People like to go around chanting "We're #1!"

Soon the winner-takes-all market dynamics turns #1 into an 800lb gorilla, which does what gorillas do, until their once-proud fan base begins to feel the grip tighten to eye-popping intensity, whereupon the parade degenerates into a comic spectacle from the Ministry of Silly Walks.

The parade veterans dress in uncool loose shorts forever after, and express a lot less enthusiasm about chanting "We're #1!" but every generation has to learn for itself, so the cycle repeats.

I've come to realize that loyalty is a tricky business. If one puts any stock in the maxim that absolute power corrupts absolutely, it's hard not to view loyalty as sowing the seeds of destruction. I'm pretty happy in most markets if I can align myself with a viable #2, and almost ecstatic if I can align myself with a viable #3 (with any hope of midterm survival). In the early days of ATI/Nvidia I tended to buy Matrox. Matrox had fewer frames, but sharper pixels. Of course, that couldn't last.

I used to support AMD for the same reason. But now we have AMD Opteron 3200 Series [slashcode mdash fuckup] Where did they go?. You can't even read an AMD press release with any confidence the product exists. There are limits to rooting for the underdog. I continue to prefer OpenCL even through CUDA probably has an edge in stability. Whatever happens to AMD, I hope OpenCL doesn't end up owned by Oracle.

Chrome is now better than FF for many tasks. But I continue to use FF because the day FF dies off, Chrome will immediately begin to suck donkey balls where it suits Google. Google+ will be bundled into the browser experience in much the same way the IE was bundled into Windows. No, your honour, we can't remove Google+. It's a design pillar.

Samsung so far seems to have relative immunity to whatever got into the Sony water supply. Phones will remain a contested space for a while yet. The Koreans as a culture seem less attracted to DRM and more attracted to price fixing.

We'd all be a lot better off with less bandwagon effect. When I imagine the movie made about Jobs in the style of Gandhi, my version would probably begin with the line "As far back as I can remember, I've always wanted to be the band leader."

Slashcode has also completely fucked Unicode handling. We're a geek culture in deep violation of a core geek principle:

Postel's law

Be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept.

If you paste text into the Slashdot edit box containing a Unicode rendered apostrophe mark (among others), you get broken European ASCII charcters and no apostrophe. That does not meet the principle of being liberal in what you accept.

All they need to do is add a tick box "normalize Unicode" whereby any Unicode code point which maps directly onto an ASCII equivalent character is so replaced. If you intended to write "someoneÃs" so be it, don't click the tick box.

This is a persistent insult to a core cultural value. To paraphrase Primo Levi concerning the appropriate use of profanity: If not now, when?

Innocent? Who fucking cares. Fix it.

I guess I lied in my last post. This time I wrote the subject line first.

One of the worst forms of cognitive prejudice is the premature closing of the mind to the possibility that's there is more than one way to get from point A to point B. For example, a top-down thinker might routinely fill in the subject line before composing. So too would an ideological hack, as this would be so easy to do. A bottom-up thinker might wish to back-fill something evocative of where the screed ultimately comes to rest.

I pressed "preview" to get a preview, and what I got instead (which I've seen before but wish to forget) was a chiding over my work flow and not what I reasonably requested (the preview).

I tend to lump these things in a mental category I've labeled "work flow blindness". Work flow blindness is extremely corrosive. I'm sure everyone has been in a relationship setting where one person goes "What are you doing that for?" observing an intermediate step of some completely reasonable improvisation.

If this becomes normative and there's no pushback, you end up with a compliance-oriented culture with no improvisation or common sense.

In my opinion, if profanity has a valid use case, this must be it. If you're challenged in a sharp tone of voice in the middle of a completely reasonable improvisation the correct response is to say "Fuck off" and continue with your business. It's the snarky person who ought to be feeling the stinging rebuke over the presumption that another person was too damn stupid to sensibly improvise.

I understand the motivation. Policing conformity is easy. Policing improvisation requires actual thought.

