who have seen the consequences of drug addiction want no part in bring about the suffering and misery an addict undergoes - first, in response to his addiction to drugs, and secondly, in the difficult and never-ending process of breaking the addiction and trying to stay clean.
I know people who have died from drug overdoses. I also know that it would not have happened had they never been exposed to those drugs in the first place. A mother of two doesn't just decide - at age 40 - to take up a drug habit. She probably thought she could handle it. Her son sold her the stuff. Her pursuit of a good time killed her.
Drugs are illegal not because the government is afraid of you - that, quite frankly, is ridiculous. Drugs are illegal because most people understand the harm they cause to individuals and society alike. Yes, there may be a few people who really can handle drugs without getting addicted, but they are the exception, rather than the rule. It just wouldn't make sense to keep something legal which causes problems not only for the overwhelming majority of users, but also for society as well.
It was obvious that speaking up would have been taken as challenging their "combination dominance game and mutual admiration society". It was just as obvious that they were totally oblivious to the effect they were having.
I had a similar experience with women where I was one of two guys on the team. I could prove - in a formal, mathematical, way - that the proposed design would not work, and when I merely asked if they had considered using a different design, I was called on the carpet by my manager.
A year or so later, one of the directors interviewed me regarding the project, and asked what I thought of the project. I told him. It turned out that only after trying the project in a production environment that they discovered response times of several minutes! Not long afterward, the project was cancelled.
Sometimes people are misogynists. But my experience has been that for every misogynist in the workplace, there are a dozen people who are just plain jerks, or who make technical decisions for personal or political reasons. Your mistake, I believe, is that you think people come to work to do the best job they can. At some companies, they do. But it is very common in corporate america for people to come to work to further their careers, without regard for the interest of the customers, their coworkers, or the shareholders.
Um, you mean how everything requires
It's not monolithic in the microkernel way, but the rat's nest of dependencies make it very difficult for the average person to run the typical system without either running everything, or nothing at all. If you're going to ask the user to delete DLLs and edit the registry, they may as well be running Linux.
I suppose I've been fortunate, though - I haven't had to deal with any version of Windows after XP. The fact that most businesses haven't upgraded in 8 years is telling. Maybe they just got tired of Microsoft's empty promises.
While I would agree that Microsoft has made progress with Windows, it remains the only widely-used operating system for which failure to run an anti-virus program exposes the user's computer to a substantial risk of being infected with malware.
There are still fundamental flaws in its design and implementation which make it less secure than its alternatives. With Linux, it's relatively trivial for me to eliminate entire vectors for attack - i.e. I could care less about apache vulnerabilities because I simply don't run it. The same isn't true for Windows - in the first place, it's a monolithic, integrated OS which requires much more code for basic functionality - and in the second, even if the user could remove unused software components, the average Windows user wouldn't understand how or why they might want to.
Today, I'm looking up modelines for my A90 monitor, because I want to run at greater than 1024x768. In Windows, I wouldn't even have to know what a modeline is. However, I'd be stuck with a system that ran slowly because of the inevitable AV software I'd have to run. While I would appreciate it if Debian just got it right with respect to monitor detection, I'd rather endure the drudgery of X configuration once, than deal with a slow and unreliable computer every day. Of course, you may prefer the opposite.
Doesn't anyone remember that when Java first came out that it was marketed as a secure alternative to C and C++? Proponents claimed that Java got the security model right, and that we could all just get down to solving the problems at hand, rather than having to worry about writing insecure code.
I guess it just goes to show that you can write security vulnerabilities in any language.
The security problem isn't in the language, but the programmer. Any programming language requires diligence wrt to security, and Java is no different. Those who couldn't write secure code in C won't be writing secure code in Java, either.
Now this is not to say that Java is inherently insecure, but that security is not so much an attribute of the language, but the programmer. One of the most secure operating systems on the planet is written in C, not Java.
There are many reasons to use Java, but as this book clearly demonstrates, security is not one of them. The notion that a language automatically provides security is flawed, at best. The best a language can do is provide a mental model which encourages secure coding. The rest is on the programmer.
You could have a descriptive moderation system rather than a judgemental one. What if I want to see the posts with strong emotion? What if I want to read the posts expressing an unpopular view?
The current moderation system rewards popular opinions well expressed. Some debate happens as a result of that. However, I could often care less about the popular view, because I've heard it already. I'd rather hear views that haven't been expressed before, are unpopular, or point out flaws in the popular viewpoint. How do I filter for that when
One way to make your old car run better is to look up the price of a new model.
