Log

www.SorryNorwayDenmark.com. Finally some people with sense.

We're next!

My prediction: When the shit hits the proverbial fan, the cabinet will get blamed because they support the U.S. in the war on terror/Iraq against the wishes of the dutch public.

I wonder how many people in New Orleans donated to the Tsunami relief fund back in December last year.

I wonder how much they donated.

I wonder how many people that thought the U.S. was spending too much taxpayer's dollars on the Tsunami relief fund are now victomized by Katrina.

I wonder if the same US citizens who complained about too much of their tax money (USD 950M) going to the Tsunami relief fund are now also complaining about too much of their tax money (USD 10B) going to the Katrina relief fund.

I wonder if people realise that Katrina will probably be claiming 'only' about 18.000 deaths (which is almost certainly a much too high estimate) whereas the 2004 tsunami claimed 350.000 confirmed deaths.

I wonder why I'm seeying a lot more sites linking to donation-sites than I did when the Tsunami hit.

I'm not trying to be hateful here or anything.. just wondering.

The King and the Toaster

Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, the king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?" he asked. One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?"

The engineer replied, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantifies its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype."

The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years."

"With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods and specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes."

"The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, Cook yourself. The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs."

"Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too."

"We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message Booting UNIX v. 8.3 appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook."

"Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. A Pentium-90 with 32MB of memory, a 1G hard disk, and a Super-VGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object-oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller!)."

The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after.

_{From: this comment at this story on slashdot}

I believe that:

• Data retention is an invasive tool that interferes with the private lives of everyone;
• Retaining personal data on everyone is an illegal practice in terms of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, as it is disproportionate;
• Security gained from retention may be illusory, as it is likely that traffic data that is associated to one individual may actually be linked to activity taken by another, or by a process that is unrelated to the activities of that user;
• The means through which this policy is being pursued is illegitimate, as some member states who have failed to pass this policy through their own Parliaments are now trying to push it through the EU instead in the name of harmonisation and international cooperation.

I call upon the European Commission and the European Parliament to examine the proposal for data retention very critically and uphold the protection of human rights, including privacy, in these difficult times.

www.DataRetentionIsNoSolution.com

From a slashdot article:

"According to BBC News, the second series of "The Mighty Boosh" will be available to stream from the 19th of July, A full week before starting its run on BBC 3.
And then a comment from one of the slashdot readers:

It's ironic that a socialist funded network can innovate faster than our great and mighty capitalist free market media can.

America used to innovate like this before MicroSoft and their gang came along… before the dotcom bust there was a huge sense of "let's throw money into the great evolutionary genesis pit and see which species wins". Now the winners have been declared by the decree of those with the big money, and new technologies are threatened with patent disputes or RIAA/MPAA lawsuits.

What the heck went wrong? How can we get our free market system working again?
Well, duh! It seems somewhat obvious, doesn't it? Perhaps it's because I live in the Netherlands and we have a lot more publicly funded things here than they do in the capitalistic U.S; perhaps it's because I've witnessed a great deal of government-owned companies and public services going private over the last years. But one thing is sure: the quality of just about anything in a government owned enterprise is always better than that of a private counterpart.

I am surprised this actually surprises some people. Companies on the capitalistic free market don't care about innovation; they don't care about service, quality, image, their employees or their customers.. unless it brings in more money. If the projected costs of innovation is higher than the projected profits, then forget it. If the projected costs of providing quality customer service doesn't weigh up against the projected profits they'll lose if they don't provide quality service, then forget it. All this and the negative impact it has on quality and innovation should hardly be a surprise to anyone.

The free market is about one thing and one thing only: Generating as much profits from offering as little as possible. Generating those profits and protecting them. Profits. Money. The BBC doesn't have to care about whether what it's doing will reach the largest demographic possible and will therefor make the biggest profits.

When the Dutch Railways (NS) went private, ticket prizes suddenly went through the roof and quality sunk to the bottom of the ocean. The Dutch Public Television Broadcasting produces some pretty quality shows and programs; the commercial stations only steal crap from U.S television and only broadcast proven-concept programs.

On a side-note: People often complain about everything publicly owned being so extremely bureaucratic. While this is in general not a good thing, it does allow for all the holes and gaps to be plugged. You know, the gaps you fall through with commercial companies when you need something that slighly deviates from their average customer's needs.

Anyway, while publicly owned companies may throw money down the drain every once and a while, they do innovate and they do provide quality services that will never be surpassed by the free market. And when, like me, you're not part of the largest, most profitable, demographic, you're out of luck when dealing with commercial companies.

A while ago, I wrote a little piece on two types of programmers. The practical programmer and the acadamic programmer. This article describes it better, eventhough it's much more focused on the shipping end-product.