In my online personae, I've decided not to reign in the profanity bursting inside whenever I encounter a system which bakes in something that smells anything like this kind of use-case blindness. It's about establishing a base-line permission for people to bark back at the implied insult. I've decided that even those who stumble into this by innocent mistake deserve rebuke for providing a cover story to those who innately prefer to take this stance.

I'm also fairly harsh with innocent racism. Certain forms of innocence are inexcusible.

I signed up, then decided I was wasting my time when it got to the True/False verbal test. I've spent decades training myself not to think this way. In my version, the choices would contain active verbs.

+-+
|o|
+-+

(A) Circle Contains Square -or- (B) Square Contains Circle

When you're writing complex code, and you invert the logic once as you mentally transform it the desired symbolic transliteration, and then you transform it again (now it's a double negative), etc. you're soon relying on your brain to maintain an abstract parity calculation, which the human brain does not reliably do in my experience; and worse, the portion of your attention span devoted to walking on water is not available to cross-check your work on other levels.

I felt like a mental pygmy trying to hold the not-ness of the question in mind while assessing the geometrical relationship. It's the same for me reading text on a screen where anything blinks or flashes or crawls in any way at all. My comprehension plummets. I have smart friends who say they don't even notice the surrounding blink. I'm not the fastest reader, but I'm a deep reader, and I have supremely good long term retention of the core ideas. I have a bit of the intelligence that made Christopher Hitchens famous among his own set: the ability to seemingly recall anything he'd ever read at any point in any debate. For me its not so much eidetic, but a life long practice of weaving a dense idea graph. What for another person is three degrees of separation for me is usually only two, which spares me an extra activation of short term memory in the heat of the moment.

It would take me about fifteen minutes to activate a reliable mental video game circuit to delegate the "not" out of band as a reversal of my final decision. The task felt too repugnant to even begin.

I just wanted to click the box labeled "This is a bad way to think" then get on with the next question.

.
.
.

Note to Slashdot: fuck off with the

Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)

when I press preview to check that markup is properly supported. I wouldn't bitch so harshly if it had also displayed my preview, which it didn't. Save the snark for when I press submit on a subjectless comment.

Unlike some people content with endlessly rehashing their favorite party line, my subject line emerges in the process of engaging what I have to say.

Where have all the smart people gone? I've read several dozen posts and not one has pointed out that the problem of promising a scalar delivery date before determining subscription level can't possibly optimize over a metric of on-time delivery.

Kickstarter projects should be providing an estimated delivery date as a function of subscription level, where x1 (or less) is the number most projects now promote, but you also have numbers for x3, x10, x30, and x100. Out my ass, I'd guess you could fit a curve to existing Kickstarter data that would add six weeks to the deadline for each multiple of 3 in oversubscription level.

The Pebble project actually hit x100, so a realistic ship date in my mind might be 4x6=24 weeks later than the originally promised early fall delivery date.

The positive influence of having substantially greater funds to deploy (Pebble hired more people than originally planned) is wiped out and then some by the hugely increased risk level. If Pebble manufactures 85,000 watches, ships most of them out immediately, then discovers that 20% of the devices fail in under three months due to faulty moisture control or creeping solder whiskers, they might as well just blow the hole thing up.

Who is going to show up with $2,000,000 to bail them out of a huge PR fiasco?

One could say that the Pebble originally promised is late. Or one could say that the originally promised Pebble will never ship because it no longer exists. I tend to take the second view. The Pebble that ships 6 months downstream of the delivery date promoted during the funding cycle is not the same device. The manufacturing standards are higher, the QA standards are higher, additional features have been added (higher level BT standard, additional waterproofing), and the development environment should be further along (though I haven't seen any tangible evidence of this as yet).

The whole problem here begins with the phrase "The Pebble". "The Pebble" people thought they were buying/endorsing ceased to exist as the subscription level climbed toward the first $1,000,000 (the x10 subscription level). Pebble went deep into the regime of "a Pebble" from a spectrum of possible Pebble delivery scenarios.

The Pebble promoted was supposed to be manufactured in the S.F. region. The Pebble delivered will have been manufactured off shore in China. Until the subscription level was determined, we were truthfully talking about a Pebble modulo volume and risk. There's not even any point in totting up on-time delivery statistics without confronting the central fiction of the Kickstarter model.

When I signed up mid-snowball I viewed it as a quantum superposition of two entrepreneurial stories: A) a relatively low volume run with mid grade QA, immature tools, and a small target market; B) a high volume run with high volume QA standards, somewhat mature tools, and a moderately large target market for app developers.

The story was acceptable to me, either way. One watch, two stories. Kickstarter is not a single story engagement, even if the convention holds that only one of these stories is mentioned during project promotion.

A person has to be in some profound eigenstate of stupid, uniformed, myopic, deluded, distracted, self-serving, or litigious to fail to figure this out.

In my previous post, the value implied for Pi by that figure is actually 32/10. And there's a "would" missing from my final sentence. I was in thrall momentarily to reductive epilepsy.

Nope! It's the same processor. Sure, some come out different, but oftentimes there are loads of perfectly good processors that get underclocked for marketing reasons only.

When the day arrives that we achieve molecular assembly, even then for two devices identically assembled with atom for atom correspondence, there will likely be enough variation in molecular or crystaline conformation remaining to classify the two devices at the margin as "not quite the same".

Binning levels are determined by the weakest transistor out of billions, the one with a gate thickness three deviations below the mean, and a junction length a deviation above. There is probably some facility for defective block substitution at the level of on-chip SRAM (cache memory), and maybe you can laser out an entirely defective core or two.

As production ramps, Intel has a rough model of how the binning will play out, but this is a constantly moving target. Meanwhile, marketting is making promises to the channel on prices and volumes at the various tiers. There's no sane way to do this without sometimes shifting chips down a grade from the highest level of validation in order to meet your promises at all levels despite ripples experienced in actual production.

Intel is also concerned--for good reason--about dishonest remarking in the channel. There's huge profit in it, and it comes mainly at the expense of Intel's reputation. Multiplier locks help to discourage this kind of shady business practice. So yeah, a few chips do get locked into a speed grade less than the chip could feasibly achieve. This is all common sense from gizzard to gullet. What's your point, then?

If they were an engineering firm, they'd sell one product at one price and be done with it.

Where you even find so many stupid engineers? The College of Engineering for Engineers Who Think Statistics is One Big Cosmic Joke presided over by the Edwin J. Goodwin Chair of Defining Pi As Equal to 22/7?

Cofactor F430

Forget the organism. This is about the advent of a novel reaction pathway, that scales on the availability of nickel. Surprisingly, geology might have something to say on that score. Any vigorous reaction pathway that bubbles madly away at an oceanic scale is almost certain to colour the infrared signature of our thin gas membrane. Imagine if everyone on the planet had an F430.

There's a lot to like about this hypothesis. I've seen worse. To determine exactly how this pathway becomes prolific at global scale would take decades of further study. It's as yet a humble beginning, of the kind that sometimes pans out.

Would any other war hero have received the same treatment? The question here is double standards, surrounding the secrecy of Turing's work, the eternal nature of Turing's crime (does this remind anyone else of the war on drugs?), and the severity of his sentence.

Take Brian Carbury for example, an "ace in a day" New Zealand fighter pilot.

After leaving the RAF, he lived in England until his death in July 1962. In 1949, he along with three others, in a trial at Princes Risborough Magistrates' Court, was found guilty of two offences relating to the illegal export of Bristol Beaufighters to Palestine. Each man was fined a total of £100. [slashcode sucks]

My emphasis. In modern parlance, that sounds like an ITAR transgression, for which the current maximum sentence is detainment without charge. Let's see here. Door #1: a £100 fine. Door #2: chemical castration. Cue the game show music for the tense decision making. Tick tock tick tock, what will he choose?