Some excerpts:
One day I went to a brown bag lunch, and a lead architect proudly proclaimed that he had used every GoF Design Pattern in a project. What he failed to mention was that the software didn't live up to the customer's expectations. It didn't work.
There are two types of people in this industry. Talkers and Doers. ObjectSpace was a company of talkers. Adobe is a company of doers. Adobe took in $430 million in revenue last quarter. ObjectSpace is long bankrupt.

Some years ago I spent half a year doing an internship at a company named "IT's Logic". I wasn't particularly happy at this company due to the way they did business. In my (and not just mine) humble oppinion, this company had a very unethical way of doing business. The way they treated competition, employees and clients seemed quite devoid of any morals.

Therefor I must link to an article about IT's Logic at http://xo.inborn.net in the hope of boosting its google pagerank. The article is in Dutch, so some of you may not be able to read it, and I'm too lazy to translate it, but basically it comes down to the fact that they are bad news. If you have any gripes with IT's Logic, please take the time to link to the article on your website/weblog.

Update: I don't consider boosting the linked article's Pagerank unethical because of two reasons. One is that it appears that IT's Logic itself is using its customers webpages to boost their own Pagerank. The second is because I fully support the oppinions stated in the linked article and feel it deserves more attention.

I found some proof on Slashdot (of all places) that not all Americans are stupid. This guy/girl really gets it.

by Catbeller (118204) on Wednesday May 04, @08:55PM (#12437363)

"The terror threat is real"

Please, everyone, stop a moment and think about this .

Who is "terror", and have they been threatening us? Utterly unexamined assumption.

We got hit by a few dozen nutters a few years ago, and now we are under a "terror threat".

Firstly, a threat is a statement of intent — a SPECIFIC statement — that someone is coming to hurt or kill you.

Secondly, what the hell is "terror"? Bush has slapped the label on so many disparate factions and actions so as to make the term meaningless. Someone shoots at someone in the Phillipines? Terror. Someone kidnaps someone for ransom? A terrorist act. We invade a country, kill tens of thousands and mutilate far more — those who shoot back are branded "terrorists" of the same stripe who blow up trains in Spain. Teacher's unions have been labelled terrorists by a Congresscritter.

The word "terrorist" is a simple cognate coined and maintained as a substitute for the old Red/Communist/Russian/Soviet monolithic "they" that we were told was intent on killing or subverting us for over fifty years. It turned out that the original threat estimate for the Soviets were based on "information" offered up by ex-Nazis in the same manner information is "offered" by people in Guantanamo. The prisoners tell the torturer what they want to hear: The Soviets are mighty and mad; Al Queda has cells EVERYWHERE and is planning to kill again soon, please, not the electrodes again…

Terrorism. What is shock and awe, but terror? What is slaugtering your way into a country, but terror? What was what we did, invading and killing to capture Noriega, but terror? Terror is an emotion, not a tactic. It is felt by us, not inflicted on us. We've become flaming cowards, afraid of everything and everyone, condoning torture and kidnap and murder of "terrorists", which is nothing but an label slapped onto any damned one that Bush wants to eliminate. The Partiot Act has created a dictator who has declared that human rights and treaties don't apply to "terrorists", as Bushie said just yesterday. Since "terror" is defined as "anything that makes us uneasy or afraid", and a "terrorist" can be declared secretly by the Bush team, Bush has declared "war" on no particular person, has no timetable for the "war" to be ended, has no definition of the terms of its ending.

By ceding this terminology to Bush's whim, we've created an uncheckable police state that recognizes no national boundaries and strips human rights, in holes in the ground, from people snatched from their homes in the middle of the night.

The most telling point to be made is that when Bush's Justice Department takes the few cases it has made to the court system, they have convicted NO ONE on the evidence; on the contrary, they have consistently lost every case they have had to make.

Terror? Threat? The terror is the fear instilled in you by national hysteria fed by a pack of radicals intent on a revolution in our way of life and law. The threat is pathetic; a few dozen wackos who barely have had enough juice to make video tapes. They got lucky once, and they got what they wanted: an America attacking the oil rich countries, just as they predicted. We've made far, far more enemies killing — quite illegally — the Iraqis than we had before 9/11. We've made the nonexistent enemy a reality by our own terror and yes, racism and confusion, and by an elect few, greedy for power and riches beyond count.

Right on every count. I mean…

• The war on Communism
• The war on drugs
• The war on terrorism

It's all bullshit. ALL OF IT! It's propaganda in it's purest form. You people are being told what to hate! It's pathetic! And the saddest thing is, Americans really think they are doing the right thing. They really think everybody should love them for what they're doing. The fact that anti-americanism isn't just something happening in the middle-east, but also in the rest of the world just baffles them. Learn your leason already!

The pope is not interesting. Repeat after me: The pope is not interesting. I hope the dutch media can now stop reporting on every word the man speaks. He's not god, he's not jezus, he's just the head of some crazy sect. Enough is enough already.

Man, how I hate the press.