Because of the upper crust attitude toward secrecy, Turing was positioned as an ordinary sex offender in the mind of the public instead of a flawed hero--no let me fix that--an outcast hero whose only flaw was being born into a culture of soft vegetables and spittle-spewing homophobes.

His chemical castration makes one wonder what the proportionate punishment might be (far, far worse than chemical castration) for a white-collared repeat pedophile, or for the white haired goats or moral opprobrium who vainly sheltered this behaviour so as not to publicly besmirch their high moral ground.

It was a crime at the time. Yes, the whole social structure was a crime at the time, and then some.

While that would have been nice, it is very debatable if it is wise.

If they ever update The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization I'm sure they can cull a hundred pages of business-speak blather to make room for an additional chapter on the pernicious feedback loops of responsible disclosure.

Normally we allow markets to punish corporations for sloppy work. Causing grave identity harm to your customer base is the kind of sloppy work deserving of punishment. And then, you know, the innovation of the private sector swoops in, as it must under Hayekian divine law, to save the day.

But no, as usual we turn things upside down when the going gets tough: unpaid security researchers provide valuable QA in hushed conversations to deep-pocketed corporations, who may or may not choose to do anything about it.

Here's a suggestion: if a corporation has any unfixed security flaw they've known about for more than three months, they no longer qualify for responsible disclosure.

Customers when purchasing their toys can check the reputations of vendors in having their responsible disclosure pants down, aka those malingering issues not fixed because they value their bottom line more than their customer's peace of mind. In Hayekian theory, these are supposed to align by the divine grace of the invisible hand, but sometimes society weaves clever narratives to prevent this from happening.

The true Hayekian solution would be to allow security researchers to auction off the fruit of their labour to the highest bidder, black or white. This might be Samsung, should they care enough to protect their reputation by dipping into their bottom line.

Wanna revisit your recent rants?

I can't stand how every slashdot story submission has to end with a pink flamingo smoke grenade. I'm guessing that sober "just the facts, ma'am" submissions still exist, but rarely make it through the selection hoop of our post-counting overlords.

I have several online pseudonyms which I make an effort to keep separate. I rarely post the same idea under more than one identity. If I post it here, it doesn't go there. I prefer to keep things separate so far as I can. I also have some background in computational linguistics. I've known for fifteen years that there is absolutely no way to win this battle long term. Only the most insipid comments will escape long-term annealing. If the word "gay" is the all season tire on your social media K-car, then your identity is safely concealed within the deep-wank weeds.

If every post you write contains colourful language or idiom such as "all-season tire of deep-wank camouflage" you're toast and you know it, clap your hands. Merely getting my possessives and plurals and possessive plurals right more often than not narrows the net substantially. I might pedantically write Harry S Truman without putting a dot after the S (Snopes: "Although the 'S' was not technically an abbreviation and therefore did not need to be followed by a period, Truman's full name was generally rendered as 'Harry S. Truman' during his lifetime ..."). I make use of colons, semicolons (these come and go), mdash appositives, and parenthetical side-notes--at least one of these in almost every paragraph I write. I post way more links than the average person. My thoughts meander. There is playful use of language with double readings. I subvert cliche to achieve double readings that enable me to circle away from my target, then loop back from an unexpected angle. My unit of thought is the paragraph more so than the sentence.

Even with all those signatures, originality in word selection is my neon tattoo. The corpus analysis algorithms likely don't do much (yet) with originality. Hard to characterize. For a while my anonymity might pass through the gun-metal algorithms unmelded by virtue of my writing being too bright and distinctive and easy to trace. But not for long. Even the fractal filigrees of originality will be coded eventually. (Pay no attention to the alliteration: an accident, not a stylistic signature.)

Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

This is about respect. We all live a double life, pretty much all the time. We speak differently in front of our mothers (most of us) than with the lady-killing rough necks at the peanut bar or power tie horn-dogs at the chichi sushi bar.

I value anonymity because I don't wish to own everything I say on a literal level, stripped of context, devoid of my original conceit or persona.

I happen to regard linearity as a social construct. Humans are not inherently linear in cognition or constitution. We learn how to cultivate linear facades in our areas of competence (but not necessarily around the edges: this is why a competent accountant consults his astrologer Madam Threenipple). If you like the primary facade you have, and it suits all purposes, then I suppose you'll see the charm in proclaiming it from the RealName rafters.

If you're a Baptist homosexual (I've known a few), you might wish to string your public identity by separate ropes.

Or maybe you've just got things to work out. You're figuring things out on the fly and trying them on for size and you don't wish to fall prey to the Joseph McCarthy clean-nose auto-da-fe "have you ever". Implication: Anything you've ever said will be permanently recorded and will classify you irretrievably. This despite 0/1 statistics never passing T-scores. If the same person also has an NRA membership and has been a career employee of the Hoover Institute for two decades? Still a communist. Ten times more dangerous.

The kind of person most willing to spread their wings has the most to lose in the sphincter-wattled sport of cherry-picking thought crime. For this reason I will continue to compartmentalize my personae long after the velvet drapes are hoisted by the Peeping Tom ad-bots of the TSA. Putting my own name on everything I write would almost amount to granting permission to these parties to engage in assimilation rape.

It's getting harder and harder to find obtain premium power supplies rated under 400W. Sure Seasonic makes some, but my preferred vendors don't carry these models. On my last iteration I got pushed up to the 550W bracket on a file server I know won't use more than 300W packed with disk drives.

BEWARE that many high-efficiency supplies are extremely unreliable running off a cheap, conventional UPS.

Astronomer steps out of TARDIS under a bright moon.

Astronomer: Isaac, guess what? First: We've discovered time travel. Second: Our telescopes can now see all the way back to 300 million years since the, uh, beginning of, uh, all that exists. Aren't you impressed?

Isaac: What a stupendous lie and intrigue to greet this fine, rotund moon! Let me process that on its face. First: Light has a velocity finite after all, and either this velocity is slower than I surmised or the creation is larger than I dared conjecture. Second: Either the haste of light exceeds the velocity of leaving from objects so large as the sun might be, or light is impervious to restitution gravitational. Third: God fudged the creation story by seven multiples of both hands to conform with Aramaic notations of quantity. Fourth: This dorky astronomer thing is not just me, but a blight eternal.

Astronomer: Not bad, Isaac. Four out of four, from a suitable reference frame. You're the man.

Isaac: Indeed I am. You suggest light looks different depending on the observer? Only light confuses me so.

Astronomer: Close. Light looks the same. Time and space, they change instead.

Isaac: Oh, don't think I'm so foolish as to try to write down equations such as that. How malicious to taunt me with a puzzle that might [pauses for a moment] perhaps even have a viable geometry. [shakes head violently] Madness! It's my formula for the transmutation of gold you're after, isn't it? You've come back in time to distract me from my rightful legacy! Good day to you, sir.

Astronomer: Gravity makes gold, Isaac. You're thinking too small.

Isaac: If gravity made gold, the stars would capture and keep it.

Astronomer: Gold destroys stars, Isaac.

Isaac: Destroys stars, but not planets? A likely story.

Astronomer: A planet is just a star too small to either ignite or collapse.

Isaac: One nonsense after another. Gravitational collapse is a singularity forbidden. Where does this end?

Astronomer: Shucks, I hate to push you in this direction, but in truth your glassware will answer you at the end of a long road. By this you will know: table salt dissolved in water dissociates into two constituent elements. One of these come from a group of elements with similar properties we in the future term "halides". Halides reacted with argentium create a family of substances some of which exhibit physical change upon capture of light, including forms of light undetected by any eye in the animal world. A modest flux of this invisible light is released in the natural transmutation process that begets lead--which perhaps you know as plumbum. Once you have the seeing emulsion that never blinks, point your prism at the stars, Isaac, and be prepared for some rude surprises.

Isaac: Natural transmutation into plumbum? This is a joke most foul. Pray tell, what regulates this alchemical sacrilege attested as you claim from the unseen by this elixir of salts and metals?

Astronomer: God plays dice, Isaac, with an exceptionally steady hand ... and the patience of a saint.

Isaac: Enough! Enough of your heathen smirks and portly numbers! Antiquity as a blink of the eye in God's creation. What rubbish! Be off with you!

Astronomer: Farewell, then, my good man. May you neither underestimate nor inhale your aqua fortis, cleaver of matter.

Isaac: At last, a sensible word now that the joke has ended.

Astronomer: So long, Isaac, time waits for no man. [Pffft.]

Isaac: [Looks up at sky.] Stars, I see you, with my physical orbs, and from these orbs I shed tears of brine. The smug fellow weaves a deft braid of fact and fancy under a charmed moon. Has God indeed frozen time and bent space to favour your ethereal flux? And yet I can not say it could not be so. Why these folios unforeseen within the book of nature unknown to scripture or by revelation? Why send your faithful and humble servant this man of riddles to mock your immensity with numbers ungodly? Perhaps it is so that the human magnitude is but a puny magnitude against a vastness so arranged that in the grasping our bound recedes.

If you don't, you shouldn't hire them to work on an application that interfaces directly with your database.

No one ever gets hired for any reason other than competence.

I would think that the resurgent interest in functional programming would ameliorate this to some extent but most of the JS I've worked on is crap and I would strongly recommend against using it unless you have a clear picture of why you would want to do so.

I'm taking an online course on MongoDB. This caused me to look into JavaScript and Node after a long hiatus concerning the web application stack.

We're deep into the territory of people confusing a tool with the culture of its use. JavaScript appears to be a fairly decent language of Scheme derrivation, minus one horrible blunder on scoping rules (to be addressed, perhaps in the worst possible way, in the next language standard). I'm given to understand that many of the horrendous web applications out there involve heaps of disorganized JavaScript maintaining application state via DOM edits. What could possibly go wrong? Is the language at fault, or the culture of its use? Hint: one of these answers takes more than five seconds to justify, so you might find it time efficient to run with the first answer that comes into your head. No one ever got fired for spewing blame in the widest possible arc.

Node.js itself is a strange beast. There's something to be said for language plasticity, of not having to prematurely bind code to server or client. Adopting an entire world-view to make this possible is the domain of fools and zealots. Today's zealots are tomorrow's gurus. Gurus don't grow on trees, after all.

I write a fair amount of code in R, also from the Scheme family tree. Are there any people out there who think that JavaScript sucks, but R doesn't? Wow. I'd be interested to hear that argument. No wait, with an infinite number of monkeys, all languages suck, by the simple statistical principle that natural languages are denser in idioms of derision than admiration. It's almost as if our languages know something about us. Hey, no one ever got fired for spewing blame in the widest possible arc.

I've said this before and I guess it's my fate to keep repeating this observation. There's a litmus test across the language like/despise spectrum of attitude toward one's fellow humans. If you hate your fellow humans, you most favour languages that offer facilities of orthodoxy, control and prevention. On the other hand, if you believe that your project is so difficult that only by the miracle of collaboration and teamwork can the project be completed at all, then you tend to value languages with the fewest expressive impediments, whether the nail-gun interlock works or not.

I've read many times about small teams doing big things with C++ and remarking about the language's unbearable legacy of self-harm "we're professionals: we rarely have a problem with it". If you're an ambitious code monkey and the coder beside you working on the same project was fathered by a dangling pointer, you really hate C++. No power under the sun can prevent the dangling pointer from making you also look bad.

I would certainly use Node.js, but with great caution. It won't maim your appendages like C++, but it will paint you into a corner (a certain asynchronous world view) if you don't understand its long term limitations. This is why I ultimately rejected my online MongoDB course. It taught you enough to get yourself into trouble (deep trouble), but not enough to get yourself back out again.